Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. It
Speaker 1: could have happened like this one winter night, just three
Speaker 1: years ago, when my husband mentioned to me that he
Speaker 1: was ordering one of those popular DNA testing kids, and
Speaker 1: he asked me whether I wanted to have my DNA
Speaker 1: tested too. I might have said no, no, thanks, not interested.
Speaker 1: Instead I sort of shrugged, at least this is how
Speaker 1: I remember it, and said sure, why not. I wasn't
Speaker 1: particularly curious. I had never considered doing something like this before.
Speaker 1: I mean, I knew my relatives, I knew my ancestors,
Speaker 1: I knew their stories. I knew exactly who I was
Speaker 1: and where I came from. It could have happened like that.
Speaker 1: I might have lived my entire your life without ever
Speaker 1: knowing the truth of who I was. My name is
Speaker 1: Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets. Secrets that are
Speaker 1: kept from us, secrets that we keep from others, and
Speaker 1: secrets that we keep from ourselves. You're going to be
Speaker 1: hearing a lot of different kinds of family secrets on
Speaker 1: my new podcast, Secrets involving crime, race, sexuality, abuse, addiction, loss,
Speaker 1: and identity. While these family secrets are as individual as snowflakes,
Speaker 1: what each one of them, What every family secret has
Speaker 1: in common, is the silence rooted in shame, trauma, and
Speaker 1: the desire to protect what he doesn't know won't hurt him.
Speaker 1: Why should we tell her when she'll never find out?
Speaker 1: It's none of her business. I've been a student of
Speaker 1: family secrets for my entire life. I've written novels that
Speaker 1: center around secrets corrosive power. I've written memoirs in which
Speaker 1: I dug deep into my own family's buried past. One
Speaker 1: of the first big pieces of journalism I ever wrote
Speaker 1: as a young writer was a story for The New
Speaker 1: Yorker called The Secret Wife. My dad had been dead
Speaker 1: for a few years, and I was trying to understand
Speaker 1: him better. From a chance throwaway comment, I had learned
Speaker 1: that before my dad met my mother, he had been
Speaker 1: briefly married to a young woman named Dorothy. She died
Speaker 1: shortly after they wed. As I researched and reported the story,
Speaker 1: I felt I was uncovering the truth of my own
Speaker 1: father's sorrow and oppression. I interviewed people who told me
Speaker 1: that Dorothy had been the love of his life. I
Speaker 1: began to understand, or so I thought, the reasons he
Speaker 1: was so distant the source, ultimately of the pain killers
Speaker 1: he swallowed by the dozen each day. When I finished
Speaker 1: the Secret Wife, I thought I was done. Like a detective.
Speaker 1: I had gotten to the bottom of things. I had
Speaker 1: solved the case of my beloved, sad dead dad. It
Speaker 1: could have happened like this. I could have skipped the
Speaker 1: whole DNA testing thing because I had no curiosity about it. Really,
Speaker 1: I didn't need to spit into the plastic vials sent
Speaker 1: by ancestry dot Com. I wasn't going to discover new
Speaker 1: branches on my family tree, So why didn't I? Why
Speaker 1: didn't I skip it? I've learned something new about family
Speaker 1: secrets in the three years that have elapsed between that
Speaker 1: moment in my kitchen in Connecticut, that cold winter evening,
Speaker 1: Like so many other cold winter evenings, I've learned that
Speaker 1: when we discover a family secret is as important as
Speaker 1: the how and the why of what we discover. It
Speaker 1: could have happened like this, that most subtle whisper, that
Speaker 1: place in the deepest interior that we feel when we
Speaker 1: know something isn't right. There's something we're missing, some piece
Speaker 1: of elusive information that has been withheld from us, that
Speaker 1: subtle whisper can become so subtle that we almost don't
Speaker 1: hear it at all. We brushed by it as we
Speaker 1: go about our lives. We're so busy. Our to do
Speaker 1: lists are endless. There are jobs, bosses, spouses, kids, always
Speaker 1: something louder clamoring for our attention. On the day that
Speaker 1: my DNA results were returned to me by ancestry dot Com,
Speaker 1: I was fifty four years old. I had been married
Speaker 1: for nearly twenty years. I was the mother of a
Speaker 1: teenage son. I lived with my family in a house
Speaker 1: in the Connecticut countryside. I was a writer who had
Speaker 1: just finished my ninth book, Woman, wife, mother, cousin, niece, granddaughter,
Speaker 1: great granddaughter, daughter. I stared at the results of my
Speaker 1: DNA test on my computer screen. The numbers, letters, words,
Speaker 1: names were a nonsensical blur. They arranged and rearranged themselves
Speaker 1: as I tried to make any kind of sense of them.
Speaker 1: But I couldn't make sense of them. They made no
Speaker 1: sense the results of the DNA test. I almost didn't
Speaker 1: take Those results, spilled out in crystal clear, scientific black
Speaker 1: and white, meant only one possible thing. My father was
Speaker 1: not my father. What forms us? What shapes are identities.
Speaker 1: When we're children, teenagers, young adults, there's nature, and there's nurture,
Speaker 1: of course, and then there are the stories were told
Speaker 1: and the stories we tell ourselves. The story I was
Speaker 1: told and the story I told myself all my life
Speaker 1: until I was fifty four, was that I was the
Speaker 1: only child of my two older parents. My father was
Speaker 1: from an Orthodox Jewish family, a family well known within
Speaker 1: the confines of the Orthodox Jewish world. I spent my
Speaker 1: childhood in suburban New Jersey, going to synagogue with my
Speaker 1: dad on Saturday mornings. Our home was strictly kosher, dairy
Speaker 1: and meat kept separate. I never tasted bacon or shell
Speaker 1: fish until I rebelled as a teenager. And when I
Speaker 1: first tried at cheeseburger, I was afraid that God would
Speaker 1: strike me dead. Oh and one more sing I didn't
Speaker 1: look at Jewish. I know this sounds like the punch
Speaker 1: line of a joke, but it was a real thing,
Speaker 1: A huge part of what formed my identity. This not
Speaker 1: looking like who and what I was. I was very fair,
Speaker 1: with blonde hair, blue eyes, pale skin. I blushed easily.
Speaker 1: People made comments every single day of my life about
Speaker 1: how non Jewish. I looked your mother had an affair
Speaker 1: with a Swedish milkman. Come on, I've never seen a
Speaker 1: Jewish girl who looks like you. Sometimes people would even
Speaker 1: get mad at me, as if I was trying to
Speaker 1: pull one over on them, pretending to be something I wasn't.
Speaker 1: The ethnic breakdown on my ancestry dot com d n
Speaker 1: A was as follows, that was pretty much half Jewish,
Speaker 1: to be precise. The other half was English, French, German, Swedish, Irish.
Speaker 1: It turns out that all those people were right. They
Speaker 1: saw something that I couldn't allow myself to see, and
Speaker 1: so at the age of fifty four, I was left
Speaker 1: holding a massive mystery. My dad was dead, my mom
Speaker 1: was dead. Who was my father? Where had I come from?
Speaker 1: I mean literally who and what had made me? Here's
Speaker 1: another thing I've learned during my recent crash course and
Speaker 1: family secrets. If the secret keepers believe, really, truly believe
Speaker 1: that their secret will never come to light, they can
Speaker 1: pretend that it doesn't exist. And if they pretend long
Speaker 1: enough and hard enough that the secret doesn't exist, it's
Speaker 1: possible for them to come to believe this with their
Speaker 1: whole selves. In a sea of confusion. I did have
Speaker 1: a few clues to go on, and I clung to
Speaker 1: them like life raft. If a secret has been kept
Speaker 1: from you for your whole life, there's a part of
Speaker 1: you that knows it, not consciously, but in a deep
Speaker 1: place of knowing what the psychoanalyst Christopher Bolas calls the
Speaker 1: unthought known, something you know but can never allow yourself
Speaker 1: to think. Here's what I knew. My parents had been older,
Speaker 1: they'd have trouble conceiving me. My mother had had a
Speaker 1: number of miscarriages. She was nearly forty when I was born.
Speaker 1: Many years earlier, my mother had once let it slip
Speaker 1: that they had visited an institute in Philadelphia where they
Speaker 1: had undergone the process of artificial insemination. But there was
Speaker 1: no question that my dad was my dad. That was
Speaker 1: a given, that was a fact, his sperm, her egg,
Speaker 1: my parents. Do you know that expression the rug was
Speaker 1: pulled out from under me? We use that expression so
Speaker 1: often that it's pretty much a cliche. But stop for
Speaker 1: a second and think about what it really means. On
Speaker 1: the day that I found out that my dad hadn't
Speaker 1: been biologically speaking, my dad beneath me, all was suddenly empty,
Speaker 1: all was air, all was nothingness. The rug of my
Speaker 1: entire foundation had been, in fact pulled out from under me.
Speaker 1: The ancestors whose photographs and portraits hung on the walls
Speaker 1: of my home, the men and women I believed I
Speaker 1: came from, were transformed in a single instant into people
Speaker 1: with whom I had no connection. I had never known them,
Speaker 1: so now who were they to me? It felt almost
Speaker 1: as if they were all floating away, perfect strangers, waving
Speaker 1: at me solemnly. As the distance between us grew and grew.
Speaker 1: I had never felt so alone. Somewhere out there was
Speaker 1: my biological father, a huge question mark. I quickly understood
Speaker 1: that he must have been a sperm downer. I walked
Speaker 1: through the world for days, looking at every man of
Speaker 1: a certain age, wondering, are you my father? But the
Speaker 1: deeper mystery was this, What had my parents known when
Speaker 1: they went to that institute in Philadelphia? What was their mission?
Speaker 1: This was in the early days of reproductive science. What
Speaker 1: did my parents understand about what they were doing? One
Speaker 1: thing became quickly clear. They would have been told that
Speaker 1: they must never speak of this again. They would have
Speaker 1: been told that the child would never know. They would
Speaker 1: have been given express permission, no more than permission, a mandate,
Speaker 1: to keep a secret forever, to take that secret to
Speaker 1: the grave with them, to die with it. I was
Speaker 1: that secret. Their secret was me. Somewhere out there in
Speaker 1: a vast world was an elderly man with white hair
Speaker 1: and blue eyes who blushes easily, A man whose background
Speaker 1: is French, English, German, Swedish, Irish, a man who lived
Speaker 1: in Philadelphia during the year I was conceived. Somewhere out
Speaker 1: there was an elderly man who had been told long ago,
Speaker 1: when he was a young medical student, that no one
Speaker 1: would ever know, that records would be destroyed, that he
Speaker 1: would help a couple have a baby, make a family.
Speaker 1: Somewhere that man existed, and I would find him. I
Speaker 1: did find him, and also learned a great deal about
Speaker 1: the journey my parents took on their path to making
Speaker 1: a family to making me. We're living in an extraordinary
Speaker 1: moment in time, one in which the potent combination of
Speaker 1: easy and popular DNA testing and the power of the
Speaker 1: Internet have made many kinds of family secrets no longer possible.
Speaker 1: Every day, people are making discoveries. They're finding out that
Speaker 1: they were adopted, or donor conceived or have siblings they
Speaker 1: hadn't known about. They're discovering that their ethnicity is other
Speaker 1: than what they've always known, and often the keepers of
Speaker 1: those secrets are still alive, the ones who thought their
Speaker 1: secrets were safe. These kinds of secrets have been around
Speaker 1: since the dawn of humanity, but now that era is over.
Speaker 1: In the not too distant future, the very idea that
Speaker 1: family has kept these kinds of secrets out of self
Speaker 1: protectiveness or shame or in the name of love will
Speaker 1: be considered ludicrous and just playing wrong. But here we are,
Speaker 1: with secrets tumbling out at a staggering rate. Join me
Speaker 1: and my guests on Family Secrets as we shine a
Speaker 1: bright light into the dark hidden corners of the unspoken
Speaker 1: and discovered together the power and beauty that comes with
Speaker 1: finally knowing the truth. Family Secrets is an I Heart
Speaker 1: Media production. Dylan Fagin is the supervising producer, Andrew Howard
Speaker 1: and Tristan McNeil are the audio engineers, and Julie Douglas
Speaker 1: is the executive producer. A special shout out thank you
Speaker 1: to my husband Michael Marin and my son Jacob Marin
Speaker 1: who have been on this journey with me If you
Speaker 1: have a family secret you'd like to share, you can
Speaker 1: get in touch with us at listener mail at Family
Speaker 1: Secrets Podcast dot com, and you can also find us
Speaker 1: on Instagram at Danny Ryder, and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod,
Speaker 1: and Twitter at fam secrets Pot. That's fam secrets Pot.
Speaker 1: For more about my book, Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot
Speaker 1: com