Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Warning.
Speaker 1: This episode contains discussions of suicide. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 1: If you are a loved one is struggling with suicidal thoughts,
Speaker 1: please call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at three and
Speaker 1: four and huddled in the backseat of the VWS square back.
Speaker 1: My fingers are dusty from the dirt of the community garden.
Speaker 1: The patched knees of my jeans are caked and brown.
Speaker 1: The community garden is a city of square plots with
Speaker 1: this figot in the middle. It's a sea of green
Speaker 1: beans and lettuce. There's no room to grow at home.
Speaker 1: It's communism and free choice in the land of the people.
Speaker 1: It's ideals. I don't understand. Home is a left out
Speaker 1: of the parking lot, and we always turn left out
Speaker 1: of the parking lot and go home after. But today
Speaker 1: Dad turns right, and I can hear my heart and
Speaker 1: my ears when I reached my thumb into my mouth.
Speaker 1: I have never turned right out of the parking lot.
Speaker 1: And what is up this hill? What is beyond these gardens?
Speaker 1: How far does this road go? And where will it
Speaker 1: lead us? We are lost, Dad says, And it's laughter
Speaker 1: in his voice and cunning. Let's get lost, he shouts,
Speaker 1: And am I alone in the car? And how far
Speaker 1: do we drive? Lost? The word throbs through my head
Speaker 1: like lightning, and I can't see out the window, but
Speaker 1: I strained to see something I recognize, and my thumb
Speaker 1: is in my mouth. And then I close my eyes,
Speaker 1: but I still see him wild at the wheel. He
Speaker 1: drives a cartoon car with television abandoned. We are lost.
Speaker 1: That's Julia Mackenzie Muonemo, reading from her new memoir The Bookkeeper.
Speaker 1: Julia grew up beneath the shadow cast by her father's
Speaker 1: mental illness and suicide. You might think that this would
Speaker 1: be her family secret, But the secrets surrounding Julia's father
Speaker 1: involve dusty paperbacks written under a variety of pen names,
Speaker 1: hidden in a box that Julia couldn't bring herself to
Speaker 1: open or face for the longest time. I'm Danny Shapiro,
Speaker 1: and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept
Speaker 1: from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
Speaker 1: secrets we keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape
Speaker 1: of your childhood, you know, I would say the landscape
Speaker 1: of my childhood was sort of like indoors and somewhat anxious.
Speaker 1: I came home from school and I found my mom
Speaker 1: in the TV room. Most of the time, she worked
Speaker 1: from home, and her office was just outside the TV room,
Speaker 1: and we would sort of gather there and watch soap
Speaker 1: operas all afternoon. She periodically had to dash off to
Speaker 1: answer her business phone, but that was really our time together.
Speaker 1: And you know, I vaguely knew that I had friends
Speaker 1: who did sports or other things after school. Even my
Speaker 1: siblings did sports and other things after school, but I
Speaker 1: wasn't interested in that. For most of my childhood. I
Speaker 1: really needed to be near my mom, and that's where
Speaker 1: she was. What soap operas did you watch? What was her? Um?
Speaker 1: The Guiding Light was the big one, that's what That's
Speaker 1: what came on right at three o'clock, was around the
Speaker 1: time I got home. Um, but on like half days
Speaker 1: or vacation that you know, they're whatever the ones were
Speaker 1: on Channel three. But that was what it was in Northampton.
Speaker 1: So we were the Guiding Light side of things, not
Speaker 1: the general hospital side of things. It was kind of
Speaker 1: a war, yeah, I was. I was more of a
Speaker 1: general hospital kid myself, so almost everybody was Yeah, So
Speaker 1: the other place I spent a lot of time as
Speaker 1: a child was at um My mother was a nikedo
Speaker 1: instructor and she ran a dojo a couple of miles
Speaker 1: away from home, and so I spent a lot of
Speaker 1: time there with her on weeknights and Saturday mornings, and
Speaker 1: you know, sort of watching her throw people around. And
Speaker 1: it was not anything that was interesting to me. I
Speaker 1: wasn't interested in niketo. I wasn't there to study. I
Speaker 1: was there just to make sure that she was safe.
Speaker 1: I think I spent a lot of my childhood kind
Speaker 1: of paying attention to my mom and making sure that
Speaker 1: she was alive. There was this big absence, which was
Speaker 1: my father, who was always missing, and you know, sort
Speaker 1: of the absence also of talking about the fact that
Speaker 1: he was missing. We didn't really, I didn't really do that.
Speaker 1: We didn't talk about him or mourning him or missing him.
Speaker 1: We just sort of plotted along with soap operas and
Speaker 1: aikido and things like that. Describe your mother a little
Speaker 1: bit for me. My mother, I think before my father's death,
Speaker 1: and I think certainly before we were born, I think
Speaker 1: she was a very vibrant, socially active woman. You know,
Speaker 1: they hosted dinner parties all the time they traveled the world.
Speaker 1: They had lots of friends. After his death, a lot
Speaker 1: of with friends I think sort of faded away, you know,
Speaker 1: some remained, but a lot of them didn't, And so,
Speaker 1: you know, it's sort of a lonely time. And I
Speaker 1: think my mother sort of wore the suit of that
Speaker 1: almost as an armor. You know. She would never have
Speaker 1: said that she was lonely, and she wouldn't call herself lonely.
Speaker 1: Now she you know, lives alone and says she's happy
Speaker 1: to do that. But I see her as lonely, and
Speaker 1: I think I saw her as lonely as a child too.
Speaker 1: She's incredibly intelligent. She's one of the smartest people I know.
Speaker 1: We had a joke when we were little that she
Speaker 1: didn't know the answer to something, she would just make
Speaker 1: it up, and often the made up answer was better
Speaker 1: than the real answer, so we liked it better. I
Speaker 1: always trusted her implicitly to sort of see us through
Speaker 1: whatever needed seeing through. You know, she was a fierce
Speaker 1: advocate for us when she felt that people had wronged us.
Speaker 1: So there was a time when I was placed in
Speaker 1: an English class that she thought was below me. In
Speaker 1: high school, and I just remember her kind of charging
Speaker 1: in and talking to the guidance counselor and taking over,
Speaker 1: and you know, my whole curriculum shifting as a result,
Speaker 1: much for the better, obviously, but that was work. I
Speaker 1: don't know that I would have ever done right. I
Speaker 1: didn't see it really as a lack and so that
Speaker 1: my mom kind of came to my defense. She advocates
Speaker 1: for us when she needs to. Yeah, you know, she's
Speaker 1: fears she's a niketoist, right. She was one of the
Speaker 1: highest ranking female aketoists in the country who was in Japanese.
Speaker 1: How did your mother and father meet? They met at
Speaker 1: a bar in New York City, um called the Riviera.
Speaker 1: So when they met, they were both married to other
Speaker 1: people and were introduced by a mutual friend. And my
Speaker 1: understanding is that it was just kind of immediate that
Speaker 1: spark was was quite alive right away. And my mother's
Speaker 1: marriage first marriage was very young, and she very quickly
Speaker 1: discovered that he was an alcoholic and there were all
Speaker 1: sorts of lives that he had told her, and she
Speaker 1: was able to get that marriage annulled. So I grew
Speaker 1: up with the sense of, like my mother was sort
Speaker 1: of married before, but there's this word that means she
Speaker 1: really wasn't ever married before, and it's annulment, so she
Speaker 1: had her marriage annulled. My father was married to a
Speaker 1: Dutch woman who I always understood to have been around
Speaker 1: for not a very long time, much like my mom husband.
Speaker 1: Doing research for my book, I learned that she had
Speaker 1: been around for actually quite a long time. They were
Speaker 1: married for a while, but he left her, and he
Speaker 1: and my mom got on a freight ship and sailed
Speaker 1: across the Atlantic to write books under contract for various
Speaker 1: sort of what they called factories of paperback originals, these
Speaker 1: publishing houses that just kind of put out what my
Speaker 1: mother would describe as trashy novels, And so they had
Speaker 1: contracts to write those, and I have pictures of them
Speaker 1: on that ship, sitting in there underpants, you know. Add
Speaker 1: two typewriters romantic huh, a couple newly in love sailing
Speaker 1: across the ocean on a freighter, pecking away at their
Speaker 1: twin typewriters turning out trashy, pulpy novels, sort of like f.
Speaker 1: Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, the non literary version. These are
Speaker 1: the kinds of books that might display a man and
Speaker 1: a woman wrapped in all manner of torrid embraces on
Speaker 1: our paperback covers. It's so interesting that very often in
Speaker 1: that generation, if there were early marriages and there were
Speaker 1: no kids, especially if they were brief marriages or even
Speaker 1: more especially annulled, the kids would never have known. Parents
Speaker 1: wouldn't have told. So that wasn't a secret. No, we knew.
Speaker 1: There were things that a lot of people would have
Speaker 1: kept from us that my mother just insisted on being
Speaker 1: truthful about. And so the whole sort of definition of
Speaker 1: secret in our family is feels a little different. Julia's
Speaker 1: mom and dad were from very different backgrounds. Her father
Speaker 1: was Jewish, raised in Brooklyn by Holocaust survivor parents who
Speaker 1: were Orthodox. Her mother was raised in Albany in a
Speaker 1: waspy family who were members of the local country club.
Speaker 1: Her dad's mother is very unhappy that he's marrying a
Speaker 1: non Jewish girl, super unhappy, and that doesn't change as
Speaker 1: they start to have kids. The story is that she
Speaker 1: said to my mom while she was laboring with my sister,
Speaker 1: who's the oldest. You know you're not religious anyway, Susie,
Speaker 1: So why don't you just convert, and my mom was like,
Speaker 1: it's because I'm not religious that I can't convert. Right,
Speaker 1: I have a sort of moral compass about this. So
Speaker 1: you know whether or not that conversation happened actually during
Speaker 1: her labor, I cannot confirm, but that's sort of the
Speaker 1: legend way to choose a moment. Tell me about what
Speaker 1: you remember of your father. Yeah, my memories are spare um,
Speaker 1: although I started to develop more as I was writing.
Speaker 1: I remember this sort of you know, this larger than
Speaker 1: life figure. I just he was physically enormous, you know,
Speaker 1: very tall, strong and muscular, and you know, sort of
Speaker 1: dark hair, mustache, glasses, this kind of not really Clark Kent,
Speaker 1: but he felt like a superhero to me. Right. I
Speaker 1: definitely stories from friends of his about the way he
Speaker 1: yelled my name when I came into a room, or
Speaker 1: um sort of the way he held us and how
Speaker 1: much he loved us. So there was the sense of
Speaker 1: this warm kind of they're like figure, And I don't
Speaker 1: mean teddy bear, I really mean like sort of animal
Speaker 1: kind of again. Vibrant also, you know the word I
Speaker 1: used to describe my mother too. I think that there
Speaker 1: was a vibrancy to him, and my brother certainly talks
Speaker 1: about the sort of before and after. The dad he
Speaker 1: knew before his illness set in was just you know,
Speaker 1: he was Daddy. He was this loving, larger than life figure.
Speaker 1: You're the youngest of three, I'm the youngest of three.
Speaker 1: And what's the age difference between you and your older siblings.
Speaker 1: So my brother is three years older and my sister
Speaker 1: is five years older, so enough of an age difference
Speaker 1: that they would really have had much more concrete memories. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they definitely knew him better than I did. Will be
Speaker 1: back in a moment with more family secrets. Julia's father
Speaker 1: is frequently absent. He's looking for nothing less than the
Speaker 1: meaning of life. It starts with the practice of Aikido,
Speaker 1: which both of her parents become deeply involved in, but
Speaker 1: then he branches out into other philosophies and spiritual seeking.
Speaker 1: I don't know that he always knew what he was seeking,
Speaker 1: but I think a sense of sort of answers he
Speaker 1: had a he had a kind of quest to understand
Speaker 1: cosmos in a way, I think he wanted there to
Speaker 1: be something better than, something bigger, and he wanted to
Speaker 1: be a part of it. He went on sort of
Speaker 1: any excursion that would take him into the path of
Speaker 1: someone he thought was sort of enlightened, right, So he
Speaker 1: went to see the Dalai Lama speak he would go
Speaker 1: on a retreat, eat and meditate for days on end.
Speaker 1: So when I was I think two and a half,
Speaker 1: he left for one such retreat, and it was at
Speaker 1: ten days, and it was the kind of retreat where
Speaker 1: I believe that it was meditation primarily, and there's a
Speaker 1: teacher who you follow, and he was very eager to
Speaker 1: impress the teacher, and he was very eager to return enlightened.
Speaker 1: He felt that he was sort of ready to receive enlightenment,
Speaker 1: whatever that might mean. And so his plan, which I
Speaker 1: believe he executed, was to go there and in addition
Speaker 1: to meditating all the time, also not sleep and I
Speaker 1: believe eat as little as possible. So he was really
Speaker 1: sort of taking this ten day retreat to an extreme,
Speaker 1: and it didn't go well. So he had an altercation
Speaker 1: with the teacher, who pointed out to him that the
Speaker 1: quest for enlightenment was not one you could speed up
Speaker 1: or compete to win. It was really a journey, and
Speaker 1: he didn't like that at all. Julia's father sort of
Speaker 1: falls apart. On this retreat, he steals a sacred bowl,
Speaker 1: and then he escapes and drives back home. While he
Speaker 1: was driving home, my mother got a phone call that
Speaker 1: that it hadn't gone well and that he didn't look
Speaker 1: right when he left. And this is actually, this is
Speaker 1: a memory that I have, is um the moment that
Speaker 1: he came home, which you know, the memory is very vague.
Speaker 1: I was very young, but just this image of him
Speaker 1: walking in the door pretty obviously transformed physically, not the
Speaker 1: dad who had left. And in the image that I have,
Speaker 1: he's just sort of standing in the entranceway of the house,
Speaker 1: looking pretty rattled and confused, and he turns and looks
Speaker 1: at me and starts coming towards me, and I don't
Speaker 1: I don't think anything horrible happen next. But that's where
Speaker 1: my memory sort of shut out. And so that was
Speaker 1: his what his family says is his first breakdown. Are
Speaker 1: sort of the family lore that that was his first breakdown,
Speaker 1: and he didn't really ever come back from that one.
Speaker 1: So he spent a lot of you know, the next
Speaker 1: two years two and a half years in and out
Speaker 1: of psychiatric institutions and in and out of therapy. There
Speaker 1: weren't the same kind of treatment then, so um, he
Speaker 1: didn't like the treatments that there were that he didn't
Speaker 1: like the way they made him feel. Um. And he
Speaker 1: was really, really smart, and you know, one of the
Speaker 1: things that he could do quite well was sort of
Speaker 1: trick a therapist into into thinking that he was better,
Speaker 1: better enough to sort of lower their guard. And so
Speaker 1: then in probably November of the year that I was five,
Speaker 1: he agreed to go to a psychiatric institution in western
Speaker 1: Massachusetts called Austin Rigs, which I don't think anyone knew
Speaker 1: very much about at the time, but it was a
Speaker 1: place that he was willing to go because, like James
Speaker 1: Taylor had gone there to kick a habit or something,
Speaker 1: it felt like a place that he could respect. There
Speaker 1: were people he respected who had gone there, and he
Speaker 1: went and it turned out not to be the kind
Speaker 1: of facility that was prepared to deal with his level
Speaker 1: of illness. And he was there for a month. He
Speaker 1: came home briefly at Christmas to see us, and went
Speaker 1: back to the hospital, and on January five, he hanged
Speaker 1: himself in his hospital room. Did you know right away
Speaker 1: as a five year old what suicide talked about Yes,
Speaker 1: I did as a five year old to know that
Speaker 1: his parents wanted us to be told that he had
Speaker 1: had a heart attack, and my mother was unwilling to
Speaker 1: lie to us, and we also knew that we also
Speaker 1: knew that his parents wanted us to know that he
Speaker 1: had an heart attack, so we knew from the beginning
Speaker 1: that it was a suicide. I didn't know the method
Speaker 1: of that suicide. My sister and brother both did, at
Speaker 1: least earlier than I did. My mother was certain the
Speaker 1: line to us was not the solution that we needed
Speaker 1: to know that it was suicide. We had known he
Speaker 1: was mentally ill. I think we didn't use words like
Speaker 1: schizophrenic or bipolar at that time, but we knew that
Speaker 1: he was mentally ill, and the suicide was not kept
Speaker 1: a secret. But it wasn't for several years until she
Speaker 1: told me that that he had hanged himself. And that
Speaker 1: just that piece took up a lot of space in
Speaker 1: my imagination as a very young child, not knowing how
Speaker 1: he had committed suicide, I spent a lot of time like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: did he shoot himself? No, where would he have gotten
Speaker 1: a gun. He was in a psychiatric institution. Did he
Speaker 1: slid his wrists, Like again, where would he have gotten
Speaker 1: the razor blade? I was sort of plagued by this question.
Speaker 1: And when I did finally find out that we know,
Speaker 1: when my mother told me that he hanged himself, I
Speaker 1: still had the questions because I didn't know with what
Speaker 1: I was so sort of fixated on these details as
Speaker 1: a kid. Just think of the imagination of a very
Speaker 1: young child, a precocious, creative child, thinking about how her
Speaker 1: father took his own life. Julia doesn't ask her mother,
Speaker 1: it's just too hard. It was years before she learned
Speaker 1: that he had hanged himself with his belt. Julia survives
Speaker 1: the tragic loss of her father, grows up, excels intellectually
Speaker 1: and academically, and heads off to bar to college. At
Speaker 1: what point do you meet the man who will become
Speaker 1: your husband? M hmm, Very early in my last semester
Speaker 1: of college. So I'm going it comes from Zimbabwe and
Speaker 1: I was a student at Barred and they had an
Speaker 1: exchange program with schools in South Africa and Zimbabwe as
Speaker 1: part of a program in international education. And he arrived
Speaker 1: at Bard in you know, early February, in the middle
Speaker 1: of a snowstorm in clothes you might expect someone to
Speaker 1: arrive from Africa in, right, like light pants that didn't
Speaker 1: go all the way down to his ankles, and you know,
Speaker 1: a sweater that he had probably bought at the airport.
Speaker 1: He looked so out of place and so handsome. And
Speaker 1: I've noticed in the minute he stepped into the cafeteria.
Speaker 1: I'll never forget that moment. Yeah, what had been your
Speaker 1: in a sort of dating life before that? I had
Speaker 1: had a relatively serious boyfriend earlier in college who I
Speaker 1: had felt great seriousness for. Right, I think that I was,
Speaker 1: from a pretty young age, kind of seeking a partner
Speaker 1: and like a family. I wanted that sense of security
Speaker 1: and that sense of sort of constancy that I didn't
Speaker 1: have as a child. And so I had sort of
Speaker 1: attached myself to this white Jewish man in college and
Speaker 1: that didn't last terribly long or end with any grace.
Speaker 1: My best friend in college said to me at one
Speaker 1: point when I was trying to figure out how I
Speaker 1: was going to go forward and date someone, she said,
Speaker 1: you know what, it was so great. You're not the
Speaker 1: kind of girl but a man wants to date. You're
Speaker 1: the kind of girl that a man wants to marry
Speaker 1: and like college boys don't want to get married. And
Speaker 1: what do you think she meant by that was it
Speaker 1: is kind of a seriousness about the way that you
Speaker 1: were taking your life that you know, a lot of
Speaker 1: college students aren't kind of there yet. Yes, I had
Speaker 1: taken time off between high school and college before it
Speaker 1: was called a gap year and a cool thing to do. Um,
Speaker 1: I had taken time off because I wasn't ready, so
Speaker 1: I was a little bit older than the other people.
Speaker 1: But yes, I was serious. I was interested in kind
Speaker 1: of figuring out the great mysteries of my family, of
Speaker 1: my dad, of what that meant, what his history meant
Speaker 1: about who I was. I had this real, deep sense
Speaker 1: that I needed to connect myself to someone so that
Speaker 1: I would never be alone again. Right, of course, I'm
Speaker 1: now much older and understand that that's impossible, but at
Speaker 1: the time I just thought, well, isn't that what you
Speaker 1: do right? You find love and you get committed and
Speaker 1: and that person is your rock. And I think I
Speaker 1: was really looking for a rock and lo and behold
Speaker 1: in locked and Gone from Zimbabwe. And he too was
Speaker 1: very serious and was very interested in these larger questions.
Speaker 1: He too came from a family with lots of complexity
Speaker 1: and also with mental illness, and we just had a
Speaker 1: lot of questions and common and we were both willing
Speaker 1: to sort of be that rock for each other from
Speaker 1: very early on. I love that phrase, questions in common.
Speaker 1: What a great way to go through life with a
Speaker 1: partner with shared questions. And this is just what happens.
Speaker 1: Julia and Goni become bonded and serious from the start.
Speaker 1: They're together for two semesters and then Goni returns to Zimbabwe.
Speaker 1: This is by now, and Zimbabwe is beginning to fall
Speaker 1: apart politically. The university where he hopes to do his
Speaker 1: graduate work to eventually become a professor is shut down.
Speaker 1: Julia fears Forni's physical safety, but there is a way
Speaker 1: he can come back on a fiance visa. As Julia
Speaker 1: and Goni plan their wedding, there's one person she fears
Speaker 1: isn't going to be happy about it. Remember her father's mother,
Speaker 1: the Holocaust survivor who hadn't approved of Julia's parents marriage.
Speaker 1: Julia's grandmother had met and Gooni once and had been
Speaker 1: rude to him. Tell me a bit about that encounter
Speaker 1: with your grandmother when you went to see her and
Speaker 1: tell her my grandmother was a you know, she obviously
Speaker 1: had had more heartbreak in her life then really and
Speaker 1: anyone should have had to survive. But as a result,
Speaker 1: she was pretty broken. By this time. We had relatively
Speaker 1: regular contact up to the time that I started dating Goni,
Speaker 1: but she really did not approve and so communication had
Speaker 1: already been tense for some time. But I think she
Speaker 1: felt that she had sort of dodged a bullet when
Speaker 1: he moved back to Zimbabwe. So when I came to
Speaker 1: her to tell her that we were getting married, she
Speaker 1: I don't think was ready for that news. She had
Speaker 1: this very physical you know, she'd move her body, but
Speaker 1: her face just I had never seen someone's face just
Speaker 1: go white, and it was clear to me immediately that
Speaker 1: this was it. This was the sort of breaking point
Speaker 1: for us. And at first she cried. There were a
Speaker 1: lot of tears. She then sort of exploded in anger.
Speaker 1: And at this point where so we're at her condo
Speaker 1: in a development for older people in Connecticut, and we're
Speaker 1: moving between her living room and her kitchen, and she's
Speaker 1: sort of having this breakdown. I think, you know something.
Speaker 1: She stands at her counter in her kitchen and she
Speaker 1: sort of punches her fists onto the counter and she
Speaker 1: just says, to me, where will the children be? And
Speaker 1: that's when I realized that it wasn't really about me
Speaker 1: being white and going to being black. Her anxiety was
Speaker 1: about what would come of the children of such a union.
Speaker 1: And at the time it was so naive. But at
Speaker 1: the time I was like, I have the answer to this.
Speaker 1: This is so easy, right, because she also thought that
Speaker 1: my mother and father were such a union that would
Speaker 1: create children who didn't have a place. And so I said, oh,
Speaker 1: but Grandma, look at me. I'm fine. No one wonders
Speaker 1: what I am. I'm half Jewish, I'm half Christian. It's
Speaker 1: not an issue. By the time our children are born,
Speaker 1: it won't be an issue. Like I was. It was
Speaker 1: just so naive, and you know, in love and wanted
Speaker 1: love to answer all problems. But you know, she knew
Speaker 1: much more than I did about racism and hatred and
Speaker 1: what hatred could do to a people. Right, she had
Speaker 1: lost a lot of people in the Holocaust, and you
Speaker 1: know it had of course soured her. What I grapple
Speaker 1: with is this question of why it soured her in
Speaker 1: this particular way why she became what I see is
Speaker 1: as really racist. So she asked me that question, where
Speaker 1: will the childre and be? Ferociously I answered it. She
Speaker 1: wasn't satisfied with my answer, and then she sort of
Speaker 1: turned around and picked up this thing that I had
Speaker 1: never You know, I'd spent some time in this condo
Speaker 1: of hers. I had never seen it before, this strange
Speaker 1: glass basket like thing. Was her grandmother genuinely concerned about
Speaker 1: the future of Julia and Boni's children or was she
Speaker 1: just using them as a cover for her own bigotry. Regardless,
Speaker 1: it seemed impossible that she could get out of her
Speaker 1: own way and realized that she was perpetrating the very
Speaker 1: thing that had been done to her. In fact, she
Speaker 1: was willing to lose her granddaughter over it. After we
Speaker 1: had the rest of our conversation, which did not go well, um,
Speaker 1: she told me, you know, if I was going to
Speaker 1: marry and Gony, I could never come back to her.
Speaker 1: I was heart of standing in the doorway with the
Speaker 1: door open, ready to leave, and I turned around to
Speaker 1: sort of say, are you sure do you really want
Speaker 1: me to leave this way? Because I'm choosing and GONI
Speaker 1: right if there's a choice, it's obvious to me. And
Speaker 1: she thrust this glass basket thing into my hands and
Speaker 1: close the door. And it was such a strange moment
Speaker 1: for me. It was really surreal, you know. I sort
Speaker 1: of walked back to my beat up Toyota Corolla and
Speaker 1: put this basket on the seat next to me and
Speaker 1: drove away. It was not the last time I saw her,
Speaker 1: but it was last time I saw her for a
Speaker 1: very long time. Do you think it was a wedding present? God,
Speaker 1: I'm asking him, because you know the way you're describing it,
Speaker 1: it's like wedding presents are often these strange glass things, right,
Speaker 1: Like just it's like something maybe just happened in her
Speaker 1: psyche that was like, I'm not going to see you again,
Speaker 1: but you're getting married, and here's my gift. That's so funny.
Speaker 1: I have never thought of that. Maybe, yeah, maybe it
Speaker 1: felt like this heavy sort of talisman of her hatred. Right,
Speaker 1: it was not. It's not something I held on too.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back and Gooni and Julia Mary and
Speaker 1: have two sons. They moved to Williamstown, Massachusetts, Whereon is
Speaker 1: a professor at Williams College. It's a lovely town. They're
Speaker 1: a lovely family living a lovely life. But there's a
Speaker 1: secret lurking beneath the surface, because that's what secrets do.
Speaker 1: They lurk. You knew that your father had written these
Speaker 1: kind of pulpy novels, that this was what your parents
Speaker 1: did when they traveled across the Atlantic, and this is
Speaker 1: how he made his living, and he had all these
Speaker 1: different pen names. You didn't know what the contents of
Speaker 1: some of those novels were and what they would reveal
Speaker 1: to you about his preoccupations and his psyche and this
Speaker 1: whole kind of history. So can you maybe start from
Speaker 1: your discovery about that. So when my first son was
Speaker 1: born and was a toddler, and my cousin came to
Speaker 1: visit us and sort of dropped this box of books
Speaker 1: on my dining room table. And this is my cousin
Speaker 1: on my mother's side, and so it was a surprise
Speaker 1: to me that what they were were books my dad
Speaker 1: had written. And they each had these very racially charged,
Speaker 1: selecious covers on them. They were clearly pornography, and you know,
Speaker 1: each one had a muscular black man in some form
Speaker 1: of undressed with his wrists and chains and a sort
Speaker 1: of stereotypically Southern bell type white woman. On the cover,
Speaker 1: Julia's father wrote slave porn, or what was sometimes known
Speaker 1: as plantation porn. This was a thing, a dreadful subgenre
Speaker 1: of the trashy novel. There was an appetite for this
Speaker 1: kind of racist kinkiness, enough so that Julia's father turned
Speaker 1: out a whole bunch of them, along with the other
Speaker 1: less offensive pulp. When my cousin plopped those books on
Speaker 1: the counter, I was shocked. I was horrified. I was
Speaker 1: certain I had never seen them. I couldn't believe that
Speaker 1: anyone would want to bring them into a house with
Speaker 1: this two year old child in it and let him
Speaker 1: see them. I was just the whole thing. I was
Speaker 1: filled with shame, and I didn't believe that my father
Speaker 1: had written them. And she said to me, no jewels,
Speaker 1: look in the back, right, and her mom had written
Speaker 1: written by George Wolk on the back so that everyone
Speaker 1: would remember, right, sort of posterity. I hid them away
Speaker 1: when my cousin brought them to me, and continued to
Speaker 1: hide them. You know, we moved a couple of times.
Speaker 1: By the time we landed in Williamstown, I thought I
Speaker 1: might be ready to face those books. We've moved around,
Speaker 1: We've lived in Zimbabwe and Batswana and Virginia, and so
Speaker 1: our stuff has been in storage for a long time.
Speaker 1: And we're finally settling down and I think, oh, but
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna alphabetize all the books and I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna put all of Dad's books out. I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna see how that feels. And it immediately felt so
Speaker 1: horrible that I packed them right back up and put
Speaker 1: them in the back of the closet. How many of
Speaker 1: them were there, But at this point I still just
Speaker 1: had those four that my cousin had brought me um,
Speaker 1: and I had no real sense of how many more
Speaker 1: I might find. I didn't even have a sense of
Speaker 1: wanting to find more. I just knew I didn't want
Speaker 1: those books out in the world. He had written four
Speaker 1: books under his own name that I did have on,
Speaker 1: you know, alphabetized on my bookcase, but which I had
Speaker 1: never read. And you know, people would ask me over
Speaker 1: the years why I had never read them, and I
Speaker 1: was like, well, yeah, I just I just don't think
Speaker 1: he was probably a very good writer, and I don't
Speaker 1: want to know about that. I want him to still
Speaker 1: be some kind of a great person in my memory. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't want to be disappointed. And that was sort
Speaker 1: of the story I told myself, and so then passed
Speaker 1: forward more years. The kids are probably nine and twelve. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were nine and twelve. It was when Tamir Rice
Speaker 1: was killed, you know, twelve year old African American boy
Speaker 1: killed by a police officer. He had a toy gun
Speaker 1: in his hand. And when that happened, Julius was also
Speaker 1: turning twelve very soon, and I just was sort of
Speaker 1: shattered awake. It was way too long in coming. I
Speaker 1: had these boys who were nine and twelve, who are
Speaker 1: growing up as black children in the United States. I
Speaker 1: should have woken up much earlier than I did. But
Speaker 1: when Tamir Rice was killed, I just I couldn't see
Speaker 1: a future in which I didn't figure out who I was,
Speaker 1: what my race meant in my household, what my legacy meant.
Speaker 1: You know. I knew that I had been hiding these
Speaker 1: books in my closet for ten years. So by this
Speaker 1: point I know what I'm hiding, right, and I just
Speaker 1: couldn't keep that up. I knew that it was time
Speaker 1: for me to to face that history and to face
Speaker 1: my whiteness. So at that point I sort of crept
Speaker 1: to the closet and picked up one of these books,
Speaker 1: and it was hard. It took months to read just
Speaker 1: the first one. When your cousin first brought those books.
Speaker 1: What was the quality of your response in that moment
Speaker 1: at your kitchen table. Were you shocked or stunned or
Speaker 1: was there more of a sense of Oh, I kind
Speaker 1: of somewhere somewhere within me, I knew this. And this
Speaker 1: This is where I have loved listening to your podcast
Speaker 1: so much, because you talk about the unthought known? Is
Speaker 1: that what it's called? Yes, ah, the unthought known? When
Speaker 1: it comes to family secrets, this psychoanalytic phrase comes up
Speaker 1: again and again what we know deep down absolutely no,
Speaker 1: but cannot allow ourselves to think because it's just too dangerous.
Speaker 1: Julia is certain that she's never seen these books before,
Speaker 1: But when she mentions them finally to Goni and shows
Speaker 1: him a particularly disturbing cover, he's strangely nonchalant, and he said, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: that one, And I was like, what do you mean
Speaker 1: that one? And I was completely confused. When would he
Speaker 1: have seen this? Did my mother show these to him?
Speaker 1: And I just don't know. And I this time did
Speaker 1: ask this question, and he said, you showed these to
Speaker 1: me when we were dating. They were in the bottom
Speaker 1: shelf of a glass fronted bookcase in your mom's bedroom,
Speaker 1: and you showed them to me. And I believe him entirely.
Speaker 1: I mean, in part because he remembers it. He wouldn't
Speaker 1: have made that up. But also I have no memory
Speaker 1: of that. I can't even like construct the memory of that,
Speaker 1: now that he's told me all the details. You know,
Speaker 1: at what point did my shame kind of wash over
Speaker 1: me and shut that down? You know? Was it that
Speaker 1: I showed him one and saw the look on his
Speaker 1: face and was so ashamed that I just pretended it
Speaker 1: never happened. Maybe I think that's possible. Or was it later?
Speaker 1: Was it after the kids were born? I was just
Speaker 1: couldn't imagine that my father had made his living doing
Speaker 1: this thing, but felt like it went so against who
Speaker 1: my family was. I don't know, I don't know, but
Speaker 1: in that moment at my kitchen counter, I was shocked
Speaker 1: and believed I had never seen those books before. Um,
Speaker 1: but that isn't true. It's so extraordinary the way we
Speaker 1: can know and yet not be able to bear the thought,
Speaker 1: and so the thought can really just vanish. And so
Speaker 1: then when you do come back around and you are
Speaker 1: actually interrogating these books for the first time, and you know,
Speaker 1: as you said, it was very difficult to took a
Speaker 1: long time to read. What was that feeling? Like, what
Speaker 1: was the If you can bring back the feeling of
Speaker 1: beginning to read this material, that's so horrifying. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: at this time in my life, I was back in school,
Speaker 1: I was getting an m f A. And I was
Speaker 1: working with a writer who was so supportive of this
Speaker 1: journey and really encouraging me to do it. And I said,
Speaker 1: I can't, you know, I can't read these books. I
Speaker 1: took a picture of it to show him, like some
Speaker 1: of the covers, and I was like, how could you
Speaker 1: expect me? You know, because it was a little residency
Speaker 1: m f A, so we were we were very rarely
Speaker 1: in person. I took a picture and I sent it
Speaker 1: to him. I said, you can't expect me to read
Speaker 1: these books. You know, this isn't even what I'm working
Speaker 1: on right now, this isn't even my project. And he said,
Speaker 1: I want you to read one book, and I want
Speaker 1: you to trace physical description. Just write a write a
Speaker 1: paper about how your father described black people and how
Speaker 1: we described white people. I was like, okay, that's dumb, right,
Speaker 1: Like I was at so dismissive of this idea. In
Speaker 1: giving me an assignment, it gave me a path in
Speaker 1: and now I felt like, well, I have to do this, right.
Speaker 1: My professor told me that I have to do this,
Speaker 1: and so I will. So I read the first one
Speaker 1: over the course of I don't know, a month probably
Speaker 1: You know, these are not long books. They don't take
Speaker 1: to read um, but I had to read them in
Speaker 1: very small doses because they were really upsetting, right. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know some people have when they hear the beginning
Speaker 1: part of the story, Oh, my father wrote pornography that
Speaker 1: you know. I've had friends before they know the whole story,
Speaker 1: laugh and say, well, what's it like to read something
Speaker 1: that your dad wrote? Have it turned you on? And
Speaker 1: I was like, no, no, wait, no, that's not that's
Speaker 1: not the problem. The problem, of course, was encountering her
Speaker 1: father's racism right there in start well, black and White,
Speaker 1: what has it been like for you to trace and
Speaker 1: discover things, very uncomfortable things about your father's psychology By
Speaker 1: becoming in a way, sort of a literary salue, and
Speaker 1: you know, trying to piece him together, this man that
Speaker 1: you know that you lost when you were five, and
Speaker 1: that you make this really difficult discovery about. I went
Speaker 1: into reading his books believing that they would hold the
Speaker 1: key to his racism. That I once I could finally
Speaker 1: read them and had sort of gotten over the hump
Speaker 1: of that first one, which took me so long, I
Speaker 1: was like, well, this is the key. This is the
Speaker 1: place where I'm going to understand what made my dad
Speaker 1: a racist and why he could make his living on stereotypes,
Speaker 1: and what that reveals about the beliefs that he held,
Speaker 1: even if they went against his kind of liberal politics.
Speaker 1: So I went in with this very clear aim, and
Speaker 1: I was frustrated, as makes sense, right, how does any
Speaker 1: one of us trace our racism to its route? Right?
Speaker 1: But that was sort of what I hoped I would
Speaker 1: be able to do with his books. What I didn't
Speaker 1: expect was to trace his mental illness through his writing,
Speaker 1: and certainly not through his writing under pseudonym I somehow
Speaker 1: believed that I would learn some being about his mental illness.
Speaker 1: It would be under his books that he wrote under
Speaker 1: his own name, which it's foolish, right. No matter how
Speaker 1: many different names he used, they were all him. And
Speaker 1: so it was jarring to sort of enter this project
Speaker 1: expecting to go on a journey about race and my
Speaker 1: race and my husband's race, and the race of the
Speaker 1: characters in my father's books, and end uh also taking
Speaker 1: this sort of parallel journey into his mental illness. And
Speaker 1: so what I discovered was that in every single one
Speaker 1: of his books, there was a hanging, There were multiple suicides.
Speaker 1: There were many times his protagonist was black and was
Speaker 1: someone who had either been stolen and was on the
Speaker 1: slave ship or who was living as a slave. And
Speaker 1: these men are often in his novels grappling with their sanity,
Speaker 1: trying to do anything to stay sane. Julia's deep reading
Speaker 1: into her father's books and her delving into his history
Speaker 1: leads her into a greater awareness not only of his racism,
Speaker 1: but also drives home the legacy of his mental illness.
Speaker 1: Gooni too as a mentally ill father. What will this
Speaker 1: mean for her two boys? One thing is certain, the
Speaker 1: legacy of family secrets is one that is not being
Speaker 1: passed down. Julia and Gooni's sons know about her father's
Speaker 1: racist move They also are aware of the rocky shoals
Speaker 1: of mental illness that exists in their genetic history. Because
Speaker 1: this tough inheritance has not been covered up, it will
Speaker 1: not fester. There's no cause for secrets because the shame
Speaker 1: is not theirs to carry. You know, there are unanswerable
Speaker 1: questions about the genetics of mental illness, and I mean,
Speaker 1: one never wants to believe that this is the kind
Speaker 1: of thing that could pass on to your children right
Speaker 1: through your genes. And here are my children who have
Speaker 1: two grandfathers who neither of whom they ever knew, both
Speaker 1: of whom were mentally ill. It was a difficult journey
Speaker 1: to take. It was uncomfortable most of the time. How
Speaker 1: has it settled within you? You know, probably as much
Speaker 1: as you can, as much as it's possible to know.
Speaker 1: And now there are no more secrets. I guess I
Speaker 1: would say I feel very lucky to have two sons
Speaker 1: who are there now fourteen and seventeen, and they are
Speaker 1: open to the world, right they're open to me. They're
Speaker 1: very clear about who they are. They're they're very different
Speaker 1: from each other, but there's very little about their sort
Speaker 1: of inner psyche that feels like a mystery to me. Obviously,
Speaker 1: the older one is beginning to do things that I
Speaker 1: don't know the details of, and that's fine, but I
Speaker 1: feel like I know who he is and how he is,
Speaker 1: and that's also true for my fourteen year old. I'm
Speaker 1: also married to a man who is so aware that
Speaker 1: the world can kind of shift at any moment, which
Speaker 1: is very handy at times like this. It's good to
Speaker 1: sort of be grounded by someone who's like, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: anything can happen. There can be a pandemic. What we
Speaker 1: have control over is what's happening in our house. And
Speaker 1: so he's also quite clear that we need to continue
Speaker 1: that sort of vigil that I started as a teenager
Speaker 1: and that I imagine he did too, to make sure
Speaker 1: that our kids have what they need, but that we
Speaker 1: don't have much control over over any of this, and
Speaker 1: so really the best we can do is stay tuned
Speaker 1: into them. What has become clear is how much it
Speaker 1: matters to my kids that they know this history and
Speaker 1: that not a secret. And if we had kept from
Speaker 1: them my father's illness or my husband's father's illness, it
Speaker 1: would feel dangerous and it would feel probably like something
Speaker 1: that couldn't talk to us about, and so it's so
Speaker 1: important for them not to feel those those pressures that
Speaker 1: secrets can bring. Family Secrets is an iHeart Media production.
Speaker 1: Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer and Bethan Mcaluso is
Speaker 1: the executive producer. We'd also like to give a special
Speaker 1: thanks to Tyler Klang and Tristan McNeil. If you have
Speaker 1: a family secret you'd like to share, leave us a
Speaker 1: voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode.
Speaker 1: Our number is one eight eight eight secret zero. That's
Speaker 1: secret and then the number zero. You can also find
Speaker 1: us on Instagram at Danny Ryder and Facebook at facebook
Speaker 1: dot com slash Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at fami
Speaker 1: Secrets pot. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit
Speaker 1: the i Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows.