"In the Spring of 2007, I returned to my hometown after drinking my way out of a corporate job out of state. I also returned to unknowingly begin drinking myself to death, living in an almost entirely unfurnished two-story condo in the middle of the city. I'd finished graduate school the year prior and found myself in a world in which I was less protected by the academic lifestyle I was accustomed to, which basically meant I'd suddenly run out of excuses for the way I was living." Through a subsequent series of letters written to his nephew, Nathan D.'s The Nephew Letters: Notes of a Failed Sobriety are truthful admissions of this common addiction and disease known as alcoholism.