DEAR DEALER

A sister struggles to accept her sibling’s overdose death.

Bowers, a film and stage actor, had a lifelong intense relationship with her older sister, Sasha, though at the time of Sasha’s death at age 44 due to a fentanyl overdose, some distance had grown between them. Both the closeness and the distance are evoked with resonant detail in this debut memoir, which documents the author’s slow, painful progress over a period of years toward an understanding of her sister’s life and death that she can live with. One of the focal points of this obsessive process was Sasha’s cell phone, found with her body in the car where she died, in the parking lot of a seafood restaurant in the Bowers’ hometown of Branford, Connecticut. Reading and rereading the texts Sasha sent and received, the author tries to recreate her last days and the characters who populated them. Among them, she is sure, is the person responsible for Sasha’s death, the person who sold her drugs cut with a lethal amount of fentanyl. The central device of the book is a series of letters to this mystery man, which the author first created in a 2018 piece for This American Life. “Dear Dealer,” each one begins, then goes on to berate, question, and hound him. "So, it’s just you and me, man. I’m calling you man because I don’t know your name, and because I believe you are one. Everyone blowing up my sister’s phone, offering and seeking drugs, is a man. Sean, Jimmy, Eric, and my personal favorite, Baby Jesus. These guys, and all the ones I’ve ever associated with misfortune for my sister, are circling around her memory. Like deadbeat ghosts with the nerve to be alive.” Bowers also reviews the details of her childhood, her parents’ backgrounds, and touchingly elucidates the sisters’ many shared rituals and silly traditions, among them the beloved “fou rire,” a crazy fit of hysterical laughter, “[t]hat unique, unstoppable kind that comes from a deep place of knowing and being known.”

A moving embodiment of the powerful, creative energy of grief.