Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Warning.
Speaker 1: This episode contains discussions of suicide. Listener discussion is advised.
Speaker 1: If you are a loved one is struggling with suicidal thoughts,
Speaker 1: please call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at three. When
Speaker 1: I tell my daughter about the fire, she looks at
Speaker 1: the sun. I won't tell her that my mother, her grandmother,
Speaker 1: said it, just as when she asked how she died,
Speaker 1: I won't tell her about the gun. I'll say simply,
Speaker 1: she had a bad heart. This is the only jar
Speaker 1: I'll offer. If you're reading this now, I'm sorry I
Speaker 1: lied to you. You're only seven. I didn't want you
Speaker 1: to know, before you had even fully landed on this
Speaker 1: planet a grandmother had chosen to leave it. I didn't
Speaker 1: want you to know that it was an option, it
Speaker 1: was something in our blood. I didn't want you to
Speaker 1: know that at one when I was your age, she
Speaker 1: might considered, with one match to suit be fold me
Speaker 1: us everything back into the universe, just as I didn't
Speaker 1: want you to know at that moment that I too
Speaker 1: had considered leaving. That's Nick Flynn, poet, memoirist, teacher, and
Speaker 1: author of the recent memoir This is the night our
Speaker 1: house will catch fire. Nick's story is like an intricate
Speaker 1: piece of origami, secrets folded into secrets, folded into secrets,
Speaker 1: until finally, over the course of a lifetime, a shape emerges.
Speaker 1: It's tough and shocking and ultimately beautiful. This is one
Speaker 1: man's journey to assemble the shards of memory into something
Speaker 1: whole and coherent, something he can live with. I'm Danny Shapiro,
Speaker 1: and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept
Speaker 1: from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
Speaker 1: secrets we keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape
Speaker 1: of your childhood. I grew up in a small town
Speaker 1: in New England, in Massachusetts on the coast. For beautiful,
Speaker 1: I mean I can see that I knew it was beautiful,
Speaker 1: then I can still see it's beautiful, although I don't
Speaker 1: go back very much. So. The ocean was a big
Speaker 1: part of the Atlantic Ocean, and uh the beach and
Speaker 1: even more specifically, salt marsh that the sort of body
Speaker 1: is landform that separated the ocean from the mainland. I
Speaker 1: spent a lot of time in the salt marshes, and
Speaker 1: another part of the landscape was the woods behind my
Speaker 1: grandmother's house. Those are sort of the main places. It
Speaker 1: was a small town. It was a small town. It
Speaker 1: didn't you know one street town called the center town,
Speaker 1: the harbor, a lot of fishing boats in it. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I spent a lot of time in the harbor. So
Speaker 1: you just went back and forth down the one street.
Speaker 1: And your family had deep roots in this town, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: deep roots. Yeah, it's funny when you say that, because
Speaker 1: I don't think of them. There was a deep because
Speaker 1: we felt like like interlopers or that we didn't belong
Speaker 1: there in some way. I think as my mother broke
Speaker 1: away from her family in some way, and we dropped
Speaker 1: several class notches from her being raised probably upper class
Speaker 1: down to like very working class poor by the time
Speaker 1: I came along. But yeah, I know that her father
Speaker 1: and grandfather at least grew up in the town or
Speaker 1: had roots in the town. And then my father's also
Speaker 1: his father grandfather, so I know it goes back at
Speaker 1: least that far, you know, at least two or three generations.
Speaker 1: So tell me about the mother of your childhood. Describe
Speaker 1: her for me what she was like. By the time
Speaker 1: she was twenty, she had two kids, I was a
Speaker 1: second child after you know, probably six months after I
Speaker 1: was born, she left my father, which is a good thing,
Speaker 1: a necessary thing, and then she was on her own. Really,
Speaker 1: she had this wealthy father, but she didn't take any
Speaker 1: help or get any help from him. She was kind
Speaker 1: of on her own. But she stayed in the same
Speaker 1: town that she grew up in and well that at
Speaker 1: least the grandfather wasn't and her mother, I think mostly
Speaker 1: just two, so she does some childcare. Like we often
Speaker 1: stayed at her mother's house, at my grandmother's house. Because
Speaker 1: my mother got three jobs, you know, three lousy jobs,
Speaker 1: as Philippine would say. She worked at a making donuts
Speaker 1: at the supermarket, and she worked waiting tables and restaurants,
Speaker 1: and eventually she got her more secure job, which was
Speaker 1: a bank teller, and that gave us health insurance. So
Speaker 1: she was young. She was very young and beautiful and
Speaker 1: vivacious and fun, and she had a series of boyfriends
Speaker 1: growing up. She had these, you know, men that would
Speaker 1: sort of be in our life, and they'd usually be
Speaker 1: in a life for like maybe a year or so,
Speaker 1: or maybe a little bit longer, and you know, I
Speaker 1: got to know each of these guys, and the guys
Speaker 1: that she went with were for the most part kind
Speaker 1: of great guys, um gentle. For the most part, that
Speaker 1: wasn't like violence being brought into the house. And for
Speaker 1: the most part, I say there was something. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: was the reason behind the riffed with her father with
Speaker 1: your grandfather? Well, you know, my mother married my father,
Speaker 1: or got pregnant by my father. She was probably seventeen
Speaker 1: and he was probably twenty seven, and he was pretty
Speaker 1: clearly you know, for my grandfather to see he was
Speaker 1: maybe not the right guy. He was on his way
Speaker 1: to pretty serious alcoholism. He didn't really have a job.
Speaker 1: He just sort of drifted around. One of the things
Speaker 1: that he called himself a writer, which became a point
Speaker 1: of contention in my family. When I started to call
Speaker 1: myself a writer, it wasn't like a sign of something
Speaker 1: noble to do, so it sort of met you are disreputable.
Speaker 1: I think it was mostly that, and mostly that she
Speaker 1: sort of and she was rebellious when she was young.
Speaker 1: She was rebellious I think because the house she grew
Speaker 1: up in was there was a lot of alcohol. There
Speaker 1: was a lot of alcoholism. Her mother and her father
Speaker 1: were both alcoholics. And even if they had money, so
Speaker 1: there wasn't the consequences that come with alcoholism, you know,
Speaker 1: certain consequences, But at a certain point, I think by
Speaker 1: the time she was like fifteen or so, she was
Speaker 1: just really rebellious and we kept getting kicked out of schools,
Speaker 1: out of private schools, and it was just kind of
Speaker 1: a little bit wild, and I think that he they
Speaker 1: didn't have the tools as parents to deal with the
Speaker 1: young woman and their pardon what they were doing to
Speaker 1: adding to her her struggles. You know. It's interesting though,
Speaker 1: because she does leave your father, and so if he's
Speaker 1: the problem was sort of the last straw, then that's gone,
Speaker 1: but her relationship with them never really improves. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: was also I think by the time she was with
Speaker 1: my father, around the same time my grandparents got divorced,
Speaker 1: and so there was the grandmother who was Irish, the
Speaker 1: grandfather who was you know, waspy English. He was the
Speaker 1: one who had the money, and the grandmother, who is
Speaker 1: the one who also helped raise us. She didn't have
Speaker 1: much money then once they got divorced, and so I
Speaker 1: think from the waspy side, it's a little incomprehensible to
Speaker 1: some of my friends, and they just there's a thing
Speaker 1: about like not supporting the children, like they have to
Speaker 1: make it on their own, that they have to prove themselves,
Speaker 1: or you know, not even to the point of just
Speaker 1: offering her an education. You know, like I would think
Speaker 1: that you would think she's twenty years old, just two kids,
Speaker 1: like you just stepped in and say that we want
Speaker 1: to put you through college or something, just do something
Speaker 1: that would basically set her on the right track. They
Speaker 1: just didn't do that. I don't It's a little bit
Speaker 1: incomprehensible to me. My grandfather in some ways was the
Speaker 1: strange in that way, Like I think he had a
Speaker 1: strange relationship to money. He inherited his money and he
Speaker 1: just went through it like in his life. He sort
Speaker 1: of was nominally a businessman, but he just kind of
Speaker 1: spent the money that he had, and I think he
Speaker 1: felt like he hadn't earned it and so maybe his
Speaker 1: kids should earn it. It's really hard for me to say,
Speaker 1: tell me a little bit about your father. Well he
Speaker 1: was I didn't know him growing up at all. He
Speaker 1: left when I was six months old, or we left him.
Speaker 1: And the stories I heard you just tell there was
Speaker 1: bad blood, like if you brought him up. And I
Speaker 1: began getting letters from him when I was fifteen or so,
Speaker 1: fourteen or fifteen, and he was in federal prison at
Speaker 1: that point he'd gone to jail, but at this point
Speaker 1: he was in federal prison for passing bad checks, robbing
Speaker 1: banks with these bad checks across state lines. Was federal.
Speaker 1: And he began writing me letters and the letters were,
Speaker 1: you know, confusing, and my mother would give me the letters,
Speaker 1: but she was given some resentment like, you know, your
Speaker 1: father's in prison, did this thing. Um, it was sort
Speaker 1: of making a connection. But he's very um. You know,
Speaker 1: if he had to diagnose him, probably know, narcissism would
Speaker 1: probably be high on the on the list. He was
Speaker 1: an alcoholic but also narcissistic. And so he really just
Speaker 1: talked about himself in the letters, like he didn't seem
Speaker 1: like he was really that interested in me my life,
Speaker 1: and he was just sort of go on about himself,
Speaker 1: you know. So the letters stopped he got out of prison.
Speaker 1: You know, through some certain strange coincidences, I knew who
Speaker 1: he was and where he was, you know, I document
Speaker 1: that in one of my earlier books. And then at
Speaker 1: a certain point I began after my mother died when
Speaker 1: I was twenty two. I began working in homeless shelter,
Speaker 1: and after I'd been there for three years, he showed
Speaker 1: up at the homeless shelter. At that point he was homeless.
Speaker 1: It was well into his alcoholism, and he was homeless
Speaker 1: for about five years. And you know, he and I
Speaker 1: were sort of wrestled in the homeless shelter for for
Speaker 1: about three years until I finally got sober, and then
Speaker 1: I left the shelter, and then a little while after that,
Speaker 1: we got him into housing, into a subsidized housing. We'll
Speaker 1: be right back. When Nick is seven years old. His
Speaker 1: house catches fire. That's how it's talked about. The house
Speaker 1: catches fire, as if this is something that happens passively
Speaker 1: all by itself. Nick writes quite a bit about cover stories.
Speaker 1: He quotes another guest on this podcast, Dr Bessel vander Kolch,
Speaker 1: from his seminal book on trauma, The Body keeps the score. Trauma,
Speaker 1: by its nature, drives us to the edge of comprehension.
Speaker 1: Sooner or later, most survivors come up with what many
Speaker 1: of them call their cover story that offers some explanation
Speaker 1: for their symptoms and behaviors for public consumption. These stories, however,
Speaker 1: rarely capture the inner truth of the experience. It's enormously
Speaker 1: difficult to organize ins traumatic experiences into a coherent account,
Speaker 1: a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Speaker 1: The truth Nick will come to realize later, much later,
Speaker 1: is that the fire didn't just happen. His mother said
Speaker 1: it herself. Well, Nick and his brother were asleep upstairs.
Speaker 1: The story of the fire is something I've been wrestling with.
Speaker 1: That it happened, and it also it appears in every
Speaker 1: book that I've written, actually is a there's a fire,
Speaker 1: there's a house on fire. This's you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: something that he sort of has always been hovering in
Speaker 1: my subconscious and and I did, you know, like vessel
Speaker 1: Vandicle and that really struck me, that passage from vessel Vandricle.
Speaker 1: He's done a lot of work with with veterans with
Speaker 1: post traumatic stress, and I really felt the thing that
Speaker 1: had this book arise was this sort of moment of
Speaker 1: sort of really seeing the fire for what it was
Speaker 1: in a way as much as I could at that moment,
Speaker 1: which was that my mother had said it, and that
Speaker 1: that was a really kind of a terrifying thing to do,
Speaker 1: and I hadn't really felt the terror of it, or
Speaker 1: the directicus of it, or the the layers the danger
Speaker 1: of that until that moment. And it's strange to say
Speaker 1: that what compelled me to see it, or what fortunate
Speaker 1: to see it, was that my daughter turned the same
Speaker 1: age I had bed and I sort of looked at
Speaker 1: her when she was set and I was just like, well,
Speaker 1: that's that's a really that's kind of a crazy thing
Speaker 1: to do, to set a house on fire with a
Speaker 1: kid in it. And it's a little embarrassing to say
Speaker 1: because before that moment, before my daughter turned seven, you know,
Speaker 1: in the beginning, when the house got fire, the story
Speaker 1: for the family was that raccoons had knocked out her
Speaker 1: botti over, we had a grill, the raccoons came knocked
Speaker 1: to have bought you over, and the house got fire.
Speaker 1: And then several years later I interviewed her boyfriend at
Speaker 1: the time, who was in the house of the night
Speaker 1: at the fire, and he just laughed at the story
Speaker 1: of the raccoon as he said, well, you know, the
Speaker 1: raccoons did say your house on fire, your mother did.
Speaker 1: And that was when I was about thirty five. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it was more than several years later. It was
Speaker 1: a whole lot of years later, right, so like a
Speaker 1: lifetime later. Three years later, thirty years later. I lived
Speaker 1: with this story of the of the raccoons for like
Speaker 1: thirty years, and that seemed like a good story. It
Speaker 1: made sense, you know. I didn't think about the fire
Speaker 1: on a conscious level that much, because you know, there
Speaker 1: was an accident. I reckon said the house on fire, Like,
Speaker 1: we escaped, my mother got the insurance money and got
Speaker 1: the house fixed. It was it was kind of a
Speaker 1: good thing. But then even after I heard the story
Speaker 1: that she had set the house on fire, I still
Speaker 1: held onto that thing that it was a good story that,
Speaker 1: you know, because it worked out. We got the money
Speaker 1: and we got the house fixed, and you know, my
Speaker 1: mother was broke, she was young. Our house was really
Speaker 1: not in good shape, and it became a little bit better.
Speaker 1: I held onto that story until my daughter was the
Speaker 1: same age I was, and then I was like, well, wait,
Speaker 1: that's a strange thing for a parent to do. Like,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't know about you, but I had
Speaker 1: no idea what it was to be a parent until
Speaker 1: I became one. And then suddenly you're you know, one
Speaker 1: day you're not a parent, the next day you are one.
Speaker 1: And then you sort of figured out as you go along.
Speaker 1: And as she got to that age, the fire rose
Speaker 1: up again in my subconscious it rose up. Remember what
Speaker 1: I said about origami. When he's thirty five, Nick goes
Speaker 1: on a pilgrimage of sorts, traveling the country to interview
Speaker 1: each of his mother's ex boyfriends. He does this in
Speaker 1: a journalistic way and actually decides to make a documentary
Speaker 1: about it. This is his own way of giving himself
Speaker 1: permission to dig deeper, show up on the front steps
Speaker 1: of strangers, learn more about all he doesn't yet know.
Speaker 1: It's like in a dream, when there's a door and
Speaker 1: a dream you have the choice way to open it
Speaker 1: or leave it closed, And you know, it just seems
Speaker 1: if just to note to know what's beyond it, you
Speaker 1: open the door, and it might be something that's you
Speaker 1: don't want to see, or something that's somewhere terrifying. But
Speaker 1: if you don't open the door, then you're you'll never know. So,
Speaker 1: you know, when I was thirty five and I got
Speaker 1: a notice, a friend of mine told me that there
Speaker 1: was a organization in New York called The Kitchen, which
Speaker 1: is a performance arts space, and they put out a
Speaker 1: call to artists and writers who were not video we're
Speaker 1: not filmmakers, and they would train you to how to
Speaker 1: make films, how to make a videos, and they gave
Speaker 1: you editing, and they gave you equipment, and you know,
Speaker 1: you met and so I submitted a proposal. And the
Speaker 1: proposal I submitted was that I would go track down
Speaker 1: my mother's ex boyfriends. Which the reason I did that
Speaker 1: was because it really seemed like it gave me the creeps.
Speaker 1: It seemed like a really strange proposal. Just suddenly show up,
Speaker 1: you know, suddenly you're seven, and now that these guys
Speaker 1: are probably fifty or something, and now you're thirty five,
Speaker 1: and like, hi, do you remember me? And I think
Speaker 1: it was because of that they were such a strange
Speaker 1: proposal that they let me in. I made the film,
Speaker 1: and um, there's a documentary film. And I went and
Speaker 1: found these men. He's like about a dozen men all
Speaker 1: up and down the Eastern Seaboard down to Florida, from
Speaker 1: Florida to almost to the Canadian border. And you know,
Speaker 1: I rented cars and flew and didn't really relatively, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe two week or a month long period. I just
Speaker 1: canted all these interviews and then edited it into a film.
Speaker 1: I decided to just steal it down just for to
Speaker 1: make it more streamline to two questions. I just asked
Speaker 1: them how they had met her and then how they
Speaker 1: find out she had died, and that just sort of
Speaker 1: was enough to get them going to tell the story
Speaker 1: about what she was to do. And I remember them
Speaker 1: all too like, they all like, you know, I could
Speaker 1: even recognize them when I was with them. They were
Speaker 1: like these father figures in my life growing up, this
Speaker 1: rotating cast of father figures. So that's how I met
Speaker 1: I call him Vernon in the book. His name is
Speaker 1: in Vernon, but I called him Vernon in the book.
Speaker 1: That's so how I met him. And he told the story,
Speaker 1: the story being that it wasn't Raccoon's tipping over the habachi,
Speaker 1: it was Nick's mother setting the house on fire to
Speaker 1: be able to collect the insurance money. I sometimes wonder,
Speaker 1: you know, when it comes to being a writer and
Speaker 1: digging into material, opening the door and not knowing what's
Speaker 1: going to be on the other side of it, that
Speaker 1: sometimes it feels like the writing, or the assignment or
Speaker 1: the proposal, is the thing that gives you permission to
Speaker 1: go ahead and do the thing that scares you, because
Speaker 1: now it's work, now it's art, but it's something that
Speaker 1: you actually really want to know, but you would never
Speaker 1: just go do on your own. It has to have
Speaker 1: a form and a shape. Are you thinking of inheritance?
Speaker 1: I'm thinking of inheritance. I'm thinking of a piece I
Speaker 1: wrote for The New Yorker many years ago when I
Speaker 1: was just trying to understand my father better again after
Speaker 1: his death, where I knew he had been married to
Speaker 1: a woman who died shortly after they got married, and
Speaker 1: I never knew anything about her, anything about it. It
Speaker 1: was a subject that we never broached. And I pitched
Speaker 1: it to The New Yorker and I got an assignment.
Speaker 1: So I had to pick up the phone. I had
Speaker 1: to get in the car, I had to go. I
Speaker 1: had to find her family, and and my heart was
Speaker 1: in my throat. I was absolutely terrified. I really wanted
Speaker 1: to know. But the only way that I could bring
Speaker 1: myself to push it, to push myself was to feel
Speaker 1: like I had a purpose. Yeah, I mean, I think,
Speaker 1: and there there is terror involved in it too. I mean,
Speaker 1: there are a couple of the men that I interviewed
Speaker 1: that I that I tracked down. I had feared, like
Speaker 1: my mother's second husband was a Vietnam VET and he
Speaker 1: was just back in Vietnam at the time, and you know,
Speaker 1: he was he was suffering from PTSD and he was
Speaker 1: just a little bit scary, or you know, that's that's
Speaker 1: sort of minimizing it. He was. He was a lot scary,
Speaker 1: and he's also great. He was also a really great guy.
Speaker 1: And so when I found him, it was frightening until
Speaker 1: we actually were face to face, and then suddenly it
Speaker 1: all melted away. I saw this, this human being. When
Speaker 1: you're eighteen, your then girlfriend, who you referred to as
Speaker 1: the initial oh, is looking for a pad of paper
Speaker 1: to write something down on and she finds a pad
Speaker 1: of paper and on it is in your mother's handwriting
Speaker 1: is a suicide note. And it's written at some time earlier,
Speaker 1: and it's not something that your mother carried through with.
Speaker 1: She had not committed suicide at that time. But there's
Speaker 1: this note and there's a really powerful moment where you
Speaker 1: go outside and you burn it more fire, And how
Speaker 1: does that then sort of play within you during this
Speaker 1: period of time. I mean, you've you're in the midst
Speaker 1: of your addiction, you're drinking really heavily. Is it something
Speaker 1: that at that time stayed with you and haunted you?
Speaker 1: Or did it burn up with the paper that you
Speaker 1: set fire too? You know, I think I had a
Speaker 1: sense at the time that you know, I could tell
Speaker 1: you again, you can tell yourself a story. And the
Speaker 1: story that I told myself is that when you know,
Speaker 1: the Vietnam vette had left, had left our house, that
Speaker 1: my mother fell into a depression. And that had been
Speaker 1: probably two or three years before I found that note,
Speaker 1: and so I didn't know how ng that. No, there
Speaker 1: was like a yellow legal pad had been kicking around
Speaker 1: the house and maybe just somehow surfaced. And I attributed
Speaker 1: to that because she didn't seem in that state at
Speaker 1: that time when I was eighteen, and so I really
Speaker 1: was like, this is something that she went through and
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna get rid of it. I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: burn this, and that it was like a like a ritual.
Speaker 1: And I assumed in my teenage mind, my teenage cosmology,
Speaker 1: that by burning it it somehow would send it back
Speaker 1: out into the universe, and it wouldn't be real. Somehow
Speaker 1: that released the energy of it, and rather than just
Speaker 1: deny it, just like exilely to a place of denial.
Speaker 1: We you're just not going to think about this because
Speaker 1: it's too much to think about. And so that's what
Speaker 1: I did. And I did I think about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I thought about it, you know, quite a bit. Like
Speaker 1: when I after I got that note, I was eighteen,
Speaker 1: and I decided not to go to college. I was
Speaker 1: just gonna stay sort of closer to home to keep
Speaker 1: an eye on my mother. And so I worked for
Speaker 1: a couple of years and I ended up working for her,
Speaker 1: her boyfriend at the time, it was a gangster. Worked
Speaker 1: for those guys for about five years ago, but a
Speaker 1: lot of it was to keep an eye of my mother.
Speaker 1: And then I eventually did go to school. I eventually
Speaker 1: did end up admitted to you mass Amherst, and it
Speaker 1: just made sense to go. There was a couple years later,
Speaker 1: I was like twenty. At that point, your mom was
Speaker 1: she was home and tending bar and laundering money for
Speaker 1: this gangster. Right, Yeah, you're off in college and you're
Speaker 1: also in the thrones of your own alcoholism. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was early on, you know, I think you can get
Speaker 1: away with a lot not everyone. But I was functional.
Speaker 1: I was doing well in school and greeting and that
Speaker 1: I just kidding. I push it at night and stuff.
Speaker 1: But I hadn't reached the bottom of my alcoholism. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And you also it sounds like, well you're in school
Speaker 1: that you really you kind of find yourself in books,
Speaker 1: in literature, and do you start to know that this
Speaker 1: is what you want to do, especially given that you've
Speaker 1: got this legacy of your father, you know, being quote
Speaker 1: unquote a writer, and that not being an okay thing
Speaker 1: to be or a thing to be or pretending to be. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it seemed like there was a lot of
Speaker 1: pretend things like the Vietnam Vetpan came home Vietnam, you
Speaker 1: just put a sign in his car that said carpenter.
Speaker 1: He really wasn't a carpenter. At that point, it seemed
Speaker 1: like writers were the same thing. You just sort of
Speaker 1: put a sign up and say, yeah, I'm a writer,
Speaker 1: and then just then you just go try to do it.
Speaker 1: But I had been interested in writing though for probably
Speaker 1: at least since I was early teens, ten twelve. It
Speaker 1: was something that interested me that I was really circling around.
Speaker 1: And when I went to school, I already I've been
Speaker 1: working for a couple of years and I had become
Speaker 1: an electrician, so I knew that I could make money.
Speaker 1: I knew I could sort of support myself, and it
Speaker 1: allowed me the financial freedom to study poetry and to
Speaker 1: study uh you know, it wasn't poetry at first and
Speaker 1: became poetry, but just just to read it just seemed
Speaker 1: like such a you know, such a gift after working
Speaker 1: for a few years after high school, just to be
Speaker 1: able to live in one place and you just have
Speaker 1: to read books. It was amazing. We'll be back in
Speaker 1: a moment with more family secrets. Nix and his junior
Speaker 1: year of college twenty one years old, steeped in literature
Speaker 1: but also ooze when his mother dies by suicide advance
Speaker 1: school for I think I was finishing my junior year.
Speaker 1: I had left home, which is you know, one of
Speaker 1: those codependent nightmares. You think you're you know, you're in
Speaker 1: charge of keeping someone alive, and then you leave and
Speaker 1: then I do die. Um, so that wasn't a good thing.
Speaker 1: But she did the games to this year is with
Speaker 1: He was a really sweet guy. I still know him
Speaker 1: I'm still friends with him, but they were, you know,
Speaker 1: he just sort of had morphed into cocaine, had become
Speaker 1: a big part of it. And so she was doing
Speaker 1: cocaine and he was in prison. Actually he actually got
Speaker 1: busted and he was in federal prison. He got through
Speaker 1: to five years and he was about to get out
Speaker 1: of prison. He had been in for you know, usually
Speaker 1: three or five he served too, and he was about
Speaker 1: to get out. And she was seeing someone else at
Speaker 1: that time, and it was right before Christmas, and I
Speaker 1: think she was doing cocaine and she went through with it.
Speaker 1: She went through with her her suicide, which you know,
Speaker 1: I feel that she had always been that had always
Speaker 1: been lingering as part of her one of her ways
Speaker 1: out from whatever she was suffering from. You know, some
Speaker 1: of the things would go back to her family. I
Speaker 1: think she you know, I say in the book that
Speaker 1: you can see from the age that she's like six
Speaker 1: to seven or something, that something happened, Like it looks
Speaker 1: like her face just changes and she becomes harder. And
Speaker 1: you know, she was always incredibly beautiful, but you could
Speaker 1: see there was like a look like the world is
Speaker 1: much darker than I imagined. So I don't know what
Speaker 1: that is. You know, I'm not sure what that is
Speaker 1: had happened, but we can guess, and I think it
Speaker 1: followed her through and you can see that she had
Speaker 1: even some of the boyfriends. I talked to it and
Speaker 1: said that she had actually attempted to aside even you know,
Speaker 1: when I was very younger, even when she was carrying me.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's always it was not the first time,
Speaker 1: and then this time she succeeded. But it wasn't something
Speaker 1: she talked about. It wasn't like when we were when
Speaker 1: I was a kid. It wasn't like. That's why the letter.
Speaker 1: That's why I could burn the letter and feel that
Speaker 1: it was like somehow releasing, because it wasn't. She wasn't
Speaker 1: like she was very fun to be around. She was
Speaker 1: very loving, she was very uh vivacious and fun and
Speaker 1: uh so it wasn't like she was like, for the
Speaker 1: most part, like expressing suicidal intent to anyone. It was
Speaker 1: really something she kept herself. It was a secret. The
Speaker 1: long wake of his mother's suicide follows Nick through his
Speaker 1: twenties and into rock bottom alcoholism. So often when there's trauma,
Speaker 1: there's also addiction. The two states of being go together
Speaker 1: hand in glove. It's excruciating to feel the feelings, and
Speaker 1: here is a way to number them. Nick quotes the
Speaker 1: great British psychoanalyst D W. Winnicott, who writes, it's a
Speaker 1: joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.
Speaker 1: Nick needed to stay hidden for a good long while.
Speaker 1: He finally gets sober, and in many respects he is
Speaker 1: found by recovery and eventually by marriage and fatherhood. But
Speaker 1: over the years trauma, that tricky shape shifting state of
Speaker 1: being takes many forms, including a long affair that begins
Speaker 1: when his daughter is two. Because trauma and secrecy also
Speaker 1: go together, hand in glove. My relationship to sobriety just
Speaker 1: came in a necessary time. I think I started to
Speaker 1: feel it around the same age that my mother had been.
Speaker 1: You know, if you have any astrology beliefs or anything
Speaker 1: that sort of sadom return the late or so where
Speaker 1: and then you go for another twenty seven years and
Speaker 1: that's when there's a whole creation destruction happens, so you
Speaker 1: have to sort of rethink your entire life or to it.
Speaker 1: So around when my father showed up at the shelter
Speaker 1: or I wrestled with that for a couple of years.
Speaker 1: My drinking just increased, and then I quit. I don't
Speaker 1: want to make it sound easy that I quit. It was.
Speaker 1: It was a long process of including drugs and alcohol.
Speaker 1: You know. It was actually the just say the obvious,
Speaker 1: but or say things that you always hear, But it
Speaker 1: was the thing the same. I can't imagine what my
Speaker 1: life would be if I had not quick drinking doing drugs.
Speaker 1: I certainly would have written probably anything. I was trying
Speaker 1: to be a writer all through my twenties, but I
Speaker 1: really couldn't write anything coherent, which I feel very lucky
Speaker 1: about also because that's the reason I went to therapy,
Speaker 1: and the therapist is the one who told me to
Speaker 1: get sober, because I was just I knew I could
Speaker 1: write something, but I just couldn't quite get the clarity
Speaker 1: to do it. So there was that, And then the
Speaker 1: thing about going to therapy and getting sober is suddenly
Speaker 1: there's a certain clarity. You know, it's a slow building clarity,
Speaker 1: but it does whatever trauma you have suddenly begins to
Speaker 1: rise up a little bit more. And it it does
Speaker 1: with PTSD type stuff, which probably escaping from a burning
Speaker 1: house and uh, you know, your mother committing suicide, you know,
Speaker 1: probably could definitely trigger a PTSD reaction, even though you know,
Speaker 1: I might not have been used that language at the time.
Speaker 1: But it lodges in your brain, you know, from what
Speaker 1: I read about a neuroscience that lodges in your brain
Speaker 1: in different place. Like trauma doesn't sort of always active.
Speaker 1: It's always sort of hyper vigilant and sort of reading
Speaker 1: for this traumas or to happen again. And it's very
Speaker 1: hard because it doesn't go into the deeper long term
Speaker 1: MEMBORI just sort of stays and like the other part
Speaker 1: of the brand, I'm Avigdala. Yeah. Yeah, the fight flight
Speaker 1: or freeze part of the bran, the idea of like
Speaker 1: hidings that was so important, It is so important to
Speaker 1: my life as an addict. I was one of those
Speaker 1: acts that, like, really I thought the best thing, the
Speaker 1: most clever thing, was like to be fucked up and
Speaker 1: I don't know if you could swear on this and
Speaker 1: to yet to have no one know, you know, you
Speaker 1: sort of put on dark glasses. You just sort of
Speaker 1: go and you're like no one knows you are, and
Speaker 1: that's like you're so you have two lives. It's like
Speaker 1: a very dual existence. You know though, when I quit,
Speaker 1: when I got sober and quit, pretty much everyone I
Speaker 1: knew said, oh, we knew you were sucked up all
Speaker 1: the time. You know, I wasn't really fooling anyone. There
Speaker 1: was so much I think from my childhood that was
Speaker 1: like hidden, like where my mother came from, what her
Speaker 1: childhood was, like what she was holding inside with the
Speaker 1: you know, with her relationship, her grip on life when
Speaker 1: she started dating the gangster and what she was going on.
Speaker 1: I mean, I knew, you know, gangsters only do a
Speaker 1: few things. I mean, I guess there was drugs, because
Speaker 1: you know, either it's guns, drugs, or prostitutes. I guess,
Speaker 1: so they have a limited talent of things they do,
Speaker 1: so I guess drugs. We didn't talk about it. We
Speaker 1: didn't like it. Seemed like you had to keep things
Speaker 1: sort of in this very sort of the asthma where
Speaker 1: you could deny things and you could sort of have
Speaker 1: other lives that's sort of happening outside of it. So
Speaker 1: that's what I grew up with. I really grew up
Speaker 1: with that. That's what slowly, very very slowly, and then
Speaker 1: I can return to that too. I can return to
Speaker 1: that double life very easily if I'm not vigilant, I
Speaker 1: can sort of that can seem like the best place
Speaker 1: to be still, you know, maybe not today. I think
Speaker 1: this book was part of me trying to drag that
Speaker 1: into the light too, and trying to say, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's this part of me that like really is comfortable
Speaker 1: with just closing a hotel room door and you know,
Speaker 1: being alone in there, or being with a lover that
Speaker 1: I probably shouldn't be with that feels to me like
Speaker 1: familiar in this way, that seems to me like the
Speaker 1: real definition of love. Maybe, well yeah, and it's like home,
Speaker 1: It's like what that's all we know. All we know
Speaker 1: is what we got way back then. That's a good,
Speaker 1: that's a good that could that could be ship bumpers.
Speaker 1: All we know is what we've got. So you're a
Speaker 1: writer and you're a teacher, you have this full of
Speaker 1: professional life, you're sober, You fall in love with the
Speaker 1: woman who becomes your wife. You have a daughter, and
Speaker 1: when your daughters too, you begin an affair that asked
Speaker 1: for a whole bunch of years. Yeah, off and on
Speaker 1: for five years. Yeah. Yeah. When my daughter turned too,
Speaker 1: I began this affair, and you know, part of it
Speaker 1: it had to do with the person I had the
Speaker 1: affair with. It was a lovely person who is a
Speaker 1: lovely person, but also probably a person who's comfortable with
Speaker 1: having a double life, at least was at that point.
Speaker 1: It happened also with a traumatic moment in my life.
Speaker 1: It was right at the moment when they began filming
Speaker 1: my first book that began making into a film, and
Speaker 1: I was on set every day and to day that
Speaker 1: um and I knew this was kind of part of
Speaker 1: you know, writing the scripts and there's a day where
Speaker 1: Juliette Moore, who plays my mother, and it would re
Speaker 1: enact my mother's suicide and being a set that day,
Speaker 1: like it's not like again, it's like almost like going
Speaker 1: and tracking down your mother's explore friends and asking him questions,
Speaker 1: which it's it's a strange thing to be and that
Speaker 1: even the director was like, you don't have to be
Speaker 1: here today, But I again, I was like, well where
Speaker 1: else would I be? Like it? I'll always wonder what
Speaker 1: this was if I don't stay here. And so I
Speaker 1: stayed through that, but I think it did some restimulated
Speaker 1: or reactivated that trauma in the and one of the
Speaker 1: ways this woman we have been friends for a while,
Speaker 1: you know, for a year or so, and we became
Speaker 1: lovers like right around then, and then it was off
Speaker 1: and on for the next several years taxt to five years.
Speaker 1: I mean, it makes so much emotional sense to me
Speaker 1: that being on the set watching that re enactment and
Speaker 1: somehow needing to like where else would you be as
Speaker 1: you said, what is the nature of that trigger? Like
Speaker 1: what would you call it? Is it like a funking
Speaker 1: I'm going to do what I want? Is itself desse
Speaker 1: itself destruction? Is it I've been through so much? This
Speaker 1: is you know, because in a way, like when you're
Speaker 1: describing the re enactment, it's a little bit like you know,
Speaker 1: when you're outter turned seven having the thought, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: that was really really not a good story. That was
Speaker 1: not okay. You know. It's like I mean, and obviously
Speaker 1: your mother suicide wasn't okay, But somehow it's now being
Speaker 1: literally played out by an Academy Award winning actress, like
Speaker 1: in front of your eyes. I just wonder what you
Speaker 1: would say about like what that was that then triggered
Speaker 1: the beginning of this long affair. It's really hard to
Speaker 1: categorize because it's you know, like most of my life.
Speaker 1: You know, I would say it is mundane in a way,
Speaker 1: or at least comprehensible. Like you know, everyone struggles with
Speaker 1: trying to figure out who your parents are, and like
Speaker 1: people get lost at the parish points in their lives,
Speaker 1: and you know, my parents got lost at various points
Speaker 1: and their consequences were maybe more intense than some other people.
Speaker 1: But it's it's within the realm of comprehension. But you know,
Speaker 1: somehow being on the set, well you're seeing this amazing
Speaker 1: actor saying lines that you've actually helped a craft that
Speaker 1: are based on things that your mother said. There was
Speaker 1: no precedent for it. There's not nothing I could sort
Speaker 1: of look back on and say like, oh, yeah, this
Speaker 1: is I know what to do with this, because I
Speaker 1: really didn't. It was really like sort of like you're
Speaker 1: in like a very strange dream that just doesn't end,
Speaker 1: because then you know, it really doesn't end because then
Speaker 1: for the next year you're editing that scene. You know,
Speaker 1: you're in the editing room with the with the director
Speaker 1: in the editor, you're working on the scene. So you're
Speaker 1: seeing it over and or then you go into the
Speaker 1: premiere and you're seeing it again, and then you're it
Speaker 1: keeps rising up in a way that like memory does too,
Speaker 1: but memory sort of changes, you know, memories more like
Speaker 1: a play where every performance is a little bit different,
Speaker 1: whereas this is like your I mean, it's different because
Speaker 1: you bring something different to it every time, but you're
Speaker 1: really seeing that that moment and then remembering that moment,
Speaker 1: you know. But it occurs to me this was utterly
Speaker 1: surreal and singular experience, and it wasn't like you could
Speaker 1: call one of your friends and been like, you know, so,
Speaker 1: so when when you've had that situation, how did you feel?
Speaker 1: You're so solitary within that and it's also playing out
Speaker 1: over and over and over again. I haven't thought about that,
Speaker 1: but that, you know, that reminds me of another line
Speaker 1: of vessel Vandercolks, where he he says, um, it's the
Speaker 1: nature of trauma that it doesn't allow a story to
Speaker 1: be told. It doesn't allow us to hold onto stories.
Speaker 1: So again and again, it's why we repeat so much.
Speaker 1: It's why we go back to either the cover story
Speaker 1: or the real story, and as a way of I'm
Speaker 1: going to try to tell the story again so that
Speaker 1: I can hold onto it because it keeps on slipping
Speaker 1: through our fingers. But there you are, and you're actually
Speaker 1: seeing the same scene played over and over and over again,
Speaker 1: honed and perfected. Yeah, and I'm not even sure if like,
Speaker 1: you know, I wouldn't want to argue with Vessel Vandercole,
Speaker 1: because you know, we created a story with the film.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a wrote a book, so those are
Speaker 1: they have the beginning, middle, and end. But you know,
Speaker 1: the moment of trauma, I think, is what really gets
Speaker 1: sort of you know, you snap awake at even though
Speaker 1: it's embedded in a story, the moment of trauma sort
Speaker 1: of always sort of like brings you back to like
Speaker 1: that very moment, whatever it was was lost. So this
Speaker 1: relationship plays out over off and on over a period
Speaker 1: of five years, in trips and travel and motels and
Speaker 1: talking on the phone while your daughter is like, you know,
Speaker 1: swinging nearby on a playground and in Texas and you
Speaker 1: know down where where I teach. And after five years,
Speaker 1: you go to therapy, back to therapy, back to therapy, right, different,
Speaker 1: different therapists, different and this therapist tells you that you
Speaker 1: have the ethics of a drowning man. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: you don't go near a drowning man, right, If you
Speaker 1: try to save a drowning man will probably are you under.
Speaker 1: He's just trying to stay alive. So take us to
Speaker 1: the moment where your wife asks you if you're having
Speaker 1: an affair, and she's asked you before and you've said no,
Speaker 1: but this time you say yes, after these five years,
Speaker 1: and what is that moment? Yeah, the moment I revealed
Speaker 1: to my wife that I was having an affair was
Speaker 1: right around Christmas, which my mother kind of suicide right
Speaker 1: around Christmas, and so it's always it's a historically a
Speaker 1: difficult time in a year from me. But that fall
Speaker 1: I had, I started to go through the sense that
Speaker 1: I talked about before about realizing that it was her
Speaker 1: reckless thing my mother did sitting in the house on
Speaker 1: fire with us inside, maybe even worse than reckless. And
Speaker 1: that's how ar wrestled with that in the book, like
Speaker 1: what was going on in her head. You can also
Speaker 1: have many You can have some very dark thoughts in
Speaker 1: your head, and you can have some little less thought
Speaker 1: like maybe maybe will all be saved, or maybe some
Speaker 1: people will die. So that was hit me and it
Speaker 1: was feeling like, um, you know, I'd call it some
Speaker 1: sort of a breakdown, a psychic breakdown, and I've been
Speaker 1: going through the fall, and my wife knew that, and
Speaker 1: as she knew that, it was about partially about the revelation,
Speaker 1: my own interim revelations about my mother and the fire,
Speaker 1: but it was also like, you know, I was also
Speaker 1: considering leaving the family too. I was considering on a
Speaker 1: metaphoric level, burning down the house that I had created,
Speaker 1: the home I created with my family. It wasn't making sense,
Speaker 1: Like what I was considering doing didn't really make sense
Speaker 1: in a way in a larger sense, like is that
Speaker 1: really what I wanted? Or set doors? I just trying
Speaker 1: to go? It was I trying to run away? Was
Speaker 1: I trying to hide more? Was I trying to get
Speaker 1: away from the pain. So therapy really helped me. I
Speaker 1: got into the therapist and he sort of recognized, you know,
Speaker 1: what I was going through and told me that I
Speaker 1: had the ethics of a drowning man with thout are
Speaker 1: struggling with and yeah, he's he's a he's a young
Speaker 1: Gian therapist, which was really helpful. Also, because he would
Speaker 1: really would really go into like dreams and into the
Speaker 1: subconscious until get to see these things pull pull it out.
Speaker 1: So that was that was it. So I came clean
Speaker 1: and then you know, likely getting sober. You know, takes
Speaker 1: a little while for it to stick. And h here
Speaker 1: we are, like five hour, six years later. Towards the
Speaker 1: end of your book, there's a really moving passage where
Speaker 1: you essentially address it to your daughter. It's really arresting
Speaker 1: and interesting moment because you know, those of us who
Speaker 1: have children who right have some tucked away, very far
Speaker 1: tucked away awareness that our children are probably going to
Speaker 1: read these words someday, you know, and we can't think
Speaker 1: about it while we're writing or it would completely stop us.
Speaker 1: Yet it's there, and I mean I actually think of
Speaker 1: it in my own life as a hedge against secrecy.
Speaker 1: Secrecy when you are a writer who is a parent
Speaker 1: is actually really not so possible ultimately, And the way
Speaker 1: I think of it in my own life, it really
Speaker 1: keeps be honest. I mean, I if my son wants
Speaker 1: to he can go read you know, some really difficult
Speaker 1: stuff about you know, what his mother was like as
Speaker 1: a very young woman his age. So you address your
Speaker 1: daughter a future version of her reading this someday. And also,
Speaker 1: I was struck by you had made a decision, at
Speaker 1: least to this point, to not tell her how your
Speaker 1: mother had died. You told her that she had a
Speaker 1: bad heart. And then your daughter sees the title of
Speaker 1: a poem of yours, and she learns how your mother
Speaker 1: died by seeing the title of one of your poems,
Speaker 1: which is on the anniversary of my mother's suicide. My
Speaker 1: daughter and I take the A train to the Museum
Speaker 1: of Natural History. Yeah, and that was, like, you know,
Speaker 1: in the writing of the book, that's what happens when
Speaker 1: it takes five years throughout a book. In the beginning,
Speaker 1: she didn't know, and at this point she doesn't know
Speaker 1: until she listens to this podcast that but my mother,
Speaker 1: her grandmother had said fire to our house. She knows
Speaker 1: about the fire, but she doesn't know about that. It
Speaker 1: felt like too much. She knew about my father being homeless, homeless, alcoholic,
Speaker 1: mostly because she saw, you know, we live in New York,
Speaker 1: we travel and we see homeless people, and it's just
Speaker 1: she she got to meet my father also before he died,
Speaker 1: when she was very young. It just seemed important for
Speaker 1: a note to know that's like to give her empathy, like,
Speaker 1: this is not far from our lives. These people are not.
Speaker 1: Each one is related to someone that they have, you know,
Speaker 1: they have children that have parents to have you know,
Speaker 1: they connected to not just these these satellites floating drifting
Speaker 1: in space. It seemed important for her to know that.
Speaker 1: But somehow the idea of my grandmother or her grandmother
Speaker 1: make suicide it felt like too much for her at
Speaker 1: the age. And then she she sorry, I was I
Speaker 1: forget I think I had a I guess I was
Speaker 1: at a piece of paper and she just said it.
Speaker 1: She doesn't always read my poems, but I was just
Speaker 1: sitting I think it's just sitting at the top and
Speaker 1: she read it. I actually burst into tears. So I
Speaker 1: didn't I didn't want to find out like that. But
Speaker 1: it was really good though, like she just really sort
Speaker 1: of got it. And I have this sense that our
Speaker 1: children sort of know everything about us anyway, like there's
Speaker 1: really nothing that they don't know. Is I don't think
Speaker 1: there's anything that spoken that she'd be like, Oh, that's
Speaker 1: that's shocking. I mean, you know the problem because I've
Speaker 1: been working on not being so you know, having a
Speaker 1: double life, and so she gets to see moments of
Speaker 1: struggle and working things out. And I think that's important.
Speaker 1: I think that's important for Case to see that one
Speaker 1: can struggle, and one can you know, suffer, and yet
Speaker 1: can come out of it and the next day or
Speaker 1: even the next minute, can be laughing about something. Here's
Speaker 1: Nick reading one last passage from his extraordinary book, one
Speaker 1: which his daughter may hold in her hands one day
Speaker 1: and not have to wonder who her father really is.
Speaker 1: And that is what I meant when I said at
Speaker 1: the start that this story is tough and ultimately beautiful. Mhm.
Speaker 1: A thousand and one times I've told this story why
Speaker 1: because it happened, because I escaped, as it involves fire
Speaker 1: and firemen and sirens. Sometimes still, this story starts with
Speaker 1: just me, barefoot in the next door neighbor's yard, looking
Speaker 1: back at the house we've just tumbled out of. All
Speaker 1: I can do now is watch as it burns. Phantasmagoria
Speaker 1: they need to freeze makes sense of the story of
Speaker 1: being six and running through a burning house. I need
Speaker 1: to contain it like a firefly in a jar. And
Speaker 1: I don't contain it. I don't know if I can
Speaker 1: move away from it. And if I can't move away
Speaker 1: from it, I don't know if I'll ever believe that
Speaker 1: it made it out of in one piece. If here
Speaker 1: I am, I stand before you, intact whole, holy, everything
Speaker 1: that lives is holy. Family Secrets is an I Heeart
Speaker 1: Media production. Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer and Bethan
Speaker 1: Mcaluso is the executive producer. We'd also like to give
Speaker 1: a special thanks to Tyler Klang and Tristan McNeil. If
Speaker 1: you have a family secret you'd like to share, leave
Speaker 1: us a voicemail and your story could appear on an
Speaker 1: upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight secret zero.
Speaker 1: That's secret and then the number zero. You can also
Speaker 1: find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder and Facebook at
Speaker 1: facebook dot com slash Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at
Speaker 1: FAMI Secrets Pod, m HMM. For more podcasts for My
Speaker 1: Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.