The Mother Next Door: Medicine, Deception, and Munchausen by Proxy
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What is 'The Mother Next Door' about and who are the authors?
True Story Media. Hello, it's Andrea. Today is the day. After many years of work, The Mother Next Door, Medicine, Deception, and Munchausen by Proxy, my first ever nonfiction book that I co-authored with Detective Mike Weber is officially out in the world. You can buy it right now wherever books are sold. And if you are in Seattle or Fort Worth, please come see Mike and I at our launch events on Tuesday, February 4th and Thursday, February 6th, respectively. You can find all of that info on where to find us and the book in our show notes. And today I have something very special for you, which is an excerpt of the audiobook, which I am the narrator of.
How did Andrea Dunlop feel about narrating her own audiobook?
This is the first time I've ever read one of my own audiobooks, and it just feels really special on this one to get to go with you for this part of the book's journey. So without further ado, here is an exclusive excerpt from The Mother Next Door from Macmillan Audio. Enjoy! Introduction It was a rainy night in Seattle in July 2019. The global pandemic that would reshape life as we knew it was still several months in the future, but my life was in its own dramatic state of flux. I was a first-time mom trying to navigate the exhausting back and forth of being a working parent. My daughter, Fiona, was eight months old and I was launching my third novel, We Came Here to Forget, at one of my favorite local bookstores.
It tells of an Olympic skier whose relationships and career are turned upside down by a family catastrophe. Book publications, with their touring demands, media pushes, endless social media shilling, and alternating waves of excitement and dread, are always draining. But this one was like nothing I'd been through before.
What challenges did Andrea face during her previous book launch?
The book was fiction, yes, but it was heavily based on events that had destroyed my family. I'd never written anything that made me feel so vulnerable. Overall, the launch was not going especially well. If you are lucky enough to publish more than one or two books in your life, as I have been, you are sure to have at least one where everything goes wrong. This was mine. For one thing, my beloved editor had left the publishing house some six months earlier, leaving me orphaned. Since then, there had been so many staffing changes that no one who had worked on my previous books was still in place by the time this had come out. Worst of all, instead of spending publication day trying to relax before the launch event that night, I had spent it alternating phone calls with my lawyer, agent, and therapist.
The cause was an 11th hour cease and desist I had received from my sister Megan, attempting to halt the publication of my novel and insisting I stop discussing my personal connection to one of the central themes of the book, Munchausen by proxy. Megan had always denied the abuse allegations, and now her lawyer was demanding that I retract my previous statements to the media and cancel my tour.
How did Andrea's relationship with her sister impact her writing?
In essence, she wanted me to shut up and go away. I wrote the majority of We Came Here to Forget while I was pregnant with my daughter. I always knew I'd write about my sister eventually. Writers are prone to working out their traumas on the page. When motherhood came into the picture, it suddenly felt necessary to write about the tragedy that had devastated my own family. Some book ideas take forever to coalesce, while others, like this one, arrive fully formed and feel so urgent that you ignore them at your own peril. My life was in a good place when I wrote the book, but you don't get over becoming estranged from your only sister, especially when that separation is due to something as terrifying as suspicions of child abuse.
At best, it's a wound that changes over time, and just when you think it's closed, it splits right open again. For me, the experience of becoming a mother brought my history with my sister to the surface in a way that I was no more prepared for than anything else about new motherhood. Thank you so much for having me.
So she would have been the perfect person to ask about my dreadful morning sickness and all of the paranoias that accompany a first pregnancy. It would have given me an opportunity, increasingly rare as we grew into adulthood and our lives took different paths, to feel close to her again. She would have been so great on that call.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is 'The Mother Next Door' about and who are the authors?
0:04–0:51
2
How did Andrea Dunlop feel about narrating her own audiobook?
0:51–1:56
3
What challenges did Andrea face during her previous book launch?
1:56–3:08
4
How did Andrea's relationship with her sister impact her writing?
3:08–6:11
5
What is Munchausen by Proxy and Andrea's connection to it?
6:11–11:42
6
Who is Detective Mike Weber and how did he collaborate with Andrea?
11:42–16:51
7
What cases influenced Mike Weber's understanding of Munchausen by Proxy?
16:51–21:46
8
How did Andrea's meeting with Mike Weber lead to further projects?
21:46–39:59