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20 Working Nurse l WorkingNurse.com July 27–September 7, 2020 SUMMER BOOK CLUB by Christine Contillo, RN, BSN, PHN I get book suggestions from lots of different places. I recently heard journalist Eilene Zimmerman on an NPR show being interviewed about her new book, Smacked. Like just about everyone else, I know people who have been touched by the opioid crisis, and I always feel that knowledge is power. Also, who isn't interested in learning about the lives of others taking a strange turn? I decided to check it out. The book starts out on a shocking note: In 2015, Zimmerman walked into the house of her ex-husband Peter, an affluent San Diego attorney, and found him lying dead on the floor. The persist- ent illness he'd complained about for the past year was in fact an intravenous drug habit, which finally killed him. Afterward, Zimmerman set out to understand why. What led a man who, on the surface seemed to have everything going for him, to abuse methamphetamine, cocaine and opioids? How common is substance abuse among white-collar professionals who fit none of the usual stereotypes of addiction? The Happy Facade Smacked is really several books. The first segment is a memoir, detailing Eilene and Peter's life together. They first met at a job interview in 1987, start- ed dating and later got married. Peter decided he didn't like his career as a chemist in the pharmaceutical industry and went to law school. Eilene tried to balance her own goal of becoming a pro- fessional writer with her efforts to help Peter with his career. They moved across the country a few times and Peter eventually became a partner with a successful law firm in San Diego. From Zimmerman's description, it sounds like she saw it as a happy rela- tionship at the beginning. It wasn't until they began to raise their two children that she began to realize what she had gotten herself into. To me, it seems like Peter was never really reliable husband material. His personality quirks almost immediately raised red flags in my mind, although apparently not in hers. No Big Surprise Throughout all this, we learn a good deal about how addictive behavior can be hidden if those watching convince themselves to look away. We also see how hard it can be on family life and what the eventual consequences are. It's all interesting stuff, but not terribly enlightening. The second part of the book shifts gears, looking for some broader per- spective on Peter's fate. Zimmerman presents research on the nature of white-collar addiction and the way sub- stance abuse becomes a way of self- medicating anxiety and depression. She also considers the way complex, high-stress fields like law, medicine and the tech industry contribute to sub- stance abuse and how many profession- als talk themselves into the idea that they can control their drug use without becoming addicted. None of this is particularly revelatory for me or, I'm sure, to you. Nurses are no strangers to the risks of high-stress professions, and if you've worked with substance abuse patients at all, a lot of Zimmerman's observations won't come as any big surprise. Smacked is more interesting for what is not said or examined. While today, in 2020, Zimmerman is doing a great job of evaluating her ex-husband's prob- lems, I'm at a loss to figure out where her insight was when examining her own behavior all those years. Every time I picked up this book, I wanted to say to the author, "How could you let him treat you and your children like that?" In retrospect, maybe a lot of Zimmerman's "helping" was really more about enabling. Sadly, too many of her insights are only in the rear-view mirror. Smacked: A Story of White-Collar Ambition, Addiction and Tragedy by Eilene Zimmerman (Random House, 2019) Smacked: A Story of White Collar Ambition, Addiction and Tragedy By Eilene Zimmerman When red flags are ignored Eilene Zimmerman, the wife who looked the other way