Author reads vulnerable book passagefrom @nytimes

Transcript

You write, it was July 2017 that I came up with a really good idea for what would save me from the nightmare I was now trapped in with Rhea. Can you keep reading from page two forty? Is that okay? Okay. She has to die now, said my exhausted mind. And suddenly, this seemed like a terrific solution. After all, Reya was dying already anyway, right? I just needed to move the process along before things got even worse, before she set the whole building on fire with a dropped cigarette or got us both arrested. She had to die, and I was the one who had to kill her. I decided I would do it the next day. I went to sleep that night in peace no that liberation was finally in sight. I also hadn't slept for weeks at this point because people on cocaine don't sleep. So she was keeping me awake. I wanna make something extremely clear here. When I say that I once planned to murder Rhea, I don't mean that the idea simply crossed my mind that my life would be easier if she were gone. I mean that I fully intended to kill her. And I tell this story in all its raw honesty because I want people to understand how insane codependency can make a person become. I mean, I'm the nice lady who wrote Eat, Pray, Love. And I came very close to premeditatedly and cold bloodedly murdering my partner because she had taken her affection away from me and because I was extremely tired. That's the sort of person I become when I'm in my insanity. I mean, you wrote these worse. You've read them many tier. But can I ask you what it feels like to to read? You know, I get the the thing I feel is a feeling I had a lot when I was writing this book, which is worst of all, I'm writing it from the privileged position of it's over. You no? And This didn't happen. You did not And I didn't kill her. Yes. And the privileged position of healing, not just the trauma of this circumstance, but the trauma that led me to become the kind of person who would give my life away to anybody who maybe might take care of me for a minute. And the privilege of sitting on the other side of six years of sobriety rank recovery and working a program in Codependence Anonymous and like all of these things that I've done. So I'm sitting pretty comfortably here right now. And one of the things that I talk about in the book is how careful, and I try to be very careful in the good, to not judge either her or any earlier version of myself because those people were not sitting comfortably in that moment, you no? And tier just trying to survive what had become this firestorm of trauma.