Speaker 1: Family Secrets as a production of I Heart Radio High
Speaker 1: Family Secrets. Family It's Danny. Last week I had the
Speaker 1: pleasure of being part of an ongoing series produced by
Speaker 1: Penguin Random House called Two Writers Talking. The writers in
Speaker 1: this case were myself and Bob Colcher, author of the
Speaker 1: blockbuster Hidden Valley Road. Bob and I were moderated by
Speaker 1: New York Times journalist and critic Jennifer sr. The subject,
Speaker 1: you guessed it, Family Secrets. I'm excited to share this
Speaker 1: special bonus episode with you, and remember April one, we'll
Speaker 1: be dropping a whole new season Between now and then,
Speaker 1: though we have a few surprises in store, so keep
Speaker 1: your eyes and ears out. What were you most responsive
Speaker 1: to in each other's books? And they may or may
Speaker 1: not have had to do with secrecy. I'm happy to
Speaker 1: go first. That's all right, Thank you, Danny for the
Speaker 1: chance to talk with you about your book. I I
Speaker 1: really was was blown away by it. I thought that
Speaker 1: the the part about it that really struck me was
Speaker 1: sort of the the two reactions that you had to
Speaker 1: this news about your about your biological heritage. Your first,
Speaker 1: the first thing you do is you look in the
Speaker 1: mirror and you wonder if you're still yourself, you know,
Speaker 1: if this you're wondering how this news actually changes you.
Speaker 1: And then the ripple effects start and you start to
Speaker 1: wonder if the information was there all along and you've
Speaker 1: only wielded away. You know that remark your mother made
Speaker 1: several years earlier, why didn't you see that? And several
Speaker 1: other clues that you almost wilfully didn't um, I didn't notice,
Speaker 1: and I recognized in the family I reported on and
Speaker 1: in Hidden Valley Road, you have you have children who
Speaker 1: learn more and more secrets as they get older. The
Speaker 1: mother in the book, Mimi Galvin, she she tends to
Speaker 1: let loose new pieces of information when they're back is
Speaker 1: against the wall. So so the revelations keep coming into
Speaker 1: her nineties and after a while, uh, they're so whipsawed
Speaker 1: by all the new information they start to wonder if
Speaker 1: if the in certain cases, that there are things they
Speaker 1: should have known all along, if they really had been
Speaker 1: trying to assemble a narrative. And it's this assembling of
Speaker 1: your own personal narrative that interests me the most, and
Speaker 1: how fragile it can be. But I had I had
Speaker 1: a very similar response reading Hidden Valley Road, and um
Speaker 1: thinking about the ways in which I which I loved. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I cried multiple times, especially towards the end. The sisters,
Speaker 1: the two the two youngest children, the only girls in
Speaker 1: the family, um are I think the ones who grapple most,
Speaker 1: each in their own way with what they didn't know,
Speaker 1: what they might have known, what what each of them? Uh,
Speaker 1: you know that there's a conversation that they have fairly
Speaker 1: not early, but like in the middle, in the middle
Speaker 1: of the book, where one asked the other, did this
Speaker 1: happen to you too? I don't know spoilers, but you know,
Speaker 1: did this happen to you too? And the answer is no,
Speaker 1: I have no idea what you're talking about. And then
Speaker 1: way later, as adults, they have the same conversation again
Speaker 1: and the answer, of course is yes, and and and
Speaker 1: the sister who was asked that doesn't even remember being
Speaker 1: asked that. And So there's this way in which I
Speaker 1: think that family secrets um or or secrets in general,
Speaker 1: the toxicity of them renders them like young call secrets
Speaker 1: psychic poison, right, So it renders them um something that
Speaker 1: we may know on some level but can't touch. And
Speaker 1: the family in Hi Valley Road is just it's full
Speaker 1: of so many secrets that ricochet off of each other
Speaker 1: and can't touch each other. And you know, in my case,
Speaker 1: inheritances is a is a memoir, and it's it's my
Speaker 1: own story. But because I have written nine books prior,
Speaker 1: I actually have a body of evidence for what I
Speaker 1: actually new but couldn't think because it's in my fiction,
Speaker 1: it's in my earlier memoirs. It's like the thing that
Speaker 1: was always there that I was digging for without knowing
Speaker 1: that I was digging. I I really did not consciously
Speaker 1: know it, but I now see there was a trail
Speaker 1: of breadcrumbs. Danny, what was that term that you had
Speaker 1: as I go, analytic term unsought the unthought known, unthought
Speaker 1: coined by a psychoanalyst named Christopher Bolas has written a
Speaker 1: great deal about it. The unthought known, which is just
Speaker 1: one of my favorite phrases ever, I think is really
Speaker 1: defines what we absolutely in our gut, you know, in
Speaker 1: our um. You know that we know it, but we
Speaker 1: can't think it because it's too dangerous. So you mentioned
Speaker 1: that young had this young who, by the way, had
Speaker 1: a psychotic break and may in fact of vin schizophrenic himself,
Speaker 1: which is an interesting through line through all of the
Speaker 1: um you mentioned that Young talked about called secrets psychic poison.
Speaker 1: They're good for books, though, right, I mean there, I
Speaker 1: feel like some of the best literature is about deceit
Speaker 1: if not all of it. And so I am wondering
Speaker 1: if you, before we dive into your books, if you
Speaker 1: have favorite books of about deceit um, and if you
Speaker 1: think secrets are at least useful in helping structure a narrative,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, if you were looking to the
Speaker 1: anything in particular. They certainly offer a surprise ending sometimes
Speaker 1: in um in Danny's case of surprise beginning in inheritance,
Speaker 1: but the sort of like the end of a mystery,
Speaker 1: you know, hindsight twenty. But I look back on many
Speaker 1: years of magazine writing and writing, you know, crime stories,
Speaker 1: and I see more and more stories about families in crisis,
Speaker 1: and quite often with information that's been tamped down because
Speaker 1: of scandal and then comes out again because of the narrative.
Speaker 1: And I'm writing about so, you know, I wrote about
Speaker 1: a young man who was on trial for a gay
Speaker 1: hate crime, and in the middle of the trial, he
Speaker 1: stands up and declares that he himself is gay, comes
Speaker 1: out of the closet and reveals his secret. And UM,
Speaker 1: one woman's life being molested by her father culminates with
Speaker 1: her murdering her father and then going on trial so
Speaker 1: that the secret she couldn't keep closed up for ever. UM.
Speaker 1: I think about it a lot in terms of its
Speaker 1: narrative power. But UM, and I see it everywhere. When
Speaker 1: I started reporting on the Galvins, I thought about American pastoral,
Speaker 1: which you know, has a has a family calamity that
Speaker 1: that feels so hard to explain, but it's also quite scandalous,
Speaker 1: and and secrets are kept and then the parents or
Speaker 1: the father in particular, is searching, you know what, what
Speaker 1: is it you know in the past that might have
Speaker 1: caused this? What secret relationship with his daughter might have
Speaker 1: triggered this. I think it's an effort to find clarity
Speaker 1: in an effort to write the story. UM. You know,
Speaker 1: I had listened to to a bonus episode of Family
Speaker 1: Secrets with with Bessel vander Kolke, who is no relation
Speaker 1: to Coker and UM. But but he said something that
Speaker 1: really really hit me about and I'm going to mangle it,
Speaker 1: but it's about trauma. Is a story that can't be written.
Speaker 1: So so the you know, your effort to write your
Speaker 1: book and the Galvin's determination to tell their story is
Speaker 1: to me, it's a way of moving through trauma and
Speaker 1: to try to give it a give it, uh, if
Speaker 1: not a happy ending, at least to help it settle
Speaker 1: down a little bit. I love that Um and the vessels.
Speaker 1: The quote is um, it's a nature of trauma that
Speaker 1: it doesn't allow a story to be told, which is
Speaker 1: why when we're when we're traumatized by something, all of us,
Speaker 1: our our our first instinct is to tell the story
Speaker 1: again and again and again to whoever will listen, because
Speaker 1: we're trying to we're trying to contain it, and it's
Speaker 1: like water running through our open fingers. It's it feels impossible.
Speaker 1: And of course, you know, narrative ultimately like finding a
Speaker 1: way to shape trauma into art, you know, or you know,
Speaker 1: chaos into some kind of you know, shape or clarity
Speaker 1: is um the work of literature and the work of life,
Speaker 1: I think. But you know, people me all the time
Speaker 1: about family secrets and my podcast and my like do
Speaker 1: I go hunting to those searching for my guests? And
Speaker 1: you know, I don't because the stories keep on coming,
Speaker 1: and they are very often wonderful books that either I
Speaker 1: you know, I find them, I read them, I know them,
Speaker 1: or the authors or friends of mine and I suddenly think, oh,
Speaker 1: that would be Nick Flynn, that would be an amazing story.
Speaker 1: Or Jenny Boylan that would be an amazing story. Or
Speaker 1: Ti Kira Madden that would be an amazing story. K
Speaker 1: s A. Lehman that we could go on. It's just
Speaker 1: it's why there are so many writers on my show.
Speaker 1: It's not because it's a literary podcast. It's because the
Speaker 1: work I think that writers do of finding a way
Speaker 1: to take a secret, a trauma, multiple secrets, multiple multiple traumas,
Speaker 1: and shaped them so that then you know, what we
Speaker 1: have is not only the mess, but the transcendence, you know,
Speaker 1: the redemption in some way from that, the the the
Speaker 1: turning it into something that has meaning and that will
Speaker 1: have meaning for others. That actually, excuse me, it's funny
Speaker 1: written right on my she'd here is The next thing
Speaker 1: that I wanted to ask you is what do you
Speaker 1: what do you think the hardest thing is about writing
Speaker 1: about family secrets? Like what what makes it? What are
Speaker 1: the biggest challenges and I think that each of you
Speaker 1: are going to have very different answers. Obviously, Bob, you
Speaker 1: were trying to earn the confidence of the family, and
Speaker 1: you are Danny. This is very personal to you. So, Bob,
Speaker 1: I mean, do you want to go first? I mean,
Speaker 1: it's going to be idiosyncratic, and it's going to vary
Speaker 1: from story to story and what advantage point you're telling
Speaker 1: it from, obviously, But for for you in this project, Bob,
Speaker 1: what was it? I certainly certainly believe the stakes for
Speaker 1: Danny must have been very personal and very high, as
Speaker 1: you're writing about friends and loved ones, Whereas with with me,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm encountering these sisters who are the first people
Speaker 1: I met in the family, who are determined to be transparent.
Speaker 1: They want to smash all the secrets to bits. They
Speaker 1: want to be in the open. But I am you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not them. I'm I'm I'm a reporter, and so
Speaker 1: I need to make sure that they trust me. But
Speaker 1: more importantly, I need to talk to everybody in the
Speaker 1: family to make sure that I'm telling an accurate and
Speaker 1: fair story. And that took a year before I before
Speaker 1: I even got the book deal. Uh, talking to various
Speaker 1: family members because I was very skeptical. I was convinced
Speaker 1: that one family member at least would stand up and say,
Speaker 1: you've got to be kidding me. I don't want my
Speaker 1: family secrets in a book. And Um, I hadn't been
Speaker 1: prepared for just how much the rest of the family
Speaker 1: would defer to the sisters, and also how optimistic they
Speaker 1: were that they had something to to tell the world
Speaker 1: about the science of mental illness and and about how
Speaker 1: they moved through their traumas as a family. So I
Speaker 1: was happily surprised when they did it. But but the
Speaker 1: biggest risk is that you that you'd say betrayed that
Speaker 1: trust or that or that you you skew it in
Speaker 1: some way where it it quite clearly as a self
Speaker 1: serving work of journalism. I had to be removed enough
Speaker 1: from the situation so that I didn't I didn't write
Speaker 1: something to um, can you know too completely flimsy. But
Speaker 1: I also wanted to report as intimately as possible about
Speaker 1: these people's thoughts and feelings. So that was my challenge. Bob,
Speaker 1: Can I ask you why you think that they all
Speaker 1: really did come on board? That's that that's so unusual
Speaker 1: that they all did. Was it was that out of
Speaker 1: a kind of sense of duty in a way to
Speaker 1: the two sisters, or was it also as you you
Speaker 1: touched upon, like in the name of science, that there
Speaker 1: was this extraordinary opportunity to uh, you know, for the
Speaker 1: world to learn something about schizophrenia. And can I just
Speaker 1: jump on and also say, was there I can't remember anywhere?
Speaker 1: Was who was the toughest cell, if there was a
Speaker 1: kind of cell. I mean, there were three or four
Speaker 1: things that The first was that that most of the
Speaker 1: horrible events in the family had happened thirty or years
Speaker 1: ago or more so, I hadn't really considered how how
Speaker 1: long ago the events were. The second was deferring to
Speaker 1: the sisters who were the youngest in the family, and
Speaker 1: so older brothers who were had left the house earlier,
Speaker 1: felt guilty frankly that so much had trickled down and
Speaker 1: things that they never knew happened had happened to the sisters.
Speaker 1: Family secrets had happened to the sisters, and so they said, okay,
Speaker 1: if they wanted, then that's fine. And then there was
Speaker 1: late breaking scientific information about the family genetic UH code.
Speaker 1: Two different groups of researchers found out two different things
Speaker 1: that were really stunning, all at the same time. And
Speaker 1: then finally the big one is that Mimi the mother
Speaker 1: was on board UM for the first time. She was
Speaker 1: not interested for a very long time, but she was
Speaker 1: around ninety now and in very frail health, and everybody
Speaker 1: thought it was an hour never And I think the
Speaker 1: scientific breakthroughs were very validating to her. It made her,
Speaker 1: you know, it made her feel comfortable saying this was genetic,
Speaker 1: this wasn't my fault. And so she was fine talking
Speaker 1: to me about about what she wanted to talk about.
Speaker 1: What was toughest for you. I mean, Danny, this is
Speaker 1: going to be a very different I can't even imagine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And there were a couple of different layers one and
Speaker 1: both of my parents were gone UM. And people have
Speaker 1: sometimes asked me how I think the story might have
Speaker 1: been different if my parents were alive, or if one
Speaker 1: of them had been alive, if my father had still
Speaker 1: been living, there wouldn't be a book. I just wouldn't
Speaker 1: have written it while he was living. UM. He I
Speaker 1: believe very much. UM wanted this distayed married. It was
Speaker 1: something he was both of my parents were going to
Speaker 1: take to the grave with them and they did. And
Speaker 1: then I remember when Inherent was about to come out,
Speaker 1: and the first piece that was published was in Time magazine,
Speaker 1: and it was a big thing, and there was this
Speaker 1: photograph of my dad and me um on the beach,
Speaker 1: happy like playful, loving photograph. And when the piece came out,
Speaker 1: I had such a pang because I thought, like that
Speaker 1: young father, if he could have had a crystal ball
Speaker 1: and seeing a future where his this secret that I
Speaker 1: think was so deep that he perhaps was even keeping
Speaker 1: it from himself, that that would have been there in
Speaker 1: a magazine that he read, you know, religiously every week,
Speaker 1: there for all the world to see. I was. I
Speaker 1: was just very aware of the that was painful for me,
Speaker 1: but all so felt to me in terms of like, well,
Speaker 1: what right do I have to tell this story? I
Speaker 1: have grappled with that in other books. With Inheritance, I
Speaker 1: never grappled with it, because it literally felt like the
Speaker 1: story of my life, Like this was that I had
Speaker 1: a right to tell it and to explore it and
Speaker 1: to you know, go deeply and as a journalist into
Speaker 1: you know, the his who who were my parents before
Speaker 1: I was born? And what was the world that they
Speaker 1: lived in? But the other piece of it was I
Speaker 1: discovered my biological father and um, he This is not
Speaker 1: a spoiler. I mean he had been an anonymous sperm
Speaker 1: donor as a twenty two year old medical student and
Speaker 1: was very conscious of his privacy, as was I. And
Speaker 1: from the time that he and I started having any
Speaker 1: contact with each other, it was very clear that I
Speaker 1: was going to write a book about this. I mean
Speaker 1: it was it was the book that everything else had
Speaker 1: led to. UM and I was transparent about that with
Speaker 1: my biological father and with his family, that his wife
Speaker 1: and the kids that I was in touch with. But
Speaker 1: when I promised that I would protect his his identity,
Speaker 1: and I worked very hard to protect his identity. When
Speaker 1: I finished the manuscript and before it started going down
Speaker 1: the pipeline towards being published, I did something that is
Speaker 1: such a memoir one oh one. You don't do this,
Speaker 1: but I had to, which was I sent it to
Speaker 1: him and I asked him to read it. Really for
Speaker 1: a sense. I wanted to know that he felt that
Speaker 1: that I hadn't missed anything, that there was no little
Speaker 1: tell in there where somebody who really wanted to and
Speaker 1: became obsessed configure out who he was, but I think
Speaker 1: I was also looking for his blessing, which I which
Speaker 1: I received from him. I received an extraordinary long let
Speaker 1: her back from him after he had read it, with
Speaker 1: a list of all the things that he liked, some
Speaker 1: of which were things that were very tough in the book, um,
Speaker 1: but really saying I feel that you've been fair. This
Speaker 1: reflects my experience too, and he felt that his identity
Speaker 1: had been protected. So that was that was this piece
Speaker 1: of that process that was very different from me, because
Speaker 1: even with my own mother, when she was living and
Speaker 1: I published earlier memoirs, I did not submit them to
Speaker 1: her for her approval before they came out. I love
Speaker 1: the part in your book where you infer I'm sure
Speaker 1: correctly that they've googled you. You know that your your
Speaker 1: your biological father and his family that that that they
Speaker 1: all and I just imagine, you know, with a smile
Speaker 1: and saying, oh my god, she's going to write about this.
Speaker 1: There's no reas not going to write about this. I
Speaker 1: kind of breaks on everything for a little while. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I think initially, when when I think the
Speaker 1: reticence about having any contact with me was like Oprah
Speaker 1: could be lurking in the bushes and jumping out with
Speaker 1: a camera crew. Yeah, I was like, wow, this is great.
Speaker 1: She's a writer. How interesting? Oh this is terrible. She
Speaker 1: writes about her family and identity. And yeah, although I
Speaker 1: had this thought that like that happened, and then they
Speaker 1: started reading you and they were like, oh, but maybe
Speaker 1: this will be wonderful, and maybe this will be just
Speaker 1: the thing. You know, he clearly is one over, like
Speaker 1: he's he understands how everything is so well considered in
Speaker 1: your writing, So he he gets it. Yet yet it's complicated, right,
Speaker 1: because what does it mean to be? And I was
Speaker 1: very aware of this when the book came out. You know,
Speaker 1: he was just about eighty when the book came out,
Speaker 1: and this very private person, and it was kind of
Speaker 1: you know, it was kind of hard to miss. He
Speaker 1: would turn on the TV or there would be a
Speaker 1: magazine and these things. I think we're a little intense
Speaker 1: because it was also a story that was in a
Speaker 1: way part of his story too. But he was certainly
Speaker 1: choosing anonymity and and I was offering it so on
Speaker 1: a human level. I mean, it's just I mean, he
Speaker 1: and I have spoken about it, but will never speak
Speaker 1: about it publicly. I don't think, but it's just an
Speaker 1: interesting thing to grapple with. And we were all googling
Speaker 1: each other, like, Matt, Meanwhile, your father, like the man
Speaker 1: who brought you up, is is all over inheritance you know.
Speaker 1: He it's dedicated to him, your your relationship with him,
Speaker 1: and your new thoughts on how you how how will
Speaker 1: you relate to him now that you have this news.
Speaker 1: It's something you wrestle with so openly and cogently all
Speaker 1: the way through it really, um, I feel like it
Speaker 1: keeps coming back to him. It's another part that really
Speaker 1: struck me. Thank you. Yeah. And when people ask me
Speaker 1: the dedication page of inheritances is it's books dedicated to
Speaker 1: my father. And I don't specify which father which because
Speaker 1: of course I didn't specify which father. Of course it
Speaker 1: should be a parent. That I have one father, I
Speaker 1: have one dad, uh, and that's the dad who raised me.
Speaker 1: But people would bring that up and I'm like, no,
Speaker 1: that's the whole point. Can I just point something out
Speaker 1: you said, of course it would it should be a parent.
Speaker 1: That's no. I mean, it's just one of these weird
Speaker 1: oral accidents. That's not the you know, you were talking
Speaker 1: to This is going to apply to both you, and
Speaker 1: I think it is going to be the final question
Speaker 1: actually before we go on and look at some of
Speaker 1: the audience questions. But um so, Danny, you obviously went
Speaker 1: to extraordinary lens to make sure that you know your
Speaker 1: biological father was comfortable with this, and he's probably had
Speaker 1: some instinctive sense of what you owed him. What do
Speaker 1: you think we owe the people who actually in our
Speaker 1: families who might deceive us, like, what do we owe them?
Speaker 1: It's got to be a question you've wrestled with, and
Speaker 1: I mean, certainly the two youngest sisters had very different
Speaker 1: approaches to what they believed they owe their families. So
Speaker 1: I think i'll I'll leave it on that. I think
Speaker 1: it's And Danny, you also are now you're an aficionado
Speaker 1: of of family secret stories. You've seen You've talked with
Speaker 1: a couple of dozen people now who have been through
Speaker 1: revelations and found new ways to interprelate with their family.
Speaker 1: In the case of the Galvin's um that in the beginning,
Speaker 1: I met the sisters together, and I thought that perhaps
Speaker 1: this would be a story about two sisters who hobbled
Speaker 1: together and made it through a very difficult childhood, that
Speaker 1: they could be some of the people we would root
Speaker 1: for in this story as they grow up. And then
Speaker 1: once I interviewed them separately, I found that they were
Speaker 1: quite different people, that they had had many years of
Speaker 1: closeness and then many years of not so closeness, that
Speaker 1: they had been through very similar traumas as children, but
Speaker 1: had processed them differently. And I was thrown by it
Speaker 1: for a moment or two. UM, But then I sat
Speaker 1: up and said, this is this is reality. Different people
Speaker 1: experience their families in different ways. UM. I have a
Speaker 1: you know, a sister and brother who might be watching
Speaker 1: on the zoom. Now, you know, we grew up in
Speaker 1: the same house, but in different houses, you know, and
Speaker 1: we have different memories that may each of which are
Speaker 1: probably self serving. And so when the privilege I had
Speaker 1: in writing the Galvin story is to be able to
Speaker 1: write about these um, these women's lives over decades and
Speaker 1: also their brothers, and to see how their perceptions of
Speaker 1: their family change, and how they're the way they decided
Speaker 1: to relate to their family changes. Um. They Lindsay starts
Speaker 1: out wanting to leave UM and never come back. She
Speaker 1: ends up coming back and being the caregiver for her brothers.
Speaker 1: Margaret it grabs her chance to escape the trauma, and
Speaker 1: then feels a certain amount of rejection and ambivalence about
Speaker 1: what happened. She feels a little locked out, and that
Speaker 1: colors her relationship with their family going forward. And and
Speaker 1: she decides once all the secrets spill out, that becomes
Speaker 1: further fuel for her to declare some boundaries and some independence,
Speaker 1: a little like um, like like Tara west Over and educated.
Speaker 1: So I see two different models in the book that
Speaker 1: I was really very pleased to be able to to
Speaker 1: portray year by year almost as they moved through their lives. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was. I was so struck by that. Um by um,
Speaker 1: they're the tracking of their different experiences. And you know,
Speaker 1: like if if you were if you were tracking them
Speaker 1: as a novelist and this word fiction, I think a
Speaker 1: novelist might have come up with a very different response
Speaker 1: in each of those women as adults, and or maybe
Speaker 1: a great novelist would have come up with exactly the
Speaker 1: response that that happened. Um. But you know, one of
Speaker 1: the things in having become um, you know, sort of
Speaker 1: a student of family secrets unexpectedly is that one of
Speaker 1: the things I've learned, especially in the podcast, is that
Speaker 1: when we discover something is at least as important as
Speaker 1: what we discover, like how these things break over the
Speaker 1: course of our lives. I had a moment that really
Speaker 1: took me back as I was researching and reporting and
Speaker 1: processing my own experience, where I thought I had felt
Speaker 1: so betrayed by my parents. UM. Initially, I felt like,
Speaker 1: how could you have kept this a secret? It's such
Speaker 1: a fundamental human right to know if it's possible to know,
Speaker 1: to know where you know, where we come from. And
Speaker 1: and then at some point I realized what would have
Speaker 1: happened to me if I had learned this at sixteen
Speaker 1: or at twenty three? What if my mother had blurted
Speaker 1: it out to me? Um after my father died when
Speaker 1: I mean, that was a time in my life where
Speaker 1: I was a hot mess of a human being, and
Speaker 1: I don't think I would have survived it. Um. I
Speaker 1: found out what I found out at an extremely stable
Speaker 1: time in my life, you know, when in a in
Speaker 1: a in a long time marriage and with a with
Speaker 1: a a child who was already seventeen at the time
Speaker 1: I made this discovery. Um, in a you know, just
Speaker 1: in in midlife, I had a lot of life behind
Speaker 1: me with a very solid foundation, and so I end
Speaker 1: up feeling like I found out at a really miraculous
Speaker 1: moment where there was enough time, still, enough people living
Speaker 1: who I might be able to learn something from. I
Speaker 1: also hear stories from people regularly who are making these
Speaker 1: kinds of discoveries and there in their eighties. What do
Speaker 1: you do with that? Um, you know, with the time
Speaker 1: that's left and what there is to process. So I
Speaker 1: think it has I think it has a lot to
Speaker 1: do with the with the with the wind, and and
Speaker 1: not only with the with the what. I'm also reminded
Speaker 1: of something you said in your book Anywhere. You said
Speaker 1: that sometimes family secrets are um, they're kept out of love.
Speaker 1: We're going to take a quick break here for a
Speaker 1: word from our sponsor. I'm going to go into m
Speaker 1: Q and a function here. What does Bob believe is
Speaker 1: the biggest obstacle to progress in the treatment of schizophrenia. Well,
Speaker 1: there's been some strides in early intervention and a little
Speaker 1: bit of the stigma has gone now so that families
Speaker 1: aren't blamed for the disease. UM. There's family support now
Speaker 1: if you're lucky enough to have good health care. Um
Speaker 1: so those have improved, but for a variety of reasons,
Speaker 1: it's just, um, there's been very little movement on the
Speaker 1: pharmaceutical front. I mean I came up in and we
Speaker 1: all did, in an era where when I when you
Speaker 1: think about mental illness, I thought of it as a
Speaker 1: brain chemistry issue, and that the idea was to through
Speaker 1: hard work and trial and error, in the right therapist
Speaker 1: and psychopharmacologist, you'd find the right pill that would perhaps
Speaker 1: help you become more functional. And that might be true
Speaker 1: for things like anxiety or depression. But um, but schizophrenia
Speaker 1: is still working with the same basic drugs that the
Speaker 1: Galvin family were treated with back in the late sixties
Speaker 1: and early seventies, and that part is hard, and there
Speaker 1: are a lot of reasons for that. One is um Uh,
Speaker 1: some disappointing outcomes from the Human Genome Project. Instead of
Speaker 1: finding one big genetic issue that could be zapped with
Speaker 1: the drug, they've found more than a hundred potential variants
Speaker 1: that all have very limited effects size. So it's hard
Speaker 1: to know what gene to zap with a pharmaceutical drug.
Speaker 1: And then also you can't really test it on mice,
Speaker 1: you have to test it on humans, and that's risky
Speaker 1: and expensive. And then finally, the constituency can't really advocate
Speaker 1: for themselves the same way that people with cancer can,
Speaker 1: for instance, and so that things are sluggish and all
Speaker 1: those fronts. I just found one for Danny that I
Speaker 1: think is really kind of great. UM. What questions would
Speaker 1: you ask your father and mother, knowing what you do now?
Speaker 1: I would ask how conscious they were of UM, what
Speaker 1: they were signing on for what they were doing in UM,
Speaker 1: in going to an institute and and using donor sperm UM.
Speaker 1: I'm fascinated by that time in reproductive medicine, where so
Speaker 1: many people who wanted to be parents were deceived, though
Speaker 1: often with the best of intentions. Bye bye the doctors
Speaker 1: that they went to see, who really believed it would
Speaker 1: be best if they forgot it ever happened. I wonder
Speaker 1: how closely they kept that knowledge in their consciousness. In
Speaker 1: Family Secrets, the tagline of every episode is the secrets
Speaker 1: that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
Speaker 1: and the secrets we keep from ourselves. I wonder which
Speaker 1: of those categories my parents fell into and what that
Speaker 1: meant for the three of us. What that meant for
Speaker 1: the way that we interacted with each other during my childhood. Yes,
Speaker 1: so last would like to know Hi, Robert, thanks so
Speaker 1: much for your amazing word giant passing around to other
Speaker 1: psychiatry residents. What you wanted to know was how did
Speaker 1: the Galvins react. What was the response? Well, there came
Speaker 1: a point a couple of months before the book came
Speaker 1: out when People magazine wanted to write a feature about
Speaker 1: the family and to put a small excerpt in it,
Speaker 1: And so I was I was getting on the phone
Speaker 1: with the mall saying, hey, can you meet a reporter
Speaker 1: and and I That's that's when I said to myself,
Speaker 1: you know, I can't ask them to take time out
Speaker 1: of their day and to do all of this with
Speaker 1: with the book they haven't even read. So a couple
Speaker 1: of months before it came out, I did send advanced
Speaker 1: copies to them, and I think that there was first
Speaker 1: there was in general, there was relief that I delivered
Speaker 1: what I said I would, which is something that that
Speaker 1: dealt with the tender and sensitive issues of their family,
Speaker 1: of the family secrets in a way that wasn't like
Speaker 1: rubber necking that that was tasteful, and that was really
Speaker 1: about the possible good that the family could do. And
Speaker 1: then there were individual difficulties that some of them had
Speaker 1: with placement. You know, this was a group portrait of
Speaker 1: a family with some people foregrounded and some people backgrounded.
Speaker 1: You know, I was here too at that dinner. Why
Speaker 1: why wasn't I, you know, why didn't you talk to
Speaker 1: Why aren't my thoughts and feelings about that in there?
Speaker 1: And so I think that that is the inherent difficulty
Speaker 1: with journalism in general, but also with with intimately reported
Speaker 1: narrative journalism, that that the reporter ends up being the
Speaker 1: one who makes the calls and and they they we're
Speaker 1: kind enough to give up that control to someone and
Speaker 1: trust in them. But then something amazing happened, which is
Speaker 1: Oprah's Book Club, and and that kind of set everyone's
Speaker 1: mind at ease in the family about how this book
Speaker 1: would be received in the world. The last thing they
Speaker 1: wanted was for it to be something toddry or something
Speaker 1: that would be kind of like a grizzly gross book.
Speaker 1: And so as soon as Oprah's Book Club accepted the
Speaker 1: book and started to flag the book, everyone including myself,
Speaker 1: we also kind of you know how to cigh of relief,
Speaker 1: saying we know, we know that that it will be
Speaker 1: seen as a product with goodwill and that was important.
Speaker 1: Did it alter their dynamics at all? I'm just curious.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think it gave them jet fuel to
Speaker 1: do the things that they always wanted to do. Lindsay
Speaker 1: the youngest is now a very active advocate for rights
Speaker 1: for the mentally ill, for advocating for families who are
Speaker 1: dealing with acutely mentally ill family members. She's joined the
Speaker 1: boards of two different organizations and she's looking to join
Speaker 1: a third. She's very active. And then Margaret has doubled
Speaker 1: down on her artwork, has pulled away for now from
Speaker 1: her regular family and is and is you know, sort
Speaker 1: of come close to her immediate family and her chosen family,
Speaker 1: and she is counseling people on how to move through
Speaker 1: trauma and there in her own one on one way. Um,
Speaker 1: these are things that I think they were on their
Speaker 1: way to doing, if you've read to the end of
Speaker 1: the book. These are things they've wanted to do for
Speaker 1: a while, but but the book has sort of given
Speaker 1: them permission to do it. It's done. I hope I'd
Speaker 1: like to think on a good day that it's done.
Speaker 1: That that thing that Bessel Vanderkolt talked about, that it's about,
Speaker 1: it's it's written, the thing that they couldn't right themselves
Speaker 1: so that they can feel that the story is somewhat
Speaker 1: complete and they can go to the next chapter and
Speaker 1: Bob isn't isn't there the next generation? Um, the grandchildren? Who?
Speaker 1: I mean, that was one of the things that when
Speaker 1: I said, your book maybe cry, that's that that was
Speaker 1: I can identify that as a place where it really
Speaker 1: it really did. I I the idea that this is.
Speaker 1: I mean, one of the things about family secrets is
Speaker 1: when you can actually own your story, you know, you
Speaker 1: own the whole thing, in all of its messiness and
Speaker 1: all of its complexity. And that was something that and
Speaker 1: you can't do that when it's a secret. When it's secret,
Speaker 1: all it is is toxic poison, leaking over everything and
Speaker 1: creating all sorts of behaviors in ways that people can't
Speaker 1: you know, they don't even know why they're behaving in
Speaker 1: a way that they are. And so the fact that
Speaker 1: this was so in the open ultimately in this family
Speaker 1: is also it would seem to me what allowed those
Speaker 1: grandchildren to um start owning it as well. Yes, but
Speaker 1: I hope I also hit it, hit it some of
Speaker 1: the mixed blessing of that that Lindsay was so interested
Speaker 1: in not hiding things, so interested in transparency. I wanted
Speaker 1: her children to know so much that they ended up
Speaker 1: assuming some of the burdens she carried and felt a
Speaker 1: little scarred themselves. So I was, you know, it never
Speaker 1: gets simple. It might get better, but it definitely it
Speaker 1: doesn't get wrapped up in a bow. Although there was
Speaker 1: a very lovely little moment at the end with with
Speaker 1: Lindsay's daughter that I won't reveal here before I go
Speaker 1: to Danny, know that reminds me of a question that
Speaker 1: I didn't ask you. But that has to do with
Speaker 1: the idea of at any given time, I think when
Speaker 1: people are keeping secrets. Um, Danny, you actually cautioned against this.
Speaker 1: You said, we shouldn't fall, we shouldn't be guilty of
Speaker 1: present is. Um, we shouldn't hold people in the past
Speaker 1: accountable to present day standards of moral and ethical behavior
Speaker 1: because they were probably doing the best they can and
Speaker 1: they were doing as they were counseled. So the Galvin's
Speaker 1: may have been you know, uh, sort of behaving the
Speaker 1: way they we thought they were supposed to behave. Your
Speaker 1: parents probably thought it was in your interest to keep
Speaker 1: this stuff a secret. I'm very interested in how and
Speaker 1: you both wrote with tremendous compassion about your respective families,
Speaker 1: one that you were reporting on, one that was your own.
Speaker 1: How did you manage to drum out that kind of compassion?
Speaker 1: Were their previous versions where you were kind of angrier
Speaker 1: Danny and you kind of had to hit select all delete,
Speaker 1: And but you know, Bob, where there, you know, moments
Speaker 1: where you held out the matriarch Mimi was with more
Speaker 1: contempt and then kind of toned it back. Just curious
Speaker 1: because transparency, of course now seems like the right and
Speaker 1: ethical thing to do, but as Bob was pointing out,
Speaker 1: that can also backfire. We don't know, if you know,
Speaker 1: obviously when you want to earn the side of sharing.
Speaker 1: I mean, transparency is good, but it can have its
Speaker 1: you know, too much could also be harmful. So I'm
Speaker 1: just curious. Yeah, I mean for me, Yeah, I did
Speaker 1: hit control whatever that thing is two pages because um,
Speaker 1: I didn't yet have the necessary distance. You know, there's
Speaker 1: a very very slight but very very necessary distance between
Speaker 1: myself and the story as I was telling it. And
Speaker 1: I think one of the gifts of of of of
Speaker 1: writing the book is that I developed more and more,
Speaker 1: ever deepening compassion for both of my parents as I
Speaker 1: was writing it, because my reporting was leading me to
Speaker 1: these places where I I understood what it must have
Speaker 1: been to be um an infertile, childless couple in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen sixties, and in their milieu and the and
Speaker 1: the the shame and the you know, the distress of that.
Speaker 1: It just it felt it must have felt to them
Speaker 1: like the absolute end of the world old and so
Speaker 1: when you were faced with the absolute end of the world,
Speaker 1: you know, you you you, you take desperate measures. And
Speaker 1: I'm sure this felt like a desperate measure to them.
Speaker 1: But the gift was and I think I do I
Speaker 1: do write this in the book. We don't often have
Speaker 1: the need or um the desire or the circumstances two
Speaker 1: really be able to empathetically imagine our parents as people
Speaker 1: aside from being our parents who they were before us.
Speaker 1: We just don't do it. There are parents and that's
Speaker 1: just not something that's not a place where we go.
Speaker 1: And I had to go there in order to be
Speaker 1: able to walk with them, like walk that walk with
Speaker 1: them through that process, and that was that was a
Speaker 1: great gift the here. I think there's a lot of
Speaker 1: parallels with with the part of the work that I
Speaker 1: was doing to try to discover the law lives of
Speaker 1: Mimi and her husband Don, the parents in the book,
Speaker 1: because there was archival work and there were interviews, and
Speaker 1: then there was you know, really really um deep speculation
Speaker 1: about what their challenges might have been, and then interrogating
Speaker 1: those speculations to try to report them out. Um the mother,
Speaker 1: Mimi was still around as I was reporting. She she
Speaker 1: died in the middle of my work, but the father
Speaker 1: had died close to twenty years earlier. Many of the
Speaker 1: children started out in my early conversations, had many critical
Speaker 1: things to say about their mother. She was in a
Speaker 1: lot of denial. She preferred the sick children to the
Speaker 1: well ones. She put us in harm's way. But um,
Speaker 1: I was on high alert at that time because I
Speaker 1: feel like mothers get a really raw deal in nonfiction
Speaker 1: and in fiction when you write about families, and I
Speaker 1: didn't want to necessarily run to her as a scapegoat.
Speaker 1: And sure enough, the more I talked with everyone the
Speaker 1: more I saw that over time and they understood the
Speaker 1: subtleties of what she was dealing with. And also she
Speaker 1: was the one who was dealing with it. The father
Speaker 1: who everyone had put on a pedestal, actually wasn't so great.
Speaker 1: And Mimi, who had her hands dirty, making lots and
Speaker 1: lots of decisions, some of them bad, some of them good.
Speaker 1: You know, she wasn't so bad. And I wanted to
Speaker 1: to get it that ambiguity and also avoid the present
Speaker 1: is m I mean that the options this family had,
Speaker 1: like the options your parents had, were very, very narrow,
Speaker 1: and the stigma that your parents were dealing with, and
Speaker 1: that this family we're dealing with, we're you know, considerable.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back, Danny. I like to question that
Speaker 1: I saw here for you, which is um from Tom
Speaker 1: did Inheritance, which which solves the secret make you look
Speaker 1: at your earlier books any differently? Oh that's a great question.
Speaker 1: I know, yeah, it's really a good gues Well, first
Speaker 1: of all, it made me revisit them, which you know,
Speaker 1: you really don't necessarily want to revisit a first novel
Speaker 1: that you wrote, you know, it's but I did not
Speaker 1: for the fainthearted and what I feel reading my earlier work.
Speaker 1: I wondered at first whether inheritance would render all of
Speaker 1: my earlier work moot in some way, Like you know,
Speaker 1: I had that kind of strange fear of what are
Speaker 1: those books now somehow inauthentic because I didn't know um.
Speaker 1: And I wrote a great deal about my father, a
Speaker 1: great deal about my parents, a great deal about secrets,
Speaker 1: but I was missing this essential piece. I actually end
Speaker 1: up feeling like not all of them, I mean, not
Speaker 1: the early novels, but they're more interesting to me now
Speaker 1: in a certain way, because every book is I mean,
Speaker 1: certainly memoirs most of all, is like holding time still
Speaker 1: within the covers of a book. This is this is
Speaker 1: all I know. Now it's going into this this story.
Speaker 1: And I've always known that, which is why I've written
Speaker 1: multiple memoirs. But now I look back and I think, wow,
Speaker 1: that really is all I knew in two thousand and ten,
Speaker 1: and that was all I knew and so forth, and
Speaker 1: so it actually makes for a really interesting um kind
Speaker 1: of body of work. Someday I may try to do
Speaker 1: something with that, like annotate them, or like, just because
Speaker 1: there is this this past summer, I recorded the audiobook
Speaker 1: of Slow Motion, which is my first memoir that came out.
Speaker 1: It's never been an audiobook, so I I was recording
Speaker 1: it and I had to stop so many times in
Speaker 1: the studio, just stunned by a sentence that I just read,
Speaker 1: realizing how much I knew, how much subconsciously was right there.
Speaker 1: So that's thrilling in a way. They don't feel like
Speaker 1: like I was mistaken. They just feel like that's what
Speaker 1: I knew then, and this is what I know now.
Speaker 1: If you wrote an essay about that, I just want
Speaker 1: to say I'd be here for that. I would read it. No,
Speaker 1: really like just reviewing what the things that sort of
Speaker 1: jump off the page, like crickets now that sort of
Speaker 1: tell you that you were dropping yourself clues. And if
Speaker 1: you annotated an early book, to have it on audio
Speaker 1: would be fun too. Hey hold the phone. Wait, whoa,
Speaker 1: we need two narrators. I was just gonna say they
Speaker 1: had the anxiety Danny narrator translator, Like you can peel
Speaker 1: like I'm not doing the right but you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. Oh, this is nice, Robert. When I read
Speaker 1: a book like yours, I always think about Janet Malcolm's
Speaker 1: assertion that journalism is always an act of betrayal. Did
Speaker 1: you ever have a moment of doubting what you were doing?
Speaker 1: Did it affect your decisions and you were writing as
Speaker 1: you were writing or in writing? There there is a
Speaker 1: question of who are you working for? Right? And I
Speaker 1: very specifically, I am not an advocacy journalist. Journalist I
Speaker 1: write books that are The reviewers seem to use the
Speaker 1: word empathy a lot, but I find my the way
Speaker 1: I look at it, the word empathy is, you know,
Speaker 1: a certain amount of intimacy and the ability to walk
Speaker 1: in someone's shoes. But that's different from advocacy. And and
Speaker 1: I'm right up against the line the entire time. So
Speaker 1: I kind of live in that, in that Janet Malcolm
Speaker 1: world where where some people might wonder, am I going
Speaker 1: to be betrayed by you? And and I never make
Speaker 1: that promise that I will never betray them, because I am,
Speaker 1: after all, independent, and I am not working for them.
Speaker 1: And so that's tough. It's a tough thing to do,
Speaker 1: and and it often means that some people were just
Speaker 1: going to say no, They're not going to do it,
Speaker 1: And and and moments when I like to laugh at myself.
Speaker 1: I think like journalists are like vampires, Like they only
Speaker 1: come where they're invited in, Like they can't just barge
Speaker 1: into the house. Someone actually has to let them in
Speaker 1: and u and And that's why I was so tentative
Speaker 1: with this family. I said, let's take let's take months.
Speaker 1: Let's let me get on the phone once a week
Speaker 1: with a different member of the family and speak in
Speaker 1: an open ended way about what you might expect from
Speaker 1: a book like this, and we'll all know one way
Speaker 1: or another. At the end of ten weeks, you know
Speaker 1: whether this is possible or not. And if it is impossible,
Speaker 1: I'll move on and do something else. And you have
Speaker 1: to be ready to walk away that way, Danny, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna end it. I think we have two minutes, so
Speaker 1: I'm gonna end it with you. I'm going to take
Speaker 1: the liberty of summarizing a number of the questions here,
Speaker 1: which are kind of more comments than questions, but there's
Speaker 1: a theme running through them. A lot of people are
Speaker 1: saying I was conceived by a sperm donor, or I
Speaker 1: do know anything about sperm donation laws in Georgia in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties, all sorts of like very specific things,
Speaker 1: and I'm wondering how much you've become I can ask
Speaker 1: both of you this question and you know, but how
Speaker 1: much you've become people's confessors. It's an awesome responsibility to
Speaker 1: take done and maybe, um, what kind of repository of
Speaker 1: information you have become in? You know, what kind of
Speaker 1: function you serve for people now? In this way? I mean,
Speaker 1: I couldn't have imagined what happened when when when this
Speaker 1: book came out, and and it happened from day one,
Speaker 1: from the very first event that I did, where I
Speaker 1: looked around the room and I thought, who is everybody here?
Speaker 1: This is not my usual literary demographic. There were old men,
Speaker 1: and there were middle aged couples, and there were young people,
Speaker 1: and the people crying before I even opened my mouth. Um,
Speaker 1: this period of time that we're in regarding people discovering
Speaker 1: everything that we're discovering because of the one to punch
Speaker 1: of easy accessible DNA testing plus the Internet has meant
Speaker 1: that there's there's a huge number of people who are
Speaker 1: trying to navigate all of these questions. Can I find
Speaker 1: anything out? What are the laws? Do I have any rights?
Speaker 1: And yes, I mean I feel very much activated you know,
Speaker 1: like like I began two years ago feeling like I
Speaker 1: would never really become polemical about this, and I would
Speaker 1: stay on the literary side of things. But I do
Speaker 1: and have become somewhat polemical about the state of the
Speaker 1: secrecy and the lack of regulation in this country. Um,
Speaker 1: which I can't get into in two minutes, but it's
Speaker 1: just stunning the way that we are not like sort
Speaker 1: of prepared for this reckoning that we're in. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm going to have to leave it at that, but um,
Speaker 1: but I will say to everyone who's listening, who is
Speaker 1: grappling with these kinds of issues, you know this, I'm sure,
Speaker 1: but you are far from alone. And there are a
Speaker 1: lot of there are a lot a lot of resources
Speaker 1: and and and more more every day. We'll be back
Speaker 1: with season five Family Secrets, beginning April one.