Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. This
Speaker 1: episode contains discussions of suicide. Listener discussion is advised. If
Speaker 1: you are a loved one is struggling with suicidal thoughts,
Speaker 1: please call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at three. For
Speaker 1: the next year, I was always on the road, or
Speaker 1: on the phone, or lying on my couch a Washington
Speaker 1: television gathering the strength to leave again. I answered every
Speaker 1: question like no one had ever asked before. We do
Speaker 1: not turn into what we pretend to be, but what
Speaker 1: we pretend. You can still unmake us, worship the false
Speaker 1: idol and tell yourself you are only playing the game
Speaker 1: of survival. How long before that graven image comes to
Speaker 1: mean something or everything? How long before we confuse happiness
Speaker 1: with distance from disaster, closure with being unable to remember?
Speaker 1: That's Adam Man's back. Award winning novelist, screenwriter, cultural critic,
Speaker 1: and number one New York Times bestselling author of the
Speaker 1: hilarious instant classic Go the Funk to Sleep. Yes, there
Speaker 1: are going to be cuss words in this episode. It's
Speaker 1: in the book's title. After all. You know that expression,
Speaker 1: God doesn't give us anything we can't handle. I hate
Speaker 1: that expression sometimes God or the universe or whatever gives
Speaker 1: us a lot, and sometimes something absolutely terrible coincides precisely
Speaker 1: with something absolutely wonderful, And how are we supposed to manage.
Speaker 1: Adam's story is about exactly that, when it all explodes
Speaker 1: all at once. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,
Speaker 1: the secrets they are kept from us, the secrets we
Speaker 1: keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 1: I grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, which is a close
Speaker 1: suburb to Boston. My parents moved to Newton, like a
Speaker 1: lot of people, because it was known to have good
Speaker 1: public schools. Both of them are from the Boston area.
Speaker 1: My father grew up in Boston and Brookline. My mother
Speaker 1: is from Cambridge, so I had also four grandparents living
Speaker 1: in the area for most of my childhood. Now that
Speaker 1: I'm a parent, and I look at the relatively constrained
Speaker 1: level of freedom that my kids have because of the
Speaker 1: way we are placed geographically, I look back at my
Speaker 1: childhood and think about how much freedom we had to
Speaker 1: just kind of run the neighborhood, you know, walking to school,
Speaker 1: taking the train into Boston, playing pickup basketball or football
Speaker 1: at different arcs and playgrounds, walking to friends houses. Like
Speaker 1: there was a game we played there was kind of
Speaker 1: a modified, more violent version of like Hide and Seek,
Speaker 1: where it was hide and Seek plus throwing tennis balls
Speaker 1: and people and uh, it raged over you know, like
Speaker 1: probably a couple of square miles, which was ridiculous because
Speaker 1: you never found the other team. They were hiding for
Speaker 1: like three days. So when I think about the geography,
Speaker 1: that's the first thing that comes to mind, is just
Speaker 1: sort of having the run of a large, pretty safe
Speaker 1: suburban space and then also having the freedom to take
Speaker 1: the train and explore. I could get on the train
Speaker 1: and go to my grandparents house in Cambridge, you know,
Speaker 1: take the green line, switched to the red line, be
Speaker 1: there in less than an hour. I could take the
Speaker 1: train two different record stores. You know. I was a DJ,
Speaker 1: so I was always looking for vinyl. So I could,
Speaker 1: like even before I could drive or anybody I knew
Speaker 1: could drive, I could get around the greater Boston area
Speaker 1: with a certain amount of ease. Tell me about your mother,
Speaker 1: your father, and your younger brother, David So. My parents
Speaker 1: met at the Worcester Telegram and Gazette. Um, my dad
Speaker 1: was an editor and my mom was a reporter fresh
Speaker 1: at a grad school. My mother is very funny and
Speaker 1: a serbic and has a quick wit and curses like
Speaker 1: a sailor. So like when go to fund to Sleep
Speaker 1: came out, you know, I placed a lot of blame
Speaker 1: on her for teaching me to talk like that. My
Speaker 1: mom comes from a family of writers and words smith's
Speaker 1: my grandmother. Her mother was a poet and a playwright.
Speaker 1: Her father was a law professor and a judge who
Speaker 1: was known for the eloquence of his legal writing. Both
Speaker 1: of them were very present in my life growing up.
Speaker 1: I think in a lot of ways, my mom sort
Speaker 1: of rebelled against the culture of their house. They were
Speaker 1: both very social. They threw a lot of parties. They
Speaker 1: went to a lot of parties. Their friends and their
Speaker 1: careers in some ways came first. I mean, this was
Speaker 1: also a different time, but like you know, they weren't
Speaker 1: probably as present as parents as she would have liked
Speaker 1: them to be. And as time went on, I think
Speaker 1: she found the elevated, sort of intellectual, artistic social life
Speaker 1: of her parents house to be a little bit oppressive
Speaker 1: um and kind of rebelled against it. She didn't like
Speaker 1: to go to their parties. I like to go to
Speaker 1: their party. She brought me to their parties and then
Speaker 1: like hung out in the kitchen and ignoring everybody. But
Speaker 1: she was pretty close to her parents, I think in
Speaker 1: her own way, and her parents were very much a
Speaker 1: presence and an influence on me growing up. You know,
Speaker 1: these were the first My grandmother was the first writer
Speaker 1: I ever met, And as I grew up and got
Speaker 1: into hip hop, I found this very close parallel in
Speaker 1: my grandmother's work because she was writing rhyming political poetry
Speaker 1: that you word politicians and social morays, and it was
Speaker 1: like published in our local newspaper ship poetry column called
Speaker 1: the Muse of the week in Review that was in
Speaker 1: the Boston Globe, and um syndicated in a bunch of
Speaker 1: other newspapers, which seems insane in retrospect, but like in
Speaker 1: the eighties you could have a syndicated political poetry column. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sitting here shaking my head. Oh those right, right. Also,
Speaker 1: there are these things called newspapers in those days. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Imagine that. My father was very much a working class
Speaker 1: kid from Brookline. My dad came from a family without
Speaker 1: much money. His dad was various kinds of salesmen over
Speaker 1: the years. I always think of him as kind of
Speaker 1: a Willie Loman kind of guy. His mother was a painter,
Speaker 1: but not really a successful one, and also was manic depressive,
Speaker 1: although I don't think they had that diagnosis then, and
Speaker 1: was in and out of the hospital. So my dad
Speaker 1: lived at home through college, went to Boston University, and
Speaker 1: then went straight into the workforce as um a reporter
Speaker 1: at the Worcester Telegram and Gazette the tn G as
Speaker 1: they called it, and uh, you know, is a brilliant guy,
Speaker 1: and spent forty years subsequently in the Boston Globe newsroom
Speaker 1: and became kind of the institutional memory of the Boston
Speaker 1: Globe newsroom. My dad has an incredible memory and spent
Speaker 1: forty years like laying out the front page of the
Speaker 1: paper deciding how it looked and what went there. One
Speaker 1: of the things about my dad that I really always
Speaker 1: loved and noticed was how much he loved his work.
Speaker 1: He worked weird hours. He went to the newspaper at
Speaker 1: like three four in the afternoon, he packed a dinner,
Speaker 1: he didn't come back until one in the morning. But
Speaker 1: he loved it. It was somewhere he was excited to
Speaker 1: go every day, and because of that and his job
Speaker 1: and his sensibilities, we lived in a house where everybody
Speaker 1: read the newspaper and discussed what was in it. We
Speaker 1: were very much creatures of politics. We followed elections the
Speaker 1: same way we followed the Red sox. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: it's kind of the culture that that I grew up in.
Speaker 1: And so how old are you when you moved to Newton? Uh?
Speaker 1: I was two years old when my family moved from
Speaker 1: Worcester to Newton and my dad moved from the Telegram
Speaker 1: to the Boston Globe. I think in nineteen. And your
Speaker 1: brother David is born when you're he old. I was
Speaker 1: born in seventy six and he was born in seventy nine.
Speaker 1: We're two years nine months apart. My brother was I think,
Speaker 1: you know, some of my earliest memories of him were
Speaker 1: of a certain kind of unspoken worry and anxiety around
Speaker 1: him for reasons that I think didn't actually make any sense,
Speaker 1: but that as a parent now I understand very well.
Speaker 1: Because kids developed differently, and I was really gregarious and
Speaker 1: learned to speak really really early, as firstborn kids often do.
Speaker 1: My brother didn't learn to speak quickly, and when he
Speaker 1: did he had kind of a minor speech impediment, and
Speaker 1: I think these things made my parents think that he
Speaker 1: might not be smart. And in my family, particularly my
Speaker 1: mother's family, there's really nothing more important than being smart,
Speaker 1: and I think that was their big fear that he
Speaker 1: like wasn't so bright. This is a kid who went
Speaker 1: on to get a six hundred on his s A
Speaker 1: T S go you get a PhD in atmospheric science.
Speaker 1: But I remember there being a certain kind of like
Speaker 1: worry and coddling of him, um particularly around the talking.
Speaker 1: And I remember being the only person in the house
Speaker 1: who could sometimes understand what he was saying, and I
Speaker 1: would translate what he was saying for my parents. And then,
Speaker 1: you know, I remember just a goofy, giggly kid. I remember,
Speaker 1: even at the time seeing how some of my friends
Speaker 1: and their younger brothers or sisters interacted. And I don't
Speaker 1: know that David and I were like as easy and
Speaker 1: free with each other. You know, we fought a lot,
Speaker 1: all kids do, I guess, but I loved him and
Speaker 1: we hung out to some extent, and we sort of
Speaker 1: did our own thing to a large extent as well.
Speaker 1: We had very different kind of interests David didn't have
Speaker 1: as many friends as I did. He went on to
Speaker 1: not be a creature of like words and jokes and
Speaker 1: arguing the way that I was, in the way that
Speaker 1: kind of the rest of my family also was. He
Speaker 1: became a scientist, and I mean, even at a young age,
Speaker 1: he sort of had the proclivities and the inclinations of
Speaker 1: a scientist. A lot of my childhood memories do revolve
Speaker 1: around like how we were each treated by our parents
Speaker 1: and the compensatory things they seemed to do um maybe
Speaker 1: to give him more agency or more of a sense
Speaker 1: of himself. Like I remember them buying him like a
Speaker 1: Nintendo and basically telling him that it was his and
Speaker 1: that I could only use it with his permission. So
Speaker 1: you know, like in retrospect, that's kind of a it's
Speaker 1: kind of a weird move, right, Like, Okay, you bought
Speaker 1: your like eight year old a Nintendo and he's the
Speaker 1: gatekeeper of it. There's no equity here. There's no like
Speaker 1: you're gonna play for half an hour and your brother
Speaker 1: is gonna play, or like we're gonna set a timer,
Speaker 1: or like you gotta share. I think that they felt
Speaker 1: like giving him sort of ownership was was gonna be
Speaker 1: i don't know, good for him somehow, empowering to him somehow,
Speaker 1: or that I would overwhelm him if they didn't. I
Speaker 1: remember feeling a lot like there was the fear that
Speaker 1: I would overwhelm him, or my superior ability to speak
Speaker 1: would somehow sort of subsume him, which in some cases
Speaker 1: was true. I also remember being a real dick to
Speaker 1: him because I could talk circles around him, and knowing
Speaker 1: that a eventually, if I did it long enough, he
Speaker 1: would just resort to hitting me, and and and that's
Speaker 1: and that was sort of like when I knew I
Speaker 1: had won, you know, if he just gave up and
Speaker 1: started flailing his fists at me, that was a victory
Speaker 1: for me. It's so interesting because now I'm sure as
Speaker 1: a parent yourself, once you become a parent, so many
Speaker 1: of these moments from your own childhood are understood differently, right,
Speaker 1: or the or the worry of your parents when they
Speaker 1: were being your parents as as as little kids. From
Speaker 1: the way you're describing that story to me, probably a
Speaker 1: lot of thought went into David's Nintendo, you know, and
Speaker 1: like leveling the playing field somehow, or like the idea
Speaker 1: that they needed to level the playing field so that
Speaker 1: you know that it could be his. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: I think a lot of thought probably did go into it.
Speaker 1: I wonder in retrospect if any of that thought was
Speaker 1: directed towards consulting people who knew anything about child psychology. Um,
Speaker 1: my guests, maybe not. Yeah, it sort of wasn't the time.
Speaker 1: You know, in art in our times, that would be
Speaker 1: stop number one. But in those times, no matter how
Speaker 1: educated and sophisticated people were, it wasn't the first thing
Speaker 1: they thought about. Adam and David are two very different kids,
Speaker 1: with different interests and different paths. David is on track
Speaker 1: to become a scientist and Adam is on track to
Speaker 1: become a writer. Though of course, when it comes to
Speaker 1: a career as a writer there is no well lit path.
Speaker 1: It helps that Adam comes from a family of writers,
Speaker 1: which gives him a kind of permission, the sense that
Speaker 1: such a life is possible. His father is an editor,
Speaker 1: his uncle is a sportswriter, his grandmother is a poet.
Speaker 1: It is, as you might say, the family business, and
Speaker 1: yet it can take a long time for writers just
Speaker 1: starting out to find their footing. There are no guarantees
Speaker 1: you write in your extraordinary poem slash memoir, sort of
Speaker 1: genre defying book. I had a brother once. It's a
Speaker 1: sentence that begins with not even just the word and
Speaker 1: but actually an ampersand and you you're right, And now
Speaker 1: it was eleven. What was going on in your life
Speaker 1: at that point? So you know, for a number of years,
Speaker 1: I've been basically just a novelist, a literary novelist who
Speaker 1: at any given time was like knee deep or waist
Speaker 1: deep or shoulder deep in a book and coming up
Speaker 1: to maybe do a little journalism on the side. I
Speaker 1: had a two year old daughter. I was teaching in
Speaker 1: the m f A program at Rutgers Camden, which was
Speaker 1: kind of the first full time academic job I had had.
Speaker 1: I was lucky enough to get it, and then lucky
Speaker 1: enough to get offered a second year in my visiting
Speaker 1: writer position. And you know, I was just kind of
Speaker 1: trying to figure out how to make a career as
Speaker 1: a writer. Like I had a career as a writer,
Speaker 1: but I was trying to figure out how to not
Speaker 1: lose that career, not have to fall back on teaching
Speaker 1: full time, which I enjoyed but didn't want to do forever.
Speaker 1: And I suddenly had a kid and a greater degree
Speaker 1: of sort of financial responsibility than I'd ever had before,
Speaker 1: and my teaching appointment was going to end in a
Speaker 1: couple of months, and I was going to go back
Speaker 1: to California, and the mortgage on my house and all
Speaker 1: kinds of things. So I was just trying to figure
Speaker 1: out what my next move was going to be. While
Speaker 1: he's figuring out his next move, Adam writes an unusual
Speaker 1: and unquantifiable twenty eight page book. He really writes it
Speaker 1: for himself. He's not sure there's any market for it
Speaker 1: at all, and neither is his literary agent. He ends
Speaker 1: up selling it to a small press owned by a
Speaker 1: friend with very low expectations. The book in question, though
Speaker 1: The Funk to Sleep, is not quite out yet, but
Speaker 1: it will be soon. It's about to go viral, but
Speaker 1: Adam does know this yet. He's a new dad in Philly.
Speaker 1: He's teaching dj ing, hoping for the best. I wrote
Speaker 1: that book really with no expectation that it was even publishable.
Speaker 1: Certainly was not part of my like strategy to secure
Speaker 1: future for myself, for my family. Um, you know, the
Speaker 1: book was really just kind of something I did for fun.
Speaker 1: It was my attempt two kind of cross stitch all
Speaker 1: of the board books B O, A, R D. But
Speaker 1: it kind of works both ways because they're incredibly boring,
Speaker 1: like the little cute see books that you read to
Speaker 1: your kids at bedtime that have all of these A, B, C,
Speaker 1: B rhyme schemes and these like cute animals who are
Speaker 1: all toddling off to bed. To try to kind of
Speaker 1: remix that by inserting a real parental monologue into it,
Speaker 1: something that expresses the frustration of a parent who cannot
Speaker 1: get his kid to go to sleep, which was the
Speaker 1: position I found myself in every night with my daughter Vivian,
Speaker 1: who was probably two two and a half when I
Speaker 1: wrote the book in two thousand ten, and you know,
Speaker 1: a year later when the book started to inexplicably make
Speaker 1: all this noise. The book was supposed to come out
Speaker 1: in October, but the day after my daughter Vivian's third
Speaker 1: birthday April, I did a gig in Philly where basically
Speaker 1: I read the book out loud on stage. I had
Speaker 1: just gotten a PDF of the entire book with illustrations,
Speaker 1: and I was able to project it on the screen
Speaker 1: and I, you know, I read it to maybe a
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty people, and I got a good reaction.
Speaker 1: They thought it was funny. People asked me where they
Speaker 1: could buy it. I told them they couldn't because it
Speaker 1: wasn't coming out for six months. So from that initial reading,
Speaker 1: people began to order the book, and the buzz began
Speaker 1: to spread. By the end of the week, the book
Speaker 1: was number one on Amazon. This book that that that
Speaker 1: did not yet exist, hadn't even been printed yet, was
Speaker 1: not even on a boat headed for the United States yet.
Speaker 1: And from their things sort of accelerated and got even
Speaker 1: crazier because the fact that an obscenely titled book from
Speaker 1: an obscure publisher was number one sort of engendered around
Speaker 1: of media attention, which I think then led to a
Speaker 1: PDF of the entire book beginning to ricochet around the Internet.
Speaker 1: And meanwhile, we're rushing to get the book out as
Speaker 1: soon as possible, so instead of October, we publish it
Speaker 1: on Father's Day, which I believe was June four, So
Speaker 1: we're sort of rushing towards that, and I'm fielding phone calls,
Speaker 1: and we're trying to make decisions about whether I'm even
Speaker 1: going to talk to the media. Because now there's an
Speaker 1: element of strategy in place, like someone, if I remain quiet,
Speaker 1: can get an exclusive with me. And I'm like, you know,
Speaker 1: an exclusive, like I'm I'm used to talking to anybody
Speaker 1: who's willing to talk to me. Like, you know, as
Speaker 1: a literary novelists, you're not giving exclusives. You're hoping that
Speaker 1: your phone rings, you know, But we have at this point,
Speaker 1: like a publicist in place, and she's talking to the
Speaker 1: Today Show and Good Morning America and pitting one against
Speaker 1: the other, and you know, people are trying to get
Speaker 1: the exclusive, and things are just out of control. We're
Speaker 1: auctioning off foreign rights and audio rights and movie rights
Speaker 1: and all kinds of stuff again for a book that
Speaker 1: does not technically exist yet. So it's kind of a whirlwind.
Speaker 1: And I'm doing this as I'm wrapping up my final
Speaker 1: weeks of my tenure at Rutgers and Adam, how did
Speaker 1: it feel to go from being a literary novelist spending
Speaker 1: years at a time with your head down working on
Speaker 1: one book at a time. You know, the sound of
Speaker 1: a literary novel being published is a little like a
Speaker 1: tree falling in a forest. Um, except on the rare
Speaker 1: times when when it's not and this entirely left field
Speaker 1: thing happens completely unexpected, no impossible to have imagined. Along
Speaker 1: with trying to do everything right, what did it feel like?
Speaker 1: There was definitely a lot of joy and exhilaration and
Speaker 1: shock and surprise. Um. I mean I was feeding off
Speaker 1: of the people around me, and my friends were watching
Speaker 1: this happen, and they were tickled by it because it
Speaker 1: was something that was just done with so little calculation,
Speaker 1: And I was excited, but I was also nervous or
Speaker 1: kind of jitteryan on edge, I guess, because what was
Speaker 1: happening was clearly very good, but it was impossible to
Speaker 1: see even three days into the future, so, you know,
Speaker 1: it was impossible to know whether this was such a
Speaker 1: flash in the pan that the book would actually be
Speaker 1: forgotten already by the time it was published, or whether
Speaker 1: it was conceivable that we could ride this and stay
Speaker 1: at number one until it was published. I was refreshing
Speaker 1: my Amazon page every fifteen minutes, you know, I was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: still number one, still number one. Click, okay, still number one.
Speaker 1: You know, go make a coffee, come back, click still
Speaker 1: number one. Okay, so far, so good. It was a
Speaker 1: wild moment. I mean, it was more exciting than anything
Speaker 1: that had happened in a long time. But I also
Speaker 1: felt like I had to be very strategic and careful
Speaker 1: and do anything I could to help this thing continue
Speaker 1: to succeed. And I also felt powerless over it. I
Speaker 1: didn't really know what the hell I was doing or
Speaker 1: whether any action of mine could affect this in any way.
Speaker 1: At the very least, this was an industry I knew
Speaker 1: and had been making a living in for the better
Speaker 1: part of the last decade. So you know, it's not
Speaker 1: like I was just some schmuck who'd never written a
Speaker 1: book before and this was happening to me. I was
Speaker 1: some schmuck who'd written several books and this was happening
Speaker 1: to me. So at least I had that going for me.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back with Father's Day just around the corner.
Speaker 1: Adam is cautiously riding the high of his forthcoming publication
Speaker 1: in June. On May eleven, he's playing records in a
Speaker 1: lounge bar in Philly. He's just taught his last class
Speaker 1: at Rutgers, and many of his grad students are in attendance.
Speaker 1: It's a joyful night, a victory lap of sorts, and
Speaker 1: a goodbye to his students, and a goodbye to Philly too,
Speaker 1: as he's planning to move soon. A lot of good
Speaker 1: friends are there, and Adam is basking in the great
Speaker 1: energy of the evening. Then his phone rings and he
Speaker 1: sees that it's his father. He doesn't answer. It's unusual
Speaker 1: that his dad is calling so late at night, but
Speaker 1: doesn't clock it a stranger, unsettling in a state of
Speaker 1: cognitive dissonance, he ignores the call with no inkling that
Speaker 1: anything could be wrong. But then his phone rings again.
Speaker 1: It was about twelve thirty nine times out of a hundred,
Speaker 1: I would have been home and asleep and in bed
Speaker 1: at that time. My father was always up at that
Speaker 1: time because he would be coming home, probably from the newspaper.
Speaker 1: So I saw his name on my phone, and I
Speaker 1: didn't pick it up because I was in the middle
Speaker 1: of playing this set um and you can't DJ and
Speaker 1: talk on the phone at the same time. And inasmuch
Speaker 1: as I thought anything, the quick calculation that I made
Speaker 1: about my father calling me unprecedentedly at this time he
Speaker 1: never called me that late, was that it had something
Speaker 1: to do with the book, that some new bit of
Speaker 1: news around go to funk to sleep had emerged that
Speaker 1: I didn't know about it. He did because he'd spent
Speaker 1: the last eight hours in the news room and he
Speaker 1: was haul in to tell me something funny, or you know,
Speaker 1: tell me that one of his colleagues had had the
Speaker 1: PDF land in their in boxing, you know, some something
Speaker 1: trivial and cool like that. So I didn't answer, and
Speaker 1: then he called back again, and so I answered. And
Speaker 1: the first thing my father asked me was whether I
Speaker 1: was sitting down, which I don't think anybody had ever
Speaker 1: asked me that in real life before. You know, I guess,
Speaker 1: I guess that question is only asked when you think
Speaker 1: that the news you're about to deliver might literally knock
Speaker 1: somebody on their ass, that that the person's legs might
Speaker 1: stop working. So I walked outside through the back room
Speaker 1: of the club and then also through the front room,
Speaker 1: and sometime I think before I got outside, my father
Speaker 1: said to me, David has taken his own life. That
Speaker 1: was the phrase he used, and and I was unable
Speaker 1: to even really process he was saying, it seems so
Speaker 1: outlandish that the first thing I said was what I mean,
Speaker 1: it's I couldn't even wrap my mind around it. UM.
Speaker 1: So I made him say it again, and by that
Speaker 1: time I was outside, and he proceeded to explain to
Speaker 1: me that my brother had been missing all day, that
Speaker 1: he and my mother had been at my brother's apartment
Speaker 1: with my brother's wife um with the sinking growing feeling
Speaker 1: that something had happened, um, but that they had just
Speaker 1: received the news from I guess it would have been
Speaker 1: the police officer or the emergency worker or something who
Speaker 1: found his body in his car where he chose to
Speaker 1: kill himself. So this is what my father told me
Speaker 1: A twelve thirty On that night, I had some further
Speaker 1: conversation with my father that I can't really remember very well.
Speaker 1: I remember the it was extremely hot, even at night.
Speaker 1: We're in the middle of a heat wave, and I
Speaker 1: was sort of, you know, I sort of stepped outside
Speaker 1: into this hot air and it felt like somebody was
Speaker 1: breathing right in your face, and I remember crying. I
Speaker 1: remember asking further questions. I remember my father sort of
Speaker 1: inquiring into my safety and well being, like he really
Speaker 1: wanted to know, like where are you and what are
Speaker 1: you gonna do now? And like can you get yourself home?
Speaker 1: You know, like what are you gonna do, like I
Speaker 1: he I think he made me promise not to drive
Speaker 1: or something like that. I got off the phone with
Speaker 1: my father and I stood there crying hysterically. And I
Speaker 1: don't think that I spoke out loud to my brother,
Speaker 1: but I think I spoke in my head to my brother,
Speaker 1: and you know, I said something along the lines of
Speaker 1: like what have you done. I don't think I was
Speaker 1: out there very long. I think before I was even
Speaker 1: done crying, I went back in the club. I walked
Speaker 1: straight to Emery, who was a good friend of mine,
Speaker 1: be my closest friend in Philly, and I told him
Speaker 1: then that my brother had killed himself. And you know,
Speaker 1: the look on his face was sort of the first
Speaker 1: it was the first kind of mirror that I had.
Speaker 1: It was the first reading back of what had happened
Speaker 1: on someone else's face, which because he's like, what do
Speaker 1: you need? Do you want me to drive you home?
Speaker 1: I basically just was like, I'm leaving, grab my records
Speaker 1: when you go, or something like that, and I, you know,
Speaker 1: I just I just kind of got out of there.
Speaker 1: I think I called my father back from the car,
Speaker 1: having already promised not to drive, and you know, currently
Speaker 1: driving to try to get more information, to try to,
Speaker 1: I don't know, understand this thing better in some kind
Speaker 1: of way. I remember just driving down the freeway, blinking
Speaker 1: back tears and just kind of like feeling a lot.
Speaker 1: I mean, there was there was the shock, there was
Speaker 1: the attempt to understand what was happening. I should say
Speaker 1: that I can't imagine that then NWS that someone killed
Speaker 1: himself would ever not be surprising and shocking. But in
Speaker 1: the case of my brother, he had gone to Great
Speaker 1: Pines to hide his depression and make sure that no
Speaker 1: one knew about it. So this was entirely surprising to me.
Speaker 1: I had not known that my brother suffered from depression
Speaker 1: in any way. I thought he was a weird but
Speaker 1: happy guy. So, you know, I was learning this entire
Speaker 1: history and this entire secret that his wife had kept
Speaker 1: from everybody, that he had insisted she keep from everybody
Speaker 1: on pain of him never speaking to them again if
Speaker 1: she told them. Tremendous shame on his part about what
Speaker 1: he was going through. I learned that my parents had
Speaker 1: known for a little while that my brother's wife had
Speaker 1: eventually kind of buckled under this tremendous pressure and told
Speaker 1: them but that my brother had downplayed it, but that
Speaker 1: they had all been extremely worried for the past few months,
Speaker 1: and that I had not been brought into this confidence,
Speaker 1: which even at the time, like I felt very frustrating,
Speaker 1: and I think immediately took me down the track of like,
Speaker 1: what if I would have been able to do something?
Speaker 1: What if not telling me was the worst thing you
Speaker 1: could have done? What if I'm the person in this
Speaker 1: family best equipped to do something at least and convince
Speaker 1: him to seek help. But there was another part of
Speaker 1: me that, as I was sort of navigating my own grief,
Speaker 1: navigating the roads of Philly, was filled with enormous trepidation
Speaker 1: because I knew that when I got home, I would
Speaker 1: have to wake up my then partner, Vivian's mother and
Speaker 1: tell her what had happened. And that seemed, you know,
Speaker 1: incredibly hard even I mean, saying it out loud felt
Speaker 1: in it will be hard, but having to break that
Speaker 1: news felt almost too much. Um. But that's that's what
Speaker 1: I went home and did. There's something that, you know,
Speaker 1: in the midst of just profound shock, having to say it,
Speaker 1: being the bearer of it, suddenly you know which you
Speaker 1: know you were when you when you told Emory, but
Speaker 1: then you know you're going home and you're telling your
Speaker 1: your then partner. It makes it more real, I think, Yeah, definitely,
Speaker 1: it makes it more real with every time that you
Speaker 1: say it, with every repetition you you bring it more
Speaker 1: fully into reality. Somehow you feel like you're lying, like
Speaker 1: these words can't be true. I'm saying these words that
Speaker 1: I know are true, but they can't be true. And
Speaker 1: then each time you say them, it becomes more true
Speaker 1: or more real. Yeah, and then even realer than that
Speaker 1: is watching it becomes true for someone else, destroying someone
Speaker 1: else's world with that information, you know. I mean, for
Speaker 1: months and months after his death, I really strove to
Speaker 1: never be the one to break the news to anyone.
Speaker 1: I wanted people to know. I wanted the roads sort
Speaker 1: of paved ahead of me, Like I wanted all my
Speaker 1: friends to know, but I didn't want to be the
Speaker 1: one to tell them. And you know, I found ways
Speaker 1: to navigate conversations with strangers. I've developed kind of a
Speaker 1: sixth sense for when a conversation might turn in the
Speaker 1: direction of families, so that I could steer it another way.
Speaker 1: Before I was asked to kind of account for my
Speaker 1: own family, you know. And this was a time when
Speaker 1: I was like around a lot of strangers because the
Speaker 1: funk to sleep continue to happen, and I continue to
Speaker 1: like have to deal with what that meant and tour
Speaker 1: and travel and chat and schmooz. But yeah, the actual
Speaker 1: simple act of stating that my brother had killed himself
Speaker 1: was probably the single most painful, Like it was the thing.
Speaker 1: I there's the thing I guess that I felt like
Speaker 1: I had enough agency to be able to avoid, so
Speaker 1: I tried very hard to avoid it. Adam returns to
Speaker 1: Newton to his parents home, where they observe the Jewish
Speaker 1: ritual of sitting Shiva, a prescribed week of mourning. Though
Speaker 1: they are descended from ancestors who are famous rabbis, the
Speaker 1: family are secular Jews, not religious at all, and these
Speaker 1: religious practices in the case of David's death do not
Speaker 1: feel exactly healing or helpful to Adam. Because my family
Speaker 1: is deeply culturally Jewish. I think my sensibilities are very Jewish.
Speaker 1: My sense of humor, my sense of art coming from
Speaker 1: the margins, all of these things to me are quintessentially Jewish.
Speaker 1: But we do not go to synagogue there's an, if anything,
Speaker 1: a hostility and a skepticism towards organized religion. I was
Speaker 1: not born mids, but my parents don't belong to a synagogue,
Speaker 1: nor did their parents, and you know, we go pretty
Speaker 1: far back as secular, agnostic Jews in this country. So
Speaker 1: when we were sitting shiva, we had no idea what
Speaker 1: the funk we were doing. It was an approximation of
Speaker 1: a shiva. We didn't have any guidance. We didn't really
Speaker 1: have a connection to these rituals. You know, suicide in
Speaker 1: some ways is a is a dramatization of that, because
Speaker 1: you're at a loss. I think almost no matter what
Speaker 1: your tradition is, like most religions, and most traditions kind
Speaker 1: of fail us when it comes to suicide, or they
Speaker 1: have a few terse words to say and you're not
Speaker 1: allowed to be buried in the cemetery or whatever. But
Speaker 1: my family was particularly poorly equipped to deal with any
Speaker 1: of it because we you know, we don't have that
Speaker 1: as at our fingertips at all. We don't have those traditions.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I found myself trying to grapple with what
Speaker 1: it meant, whether you could invent a ritual, whether that
Speaker 1: counted as a ritual, what a ritual was intended to do,
Speaker 1: and who it was for, and how it was meant
Speaker 1: to be carried out. Like, all of these things were
Speaker 1: adding to my state of distress, particularly the feeling that,
Speaker 1: in the absence of a regimented path, I was going
Speaker 1: to do it wrong. This idea that if you sort
Speaker 1: of mourned incompletely, like pushed it away, didn't deal with
Speaker 1: it fully whatever, that meant that the grief would somehow
Speaker 1: gree group and come back stronger. And if you didn't
Speaker 1: sort of face it now, it would become more and
Speaker 1: more unbeatable later. And and I remember, like I kind
Speaker 1: of internalized that and let it scare me even even more.
Speaker 1: And I don't think that was a useful thing to
Speaker 1: to have put in my in my mind. Like I
Speaker 1: think the opposite is true. I think that people grieve
Speaker 1: in all kinds of different ways. Certainly there are ways
Speaker 1: to not fully grieve. But the idea that that there
Speaker 1: is one way, I think for me it was a
Speaker 1: very damaging idea. And remember, this terrible grief is now
Speaker 1: coinciding with the crazy roller coaster ride of Adam's book publication.
Speaker 1: The high point of his career is now underscored and
Speaker 1: forever tied to his agony over his brother's suicide. In
Speaker 1: the midst of all this, Adam struggles to understand his
Speaker 1: brother's life and his brother's death. One of the ways
Speaker 1: I think in which for me anyway, suicide is so
Speaker 1: difficult to deal with and difficult to mourn, is that
Speaker 1: it effectively rewrites everything you thought you knew about a person,
Speaker 1: at least in the case of my brother. I am
Speaker 1: someone who, if I'm trained in anything, I'm trained to
Speaker 1: kind of create and craft narrative and pulled together threads
Speaker 1: and weave together something that makes sense and tells a story.
Speaker 1: And in trying to understand my brother's life and my
Speaker 1: brother's death, I was sort of torn between these warring impulses,
Speaker 1: one of which was to create narrative, create a narrative,
Speaker 1: and one of which was to resist the creation of narrative,
Speaker 1: even my own narrative, because fundamentally I knew that I
Speaker 1: did not understand and probably could not understand what had
Speaker 1: happened and at certain things about his actions. We're going
Speaker 1: to just be resistant to the project of creating a
Speaker 1: coherent story. Um. So, I mean, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: there's a lot of parts to that, Right, there's the
Speaker 1: part where a person can both be planning to live
Speaker 1: and planning to die, and these are simultaneous impulses, and
Speaker 1: you kind of just have to understand that his mind
Speaker 1: was running on both those tracks at once. Like I
Speaker 1: went to his apartment with my cousin, and among other
Speaker 1: things that we found there, we found in his email
Speaker 1: the receipts for the chemicals that he had ordered that
Speaker 1: he would mix together and use and breathe to kill himself.
Speaker 1: He had ordered those, and after he had ordered those,
Speaker 1: he had ordered an expensive skateboard that still hadn't arrived. Um,
Speaker 1: he had printed out directions to a memorial service for
Speaker 1: our grandfather, which wasn't for a couple of months. So
Speaker 1: like he was planning to live and he was planning
Speaker 1: to die. And you know, there's a part of you
Speaker 1: that might see all that evidence laid out and turn
Speaker 1: it into a detective story and say, something is amiss,
Speaker 1: something is a rise, something doesn't add up. Why would
Speaker 1: he do this if he was going to do that,
Speaker 1: I suspect foul play. You know, you could, you could,
Speaker 1: you could spin up any kind of narrative but the
Speaker 1: struggle for me was to understand that all of these
Speaker 1: things were kind of true at once, that this was
Speaker 1: a paradox that I was not going to resolve, but
Speaker 1: that instead I merely had to kind of hold and
Speaker 1: look at and not try to on ravel, not try
Speaker 1: to turn the two things into one thing. There was
Speaker 1: also the way in which everything I thought I knew
Speaker 1: about my brother was now rewritten by his act of
Speaker 1: killing himself, and by the revelation that he had been
Speaker 1: depressed for years and years. So, you know, things he
Speaker 1: had done and said that I had described one meaning
Speaker 1: to suddenly took on a different meaning. Even something as
Speaker 1: simple as looking at a photograph. You know, it's like
Speaker 1: a photograph in which he up until now seemed to
Speaker 1: be looking at the camera. Now he no longer seemed
Speaker 1: to be looking at the camera. He seemed to be
Speaker 1: staring into sort of the abyss, you know. I mean.
Speaker 1: It sounds dramatic and melodramatic and maybe dumb, but there's
Speaker 1: a way in which even looking at a simple artifact
Speaker 1: which has not changed in any way, it feels different
Speaker 1: now that this life has concluded. In this way, Adam
Speaker 1: also suspected looking back that perhaps has brought or had
Speaker 1: Asperger syndrome. As David's character bore some of the hallmarks
Speaker 1: of being on the spectrum. He was extremely intelligent, high achieving,
Speaker 1: and academically gifted, but it was hard for him to
Speaker 1: connect to have an emotional conversation. The type of questions
Speaker 1: one might expect to elicit an emotional response from him
Speaker 1: often did not. I remember one time, you know, at
Speaker 1: the time he and I were both involved with partners
Speaker 1: who were from other countries. His wife was Brazilian, my
Speaker 1: partner at the time was Swedish, and I remember sort
Speaker 1: of trying to talk to him about being somebody who
Speaker 1: sort of has a foot in two different cultures, and
Speaker 1: you know, do you think you'd ever moved to Brazil?
Speaker 1: How does she feel about living in America? Blah blah blah,
Speaker 1: And his response was sort of just a recitation of
Speaker 1: crime statistics in Rio, and I was like, huh, that's
Speaker 1: that's a that's a weird response. But like, you know,
Speaker 1: with the revelation of this crippling depression and the suicide,
Speaker 1: it's like I found myself looking back on things and saying, well,
Speaker 1: maybe it's not that that was the response that like
Speaker 1: made the most sense to him. Maybe that was the
Speaker 1: response that prevented him from opening up the Pandora's box
Speaker 1: of his own emotions and quickly getting lost. We'll be
Speaker 1: back in a moment with more family secrets. Adam's book
Speaker 1: is hurtling towards existence, picking up speed in the midst
Speaker 1: of all his grief and family turmoil. He's thrust into
Speaker 1: the public eye in a way that's highly unusual for
Speaker 1: a writer. He's the subject of many interviews and it's
Speaker 1: booked a coveted spot on morning television. He's worried that
Speaker 1: some interviewer is going to learn about David's suicide and
Speaker 1: ambush him, forcing him to talk publicly about his loss.
Speaker 1: He's caught between two selves, needing simultaneously to perform and
Speaker 1: to retreat. It's almost like there's another there's another Atom
Speaker 1: who is suffering and his grief stricken, and that Atom
Speaker 1: needs to kind of sit out right and not be
Speaker 1: the one who's talking to Matt Lower on the Today Show. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I knew even at the time that it was not
Speaker 1: a rational fear that like Matt Lower is going to
Speaker 1: blindside me in the middle of this fluffy interview and
Speaker 1: asked me about my brother's Nason death. Nobody actually is
Speaker 1: invested in doing anything of the kind, right, It's completely
Speaker 1: outside the narrative that all of us are agreed upon
Speaker 1: in the in that setting and in every every setting.
Speaker 1: At the same time, weird ship was happening on a
Speaker 1: daily basis, like bizarre, somewhat unthinkable, certainly implausible stuff was
Speaker 1: continuing to fold day by day. One day, a bunch
Speaker 1: of topless photos of me quote unquote leak and are
Speaker 1: like on the internet. I mean, what this was was me.
Speaker 1: What this was was like me playing basketball with a
Speaker 1: bunch of friends and students at a summer program in
Speaker 1: Anne Arbor that I taught at every summer. They did
Speaker 1: not leak. Somebody took him and they existed. But I
Speaker 1: was just famous enough for somebody to think that anybody
Speaker 1: might give a ship and to like put them out
Speaker 1: there and be like, go to funk to sleep. Author,
Speaker 1: you know whatever it was, You're like, that didn't make
Speaker 1: any sense either. It didn't make any sense of like
Speaker 1: there was a censorship fight over the book New Zealand,
Speaker 1: it didn't make any sense that Sam Jackson was reading
Speaker 1: the book on the Dave Letterman show like nothing made
Speaker 1: any sense. So it seemed just barely plausible enough that
Speaker 1: in a moment where everybody was rushing to find some
Speaker 1: angle in some way to write about go to Funk
Speaker 1: to sleep and use it as fodder for their think
Speaker 1: pieces and their takedowns and their handwringing about the sorry
Speaker 1: state apparent and whatever it was, that somebody might find
Speaker 1: this more sol of information and think to use it.
Speaker 1: But I mean, more than anything, I think, what I
Speaker 1: felt and what I was aware of was that just
Speaker 1: as David had sort of chosen to wear a mask
Speaker 1: and chosen to obscure his real feelings and hide them,
Speaker 1: and then in some real sense, this, as much as anything,
Speaker 1: was the thing that had killed him, that he chose
Speaker 1: hiding and chose that shame and that secrecy over telling
Speaker 1: anybody what was really going on and living in that
Speaker 1: and allowing us to help him. It was very real
Speaker 1: to me that I was making a not entirely dissimilar
Speaker 1: choice in putting on this different mask, but still a mask,
Speaker 1: and sort of cleaving my public persona from my real
Speaker 1: persona and going on this kind of like victory tour
Speaker 1: of American media and then international media and repeatedly telling
Speaker 1: a story about my life and my current circumstances that
Speaker 1: we're not in any way reflective of what I was
Speaker 1: really going through. That felt on one hand, it felt
Speaker 1: disrespectful to my brother to be out here pretending that
Speaker 1: I was indeed like the happiest, luckiest shmuck in the world.
Speaker 1: And it also, in an uglier and darker way, felt
Speaker 1: to me like there was a way to spend it
Speaker 1: as an affirmation of everything that he had thought and
Speaker 1: the choices that had led him to kill himself, because
Speaker 1: you don't I think a thing if the literature is
Speaker 1: to be believed, a thing that suicidal people convinced themselves
Speaker 1: of is that everybody will be better off without them,
Speaker 1: that everybody will be okay, will survive, will recover the loss,
Speaker 1: and it will be okay. And in presenting this public
Speaker 1: face to the world, it's like I was turning myself
Speaker 1: into a walking dramatization of that fact, Like I was
Speaker 1: walking around being like I'm okay um. And at the
Speaker 1: same time, I knew that my family very much needed
Speaker 1: to see me be okay and do all of these things,
Speaker 1: like they very much were of the opinion that I
Speaker 1: should go out and promote the book. And then there
Speaker 1: was the part of me that was struggling because I
Speaker 1: wanted to at least feel more conflicted about whether I
Speaker 1: should go out and promote the book. But on a
Speaker 1: very basic level, I wanted to. And I was ambitious
Speaker 1: and desirous of all of the success and the fame
Speaker 1: and the money that would come with this book being
Speaker 1: successful and sort of achieving escape velocity. Right, this was
Speaker 1: the moment where with enough booster fuel, the thing could
Speaker 1: get into orbit and potentially just kind of circle the
Speaker 1: planet forever. And I knew this this was that time,
Speaker 1: and I knew that I could play a role in
Speaker 1: that because all of these opportunities were available and we
Speaker 1: could see the results from them, like you know, when
Speaker 1: you're tracking a project that closely, you actually see the
Speaker 1: sales bump after you do the Today Show or the
Speaker 1: sales bump after you do this thing or that thing.
Speaker 1: So like it was all right there at my fingertips,
Speaker 1: and I was sort of struggling with all of those
Speaker 1: things and taggling between all of those things. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I think also there's a kind of self protection involved
Speaker 1: there too. I mean, you're right, something that struck me
Speaker 1: as really a very universal feeling there, which was, if
Speaker 1: tragedy was ever allowed to step into the winner's circle,
Speaker 1: triumph would be incinerated. You know that somehow the magical
Speaker 1: thinking feeling of there are two worlds and they can't coexist,
Speaker 1: which of course they can and they do, but that
Speaker 1: that feeling. Yeah, Adams an event for his book in Georgetown.
Speaker 1: He knows the woman who's organized it. She had gone
Speaker 1: to the same school as him and David, so he
Speaker 1: knows it's going to come up. She's going to ask
Speaker 1: how David's doing, what he's up to. Adam can feel
Speaker 1: it coming, and then there it is. She finally asks,
Speaker 1: and he flat outlies. He tells her David is married
Speaker 1: and living in Brookline. I knew I wasn't going to
Speaker 1: get out of this without accounting for him in some way,
Speaker 1: like it was, you know, no matter how how I
Speaker 1: deflected or flipped the conversation. I sort of knew the
Speaker 1: entire evening that this woman was going to ask him
Speaker 1: about my brother, and I truly did not know what
Speaker 1: I was going to do when she did. Like, you know,
Speaker 1: We're at some dinner with a whole bunch of people.
Speaker 1: I didn't know anybody. This is her event. So I
Speaker 1: just lied to her. I just told her he was
Speaker 1: he was fine, And you know, it felt like it
Speaker 1: felt like it cost me something. It felt deeply unco
Speaker 1: comfortable to me. But also I think I think better
Speaker 1: than better for all of us than me telling her
Speaker 1: that actually, three weeks earlier, he had killed himself. Suicide
Speaker 1: is also so different than every other kind of of
Speaker 1: death and every other kind of grief. That was something
Speaker 1: that also struck me again and again. You know, I
Speaker 1: would be sitting down to remember getting back to California
Speaker 1: months and months later and sitting down for dinner with
Speaker 1: two very good friends of mine, both of whom in
Speaker 1: the in the previous six months had lost a grandparent
Speaker 1: and listening, you know, and they both knew about David,
Speaker 1: and we had talked about it already, so I wasn't
Speaker 1: in the same situation. But I just remember sitting and
Speaker 1: listening to them each talk about the funeral and all
Speaker 1: of the surrounding activity and emotion and how it feels
Speaker 1: when an elder dies in the way that everybody gets
Speaker 1: a bumper here, just all of this stuff that that
Speaker 1: was very like recognizably in line with the natural flow
Speaker 1: of life. Sad but not unnatural in the way that
Speaker 1: suicide continued and continues to feel to me, and just
Speaker 1: feeling like the three of us are at this table
Speaker 1: talking about death, and yet I can't talk, you know,
Speaker 1: I can't contribute. My story does not intersect with these stories,
Speaker 1: and so life continues. Adam's riding the wave of his
Speaker 1: public success while privately contending with his grief. Many opportunities
Speaker 1: are coming his way. It's now and he's at a
Speaker 1: storytelling event at the Moss in Boston. The evening is
Speaker 1: a turning point for Adam. He feels in this moment
Speaker 1: that he wants and needs to tell the story of
Speaker 1: his brother. The other writers participating in the event are
Speaker 1: being vulnerable, and he feels like a fraud. But first
Speaker 1: he needs to shed his mask, the protected shield that
Speaker 1: has kept him well shielded for so long, and he
Speaker 1: also needs to find the length which to write about David.
Speaker 1: He's written in all sorts of forms and genres, supernatural thrillers, screenplays,
Speaker 1: literary novels, but now he feels the pull to return
Speaker 1: to where he began, with a form he'd inherited from
Speaker 1: his grandmother, poetry. Perhaps in poetry he can begin to
Speaker 1: unpack the story that needs unpacking to tell the story
Speaker 1: that needs telling the story of his brother David. I
Speaker 1: certainly think that that moment in Boston was a touch point. Well,
Speaker 1: it was the closest that I probably came to even
Speaker 1: thinking or attempting to, certainly to attempting to talk about
Speaker 1: or write about David. I think that from very soon
Speaker 1: after his death, I always knew that I would have
Speaker 1: to write something about him. This is It's just it's
Speaker 1: just too central and too critical to the way that
Speaker 1: I processed the world to not um And yet I
Speaker 1: continued to not do it, and to not really even
Speaker 1: attempt to do it. I thought about doing it. I
Speaker 1: never stopped thinking about doing it. I never stopped thinking
Speaker 1: about it, and I never stopped being stymied by things
Speaker 1: like what the form would be, what the architecture would be,
Speaker 1: what the kind of scaffolding of it would look like.
Speaker 1: I never considered doing it as a poem until I
Speaker 1: did it as a poem. I thought about a novel,
Speaker 1: a screenplay, an essay. I wrote one half of one
Speaker 1: scene of a screenplay, which was basically me djaying in
Speaker 1: a club and my phone ringing, and I don't even
Speaker 1: think I answered the phone, and seeing that I wrote,
Speaker 1: that's as far as I got um. But you know,
Speaker 1: I never stopped thinking about writing about him, and I
Speaker 1: never stopped feeling like something was out of whack, like
Speaker 1: my my life and my my creative life was out
Speaker 1: of balance for not having written about him. That, like
Speaker 1: everything else I was writing, was relatively easy, was light work,
Speaker 1: was trivial because there was this thing that I had
Speaker 1: to write about it and was not even really spending
Speaker 1: any time thinking about writing about you know that that
Speaker 1: moment that the Moth in what got me to that
Speaker 1: producers door at you know, ten o'clock the night before
Speaker 1: the performance was the fact that earlier that night we'd
Speaker 1: rehearsed and I've heard all these other stories, and everybody's
Speaker 1: story was so honest and raw and vulnerable, and there
Speaker 1: was so much bravery in them getting up and talking
Speaker 1: about whatever the thing was. Because you know, the Moth
Speaker 1: doesn't typically do too many light breezy stories, like often
Speaker 1: they take a dark turn. The classic Moth story is
Speaker 1: four or five minutes of fun and games and laughter
Speaker 1: and light, and then somebody is diagnosed with something or
Speaker 1: somebody goes through something horrible and the rest of the
Speaker 1: story is really dealing head on with whatever that turn
Speaker 1: that tragedy is. The story I was telling was none
Speaker 1: of that. The story I was telling was basically a
Speaker 1: stand up comedy routine. Now they needed that to end
Speaker 1: the night with so that everybody walked out of there.
Speaker 1: You know, able to operate heavy machinery. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: felt newly dishonest in the face of all this other
Speaker 1: courage and bravery from my other co storytellers. And it
Speaker 1: also felt very different to me. Three years later, I
Speaker 1: felt like it was one thing to do my go
Speaker 1: to Focus League tour and bullshit with Matt Lower and
Speaker 1: whoever else and promote the book and the way it
Speaker 1: needed to be promoted, and keep my grief and my
Speaker 1: pain to myself. But it felt like a new level
Speaker 1: of dishonesty, and maybe an unhealthy one. Two three years later,
Speaker 1: be crafting my own story in my own words, under
Speaker 1: my own sort of motor, and still be telling the
Speaker 1: story that didn't include my brothers, still be telling the
Speaker 1: fun and Games version. I went out and told that
Speaker 1: story exactly as I was supposed to, and got big
Speaker 1: laughs and had a ball, and they kept bringing me back,
Speaker 1: and I ended up telling that story and probably you know,
Speaker 1: ten different cities and sort of subsuming the part of
Speaker 1: me that felt like, I, you know, shouldn't be telling
Speaker 1: that story, but should instead be working on telling the
Speaker 1: real story. In many ways, Adam's book about his brother
Speaker 1: reads like a ritual itself, even though Adam is not religious.
Speaker 1: It has an incantatory quality like the Jewish mourner's prayer
Speaker 1: the Kaddish. Another staggering moment begins with an amber's hand,
Speaker 1: Adam writes, and so all I can do is grapple
Speaker 1: my way back? Is right this or maybe I mean mine,
Speaker 1: make ritual of being known as he would not build
Speaker 1: a bridge, I do rapple a lot in this book
Speaker 1: with the idea of telling his story, this notion of
Speaker 1: being resistant to narrative versus deeply deeply dependent on narrative,
Speaker 1: the idea that the fundamental thing David refused to do
Speaker 1: was tell his story like live in the honesty of
Speaker 1: what he was going through and who he was. And
Speaker 1: so I think I say those lines in the context
Speaker 1: of my own children and thinking about what tools I
Speaker 1: want them to have that David didn't in the event
Speaker 1: that they ever deal with any of the things he did.
Speaker 1: You know, I've been lucky enough to sidestep the genetic
Speaker 1: inheritance of depression, but it runs on both sides of
Speaker 1: my family, my mother's and my father's, through the generations.
Speaker 1: So I look at my own three children, and what
Speaker 1: I really want more than anything is for them to
Speaker 1: not feel the kind of shame that would lead them
Speaker 1: to keep something like depression or mental illness a secret.
Speaker 1: So the building of a bridge, I think, is the
Speaker 1: idea of helping them construct a language of framework, a
Speaker 1: life in which they never feel the need to hide
Speaker 1: that really characterized David's life. Suicide is so particular there
Speaker 1: are no natural bridges to it, like nothing connects to it.
Speaker 1: It's sort of an island, and to get there you
Speaker 1: have to swim. Here's Adam reading one last passage from
Speaker 1: his beautiful, powerful book. I had a brother once. Soon
Speaker 1: after his death, my mother tried to make me promise
Speaker 1: I would never write about David. I said nothing, and
Speaker 1: continue to say nothing until now, and still do not
Speaker 1: know what she asked, because it is nobody's business, or
Speaker 1: would be too painful to see rendered on the page,
Speaker 1: or simply because when my mother was a girl, Felicia
Speaker 1: promised never to write about her, and this, she feels,
Speaker 1: is what a writer owes his family. But I will
Speaker 1: make a different plea to my children. I will implore
Speaker 1: them to write it, speak it all, shed light, and
Speaker 1: who knows what else you might shed. Family Secrets is
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio. Molly's A Core is
Speaker 1: the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
Speaker 1: If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
Speaker 1: please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
Speaker 1: on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight Secret zero.
Speaker 1: That's the number zero. You can also find me on
Speaker 1: Instagram at Danny writer. And if you'd like to know
Speaker 1: more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out
Speaker 1: my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.