Speaker 1: Family Secrets as a production of I Heart Radio. I
Speaker 1: grew up in central Pennsylvania in a very small farming
Speaker 1: town with parents who had both grown up in working
Speaker 1: class families and had gone to college, and they were
Speaker 1: like sort of the local intelligentsia. They were very cultured.
Speaker 1: They spent a little bit of time away from this
Speaker 1: small town. My mother lived in New York for a while.
Speaker 1: My father went to Europe during his army service, but
Speaker 1: then they both came back to this little town and
Speaker 1: just stayed there and raised me and my two younger brothers,
Speaker 1: surrounded by my father's family. My father ran the local
Speaker 1: funeral home. I didn't live in the funeral home, but
Speaker 1: it was just up the street where my grandmother lived,
Speaker 1: and his sisters lived on the same street. His brother
Speaker 1: lived nearby. Just this whole clan of Bechtels, and the
Speaker 1: funeral home itself was a family business. Several generations of
Speaker 1: Bechtels had run it. And we lived in this little
Speaker 1: town between the Allegheny Plateau and the Bald Eagle Mountain.
Speaker 1: I feel like that that topography is somehow significant, like
Speaker 1: it was sort of a rift between this plateau, these
Speaker 1: big empty mountains where nobody lived and where they were
Speaker 1: strip mining for coal all the time. And then this
Speaker 1: Ridge and Valley region of Pennsylvania, which if you look
Speaker 1: at maps, are these really tidy ranges of mountains that
Speaker 1: move off to the east. And we were right on
Speaker 1: the edge of that, right between those two features. That's
Speaker 1: the extraordinary graphic memoirist Alison Bechtel. You may have heard
Speaker 1: of Allison's memoirs fun Home and Are You My Mother,
Speaker 1: as well as her recently. Really the Secret to superhuman Strength.
Speaker 1: Alison's story revolves around a secret that began well before
Speaker 1: she was born, one that was always kept from her,
Speaker 1: and yet in the light of retrospect, seems to always
Speaker 1: have been hiding in plain sight. But she didn't see it.
Speaker 1: Of course, she didn't see it. We never do. If
Speaker 1: a secret is embedded into our childhoods, it becomes our
Speaker 1: reality because that's how we survive. We inheritors of shame
Speaker 1: and silence, until survival means knowing the truth rather than
Speaker 1: living in a lie. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is
Speaker 1: family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the
Speaker 1: secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep
Speaker 1: from ourselves. I'm so interested in the way you described
Speaker 1: your parents as you know, sort of the local intelligentsia.
Speaker 1: It has sort of little echoes of revolutionary Road the
Speaker 1: Richard Yates novel. Yeah, I've always been curious, like why
Speaker 1: did they stay there? I myself was desperate to get
Speaker 1: out of that place, and both my parents loved going
Speaker 1: to New York. They go make the four hour drive
Speaker 1: to New York to go to the theater and museums.
Speaker 1: So why why were they living in this place that
Speaker 1: was really cut off from all that. I still don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't know anything. The older I get, the less
Speaker 1: I know, especially about my parents. But one thing was
Speaker 1: my my father's father had a heart attack and needed
Speaker 1: my dad to run this family business. So my father
Speaker 1: did that. He came home from Germany where he was
Speaker 1: in the army, where my one where my mother had
Speaker 1: just gone to meet him and get married, and they
Speaker 1: were very excited to start this life in Europe together
Speaker 1: and travel around after he was done with his stint.
Speaker 1: But instead they came home and stayed there. But they
Speaker 1: were both just passionately interested in different kinds of art
Speaker 1: and literature. They both loved poetry. They met in a
Speaker 1: play my mother was a more serious actor than my father,
Speaker 1: but they both acted in college, and my mom went
Speaker 1: on to do an internship at the Cleveland Playhouse and
Speaker 1: she continued to act in summer stock all through my
Speaker 1: childhood and beyond. And my dad, although his day job
Speaker 1: was teaching in the high school and running this funeral home,
Speaker 1: his real passion was for antiques and for restoring our
Speaker 1: old Victorian house. This was a really unusual house. It
Speaker 1: seems like it became more unusual and more unusual as
Speaker 1: your father sort of had his way with it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this was his real love and his life was restoring
Speaker 1: this house. Um. It was built probably in the eighteen sixties,
Speaker 1: a big American Gothic house that was all decrepit by
Speaker 1: the time my parents bought it in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1: Talking about the library, the library was amazing. I mean,
Speaker 1: who has a library in their house? But we did,
Speaker 1: like a real library with Florida ceiling, glassed in bookshelves, um,
Speaker 1: lot lots of you know, calf bound antique books as
Speaker 1: well as plenty of new books. Just a wall of
Speaker 1: books that people were just struck dumb by. They would
Speaker 1: always ask my father if you'd read all of those books.
Speaker 1: He would always say, has read most of them. There
Speaker 1: were velvet drapes, there was flocked wallpaper. There was another
Speaker 1: Florida ceiling feature, this giant peer mirror. It was like
Speaker 1: twelve ft tall. It was a very grand, beautiful Victorian library.
Speaker 1: And your father did all this himself. This is a
Speaker 1: passion of his. Yeah, he did. And um, it wasn't cheesy.
Speaker 1: You know a lot of people do that sort of
Speaker 1: thing on their own and it just looks like a
Speaker 1: i don't know, like a bad B and B or
Speaker 1: a Laura Ashley explosion. But now it was very tasteful.
Speaker 1: And you know, he studied a lot, got lots of
Speaker 1: magazines and journals, and he knew a lot about this
Speaker 1: specific period, and he was always collecting stuff, discovering stuff,
Speaker 1: talking to old people. And it was beautiful. How would
Speaker 1: you characterize, from like Alison, the child's point of view,
Speaker 1: your parents marriage during those childhood years and maybe sort
Speaker 1: of into your teenage years. My parents fought a lot,
Speaker 1: but I didn't, you know, I didn't really think about
Speaker 1: their marriage. I mean, who really thinks about their parents marriage?
Speaker 1: It's the air that you breathe. And I was surprised
Speaker 1: later when my mother would describe to me, Oh, that
Speaker 1: was when your father wasn't speaking to me for three months,
Speaker 1: Like I never noticed that, but apparently it would go
Speaker 1: for long stretches of sulking and not talking to her.
Speaker 1: Do you think that has anything to do with, you know,
Speaker 1: the fact that you had siblings, Like I asked that
Speaker 1: as an only child, because I think for me, I
Speaker 1: was a student in a way, not of my parents
Speaker 1: marriage because that would have been sort of beyond my comprehension,
Speaker 1: but of my parents. I really studied them because it's
Speaker 1: kind of all I all I had, is my subject.
Speaker 1: Whereas I wonder if you have siblings, whether you kind
Speaker 1: of are often in sibling world in a certain way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I wonder if that's true. I was just sort of
Speaker 1: having a parallel life in the same house. I mean,
Speaker 1: I was certainly taking them in, but I never thought
Speaker 1: about their marriage. What was it like to live in
Speaker 1: in the constant presence of sort of death as a fact,
Speaker 1: you know that it just it just was that there
Speaker 1: were corpses, there were dead people. There was this funeral home,
Speaker 1: and there's this moment where a young man has died
Speaker 1: and your dad calls for you and asks you to come,
Speaker 1: and it's you know, there's this naked, hairy young man
Speaker 1: with a chest wound lying there, and your dad asks
Speaker 1: you to hand him a pair of scissors in a
Speaker 1: very very matter of fact way, and then you very
Speaker 1: very matter of fact LYE do so. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: mostly the funeral home was kind of cool. I liked
Speaker 1: seeing the dead bodies. It was interesting. I felt like
Speaker 1: I knew something other people didn't know. My school friends
Speaker 1: would be like, oh my god, you see dead bodies
Speaker 1: and what's it like. I liked being able to just
Speaker 1: play it cool, you know, and to have the sort
Speaker 1: of hidden knowledge that other people didn't have. But it's
Speaker 1: pretty alarming when Allison's dad shows her this young guy's body,
Speaker 1: which has been opened up for an autopsy. Up until then,
Speaker 1: she had only seen dead people once they were in
Speaker 1: their caskets, all dressed up and with their makeup done.
Speaker 1: So Allison, who's ten maybe eleven, plays it cool. It
Speaker 1: was traumatic, but there wasn't any allowance for it to
Speaker 1: be traumatic. So much of Allison's story has to do
Speaker 1: with what isn't said, what can't be said. There's what
Speaker 1: people say, like please pass the scissors, and then there's
Speaker 1: the subtext. Everything, it seems, can be experienced and discussed,
Speaker 1: everything except for feelings. There's a lot of exchange of
Speaker 1: of information, of literature, of poetry, of you know, many
Speaker 1: different things, but not feelings, not how did you feel
Speaker 1: about that? Yeah? And I you know, only much later
Speaker 1: did I understand that that if anyone had talked about
Speaker 1: their feelings, the whole edifice would have just come crashing down.
Speaker 1: When you're in high school, you end up in your
Speaker 1: father's English class, and it seems like like sort of
Speaker 1: that's the period of time where you're most able to
Speaker 1: communicate with each other in a certain way, with with
Speaker 1: the texts between you as like the bridge. Yes, my
Speaker 1: father had always tried to guide my reading. He was
Speaker 1: always suggesting books and trying to get me to read
Speaker 1: things that he liked, and I would always resist that.
Speaker 1: It was like the only way I had to rebel
Speaker 1: as a child. But when I was in his class,
Speaker 1: of course I had to read the books. So it
Speaker 1: was an interesting situation, and what I found was I
Speaker 1: really liked them. We read Um Pride and Prejudice that
Speaker 1: semester catch her in the Rye. It was a class
Speaker 1: on coming of age. So it was really so meta,
Speaker 1: you know. But yeah, we started really bonding and connecting,
Speaker 1: and you know, I was one of his better students.
Speaker 1: He always liked his sharper students. Yeah. I mean there's
Speaker 1: a moment in fun home where you or he says
Speaker 1: to you, You're the only student class who is sort
Speaker 1: of like worth teaching to or something like that, and
Speaker 1: then and you say, your class is the only class,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of worth taking. Yeah. Yeah, we were
Speaker 1: a mutual admiration society. Yeah, it was. It was really
Speaker 1: kind of a tender moment, even though what's happening is
Speaker 1: that the literature and these coming of age stories and
Speaker 1: the inner lives of the characters on the page are
Speaker 1: standing in for anything that might resemble, um, you know,
Speaker 1: a feeling. Yeah. Well, my my dad, I think, was
Speaker 1: very eager for a friend, and the older I got,
Speaker 1: the closer I got to him. He died when I
Speaker 1: was nineteen, but we just were on this trajectory of
Speaker 1: just getting closer and closer and talking more and more,
Speaker 1: and it was great. I loved it. I loved having
Speaker 1: that connection with him. Although later a therapist told me
Speaker 1: that was probably inappropriate, that he was leaning on me
Speaker 1: so heavily for connection. We'll be back in a moment
Speaker 1: with more family secrets. Allison goes off to Oberlin College
Speaker 1: and really begins to come into her own. What this means,
Speaker 1: most deeply and powerfully for her is that she comes out.
Speaker 1: She knows she's gay, and in the great surge of
Speaker 1: energy of that realization, she wants to tell her parents immediately.
Speaker 1: She wants to share it with them. So I wrote
Speaker 1: them a letter, and the grand tradition of my shutdown Emily,
Speaker 1: I shared this intimate news with them in a typewritten
Speaker 1: letter sent through the mail like with a stamp on it. Yes. Um,
Speaker 1: at that point I hadn't had sex as anyone yet.
Speaker 1: I wasn't really absolutely. I mean, I felt certain that
Speaker 1: this was true, but yeah, it was all still somewhat theoretical,
Speaker 1: and I was just starting to tell like friends and
Speaker 1: people close to me. So I told my parents and
Speaker 1: been waited in some trepidation for their response. It should
Speaker 1: be said too, because listeners under a certain age, it
Speaker 1: will be incomprehensible. The idea of waiting two days, three days. Now,
Speaker 1: we write an email and we hit send, and we
Speaker 1: hold our breath, and you know we hear back five
Speaker 1: minutes later. Um. Yeah, I was holding my breath for
Speaker 1: three or four days. My father called me on the phone,
Speaker 1: and I was a little taken aback that it was
Speaker 1: just him, even though I was used to talking to
Speaker 1: him all the time. I thought this was like an
Speaker 1: important family piece of news I had broken, and that
Speaker 1: maybe my mother would be in on it too. But
Speaker 1: she wasn't and wouldn't come to the phone actually, as
Speaker 1: I as I learned, because she was so upset, and
Speaker 1: my dad had this sort of giddy air about him,
Speaker 1: like he was sort of excited, like, well, it's it's
Speaker 1: good to know that you're human at least, and it
Speaker 1: felt almost like sort of leering or I don't know,
Speaker 1: like he was this I don't know, something paternalistic about it.
Speaker 1: That was annoying to me, and I didn't quite understand
Speaker 1: why is my dad being so giddy and why is
Speaker 1: my mother not coming to the phone. My mother and
Speaker 1: I had another exchange of hard copy letters before we
Speaker 1: spoke on the phone. She sent me a very confusing
Speaker 1: letter saying she wished that I would rethink this lesbian
Speaker 1: thing and just focus on my work. What was the
Speaker 1: tone of the letter, like, what was the emotional tone
Speaker 1: of it? Well, it was kind of cold and formal,
Speaker 1: like my mother was with me. It was very articulate,
Speaker 1: very carefully thought out, and I responded to her letter
Speaker 1: in kind with a letter. I think I even broke
Speaker 1: it down into like a B C, you know, into
Speaker 1: sub paragraphs and things, rebutting all the things she was saying.
Speaker 1: And then following that exchange, she called me, and here's
Speaker 1: where the real information finally reached me, and she told
Speaker 1: me in this phone conversation that my dad had had
Speaker 1: affairs with other men over the course of their marriage,
Speaker 1: and some boys, some of his high school students. And
Speaker 1: I was just completely floored, just blown away. Never had
Speaker 1: never occurred to me. Remember at the beginning, when I
Speaker 1: talked about the secret hiding in plain sight and the
Speaker 1: way we who have been living in the shadow of
Speaker 1: that secret can't see what is patently obvious. Alison and
Speaker 1: I share this two very different kinds of secrets about
Speaker 1: our fathers. But what is striking is the way that
Speaker 1: each of us talk to this knowledge away. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was obvious that Alison's father was gay. In my case,
Speaker 1: it was obvious that my father wasn't my biological father.
Speaker 1: So many of us have that sense when we discover
Speaker 1: the truth of wanting to smack ourselves upside the head.
Speaker 1: I mean, my god, how could we not have known?
Speaker 1: But that's the thing. It was too dangerous, far too
Speaker 1: dangerous to know, so we just didn't. So you find
Speaker 1: this out and it makes like no kind of sense
Speaker 1: and all kinds of sense in a way. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: immediately I just began sort of reassembling this puzzle of
Speaker 1: my life and and it he actually he used that
Speaker 1: metaphor too, I think, but I've always thought of it
Speaker 1: that way. I mean, it was just so very strange
Speaker 1: that I had stumbled onto their deep dark secret in
Speaker 1: my you know, in my youthful naivete, just thinking, oh
Speaker 1: this is I'm a lesbian. I'm gonna tell everyone. I'm
Speaker 1: going to be open and above board about this. I
Speaker 1: had no idea what what I was triggering. You saw
Speaker 1: your father only a few times from the time that
Speaker 1: those conversations and that letter writing campaign was happening until
Speaker 1: he died. Yes, once he came, he stopped at my
Speaker 1: school briefly, and I saw him, and then I came
Speaker 1: home for spring break, it's spent a week. There was
Speaker 1: another time I came home at the end of the
Speaker 1: school year, very briefly and brought my girlfriend that time, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so he met my girlfriend and my mother met
Speaker 1: my girlfriend, and it was all very stressful. Did you
Speaker 1: have further conversations with him? What you know? Was there
Speaker 1: sort of bed on that initial you know, I'm so
Speaker 1: glad you're human kind of conversation. Some of it happened
Speaker 1: again in this epistolary format by letters. I have these
Speaker 1: treasured letters that my dad sent me during that time,
Speaker 1: although they were all quite cryptic and increasingly not making
Speaker 1: a lot of sense. We had one conversation about it,
Speaker 1: which was during the spring break that I was home
Speaker 1: and he and I went out to the movies one night,
Speaker 1: and I was determined to bring it up and to
Speaker 1: make him talk about it. It was very one of
Speaker 1: the most you know, frightening things I've had to do.
Speaker 1: I tried to think of a way that I could
Speaker 1: get in, and it was he had given me a
Speaker 1: copy of Collects Memoirs at Christmas time, and so I
Speaker 1: used that book and I said, did you know what
Speaker 1: you were doing when you gave me that book? Because
Speaker 1: of course, that there's a whole long scene in her
Speaker 1: memoirs about her the lesbian subculture of Paris, which I
Speaker 1: found quite riveting. And he said no, he hadn't really
Speaker 1: thought about it, but it was it was an opening
Speaker 1: and I had gotten in and we just had this
Speaker 1: short conversation until we got to the movie theater. But
Speaker 1: he opened up to me and he said, well, here's
Speaker 1: another interesting thing. When when my mother called me on
Speaker 1: the phone to tell me this shattering information, she explained
Speaker 1: it that my father had been molested when he was young,
Speaker 1: when he was fourteen, and on this night that my
Speaker 1: dad and I were talking, he described to me this
Speaker 1: incident with this older man on the farm where he
Speaker 1: grew up. I don't think he used the word molested,
Speaker 1: but I'm not sure how he would have said it
Speaker 1: if he described it as a as a pleasurable encounter
Speaker 1: and described this man as quite attractive. With me, it
Speaker 1: was a positive experience. With my mother, it was an
Speaker 1: excuse for why he had turned out this way. But
Speaker 1: clearly I could see how deeply ashamed my dad was
Speaker 1: of all this. It was really painful for him to
Speaker 1: talk about it with me, but he did at one point.
Speaker 1: When she's home, Alison and her dad have a really
Speaker 1: uncomfortable conversation. She pushes hard for it. She needs to
Speaker 1: talk with him about his sexuality and hers. She broaches
Speaker 1: the subject in a car on their way to the movies.
Speaker 1: Moving cars are such great places for these scary conversations.
Speaker 1: I find no one can escape. The conversation isn't exactly satisfying,
Speaker 1: but still it's something. Then she's back at school and
Speaker 1: she receives the worst kind of news, terrible news. Her
Speaker 1: dad has been hit by a truck. Her dad is dead.
Speaker 1: One of your responses, and it's it's such an incredibly
Speaker 1: human grief responses. You know, you and your brother have
Speaker 1: it too, Like you're laughing. Yeah, it's such an uncomfortable thing.
Speaker 1: It's like, what do you do. You're not laughing because
Speaker 1: it's funny. You're laughing because you're expelling something. Yeah, we didn't.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, you know, I don't. No, I can't
Speaker 1: remember what I even thought I was. It was a
Speaker 1: five hour drive away, so I got this news. I
Speaker 1: was completely traumatized, but not you know, in my in
Speaker 1: the in the tradition of my family. I cried for
Speaker 1: about half a minute. Maybe maybe thirty seconds, and then
Speaker 1: I was like fine, I I insisted on driving. My
Speaker 1: girlfriend had a car, but I drove, and we both
Speaker 1: drove five hours home. And I can't tell you what
Speaker 1: I was imagining had happened at that point. I know
Speaker 1: that that night my mother confided in me that she
Speaker 1: was pretty sure my father had done this on purpose.
Speaker 1: And and I don't think it that had occurred to
Speaker 1: me until she said that. It just all seemed so crazy,
Speaker 1: but everything had been crazy for months. Why do you
Speaker 1: think she told you that so quickly? Um? I think
Speaker 1: I was her only confidante. I know that her best friend,
Speaker 1: to whom she told absolutely everything. Else I didn't know
Speaker 1: and wouldn't know for a long time. I think she
Speaker 1: just needed to tell someone. And when she did tell
Speaker 1: you that, did that make sense to you? Yes? Completely?
Speaker 1: It felt absolutely right, and I think it consoled us
Speaker 1: both in some some strange way, because at least it
Speaker 1: was intentional. And I try to explain this to people
Speaker 1: and they look at me like I'm insane, but it
Speaker 1: somehow seems different. For a death to be an accident,
Speaker 1: that's really terrible, But if someone intended for it to happen,
Speaker 1: then at least something went right. You know, No, that
Speaker 1: makes sense to me. It's like, even if it's something
Speaker 1: that might have passed, it was something that was a choice.
Speaker 1: I mean, when we started talking, you were you were saying,
Speaker 1: I don't remember how you put it. But you know,
Speaker 1: the older you get, the more it's a mystery to you.
Speaker 1: You know, the more you the more your parents are
Speaker 1: a mystery to you. And I I do think for
Speaker 1: those of us that keep on thinking about this stuff,
Speaker 1: either because it's our nature or because it's our circumstances
Speaker 1: and we have to um, there's nothing resembling closure or
Speaker 1: being at a place where it all feels like tucked away,
Speaker 1: even and maybe especially when we've written about it, you know,
Speaker 1: when it's bound between the pages, I know, it keeps
Speaker 1: evolving and you can't do anything about it. I keep
Speaker 1: finding out bits of information that completely changed my story,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, wait, right, it's a very strange plight,
Speaker 1: because it really is like you're holding the world still
Speaker 1: between the covers of a book. You know, the relationship
Speaker 1: between the you that wrote fun Home and fun Home
Speaker 1: that's the story. It's the relationship between the self and
Speaker 1: the story. At the moment the story is told, We'll
Speaker 1: be right back. Allison's book ends up being adapted for
Speaker 1: the stage, and Fun Home becomes a musical, Yes, a
Speaker 1: musical that wins the Tony Award in two thousand fifteen
Speaker 1: for Best Musical, among many other accolades. I saw the
Speaker 1: show when it first ran off Broadway, and in the
Speaker 1: stage adaptation, there are three Allison's. An actress plays her
Speaker 1: as a kid, another actress plays her around the age
Speaker 1: she was when her father died, and an actress plays
Speaker 1: the adult Allison, who stands off to the side and
Speaker 1: watches it all unfold. To hear the three Allison's sing together,
Speaker 1: their voices creating a tapestry of harmony, is to witness
Speaker 1: a dramatic depiction of wholeness. I've got to admit there's
Speaker 1: been part of me that feels almost you know, guilty
Speaker 1: or bad, pulling you back into that time. And you know,
Speaker 1: and that material because it lives on in the pages
Speaker 1: of your fantastic book, and so it's always finding new readers,
Speaker 1: and it's always sort of newly alive for people. You know,
Speaker 1: new people are finding it newly alive, and for you,
Speaker 1: it's something that is, you know, sort of very much
Speaker 1: by both in the past and not. I guess yeah.
Speaker 1: It has been a bit weird having this part of
Speaker 1: my life keep sort of bringing itself to the surface
Speaker 1: over and over again. But that's fine. I can handle it.
Speaker 1: There's a phrase Alison uses con substantial paternity that I
Speaker 1: actually had to go look up. Consubstantial is defined as
Speaker 1: of the same substance or essence. We can be genetically
Speaker 1: linked consubstantial, but there is another kind of link as well,
Speaker 1: which is a spirit rual length. In a beautiful moment,
Speaker 1: Alison's father and she are discussing James Joyce's ulysses since
Speaker 1: this is the kind of thing they did together, and
Speaker 1: Allison's dad says, is it so unusual for the two
Speaker 1: things to coincide? I did find myself thinking, and I
Speaker 1: suppose it was because of my own story and my
Speaker 1: own experience. But the idea of having deep and profound
Speaker 1: spiritual connections which can or cannot be part of having
Speaker 1: a consubstantial or genetic connection. And there's this part of
Speaker 1: your book where you're trying on your father's clothes as
Speaker 1: as a kid, right, and he's trying on women's clothes
Speaker 1: at the same time, or is it's kind of there's
Speaker 1: a lot about again in that sort of hiding in
Speaker 1: plain sight kind of way, all of it. She would
Speaker 1: buy my mother's clothes or her and he confided in
Speaker 1: me that during that one conversation we had that he
Speaker 1: dressed in girls clothes as a kid when he got
Speaker 1: a chance. There's this other sentence, which is sexual shame
Speaker 1: is its own kind of death. And I would love
Speaker 1: for you to talk about that a little because I
Speaker 1: think the silencing of the deepest parts of ourselves, either
Speaker 1: because we live in a way and in a place
Speaker 1: where it feels like it's out of the question or
Speaker 1: it will be too mortifying, is so much at the
Speaker 1: basis of so many of the kinds of secrets that
Speaker 1: people keep. Yeah, that's the real tragedy of my father's
Speaker 1: that I feel like, with only a little bit of
Speaker 1: time or a little bit of help, or a little
Speaker 1: bit of being born slightly later or having some slightly
Speaker 1: different experiences, he might have been able to do that,
Speaker 1: you know, to confront that. But he just wasn't. He
Speaker 1: just couldn't do it. And when I talk about sexual
Speaker 1: shame being a kind of death, I think precisely because
Speaker 1: our sexuality is, you know, it's it's your literally the
Speaker 1: core of your vitality. It's what keeps us all reproducing.
Speaker 1: So to have that stop it up in some way,
Speaker 1: you know, I just think of my dad living this
Speaker 1: sort of half life in this little conservative farm town,
Speaker 1: or a double life, half or double I don't know.
Speaker 1: At some point after his death, you come across some photos,
Speaker 1: and among them is a photo of Roy, the babysitter
Speaker 1: who babys that for you and your brothers in the
Speaker 1: summer of sixty nine. And there was a trip that
Speaker 1: your father took you on and Roy was the babysitter,
Speaker 1: and it's clear that they were involved with each other.
Speaker 1: And there's this very handsome picture of Roy mixed in
Speaker 1: with these other family those and he had your father
Speaker 1: had blotted out or inked out the date on the
Speaker 1: Roy photo, but he had left it in. These are
Speaker 1: the mysteries that were left with right, like why why
Speaker 1: did he leave the photograph in with the rest of
Speaker 1: the photographs but block out the date? Honestly, Danny, I
Speaker 1: was like, that's weird. I don't know. I didn't go
Speaker 1: any further with it. I mean, it was literally in
Speaker 1: an envelope with all the other pictures with the same
Speaker 1: date stamp on them, And so if he really had
Speaker 1: been concerned, you would have destroyed the freaking photograph, you know.
Speaker 1: But I think it was I think I felt like
Speaker 1: it was his way of saying, look, there's nothing wrong.
Speaker 1: That's why I have this picture right here, because it
Speaker 1: was perfectly open and above board. Yeah, I mean, like what,
Speaker 1: you know, what what we're left with in the end,
Speaker 1: Like you write, what's lost in translation is the complexity
Speaker 1: of loss itself. Right, That's one of my favorite lines,
Speaker 1: because what do you do with that? You can't you
Speaker 1: don't know, you can't know, You're not going to know,
Speaker 1: And it just kind of stands as an artifact of
Speaker 1: that time and of your dad. Yeah. This was a
Speaker 1: year after my dad died when I found it, And
Speaker 1: I suddenly knew when I found that picture that I
Speaker 1: wanted to tell this story, that it was just too
Speaker 1: good of a story. I felt guilty about having that feeling, too,
Speaker 1: but it all kind of came to me in a
Speaker 1: kind burst in that little photograph. Everything was there. You know,
Speaker 1: Allison grew up on an artist's colony of sorts. Her
Speaker 1: dad is in the library exploring his profound connection to literature.
Speaker 1: Her mom has her work in the theater, and then
Speaker 1: all the kids are each doing their own artistic thing
Speaker 1: in their own rooms in this rambling house. It wasn't
Speaker 1: the artistic life Allison's parents had dreamt of or anticipated.
Speaker 1: They returned to central Pennsylvania because Allison's dad's dad had
Speaker 1: had a heart attack. These things happen, plans get derailed
Speaker 1: or dreams deferred. But perhaps Alison's parents found it easier
Speaker 1: to stay in her dad's hometown, for him to work
Speaker 1: as a high school teacher as well as in the
Speaker 1: family business, for them to be the local intelligentsia. What
Speaker 1: would have happened if they had moved to Greenwich Village?
Speaker 1: Would their marriage have survived, would they have stayed together?
Speaker 1: I feel like the message I got from both my
Speaker 1: parents was don't have children, and I didn't you know.
Speaker 1: I took that very seriously. It was like children had
Speaker 1: put an end to both of their artistic hopes. Um,
Speaker 1: but I think that was part of the cover. Children
Speaker 1: aren't necessarily what gets in the way of an artistic
Speaker 1: or creative life is dishonesty with oneself. That gets in
Speaker 1: the way of, you know, being able to express that life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they had a compact that they were not going
Speaker 1: to confront the truth of their situation. And then I
Speaker 1: came along and you know, threw it down on the
Speaker 1: floor like a gauntlet. I feel like there was something
Speaker 1: about that life that served their purposes that kept them
Speaker 1: from having to really face the real I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, the truth is they shouldn't have been married
Speaker 1: to one another, But where does that leave me? Family
Speaker 1: Secrets is a production of I Heart Media. Dylan Fagin
Speaker 1: and Bethman Mcaluso are the executive producers. Andrew Howard is
Speaker 1: our audio editor. If you have a secret you'd like
Speaker 1: to share, leave us a boy smell and your story
Speaker 1: could appear on an upcoming bonus episode. Our number is
Speaker 1: one secret zero. That's secret and then the number zero.
Speaker 1: You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer,
Speaker 1: Facebook at facebook dot com slash Family Secrets Pod, and
Speaker 1: Twitter at Fami Secret Spot. And if you want to
Speaker 1: know about my family secret that inspired this podcast, check
Speaker 1: out my New York Times best selling memoir Inheritance. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 1: favorite shows,