Dear Dealer

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

Lemonada.

SPEAKER_2 (0:06)

This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom.

For 125 years, Nordstrom has been part of your story. The stylist who found the perfect outfit for your big interview, the first pair of walking shoes for your one-year-old, the tomato soup you shared with your sister at the cafe. These are the moments that make Nordstrom, Nordstrom. Big or small, we're here for all of it. Celebrating 125 years with new moments still add. Discover it all in Nordstrom stores and at nordstrom.com.

SPEAKER_3 (0:36)

How do you want to split it?

SPEAKER_4 (0:37)

Actually, dinner's on me.

SPEAKER_3 (0:39)

Okay, big money.

SPEAKER_4 (0:40)

Well, I got a Venmo balance that I can spend with my Venmo debit mastercard, so.

SPEAKER_3 (0:44)

Well, I Venmo'd you three times last week, so it's kind of on me, actually.

SPEAKER_4 (0:48)

Yeah, you send it, I spend it.

SPEAKER_3 (0:50)

Did my money get reincarnated?

SPEAKER_4 (0:51)

Yeah, it's chicken shawarma. Want it back?

SPEAKER_3 (0:55)

I can't believe you ate my Venmo.

SPEAKER_4 (0:57)

Spend your balance instantly with the Venmo debit card. No monthly fee or minimum balance. Venmo balance account required to get a card and use a balance. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank, NA.

Nadia Bowers (1:13)

There's a strain to a secret being kept in plain sight. You begin to not trust what you see. And life around these secrets, even good life, makes them even harder still to identify. Little life rafts meant to make you feel like it's maybe all fine.

So I become the observer, develop a knack for identifying subtext, catching the wind. I become attuned to tone, to expressions and gestures, to the emotional temperature of a room. I listen for the meaning under the words, what is not said.

Dani Shapiro (1:48)

That's Nadia Bowers, actor, writer and author of Dear Dealer, a powerful, harrowing, soulful memoir, Just Out. Nadia's is a story of the very particular bond of being a sister. It's also a story about losing that sister, of having to pick up the broken shards and come to understand how to go on when the only witness to your whole life, your co-conspirator is gone, and who you are or might become without her.

I'm Dani Shapiro, and this is Family Secrets. The secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape of your childhood. I think that there were two landscapes, although the first one you may have been too young to remember.

Nadia Bowers (2:53)

You know, it's funny, I should be too young to remember that one, because we moved when I was about three, from a house on a road in Brantford, Connecticut called Pleasant Point Road. But I remember it really well. It was kind of a magical place. It's this dead end road that abuts a land preserve, and basically the ocean was our backyard.

And then we were surrounded by forests, a few other houses. Out of the end of this point that jutted out into Long Island Sound, my father had a little rowboat. He had lobster pots. It was the 70s. The house wasn't much, but it was out from the center of town in nature. And we had a bunny rabbit named Mopsy that we kept outside in a cage. We'd run around with it.

We had a big St. Bernard that lived next door and a little blow up pool that a seagull came and befriended us. And the seasons kind of got in our body.

SPEAKER_1 (3:57)

We were outdoors a lot.

Nadia Bowers (3:59)

So the elements and the witnessing of nature and our father would take us always on walks and hikes. My parents were both physicians. My father was a psychiatrist. My mother, who is still alive, is a very retired pediatrician at this point, 92 now.

Dani Shapiro (4:19)

When Nadia is three and her sister, Sasha, is five, the family moves to another part of town, on a more conventional sort of street, one with fewer forests and more neighbors. The girls start to meet other kids, build community. Nadia and Sasha's father had been married once before, so there are also half-siblings who live not too far, and who they see fairly often. But it's Nadia and Sasha who really grow up together. It's Nadia and Sasha who share a private world. Together they play, they dance, they run wild, sometimes a little too wild.

At which point their mother likes to tell them, remember who you are.

Nadia Bowers (5:03)

You know, that was something that her mother would say to her, and she had three sisters. She pretty much grew up without a father. Her parents were divorced when she was very, very young, and he left my grandmother for an actress.