Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: I Lived, shadowed by an uncertainty about my parents' marriage
Speaker 2: and a sense of some fundamental instability lurking just beneath
Speaker 2: the surface. Lynn and Dick were held up as a
Speaker 2: model couple by many of their friends, and were profiled
Speaker 2: as such in several newspaper pieces, celebrated especially for the
Speaker 2: ways my father made my mother's business success possible. They
Speaker 2: complimented each other well, my father the extravagant romantic, my
Speaker 2: mother the cool realist.
Speaker 1: As my father would.
Speaker 2: Give disquisitions on a new play, will whoop excitedly with
Speaker 2: his buddies as they watched a sports game, my mother
Speaker 2: would break in to someone everyone firmly to the dinner table.
Speaker 2: If my father luxuriated in meandering after her conversations that
Speaker 2: continued even after coffee and dessert, it was my mother
Speaker 2: who reminded everyone how late it was and briskly ushered
Speaker 2: guests out the door.
Speaker 3: That's Priscilla Gilman, writer, former professor of English and author
Speaker 3: of the recent memoir The Critic's Daughter. Priscilla's story glitters
Speaker 3: on the surface. A rarefied New York City childhood, highly
Speaker 3: successful parents who were at the epicenter of literary life,
Speaker 3: a world of intellectual stimulation and famous friends. But beneath
Speaker 3: that shiny exterior was a darker, harder truth. Things were very,
Speaker 3: very unhappy in the Gilman household, and Priscilla, as a
Speaker 3: young child, absorbed it all. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this
Speaker 3: is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
Speaker 3: the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
Speaker 3: keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape of your childhood.
Speaker 1: Three Central Park Wests.
Speaker 2: That was an incredible historic building on Central Park West
Speaker 2: in ninety third Street, inhabited by a slew of people
Speaker 2: we would now consider luminaries, lots of PBS producers and
Speaker 2: artists and therapists.
Speaker 1: It was rent controlled. My parents paid about one hundred
Speaker 1: and forty one hundred and fifty dollars.
Speaker 2: A month, and we were on the Central Park West.
Speaker 2: Literally my bedroom looked out onto the park, huge three
Speaker 2: bedroom apartment. Paint was peeling, the tubs were chipped, but
Speaker 2: we didn't care because we were living in this kind
Speaker 2: of almost sesame street world. And I say that street
Speaker 2: began in nineteen sixty nine. I was born in nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy and the Upper West Side in the seventies. It
Speaker 2: wasn't all that safe. It certainly wasn't upscale, but it
Speaker 2: was filled with academics and artists and writers and actors
Speaker 2: and interesting people who were at the center of intellectual
Speaker 2: and artistic culture.
Speaker 3: It's so amazing to hear you say that that New
Speaker 3: York is a disappeared New York now.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, And when I think back on my childhood, there's
Speaker 2: this kind of wistfulness for that feeling of vibrancy and
Speaker 2: artistic secundity, and the sense that any night some person
Speaker 2: could come over to my parents' apartment bearing a magical
Speaker 2: story or an exciting idea that they were developing a
Speaker 2: project that they wanted to work on, that they wanted
Speaker 2: advice from my mother on or my father. And there
Speaker 2: was just this continual sense of discovery and excitement and
Speaker 2: wonder in my childhood.
Speaker 3: So you and your mother and your father and your
Speaker 3: younger sister, Claire lived at three three three until you
Speaker 3: were about.
Speaker 2: How old, until I was eight, And when I was eight,
Speaker 2: in nineteen seventy eight, they bought their first apartment in
Speaker 2: New York City. They bought forty four West seventy seventh Street.
Speaker 2: It's across the street from the Museum of National History,
Speaker 2: and I think they bought the apartment for about one
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and it was a thirty
Speaker 2: two hundred square foot apartment with the living room and
Speaker 2: my father's office fronting onto the Natural History Museum. We
Speaker 2: looked out over it because we were on the tenth floor.
Speaker 2: And I think the year that we bought that apartment,
Speaker 2: there was a drug rehab facility on the block. There
Speaker 2: was a neighborhood Block Association. It was just sort of
Speaker 2: starting to get cleaned up.
Speaker 1: But we in a couple of.
Speaker 2: Years Columbus Avenue exploded and became one of the sheekest
Speaker 2: parts of the city.
Speaker 4: Tell me about the mother of your childhood.
Speaker 2: So my mother, Lynn Nesbitt, had moved to New York
Speaker 2: City in her early twenties from the Midwest as kind
Speaker 2: of the wide eyed girl. She used to listen to
Speaker 2: the radio when she was a kid, and there was
Speaker 2: a show called Grand Central Station, Crossroads.
Speaker 1: Of a Thousand Lives, and she listened to that and said,
Speaker 1: I want to be in that place.
Speaker 2: I want to be in New York City, meeting exciting
Speaker 2: people and doing exciting things. And she worked her way
Speaker 2: up from being an assistant at a women's magazine to
Speaker 2: being the assistant to a literary agent. And when she
Speaker 2: was working for that literary agent, she got a manuscript
Speaker 2: from a Harvard medical student named Michael Crichton, and it
Speaker 2: was called The Andromeda Strain, and she signed him as
Speaker 2: a client and soon began representing everybody from Tom Wolf
Speaker 2: to Hunter S.
Speaker 1: Thompson Cairo. She represented Tony Morrison.
Speaker 2: Tony's first book was published in the year I was born,
Speaker 2: The Bluest Eye, and Rice and Beaty, just a flew of.
Speaker 1: And high Low and everything in between.
Speaker 3: So your mother was already successful. She was doing very
Speaker 3: well as a literary agent by the time you were born.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, she was. She married my father when she
Speaker 2: was twenty seven. She had three miscarriages before I was born.
Speaker 2: She had to have surgery on her uterus, one of
Speaker 2: the first to kind of a pioneering surgery, and she
Speaker 2: was able to get pregnant and carry the baby to term,
Speaker 2: and she had me and my sister within fourteen.
Speaker 1: Months of each other.
Speaker 2: And so she was in her early thirties, two young children,
Speaker 2: a vice president at ICM International Creative Management in the
Speaker 2: literary department, representing a ton of incredible authors.
Speaker 4: And how about your father.
Speaker 2: So he in the sixties when he met my mom.
Speaker 2: I believe he was working at newswol when he met
Speaker 2: my mom. He was the theater critic, the staff theater
Speaker 2: critic for Newsweek in an office. Another example of how
Speaker 2: we've lost a lot in our culture. I don't think
Speaker 2: it's a staff theater critic in Newsweek anymore. And in
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty seven he was hired to teach at the
Speaker 2: l School of Drama. And in the sixties and the
Speaker 2: seventies he mainly taught dramaturgy or dramatic criticism, but he
Speaker 2: also did teach playwrights. He taught actors. Meryl Streep was
Speaker 2: one of his most beloved students. He taught Henry Winkler,
Speaker 2: Wendy Wasserstein, Sigourney Weaver, a whole bunch of performers, writers,
Speaker 2: directors at the l School of Drama. So he was
Speaker 2: up there two nights a week. He would stay in
Speaker 2: a hotel in New Haven when we were in the city,
Speaker 2: and then we had a country house in western Connecticut
Speaker 2: where we spent our weekends. My father was a very
Speaker 2: powerful formidical critic. He also wrote literary criticism. He had
Speaker 2: been the editor of The New Republic's literary section at
Speaker 2: one point, and he was known in public as being
Speaker 2: tough and difficult to please and rigorous and almost fear
Speaker 2: inducing because of how honest and how ostensibly harsh she
Speaker 2: could be in some of his reviews. But in his
Speaker 2: personal life he was warm and congenial and playful and affectionate,
Speaker 2: and he.
Speaker 1: Had grown up in Flatbush, Brooklyn.
Speaker 2: Was very sort of down to earth and loved sports
Speaker 2: and loved deli food. My mother, who came from the Midwest,
Speaker 2: was a cooler customer. I would just describe my mother as,
Speaker 2: although she was author's advocates, she was nurturing talent. She
Speaker 2: was supporting people through their dark moments when they doubted
Speaker 2: if they could write, or they doubted if they could produce.
Speaker 2: She's just a cooler, more rational person than my father.
Speaker 2: My father, even as he was that rigorous critic, he
Speaker 2: was essentially a romantic and idealist somebody who loved musical
Speaker 2: theater passionately. My mother was just more. She was very
Speaker 2: hard working, She was very competent. She worked incredibly hard
Speaker 2: and kept her cool in very difficult, tough situations. My
Speaker 2: father was more insecure. My father struggled with writer's block,
Speaker 2: and he smoked compulsively, and I could tell as a
Speaker 2: young child that he was self medicating with cigarettes. He
Speaker 2: could get irritable, he could get depressed if he wasn't.
Speaker 1: Producing enough writing.
Speaker 2: And my mother was very good at sort of laying
Speaker 2: down the law and saying, Okay, you're going in your
Speaker 2: office now, and you're going to come out in two hours,
Speaker 2: and you're going to give me some pages. She was
Speaker 2: very good at pushing him.
Speaker 1: And my mother is a rock solid person.
Speaker 2: She was then, she is now. You can always count
Speaker 2: on her in a crisis. In Joan Divien's The Year
Speaker 2: of Magical Thinking, my mother appears in one of the
Speaker 2: opening of that book as the first person Joan calls
Speaker 2: when John dies. My mother was both John and Joan's
Speaker 2: literary agent. And I don't think it's an accident that
Speaker 2: she called my mother. Yes she was a very close friend,
Speaker 2: and yes she was the agent. But Joan also knew
Speaker 2: my mother is the person you call when you're in
Speaker 2: an emergency situation.
Speaker 1: She's going to take care of things.
Speaker 2: And she's not going to cry in a way that
Speaker 2: she's not going to be able to manage herself. My
Speaker 2: father was more vulnerable emotionally than my mother.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you write that even though your father cultivated the
Speaker 3: pristine and protected sanctity of your childhood, even though he
Speaker 3: was the one you'd go to for reassurance when you
Speaker 3: had to worry, you never felt entirely secure about your father.
Speaker 3: It seems like your mother was certainly much more disciplined
Speaker 3: than your father.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, my father, he always had this cough that worried me.
Speaker 2: The kids would try to get him to quit smoking,
Speaker 2: and he would get very angry and say, no, I'm fine.
Speaker 2: My parents live until their nineties, and they my father smoked.
Speaker 2: I'll quit when I'm older. So I always worried about
Speaker 2: his health in that way. It just didn't like the
Speaker 2: way that cough sounded. I also always worried about his
Speaker 2: mood because I could see I didn't know what to
Speaker 2: label it. I didn't know what to call it. Today,
Speaker 2: we would say that he was suffering from untreated depression.
Speaker 2: He would get into kind of quiet and dark moods
Speaker 2: or sometimes not often, but sometimes he would get irritable.
Speaker 1: He had a temper.
Speaker 2: He could get angry, particularly at my sister, who was
Speaker 2: just a little bit more of a difficult child. If
Speaker 2: she would spill her milk, he might get angry, or
Speaker 2: she would complain, or she would talk back, and he
Speaker 2: would get angry. And so I just always felt when
Speaker 2: I entered a room my father's face lit up. When
Speaker 2: I was with him, he was calmer, he was happier,
Speaker 2: and he seemed more secure.
Speaker 1: So from a very young age.
Speaker 2: I sensed that I was almost what we would call
Speaker 2: today like I was my father's prozac.
Speaker 1: In a way, helping him manage.
Speaker 3: His moods, which is a tremendous responsibility for an eight nine.
Speaker 4: Ten year old.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know, one of the things that strikes
Speaker 3: me so much about your story is that there are
Speaker 3: some bigger secrets in it. But the secrets in it
Speaker 3: really have to do with what is left unexpressed, what
Speaker 3: is left unspoken, which is a more subtle kind of
Speaker 3: secret keeping. Right like you were, you were as a
Speaker 3: member of your family who was really never going to
Speaker 3: say anything that was going to rock the boat for
Speaker 3: any of them.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, I viewed myself as my sister's protector. I was
Speaker 2: only fourteen months older than Claire, but she was fragile.
Speaker 2: She would cry when my parents would go out and
Speaker 2: they would go away, and I would be comforting her.
Speaker 2: She didn't have the filter that I had in terms
Speaker 2: of if she was upset or we would be taking
Speaker 2: a trip, she'd say.
Speaker 1: We have to stop the car. I'm hungry, I'm thirsty.
Speaker 2: And I really admire her ability to advocate for her
Speaker 2: needs and to say how she was feeling. But because
Speaker 2: she did that so openly, it almost hardened me in
Speaker 2: my role of being Okay, my parents need one child
Speaker 2: who's easy. My parents need one child who's not going
Speaker 2: to complain. My parents need one child who's just going
Speaker 2: to be that boy and happy child. And I was
Speaker 2: born that way. I should say, you know, it's important
Speaker 2: to say that my parents cast me.
Speaker 1: In this role.
Speaker 2: But the role wasn't a stretch, right. I didn't cry
Speaker 2: when I was a baby. Everybody always talked about that.
Speaker 1: In the family lore.
Speaker 2: My sister was very difficult. She didn't sleep through the night.
Speaker 2: My parents were at their wits end. Claire would have tantrums,
Speaker 2: and everybody from our babysitters to my brother from my
Speaker 2: father's first marriage talk about how all little easy Persula.
Speaker 2: She was always so sweet and easy and she never cried.
Speaker 2: And I took that role seriously, and I love what
Speaker 2: you say about It was almost like I couldn't voice
Speaker 2: any feelings of worry or dissatisfaction, or this is hard
Speaker 2: for me, anything like that. I had to keep those
Speaker 2: things even from myself. I know you do talk often
Speaker 2: in this podcast about these different types of secrets.
Speaker 1: And I was almost keeping it from myself.
Speaker 2: How hard this was at times for me to always
Speaker 2: have to play that role of the good girl.
Speaker 3: Priscilla is ten years old. The tensions between her parents
Speaker 3: have been mounting. They aren't getting along even when they
Speaker 3: go on vacation together. Priscilla wonders what do they do
Speaker 3: while they're away. They really don't have much in common,
Speaker 3: but one thing has been clear. They've promised Priscilla and
Speaker 3: Claire that no matter what, they'll never get a divorce.
Speaker 3: But then one October night in nineteen eighty, Priscilla hears
Speaker 3: her parents arguing in the kitchen and it's filled with
Speaker 3: a sense of doom. This foreboding feeling is born out
Speaker 3: when her parents sit their daughters down at the kitchen
Speaker 3: table and announce that they're going to have a trial separation.
Speaker 2: I remember my sister got worried and thought it had
Speaker 2: something to do with court or the legal system, you know,
Speaker 2: when daddy's going on trial. What my mother said, No, no, no,
Speaker 2: we're going to be living in separate places. And when
Speaker 2: Claire started to look upset, she reassured her and she said,
Speaker 2: you know, it's just kind of like an experiment. We're
Speaker 2: just trying it out seeing And I knew in that
Speaker 2: instant that it was not an experiment, it was not
Speaker 2: a trial. That what I had most dreaded for a
Speaker 2: long time was going to happen. And I will say
Speaker 2: also that you know, this is nineteen eighty starting to
Speaker 2: enter the era where more and more people that would
Speaker 2: have stayed married ten twenty years ago are splitting up.
Speaker 2: And a number of their friends, couples that we used
Speaker 2: to hang out with, had split up. And so this
Speaker 2: is one of the reasons why Claire and I start
Speaker 2: asking them, right.
Speaker 1: Are you going to split up? And then they would
Speaker 1: have these kind.
Speaker 2: Of fiery arguments where they would yell at each other,
Speaker 2: and after those arguments, we would ask them and I think,
Speaker 2: you know one thing that I do want to say
Speaker 2: about their marriage.
Speaker 1: They had two major things in common.
Speaker 2: One, their children. They adored their children, They loved being parents.
Speaker 2: I could tell that they were in very invested in
Speaker 2: the family and the larger family unit, bringing the grandparents together.
Speaker 2: My mother loved my brother from my father's first marriage.
Speaker 2: And I think my mother appreciated what a wonderful father
Speaker 2: my father was, and even Crtic allows and have this
Speaker 2: major career because he loved taking care of us, playing
Speaker 2: with us, and reading to us and doing all those
Speaker 2: things that she wasn't that interested in doing with us.
Speaker 2: And at the same time, they were both passionate about
Speaker 2: art and literature and that a life devoted.
Speaker 1: To the arts could be meaningful.
Speaker 2: They had both broken from their families of origin. Both
Speaker 2: sets of grandparents were Republican. Both sets of grandparents had
Speaker 2: businessman or lawyer right paternal figures, and my parents bonded
Speaker 2: I think over that yet we're both escaping from the
Speaker 2: oppressiveness of for my mother small town Illinois, from my
Speaker 2: father Russian Jewish immigrant parents living in Flatbush and saying
Speaker 2: a critic, how can you make money being a grip
Speaker 2: that doesn't that's not a job, right, And they believed
Speaker 2: in each other's work.
Speaker 1: My mother thought my father was a genius. My dad
Speaker 1: was wholly.
Speaker 2: Admiring of my mother, supportive of her having a major career.
Speaker 1: Not that many men were at that time.
Speaker 2: So my father being sort of ahead of his time
Speaker 2: and taking on more of the child rearing and just
Speaker 2: caring for us and supporting her.
Speaker 1: I think that's what held them together.
Speaker 2: But their personalities were not compatible ultimately, And when my
Speaker 2: mother announces this, I knew not only that this was
Speaker 2: going to be irrevocable, that they were going to split,
Speaker 2: and not just separate the divorce. I knew that my
Speaker 2: father did not want this, because I could.
Speaker 1: Always sense from a very young age.
Speaker 2: That my father loved my mother far more than my
Speaker 2: mother loved my father, if she really loved him at all.
Speaker 1: I knew she revered.
Speaker 2: Him intellectually, but I never saw any physical affection between
Speaker 2: the two of them, And I did feel often as
Speaker 2: a little girl my father wanting my mother's approval and
Speaker 2: my mother not giving him the affection that I could
Speaker 2: sense that he wanted.
Speaker 3: And that night, when you leave the kitchen, you go
Speaker 3: into your father's study and he tells you as much
Speaker 3: he's crying, and he tells you, I don't want this.
Speaker 2: He says, I don't want this. I don't want to
Speaker 2: lose our family. I went after him. My mother took
Speaker 2: Claire back to bed, and I could have gone to bed,
Speaker 2: but I felt I need to go check on my father.
Speaker 2: I need to go see if he's okay. And he
Speaker 2: was crying, and I'd almost never seen him cry, and
Speaker 2: I'd seen tears in his eyes and like sentimental moments
Speaker 2: and movies maybe, and he was heaving with crying, and
Speaker 2: immediately I was just hugging him, and I was trying
Speaker 2: not to cry myself because I didn't want to make
Speaker 2: it worse for him. But that wasn't a revelation to me.
Speaker 2: When he said that, exactly as you said, Danny, I knew.
Speaker 2: I mean, I went there and I had it confirmed.
Speaker 2: My father did not want this.
Speaker 1: My mother wanted this, and I could tell from the
Speaker 1: expression in her.
Speaker 2: Face that she was out. There was no chance that
Speaker 2: he was going to be able to convince her.
Speaker 1: And for a couple of.
Speaker 2: Mon he did try, and it was very painful to
Speaker 2: watch his fumbling around trying to praise her, and he'd say, oh,
Speaker 2: you know, I've smoked only ten cigarettes today, right, or
Speaker 2: I'm not going to bet on sports anymore, or any
Speaker 2: of these things that had bothered her or have been
Speaker 2: issues I knew as a little child.
Speaker 1: Those were cosmetic things like that's not what it really was.
Speaker 1: It was something deeper.
Speaker 2: There was some deeper fault line between them.
Speaker 3: We'll be right back when Priscilla's parents separate. The change
Speaker 3: is jarring for the whole family. The life and home
Speaker 3: they all once shared is now fractured.
Speaker 2: So, you know, we had moved into this really grand
Speaker 2: apartment two years earlier, and my father had had this
Speaker 2: incredible office with this huge white desk that looked like
Speaker 2: a president could sit behind it, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: he doesn't have a home at all. We're not told
Speaker 2: where he's staying. He moves out in January, and I assumed,
Speaker 2: you know, he's basically what we would today call kout surfing,
Speaker 2: staying with different people friends for us, students, former students,
Speaker 2: and my sister and I are only able to see
Speaker 2: him for a quick lunch or a quick dinner at
Speaker 2: a neighborhood restaurant maybe once or twice a week, and
Speaker 2: he is alternately kind of shaky emotionally, like as soon
Speaker 2: as he would see us, he would look like he
Speaker 2: was about to cry, or he would get irritable because
Speaker 2: he would say, girls, you have to split a dish,
Speaker 2: and Claire would say, no, I want more food.
Speaker 1: That's not enough food. I want more, and he would
Speaker 1: get annoyed, and so I would be sort of kicking her,
Speaker 1: trying to get her to stop.
Speaker 2: And then I would notice that my father was taking
Speaker 2: the containers in the McDonald so that have like the
Speaker 2: packets of salt and pepper.
Speaker 1: Or the ketchup packets and the mustard.
Speaker 2: Packets and pouring them into his shoulder bag or sugar right,
Speaker 2: and I'm thinking he can't even afford a box of sugar.
Speaker 2: And meanwhile, my mother's career is going better than ever.
Speaker 2: She's doing a lot of business in California. We go
Speaker 2: and we stay for the summer in Brentwood, in Joan
Speaker 2: Diddy and in John Vanna's house, and we're going to
Speaker 2: all these movie premieres, and she's getting even more glamorous.
Speaker 2: My mother seems free, my mother seems lighter, she seems happier,
Speaker 2: and my father is overcome by this profound depression he'd
Speaker 2: always teetered on the verge of falling into that. One night,
Speaker 2: my father had come back to the apartment. My mom
Speaker 2: was in California on business, and she allowed my father
Speaker 2: to come into the apartment and stay with us, so
Speaker 2: we would have a couple of nights with him. And
Speaker 2: we're playing a game with Claire, and Claire spills her
Speaker 2: juice and my father had been warning her, you know,
Speaker 2: watch out for that glass, you know, don't but it's
Speaker 2: so near the board, and it spills, and he yells
Speaker 2: at her, and she starts crying, and he gets up
Speaker 2: and he stalks out, and he walks back into the
Speaker 2: room that had once been his office, and I comfort
Speaker 2: her and I go after him, and he's immediately contrite.
Speaker 2: And he always was about his temper. He didn't think
Speaker 2: it was a good thing. He never felt justified and raging.
Speaker 2: He was always immediately apologetic. And he just looks absolutely distraught,
Speaker 2: and he says, you know that I love you girls
Speaker 2: more than anything in the world, right, and I'm so sorry.
Speaker 2: You know that I didn't mean to get that angry,
Speaker 2: and you know it bothered me because I told her
Speaker 2: not to do it.
Speaker 5: So he's basically apologizing and then he looks out into
Speaker 5: space and he says, you know, sometimes I think I
Speaker 5: kill myself if it wasn't for you girls.
Speaker 2: And that's a moment where it just clicks in me.
Speaker 2: You know, you could describe that as a secret that
Speaker 2: I kind of perceived, but I didn't really know it
Speaker 2: for sure until that night. My father's survival is my responsibility,
Speaker 2: and I am the most important thing to him, and
Speaker 2: I have to do everything in my power to keep
Speaker 2: him alive.
Speaker 4: You're in fifth.
Speaker 1: Grade, yep, I'm in fifth grade.
Speaker 4: You are in fifth grade.
Speaker 3: I'm curious, Priscilla, like, what did it feel like that
Speaker 3: huge effort to push away everything that felt dangerous or
Speaker 3: you know that felt like a live wire. There was
Speaker 3: such vigilance on your part.
Speaker 1: Vigilance is a great word.
Speaker 2: It's something that I think we don't even often recognize
Speaker 2: in ourselves until we're through it. I mean, it's something
Speaker 2: that becomes so habitual that you don't even notice that
Speaker 2: you are constantly on the alert. Like I have this
Speaker 2: preternatural ability as a very young child, the sense when
Speaker 2: my father's mood was going dark, when Claire was about
Speaker 2: to lose it and have a tantrum and I think
Speaker 2: what gets you through it is feeling this is my role,
Speaker 2: Like this is what it's like to be alive. I
Speaker 2: don't know if that makes sense, but you know, it's like,
Speaker 2: this is what it means to be a human. I've
Speaker 2: been assigned this role and it's what makes life meaningful
Speaker 2: for me. Like these are my people, these are the
Speaker 2: people I love. I am blessed by having a steadier
Speaker 2: temperament than they have. I am not as prone to crying,
Speaker 2: I am not as vulnerable to moods. You know, I'm
Speaker 2: just lucky that I'm born with this temperament where I'm
Speaker 2: more buoyant. I'm generally an optimistic person. This is true,
Speaker 2: and this has been true throughout my life. I'm not
Speaker 2: prone to darkness. It's easy for me to spot if
Speaker 2: somebody's feeling left out, if somebody's feeling afraid of and
Speaker 2: I'll go in and I'll make them feel better. And
Speaker 2: I think you know that ability has served me very well.
Speaker 2: But it is can be very, very exhausting. And I
Speaker 2: remember coming back from meals with my dad where I'd think, okay,
Speaker 2: I got a ninety eight on the math quitz.
Speaker 1: I'm going to tell him that and I'm going to
Speaker 1: tell him.
Speaker 2: About the play and how I got this part, and
Speaker 2: I'm not going to tell him, you know, about this
Speaker 2: this mean girls school, because I don't want him to
Speaker 2: worry about me. So I'm just going to tell him
Speaker 2: all these good things. And I'd almost make a list
Speaker 2: in my mind of all the things I was going
Speaker 2: to tell him, and then i'd come home and I
Speaker 2: remember just sometimes going into my room and just lying
Speaker 2: on the bed and just feeling completely exhausted, like emptied.
Speaker 2: And one of the ways that I could say, maybe
Speaker 2: this was, you know, a form of rejuvenation and also distraction.
Speaker 2: But as I'm getting a little bit older, my father
Speaker 2: didn't allow us to watch any TV except PBS, and
Speaker 2: then he allowed us, in a weird exception, to watch
Speaker 2: The Hardy Boys and Nancy Droop, And all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: my dad's out of the house, and Claire and I
Speaker 2: are like, let's watch Love Both, Let's watch Fantasy Isisland,
Speaker 2: and let's start watching all these fun things that our
Speaker 2: father didn't let us do. And I thought, at one
Speaker 2: point it's almost like sort of papering over the loss
Speaker 2: with these fun you know, and I'm entering adolescents. Let's
Speaker 2: go to the Love's drug Store and buy some Bonnie
Speaker 2: Bell lipsmackers.
Speaker 1: We couldn't tell Daddy about that. I genuinely enjoyed these things.
Speaker 2: And you know, I liked going to Canal Jean and
Speaker 2: buying an overcoat and thinking Daddy wouldn't want to see
Speaker 2: my McJagger button, you know, because he doesn't approve of McJagger,
Speaker 2: and cultivating my new kind of adolescent fun life as
Speaker 2: a distraction from and something that could be just sort
Speaker 2: of more mindless. Because when I'm with my father, and
Speaker 2: you know, to a certain extent, with my sister and
Speaker 2: with my mom, I'm curating myself around my mom. I'm
Speaker 2: not telling my mom.
Speaker 1: How depressed my dad is.
Speaker 2: I'm not telling my mom I'm sad that I missed
Speaker 2: my father. I'm pretending with everyone, and I'm pretending to
Speaker 2: myself that I'm okay because I need to be okay
Speaker 2: because other people are not okay, and I need to
Speaker 2: help them because I'm more.
Speaker 1: Okay than they are.
Speaker 2: I guess was another way that I would think about it. Right,
Speaker 2: what do I have to complain.
Speaker 1: About my poor father? He doesn't even have a bedroom.
Speaker 3: Right, there's this list that you include in your book
Speaker 3: that's really just heart wrenching. And it's from a diary
Speaker 3: that you kept in middle school. And here's a page
Speaker 3: from that diary. Things not to do when I'm with daddy.
Speaker 3: One don't cry. Two, don't complain, Three, don't be difficult.
Speaker 3: Four don't tell him anything but good news. Five don't
Speaker 3: mention mommy, and six don't expect him to be the
Speaker 3: daddy of old.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: When I found that, I have no memory of writing
Speaker 2: that none, It just hit me like, Wow, that's a
Speaker 2: little girl trying to podify rules for herself in a way,
Speaker 2: trying to give myself structure, almost like if I write
Speaker 2: it down, it'll remind me, but also it maybe gives
Speaker 2: me more of a sense of control.
Speaker 1: Over what I felt I needed to do in an
Speaker 1: uncontrollable situation.
Speaker 3: Around the time Priscilla writes this list in her diary,
Speaker 3: she discovers a letter It's just sitting there out in
Speaker 3: the open, written by her father to his first wife esther.
Speaker 3: The letter contains some really unsettling and disturbing imagery and language.
Speaker 3: How does a child process something like this? Though Priscilla
Speaker 3: has made a habit out of caretaking, protecting the minds
Speaker 3: and hearts of everyone around her. In this case, she's
Speaker 3: so perturbed and in many ways scared by what she
Speaker 3: reads in the letter that she unc characteristically doesn't keep
Speaker 3: the secret.
Speaker 4: She tells her mom about the letter.
Speaker 2: I don't remember how soon after my mother came back
Speaker 2: that I told her. I know that I told her
Speaker 2: when Claire was not around, because I knew it would
Speaker 2: worry Claire and it would upset Claire. And it was
Speaker 2: a letter that shocked me, not only in terms of
Speaker 2: its graphic details. My father we would now call had
Speaker 2: BDSM tendencies, wanted to be dominated, was submissive, was asking esther.
Speaker 2: And I'd only met esther once or twice, like she
Speaker 2: was my brother's mother, and I adored my brother twelve
Speaker 2: years older though, so he didn't really live with us
Speaker 2: growing up.
Speaker 1: I didn't really know Esther.
Speaker 2: It freaked me out that my father was writing to
Speaker 2: esther and asking her to be sexually involved with him
Speaker 2: like that in and of itself felt really weird to me.
Speaker 2: And then the details of what he was asking her
Speaker 2: to do also kind of shocked me, And I think
Speaker 2: it unsettled me so much much that I felt I
Speaker 2: have to see if my mother understands this at all,
Speaker 2: Like I did not know how to make sense of it.
Speaker 2: Why is he reaching back out to esther. It hasn't
Speaker 2: been with esther in years. Why is he asking esther
Speaker 2: to do these things? And I think, to me, you know,
Speaker 2: as a ten year old, asking to be dominated.
Speaker 1: Felt to me like a cry for help.
Speaker 2: And I thought, this is not something that I can
Speaker 2: handle on my own, like, I need to tell my
Speaker 2: mom about this. And the biggest surprise of all was
Speaker 2: that my mom was not at all surprised by it.
Speaker 1: Now. I was expecting her to say, what he's what
Speaker 1: is he saying?
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, that sounds crazy, And She's like, oh, oh.
Speaker 1: Wow, wow, wow. Yeah.
Speaker 2: You know, I've been trying to protect you girls from
Speaker 2: stuff like this for years. And I just looked at
Speaker 2: her and I'm like what, and she says, yeah. You know,
Speaker 2: he had all these pornographic magazines, and he had this
Speaker 2: dash of pictures. And I would sometimes find that under
Speaker 2: the cushions of the sofa, you and Claire would have
Speaker 2: just been there like a minute before, and I'd worry,
Speaker 2: oh my gosh, you know, your grandparents are going to
Speaker 2: find them, You're going to find them. I've been protecting
Speaker 2: you girls from uears, and she was angry at him.
Speaker 2: I could tell that he'd left this out and that
Speaker 2: I'd been exposed to it, and I'm.
Speaker 1: Just very calm. While she was talking, I sat.
Speaker 2: There and I just sort of listened, And when I
Speaker 2: told her, I didn't present it in an emotionally overwhelmed way.
Speaker 2: I just said, Mommy, I found this letter and I'm
Speaker 2: wondering what you think about it, and I sort of
Speaker 2: just tried to describe it, trying to summarize it to her.
Speaker 1: And then she said, you.
Speaker 2: Know, I never did any of those things with him
Speaker 2: that he was asking esther to do, and so I
Speaker 2: think that it suddenly clicked in her head. She's like,
Speaker 2: is my daughter going to start thinking that like that
Speaker 2: was our sexual relationship, And so she felt she had
Speaker 2: to tell me that, and then we both agreed were
Speaker 2: never going to tell anyone else that Claire.
Speaker 1: Would get extremely upset and not be able to handle it.
Speaker 2: And very shortly after this, my mother initiated a conversation
Speaker 2: with me in which she told me that my father
Speaker 2: had had multiple affairs during their marriage, that some of
Speaker 2: the affairs had been with.
Speaker 1: His students, graduate students.
Speaker 2: Was very upsetting to me that he'd had affairs, and
Speaker 2: especially with students. I remember thinking that is disgusting and vile.
Speaker 2: And I even though I knew that a lot of
Speaker 2: my parents' friends and had affairs, I was aghast at that.
Speaker 2: But I remember thinking even more when my mother said,
Speaker 2: and you know, in a way, the affairs were sort
Speaker 2: of a relief for me because these women were sort
Speaker 2: of taking him off my hands.
Speaker 3: The thing that's so striking, Priscilla is that this confiding
Speaker 3: in you, ten year old you, your father making that
Speaker 3: statement about you know, if it wasn't for you girls,
Speaker 3: I would kill myself. Your mother telling you, you know,
Speaker 3: even oh, I didn't do those things with him, and
Speaker 3: he had affairs, the kind of turning you into each
Speaker 3: of them in very different ways, but into their confidante.
Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely, and confidant is a great word, because I
Speaker 2: think one of the reasons why, as my mother is
Speaker 2: telling me all these things, I'm not more upset is
Speaker 2: that I was kind of flattered that she was telling
Speaker 2: me that she was confiding in me, and she was
Speaker 2: singling me out as the mature child. You know, you're
Speaker 2: so strong, and you're so mature, and you're so smart.
Speaker 2: She would always say to me things like you can
Speaker 2: handle things, and it made me feel proud, and it
Speaker 2: made me feel closer to my mother, because as a
Speaker 2: young child, I had been much closer to my father,
Speaker 2: partly because he was around more, but also because we're
Speaker 2: just more alike and was genuinely invested in this world
Speaker 2: of childhood that my sister and I created and cultivated,
Speaker 2: and my mother was felt more adult. And now in
Speaker 2: this moment, it was more like we were on the
Speaker 2: same not the same level, but we.
Speaker 1: Were closer to each other. She was sharing her own
Speaker 1: vulnerability with me, and that felt good because I felt.
Speaker 2: I understand my mother better and I still to this
Speaker 2: day am grateful for that in the sense that it
Speaker 2: might sound odd, but she trusted me, and she felt
Speaker 2: that she wanted me to understand why she had ended
Speaker 2: the marriage. And you know, I remember talking about this
Speaker 2: with a great family friend when I was growing up,
Speaker 2: and she loved both of my parents and she understood
Speaker 2: both of them, and she's someone that I could always
Speaker 2: speak to who wouldn't come down on one side or
Speaker 2: the other.
Speaker 1: And I remember her saying to me you know, when
Speaker 1: is the right time to find this kind of stuff out.
Speaker 2: Whatever time it is, it's never the right time to
Speaker 2: find it out.
Speaker 1: And I do feel that my mother was genuinely not
Speaker 1: just venting to me.
Speaker 2: She was trying to help me, in a way make
Speaker 2: sense of what had happened. Why had this seemingly perfect
Speaker 2: family broken. Why was my father, who was this sort
Speaker 2: of magical childlike being, and I mean childlike in both
Speaker 2: the senses of being vulnerable, but also in the sense
Speaker 2: of being adventurous and playful and delightful to be around
Speaker 2: and a joy to have.
Speaker 1: How why had he been expelled? And I think she
Speaker 1: probably felt Prisolla doesn't get.
Speaker 2: It at all, and I want her to understand.
Speaker 3: So each time your mother disclosed more difficult and damning
Speaker 3: things about your father, she tells you not to share
Speaker 3: it with Claire and what struck me there, And she
Speaker 3: says to you that she's tired of deception and she's
Speaker 3: tired of secrets. But at the same time, she is
Speaker 3: asking you to keep a secret.
Speaker 2: Yes, and she didn't say this explicitly, But I also felt,
Speaker 2: I can't talk about this with my grandparents. I can't
Speaker 2: talk about this with my babysitters. I can't talk about
Speaker 2: this with my friends. This is like loaded dangerous information.
Speaker 3: We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 3: It's a hot July night in nineteen eighty one and
Speaker 3: the family's getting together for Claire's birthday. They're having dinner
Speaker 3: at a restaurant followed by a Broadway musical. At the time,
Speaker 3: Priscilla's parents are deep into their bitter divorce negotiations, and
Speaker 3: animosity is palpable, but they try to keep it together
Speaker 3: for their girls, try being the operative word.
Speaker 2: So he rushes in, and I'm starting to get really worried,
Speaker 2: and I see him and he was sweating, but I
Speaker 2: could see that he had dressed in his nicest clothes,
Speaker 2: and he was not typically a particularly natty fellow, so
Speaker 2: I was sort of touched by seeing that he had this.
Speaker 2: He was dressed up, and he was rushing in, and
Speaker 2: he went to sit down in a chair and he
Speaker 2: missed the chair and he fell on the floor, and
Speaker 2: Claire exclaimed, and the waiters are rushing over, and I'm
Speaker 2: just thinking, oh my gosh, this has gone from bad
Speaker 2: to worse.
Speaker 1: And he's sprawled on the.
Speaker 2: Floor and he's quickly getting up, and we're trying to
Speaker 2: and I start nattering on the way I do about
Speaker 2: all these good things and not wanting this to turn
Speaker 2: into a scene. Of course, it was imprinted in my
Speaker 2: brain as one of the most painful scenes of my childhood.
Speaker 2: And you know, we had to get through the dinner
Speaker 2: because we had we were going to see Barnum on Broadway.
Speaker 2: That moment that was exceptionally poignant, and I could see
Speaker 2: my mother just looking irritated and almost contemptuous, like, oh,
Speaker 2: of course, right, he's late.
Speaker 1: And then he falls on the floor.
Speaker 2: And then we're sitting in the musical and there is
Speaker 2: a love song and I start to hear something and
Speaker 2: I look and my father is crying, and he's trying
Speaker 2: to stifle it. And I can tell he doesn't want
Speaker 2: anyone to notice it, and I make noise, I rustle
Speaker 2: my program, and.
Speaker 1: I pile up my sweater so that i'm.
Speaker 2: Not he doesn't worry that I'm seeing him, and I'm
Speaker 2: trying to protect him from what I know will be
Speaker 2: my mother's contempt for you know, what she might call
Speaker 2: or think of this is kind of sloppy sentimentality. I'm protecting
Speaker 2: him from her judgment, and I'm protecting him from knowing
Speaker 2: that I know. And I think that's similar to you know,
Speaker 2: the letter. I never told him that I found that letter,
Speaker 2: never told him, never told him that I'd heard all
Speaker 2: these things about what he.
Speaker 1: Did during the marriage.
Speaker 2: Never ever told him, but he knew he had affairs,
Speaker 2: any of them.
Speaker 4: Again, you're you're in sixth grade. It's so young.
Speaker 3: I kept on as I was, as I was reading
Speaker 3: your book, thinking, oh, surely by now she's you know,
Speaker 3: a sophomore in high school. Like, No, this is all
Speaker 3: happening to a very a very young person.
Speaker 4: And you had to be so careful.
Speaker 3: You would hide any interest in popular culture or fashion,
Speaker 3: you would hide your body, and you're beginning to enter puberty,
Speaker 3: and you know, just wear the baggiest clothes you possibly could,
Speaker 3: and you know, so careful to just not rock his
Speaker 3: world in any way.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 2: It was certainly at this point that there was no
Speaker 2: hope that they were going to get back together, and
Speaker 2: that my father was asking for money for my mom
Speaker 2: really unusual and shamed in my mother's eyes, Like why
Speaker 2: would a man ask a woman for money?
Speaker 1: Like there was something very shameful about that.
Speaker 3: Your mother never sees how your father is living during
Speaker 3: this whole period of time.
Speaker 4: She never picks you up there. She doesn't want to know.
Speaker 1: Nope, And I don't want her to know.
Speaker 2: And I think maybe I should have told her, because
Speaker 2: then maybe she would have been more willing to.
Speaker 1: Give him the money.
Speaker 2: He did start to have apartments that we could sleep
Speaker 2: over in, you know, the first one there was no furniture.
Speaker 2: There was a room that we could sleep in, but
Speaker 2: he couldn't afford to buy us beds, and so we
Speaker 2: could sleep in sleeping bags on the floor. And I
Speaker 2: remember my back just killing and just not wanting to
Speaker 2: say anything. And you know, Claire and I going to
Speaker 2: this series of temporary crash pads or sublets that he had,
Speaker 2: and how dingy they were, and how almost unsafe some
Speaker 2: of them felt in the lobbies, you know, this was
Speaker 2: still the early eighties on some of these side streets,
Speaker 2: and just feeling I don't want my mother to know.
Speaker 2: I don't want my mother to look down on my father.
Speaker 2: And my father never spoke about my mother to us ever.
Speaker 2: If it came up in conversation, if we slipped and
Speaker 2: brought her up, he would always look stricken and so
Speaker 2: I would really.
Speaker 1: Try not to talk about her.
Speaker 2: And because it was New York City, we were able
Speaker 2: to go by ourselves.
Speaker 1: We didn't need to.
Speaker 2: Be dropped off or picked up because we'd walk, you know,
Speaker 2: five blocks here, take the bus. I mean we were
Speaker 2: taking the bus when we were eight and seven years old.
Speaker 2: Talk about young out on their own in the big city.
Speaker 2: So she didn't need to. But I could have asked
Speaker 2: her to, and she would have. But I didn't want
Speaker 2: her to know. I didn't want to expose my father
Speaker 2: to her judgment, and I didn't want her to feel guilty.
Speaker 1: I was protecting her too. I didn't want her to
Speaker 1: feel guilty.
Speaker 3: It's interesting that your father never spoke of her, but
Speaker 3: she did speak of your father, yes, around this time.
Speaker 3: Alice Miller's seminal book about surviving narcissistic parents, The Drama
Speaker 3: of the Gifted Child, has recently been published. Priscilla's mother
Speaker 3: gobbles it up along with millions of other readers, and
Speaker 3: she uses what she learns or thinks she learns about
Speaker 3: narcissism to pit Priscilla against her father, saying that he
Speaker 3: doesn't really love her because he's a narcissist and what
Speaker 3: he loves is the false self Priscilla has created for him.
Speaker 3: But what Priscilla's mother doesn't realize is that she too
Speaker 3: has been exhibiting narcissistic behavior by asking Priscilla to create
Speaker 3: and maintain a false self for her as well.
Speaker 2: I think that book. We really cannot overstate what an
Speaker 2: explosion that book made. And I remember friends of hers
Speaker 2: calling to ask if she'd read it and talking about
Speaker 2: it with all these friends, and she showed me some
Speaker 2: passages in the book, and she did it in a
Speaker 2: very loving, protective way, like, oh my gosh, this must
Speaker 2: have been so hard for you, and it's a lot
Speaker 2: of pressure to have to have a false self and
Speaker 2: all of this, and she's doing it in a way
Speaker 2: where it's like a light bulb moment for her.
Speaker 1: And my father was not a narcissist, he really was not.
Speaker 1: She got it wrong.
Speaker 2: She was wrong, and Alice Miller in a way got
Speaker 2: him wrong about that, in the sense that the dynamic
Speaker 2: that had been set up for me as a kid
Speaker 2: was almost like what we would call a codependent dynamic,
Speaker 2: where I was a parentified child that was taking care
Speaker 2: of my parents' needs.
Speaker 1: Both my mother and my father and.
Speaker 2: That's what she didn't see in that moment, Like I'm
Speaker 2: telling you something very disturbing, Isn't that in a way
Speaker 2: implying that I have to have a false self in
Speaker 2: this moment because I love my father. I adore my father,
Speaker 2: and our love was real. But I'm not going to
Speaker 2: cry about it in front of you when you're saying
Speaker 2: this to me. But I think that it was a
Speaker 2: moment where she was kind of thinking, oh, that's why
Speaker 2: I was so tired during my marriage to him, because
Speaker 2: it was really about her experience of him.
Speaker 1: And she was wrong about that too, in the sense
Speaker 1: that it wasn't a narcissist.
Speaker 2: It was more of a co dependency dynamic where he
Speaker 2: was insecure and she was a nurturer and a fixer
Speaker 2: and a solver, and she was taking care of him.
Speaker 1: That's exhausting for the code dependent.
Speaker 2: But I feel like that's what she was thinking, Oh, wow,
Speaker 2: life bulb moment, Now I get it. That's why I
Speaker 2: felt so tired when I was married to him, because
Speaker 2: he was so insecure and he was and also, you know,
Speaker 2: it occurs to me now. She was probably still trying
Speaker 2: to assuage her feelings of guilt about ending the marriage.
Speaker 2: And I think on a deep level, looking back, she
Speaker 2: did love my father. I mean, I've had so many
Speaker 2: family friends, family members tell me, you know, there was
Speaker 2: a love between them.
Speaker 1: It wasn't a romantic love on her part, but there
Speaker 1: was love.
Speaker 2: And I think she was still struggling with that guilt
Speaker 2: of breaking family and plunging this man into a deep despair, and.
Speaker 1: So it probably slaged her guilt to think, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: he didn't really love me. He was loving my false self,
Speaker 1: you see. And then she was extrapolating from that and saying, oh, wow,
Speaker 1: I felt a lot of pressure.
Speaker 2: Priscilla must have felt that too, And I don't want
Speaker 2: her to make the same mistake I did. I don't
Speaker 2: want her to end up with a very insecure, dependent
Speaker 2: man having to be stroking your ego and taking care
Speaker 2: of them all the time.
Speaker 3: Another way Priscilla indirectly takes care of her parents is
Speaker 3: by excelling academically. She knows this will make both her
Speaker 3: parents happy and even unite them in some way, since
Speaker 3: education is one of the few values they share. They
Speaker 3: don't want her to become an actress or a writer. No,
Speaker 3: they want her to be a scholar, so that's the
Speaker 3: path she takes. She even hears her mom and dad
Speaker 3: using friendly voices with one another, a rare occurrence these days,
Speaker 3: when they're discussing her report card. Now flash forward a
Speaker 3: few years to nineteen eighty six. Priscilla's father has just
Speaker 3: published his book, Faith, Sex Mystery. The book is dedicated
Speaker 3: to Priscilla and her sister Claire, but they don't read it.
Speaker 3: Often children of writers don't as a way to protect themselves.
Speaker 3: But try as they might, the girls cannot be completely
Speaker 3: shielded from the book or its contents. One day, they're
Speaker 3: on a flight together reading magazines. Claire is reading Vogue
Speaker 3: and in it there's a piece called Spiritual strip Tease.
Speaker 4: The piece is a.
Speaker 3: Takedown of their father's book. In the piece, the critic
Speaker 3: writes about masochistic fantasies, and it's just this horrifying download
Speaker 3: of information for the girls, even for Priscilla, who knew
Speaker 3: more than her sister did about their dad, but not
Speaker 3: this much. After Claire reads the piece, she wordlessly passes
Speaker 3: it to Priscilla. Here they were just thinking, they were
Speaker 3: casually reading Vogue, and then just like that, secrets about
Speaker 3: their father are uncovered.
Speaker 2: And I remember it had Cindy Crawford on the cover.
Speaker 2: It was it was our fun plane reading.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It was like the last place that you would ever
Speaker 2: think that you would find something like this.
Speaker 1: And you know the book.
Speaker 2: It was reviewed on the front cover of the New
Speaker 2: York Times Book Review, he was on NPR with Terry Gross.
Speaker 1: It was everywhere. But this was like a place where
Speaker 1: we thought maybe we'd be spared, maybe we wouldn't have
Speaker 1: to be dealing with it.
Speaker 2: And it quoted extensively and in a sort of disingenuous way,
Speaker 2: the worst passages as far as Claire would have been concerned, right,
Speaker 2: because she knew something about it having some masochism stuff
Speaker 2: in it, but not really and she hadn't read that letter,
Speaker 2: and we'd never filled her in along the way, and
Speaker 2: she's reading this quote and it's just horrifying. And I
Speaker 2: remember also we're both thinking, oh god, this is a
Speaker 2: really bad review.
Speaker 1: This is going to upset him.
Speaker 2: It's not fun to see be taken down in print.
Speaker 2: That review is still it haunts me. I ripped out
Speaker 2: the page and I bawled it up, and that I said, Declara, Oh, well,
Speaker 2: don't worry you know Daddie will never Readvoke, and there
Speaker 2: wasn't the internet then, so if he didn't have a
Speaker 2: physical copy of but he's never going to see this,
Speaker 2: He's never going.
Speaker 1: To hear about this.
Speaker 3: So and yet another way of kind of just burying
Speaker 3: something or absolutely protecting him and keeping it a secret.
Speaker 2: Yes, six months later, he meets Yasico. I get into
Speaker 2: Yale early that fall of eighty seven, and then I'm
Speaker 2: at Yale with him. I can have lunch with him
Speaker 2: or dinner with him every week. And he's doing wonderfully
Speaker 2: because he finally finds his permanent home on one hundred
Speaker 2: and eighth Street near Columbia. He's able to buy an apartment.
Speaker 2: Everything is going really well, and he's able to be
Speaker 2: very strong and supportive and wonderful for me.
Speaker 1: When I'm a student talk about my papers.
Speaker 2: We have these delightful lunches and dinners, and everything is good.
Speaker 3: I guess a blessing during that early time is that
Speaker 3: your father was in a much better place in his life.
Speaker 3: He had met and fallen in love with Yosco. It
Speaker 3: was complicated, she was married to somebody else, had a
Speaker 3: job as a professor there, so this was a hard
Speaker 3: won relationship, but a real you know, a real love story.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, genuine joy and happiness and you know, being
Speaker 3: with his soulmate. So there was a period of time
Speaker 3: there where you were worrying about other things, but you
Speaker 3: weren't worrying about your father.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 3: Though Priscilla is having tremendous academic success at Yale, at
Speaker 3: some point her nerves are afraid. She's suffering on mental
Speaker 3: and physical overload. For once, she cannot perform perfectly, so
Speaker 3: she steps away and takes an academic leave.
Speaker 1: I needed to hit pause.
Speaker 2: I started having a lot of health problems when I
Speaker 2: was in high school, like sinus infections that I just
Speaker 2: couldn't get rid of, strepped throat, all sorts of sort
Speaker 2: of upper respiratory stuff, and also aching stuff in my body.
Speaker 2: After my first year at Yale, I was in an
Speaker 2: honors program. I won the prize as the best student
Speaker 2: in this program, and I remember, you know, getting this
Speaker 2: letter that said that I won the prize and feeling, oh,
Speaker 2: my parents are going to be so thrilled about this,
Speaker 2: and every grade that I got back it was good,
Speaker 2: and every paper that I got back, Oh, I'm going
Speaker 2: to mimeograph this and give it to my parents and
Speaker 2: this is going to make them happy, and I just
Speaker 2: remember feeling empty inside. In that summer between what would
Speaker 2: have been freshman and sophomore year, I went back to
Speaker 2: school for my sophomore year. I was there for a
Speaker 2: few weeks. I got sick again. I was exhausted, and
Speaker 2: I felt listless in my studies, and I said, I've
Speaker 2: got to take some time off. And I think that
Speaker 2: was so the first moment where I stepped off that
Speaker 2: you know, good girl fast track, because part of being
Speaker 2: the good girl in my family was being precocious. That
Speaker 2: was part of the legend around me and the family
Speaker 2: that I read when I was three that.
Speaker 1: I got into Yale early admission that I was moving
Speaker 1: along in a smooth.
Speaker 2: Trajectory of success. And I was like no, And I
Speaker 2: was terrified to tell my parents, and they both actually
Speaker 2: took it really, really well. And that was the first
Speaker 2: indication it's okay to say I have needs, it's okay
Speaker 2: to say I need to slow down. And I went
Speaker 2: into Fordian analysis, and I.
Speaker 1: Think it was, you know, all of the residue of
Speaker 1: the split catching up with me.
Speaker 2: The problem was that the analyst that I went to
Speaker 2: was my mother's analyst.
Speaker 3: Yes, you heard that right, her mother's analyst. And it
Speaker 3: isn't just that doctor T is her mother's analyst, but
Speaker 3: also that Priscilla ends up knowing a lot about doctor.
Speaker 3: His wife is ill with cancer, and Priscilla, in what
Speaker 3: Freud might have had a field day analyzing, feels she
Speaker 3: needs to take care of him. And most amazingly, he
Speaker 3: regularly calls her by the wrong name, and she doesn't
Speaker 3: correct him because she doesn't want to hurt his feelings.
Speaker 2: He was such a kind, wonderful, wise man, and there
Speaker 2: was a lot that he told me that I held
Speaker 2: on to. He was the first person to say you
Speaker 2: are going to be a writer, and not an academic writer.
Speaker 2: His wife was dying. His wife lived in Florida.
Speaker 1: He was kind of flying up to do his sessions
Speaker 1: near Grand Central. He created a lot of famous writers.
Speaker 2: My mother sends a number of people to him, And
Speaker 2: I just knew he was like this wonderful.
Speaker 1: Man, and I just found myself thinking.
Speaker 2: Oh, my gosh, I don't want him to know that
Speaker 2: I'd noticed that he fell asleep. I mean, isn't it
Speaker 2: a repeat of this what I did with my dad?
Speaker 2: It's crazy.
Speaker 4: Did that occur to you at the time, No, definitely not.
Speaker 3: But Priscilla actually does get the help she needs from
Speaker 3: this doctor, and her time off from school turns.
Speaker 4: Out to be very restorative. She goes back to.
Speaker 3: Yale feeling much better. But the reprieve from worrying about
Speaker 3: her father is brief. That worry returns.
Speaker 2: I guess we could say it's almost like a return
Speaker 2: to having to worry about him. Is when in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety two, the summer I graduated from Yale. In nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety three, he marries also go in Japan and they're
Speaker 2: going to have another wedding in New York, so we
Speaker 2: didn't go to Japan for that little wedding.
Speaker 1: He has a very severe heart.
Speaker 2: Attack in Japan and they make him quit smoking, which
Speaker 2: is a good thing. But for a while it was
Speaker 2: not looking good and he was not in good health.
Speaker 2: But ultimately it becomes a positive because he's becoming healthier.
Speaker 1: He's going to lose weight, he's going to stop eating
Speaker 1: so unhealthily.
Speaker 2: He never took care of himself, he never exercised. He
Speaker 2: ate red meat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and bacon
Speaker 2: bits in between.
Speaker 3: Positive changes are happening for Priscilla as well. She's just
Speaker 3: finished her undergraduate degree and she decides to pursue a
Speaker 3: doctorate in English literature. During this time, she also meets
Speaker 3: and falls in love with a man named Richard. They
Speaker 3: get engaged and eventually marry, but as time moves forward,
Speaker 3: her worry about her father continues to underscore her life.
Speaker 2: So in nineteen ninety seven, when he went in to
Speaker 2: do his chock up on his heart, they took an
Speaker 2: X ray. I was in graduate school and they found
Speaker 2: that he had terminal lung cancer. I just turned twenty seven,
Speaker 2: I had been married for two years. My mother in
Speaker 2: law had died of cancer the year before, and my
Speaker 2: father is.
Speaker 1: Given seven months to live.
Speaker 2: At this point, in that moment, when we get this
Speaker 2: news that he has lung cancer that has metastasized to
Speaker 2: his brain, we thought, oh, he quit, he quit five
Speaker 2: years earlier, but it was too late.
Speaker 1: And those cigarettes that I always feared would kill him,
Speaker 1: we're going to kill him.
Speaker 3: And when you tell your mother that that he has
Speaker 3: terminal cancer, her response is a last dick, never took
Speaker 3: care of himself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, she's sort of like it was expected
Speaker 2: in a way, for her and for me.
Speaker 1: I mean, we just always had this feeling.
Speaker 2: But he had this nonchalance because his parents both lived
Speaker 2: well into their nineties. There was no cancer in the family,
Speaker 2: and he was one of those people who just banked
Speaker 2: on his good genes. And you know, he basically did
Speaker 2: everything a person could do if they want to get
Speaker 2: a heart attack.
Speaker 1: But it's still, even though.
Speaker 2: I had always feared it, it still felt unreal when
Speaker 2: it actually happened.
Speaker 1: And at this time, Danny, you know, when.
Speaker 2: We talk about secrets, I thought my father was seventy
Speaker 2: two years old at this time. My sister and I
Speaker 2: went to a doctor's appointment with him a couple of
Speaker 2: months after he was given this very grim prognosis, and
Speaker 2: this was like a second opinion doctor's appointment. It was
Speaker 2: sort of an intake appointment with an expert at Columbia Presbyterian.
Speaker 2: And the doctor was just running through, you know, a
Speaker 2: series of road questions and Claire and I are sitting
Speaker 2: there listening attentively, and the doctor says, so how old
Speaker 2: are you in my father's causes and it's weird, and
Speaker 2: his voice kind of cracks in a strange way, and
Speaker 2: he says seventy four, and Clara and I look at
Speaker 2: each other and I'm like, And then later when we're home,
Speaker 2: we go to Osico and we're worried because my father
Speaker 2: had lung cancer that was in the brain, and we think,
Speaker 2: oh my gosh, this is a symptom that he's really adult,
Speaker 2: that the cancer. You know, he's doing something to his brain.
Speaker 1: And we said, you know, he.
Speaker 2: Told me the doctor he was seventy four, and she says,
Speaker 2: she looks at us calmly and says, he is seventy four.
Speaker 1: And it's clear that she doesn't want to talk about it.
Speaker 1: It's clear that she knows that we didn't know that.
Speaker 2: She's asserting that this is the case, and it's a
Speaker 2: secret that he had shared with her, and this is
Speaker 2: very highly wrought secret. We call my mom, we called
Speaker 2: his friends. No one that we talked to knew this.
Speaker 2: My father in nineteen twenty five was like a date
Speaker 2: that he would say all the time, and it was
Speaker 2: like who's do in America?
Speaker 1: Richard Gilmot born nineteen twenty five. It was everywhere, and
Speaker 1: he would use it.
Speaker 2: He would refer to it frequently, and he had this
Speaker 2: whole thing about how he graduated from high school when
Speaker 2: he was sixteen.
Speaker 1: Because he was precocious.
Speaker 2: He went to college when he was sixteen, and you know,
Speaker 2: we made jokes about it.
Speaker 1: We're like, well, if you're going to lop ears off
Speaker 1: your age, why only do two?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: Why wouldn't you go for five or eight or ten?
Speaker 2: And we never mentioned it to him, We never acknowledged
Speaker 2: to him that we noticed it. He didn't seem aware
Speaker 2: that he was outing it in front of us, probably
Speaker 2: because he was just in so much ear about his
Speaker 2: cancer and just focusing on the doctor and he just
Speaker 2: didn't think about it in that moment.
Speaker 1: But we never discussed it with him.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's unsurprising because it's a pattern.
Speaker 4: You weren't going to start discussing those things at that
Speaker 4: late date.
Speaker 1: Yes, exactly.
Speaker 3: Despite the very grim prognosis, both Priscilla's life and her
Speaker 3: father's go on. Priscilla and her husband start a family.
Speaker 3: She's hired as an assistant professor at Yale and eventually
Speaker 3: moves to Vasser. She's thirty two years old, doing impressive
Speaker 3: work she isn't even sure she wants to be doing,
Speaker 3: and is the mother of a three year old and
Speaker 3: an infant and Priscilla's father. He surpasses every prediction and
Speaker 3: statistic and lives with stage four cancer for another nine years,
Speaker 3: and more secrets keep tumbling out, this time in the
Speaker 3: form of a manuscript in which he describes his sexual escapades,
Speaker 3: including sleeping with hundreds of women and several men.
Speaker 2: We were in Japan, staying in their apartment and my
Speaker 2: father was in the hospital at this point, and Nikki,
Speaker 2: my brother, was sleep being in my father's office. And
Speaker 2: one day he called me in and he said, and
Speaker 2: he was sort of gleefully swelling because my brother is gay,
Speaker 2: and you know, half of my parents' friends are gay,
Speaker 2: you know, And it was never a big deal. My
Speaker 2: brother came out in nineteen seventy eight. It was all
Speaker 2: completely fine. So there was no there would have been
Speaker 2: no reason for my father to hide this. Why would
Speaker 2: you have hidden this? Why is this something that's a secret.
Speaker 2: And Nicki says, look at this, you believe this, And
Speaker 2: we're looking at it, and we're thinking, who was it?
Speaker 1: Because my father was.
Speaker 2: In the Marines in World War Two, he was on
Speaker 2: an island in the South Pacific. We're thinking, was it
Speaker 2: was it a marine?
Speaker 1: Was it w.
Speaker 2: Johnon my father had a famous story about W. A.
Speaker 1: Todden made a pass at him. I was like, maybe
Speaker 1: he took W. A. Dodden up with that. You know,
Speaker 1: wasn't Harold Bronkey who.
Speaker 2: Was famous his good friends and then died of age right,
Speaker 2: So we're thinking who could this have been? And I've
Speaker 2: since Stanni asked many close friends because no one knows.
Speaker 1: We don't know.
Speaker 3: Priscilla's father dies at age eighty three. The Yale School
Speaker 3: of Drama hosts memorial and prior to this, a package
Speaker 3: arrives from Japan. It's from Yasica and it's addressed to
Speaker 3: both Priscilla and her sister Claire.
Speaker 1: It was a package of things that he had taken.
Speaker 2: So he ended up living permanently in Japan because he
Speaker 2: also had better health insurance than he had and he
Speaker 2: was at home in a hospital bed the last few
Speaker 2: years of his life. So when they sold the apartment
Speaker 2: in New York and moved to Japan, he took what
Speaker 2: he could. And this was a manila envelope that's had
Speaker 2: girls on it, and it was filled to bursting with
Speaker 2: photographs of us that had you could see the tape
Speaker 2: marks on the edges, and I remembered them hanging on
Speaker 2: walls of different apartments that he'd been in. It was
Speaker 2: envelopes that had our hair in them that said girls hair,
Speaker 2: programs from plays and shows that I'd been in, notes
Speaker 2: that I'd written him over the years, because I would
Speaker 2: often give him a note when I left after a
Speaker 2: lunch or at dinner with him, saying you know, I
Speaker 2: love you so much, Daddy, and don't worry, You're going
Speaker 2: to see us soon and all this, and it was
Speaker 2: just the evidence of our love for him, but also
Speaker 2: his love for us that he had kept everything. He
Speaker 2: had kept all this memorabilia, these tiny little.
Speaker 1: Notes, you know, on like almost like a post it
Speaker 1: note size.
Speaker 2: And he had this poem that I had written when
Speaker 2: I was nine, called Loneliness in that envelope as well.
Speaker 2: He also said, you know, this is the evidence of
Speaker 2: your father's great.
Speaker 1: Love for you.
Speaker 2: And maybe she said, Daddy's your daddy's great love for you.
Speaker 2: She always called him your daddy because that's what we
Speaker 2: called him. We never called him father, we never called
Speaker 2: him dad.
Speaker 1: We called him daddy always.
Speaker 3: Sometime after her father's death, Priscilla asks her mother to
Speaker 3: put her reasons for marrying her father down in writing,
Speaker 3: she yearns for clarity, if not closure, and Lynn sends
Speaker 3: Priscilla an which reads, why did I marry him? Well,
Speaker 3: he had a brilliant and refined mind, which I respected
Speaker 3: and admired. I knew he'd be an excellent father for
Speaker 3: you girls. Basically he was a kind and ethical man.
Speaker 2: It was something that I had been waiting for forty
Speaker 2: years for her to say to me.
Speaker 1: And I knew.
Speaker 2: About the brilliant and refined mind. I knew she felt that,
Speaker 2: and I had been told in various ways that she
Speaker 2: did think he would be an excellent father, although I
Speaker 2: hadn't heard enough of that since they split, so that
Speaker 2: was important.
Speaker 1: But basically he was a kind and ethical man.
Speaker 2: You know, I thought, thank you for finally acknowledging it.
Speaker 2: It wasn't that I needed to hear it because I
Speaker 2: doubted it. I always knew my father was a basically
Speaker 2: kind and ethical man.
Speaker 1: And you know, I had.
Speaker 2: Those moments when I was younger when I heard the
Speaker 2: secrets about his affairs with students, and I was absolutely
Speaker 2: disgusted and horrified by it. But as I grew and
Speaker 2: I came to understand the complexities of our parents that
Speaker 2: he was a human being, that he had failings, that
Speaker 2: he was in a terribly unhappy marriage to.
Speaker 1: Someone who didn't love him.
Speaker 2: And you know, another thing that my mother revealed to
Speaker 2: me when I was in college was that she had
Speaker 2: never been in love with my father, and that she
Speaker 2: had told my father that she wasn't in love with him,
Speaker 2: and he had asked her to marry him anyway, and
Speaker 2: he said, passion faiths, but companionship blasts. And when I
Speaker 2: figured that out, how terrible for my mother to be
Speaker 2: in a marriage to somebody she wasn't in love with.
Speaker 2: How terrible for my father to be in a marriage
Speaker 2: to someone he knew wasn't in love with him, and
Speaker 2: he was in love with her, and.
Speaker 1: He was medicating depression by smoking.
Speaker 2: He was medicating those feelings of inadequacy through affairs. You know,
Speaker 2: another thing that I think is important to say is
Speaker 2: that my father kept his sexuality secret from most people.
Speaker 2: And when he wrote that memoir where he acknowledged his sexuality,
Speaker 2: he wrote in the book about being unfaithful to his
Speaker 2: wives and how guilty he felt about it. He wrote
Speaker 2: about going to prostitutes to get them to do what
Speaker 2: the women his girlfriends and wives didn't want to do.
Speaker 1: I think that is what.
Speaker 2: Enabled him to find the woman that you described as
Speaker 2: his soulmate.
Speaker 1: He got over, to a large extent.
Speaker 2: The shame and the guilt. He wasn't keeping secrets anymore.
Speaker 2: He was telling the truth in a book. Now, it
Speaker 2: wasn't the complete growth because he was still supposedly born
Speaker 2: in nineteen twenty five when that book came out, but
Speaker 2: a lot of the secrets came into the light.
Speaker 1: And I think that's.
Speaker 2: What enabled him to get the confidence to be accepted
Speaker 2: and to meet and share with the Ostigo because she
Speaker 2: knew all his secrets, she knew about his age, she
Speaker 2: knew about the men because that was a book he
Speaker 2: was working on, and she was helping him with us,
Speaker 2: and he wanted.
Speaker 1: To publish that book.
Speaker 2: If he had not gotten so sick, perhaps that would
Speaker 2: have also been in a book that was published.
Speaker 3: And now it is right, that's right, that's right, in
Speaker 3: the fullness of time, Yes, now it is right. Here's
Speaker 3: Priscilla reading from her beautiful love letter to her complicated father.
Speaker 3: In this moment, she's a frightened child, awakened by a thunderstorm,
Speaker 3: being offered a gift.
Speaker 2: My father didn't give me a hug and a kiss
Speaker 2: and send me back to sleep.
Speaker 1: He brought me to the window.
Speaker 2: In the face of the unexpected, the frightening, that disorienting.
Speaker 2: He was a mad cap sportscaster, a wise stage and
Speaker 2: a builient enthusiast. As one arm embraced me, the other
Speaker 2: helped me face a world beyond him, a world of
Speaker 2: challenge and intensity and wonder.
Speaker 3: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zacour is
Speaker 3: the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
Speaker 3: If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
Speaker 3: please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
Speaker 3: on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
Speaker 3: eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
Speaker 3: find me on Instagram at Danny Rider. And if you'd
Speaker 3: like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
Speaker 3: check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
Speaker 3: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 3: to your favorite shows.