Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio High
Speaker 1: Family Secrets listeners. It's Danny here to share another incredible
Speaker 1: conversation with you, the second in our series of live episodes.
Speaker 1: Recorded in January. During my paperback tour, I sat down
Speaker 1: with author and podcast host Gretchen Reuben, who interviewed me
Speaker 1: about my own family secret. We also talked about the
Speaker 1: still almost totally unregulated world of sperm and egg donation
Speaker 1: and why the era of recreational DNA tests could mean
Speaker 1: the end of secrets for anyone who wondering where they
Speaker 1: really come from. Stay tuned for the second half of
Speaker 1: my conversation with Gretchen. We opened the discussion up to
Speaker 1: our audience, who had incredibly moving stories of their own
Speaker 1: to share. That's out tomorrow. My first question, Danny, is
Speaker 1: I mean, you're a writer, You're having this intense experience.
Speaker 1: Did you know from the beginning that you would write
Speaker 1: about it? I really did, I really did. I It
Speaker 1: wasn't knowledge like I thought, Oh goody, my next book.
Speaker 1: It was my life has turned upside down. This is
Speaker 1: great copy, right, That's what Nora says. And I even
Speaker 1: had writer friends saying, like, boy, this is going to
Speaker 1: be an amazing book, and I was almost insulted initially,
Speaker 1: like this doesn't feel like a book. This is my
Speaker 1: life that's been so upended. But as a writer, I
Speaker 1: have always um written in order to understand what I feel,
Speaker 1: what I know, what I think, what I the world
Speaker 1: around me. It's how I it's literally how I how
Speaker 1: I process. And so I began writing very quickly, even
Speaker 1: just scribbling on index cards, because I wanted to remember
Speaker 1: what it was that I was feeling, because my um,
Speaker 1: my emotional life was moving sort of so rapidly. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know that we can remember what shock feels like,
Speaker 1: you know, months later, that kind of thing. But there
Speaker 1: also was a ticking clock because I was aware that
Speaker 1: anything that I might learn about the truth of my identity,
Speaker 1: about what my parents had known or not known, about
Speaker 1: what the world of medicine was like at the time
Speaker 1: of my conception, literally the story of my life and
Speaker 1: how I came to be. Anyone who still knew anything
Speaker 1: about that was going to be elderly. And so my
Speaker 1: my husband and I like, forgive me for this. My
Speaker 1: my husband I had a running joke because I'm I'm
Speaker 1: a writer. I don't like picking up the phone and
Speaker 1: calling people who don't want to hear from me. Um.
Speaker 1: I would or make a good investigative journalist that way.
Speaker 1: And if you're reaching out to people in their nineties
Speaker 1: that they probably don't have email, which was always like
Speaker 1: the writer's first refugees, I can just send an email.
Speaker 1: It's uh, the easier way to go about it. So
Speaker 1: I would be in the position of having to pick
Speaker 1: up the phone and call people and I was dragging
Speaker 1: my feet, and my husband Michael would say, he may
Speaker 1: be dead by Friday. Yeah, so that that that guy
Speaker 1: made that that definitely got me going yes. Um. And
Speaker 1: one of the things that was interesting was as you
Speaker 1: approached your biological father and he and his family became
Speaker 1: sort of comfortable with connecting with you, how did they
Speaker 1: respond to the book And also sort of the two
Speaker 1: stages of the book, because it's one thing to be like, hey,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be this book, and then it's like, hey,
Speaker 1: this book is actually like a huge runaway bestseller, and
Speaker 1: now I have a podcast and maybe there's gonna be
Speaker 1: a TV show and I'm giving lectures all around the country.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's one he may not have, they may
Speaker 1: not have conceived of what the book might become. So
Speaker 1: how did they how they grappled with that? Well, to
Speaker 1: begin with, I was transparent with them from the time
Speaker 1: that we were conversing with each other that that I
Speaker 1: would be writing about it. I mean, all they would
Speaker 1: need to do is that's a good example, like do
Speaker 1: the right thing right away, because if you had just
Speaker 1: sprung a book on them, slid that by. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: also I think energetically it wouldn't have it would have
Speaker 1: polluted the air between us because I would have really
Speaker 1: been secretly taking notes. I was never doing that. I
Speaker 1: was and anyone who knew anything about my history as
Speaker 1: a writer that I've always written about family secrets, I've
Speaker 1: always written about identity. These have been my subjects. And
Speaker 1: then it turns out that I was the family secret
Speaker 1: and that my identity has been upended. Of course I'm
Speaker 1: going to write about it. So I was transparent about
Speaker 1: it from the beginning. Um, what I did when I
Speaker 1: finished the book and it was really done and ready
Speaker 1: to be turned into my publisher is I sent it
Speaker 1: to them. I sent it to my biological though. Note
Speaker 1: that's pretty unusual usually with memoirs there they really don't
Speaker 1: do that. It's unusual to allow someone the opportunity to
Speaker 1: weigh it. Well, it's a little dangerous because it's like
Speaker 1: giving someone wet clay. I'm like, here, you can shape
Speaker 1: this now. It can feel like, um, it's giving permission
Speaker 1: to really kind of make changes. What I was interested
Speaker 1: in mostly was that he felt that his privacy was protected. UM.
Speaker 1: I had taken great pains to protect his privacy. It
Speaker 1: was very important to me to do that. UM. But
Speaker 1: I wanted him to feel that his privacy was protected.
Speaker 1: I wanted to make sure that there was nothing I
Speaker 1: had missed. Uh. I guess I wanted his blessing too.
Speaker 1: I wanted him to like it. I wanted him to
Speaker 1: feel that it accurately reflected what it happened between us.
Speaker 1: But mostly it was that I wanted his privacy to
Speaker 1: be protected. And so the second part of this, which
Speaker 1: is that UM, the book came out and did strike
Speaker 1: a chord and did start to be a book that
Speaker 1: you would know about, you know that you couldn't really
Speaker 1: avoid knowing about. I was on a lot of TV shows,
Speaker 1: and there were a lot of pieces written, and there
Speaker 1: was a big piece in Time magazine right before the
Speaker 1: book came out, So the question of like, how did
Speaker 1: that feel too, Um, people who were in the book,
Speaker 1: even with their identities protected, but they were in the book.
Speaker 1: They've been wonderful and I think actually proud, I would say,
Speaker 1: and UM in a certain way, very interested in following along.
Speaker 1: So that's another way in which this has been a
Speaker 1: kind of remarkable. Um. I you know, one of the
Speaker 1: things that I've said often since the book came out,
Speaker 1: and I've met so many people who are having these
Speaker 1: discoveries of various kinds because of easy, accessible DNA testing
Speaker 1: and the impact that it's having on our society and
Speaker 1: on so many families. My story is a good one.
Speaker 1: Not all of the stories are easy. A lot of
Speaker 1: them are quite painful. There's pain in all of these
Speaker 1: stories of discovery. I mean, it was a very very
Speaker 1: hard thing for me to metabolize that my dad, who
Speaker 1: raised me and who I adored and who loved me
Speaker 1: into being and is a huge part of why I
Speaker 1: am the person that I am, UM, that he wasn't
Speaker 1: my biological father, and that I had never known it.
Speaker 1: That was really hard. But then there have been so
Speaker 1: many gifts in the wake of this discovery, and one
Speaker 1: of them really is that my biological father and his
Speaker 1: family have been as kind and as open as they
Speaker 1: have been. Well, Um, I have a podcast called Happier
Speaker 1: with Grudge and Ruben and Elizabeth at My Cost and
Speaker 1: I interviewed you for our book book club, and one
Speaker 1: of our listeners asked a question that I thought was
Speaker 1: really interesting, which was, do you think that your biological
Speaker 1: father and his family would have been as willing to
Speaker 1: meet with you if they couldn't have seen that you
Speaker 1: were so accomplished, Like they could just look you up
Speaker 1: and see like And then I remember in your first
Speaker 1: letter to him, you say I'm a wife, I'm a mother,
Speaker 1: I'm a writer. You know you sort of say I'm
Speaker 1: a ordinary, stable person with a good life, a rich life.
Speaker 1: But he could also look that up and see that
Speaker 1: you were very accomplished. Do you think if you hadn't
Speaker 1: been so google able they might not have been willing
Speaker 1: to open themselves up to you. One of the things
Speaker 1: that I'm hearing a lot um as I've been traveling
Speaker 1: for the last year since Inheritance came out, UM, is
Speaker 1: that whenever there is a situation like this in a
Speaker 1: family of any kind of someone sending an email or
Speaker 1: calling or writing a letter saying I'm confused. I mean,
Speaker 1: but I have this information. I think we're related. I
Speaker 1: think i'm your biological daughter, or I think i'm your
Speaker 1: half sibling, or you know, I got these results from
Speaker 1: my DNA test and they point to some kind of
Speaker 1: genetic connection. The very first response that across the board
Speaker 1: every family that I have encountered UM has is feeling threatened,
Speaker 1: every single one. And I think it's hardwired into us.
Speaker 1: It's a primal reaction. It's a primitive reaction. It's like,
Speaker 1: you know, we're sitting here in a synagogue. It's like
Speaker 1: it's the outsider, you know, it's it's the it's the
Speaker 1: it's the outlier. It's the stranger in our midst that
Speaker 1: kind of feeling. But it's more than a stranger. It's
Speaker 1: somebody who might have a claim, and that's even more
Speaker 1: threatening in a way. And and the threat usually UM
Speaker 1: goes straight to financial. What do you want from me?
Speaker 1: You want my money? Um, even if it's you know,
Speaker 1: I know a story where the person who has made
Speaker 1: the discovery was a extremely wealthy person, uh, and the
Speaker 1: the discovered biological family was not. But there's still that
Speaker 1: feeling of what do you want from me? I, um,
Speaker 1: I have nothing for you, and the times that families
Speaker 1: are able to get past that. I mean, it's just
Speaker 1: my I mean my biological family. The same thing that
Speaker 1: was the first response was what do you want? No, No,
Speaker 1: I I donated anonymously. I signed a contract. I was
Speaker 1: guaranteed an anonymity. You know you're you're you're intruding into
Speaker 1: my life. Yes, I was google able. I also when
Speaker 1: I initially wrote to him, I was very conscious of
Speaker 1: wanting him to understand that I was a human being,
Speaker 1: you know, a wife, a mother, living in Connecticut. You
Speaker 1: know that I was um that I came in peace.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, on my website, the very
Speaker 1: first thing you would have seen at that time on
Speaker 1: the home page of my website would have been a
Speaker 1: picture of me with Oprah with her arm around me,
Speaker 1: because I had recently been on super Soon Sunday. Now,
Speaker 1: that is both good news and bad news. And I
Speaker 1: really think, as someone very concerned about his privacy, that
Speaker 1: the idea that Oprah could come bring out spring out
Speaker 1: from the bushes with a microphone episodes. So I do think,
Speaker 1: and and and also he started, I think digging into
Speaker 1: my history a little bit as a writer and seeing
Speaker 1: that I've written about family all my life will be
Speaker 1: back in a moment with more family secrets. So talk
Speaker 1: for a moment about what this was. You write about
Speaker 1: this so beautifully in the book, and it's it's the moment.
Speaker 1: It's this tremendously thrilling, terrifying moment when you and your husband,
Speaker 1: and your husband's like, here we go, here we go,
Speaker 1: and you're opening up the page and there's a little
Speaker 1: video of him and you see that it's your father
Speaker 1: and it's your features, and your husband says, oh my goodness.
Speaker 1: He even runs a question an answer session the way
Speaker 1: you do, and you recognize yourself in his gestures. I mean,
Speaker 1: talk about what that was like after all this time
Speaker 1: of feeling the sort of sense of not quite fitting
Speaker 1: in and now suddenly seeing your face in someone else's face.
Speaker 1: I think it will stand forever as the most surreal
Speaker 1: moment of my life because it wasn't so much looking
Speaker 1: at someone who looked like me and gestured like me.
Speaker 1: It was also realizing that I hadn't had that familiarity before.
Speaker 1: And you know, when we grow up in our biological
Speaker 1: family and we know it's our biological family. There's that
Speaker 1: thing that we do just as human beings that's sort
Speaker 1: of like, oh, he walks like Uncle Mo. You know,
Speaker 1: oh he has Grammy's nose, or oh, you know, we
Speaker 1: don't even think it. It's just when we know that
Speaker 1: we're part of a biological family, that is part that
Speaker 1: familiarity is part of being part of a biological family.
Speaker 1: If we are adopted, and we've always known that we
Speaker 1: were adopted, and it's been woven into our identity from
Speaker 1: the time that we're very small, then we know why
Speaker 1: we don't look like our biological family or why there
Speaker 1: is this sense of unfamiliarity. In an adoption literature, there's
Speaker 1: a beautiful phrase called um genealogical bewilderment. We know why
Speaker 1: there is this geneological bewilderment. But if our identity has
Speaker 1: actually not been told to us, as you know, our
Speaker 1: identities are formed by the stories were told from the
Speaker 1: time were very small, and it's a story that we're
Speaker 1: told is this is your biological family. But in my case,
Speaker 1: on my father's side, it was not. I did not
Speaker 1: have that familiarity. I did not have that recognition. In fact,
Speaker 1: I looked completely unlike a Shapiro and and that was
Speaker 1: a big part of the story of my life. People
Speaker 1: constantly telling me that I didn't look Jewish, that I
Speaker 1: didn't look like my father's family. Um. I was constantly
Speaker 1: mistaken for, you know, just being not not not being Jewish.
Speaker 1: And meanwhile, and I would come back with raised kosher
Speaker 1: you know, when to achieve us, you know, like, don't
Speaker 1: talk to me about not being Jewish. Um. But it
Speaker 1: was the story of my life. So when I saw
Speaker 1: my biological fathers phase for the first time and was
Speaker 1: lecturing for those of you who haven't read the book yet,
Speaker 1: he was standing by, you know, behind a lectern, delivering
Speaker 1: a lecture on medical ethics, and you can't make it up.
Speaker 1: You can't know. I couldn't. I changed identifying details. But
Speaker 1: that wasn't one of them. That would be cheating, that
Speaker 1: wouldn't have been fair. Um, But there was. I saw
Speaker 1: his gestures, and when I saw his gestures, I recognized
Speaker 1: my gestures. And that was like a heart stopping moment
Speaker 1: because it was seeing the familiar in a stranger. He's
Speaker 1: a stranger. But it was also like I wasn't looking
Speaker 1: at a video of a fireman. You know, I wasn't
Speaker 1: looking at a video of something I've never done. I
Speaker 1: stand behind podiums all the time, and I deliver lectures
Speaker 1: all the time, and I run q and as all
Speaker 1: the time. So he was doing something that was very
Speaker 1: familiar to me. So I could see I could see
Speaker 1: myself in that way. Well, in speaking of medical ethics,
Speaker 1: it's interesting since the book has come out, and since
Speaker 1: it's it's made such an pression on people, you have
Speaker 1: become sort of the voice of kind of all the
Speaker 1: people who are experiencing what we might call like technology
Speaker 1: enabled UM secret discovery, and you are starting to talk
Speaker 1: to people about medical ethics and bio ethics. How has
Speaker 1: that been for you to kind of be pulled into
Speaker 1: this expertise UM? And and also in kind of a
Speaker 1: larger way, you are also sort of a a person
Speaker 1: where many people who have secrets like this want to
Speaker 1: confide the secret in you. And now with your your
Speaker 1: podcast Family Secrets, that's given you a way to sort
Speaker 1: of give boys to that. UM. How has it been
Speaker 1: for you to sort of be thrust into these roles
Speaker 1: by what happened to you personally? You know, it's interesting.
Speaker 1: The other night I was in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and
Speaker 1: I was having UM an onstage conversation with Dr Bessel
Speaker 1: Andrew Kolke, who is the leading expert on t mamma
Speaker 1: UM in the world. And one of the things that
Speaker 1: Dr Vander Kolch writes about in his book, which is
Speaker 1: called The Body Keeps the Score, he writes about the
Speaker 1: necessity when you've experienced a trauma of some sort one
Speaker 1: of the ways that people recover best is if they're
Speaker 1: able to take action, um, if they're not in some
Speaker 1: way trapped, either physically or emotionally. And I was reading
Speaker 1: Dr Bandicooke's book, and I was thinking about what I
Speaker 1: was able to do in the wake of my discovery.
Speaker 1: I was able to do something with it. First, by
Speaker 1: I mean, my journey and my book are the same
Speaker 1: in many ways. I was trying to understand what it
Speaker 1: meant that my dad wasn't my biological father. Both of
Speaker 1: my parents were dead. I was trying to piece together
Speaker 1: as best as I could what they had known and
Speaker 1: whether they had consciously kept this from me. I was,
Speaker 1: you know, there were so many mysteries that I was
Speaker 1: kind of trying to untangle and I as a writer,
Speaker 1: that's what I do, that's that's my toolbox. And then
Speaker 1: the book came out, and from the very first event,
Speaker 1: it was clear that people were coming who had their
Speaker 1: own stories and had their own discoveries, and and they
Speaker 1: were from all different kinds of discoveries and different roles
Speaker 1: in the discovery process. There were older men who were
Speaker 1: coming to my events, and I would realize that they
Speaker 1: had been sperm donors and they were trying to figure
Speaker 1: out how to deal with the fact that they might
Speaker 1: be contacted. I would see couples sitting together and looking
Speaker 1: kind of stricken, and I would realize, Oh, you have
Speaker 1: donor conceived children who don't know, and you're trying to
Speaker 1: figure out what to do about that. And then I
Speaker 1: would see many people who were had recently discovered that
Speaker 1: they were adopted, or recently discovered half siblings, or recently
Speaker 1: discovered fathers who discovered children that they had never known about,
Speaker 1: um adopted children, discovering birth parents and vice versa. All
Speaker 1: of this was happening. And I think that for me
Speaker 1: becoming having this voice and ending up having you know,
Speaker 1: a megaphone in a way, has been the action that
Speaker 1: has allowed me to process, metabolize, and heal from what
Speaker 1: was really a very shocking UM discovery. And in terms
Speaker 1: of the bioethics of this, I mean, we're in this
Speaker 1: moment where can I ask a question, just show of hands,
Speaker 1: how many people have bought a DNA test in this room? Yeah?
Speaker 1: A lot of you. Yeah. So the number are I
Speaker 1: think last year was twelve million kits were sold this year.
Speaker 1: I think it was a little bit. They were expecting
Speaker 1: it to be higher, and I don't think it was
Speaker 1: at least I read an article about twenty three and
Speaker 1: me laying off some of its staff because they were
Speaker 1: expecting a bigger explosion. But I can tell you that
Speaker 1: of those many millions of people who are gifting families,
Speaker 1: gifting each other at Hanukkah and Christmas. You know that's
Speaker 1: what my mother in law gave it to me for Christmas. UM.
Speaker 1: I saw on Twitter recently somebody posted something like, you know,
Speaker 1: all all those people who who got their DNA test
Speaker 1: for the holidays, Easter is gonna suck. But they're they're
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of people who are making versions of
Speaker 1: this discovery and the bioethics community, I mean I've spoken
Speaker 1: at Harvard and at Stanford, i was us at Johns Hopkins.
Speaker 1: I'm going to pen speaking with the head of the
Speaker 1: program at Colombia. It is one of the I mean,
Speaker 1: we have many ethical issues of our time, but it's
Speaker 1: one of the big ones, because what does it mean
Speaker 1: that the science has changed everything and that men and
Speaker 1: women to now because of egg donation who were promised
Speaker 1: anonymity no longer have it. Secrets are are no longer possible.
Speaker 1: There's a huge stream of people who are making really
Speaker 1: difficult identity shifting discoveries and the question of what is
Speaker 1: our moral responsibility to each other. I think one of
Speaker 1: the reasons why Inheritance has resonated so much is because
Speaker 1: I have become an expert on this from the inside,
Speaker 1: from the inside, right, it's it's not a research project,
Speaker 1: it's um And you know. One of the things that
Speaker 1: happens that I feel that I can give voice to is,
Speaker 1: for example, in the adoption community. I think a lot
Speaker 1: of people thought who hadn't read the book yet, I
Speaker 1: thought that I was saying that nature is all important, right,
Speaker 1: it mattered to me to meet my biological father. I
Speaker 1: actually had people saying to me like, why would that matter?
Speaker 1: And it was usually people who grew up with their
Speaker 1: biological parents, you know, who just couldn't kind of imagine
Speaker 1: themselves in my shoes. But one of the things that
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm here to say is my mother,
Speaker 1: who was my biological mother. I actually double checked. Um.
Speaker 1: She and I weren't close. I never felt connected to her.
Speaker 1: We were just kind of oil and water. She was
Speaker 1: my biological mother. My dad, who it turns out is
Speaker 1: not my biological father, is like a soul connection to me. Um.
Speaker 1: He died when I was twenty three years old, and
Speaker 1: there hasn't been a day that's gone by that I
Speaker 1: haven't spoken to him and thought about him. My books
Speaker 1: have been for him in a certain way. I've written
Speaker 1: about him, I've wrestled with him. I've tried to understand him.
Speaker 1: He's on the cover of your book now. He is
Speaker 1: now on the paperback that you all have that is
Speaker 1: a picture of myself as UM a little girl with
Speaker 1: my dad, and you can see the connection between us.
Speaker 1: I love that picture so much because there's so much
Speaker 1: unfettered joy. It matters not at all that he's not
Speaker 1: my biological father. That it didn't matter. Then I'm sure
Speaker 1: that didn't matter to him. I didn't know. The problem
Speaker 1: is not knowing um And that's what I really kind
Speaker 1: of feel like I am trying to give voice to
Speaker 1: because there was a huge amount of secrecy in those days.
Speaker 1: It's just it's what was counseled, it was what was believed.
Speaker 1: Everyone felt that they were doing the right thing. And
Speaker 1: and I've come to understand one of the gifts of
Speaker 1: this process for me is there's this great term um
Speaker 1: in in ethics, which is retrospective moral judgment. We can't
Speaker 1: judge the past by the standards of the present. And
Speaker 1: when I first found this out, I really thought, how
Speaker 1: could they? How could they? How could they? Everyone has
Speaker 1: a right to know their own identity as much as possible.
Speaker 1: How could they have kept this? For me? My journey
Speaker 1: was to get to a place of imagining my parents
Speaker 1: as people, as people of their time, as people who
Speaker 1: existed before me. And that's a great gift. We don't
Speaker 1: often get to do that about our parents. We don't
Speaker 1: think of our parents as people separate from us. And
Speaker 1: I had to think of them as this traumatized, deeply
Speaker 1: ashamed couple who were childless in the late nineteen fifties
Speaker 1: and early nineteen sixties, male infertility was so shameful it
Speaker 1: didn't exist. You couldn't get a doctor to diagnose it.
Speaker 1: And that was the beautiful scene with the rabbi when
Speaker 1: you go to find out sort of describe that where
Speaker 1: he says, no, I would have thought that if my
Speaker 1: wife had wanted a baby, you know, all honor to
Speaker 1: him for having been willing to do this. That was
Speaker 1: such a beautiful moment. Explained that a little bit. I'm
Speaker 1: so glad you brought that up. Yeah. So one of
Speaker 1: the elderly people that I reached out to early on
Speaker 1: was Rabbi Haskel Lukstein, who is one of these sort
Speaker 1: of venerable Orthodox rabbis in Manhattan, UM. His father founded
Speaker 1: the Roma's School UM. His father and my grandfather knew
Speaker 1: each other. Haskel and my father, he was a bit
Speaker 1: younger than my father, but they knew each other and
Speaker 1: they were in the same social circles. And I went
Speaker 1: to see him in part because I thought, maybe my
Speaker 1: my father was an Orthodox Jew, maybe he would have gone,
Speaker 1: maybe he would have sought rabbinic advice, and if he had,
Speaker 1: maybe he would have gone to Rabbi Lukstein. I was
Speaker 1: looking for anyone who could tell me. Yes, I spoke
Speaker 1: to your father about this or um. But instead what
Speaker 1: happened was I explained what had happened. I explained my discovery.
Speaker 1: I explained what I knew um, and Rabbi Lupstein, once
Speaker 1: he understood it, his immediate response was colaka, voted to
Speaker 1: your father all the honor. If God forbidd it had
Speaker 1: been my wife and I who had struggled with this,
Speaker 1: I would have done the same thing. And what was
Speaker 1: so interesting to me over the course of my journey
Speaker 1: was expected. It was not because I had read the Hallaja.
Speaker 1: I had read the body of Jewish law around this stuff,
Speaker 1: and it was it called um sperm donation an abomination,
Speaker 1: which was a terrible thing to read, because then I
Speaker 1: felt like, well, am i am? I am an abomination?
Speaker 1: Did my father think of me as an abomination? It
Speaker 1: was awful. And both Rabbi Lukstein and another elderly person
Speaker 1: who I visited and sought out was my my aunt Shirley,
Speaker 1: my father's younger sister, who is devout. Both of them
Speaker 1: were so completely willing to throw the rule book out.
Speaker 1: You know it was so interesting to me, Like I thought, like, yes,
Speaker 1: there's the law, and then there's the humanity, Like, yes,
Speaker 1: there's the law, and then there's the what's right? And
Speaker 1: I saw that with the two most um religious people
Speaker 1: whose insights I saw it. We'll be back in a
Speaker 1: moment now. One of the things you make a point
Speaker 1: in the book that you felt that when you were
Speaker 1: approaching your biological father, you were you were fortunate that
Speaker 1: you were the first, because in many cases, when these
Speaker 1: secrets come out, they come out in large groups, and
Speaker 1: that that makes the bioethics of it and the human
Speaker 1: problem of it more complex. Um. I'm sure people are curious,
Speaker 1: have you found any other have siblings and um like?
Speaker 1: And how do we think about these people who find
Speaker 1: each other? Some grow up knowing each other, but then
Speaker 1: some are find out about it much later. Yea, So
Speaker 1: there's a number of different layers to that. UM. No,
Speaker 1: I have not um discovered any other biological half siblings,
Speaker 1: which makes me fairly unusual. Most people who are making
Speaker 1: these discoveries are discovering significant numbers of half siblings because
Speaker 1: often donors donated over a long period of time, or
Speaker 1: in more recent years, because of frozen sperm. There could
Speaker 1: be half siblings that are generations apart, right, And I
Speaker 1: have regularly encountered people who make a discovery like this
Speaker 1: and then discover that they have half siblings, twenty three
Speaker 1: half siblings, some cases half siblings numbering in the three digits.
Speaker 1: My sister's writing partners a single mother by choice, and
Speaker 1: there are twenty three known done our siblings and that
Speaker 1: in their group. And it's getting you know. But one
Speaker 1: of the things that you're bringing up that is interesting
Speaker 1: and sort of different from sort of the older generations
Speaker 1: where this is these discoveries are happening, is that today,
Speaker 1: for the most part, people understand that it's important for
Speaker 1: their children to know, you know, to be told the
Speaker 1: truth from an early age. There are tools. There are
Speaker 1: books that can be read to children, you know, that
Speaker 1: have illustrations of trees and seeds and leaves and you know,
Speaker 1: just ways for children to process this information. And there's
Speaker 1: also much more transparency lead I think, initially by the
Speaker 1: same sex community, where there's got to be somebody else, right,
Speaker 1: so they've got to tell. And then there are communities
Speaker 1: of these kids who grow up who are half siblings
Speaker 1: with biologically with each other, who get to know each other,
Speaker 1: and it's all this sense of normalcy around it. It's
Speaker 1: it's a different way of making family and of of
Speaker 1: processing this. And that's a beautiful thing because it's because
Speaker 1: it's out in the open and there's no shame involved.
Speaker 1: As soon as there is this secrecy, this non disclosure,
Speaker 1: their shame underneath it, their shame because it means that
Speaker 1: why does it need to be kept a secret? Now
Speaker 1: in my generation and generations older than me and a
Speaker 1: little bit younger than me, it was I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: constantly people in their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties and older
Speaker 1: are making these discoveries and then discovering half siblings. What
Speaker 1: does it mean to be related when there are more
Speaker 1: of you than there ever would be in a traditional family?
Speaker 1: The last question I want to ask you, and then
Speaker 1: we're going to open it up for questions. Just um
Speaker 1: coming up of that. So you have your podcast Family Secrets,
Speaker 1: which if you haven't listened to you should just run
Speaker 1: and listen. It's so interesting. You highlight, you do long,
Speaker 1: hot interviews with people who have a secret. And then
Speaker 1: you've also been doing this fascinating thing where people has
Speaker 1: mentioned in the introduction, people can call in and just
Speaker 1: sort of like tell their secret. So, given all of
Speaker 1: the thinking that you've done about this kind of what's
Speaker 1: your bottom line about how to think about a secret? Like,
Speaker 1: how do you know when it's your secret to keep,
Speaker 1: when it's not your secret to keep? How do you
Speaker 1: how do you think about secrets? It's so individual? Um,
Speaker 1: there are you know? It's interesting. I actually UM did
Speaker 1: a bonus episode with the therapist and writer Laurie gottlieb
Speaker 1: Um between my first season and second season, and I
Speaker 1: asked Lorie if she thinks it's ever okay to keep
Speaker 1: a secret? And her response I was asking her as
Speaker 1: a therapist, and her sponse was really no, never. Secrets
Speaker 1: are simply just toxic. UM. I think it was Carl
Speaker 1: Young who referred to them as UM toxic poison, which
Speaker 1: is kind of redundant, isn't it. Uh, it's a curative UM.
Speaker 1: I think when a secret is revealed is as important
Speaker 1: as what the secret is or that it's revealed. I
Speaker 1: think there are times in UM someone's life where they're
Speaker 1: too vulnerable to handle the information. UM. I feel very
Speaker 1: fortunate that when I discovered this secret, I was very
Speaker 1: much a mature adult. I had a family, I had stability,
Speaker 1: I had my life's work. Um, I was in a
Speaker 1: place where I was as grounded as I had ever been.
Speaker 1: If I had made that discovery when I was in
Speaker 1: my twenties and I was not in that kind of
Speaker 1: shape at all, I don't know what it would have
Speaker 1: done to me. So I think we have to take
Speaker 1: care with the secrets that we hold if we're holding them.
Speaker 1: And yet, at the same time, because of the combination
Speaker 1: of the Internet and I remember you said that on
Speaker 1: your podcast one time in Passing, You're like, well, with
Speaker 1: the Internet there there's not going to be any more secrets. Well,
Speaker 1: I think we're Yeah, we're heading into an era that
Speaker 1: I really do think is the the end of the secret,
Speaker 1: because you know, it's it's a misunderstanding that people have
Speaker 1: that if if they haven't had their DNA tested, it
Speaker 1: means that they couldn't be discoverable. Um in any family.
Speaker 1: I mean, I've had people who were donors say to me, well,
Speaker 1: I don't want to I'm not going to do my
Speaker 1: DNA testing because I don't want to be found. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: your nephew could do it. Your first cousin, your second cousin,
Speaker 1: even your third cousin could do it and somebody would
Speaker 1: be able to figure that out. Your your grandchild could
Speaker 1: do it. It's it's the it's the unintended consequence of
Speaker 1: this development in science and what's complicated. Um, many things
Speaker 1: are complicated about it. But there's secrecy and then there's privacy, right,
Speaker 1: and they're very connected and they're not the same thing.
Speaker 1: And you know, I think we can agree the privacy
Speaker 1: is important and we want to have privacy. UM. And
Speaker 1: secrecy I think is toxic. But there's you know, there
Speaker 1: are families now in which there are some people keeping
Speaker 1: secrets from others because some people want to know and
Speaker 1: some people don't want to know. UM. And it's it's
Speaker 1: it's very complicated. So I think it's as individual as
Speaker 1: um the person and the family that it's happening to.
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