Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. People
Speaker 1: came racing out of their houses in their backyards, and
Speaker 1: these are all people who knew everyone involved and saw
Speaker 1: these children. I mean young teenagers children. My sister was
Speaker 1: told my brother was fourteen in the street, you know,
Speaker 1: essentially dead. This is Joanna Raykoff. Joanna is a novelist
Speaker 1: and memoirist who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Picture a woman
Speaker 1: with dark, curly hair, lively eyes, an easy smile, a
Speaker 1: woman you might pass on the cobblestone streets of Cambridge
Speaker 1: and imagine that she has had a simple, lovely life.
Speaker 1: But Joanna's life has been shaped by an enormous secret.
Speaker 1: It a family tragedy that she was shielded from until
Speaker 1: well into adulthood, a secret that cast a long, sad
Speaker 1: shadow over her childhood. 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 was born in the Hudson River Valley
Speaker 1: in a town that a lot of people know. It's
Speaker 1: sort of a popular town outside the city called Nayak.
Speaker 1: So Nayak sits on the river sits on the Hudson River.
Speaker 1: It's a very beautiful, beautiful place. It's a place that
Speaker 1: you know, Manhattan Night's like to come visit for the day.
Speaker 1: There are wonderful restaurants and beautiful shops and lovely walks
Speaker 1: along the river, seafood restaurants, boats, that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: It's a lovely place to live. Kids all walked to
Speaker 1: school there at sort of a utopian place. So I
Speaker 1: was born in this town and my father had a
Speaker 1: dental practice in the town. And when I was about three,
Speaker 1: for reasons that were were not quite clear to me,
Speaker 1: my family moved to a few towns over. We moved
Speaker 1: to a very different place. We moved inland to the
Speaker 1: kind of mountains a few miles up from nyack Um
Speaker 1: to a very very tiny town called Pomona that was
Speaker 1: more a very new town. It was kind of a
Speaker 1: fake town that catered to people fleeing the city as
Speaker 1: they did in the seventies, and was filled with brand new,
Speaker 1: modern glass houses. We moved to one of these houses,
Speaker 1: a very large house that was kind of surrounded by forest.
Speaker 1: It couldn't have been more different than nyak which was
Speaker 1: this tiny The ancient town where the houses are very
Speaker 1: close together, and we knew all our neighbors and kind
Speaker 1: of ran back and forth between their houses and this
Speaker 1: new town Pomona, the houses were sent much farther away,
Speaker 1: and you couldn't see your neighbors. And in retrospect, I
Speaker 1: realized that was what my parents wanted. They wanted privacy,
Speaker 1: they wanted to be anonymous in this town. At the time,
Speaker 1: I didn't understand it, And what I did understand was
Speaker 1: that this felt like a kind of scary, strange place
Speaker 1: to me. And I also understood that my mother was
Speaker 1: sort of unhappy in this place, and I didn't understand why.
Speaker 1: You know, I would walk into the kitchen and find
Speaker 1: my mother crying, or I would do some small thing
Speaker 1: that didn't seem at all like a big deal to me,
Speaker 1: like take my security blanket out of the dryer on
Speaker 1: my own, or said this this really happened, um, and
Speaker 1: my mother would you know, go crazy and start screaming
Speaker 1: at me in this sort of hysterical way and grow
Speaker 1: so angry at me that I truly couldn't understand it. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, screaming get away from me. I can't look
Speaker 1: at you, I can't see you get away from me,
Speaker 1: and as a small child, I spent a lot more
Speaker 1: time with my father. There's a way in which, you know,
Speaker 1: some people maybe are just by nature kid people, and
Speaker 1: some people are not. And my father just was a
Speaker 1: kid person, and he just loved doing stuff with me.
Speaker 1: And so my childhood, when I think back on it,
Speaker 1: and as I as I experienced it at the time
Speaker 1: as well, had these kind of polarities to it. I
Speaker 1: have such vivid memories of being of kind of trapsing
Speaker 1: around this giant cold house, not quite knowing what to
Speaker 1: do with myself, or sitting by myself playing with my
Speaker 1: million barbie dolls, um wishing that my mom would sit
Speaker 1: on the floor and play with me. And then also
Speaker 1: have these memories of going to the park with my dad,
Speaker 1: going to this lake nearby and feeding duck. Joanna has
Speaker 1: a much older sister, Amy, who no longer lives at home.
Speaker 1: By the time Joanna is a toddler, this is familiar
Speaker 1: to me. I grew up that way too, the feeling
Speaker 1: on the one hand of having a sister and on
Speaker 1: the other of being alone, surrounded by the eyes of
Speaker 1: all your toy animals, your barbies, staring back at you,
Speaker 1: I had those barbies to army of barbies, army of
Speaker 1: barbies who are like your friends and only friends or
Speaker 1: so would feels exactly making up stories for them and
Speaker 1: so Um. Yes, So I did grow up feeling like
Speaker 1: an only child. So I had an older sister who
Speaker 1: was eighteen years my elder, Amy. I didn't really understand
Speaker 1: where she lived or what she did. Amy Um basically
Speaker 1: graduated from college by the time I was born, and
Speaker 1: in a way, the role she played in my life
Speaker 1: was more of an aunt, a kind of fond but
Speaker 1: distant aunt. She would occasionally come to our house on
Speaker 1: my birthday, you know, give me a little present. She
Speaker 1: would often show up at her house unexpected. So I
Speaker 1: didn't I just didn't understand. And I think, if I'm
Speaker 1: really honest, which I'm sorry, I often try to kind of,
Speaker 1: I will be honest here and say I really often
Speaker 1: try to sugarcoat our life and make excuses for everyone.
Speaker 1: But the truth is I'm sort of struggling that to
Speaker 1: cry here. You know, I I was just filled with longing.
Speaker 1: I wanted I so badly, just wanted her to be
Speaker 1: a sister, sister too, despite her age to come back
Speaker 1: and live with us and be there every day. We're
Speaker 1: going to take a quick break, we'll be back in
Speaker 1: a moment. What Joanna didn't realize was that there was
Speaker 1: an entire tragic history surrounding her sister Amy. Sometimes Joanna
Speaker 1: would walk in on her mother crying or looking horribly sad,
Speaker 1: and she would ask what was wrong, because Joanna presumed
Speaker 1: that she she must have done something wrong that her
Speaker 1: mother's sadness had to do with her. In general, I
Speaker 1: knew not to ask anything of more depth than what's wrong,
Speaker 1: you know, to not kind of probe at all. And
Speaker 1: as an adult it's actually been I'm forty six years old,
Speaker 1: and it's still very very hard for me to probe deeply,
Speaker 1: to ask my mother difficult questions or to tell my
Speaker 1: mother difficult things. But it also is difficult for me
Speaker 1: to talk I realized to talk to other people, to
Speaker 1: kind of probe deeply into other people's lives, and it's
Speaker 1: affected my friendships. There's this way in which I was
Speaker 1: kind of raised in this environment of just pretending that
Speaker 1: everything is fine. This is the work of a lifetime,
Speaker 1: isn't it. Sometimes we're able to look back, or we're
Speaker 1: forced to look back. And see all the ways in
Speaker 1: which our childhood selves have formed the adults we've become.
Speaker 1: Especially when we discover a secret that has been kept
Speaker 1: from us, we can look back and see the isolation,
Speaker 1: the loneliness, the walking on eggshells that we once had
Speaker 1: to do. And finally we understand all the ways we
Speaker 1: were shaped by the unsaid. Because here's the thing. We
Speaker 1: feel the things that are hidden from us, they live
Speaker 1: in our bodies, in our bones, but as children we
Speaker 1: don't understand. It's only later that the piece has fallen
Speaker 1: a place. And for Joanna, one of those pieces was
Speaker 1: a trio of portraits that hung in her childhood home.
Speaker 1: One was a boy, dark hair in a style that
Speaker 1: dated the portraits, neatly parted on the side and kind
Speaker 1: of brushed to the side. It was sort of nineteen
Speaker 1: fifties look, though I didn't quite understand that. I just
Speaker 1: knew that this was a different thing from a different era.
Speaker 1: And then there were two girls who did not look
Speaker 1: like at all. One girl had dark brown hair and
Speaker 1: bright green eyes and kind of olive skin, and um
Speaker 1: was looking at the artist in a very kind of
Speaker 1: I don't want to say ferocious because that's too extreme,
Speaker 1: but a kind of bold way and smiling, but not
Speaker 1: a smile of joy, a kind of smile of engagement.
Speaker 1: More and um an intelligence. There was a fierce intelligence
Speaker 1: to this girl, really captivating. And then the third one
Speaker 1: was also a girl younger who had beautiful blonde hair,
Speaker 1: kind of ash blonde um that kind of curled softly
Speaker 1: to her shoulders, and bright blue eyes and a much
Speaker 1: kind of softer expression on her face. She looked kind
Speaker 1: of shy, almost kind of bashfulled. Both girls were matching
Speaker 1: blue ribbons in their hair. The children were of indeterminate age,
Speaker 1: like it wasn't quite clear to me. Maybe the older
Speaker 1: girl was on the cusp of adolescence, like ten or eleven,
Speaker 1: maybe twelve. The other two kids, it wasn't clear. Um,
Speaker 1: they weren't little kids, but nor were they teenagers. So
Speaker 1: these portraits um sort of gazed down at me for
Speaker 1: a lot of my day as I watched TV, as
Speaker 1: I did everything, and I had no idea who they
Speaker 1: were of I honestly thought that they were art. We
Speaker 1: had a lot of art in her house, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of original art of all from all different eras,
Speaker 1: all different types. I told myself that these were just
Speaker 1: beautiful paintings, and so what did I do with this?
Speaker 1: I I loved them, and I would gaze at them.
Speaker 1: I would sit there on the sofa. I was a
Speaker 1: huge reader, and I spent a lot of time just
Speaker 1: lying on the sofa eating an apple, and I would
Speaker 1: kind of gaze at them and make up stories about
Speaker 1: them in my head. And I would when I read books,
Speaker 1: I would kind of imagine the characters as as looking
Speaker 1: like these kids. Joanna also recalls a mysterious photograph in
Speaker 1: a home that has no family photos at all. There's
Speaker 1: one picture in Joanna's dad's office, a place he retreats
Speaker 1: to to smoke his pipe and do paperwork, of a family,
Speaker 1: but whose family. These people are strangers to her still,
Speaker 1: they pull her in and she knows in a bone
Speaker 1: shaking way that she'd better not ask about it. But
Speaker 1: when she's about ten years old, her need to know
Speaker 1: wins out. So finally, one day, after contemplating it for
Speaker 1: a very long time, I said, who are these people
Speaker 1: in the photo? And my father said, you you really
Speaker 1: don't know who these people are? And I said no,
Speaker 1: But I felt there's a horrible guilt, This horrible guilt
Speaker 1: because and I thought, I guess I should know who
Speaker 1: they are. And he he said, even sort of incredulous,
Speaker 1: and he took the photo from me, and he pointed
Speaker 1: to the woman in it and he said, that's your mother.
Speaker 1: And then he pointed to the man in the photo,
Speaker 1: who was also smiling and laughing and looked very happy,
Speaker 1: and he said, you and that handsome devil is me.
Speaker 1: And then he pointed to the teenagers, the children in
Speaker 1: the photo, and he said, this boy right here is
Speaker 1: your brother Mark. And so one of the people in
Speaker 1: the photo who I had perceived as being a girl,
Speaker 1: was a boy who had very long hair and you know,
Speaker 1: kind of delicate features. Um, and I suddenly went the
Speaker 1: minute he said boy, I realized, oh my gosh, that
Speaker 1: is a boy. I hadn't realized it, but in my
Speaker 1: mind was reeling because of course I didn't know that
Speaker 1: I had a brother. And then he went on and said,
Speaker 1: in this girl right here, that's your sister Amy. You
Speaker 1: know your sister Amy, And I said yes. And then
Speaker 1: he pointed too the other girl, the third girl who
Speaker 1: had could have blond, curly hair, and he said, and
Speaker 1: this beautiful girl is your sister Anita. And his voice broke,
Speaker 1: and it never seen my father cry and all my
Speaker 1: father was always happy, and it just kind of held
Speaker 1: me close to him, and you, I just said oh.
Speaker 1: And he helped me for a long time, and then
Speaker 1: I it was my bedtime and I said good night
Speaker 1: and I left. So in all the years between that
Speaker 1: first conversation Joanna and her father had in which he
Speaker 1: told her of her brother and sister, those pastel portraits
Speaker 1: on the family room wall, they never again spoke of
Speaker 1: her siblings, Anita and Mark. If people asked Joanna if
Speaker 1: she was an only child, she would respond that she
Speaker 1: had one sister, a much older sister. She just didn't
Speaker 1: allow herself to go there. In a way, she unconsciously
Speaker 1: conspired with her parents to allow the secret to go
Speaker 1: back into its hiding place. After all, this is a
Speaker 1: secret kept not only by Joanna's parents, but by her
Speaker 1: entire large extended family. If you think about it, it's
Speaker 1: kind of amazing Joanna never learned more about her siblings.
Speaker 1: Think of the many many cousins of Joanna's, the aunts
Speaker 1: and uncles, the satyrs, the thanksgivings, the reunions, the Mother's
Speaker 1: day lunches. Not one mention of her vanished brother and sister.
Speaker 1: Was it a conspiracy of silence? Did my parents ay
Speaker 1: to my whole family, we don't want Joanna to grow
Speaker 1: up with the specter of the lost children? Is that
Speaker 1: what happened? Or was it just kind of an unspoken
Speaker 1: rule in my family, a very talkative, kind of stereotypical
Speaker 1: Woody Allen movie Jewish family in which people were always
Speaker 1: talking and arguing. Was it just an uns oken rule
Speaker 1: that no one was ever going to talk to me
Speaker 1: about this? I still don't know. It's one of the
Speaker 1: things I'm struggling to find out. I know my mother
Speaker 1: very much did not want me to be tainted by
Speaker 1: this tragedy or to feel like a replacement child in
Speaker 1: any way. She's told me this explicitly, that she didn't
Speaker 1: want me to be known as the girl whose brother
Speaker 1: and sister died, or the girl whose parents had this
Speaker 1: horrible tragedy happened to them. She wanted me to be
Speaker 1: my own person, free from the burden of this tragedy.
Speaker 1: And I really I respect her so much for that.
Speaker 1: I understand that I do, I really really do. The
Speaker 1: only clues that Joanna has as to the fate of
Speaker 1: her siblings is when as a child she eavesdrops on
Speaker 1: her mother's telephone conversations. My mother, almost every evening, like
Speaker 1: so many mothers of her generation, would spend the evening
Speaker 1: talking on the phone to her friends and so. Then
Speaker 1: she would sit in her bedroom using her blue rotary
Speaker 1: dial phone talking dif friends, and I would be reading
Speaker 1: or watching QV and I would catch these glimpses of
Speaker 1: the subject. I would hear these these little bits and
Speaker 1: pieces of things. And one of the things that would
Speaker 1: often jump out at me, probably because the tone of
Speaker 1: her voice changed, would be this term the accident. So
Speaker 1: she would say, you know, oh, we weren't at that
Speaker 1: wedding that was right after the accident, or oh, I
Speaker 1: didn't do X y Z, you know with the synagogue
Speaker 1: that was right after the accident. I just couldn't do
Speaker 1: anything at that time, or oh I lost touch with
Speaker 1: so and so after the accident, I just couldn't see
Speaker 1: her anymore. So my child brain started to realize that
Speaker 1: there had been there the accident meant something to do
Speaker 1: with my brother and sister. It took some time, but
Speaker 1: I made the association, though I was, of course afraid
Speaker 1: to ask what the accident was, and I developed a
Speaker 1: whole story in my head it which was that my
Speaker 1: parents had been driving a car. I imagined it as
Speaker 1: the car that we had at that point, which may
Speaker 1: have been a giant chevery cabrief classic um. And it
Speaker 1: had been snowing, and they had been in an accident
Speaker 1: on the highway and something had happened. I couldn't envision
Speaker 1: the actual accident, but I would lie in bed at
Speaker 1: night and kind of run through this scenario, the story
Speaker 1: of my parents driving the car in the snow and
Speaker 1: some sort of accident happening that resulted in my brother
Speaker 1: and sister somehow dying. Um. And it would somehow simultaneously
Speaker 1: terrify me so that I couldn't fall asleep, but also
Speaker 1: comfort me so that I could. But I of course
Speaker 1: never asked what the accident was. Imagine growing up without
Speaker 1: critical information about your family. Imagine creating your own story,
Speaker 1: one that feels satisfying enough and survives into adulthood until
Speaker 1: someone shatters that story. That is exactly what happened in
Speaker 1: two thousand ten. Joanna is married and the mother of
Speaker 1: two young kids. Her first book, a novel, is about
Speaker 1: to come out and paperback and one of her first
Speaker 1: events is at a small independent bookstore in Maplewood, New Jersey.
Speaker 1: When she gets there, the audience is packed a great thing, obviously,
Speaker 1: and there are quite a few staff members lined up
Speaker 1: to greet her. So I was going down the line
Speaker 1: as if I were at a wedding, shaking their hands.
Speaker 1: And I get to this one particular man and he
Speaker 1: shake my hand and tears welled up in his eyes,
Speaker 1: and he, with his voice breaking, said to me, can
Speaker 1: get very nervously. Can you do you come with me?
Speaker 1: Could you? Could you come with me for a second.
Speaker 1: Could you just come to the office for a second.
Speaker 1: So I went with him, and we got to the
Speaker 1: office and he was actually sweat adding really profusely, and
Speaker 1: he handed me some water and was kind of hunting
Speaker 1: and hawing, and then finally he said, I'm Jonah Zimless,
Speaker 1: and he sort of looked at me. I'm not really conveying.
Speaker 1: He said it to me in this kind of pretendous way,
Speaker 1: you presuming that I would know who he was, but
Speaker 1: I did not. And and then he said I'm the
Speaker 1: owner of this bookshop. And I thought, oh no, this
Speaker 1: is going to be a terrible thing about my book
Speaker 1: he's telling me he's the owner of the bookshop, and
Speaker 1: all of these thoughts were raising through my mind. But
Speaker 1: then he sort of looked perplexed, and he said, you
Speaker 1: don't know my name. You don't know who I am.
Speaker 1: And I said, no, I'm you know, I'm sorry. He
Speaker 1: said I was your brother Mark's best friend. And that
Speaker 1: was when sort of the tears really let loose, and
Speaker 1: he said, my family lived, we were neighbors in Nayak.
Speaker 1: I was your brother Mark's best friend, and I was
Speaker 1: in love with your sister Anita. And then he just
Speaker 1: fawn started crying and we sort of sat there. I
Speaker 1: started crying too. I had never met anyone who knew
Speaker 1: my brother and sister, because of course I did. All
Speaker 1: my cousins, my aunts, and uncle's family friends, they all did,
Speaker 1: but they didn't speak of them to me. So I
Speaker 1: had never been in this situation before with someone who
Speaker 1: was a peer of my brother and sister and knew
Speaker 1: them really well, and for who like who had sort
Speaker 1: of suffered a loss himself, you know, to use the
Speaker 1: contemporary parliance. And he just started talking about the accident,
Speaker 1: about our town, Nayak, and how the accident had affected
Speaker 1: our town, but he I didn't understand anything that he
Speaker 1: was saying. He was naming people's names and discussing repercussions
Speaker 1: and all sorts of things, but I didn't know any
Speaker 1: of this. And he kept saying, I know you know this,
Speaker 1: and I knew you knew this, and I finally said,
Speaker 1: I just I I need to tell you something. I
Speaker 1: actually don't know anything. And he looked at me a
Speaker 1: little bit like I was crazy, and I explained, I said,
Speaker 1: you know, I know that I have his brother and sister,
Speaker 1: but my parents have never ever talked to me about them.
Speaker 1: And I don't even know what happened. I I sort
Speaker 1: of know that there was an accident, but I don't
Speaker 1: know what that accident was. And he was so stunned,
Speaker 1: I mean, his jaw dropped open, and he just kind
Speaker 1: of stared at me for a very long time. And
Speaker 1: you know, then he of course said what I guess
Speaker 1: any empathic, normal person would say, which was he was like,
Speaker 1: oh god, oh God, And he felt horrible, and it
Speaker 1: was clear that he didn't know how much to say
Speaker 1: to me, like he wanted to talk to me about
Speaker 1: all this, but he didn't necessarily feel that it was
Speaker 1: his place to tell me about this horrible tragedy in
Speaker 1: my own family. He basically said, you know, this was
Speaker 1: a tragedy for the whole town. The whole town was
Speaker 1: in mourning, the whole town was affected by it. And
Speaker 1: then he said, you know, I know there was obviously
Speaker 1: a tragedy for your family. I'm not in any way
Speaker 1: comparing our grief and sorrow to your family is. I'm not.
Speaker 1: Please don't think that I am. This conversation between Joanna
Speaker 1: and Jonah is the first of several talks they have
Speaker 1: in which the horrific truth of the accident that killed
Speaker 1: her siblings slowly reveals itself. On that first evening, she's
Speaker 1: so shaken by the conversation that she sits in the
Speaker 1: office of his bookstore sobbing. Later, he contacts her again
Speaker 1: and makes himself available to her should she want to
Speaker 1: know more. Jonah also asks Joanna if he can put
Speaker 1: her in touch with others, some people from Nayak who
Speaker 1: want to connect with her. It turns out that there
Speaker 1: was a world of people affected by this accident. They've
Speaker 1: spent their lives devastated by it talking about it all
Speaker 1: the while. Joanna's family moved into their glasshouse and lived
Speaker 1: in complete silence. We're going to take a quick break.
Speaker 1: Here are the bare bones of what happened. In June
Speaker 1: of nine, the year before Joanna's birth, her parents went
Speaker 1: on a vacation to Grand Bahama Island to celebrate their anniversary.
Speaker 1: It was not a trip Joanna's mom wanted to make,
Speaker 1: but her dad convinced her that it would be fun.
Speaker 1: They left Mark and Anita, both middle schoolers, along with Amy,
Speaker 1: a high school student, in the care of their maternal grandmother, Pearl,
Speaker 1: a sweet, sweet person, but not someone who could necessarily
Speaker 1: control teenagers. Before their trip, Amy had turned seventeen and
Speaker 1: they had given her a car, a red Mustang convertible.
Speaker 1: Amy decided to take her younger siblings, along with a
Speaker 1: family friend named Rachel Finer, to the beach in Westchester
Speaker 1: and then passa blee to a rickety old amusement park
Speaker 1: called Ride plain Land. So this was a Sunday night
Speaker 1: at the end of June. It was a beautiful day
Speaker 1: out and you know, it got dark very late at
Speaker 1: that point. Nayak is a pedestrian town. It's a real,
Speaker 1: as I said, utopian, old fashioned American town where kids
Speaker 1: play in the streets. There's not a lot of traffic.
Speaker 1: There were tons of families and kids in the town,
Speaker 1: and at this time, there were all of these kids
Speaker 1: playing on their lawns, you know, having barbecues, all sorts
Speaker 1: of stuff was happening. As Amy and the kids drove
Speaker 1: along Broadway, a large sedan that had gotten off the
Speaker 1: thru away from a different exit, crashed into the convertible.
Speaker 1: Joanna researches the coroner's report and discovers that the kids
Speaker 1: weren't killed on impact, but were gravely injured. So this accident,
Speaker 1: you know, which was just brutal, it was loud, you know,
Speaker 1: the impact was heard literally throughout the town. That's not
Speaker 1: just a kind of thing to say like, it was
Speaker 1: actually heard throughout the whole town. And people came racing
Speaker 1: out of their houses in their backyards. And and these
Speaker 1: are all people who knew everyone involved and saw these children,
Speaker 1: I mean young teenagers, children. My sister was child, my
Speaker 1: brother was fourteen, as was Rachel in the street, you know,
Speaker 1: essentially dead and um, the finders who lived right there,
Speaker 1: it's so horrible. They were waiting for Rachel to come home,
Speaker 1: waiting for her, getting angry. You know the parents were
Speaker 1: getting angry, thinking where is she, Why isn't she home yet?
Speaker 1: Why isn't she home yet? What's wrong? They thought she
Speaker 1: was going to be back butch earlier, and they heard
Speaker 1: the accident and they went running out into the street. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there are some secrets that, even when revealed, unpacked, understood,
Speaker 1: will never fully be put to rest. How can a loss,
Speaker 1: this violent and profound, one that affected an entire town
Speaker 1: and devastated two families ever be made Okay, time heals
Speaker 1: all wounds, it is said, or God doesn't give us
Speaker 1: more than we can handle, or my personal favorite, everything
Speaker 1: happens for a reason. These are the things well meaning
Speaker 1: people say to those who are grieving. We don't like
Speaker 1: to acknowledge that there are some wounds that will always
Speaker 1: remain at least somewhat open, that it is our job
Speaker 1: to bear them, to transform them slowly over time by
Speaker 1: making meaning out of them, something Joanna is doing. And
Speaker 1: the writing, research and reporting of this story she has
Speaker 1: never known, and it haunted her all the more because
Speaker 1: of not knowing. Healing all of us back as in
Speaker 1: honestly pretty unbearable. I have three kids now. They are fourteen,
Speaker 1: ten and three and it's simultaneously is causing me to
Speaker 1: remember so much about my own childhood, which then of
Speaker 1: course forces me to think about how I am as
Speaker 1: a mother and makes me so conscious of every choice
Speaker 1: that I make while simultaneously feeling strangely vulnerable, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of remembering all of these moments from my own
Speaker 1: childhood when I felt so alone and afraid, or confused
Speaker 1: or sometimes happy. Honestly, just but just remembering my way
Speaker 1: back into my childhood is a really profound thing to
Speaker 1: do as a parent, particularly a parent with kids at
Speaker 1: these very developmental ages. Also my son and daughter being
Speaker 1: about the ages that my siblings were when they were killed.
Speaker 1: I have been doing this research very very slowly, because
Speaker 1: each time I uncover something, it just eviscerats me in
Speaker 1: a matter that I was not prepared for. You know,
Speaker 1: I have a history as a journalist or reporter. You know,
Speaker 1: I've done a huge amount of research for you know,
Speaker 1: fiction projects, for my last memoir project, and I thought,
Speaker 1: I'm ready for this. I'm ready to to sort of
Speaker 1: lay bare these secrets. I'm ready to kind of talk
Speaker 1: about all this with my family. But maybe you're never ready.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine a world in which you had never
Speaker 1: known this, where the secret remained very in those portraits
Speaker 1: on the wall. You know, imagine a past in which
Speaker 1: you would never ask the question. I mean, do you
Speaker 1: in any way I wish that you didn't know this?
Speaker 1: Maybe a little part of me does and wishes that
Speaker 1: my relationship with my mother and my sister could be
Speaker 1: less complicated. You know that, because my relationship with my mother,
Speaker 1: whom I love dearly and I love like in this
Speaker 1: animal love, and you also feel so protective of in
Speaker 1: so many ways, But my relationship with her is very fraught,
Speaker 1: and I just wish that it could be less complicated.
Speaker 1: So it's not so much that you wish you didn't
Speaker 1: know the secret as that you wish the secret had
Speaker 1: never existed. Yeah, I either wish I had never existed,
Speaker 1: or I wish that maybe they had. But the truth
Speaker 1: is you can never truly shut the door. Right. Here's
Speaker 1: Joanna reading from the manuscript of her upcoming memoir. Where
Speaker 1: do I start? How do I begin? How do I
Speaker 1: tell a story that begins before my birth? Or rather
Speaker 1: I should say the story that resulted, grim and improbable
Speaker 1: as it sounds, in my existence, it's a story that
Speaker 1: now I'm called upon to tell this explanation of my life,
Speaker 1: of my family, of how I came to be. Nearly
Speaker 1: every day, every time someone innocently asks do you have
Speaker 1: brothers and sisters? Or are you from a big family?
Speaker 1: But there's no easy answer, no response that won't lead
Speaker 1: to further questions at best, or at worst make the
Speaker 1: inquirer uncomfortable or horrified, or sad or filled with regret
Speaker 1: that she'd brought up such painful memories. There's no answer
Speaker 1: that won't lead to an awkward social moment, a tragic
Speaker 1: silence within a gay part, and after the shockwas off,
Speaker 1: there will still always be more questions, questions I can't
Speaker 1: necessarily answer. I'd like to thank my guest, Joanna Raykoff.
Speaker 1: You can find out more about Joanna and her books
Speaker 1: at Joanna Rakoff dot com. Family Secrets is an I
Speaker 1: Heart media production. Dylan Fagan is a supervising producer, Lowell
Speaker 1: Brolante is the audio engineer, and Julie Douglas is the
Speaker 1: executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like
Speaker 1: to share with us, you can get in touch at
Speaker 1: listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com, and you
Speaker 1: can also find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder, and
Speaker 1: Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fami Secrets Pod.
Speaker 1: For more about my book, Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot
Speaker 1: com For more podcasts. For my heart Radio, visit the
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to your favorite shows,