Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. One afternoon, I
Speaker 1: was listening to Derek DelGaudio, a master of sleight of hand,
Speaker 1: on NPR. He talked about secrets, their weight, their heft.
Speaker 1: He talked about how carrying them affects your breathing, your speech,
Speaker 1: your movements. You have to remember who knows what. You
Speaker 1: have to remember which versions of the stories you've told
Speaker 1: and to whom and when. If you tell the truth,
Speaker 1: there's nothing to keep straight, nothing to work at. The
Speaker 1: truth isn't easy, but it's simple. What I wanted from
Speaker 1: my husband was the truth. I asked for it, and
Speaker 1: I waited for it, and eventually I stopped waiting. What
Speaker 1: I was given was something different. It was shaped like,
Speaker 1: It's not what you think. It held the weight of
Speaker 1: You don't understand. How did I not see the heft?
Speaker 1: How did I not hear it? The question I keep
Speaker 1: asking myself is the same question we ask about someone
Speaker 1: who's good at sleight of hand? How did he do that?
Speaker 2: That's Maggie Smith, poet, writer, editor, and teacher. Maggie's is
Speaker 2: a story about secrecy and betrayal, deep inner knowing, groundedness,
Speaker 2: and grace. Ultimately, It's the story of a woman coming
Speaker 2: into her own. This episode was recorded in front of
Speaker 2: a live audience at the Miami Book Fair at Miami
Speaker 2: Dade College in Miami, Florida. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this
Speaker 2: is Family Secrets. The secrets that are kept from us,
Speaker 2: the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
Speaker 2: keep from ourselves. So much of your story has to
Speaker 2: do with the secrets that we keep from ourselves. There
Speaker 2: are other kinds of secrets within it, too, But that
Speaker 2: feeling of knowing and yet not being able to apprehend,
Speaker 2: not being able to quite touch what's really happening, because
Speaker 2: it's too scary, it's too frightening.
Speaker 3: It's too dangerous.
Speaker 4: But I want to start way back at the very beginning.
Speaker 4: But the question that I always start with in Family Secrets,
Speaker 4: which is tell me about the landscape of your childhood.
Speaker 4: There's a line in your book which is, if you
Speaker 4: opened me up, you'd find Ohio.
Speaker 1: It's true, Yeah, the heart of it all, I'll live
Speaker 1: in my hometown. Basically, I grew up in central Ohio,
Speaker 1: in the Columbus, Ohio area. I'm the oldest of three girls.
Speaker 1: I have two younger sisters each two years apart, so
Speaker 1: we're stairsteps. My parents still live in the house I
Speaker 1: grew up in, and I have Sunday dinner there every Sunday,
Speaker 1: except when I'm at the Miami Book Fair and I
Speaker 1: won't make it back in time for Sunday dinners. I
Speaker 1: had honestly a really traditional, blissfully boring childhood. You know,
Speaker 1: I was born in seventy seven. I'm a gen xer.
Speaker 1: I grew up in the eighties, your parents being able
Speaker 1: to reach you when you were out playing, so we
Speaker 1: would just sort of leave on our bikes in the morning,
Speaker 1: come back at meals kind of scuffed up, and that
Speaker 1: was pretty much it. I was bookish, as you can
Speaker 1: probably imagine, an introverted, and when I wasn't playing with
Speaker 1: my friends, I was either reading, listening to music, or
Speaker 1: doing jigsaw puzzles in my bedroom. I was not cool.
Speaker 3: It's so much better to get cooler later, wasn't it.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, I definitely did not peak early, let's
Speaker 1: just put it that way.
Speaker 4: So when you were in that sort of blissfully boring
Speaker 4: childhood and this very stable kind of extended family family situation,
Speaker 4: how did the feeling of that stability impact you as
Speaker 4: a child.
Speaker 1: Honestly, I think it was just sort of the air
Speaker 1: I breathed and the water I swam in, So I
Speaker 1: don't think I recognized it as anything special. Now, as
Speaker 1: an adult, I realized there's a sort of novelty to
Speaker 1: having almost my entire extended family live in the same place,
Speaker 1: and to all get together, and to have dinners thirteen
Speaker 1: people on the weekends. It's not the norm. I think
Speaker 1: it's not very twenty first century for sure, and maybe
Speaker 1: not very twentieth century in a lot of ways. But
Speaker 1: at the time it didn't seem strange to me, and
Speaker 1: in fact, it probably didn't prepare me well for what
Speaker 1: my own adult life would would look like.
Speaker 4: Did you ever think about leaving or did you always
Speaker 4: know that you would stay in Ohio?
Speaker 1: I tried. I guess I would like to be like, no,
Speaker 1: I'm so rooted. I never wanted to leave.
Speaker 3: I did.
Speaker 1: I considered MFA programs very far away from home, and
Speaker 1: then a fellowship kept me, kept me in Columbus at
Speaker 1: Ohio State, and since then, you know how it is.
Speaker 1: You stay someplace and you meet someone, and then you
Speaker 1: have kids, and then they're in school and then you
Speaker 1: have a mortgage, and then your parents start aging, and
Speaker 1: so I don't think when I was twenty, I didn't
Speaker 1: really necessarily imagine my self living in Columbus, Ohio when
Speaker 1: I was forty six, But here I am. I met
Speaker 1: my husband at Ohio Wesleyan actually, which is where I
Speaker 1: went to undergrad. I would have been nineteen or twenty.
Speaker 3: And you were both in a creative writing workshop, that's right.
Speaker 1: I think we had a couple of other classes together
Speaker 1: in the English department before that class, but that was
Speaker 1: the sort of smallest seminar, and that was around the
Speaker 1: time that we became good friends.
Speaker 4: And did you both know that you wanted futures as
Speaker 4: writers at that point?
Speaker 1: I knew when I was in college that I always
Speaker 1: wanted to write, and then I probably always would because
Speaker 1: I had been doing it for, you know, five or
Speaker 1: six years already, and it didn't seem like something I
Speaker 1: could quit even if I wanted to. I didn't know
Speaker 1: what my work would be, though, and in my mind
Speaker 1: it was still pretty separate. I need to find a
Speaker 1: job in the world eventually, and also I'm going to
Speaker 1: be a writer, and it's still kind of strange to me.
Speaker 1: That those things have braided together in the ways that
Speaker 1: they have, and I don't know what he thought he
Speaker 1: was going to do.
Speaker 3: It's interesting.
Speaker 4: I mean, being a writer is something that we are,
Speaker 4: not something that we aim for.
Speaker 3: It's not a career choice. I think.
Speaker 4: I don't think there's a writer out there who would say,
Speaker 4: you know, when they were a little kid, that they
Speaker 4: knew that they were going to build their life toward that,
Speaker 4: because how do you know how to do that?
Speaker 1: That seems terribly impractical. I'm a Midwesterner. That's not something
Speaker 1: we do.
Speaker 4: So in a way, it sounds like you initially replicate
Speaker 4: that kind of solid family history by choosing the person
Speaker 4: that you were going to be with very young, you know,
Speaker 4: very young for your generation, and sticking sticking to him.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean I really did think that what I was
Speaker 1: building would end up looking a lot like what my
Speaker 1: parents had in some ways and probably not in others,
Speaker 1: because I'm not my mother.
Speaker 3: Tell me a little bit about your mother.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, she's a firecracker. I love my mom.
Speaker 1: My mom is someone I talked to almost every day.
Speaker 1: She married my dad when she was twenty had me
Speaker 1: at twenty four. My sister at twenty six, my other
Speaker 1: sister at twenty eight. She was a stay at home
Speaker 1: mom until we were old enough to get off the
Speaker 1: school bus and get ourselves into the house, and so
Speaker 1: she went back to work at some point, but even
Speaker 1: then she was still the mom. So if I was sick,
Speaker 1: she took care of me. If I needed food, she
Speaker 1: made it, If there was laundry to be done, Mom
Speaker 1: was the person you TalkTalk to. You if you need
Speaker 1: a permission for something, you clear it with Mom. She
Speaker 1: was sort of the CEO. And my dad went to
Speaker 1: work every day and was sort of probably blissfully unaware
Speaker 1: of most of what was going on. And so if
Speaker 1: I wanted to do something I wasn't supposed to do,
Speaker 1: I'd ask Dad, right like Mom probably wouldn't say no
Speaker 1: because she knows, but Dad doesn't know, so maybe Dad'll
Speaker 1: clear me for this. So he was, I mean, hilarious
Speaker 1: and I'm very close to my dad, but a very
Speaker 1: classic arrangement where the caretaking was very much my mother's
Speaker 1: job and not my father's. Like I don't think he
Speaker 1: changed a diaper until he had grandkids, and that was
Speaker 1: a big deal when he finally did.
Speaker 4: But when you say that you imagined a life that
Speaker 4: was somewhat like your mom's but not But you're not
Speaker 4: your mom. I think part of what we're talking about
Speaker 4: here is that your mom really wanted That was what
Speaker 4: she wanted. Yes, that was that she wanted to be
Speaker 4: a wife and a mom and to raise this family.
Speaker 4: And so there was nothing conflicted about that.
Speaker 1: No, nothing conflicted at all. I mean, if you asked
Speaker 1: my mom today, what did you want to be when
Speaker 1: you grew up, she would say a mom and she
Speaker 1: got to do it. So there wasn't that kind of
Speaker 1: push and pull. And when she went back to work,
Speaker 1: it was because she needed to and because we were
Speaker 1: at school all day. But it wasn't because she had
Speaker 1: some grand design on a career. You know, she's recently
Speaker 1: retired and is so happy hanging out with her girlfriends
Speaker 1: during the day and like traveling and doing all these things.
Speaker 1: And I wish she had just been able to do
Speaker 1: more of that. But yeah, I thought I could copy
Speaker 1: paste my childhood into my home and have a completely
Speaker 1: different kind of career. By the time my mom had
Speaker 1: three kids at twenty eight, and I had just published
Speaker 1: my first book to finish graduate school and didn't have
Speaker 1: kids and was just getting married then. So the idea
Speaker 1: that I could just replicate that template and sort of
Speaker 1: overlay it on my life all these years later now
Speaker 1: seems a little naive, But at the time I was like, sure,
Speaker 1: it can look exactly like that, except I'll be doing
Speaker 1: all these other things too.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: Well, it's such a classic and such a relatable story,
Speaker 4: I think that because how else do we know, right,
Speaker 4: I mean, we can only know what we were raised
Speaker 4: with and what our hopes and dreams might be. And
Speaker 4: why can't we quote unquote have it all?
Speaker 1: Have it all?
Speaker 2: Maggie and her husband embark on their lives together. She
Speaker 2: finishes graduate school, he goes to law school. Maggie's first
Speaker 2: book comes out, and they move into a house painted
Speaker 2: the very optimistic color of Perrywinkle blue.
Speaker 1: I just actually painted the house charcoal gray. It's not
Speaker 1: Perrywinkle anymore. So it's like now it's sort of memorialized
Speaker 1: as a Periwinkle house.
Speaker 3: There's a metaphor in there somewhere.
Speaker 1: Isn't there. Yeah, And there's a metaphor in everything.
Speaker 2: True.
Speaker 4: Tell me about the search for the house, because you
Speaker 4: write about that in this book, And there's something that's
Speaker 4: so lovely and hopeful about looking for the place that
Speaker 4: you're going to just start your life as a young adult.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think my daughter Violet was one when we were
Speaker 1: looking for houses because we'd been renting and the woman
Speaker 1: we were renting from was putting the house on the
Speaker 1: market and we couldn't afford to buy that house. It
Speaker 1: was big Victorian and German village in this historic neighborhood,
Speaker 1: and so we thought, Okay, now we have to buy
Speaker 1: the house in the school district where we think we're
Speaker 1: going to send her to kindergarten, even though she's one,
Speaker 1: because that's how you do it, right, you do the thing.
Speaker 1: And I thought, well, I still want to live in
Speaker 1: a walkable neighborhood because all these years we've lived in
Speaker 1: neighborhoods we can walk to a bookstore, a coffee shop,
Speaker 1: a post office. You know. I didn't want to replicate
Speaker 1: that part of my childhood and be out in the
Speaker 1: suburbs and have to get in the car to go anywhere.
Speaker 1: And so it came down to two things. One, we
Speaker 1: visited this house on this street, and the house is
Speaker 1: a very beloved money pit that I continue to work
Speaker 1: on year after year earmarking and moving things around, like
Speaker 1: is it the bathroom year or the roof year. But
Speaker 1: I was completely charmed by it because there are like
Speaker 1: thirty four windows in my house. It's all glass. The
Speaker 1: whole street is a tunnel of sycamores or London plane trees,
Speaker 1: which are kind of cousins, and in the summer they
Speaker 1: make this arch of green and so it looks like
Speaker 1: you're driving down this tunnel of trees. And it seems like,
Speaker 1: of course, such a poetic thing to do to buy
Speaker 1: a money pit of a house on a street with
Speaker 1: a tunnel of sycamore trees. But that's exactly what we did.
Speaker 1: And we also chose that house because it's Caddy corner
Speaker 1: across the street from one of my best friends. I
Speaker 1: love the house. It's just home. It's a constant project,
Speaker 1: but there's lots of light and lots of trees and
Speaker 1: friendly dogs and then albino squirrel. And I know it
Speaker 1: sounds like I'm snow white. It's not that ucolic. You know.
Speaker 1: Things are constantly breaking, but I love it.
Speaker 2: We'll be right back. Prior to this big hopeful move,
Speaker 2: Maggie and her husband are still renting their home in
Speaker 2: German Village when Violet is born. After Violet's birth, Maggie
Speaker 2: has an extremely difficult time. She doesn't even realize what
Speaker 2: plagues her postpartum depression until she has it for the
Speaker 2: second time years later.
Speaker 1: I had pretty serious postpartum depression after Violet was born,
Speaker 1: and we lived in the house in German Village then,
Speaker 1: and I was just a shell of a human being.
Speaker 1: I actually cut my maternity leave short because I couldn't
Speaker 1: cope anymore. I actually chose to go back and sit
Speaker 1: in a cubicle to just have a different kind of
Speaker 1: day than I was having with a colicky child feeling
Speaker 1: that bad.
Speaker 4: So I wonder, Maggie, you know, is in not knowing,
Speaker 4: which I think is so true of people who are
Speaker 4: suffering from something that they haven't experienced before. The instinct
Speaker 4: is to think it's my baby's colloquy, or I'm impatient,
Speaker 4: or there must be something wrong with me that I'm
Speaker 4: not handling this better, and not to go to the
Speaker 4: place of self compassion of maybe there really is something
Speaker 4: going on that isn't my fault.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's right. I remember at one point,
Speaker 1: and maybe it was my mother or one of my
Speaker 1: sisters said, you don't talk about any of this with
Speaker 1: any joy. You seem miserable and stressed out. And I mean,
Speaker 1: granted I wasn't sleeping, but no parent sleeps, and a
Speaker 1: lot of them still seem okay. And it didn't occur
Speaker 1: to me that the way I was feeling was any
Speaker 1: different from what anyone else was feeling. And one of them,
Speaker 1: I remember, said to me, you need to go to
Speaker 1: your doctor, like this isn't normal to feel this way,
Speaker 1: and I remember saying something like there's no pill for
Speaker 1: no sleep and a baby with acid reflux and colic
Speaker 1: and a dairy allergy, like that's just my life and
Speaker 1: there's nothing that anyone can do to make it any different.
Speaker 1: But of course that was me speaking from a place
Speaker 1: of not being well. And I know now that no,
Speaker 1: those material aspects of my life would not have changed,
Speaker 1: and probably if I had taken a bit of something
Speaker 1: prescribed to me by a medical professional, I would have
Speaker 1: been able to manage those bits better, because I then did.
Speaker 1: When my son was.
Speaker 3: Born, and that was also a year of not writing.
Speaker 1: It was a whole year of not writing, and I
Speaker 1: think about that, I'm like, well, no wonder I was depressed.
Speaker 1: I had a baby. It didn't go the way I
Speaker 1: thought it would. I thought, where's my bundle of joy?
Speaker 1: This child screams at me all the time. I feel
Speaker 1: like screaming all the time, but have the decency not to.
Speaker 1: The poems are not happening. My husband is in law school,
Speaker 1: and that's very demanding on his time. Even having family support,
Speaker 1: even being in a place where I had lots of
Speaker 1: people checking on me and coming over, bringing soup and
Speaker 1: doing all the things. I couldn't get to a place
Speaker 1: where anything was cooking up there for a year.
Speaker 4: Which is a vicious cycle, right, because I think for writers,
Speaker 4: for poets, that feeling of It's one of my favorite
Speaker 4: quotes from Joan Didion in her essay y I write,
Speaker 4: if I had the remotest access to my own mind,
Speaker 4: I never would have become a writer.
Speaker 3: I write in order to understand.
Speaker 4: What I think, what I feel, what I fear. And
Speaker 4: there's no other path, there's no other way to get
Speaker 4: at that. So to be feeling all that and not
Speaker 4: have the tool to not be the instrument of being
Speaker 4: able to do that kind of work is just a
Speaker 4: prescription for disaster.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think about that now. And I'm like, why
Speaker 1: wasn't I even journaling through that time? And I really wasn't.
Speaker 1: The only writing I think I even have to this
Speaker 1: day from that first year are lists, like nerotic lists
Speaker 1: of when she slept or didn't sleep, what she ate,
Speaker 1: and how much the color of her poop, because this
Speaker 1: is what we do with newborns, you know. I just
Speaker 1: was sort of like looking for patterns in anything she did,
Speaker 1: thinking that if I can just find this pattern that,
Speaker 1: like if she eats this and this, then she'll sleep,
Speaker 1: if she does this and this, if I do this
Speaker 1: then this, looking for some way to make sense of
Speaker 1: it all. And it was just lists and charts and
Speaker 1: nothing of any import really.
Speaker 4: You know, in reading your book, I was experiencing it
Speaker 4: as this kind of slow erosion of identity, of intimacy,
Speaker 4: of both intimacy in your marriage but intimacy with yourself.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So there's this, there's this period of which you go
Speaker 4: through this postpartum depression. Then you move into the Periwinkle
Speaker 4: House and you suffer two miscarriages. Yeah, in trying to
Speaker 4: have another child and for Violet to have a sibling.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And of course I didn't know until after my
Speaker 1: son was born, and I had postpartum depression again. I thought,
Speaker 1: what are the odds? And he was colicky again and
Speaker 1: had asked reflux, and I thought, what are the odds
Speaker 1: that lightning will strike twice? Surely it will be different
Speaker 1: the second time. And it was not. And I only
Speaker 1: found out later that, you know, miscarriage is a huge
Speaker 1: sort of predisposing condition for postpartum because of course it is.
Speaker 1: I mean, being pregnant three times in a year and
Speaker 1: a half does pretty wild things to your hormones and
Speaker 1: also your grieving and terrified, and so the even the
Speaker 1: sort of joy of pregnancy of even finally getting pregnant
Speaker 1: and thinking is this going to stick? Is this going
Speaker 1: to happen? I never relaxed that entire you know, ten months,
Speaker 1: I never relaxed. Every day I woke up and thought,
Speaker 1: this is the day. There's not going to be a heartbeat,
Speaker 1: this is the day. There's going to be blood, this
Speaker 1: is the day. And so it really it changed me
Speaker 1: in ways I probably can't even articulate or understand myself.
Speaker 1: It made me a very fearful person. I didn't trust
Speaker 1: my body, and I didn't trust my mind. You know,
Speaker 1: I didn't know what kind of mom I would be
Speaker 1: the second time around, because I knew what happened the
Speaker 1: first time, and so when rhet was born, it didn't
Speaker 1: take very long for things to go downhill. And the
Speaker 1: difference was I went to the doctor and it got better.
Speaker 1: And that also gave me a little bit of regret
Speaker 1: I would say about what didn't happen the first time,
Speaker 1: because I thought, God, I didn't have to feel that way.
Speaker 1: I didn't have to go through that.
Speaker 4: There's a point where you realize that you become more
Speaker 4: mom than wife. And it was also a period. You
Speaker 4: didn't write this, but it was my sense that you
Speaker 4: became more mom than poet, more mom than Maggie.
Speaker 1: Yes, that became my primary identity. And I think there
Speaker 1: are probably people listening who can relate to that sort
Speaker 1: of eclipsing of the self that happens, particularly when your
Speaker 1: children are small and need you for everything, including food,
Speaker 1: like you are the person keeping them alive, and that
Speaker 1: kind of daily, ongoing responsibility sort of shoves everything else
Speaker 1: into the margins of the page, I suppose, And of
Speaker 1: course I think this happens in marriages. You know some
Speaker 1: of the and I you know, I think in general
Speaker 1: my writing and my children are the greatest blessings of
Speaker 1: my life. I feel both of them are sort of
Speaker 1: miraculous to me. I in some ways have no idea
Speaker 1: how that all happened. I mean, I know how it happened,
Speaker 1: but I really in some ways don't. Like these human
Speaker 1: beings live here now in my house and have their
Speaker 1: own personalities in their own lives, and these pieces of
Speaker 1: writing like come to me, like occur to me, and
Speaker 1: then grow and unfold, and all of this still seems
Speaker 1: very much like magic to me. That the greatest blessings
Speaker 1: of my life. And I think they're also the things
Speaker 1: that were hardest on my partnership in a lot of ways,
Speaker 1: and probably because of the demands on my time right
Speaker 1: and not just but bandwidth.
Speaker 2: During these years of young motherhood when Maggie's kids are little,
Speaker 2: she has a job as an editor. Her husband is
Speaker 2: working long hours as an associate in a law firm.
Speaker 2: There's not a lot of time for her real work,
Speaker 2: which is writing poems. She writes whenever she can grab
Speaker 2: the time, in coffee shops, late at night, in the
Speaker 2: school pickup line, the car. One day, when Violet and
Speaker 2: Redd are seven and three, Maggie writes a poem titled
Speaker 2: good Bones, and that poem changes everything.
Speaker 1: I had a preschooler who was going off to part
Speaker 1: time preschool a couple days a week where I could
Speaker 1: get a little writing done, and I think I was
Speaker 1: in either kindergarten or first grade at that point, so
Speaker 1: she was gone all day so I could get a
Speaker 1: little bit more done. I was working from home. I
Speaker 1: had quit my job and was freelancing, so I was
Speaker 1: still working as an editor, but I was doing it
Speaker 1: from my house, so as long as Rhett was at preschool,
Speaker 1: I had a little bit of space. And that's around
Speaker 1: the time that I wrote Good Bones.
Speaker 4: It also strikes me that good Bones, as is true
Speaker 4: of other of your poems, is about being a mother.
Speaker 4: It was the gift of being a mother meets the
Speaker 4: gift of being a poet.
Speaker 1: I couldn't have written that poem without them. Really, anything
Speaker 1: I've written since they were born, I couldn't have written
Speaker 1: without them, in part because some of it's actually collaborative work,
Speaker 1: like they will give me the idea, they will give
Speaker 1: me a line of dialogue or a metaphor. But also
Speaker 1: they've changed who I am as a person. So the
Speaker 1: work that comes out of me since they've been in
Speaker 1: the world is work that they made possible, which is
Speaker 1: pretty wild to think about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is and beautiful.
Speaker 1: Thanks kids, I'll forgive you that colic. Yeah, they're like,
Speaker 1: where's our allowance? Where are the residuals? Mom? Good Bones
Speaker 1: was published online in June of twenty sixteen. I had
Speaker 1: submitted it the year before it was rejected a few places.
Speaker 1: A journal named Waxwing picked it up, and then they
Speaker 1: did what journals do, which is slated for later publication.
Speaker 1: So I don't even think I knew exactly when it
Speaker 1: was coming out. It was just like spring or summer
Speaker 1: of next year, so I forgot about it. It came
Speaker 1: out that week in June, and that was the week
Speaker 1: of the Pulse nightclub massacre, and that same week in
Speaker 1: England Brexit madness was picking up, and a member of Parliament,
Speaker 1: Joe Cox, who was a young mother of young children herself,
Speaker 1: was murdered in northern England that same week, and so
Speaker 1: the poem was published online, not in a print magazine.
Speaker 1: And because it was published online the week that two
Speaker 1: terrible things happened and two different continents, people started sharing
Speaker 1: it and I it just absolutely caught and took off
Speaker 1: in ways that I mean. I was pushing a stroller
Speaker 1: around my neighborhood and the BBC was reaching out. I
Speaker 1: didn't have an agent, I didn't have media training. I
Speaker 1: just had a cell phone, and like a non napping
Speaker 1: three year old, I really didn't know what to do
Speaker 1: with it. It was the strangest lightning strike still really
Speaker 1: of my life.
Speaker 4: And it just kept building and building. At one point,
Speaker 4: you're told that Meryl Streep read it at a benefit.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I found that out because my now friend say
Speaker 1: Joe tweeted, like, Yo, Maggie, Meryl Streep just read good
Speaker 1: Bones at the Academy of American Poets gala at Lincoln Center.
Speaker 1: And I had walked into my house and looked at
Speaker 1: my phone and thought, I'm sorry, who did what? I'm
Speaker 1: sure actually that was a lot more colorful language that
Speaker 1: was used, but I was like, I'm sorry, my words
Speaker 1: were in MARYL. Streep's perfect mouth, in that voice. I
Speaker 1: mean again, I'm a poet, working a regular job, parenting
Speaker 1: two kids, living in Central Ohio. Like, I just can't
Speaker 1: stress enough how outside of the literary world I felt
Speaker 1: it was incredibly bizarre and then it was on Madam's Secretary, Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean.
Speaker 3: It was just it took on a life of its own.
Speaker 1: It took on a life of its own, and I
Speaker 1: would meet people and they would say, oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: I love your poem, and I had the sense not
Speaker 1: to say which one, but it became. I mean, I
Speaker 1: joke now that it's hard to give a reading and
Speaker 1: not read Good Bones because it's kind of my free bird. Right.
Speaker 4: What was it like in your marriage during that time?
Speaker 4: You do at one point write that your marriage was
Speaker 4: never the same after that, meaning after the viral sensation
Speaker 4: of Good Bones.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that poem changed my life in both beautiful and
Speaker 1: terrible ways, which is funny because the poem itself is
Speaker 1: about the world being sort of equal parts beautiful and terrible,
Speaker 1: and the impact that that poem had on my life
Speaker 1: was equal parts beautiful and terrible.
Speaker 3: It had a.
Speaker 1: Beautiful impact on my writing life and a pretty terrible
Speaker 1: impact on my personal life. Maybe it's just that the
Speaker 1: sudden attention and the sort of invitation or opportunity to
Speaker 1: lean into my writing life and to spend more time
Speaker 1: on writing, and maybe that was the crux. You know,
Speaker 1: suddenly I can come to a book festival. Suddenly I'm
Speaker 1: getting invited to go to a university to give a
Speaker 1: reading or teach for a week someplace. Suddenly I had
Speaker 1: a lecture agent, you know, who would help get me
Speaker 1: speaking engagements or send me around the country or the
Speaker 1: world to get to be a writer in the world,
Speaker 1: not just at my local Starbucks between naps. It was
Speaker 1: such a blessing, but it also meant as a primary caregiver,
Speaker 1: not being available all the time, right, and needing to
Speaker 1: kind of recalibrate some things in my relationship to say, like, hey, okay,
Speaker 1: kind of like my mom was a stay at home
Speaker 1: mom for a while, right, and then eventually she went
Speaker 1: back to work. But she did that by choice because
Speaker 1: we weren't sort of in her hair as much anymore.
Speaker 1: I still had at least one child who was very
Speaker 1: young at the time and who was not in full
Speaker 1: time daycare, and so getting away was a lot of
Speaker 1: a kind of a logistical nightmare for me Personally.
Speaker 4: You were going to be the primary caregiver and write
Speaker 4: your poems on the side, and you know, this was
Speaker 4: sort of the shape of your life that suddenly got disrupted.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this wasn't the deal, right, This wasn't the deal,
Speaker 1: Like the deal was one of us goes to work
Speaker 1: and the other one works but also manages the children.
Speaker 1: And if that's not happening, then that's not the deal.
Speaker 1: And I think that's part of the strain. And yet
Speaker 1: when I think about it, if I'm really honest with
Speaker 1: myself and I do try, I do try to be
Speaker 1: I think, Okay, well, what if I had traveled for
Speaker 1: pharmaceutical sales. What if it had been incredibly lucrative, which frankly,
Speaker 1: poetry isn't. What if it had taken me out of
Speaker 1: my home on a regular basis but had nothing to
Speaker 1: do with art making, had nothing to do with writing,
Speaker 1: It had nothing to do with like being on stage
Speaker 1: or signing books or doing anything that seemed fun or
Speaker 1: attention seeking. Maybe it still would have been a problem
Speaker 1: because it would have been an inconvenience that I don't
Speaker 1: think it would have been the same kind of problem.
Speaker 1: I think it was the perfect storm of a dream
Speaker 1: being realized and not being able to sort of hold
Speaker 1: up my end of the bargain quote unquote as far
Speaker 1: as how much caregiving I could do on a daily basis.
Speaker 2: We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 2: Maggie's husband isn't prepared to do some of the caretaking
Speaker 2: without her. Once, when she's at a book festival, he
Speaker 2: calls to tell her she needs to come home. Rhet
Speaker 2: has a fever. Maggie, more mom than poet, tries to
Speaker 2: get a last minute flight home, but she can't. Her
Speaker 2: husband is left to muddle through this one on his own.
Speaker 2: This is just one instance in which the rift between
Speaker 2: Maggie and her husband deepens. Something's in the air, something's
Speaker 2: not right. A while later, when Maggie is back home,
Speaker 2: her family is asleep and she's awake. Downstairs, she sees
Speaker 2: her husband's briefcase just sitting there. He's just come home
Speaker 2: from a business trip. She's never done this before, but
Speaker 2: something tells her to go over to that briefcase and
Speaker 2: take a look, so she does.
Speaker 1: I hate that I did that. It's hard to admit
Speaker 1: that you snooped into someone else's personal belongings that didn't
Speaker 1: belong to you. Although I don't know, I suppose if
Speaker 1: I had an open bag in my house, which I
Speaker 1: often do now, my kids would probably be rifling through
Speaker 1: it for gum or post it notes. Or something. So
Speaker 1: maybe there's not quite the expectation of privacy in a
Speaker 1: home where you have stuff lying around all the time.
Speaker 4: But you know what, snooping makes such an appearance on
Speaker 4: this podcast.
Speaker 3: In so many as in life.
Speaker 4: So many episodes, to the point where I had to
Speaker 4: at a certain point thing to myself, why is this
Speaker 4: constantly coming up? Does everyone just simply snoop?
Speaker 1: Do?
Speaker 3: Is it to snoop? You know, to be human as
Speaker 3: to snoop?
Speaker 4: I actually think when there is a secret that's somewhere
Speaker 4: in in the atmosphere, that's lurking somewhere, we know it
Speaker 4: without being able to sink it, and it's almost a
Speaker 4: self protective thing to do. I'm not going to find
Speaker 4: this out, this thing that I don't even know what
Speaker 4: it is. I just know that there's something that I
Speaker 4: need to know, and that seems to be the impulse.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's sort of like Spidey sense, you know,
Speaker 1: like there's just some kind of prickle that tells you
Speaker 1: something's off. Like I don't know what it is, but
Speaker 1: something feels off, and likely there's no answer to the
Speaker 1: offness in this bag, but it's here, So I'm going
Speaker 1: to look and see if there's an answer to the offness.
Speaker 3: There was, and there was.
Speaker 1: There was an answer to the offness in the bag.
Speaker 3: So what did you find in the bag?
Speaker 1: I found a postcard addressed to a woman's name with
Speaker 1: an address, so it had not been sent, like it
Speaker 1: was ready to mail, but it had not been sent
Speaker 1: in my husband's handwriting, addressed to a woman's name in
Speaker 1: the place he had just visited and had been visiting
Speaker 1: frequently for work. And then I kept looking because I thought, well,
Speaker 1: maybe there's more glutton for punishment. And I do this.
Speaker 1: I keep a book in my bag. I like to
Speaker 1: have a notebook, and so did he. And so I
Speaker 1: opened the blank book and sort of flipping through the pages,
Speaker 1: and I flipped to the last entry and read basically
Speaker 1: a kind of journal entry about taking a walk with
Speaker 1: this particular person and being in her house. And so
Speaker 1: I thought, okay, this is actually happening. And at first
Speaker 1: I was telling myself, maybe these are ideas for like
Speaker 1: a piece of writing, you know, like maybe it's a
Speaker 1: novel start or a play, or this is a short story.
Speaker 1: Of course it was not a short story.
Speaker 4: And there was also a pine cone that he had
Speaker 4: brought back with him for your kids.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so Rhet likes to collect nature treasures. So on
Speaker 1: his last business trip, he had brought a pine cone
Speaker 1: home as a souvenir, and the postcard and the entry
Speaker 1: both referenced the pine cone, and so then I knew
Speaker 1: that the pine cone was actually something picked up with
Speaker 1: this other individual and then brought home to our house.
Speaker 3: So in that moment, what did it feel like in
Speaker 3: your body?
Speaker 1: I don't know that I was in my body. Honestly,
Speaker 1: I have such a hazy recollection. I mean I remember
Speaker 1: standing there, I remember finding it, I remember going upstairs
Speaker 1: like I have almost sort of polaroid or you know,
Speaker 1: like flashes, almost like jump cuts in a film, but
Speaker 1: nothing I could actually stitch together. And I'm sure that
Speaker 1: is just protective, like we're just not gonna catalog all
Speaker 1: of that in great detail for reasons that make perfect sense.
Speaker 4: So in that state, you went upstairs and you woke
Speaker 4: him up, and.
Speaker 3: What did you share with him in that moment?
Speaker 1: I think I just yelled something like who is fill
Speaker 1: in name on postcard? I brought up the postcard that night,
Speaker 1: but did not tell him that I had looked in
Speaker 1: the notebook, in part because I just really what I
Speaker 1: wanted was for him to tell me the truth. And
Speaker 1: so I kind of held that back and thought, i'll
Speaker 1: know if he's telling me the truth if he discloses,
Speaker 1: because now I can ask questions based on what I
Speaker 1: know from these page and if he doesn't tell me
Speaker 1: the truth, I'll know. I mean, I watch a lot
Speaker 1: of true crime, so I just thought, now i'll know,
Speaker 1: like I'm going to know if I'm being if there's
Speaker 1: some gas lighting here, if there's some something else going
Speaker 1: on here. And so I didn't bring up the journal,
Speaker 1: and he didn't bring up the journal, and so then
Speaker 1: I just thought, you know, we'll get to that eventually.
Speaker 1: But the next day I did the same thing. I
Speaker 1: repeated my actions. I went back into the bag. The
Speaker 1: postcard was gone. Who knows, maybe it was mailed. I
Speaker 1: really don't know. I don't know whatever happened to that.
Speaker 1: And when I opened the pages of the journal, I
Speaker 1: flipped to the last entry, and the pages were gone,
Speaker 1: like you could see where there had been pages, and
Speaker 1: they had been not ripped out, but like surgically removed,
Speaker 1: like with the exact o knife.
Speaker 2: Now it's Maggie who is keeping a secret. She doesn't
Speaker 2: tell her husband she's seen those pages that she knows,
Speaker 2: she doesn't say anything at all. The temperature at home
Speaker 2: is chili. Whenever they do communicate, it's about the kids.
Speaker 2: They go to couple's therapy, but even there they refrain
Speaker 2: from talking about the enormous elephant in the room. Maggie
Speaker 2: does not tell the couple's therapist what she's found out.
Speaker 2: This might be the most logical space for an issue
Speaker 2: like this to surface, but still it remains buried. Instead,
Speaker 2: with their therapist, they discuss all the rudimentary baseline marital tension,
Speaker 2: which Maggie's husband believes to be effectively her fault.
Speaker 1: We go to counseling because I found these things. And
Speaker 1: then in counseling we talk about that he's unhappy because
Speaker 1: my career is taking up too much space, and I
Speaker 1: don't bring up the fact that we're actually there for
Speaker 1: this other reason, and we don't talk about it at all.
Speaker 3: So what really struck me about that?
Speaker 1: I'm asking because I'm just like, that's absurd.
Speaker 4: Like the doubleness of the secret keeping here. So you
Speaker 4: discover a secret in the form of this postcard and
Speaker 4: this journal entry, and then you keep the secret your husband,
Speaker 4: and you don't speak about it. You don't tell your mother,
Speaker 4: who you're very close to, You barely tell any friends.
Speaker 4: You certainly don't tell your children, and you don't tell
Speaker 4: the therapist. No, what were you waiting for? Or maybe
Speaker 4: another way of putting it is, when we don't speak
Speaker 4: of something of that magnitude, usually thrumbing underneath that is.
Speaker 1: Fear. Fear. Yeah, I think I was trying to keep
Speaker 1: it intact, and so if I didn't tell my mother
Speaker 1: what was going on, then she would never find out
Speaker 1: what had happened. And therefore, when I I fixed it,
Speaker 1: because I could fix it, I could fix it and
Speaker 1: then she'd never have to know and it would never
Speaker 1: affect their relationship. Because I really thought I could fix
Speaker 1: it by fixing my own behavior. And if I fixed
Speaker 1: it by fixing my own behavior, then no one would
Speaker 1: ever have to know, and it wouldn't ripple, and we
Speaker 1: could just go back to life being fine, and then
Speaker 1: no one would have any hard feelings or ill will.
Speaker 1: I didn't tell the counselor because I thought it would
Speaker 1: anger him, my ex husband. I just remember thinking, I
Speaker 1: feel like I'm holding this live grenade of all of
Speaker 1: this knowledge, and if I speak up, it's like pulling
Speaker 1: the pin.
Speaker 3: And if I just.
Speaker 1: Stay small and be as agreeable as possible, it breaks
Speaker 1: my heart to say it now, Like if I just
Speaker 1: make myself very sack small and acquiesced it as much
Speaker 1: as humanly possible and basically bargain away everything that feels
Speaker 1: essential to me as a human being, then maybe we
Speaker 1: can make it work and then no one has to know.
Speaker 4: But the thing about secrets is they won't stay. No,
Speaker 4: they won't. Another guest on the podcast said something that
Speaker 4: I thought was just so perfect about what it is
Speaker 4: to keep a secret, which is when you bury a secret,
Speaker 4: you bury it alive, right, And this thing was alive
Speaker 4: and wasn't going to go away.
Speaker 1: No it was not. I mean I did get to
Speaker 1: a point where eventually I realized that all of the
Speaker 1: acquiescing wasn't getting me anywhere, Like it wasn't actually like
Speaker 1: canceling speaking engagements and agreeing not to travel and being
Speaker 1: kind and cooking meals and taking the kids out like
Speaker 1: it didn't matter. I could be the sort of best
Speaker 1: version of myself, or not the best version of myself,
Speaker 1: but the best version of myself. I thought that he wanted,
Speaker 1: and it actually didn't change his behavior toward me, And
Speaker 1: so I thought, why am I doing all of this
Speaker 1: for nothing? Like it just feels pointless. And it struck
Speaker 1: me eventually that it wasn't going to be enough. And
Speaker 1: I think I also came around to the idea that
Speaker 1: if your partner would happily let you let go of
Speaker 1: things that matter a lot to you, then probably it's
Speaker 1: not worth salvaging anyway. And so I talked to my
Speaker 1: mom and then finally I just unloaded one day and
Speaker 1: counseling and just said, by the way, I don't know
Speaker 1: why we're this is a total charade.
Speaker 3: That therapist must have been dumbfounded.
Speaker 1: Why have you been coming in here for months taking
Speaker 1: the blame and acting like it's all about that you're
Speaker 1: not enough of a stay at home parent.
Speaker 2: That the charade is over and done with, so is
Speaker 2: the marriage. After a lengthy separation, Maggie's soon to be
Speaker 2: ex husband moves in with the address see of the postcard.
Speaker 2: He communicates with Maggie only by email updates. In one
Speaker 2: of these, he lets her know that he will be
Speaker 2: moving five hundred miles away.
Speaker 4: This is so much a story of the coming hole
Speaker 4: and these sharp fragments and this sort of puzzle like
Speaker 4: structure of trying to come to an understanding of what happened.
Speaker 4: My friend Andrea Debuse a bunch of years ago, Andrea
Speaker 4: is talking about memoir, and he said, the question in
Speaker 4: memoir is not what happened. The question in memoir is
Speaker 4: what the fuck happened?
Speaker 1: I like him already.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And you're asking yourself that question, right, And in
Speaker 4: asking yourself that question again and again, you're doing the
Speaker 4: hard and profound work of knitting together all of yourselves
Speaker 4: over time. This is the work that we all have
Speaker 4: to do. Hopefully we do it, you know, until we
Speaker 4: take our last breath. Is we're reconciling ourselves with all
Speaker 4: of the different selves we've ever been. So that twenty
Speaker 4: year old who met that, you know, that young woman
Speaker 4: who wanted to replicate her life, and then the woman
Speaker 4: that you became, and the mother and the wife, and
Speaker 4: the poet and the grown ass woman you know who's
Speaker 4: actually just putting together a life of meaning. And there's
Speaker 4: so much in this book about making meaning that I
Speaker 4: think is really extraordinary.
Speaker 2: Here's Maddie reading one of her poems. This one is
Speaker 2: titled Bride.
Speaker 1: How long have I been wed to myself? Calling myself darling,
Speaker 1: dressing for my own pleasure each morning, choosing perfume to
Speaker 1: turn me on? How long have I been alone in
Speaker 1: this house? But not alone? Married less to the man
Speaker 1: than to the woman silvering with the mirror. I know
Speaker 1: the kind of wife I need, and I become her,
Speaker 1: the one who will leave this earth. At the same
Speaker 1: instant I do, I am my own bride. Lifting the
Speaker 1: veil to see my face, Darling, I say, I have
Speaker 1: waited for you all my life.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 2: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zacre is
Speaker 2: the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
Speaker 2: This episode was recorded in front of a live audience
Speaker 2: at the Miami Book Fair. The interview was engineered by
Speaker 2: Mitch Mormon. If you have a family secret you'd like
Speaker 2: to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story
Speaker 2: could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is one
Speaker 2: eight eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You
Speaker 2: can also find me on Instagram at Danny Rider. And
Speaker 2: if you'd like to know more about the story that
Speaker 2: inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 4: For more podcasts us from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 4: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.