Nobody Should Believe Me
The Mother Next Door: Medicine, Deception, and Munchausen by Proxy
Tue, 04 Feb 2025
It's pub day!! The Mother Next Door is officially out in the world. Thank you to everyone for all of your support! For our amazing podcast listeners, we have a very special treat for you: a 40 MINUTE exclusive excerpt of the audiobook! Enjoy! *** Order The Mother Next Door: Medicine, Deception, and Munchausen by Proxy https://read.macmillan.com/lp/the-mother-next-door-9781250284273/ Catch Andrea and Mike at their Seattle Book Launch Event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/andrea-dunlop-and-mike-weber-the-mother-next-door-tickets-1097661478029 Catch Andrea and Mike at their Fort Worth Book Launch Event: https://www.instagram.com/p/DE0ynPhxLOo/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: 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.
Chapter 2: 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.
Chapter 3: 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.
Chapter 4: 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.
But she wasn't there on the other end of the line to take that call, just as she wasn't there to celebrate with me when I got my first book deal. She wasn't standing next to me on my wedding day. She wasn't holding my hand in the delivery room. Her absence has fundamentally altered the life I thought I would lead. I was sure we'd raise our kids together.
I took for granted that she'd be there to help me cope as our parents age when they inevitably pass away. I imagined us having lunches together as old women, comparing notes on our grandkids. As it stands, I can't imagine she'll ever even meet my children, much less their children. Her absence has hardened into a permanent thing that feels like a death, only less complete.
In July 2019, I hadn't seen my sister in almost a decade. And as the years had gone by, what once seemed unimaginable felt increasingly likely that I would never see her again. Until that rainy night of the book launch.
Thankfully, a dear friend, humorist Geraldine DeReuter, was moderating the event, so I didn't have to sit alone at the microphone after being rubbed raw by the emotions of the preceding days. As she finished introducing me, I smiled, trying to appear calm as my eyes scanned the room. This was my hometown event, so there were lots of familiar faces in the crowd.
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Chapter 5: What is Munchausen by Proxy and Andrea's connection to it?
My parents and my husband and daughter were sitting in the front row, along with some other family members. One face in particular moved me so deeply that I almost lost my tenuous composure right away. Stephanie was my sister's best friend growing up, and a second big sister to me. We'd only recently reconnected, but she was there, heavily pregnant with her second child, sitting with her own mom.
Between these friends and the subtext of the book, it felt like my sister's ghost was hovering in the front row as well. The ghost of the sister who should have been there. For a moment, I let myself imagine her, somewhere on the edge of the store. All day, a small part of me had wondered whether she might try to disrupt the event. But when I didn't see her in the audience, relief washed over me.
Most writers share an alternating fear and fantasy about our books drawing people out of the woodwork to see us triumphant in our success. Maybe the crowd will part and an old lover will try to win you back, or your high school bully will approach, chagrined and apologetic.
When I launched my previous books, I confess there was some small part of me that hoped my sister might show up, full of pride that I'd accomplished what had always been my lifelong dream. But this was before I ever went public about her. On that night, I knew that wherever she was, she wasn't feeling anything close to pride.
Regardless of what she thought, I didn't write We Came Here to Forget to settle a score. I wrote it because I needed to. And the reason I went public about my own connection to Munchausen by proxy, also known as medical child abuse, wherein a parent or caretaker fabricates, exaggerates, or induces illness in their child, was that I wanted to authentically portray a family coping with its specter.
The media pays little attention to this topic, and when it does, it sensationalizes it. At the time of my book launch, I had never spoken to a single other person who'd navigated the bizarre, lonely waters of an investigation. Back when my family was imploding, it would have meant so much to me to talk to someone who could understand.
It would have helped to see the story reflected with empathy and dignity, rather than as grisly fodder for true crime drama. My third novel could be my chance to live that adage, write the book you want to read. I wanted to be that voice for someone else. A few days after my book event, I had lunch with Stephanie at a pub on Seattle's East Side.
Stephanie is so deeply entwined in my history that her voice feels familiar to me in the way a family member's does. More of my memories growing up include her than don't. It meant so much to me that she and her mom came to the event and that she read my book. I filled her in on the surrounding legal drama, eager to talk to someone else who'd known and loved my sister.
I was up there just waiting for her to burst in and disrupt the event. I finished, now able to laugh at my paranoia. Stephanie's eyes got big. "'There's something I have to tell you,' she said slowly. I didn't want to say anything the night of, but I went to the ladies' room right before the event started. She paused. Meg and I walked right by each other. I froze.
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Chapter 6: Who is Detective Mike Weber and how did he collaborate with Andrea?
Mark and I became fast friends and began pairing up on interviews. He asked me to come to San Diego to meet with APSAC's MBP committee, a cross-disciplinary group of child abuse professionals who represent the only cohesive effort to combat a form of abuse so taboo and misunderstood that even many of the most hardened social workers, detectives, and psychologists want nothing to do with it.
By the time I met with the committee, I was an experienced public speaker. Yet as I paced my hotel room, inhaling the ocean breeze and trying to find serenity in the waves that crashed just beyond the line of palm trees, I was nervous. Previous attempts to tell this story hadn't gone well, and I didn't know what to expect from the committee.
I wasn't sure how receptive a group so packed with advanced degrees and professional accolades would be to a novelist whose sole qualification in the arena was her own sad story. In the hotel's conference room, I was immediately met with warmth and appreciation as the group gathered around the big table with hotel pastries and hot coffee.
It felt like a meeting of old friends more than stuffy academics. In the rare instances when I tried to explain to someone what had happened in my family, I had been met with dropped jaws, wan faces, and occasionally tears. I had never encountered nodding heads and knowing looks.
It was the first time I understood that what I'd witnessed in my family was not a bizarre outlier but part of an eerily consistent pattern of behavior. I'd been utterly alone with this story for almost a decade. Then, all at once, I wasn't.
This feeling deepened the next day as I sat in the front row listening to Mike Weber and Sheriff Bill Weyburn unpack the case of Brittany Phillips, which we'll cover in this audiobook, for a rapt audience. I'm not a religious person, but sitting in that nondescript hotel ballroom, I was overcome by the powerful sensation that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Bill Weyburn and Mike Weber are straight out of central casting. Whatever comes to your mind when you think Texas Sheriff, Bill embodies it. He stands a towering six feet four, not counting the additional inches of his signature 10-gallon hat, and sports a glorious mustache and a gleaming belt buckle.
I could imagine him being intimidating under the right circumstances, likely a job requirement, but he also exudes warmth. When I first introduced myself after his presentation, I asked if I could give him a hug and found myself fighting tears. Bill was the first person I'd ever met who'd had a case of Munchausen by proxy in his family. His story had left very few dry eyes in that crowd.
His was also the first story that gave me any hope. Mike hadn't been present at the committee meeting, but I knew he was a member, and Dr. Feldman has spoken highly of him. Tall, with a flat-top haircut, in a no-nonsense suit and tie, Mike was an endearing combination of tough and humble.
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Chapter 7: What cases influenced Mike Weber's understanding of Munchausen by Proxy?
But if he was expecting every perpetrator to be a master manipulator, Brittany Phillips, a person who fooled exactly no one, would prove him wrong. Brittany brought home for Mike how important an offender's digital footprint could be.
The phenomenon of social media has exacerbated Munchausen by proxy in unimaginable ways, and in the early 2010s, when Mike investigated Brittany, it was only beginning to emerge how dramatic the coming shift would be. And with Mary Welch, Mike would see just how inept the systems around medical child abuse truly are, and how money and the soft power of charm and beauty can blur all the lines.
Mary was the archetypal perfect upper-middle-class mom, impossible for many to view as a criminal. At first, I'd planned to help Mike with a book proposal, introduce him to some agents, and then bow out. But before I knew it, I'd gone through the looking glass, too, and offered to write it with him. I'd spent years trying to avoid analyzing what happened in my family.
But by the time I met Mike, I was deep into the process of trying to understand it and to hopefully help others do the same. It was a fateful meeting that would launch not only the creation of this audiobook, but my podcast, Nobody Should Believe Me, which, as of this writing, has been downloaded more than 5 million times. Before we go any further, some lexicon.
The disorders underlying what are colloquially known as Munchausen syndrome, factitious disorder imposed on self, and Munchausen by proxy, factitious disorder imposed on another, are grouped together under the umbrella of factitious disorders and are characterized by intentional deception around medical issues for the purposes of attention and sympathy.
Munchausen syndrome was first coined by Dr. Richard Asher in The Lancet back in 1951, after Baron Munchausen, a character from a 1785 novel who told tall tales about his exploits. Munchausen behaviors do not always lead to Munchausen by proxy abuse, but they are certainly considered a risk factor by every expert I've spoken to. And we will see ample evidence of both disorders in this book.
It's worth noting that on its own, the Munchausen phenomenon is baffling and complex and causes very real harm to the people it ensnares, even as the risks are less horrific than child abuse. Consider one example. In 2015, Australian food blogger and author Belle Gibson caused a national firestorm when it was revealed to be a hoax all along that she'd cured numerous forms of cancer with her diet.
The cascade of fallout included a fraudulent claim that she had donated $300,000 to various charities. Bell was ultimately convicted in the Federal Court of Australia for breaching consumer laws and was fined more than a quarter of a million dollars, which, as of this writing, she still has not paid.
According to news reports, numerous people came forward with their stories of foregoing traditional treatment for their very real cancer diagnoses in order to follow Bell's regimen.
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Chapter 8: How did Andrea's meeting with Mike Weber lead to further projects?
Medical misogyny is real, and I don't know a single woman, myself included, who hasn't experienced it, who hasn't been brushed off or had their experience of their own body questioned at least once by someone in the medical establishment. Add in any other marginalized identity and the problem gets worse. Black people receive worse care. The mortality rate for black mothers in the U.S.
is nearly three times what it is for white women. As do fat people who are routinely denied care because of their size and trans people who face innumerable barriers and biases to receiving care.
Most doctors get into the profession to help, but they are still human beings with biases, and they're operating within a system originally designed to serve the needs of cis white men first with everyone else as an afterthought. We are still in the nascent stages of reforming those ideas.
Take, for example, the Body Mass Index , developed 200 years ago by a Belgian astronomer and mathematician as a way to determine the average man, which he considered a social ideal. Despite its problematic history, this metric is nonetheless trotted out for bodies of all genders and races and used as though it is an infallible metric of health.
or consider that women were generally excluded from clinical trials until the 1990s, based on an earlier medical ethos that they were just men with boobs and tubes.
Black Americans have a particularly horrifying history with the medical system, including the 1932 Tuskegee study of untreated syphilis in the Negro male, wherein black male participants were not told they had syphilis and treatments were intentionally withheld. The study went on for 40 years until an Associated Press expose put a stop to it.
There is also the grim history of Dr. J. Marion Sims, the so-called father of gynecology, who conducted gruesome experiments on enslaved women, foregoing anesthesia.
These examples are the tip of the iceberg in terms of why many people have a rightful mistrust of the medical system and find themselves needing to be dogged about receiving care, perhaps even to be a bit more dramatic about their symptoms than they'd prefer. But Munchausen is not seeking a second opinion or even hamming it up a little bit to make sure the doctor takes you seriously.
It's a pattern of deliberate, often extremely well-researched deception, perpetrated for the intrinsic reward of sympathy, attention, and, to a degree, the sheer thrill of fooling people. These same motivations and behavior patterns underpin Munchausen by proxy, but because it involves child victims, who often cannot speak for or defend themselves, the consequences are far more severe.
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