00:00Came to me in the strangest way. I was, so that book, Say Nothing, was made into a television drama.
00:05And I was a producer on the show and I was living in London with my family while we made
00:11it.
00:12And I was on set one day and I got to chatting with a guy.
00:15I was literally doing the wordle on my phone and a guy sat down next to me.
00:19But I think it's good for, you know, if you're a reporter to be curious and start conversations with strangers.
00:23So I started chatting with this guy and he figured out that I write for The New Yorker
00:28and I write these kind of investigative narrative pieces.
00:30And he said, I might have a story for you.
00:32And what he said was, there's a family here in London that I'm very close with.
00:37And they, in 2019, had this tragedy.
00:39They lost a son. Their 19-year-old son, Zach, died in mysterious circumstances.
00:43He went off the building of a luxury apartment building and died in the Thames, in the river there.
00:49And after he died, his parents made this shocking discovery.
00:53They learned that unbeknownst to them, he had had a secret double life.
00:57And he had been pretending that he was the son of a Russian oligarch.
01:02And this guy had said about that much to me.
01:04And I knew, if the family will talk with me, I'm in.
01:07I have to write about this.
01:08It is a crazy story.
01:10And I was just in the UK.
01:12And I told you before you came on, all of my friends with school-age children are now reading this
01:17book,
01:17especially given the boarding school culture and the day school culture in the UK.
01:21This is an upper-middle-class family.
01:23The children, the parents are children of Holocaust survivors, prominent rabbis.
01:28One was even on television for a while.
01:30They send their kids to a good school, maybe not the best of the best, but like a top school.
01:35And you have these two brothers.
01:36One does slightly better than the other.
01:38And the other just can't ever seem to think that he's good enough and ends up getting obsessed with, at
01:44this era.
01:44Talk about what's going on in this era in London with this Russian money and this influx of oligarchs kids.
01:49And he just wants that life and kind of starts pretending that he is that kid.
01:53Yeah, that's one of the kind of strange aspects of this story is this boy, Zach Brettler, was born in
01:57the year 2000.
01:58So he's a real child of the millennium.
02:00And he comes of age at a time when London is changing.
02:03There's a huge amount of foreign wealth coming into London.
02:07There's a lot more conspicuous consumption, luxury real estate.
02:11There's a whole kind of blinging vibe.
02:13Right, we're going away from like mud-splattered Land Rovers and muck boots and tweed and more like.
02:17It's much more sort of new money ostentation.
02:20And then, you know, he's also kind of a social media native.
02:23He grows up on Instagram.
02:25And so if you have those kinds of preoccupations, if, as he was, you're interested in supercars and luxury apartments
02:31and that kind of thing,
02:32and you're just scrolling, you start to see more and more of that stuff.
02:37And he became really obsessed with wealth and, you know, one of the ironies is that his family is pretty
02:43comfortable.
02:44I mean, they lived in a nice neighborhood.
02:46They had a big apartment.
02:47These are nice schools they're sending them to.
02:48His father works in finance.
02:49They, you know, goes to a fancy private school.
02:51But in comparison to the children of oligarchs who were at school with him, he felt poor.
02:58He felt as though he didn't have enough.
03:00And so part of what this story is about is that kind of sense of anxiety he felt.
03:04And then his desire as a teenager to kind of con his way into that next level.
03:12The story is about this kid and this young man.
03:15It's also about what's happening in London.
03:18You follow some of these characters around this real estate boom.
03:21But it's also just kind of a story about parenting and how little you can know someone that you've raised
03:26from infancy.
03:27I mean, you've got two boys.
03:29Was that really the crux of why you ended up pursuing this and what you think the heart of it
03:32is?
03:33Yeah, I mean, this was something that kind of, listen, on the front end I was drawn to it because
03:38it's kind of a mystery, right?
03:39It's sort of a thriller.
03:40It's really a story about.
03:41And you still don't really solve it.
03:42I mean, you have ideas.
03:43Well, I think I roughly know what happened.
03:46But you, yeah, it's a story about these parents basically who are trying to investigate their kid's death.
03:51And they have to sort of become detectives and figure out what's going on.
03:55What snuck up on me as I was working on it is that it really is a story about parenting
04:00and about adolescence today and what it's like to see, you know, one of these people who you feel like
04:07you know really well.
04:08You love them the most in the world.
04:10They live under your roof.
04:11You raise them.
04:12But they kind of turn into a bit of a stranger and sort of coming to terms with that and
04:16trying to figure out, you know, in Zach's case, not just the mystery of how he died, but the mystery
04:22of who he really was when he was alive.
04:24You worked with the family very closely for this book.
04:28The case made headlines when the death happened.
04:31And they have been very critical of the police investigation and how this all went on.
04:35How are they doing?
04:37Are they OK with all this publicity?
04:39Has it made it harder?
04:39Like, how are they?
04:41I think they're doing all right.
04:42You know, I texted with them this morning.
04:45I talk with them all the time.
04:46When we launched the book here at the 90 Second 3Y in New York back in April, they actually came
04:51and they were in the room, not just the parents, but also Zach's brother, Joe.
04:55And so I think they feel good about the process of having opened up to me in this way.
05:00It is inescapably weird to be in London and see the book in shop windows to know that people are
05:06reading about your family's tragedy, you know, on the beach during the summer.
05:11That's strange.
05:12Or listening to it on my run.
05:13Yeah, exactly.
05:14But having said that, they are an uncommonly resilient family.
05:19And part of what the story is also about is learning to keep moving and keep living in the face
05:25of loss.
05:26Yes.
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