Family Week

“I’m going to need you to attend Family Week with your addict." My addict? I had not realized I was in possession of an addict. Or that he lied, not just about doing drugs but about everything.

This is an excerpt from a memoir I have decided to abandon. It took too much out of me to relive this period of my life day after day, sentence after sentence. One of the advantages of age is knowing one’s emotional and temporal limitations. Another is understanding that, sometimes—no, often—it’s not about you. Sometimes our shadows are simply cast by others, whose motivations will remain a mystery, as hard as we might try to understand them. Moreover, my life, for once—and hopefully for much longer—is objectively beautiful right now: filled with laughter and love, honesty and peace, and every other cheesy word pairing on a refrigerator magnet in between. I am leaning into that light and working on a new novel instead. 

That being said, I did not want to simply toss this part of my history into the trash. In fact, it feels imperative, as a memoirist, to bring it into the light, in order to let it go and never speak of it again. So many of you gathered here in this communal space have experienced the pain of betrayal and gaslighting in all of its many forms. I know this because you write me private notes to tell me your stories, and I appreciate both the specificity and universality of each one. It is alienating and alone-making to be duped by someone purporting to love you. You not only feel hurt, you feel stupid, blind, used, and ashamed. In addiction recovery, they say that shame poisons, and that sharing one’s stories of shame is a necessary step on the path to healing. But we don’t have readily available sharing circles or community-building sessions for the romantically betrayed. No Bamboozled Anonymous meetings every hour on the hour wherever we live, whenever we need to bear witness to others’ pain or to share ours. Most of us who’ve been duped and gaslit are left to lick our wounds and try to piece together the truth in private, or amongst trusted friends and family members. We then become other people’s stories: whispered gossip, a cautionary tale, a punchline, a pariah. I am convinced that stepping out of the shadows to share our stories of betrayal publicly, however shameful they might feel in the dark, is not only the antidote to that unwarranted shame, it is a source of power, reclamation, and, yes, even humor. Or as my late mentor so wisely put it, “When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you. But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it's your laugh.”

This is my banana peel.

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The week I simultaneously launched my memoir into the world and my daughter into med school was already jammed with logistical challenges when I received a call from the luxury rehab facility in Utah, asking me to clear my calendar for Family Week with my addict. The counselor actually used the possessive adjective: your addict. As in, “I’m going to need you to attend Family Week with your addict.”

My addict? Up until that week, in the summer of 2021, I had not realized I was in possession of an addict. Or that he lied, not just about secretly doing drugs but also about not doing other things: his taxes, getting tested for STIs, monogamy. This trifecta of deceit—addiction, lying, cheating—is par for the course for addicts, as books on the subject like to inform us. But the book I’d just unleashed into the world—having made sure, given the singular perspective limitations of memoir, that it was as close to the truth as possible—contained no mention of my partner’s addictions, lies, or betrayals. He was simply the kind and loving man in Chapter 37, toward the end of the book, holding a glowing birthday cake on March 11, 2020, telling me to blow out my candles and make a wish.

Had I known he was an addict that night—our last dinner with friends before lockdown—I would have used my one wish for his sobriety instead of what I wished for as our phones started to buzz with alerts about Tom Hanks being sick and the NBA shutting down: a string of normal days for all of us. Was he high on my birthday? Was he texting his side piece under the table while I blew out the candles? Who was this man with whom I’d been sharing a king-sized bed for four years, and how had I, a person whose job depends on getting characters right, so grossly gotten his wrong?