Pharmakon

Dirk Wittenborn’s life has been shaped by his father’s work and one man’s reaction to that work.

His father, J.R. Wittenborn, was a prominent psychopharmacologist who became the number one target on a homicidal student/ex patient’s “kill list.” As a result of the near tragedy and his father’s life’s work in psychoactive drugs, the younger Mr. Wittenborn said that he grew up knowing two absolute truths; happiness is a fleeting emotion, and there really is a bogeyman.

In his newest novel, “Pharmakon,” from a Greek word that can be used to mean both cure and poison, Mr. Wittenborn put pen to paper and created literature based on his own life experiences, including secrecy, drugs, happiness and the unique relationships that occur in every family.

The seminal action in “Pharmakon” was born from that real-life event in which one of J.R. Wittenborn’s former students at Yale, on a mission to kill him, instead shot and killed a colleague. The action is replayed in the book, down to the happy Wittenborn family—renamed the Friedrichs—planting tulips on the front lawn of their home when the troubled student appeared and passed by.

“We had this bogeyman ... an angel of death passed us by,” Mr. Wittenborn said in a recent telephone interview, explaining how the actual events mirrored in “Pharmakon” occurred.

“Don’t look up and don’t say a word,” his father, renamed Will Friedrich in the book, told his wife. And by simple avoidance, the man who was number one on his troubled student’s hit list, escaped death.

The younger Mr. Wittenborn was born a few years after his father’s narrow escape, but he said that the unspoken event was always close to the surface and the secrecy surrounding it intrigued him for many years. “What’s whispered behind closed doors, what’s never shared with us and the blanks we have to fill in for ourselves is what really shapes us,” he said. “The blanks we fill in for ourselves is what makes us unique.”

Mr. Wittenborn pointed out that although the novel is based on some of his family’s experiences, it is still a work of fiction. “There are bits like us, but it isn’t like us,” he said of the translation from reality to the tale of the fictional Friedrich family.

Now a novelist, screenwriter and Emmy-nominated producer, Mr. Wittenborn first experienced his own success in the 1970s as a writer for “Saturday Night Live” and then went on to make his mark in other television venues. In early adulthood, the downtown art scene bon vivant had famous friends like John Belushi and a growing drug problem that nearly cost him his life and his livelihood.

He is clean and sober now, but growing up with a father who was at the forefront of the creation of psychoactive drugs and antidepressants also made its mark on Mr. Wittenborn. “There is an obvious irony that my father was a drug expert struggling to invent synthetic joy and that I self-medicated with cocaine,” Mr. Wittenborn said. “I wish I had stopped earlier but it’s been a long time,” he said of the path to recovery from his former out-of-control habit.

Now happily married to wife Kirsten and father of a nearly 7-year-old daughter, Lilo, Mr. Wittenborn is finally at a place where success and productivity have revisited his life. “Pharmakon” just hit bookstore shelves and his film, “The Lucky Ones,” starring Rachel McAdams and Tim Robbins, will be released in September.

The dual experiences of growing up in the world of pharmaceutical research and being drug free for approximately 20 years has given him the interest and opportunity to examine the human desire to manufacture happiness.

Carole DeSanti, the vice president and editor-at-large for Viking Penguin, which published “Pharmakon,” said that it was Mr. Wittenborn’s perspective and personal experiences that drew her to his book.

“What intrigued me most about the novel was the way it suggested the ‘truths behind the medicine cabinet mirror’ and the larger story of how human drama might play into those vials of antidepressants on our shelves,” she said.

As for Mr. Wittenborn’s perspective now, he said that he is “not pro brain candy” and that he wants to shine a light on why 40 million Americans take antidepressants.

“Drugs are changing us. The highs and lows are removed,” he said. “The normal state of humans is discontent. Longing is the evolutionary mechanism that really drives people to advance civilization, and without it nothing would get accomplished.”

Though he said that there are some people who do benefit from necessary medication, Mr. Wittenborn said that he, for one, no longer wants to mask his emotions with drugs, and that is part of the truth that drove him to write the book.

“It is a cautionary tale in a sense,” he said, adding, “I’d like people to realize that there is nothing wrong with discontent.”

Mr. Wittenborn and his family live in Brooklyn and summer in East Hampton. He recently gave a reading from “Pharmakon” at Book Hampton in Sag Harbor and was slated to continue his national book tour through the end of August.