Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. It's
Speaker 1: funny how so often those secrets get passed down, and
Speaker 1: some smuggled down secretly. It's like he'd clapped me out
Speaker 1: in the back and then slipt it into my pocket
Speaker 1: and I didn't notice. He's like the artful dodger. And
Speaker 1: maybe his mom did the same thing to him. You
Speaker 1: don't know where you're getting it, you know. I would
Speaker 1: have said if I'd had to guess that he had
Speaker 1: been unfaithable, But I didn't know that, and we've never
Speaker 1: talked about it, and I never, certainly would never have thought,
Speaker 1: like I want to model myself. I'm that guy who
Speaker 1: I can't get it you enough love from That would
Speaker 1: be a mistake. Why would I want to do that.
Speaker 1: I was trying to be the opposite. That's Tad Friend,
Speaker 1: staff writer for The New Yorker, an author of the
Speaker 1: memoir Cheerful Money, as well as the recent In the
Speaker 1: Early Times, A Life Reframed. Tad's is a story about stoicism, silence,
Speaker 1: and shame. It's also a story about a complex emotional
Speaker 1: legacy passed from generation to generation. A father, a son,
Speaker 1: a shared history of marital infidelity, that leaves a great
Speaker 1: deal of damage in its wake until the cycle is
Speaker 1: finally broken. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,
Speaker 1: the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
Speaker 1: keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 1: The first house I grew up and was in Buffalo,
Speaker 1: New York, it felt very dark. Um. I don't think
Speaker 1: it actually objectively was. I mean, there's probably just as
Speaker 1: much son in Buffalo um and in most other parts
Speaker 1: of the world. But it felt like the house felt dark.
Speaker 1: And that's because I spent most of my time when
Speaker 1: I was young on the sun porch, which is all
Speaker 1: entirely mullioned. Last windows looking out on those days were
Speaker 1: still this sort of avenue of elm trees before Dutch
Speaker 1: elm disease took them all down. The reason I think
Speaker 1: the house felt dark is because I was alone. I
Speaker 1: was the first child and for four years, the only child.
Speaker 1: And also because the living room felt to me and
Speaker 1: maybe actually was dark, and my mom was beyond it
Speaker 1: in the kitchen, usually doing something, and it felt like
Speaker 1: that sort of almost like a moat between me and
Speaker 1: the sunlight and the rest of the house and her
Speaker 1: and my dad wasn't around much. He was a Southeast
Speaker 1: Asian history professor at the University of Buffalo. And those
Speaker 1: first four years of darkness and isolation are pretty tough
Speaker 1: to shape. That's a fairly important time in anyone's life.
Speaker 1: And I blamed my mom bar without having any understanding
Speaker 1: of her own difficulties or what she was going through,
Speaker 1: or her postpartum depression or her filling left alone a
Speaker 1: bout my dad to with this baby that she hadn't
Speaker 1: really wanted, which, on the one hand to make you
Speaker 1: feel worse, like who wants to be the unwanted child?
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, you know, like, hey, here
Speaker 1: I am. And she started to do her best, and
Speaker 1: she became a lot better mom later, and I felt
Speaker 1: like so many of the things that I like about
Speaker 1: myself actually come from her. I like my sense of whimsy,
Speaker 1: I like missions of humor, I like my playfulness, and
Speaker 1: that's all straight from her. Soon, though, the darkness begins
Speaker 1: to lift. When Tad's brother and sister come along. The
Speaker 1: house becomes livelier, more jolly. His parents are warming to parenthood,
Speaker 1: becoming better at the job, and raising their proverbial game.
Speaker 1: When Tad is almost eleven, the family relocates from Buffalo
Speaker 1: to Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. My dad became the president of wealthmart
Speaker 1: College in nineteen seventy three, and we were lived in
Speaker 1: a gigantic, colossal field stone house called Overstone, what wasn't
Speaker 1: really called Overtold by anyone, but technically was his name.
Speaker 1: And that sort of tokei nish name UM felt right
Speaker 1: because it had a sort of goblin ish feel somehow,
Speaker 1: Um and my parents were both always super busy. I
Speaker 1: felt like that was sort of the end of my
Speaker 1: childhood with my dad in some ways. You know, we
Speaker 1: all had our own bedroom, you know, in this new
Speaker 1: big president's house, and there were three floors and just
Speaker 1: endless rooms, and it was gigantic and a nice place
Speaker 1: to run around and play, but a lot of it
Speaker 1: was sort of also felt off limits because there were
Speaker 1: constant cocktail parties and dinner parties for the college of
Speaker 1: events which we were not invited to and basically shoot
Speaker 1: away from. And also because you know, we just didn't
Speaker 1: see much of my parents. And you know, with the
Speaker 1: benefit of Hindstein and being help myself now, I realized
Speaker 1: that they're both just insanely busy. And overworked and doing
Speaker 1: their best, but it felt like that we were we
Speaker 1: can sort of weaving but drowning a bit in terms
Speaker 1: of trying to get their attention. Describe your father, who
Speaker 1: you called Day, described Day both Buffalo Day and then
Speaker 1: slothmore Day. How did he change and what was that like?
Speaker 1: Buffalo Day coached my soccer team, the Panthers UM and
Speaker 1: was excitable and enthusiastic about kicking soccer ball with me
Speaker 1: and coaching our team and taking me out for a
Speaker 1: Hamburg actor practice. And he felt like his dad. You know,
Speaker 1: you could look from the dad on TV, you know,
Speaker 1: in a family show, and then turn my dad and
Speaker 1: I kind of nod that yet that dad he felt engaged.
Speaker 1: And then swathmore Day felt disengaged and preoccupied with faculty
Speaker 1: treachery and board uprisings and students camping out in his
Speaker 1: office and protesting to Vietnam War, which he himself was against.
Speaker 1: UM and he gave a lot of weight, and he
Speaker 1: felt harried and harassed and like he wasn't doing a
Speaker 1: very good job, which he probably wasn't in the first
Speaker 1: couple of years, but I think he got better at it,
Speaker 1: and it just felt like we were another claim on
Speaker 1: his time, so I had never felt I felt that
Speaker 1: he would hit baseballs to me in the yard sometimes
Speaker 1: for like twenty minutes after he got home, but not
Speaker 1: And it always felt like he had a sense of
Speaker 1: like you know, a surgeon who was about to go
Speaker 1: into surgery, and he was kind of like mentally cutting
Speaker 1: the minutes until you know, he's got to go and
Speaker 1: do it. It had a feeling of like forbearance to
Speaker 1: him rather than a joy in it. My mom she'd
Speaker 1: had like nine billion conversations with him about over the years,
Speaker 1: beginning probably on like the second day against wat More.
Speaker 1: That was a big source of their strife during that period.
Speaker 1: It was just that he was never home and never available,
Speaker 1: so I think she didn't say too much. It was
Speaker 1: mostly the kids who were now growing up saying it,
Speaker 1: and which we hadn't like that before because we weren't
Speaker 1: asked to and we're sort of psychically discouraged from delivering
Speaker 1: a word. It done the unhappiness, and I was probably
Speaker 1: the most unhappy. I'm thinking about my sister maybe giving
Speaker 1: me a good race for it. Our brother in the
Speaker 1: middle has always seemed very equable and able to get
Speaker 1: along anywhere and thinking the best of everyone. And he
Speaker 1: has sort of somehow, you know, grew up under a
Speaker 1: cabbage sleeve in some different, slightly different universe than we did.
Speaker 1: So but I think, yeah, my sister helps neglected, and
Speaker 1: I certainly did. I think their marriage appeared to friends
Speaker 1: and people on the outside to be magical, and they
Speaker 1: seem to in public always be attentive to each other,
Speaker 1: taking cues from each other. They were married for more
Speaker 1: than forty years. They had a really rough patch in
Speaker 1: swathamore where they were in therapy together, and I think,
Speaker 1: I'm they just felt neglected. And she wrote him a
Speaker 1: letter one point saying like, you know, I'm not having
Speaker 1: any fun? Are you having any fun? And neither one
Speaker 1: of them was having a whole lot of fun. And
Speaker 1: I think she felt like he becomes sort of a
Speaker 1: pompous ass, and he felt that she was always nagging him,
Speaker 1: and I didn't understand all the challenges you faced. You know,
Speaker 1: they were reasonably good about not blowing up at each
Speaker 1: other in front of us, because their wasps and they
Speaker 1: would go blow up each other, you know, you know,
Speaker 1: just a region of the house or take a walk
Speaker 1: or do something. But we still got the general drift
Speaker 1: of a kind of current of mutual unhappiness, and I
Speaker 1: think think things sort of get get her sort of
Speaker 1: by and large. Once my dad left that job, I
Speaker 1: think my mom made her peace with sort of being.
Speaker 1: We carved out her own life a bit. She started
Speaker 1: to become a painter. Um she didn't feel like an appendage,
Speaker 1: which she was clearly as the wife of the president Blosmore.
Speaker 1: I mean there's a lot of just social duties of
Speaker 1: smiling to people and saying on what a nice frock.
Speaker 1: And when she started to paint, and she became a
Speaker 1: board member in high school and took on more project
Speaker 1: where people, he was using more of her years and
Speaker 1: not just sitting around whenning to phone to ring. So
Speaker 1: that helped in the course of becoming a parent myself
Speaker 1: and growing older. And I think kind of understanding my parents,
Speaker 1: I hope better than I did. I feel much closer
Speaker 1: to them and much more forgiving is probably the word,
Speaker 1: or grateful too. Time has a way of allowing us
Speaker 1: a different understanding of the complicated people who raise us.
Speaker 1: As we evolve, our sense of our parents often evolves too.
Speaker 1: In midlife, Ted learns to think of his parents not
Speaker 1: just as parents, but as people too, complex and multifaceted people.
Speaker 1: But before he reaches this point, when he's in college,
Speaker 1: something else strikes him about evolution. It was something I
Speaker 1: was reading about a primatology class, and it was about
Speaker 1: this experiment that he's insane. But scientists had done with
Speaker 1: baby monkeys by taking them away from their mothers and
Speaker 1: then giving them the surrogate mothers, who were these sort
Speaker 1: of as I imagine it anyway, like and I think
Speaker 1: they describe it as sort of a metal armorature covered
Speaker 1: with some cloth, but in a very rudimentary way. She
Speaker 1: was like the bare minimum of monkey nous. And then
Speaker 1: they had these these sort of mother contraption monkeys, and
Speaker 1: of course the baby monkeys would kind of try swarm
Speaker 1: all over this, you know, sort of numbly inert mom
Speaker 1: looking for comfort. And then they had all these things
Speaker 1: where they would they would blast like air out of
Speaker 1: the monkey mothers nipples at the baby to see how
Speaker 1: strong the instinct to go back to the mom was.
Speaker 1: And they had spikes to chat out of the abdomen,
Speaker 1: and it was like all these sort of insane, horrifying
Speaker 1: torture things that I almost couldn't read about them, but
Speaker 1: it actually reading about it plunged me back into that
Speaker 1: state of being on the sun porch. And obviously my
Speaker 1: mom was not a metallic monster with hair shooting at
Speaker 1: nipples as part, and I know, but the experience, the
Speaker 1: sense of like desperately trying to swarm towards my mother
Speaker 1: for comfort and being rebuffed was very strong beneath that,
Speaker 1: and that it invoked in such a way that I
Speaker 1: kind of was intrusive. I kept sort of thinking about
Speaker 1: the bathing monkeys when I was going to class or
Speaker 1: eating lunch and we're talking to friends in college and
Speaker 1: I and it. I had to kind of almost like
Speaker 1: just push it all away with a great effort of
Speaker 1: will to not think about it, because it kind of
Speaker 1: took me over. I never talked about it with my
Speaker 1: mom for obvious reasons, but um, but it definitely stayed
Speaker 1: with me as a weird and unpleasant reminder of the
Speaker 1: weird and unpleasant four years that I had spent kind
Speaker 1: of trying to get more affection and maternal cuddling from
Speaker 1: her than um she was capable. Also, while Tad is
Speaker 1: in college, he tries, as many college students do, to
Speaker 1: decide on what he'd liked to do with his future.
Speaker 1: He considers pursuing law that he keeps returning to the
Speaker 1: idea of becoming a writer. He had seen both his
Speaker 1: parents right professionally and otherwise, and it's a world that
Speaker 1: seems both familiar and appealing to him. I had been
Speaker 1: working in a magazine called The American Lawyer my first
Speaker 1: year after college, because I thought that I would be
Speaker 1: a great way to both right and also get exposure
Speaker 1: to what lawyers actually did all day. And that turned
Speaker 1: out to be true. Um, and the result was that
Speaker 1: I realized I did not want to be a lawyer.
Speaker 1: My dad had was a historian, and he'd written his
Speaker 1: first big history book at One's Big Prize, and he'd
Speaker 1: written a novel that came out eight scurity seven and
Speaker 1: got pretty good reviews, and he thought it would started
Speaker 1: thinking himself as like someone who could write more novels,
Speaker 1: and he did, but of course he couldn't get any
Speaker 1: of them published. But I didn't necessarily think of him
Speaker 1: as a writer when I was kind of in high
Speaker 1: school and college, because he had written one book and
Speaker 1: then his second book had been kind of put on
Speaker 1: a hold. Well, he was running Swathmore College. So he
Speaker 1: wasn't really writing, and so I didn't feel I think
Speaker 1: he still I think he he thought of himself a writer.
Speaker 1: He had turned out he'd years later I discovered that
Speaker 1: he'd been writing like lots of poetry and in the
Speaker 1: sixties and um, and they'd been keeping these very extensive journals,
Speaker 1: um And I think he communicated with himself most effectively
Speaker 1: by writing down what he was feeling, and then he
Speaker 1: could sort of know what he was feeling. But if
Speaker 1: he didn't write it down, and almost was like he
Speaker 1: didn't feel it or he didn't understand it. So he
Speaker 1: was almost writing to an audience of one a lot
Speaker 1: of the time, which later became an audience of two
Speaker 1: because I read all the stuff that he wrote. That's
Speaker 1: what I was just thinking, is that he he was
Speaker 1: writing as a way of knowing himself. You know, he
Speaker 1: was elusive to himself. He was also ellusive to you. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But the thing I didn't know was that he was
Speaker 1: listening to himself. I thought he was keeping it from
Speaker 1: us on purpose. But I had sort of intuitive that
Speaker 1: he somehow was reserving his inmost self for reasons unknown,
Speaker 1: and that we were not getting it. My sister and I.
Speaker 1: My sister Timmy and I both for sometime sort of
Speaker 1: thought there's sort of a bit of a child's fable
Speaker 1: quality to it. Where would we just say the right phraise,
Speaker 1: the rock will spring open and the you know, like
Speaker 1: and the steps will go down and to the basement
Speaker 1: with the sects of gold. There was something he was
Speaker 1: sort of like, maybe we can this time, and you know, like, oh,
Speaker 1: what if we do this or what if we asked
Speaker 1: him about that? And I gave up at a certain point,
Speaker 1: probably about twenty five years ago, and my sister really
Speaker 1: didn't you know, and I can we I would talk
Speaker 1: with her about it, and and I would say a because
Speaker 1: she would often end a conversation, a bad phone conversation
Speaker 1: with him and be really kind of stricken by it.
Speaker 1: And I would At that point, I was like, if
Speaker 1: you go to the potato store and they say they're
Speaker 1: out of potatoes, they don't have any podatos, Like I
Speaker 1: was like they you know, just thinking like it's not
Speaker 1: going to happen. But there were some podatos there. We
Speaker 1: just didn't know. And I remember, you know, there was
Speaker 1: a point late in my dad's life when I was
Speaker 1: somehow the one who was as Signs who asked him
Speaker 1: about his plans for his memorial service, which was sort
Speaker 1: of a tricky conversation. Um he seemed to welcome it.
Speaker 1: He was like, he loved the idea of people celebrating
Speaker 1: his life, and he had all these ideas, none of
Speaker 1: which seemed to involve any of his children speaking about him.
Speaker 1: But there were some eminent Southeast Asian historians we had
Speaker 1: in mind would be old to really eat sum them up.
Speaker 1: And then that's once you sort of talked about all
Speaker 1: the some of the details of this and that who
Speaker 1: could talk. And I started asked him to some other
Speaker 1: questions about this this phase of his life and what
Speaker 1: was difficult and what was the best part, and he
Speaker 1: said something like, you know, the best part is getting
Speaker 1: the time an opportunity to really to reconsider something and
Speaker 1: make up my mind in a different way about things.
Speaker 1: And I was thinking, like, wow, this could be the
Speaker 1: moment where he says, you know I always really loved you,
Speaker 1: or you know, I'm sorry that I didn't always express
Speaker 1: the deep feelings I have or some version of that.
Speaker 1: I was kind of like poised and like just like
Speaker 1: I'm blame, thinking this is going to be it, and
Speaker 1: I said, you know, well, you know, do you have
Speaker 1: any examples? And he said, well, I might be just
Speaker 1: about ready to change my mind about Franklin Roosevelt. And
Speaker 1: I was started like, yeah, all right, I still no
Speaker 1: petitause we'll be right back. In the mid nineties, Tad
Speaker 1: is in his thirties when his mom is diagnosed with
Speaker 1: breast cancer. It metastasizes and she becomes very, very sick.
Speaker 1: At this point, Tad's father is no longer president of
Speaker 1: Swarthmore College. He's running the Eisenhower Foundation. But when his
Speaker 1: wife gets sick, he steps down from his position and
Speaker 1: steps up as her caretaker. He's attentive, staunch, and loving.
Speaker 1: It's in this phase of their relationship that Tad's parents
Speaker 1: can reconnect and find joy with one another, even in
Speaker 1: the face of grave illness. And then my mom unfortunately
Speaker 1: died to them and three so that cut short what
Speaker 1: would have been I think a great late My mother
Speaker 1: lives you know the West fifteen or twenty years, and
Speaker 1: you know, it turned out later on my dad had
Speaker 1: made me his literary executor, and when I was reading
Speaker 1: there's papers that he had been faithful to her. Once
Speaker 1: in the sixties in Indonesia we told her about, which
Speaker 1: precipitated her big storm honestly in their marriage, and then
Speaker 1: later on a couple of other times which he didn't
Speaker 1: tell her about. As far as I can tell, I
Speaker 1: think he felt like she once he told her about
Speaker 1: the first time that he was unfaibled or kind of
Speaker 1: cut off that part of their relationships, the intimate part
Speaker 1: in some way, that intimate physical part, and none of
Speaker 1: this was you know, they weren't talking about this with us,
Speaker 1: believe me. But this was again just something I didn't
Speaker 1: really know about it until after he died. If someone
Speaker 1: had asked you before he died, do you think that
Speaker 1: your father was unfaithful to your mother? What would you
Speaker 1: have said? Yeah, I would have guessed that he was
Speaker 1: with no evidence, no actual evidence. I could sort of
Speaker 1: feel some kind of in some sub sonic frequency kind
Speaker 1: of weighed his sense of dissatisfaction and the way he
Speaker 1: would sometimes laid up around other women. So I would
Speaker 1: have guessed that. You know, if you said she had
Speaker 1: been unfaithful, I would have been really shocked. She could
Speaker 1: be flirty, but it was it wasn't clearly that was
Speaker 1: like just in a kind of like didner party hostess
Speaker 1: kind of way in the role of his father's literary executor.
Speaker 1: As Tad pours over Day's writings, he discovers the specificity
Speaker 1: with which Day recounted his extramarital affairs three women, five nights,
Speaker 1: forty one years. Day had done the math. There was
Speaker 1: writing two of Day's mother's many affairs which had impacted Day.
Speaker 1: But even before Tad discovers the scope of this generational infidelity,
Speaker 1: he spends his early adulthood with a nagging and persistent
Speaker 1: fear of intimacy and a fear of being vulnerable. He
Speaker 1: has a desire to be known, but also to be hidden.
Speaker 1: These fears cause him to stress test his relationships, to
Speaker 1: test the loyalty of the women he dates. During the
Speaker 1: same period of his life, he's also searching for father figures,
Speaker 1: though at the time he doesn't realize that's what he's doing.
Speaker 1: I think I was doing both things without knowing them,
Speaker 1: without understanding. It wasn't like I said, I shall stress
Speaker 1: test this relationship. Observed there is also right a you
Speaker 1: know new hypothesis. Because I was dimly aware of how
Speaker 1: fragile and insufficient I felt in a relationship how I
Speaker 1: felt like when you know, if someone really needed me
Speaker 1: to be there for them, or you know, like if
Speaker 1: I had to be get married or and be around
Speaker 1: with someone all the time and they could see me,
Speaker 1: and you know, like I was extremely closed off. I
Speaker 1: could kind of I can't remember what that term is
Speaker 1: on the Myers Briggs thing, but whatever it is, where
Speaker 1: you can be an extrovert for like two minutes at
Speaker 1: a party and then exhaust you and then you have
Speaker 1: to like go lie down with a compress over your eyes.
Speaker 1: That was that I wasn't quite lying now the compress,
Speaker 1: but I was like, I can engage with people, but
Speaker 1: then I really needed or wanted space because I think
Speaker 1: I felt like they're getting too close. You know. The
Speaker 1: the hounds are the hounds of people who actually want
Speaker 1: to know who I am are being, and therefore, you know,
Speaker 1: time to run away. I would like to retroactively apologize
Speaker 1: to all all of my friends and particularly any girlfriends
Speaker 1: from my teens through my early thirties, and um, I
Speaker 1: was terrible, and I apologize because I only later on
Speaker 1: began to realize how terrible it was. I did you know,
Speaker 1: it was like the stress testing was just sort of
Speaker 1: like more of almost like pushing up pressure relief style
Speaker 1: of like you know, well, you know I won't be
Speaker 1: endangered into a see if I I'm also presenting this
Speaker 1: other person. And the way that I think I think
Speaker 1: that was linked to my equally unknowing search for other figures,
Speaker 1: is that I was looking for some kind of model
Speaker 1: for what I should be doing with my life and
Speaker 1: how I should be a man. He felt like my
Speaker 1: dad wanted to be some kind of version of him
Speaker 1: where everything was processed through your brain and nothing was
Speaker 1: processed in your heart too, And I felt like, even
Speaker 1: though I wasn't very good at processing these things in
Speaker 1: my heart, that's what I wanted to do. Um So
Speaker 1: I was looking for people who it seemed better at it,
Speaker 1: and it seemed to have access to their feelings and
Speaker 1: you know, who either took joy and daily life or
Speaker 1: who seemed savvy about you know, other people's feelings. And
Speaker 1: I sort of thought, well, it could be savvy about
Speaker 1: other people's feelings, and maybe there's a way of locating
Speaker 1: my own triangulating you know, where I am by seeing
Speaker 1: where everyone around me is. It was a kind of
Speaker 1: me blindly groping my way towards as it turned out,
Speaker 1: towards decades of misery. I didn't as I did. I
Speaker 1: was hoping it would work out better. I think objectively,
Speaker 1: my dad seemed like, you know, he was a decent husband.
Speaker 1: But I think it's rare that people say I really
Speaker 1: want to have exactly my parents marriage. I mean, there
Speaker 1: are aspects that you know that you end up having
Speaker 1: whether you want to or not. And usually and you're like, okay,
Speaker 1: and there are maybe one or two things you would
Speaker 1: like to have, but most part you're like, you kind
Speaker 1: of know the way that goes, and you want something.
Speaker 1: It would be great if your parents came with a
Speaker 1: handbook and you could just like look through it or
Speaker 1: like a set of instructions, even in bad English. You
Speaker 1: know that from me somewhere far away, and you get
Speaker 1: this sort of printed out a little mimio sheet that
Speaker 1: says your dad was raised by two wasps in Pittsburgh.
Speaker 1: His father was an a total alcoholic who was a
Speaker 1: nice but extremely ineffectual man who was fired from his
Speaker 1: last job at forty three and never worked a day
Speaker 1: in his life after that. Your father could never really
Speaker 1: respect him, even though he loved him, and your father's
Speaker 1: mother Um lost respect for her husband and had numerous
Speaker 1: affairs that were widely known, and your father was embarrassed
Speaker 1: about that and never quite worked through his feelings about
Speaker 1: women as a result. That would be really handy. I mean,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't be ready for it at age three or four,
Speaker 1: but it would be nice if you. It's sort of
Speaker 1: like became, you know, It's like in a Harry Potter's way,
Speaker 1: someone would send an owl for you with these little
Speaker 1: updates every now and again. It would be helpful because
Speaker 1: I didn't get that information. I didn't really have any
Speaker 1: picture at all of my grandparents, but we didn't see
Speaker 1: much of them his parents anyway, until I was an adult.
Speaker 1: And by then, of course, as you were saying, like,
Speaker 1: it's all the streams have already moved around the rock,
Speaker 1: and you're already set alone in your way. Pretty well,
Speaker 1: what Tad calls blindly groping, i'd call actively thoughtfully searching,
Speaker 1: searching for a partner, searching for answers about his family,
Speaker 1: and searching for answers about himself. But of course, in
Speaker 1: order to find answers, he must first ask questions. He
Speaker 1: must put himself under the microscope to uncover why he's
Speaker 1: been so closed off. He seeks and engages in therapy
Speaker 1: with a Freudian analyst, and also embarks on group therapy,
Speaker 1: a particularly scary endeavor for someone with a limited threshold
Speaker 1: when it comes to vulnerability and social interaction. Well, there
Speaker 1: was an aspect of like a version therapy, whereas like
Speaker 1: my worst fear, like exploding yourself to it, like if
Speaker 1: you don't like flying, you look at video plane crashes
Speaker 1: or something. And it was really hard. The first might
Speaker 1: have been an hour and a half, but spending that
Speaker 1: at the end of it, I was I was wrong
Speaker 1: out And even if I hadn't said it a damn thing,
Speaker 1: which I pretty much didn't. For the first we had
Speaker 1: accepted kind of enigmatic remarks about other people, but I
Speaker 1: didn't say anything about myself. But I still was exhausted
Speaker 1: by just the sheer, vibrating emotionality of it all. Exhausting
Speaker 1: and emotional are good words to describe this time in
Speaker 1: Tad's life. It's around the year two thousand, now the millennium,
Speaker 1: and it appears the hard work he's done on himself
Speaker 1: is paying off. He's opening up in therapy. He's met
Speaker 1: a woman, a writer named Amanda Hesser, who he marries
Speaker 1: just a couple of years later in two thousand two. Then,
Speaker 1: of course, the asteroid of his mother's death comes in
Speaker 1: two thousand three. It's an intense time, to say the least.
Speaker 1: And just a few years later, in two thousand six,
Speaker 1: Tad and Amanda have twins. They're building a life together
Speaker 1: in Brooklyn, two talented writers with robust careers and wonderful
Speaker 1: little kids. But that generational scope of infidelity presents itself
Speaker 1: to Tad, and he succumbs to it, just like his dad,
Speaker 1: just like his grandmother. I'm struck by there's this moment
Speaker 1: in your book where you quote something that day Rights,
Speaker 1: which is, I seem to be the prisoner of my history,
Speaker 1: regrettable as that may be. And it's right after this
Speaker 1: line of days, I seem to be the prisoner of
Speaker 1: my history, regrettable if that may be. That then you
Speaker 1: write I cheated on Amanda in two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: And that juxtaposition just felt to me like it was
Speaker 1: you acknowledging that you too were a prisoner of your
Speaker 1: own his tree. And you go on and you write,
Speaker 1: having long feared being known, I had cheated and lined
Speaker 1: in ways that gave credence to the fear. Right, we'll
Speaker 1: be back in a moment with more family secrets. Dad's
Speaker 1: book and the process of writing it thus become multifold.
Speaker 1: It's a way to unpack and confront this fear, a
Speaker 1: way to understand his dad, to understand himself, and to
Speaker 1: reckon with the secrets that shaped them. The genesis of
Speaker 1: writing the book. Wizard emotionally had sort of given up
Speaker 1: on my dad and achieved a kind of like friendly, dutiful,
Speaker 1: loving civility. You know. I felt like I tried to
Speaker 1: get more out of him and that never really took.
Speaker 1: So I sort of had just decided, Okay, here are
Speaker 1: the limits, and then I sort of rubbed along in
Speaker 1: that way, you know, thinking about him, until suddenly I realized, like,
Speaker 1: he's he's getting old, he's falling down, he is he
Speaker 1: needs help. And when he had his first big thing,
Speaker 1: he went down to the hospital and talked to the
Speaker 1: doctors and realized, like, there is a date here that's
Speaker 1: coming where he's not going to be here. And I
Speaker 1: think that had an effect. I think the book almost
Speaker 1: grew out of that trip down to the hospital where
Speaker 1: the resident was basically saying, you know, like it's a
Speaker 1: slow or maybe even medium speed or maybe even quick,
Speaker 1: you know, slide from here, it's not going to get better,
Speaker 1: and realizing that I think I was started to feel like, well,
Speaker 1: there's only so much time to keep deferring, you know,
Speaker 1: one last hail Mary, that maybe he can make this
Speaker 1: all work and answer so many questions and make me
Speaker 1: feel better about myself, because I'll say I felt if
Speaker 1: my dads were reserving his best qualities from me, there
Speaker 1: must be a judgment that I'm not worthy of them.
Speaker 1: So I started to write, and I started keeping notes
Speaker 1: and kind of drawing stuff into a file about my
Speaker 1: dad and my memories of him, and also then also
Speaker 1: about our our own family, like Amanda and me and
Speaker 1: our two kids, like you know, here I am becoming
Speaker 1: a dad myself? Am I doing in comparison to my
Speaker 1: own stat And I did turn that book in and
Speaker 1: then mahbe I got sicker and died, and that I
Speaker 1: felt like I knew I needed to revise the book,
Speaker 1: and I knew I wanted to like so I'm back
Speaker 1: at it afresh. And then he made me his literal executor.
Speaker 1: So I was reading through you know, we were cleaning
Speaker 1: out of his house to sell it, and twenty big
Speaker 1: steel file cabinets crammed with files, and there was a
Speaker 1: whole other storage shed full of files, and there were
Speaker 1: fouls on top of his desk and files on top
Speaker 1: of his bureau and fills all over the floor, and
Speaker 1: it was kind of a big mess. He's been very,
Speaker 1: very meticulous and organized and like dow we decimal slash
Speaker 1: alphabetical until a certain point and he kind of just
Speaker 1: said at a bucket and sorry everybody can said everywhere
Speaker 1: in the last like ten years of his life, and
Speaker 1: so it really wasn't organized. And I arned maybe he
Speaker 1: had there was a system, but I couldn't decipher it.
Speaker 1: So I was just kind of going through it all
Speaker 1: and never sure what, you know, what's going to turn
Speaker 1: out to be, like tax returns from nineteen and was
Speaker 1: going to turn out to be his poems and his
Speaker 1: journals from nineteen sixties seven and the course of that,
Speaker 1: and realized he was a much different man then I thought.
Speaker 1: He was much more emotional, much more sensitive, much more
Speaker 1: awake two and alive to life in every way. He was,
Speaker 1: you know, he really felt things deeply, but he the
Speaker 1: problems he couldn't convey them to us very well or
Speaker 1: something some kind of like I almost think of him
Speaker 1: as like, you know, those trumpeters, and he can trumpet,
Speaker 1: and then he like, as soon as he saw us
Speaker 1: that the mute would come over it. I don't know why.
Speaker 1: I think he just felt like the dad should be
Speaker 1: the sort of regal, regal figure who um it sits
Speaker 1: in a chair like a k throne and pronounces and
Speaker 1: it's like, no, that's that's I don't know where you
Speaker 1: got that. That is totally wrong. So, realizing all that,
Speaker 1: I rewrote the book, not completely, but I you know,
Speaker 1: I recast a lot of it, and I added all
Speaker 1: this material, and so I had written the second version
Speaker 1: and I wanted a manage to read it. She read it.
Speaker 1: She was shocked about my dad's and fidelities, as I
Speaker 1: had originally been just reading about them, because he'd written
Speaker 1: he had tholes of his premarital affairs, lots of stuff
Speaker 1: about erotic dreams he had, including about one of them
Speaker 1: he had at the time and the nineties about a
Speaker 1: girlfriend of mine, which is kind of weird to read.
Speaker 1: You're like, what, no, then you can't see that, you know,
Speaker 1: you're like, I wish I had, I wish I had
Speaker 1: somehow skipped over that particular one. There's a bunch of
Speaker 1: stuff that you know, like was candid because he did
Speaker 1: think he was going to be writing for himself, and
Speaker 1: without getting into all the glory details. In the second
Speaker 1: version of the book, he had tried to convey a
Speaker 1: much fuller, rounder, more passionate, more flawed person who you know,
Speaker 1: more human person that he was. And Amanda, she loved
Speaker 1: my dad and admired him, and I think she felt
Speaker 1: disabused in reading it and felt like he treated my
Speaker 1: mom badly. And then we're talking about it, and I
Speaker 1: said something like I had more time with it all
Speaker 1: and I but I said something like, you know, well,
Speaker 1: I know what you're saying, and I hear you, but
Speaker 1: I also think, you know, she could be tough to
Speaker 1: which I still think it's true. Um, And I said,
Speaker 1: I also think it was a pretty good marriage all
Speaker 1: and all, which I also think it's true, with reservations
Speaker 1: and that if I wouldn't want to have it be
Speaker 1: our marriage. But Amanda, it was very emotionally sensitive somehow
Speaker 1: picked up on what I was saying and thought I
Speaker 1: was referring or in some coded or unconscious way, to
Speaker 1: our our marriagers in mind and so um. When I
Speaker 1: was out the next day, she started reading to my journals,
Speaker 1: and she even though I thought I had you know,
Speaker 1: when I was writing my journals, I didn't want to them,
Speaker 1: but I didn't expect anyone to realms. So I had
Speaker 1: written about with various degrees of candor or various degrees
Speaker 1: of openness about I had said always. So that began
Speaker 1: the worst period of our lives, the ways in which
Speaker 1: I felt like I was a prisoner of my history.
Speaker 1: There's a natural assumption that sometimes people can make that
Speaker 1: if you know someone's having an affair in the marriage,
Speaker 1: that they maybe they're not satisfied with their partner, or
Speaker 1: they're not getting what they need from their partners, they're
Speaker 1: seeking it outside the marriage. I think that is not
Speaker 1: apply here. I had cheated on pretty much everyone before Amanda.
Speaker 1: It was just I was built. Say I was built
Speaker 1: makes it sound like someone else did it. I was.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm totally responsible. I'm an adult. I did
Speaker 1: these things, cheated, I was unfaithful, I behave terribly allied.
Speaker 1: You know that crappy, crappy horrible stuff that makes me
Speaker 1: still feeling incredibly ashamed and mad at myself and demanded.
Speaker 1: And I had issues in our marriage that I talked
Speaker 1: about in the book. Even if we had had zero
Speaker 1: issues in our marriage, even if I had been like
Speaker 1: just overjoyed every single day, which is hard to have
Speaker 1: any any marriage, and there was a lot of times
Speaker 1: I really was overdover the Amanda. But even if I've
Speaker 1: been overod all the time, I still probably would have
Speaker 1: diated because I felt so badly about myself, and I
Speaker 1: felt so needy, and I felt so insecure, and I
Speaker 1: you know, I think I was just building a compartment
Speaker 1: that one more bulkhead against intimacy, full true intimacy, and
Speaker 1: unconsciously replicating my dad, who does the same thing. But
Speaker 1: I didn't know that, you know, Like it's funny how
Speaker 1: so often those secrets get passed down and some smuggled
Speaker 1: down secretly. It's like he'd clapped me out in the
Speaker 1: back and then slipped it into my pocket and I
Speaker 1: didn't notice. He's like the artful dodger, and maybe his
Speaker 1: mom didn't the same thing to him, you know, like
Speaker 1: you don't know where you're getting it, because I didn't.
Speaker 1: I didn't. I would have, you know, I would have
Speaker 1: said if I had had to guess that he had
Speaker 1: been impatable. But I didn't know that, and we've never
Speaker 1: talked about it, and I never certainly would never have thought,
Speaker 1: like I want to model myself. I'm that guy who
Speaker 1: I can't get enough love from. That would be a mistake.
Speaker 1: Why would I want to do that. I was trying
Speaker 1: to be the opposite. I was trying to be like Mr.
Speaker 1: Supersensitive guy. You know, I'm going to do all his therapy.
Speaker 1: And then it turned out while he'd been doing therapy too,
Speaker 1: last lats of therapy. So on the one hand, Tad
Speaker 1: is in therapy. He's working on himself in all sorts
Speaker 1: of ways, as did his dad. But sometimes even in therapy,
Speaker 1: we don't go to the scariest places. It's ironic, I suppose,
Speaker 1: But in the inner sanctum of a therapist's office, where
Speaker 1: it's safe to expose our demons, sometimes we just don't.
Speaker 1: The shame is too large, too looming, too terrifying. Tad
Speaker 1: never addresses his fears about his infidelity with his therapist.
Speaker 1: He never addresses his truths. He realizes later it this
Speaker 1: doesn't make sense paying a professional only to present a
Speaker 1: fabricated version of yourself. I was never aware of how
Speaker 1: much shame I was carrying around until and I discovered
Speaker 1: how terribly I behaved for years in our marriage, and
Speaker 1: then I was plunged right into this big battle of it,
Speaker 1: and it felt really awful. And having access to the shame,
Speaker 1: being aware of it now, like and having it pretty easily,
Speaker 1: you know, even talking with you now At times when
Speaker 1: we're talking about my behavior, you know, I feel that
Speaker 1: clammy disbelieving but totally having to accept sense of shame
Speaker 1: that this is what I did and this is how
Speaker 1: I betrayed Amanda um and also the accompanying sense of like,
Speaker 1: what kind of person does that? But I also feel
Speaker 1: like there's some there at some point which I maybe
Speaker 1: not yet but I could see in the future where
Speaker 1: you know, you might it's not it's like incorporating it
Speaker 1: so it doesn't feel like an alien part of you.
Speaker 1: It feels like, Okay, there's the shame, and it's just
Speaker 1: you know, it's just like, Okay, there's the dog, Okay,
Speaker 1: there's the kitchen sink. Um. It feels like a useful
Speaker 1: thing at some point because it's like, well, I did
Speaker 1: do that, and it's not like something that's swept over
Speaker 1: me and possessed me. It's like part of who I was.
Speaker 1: I will never do it again, but I know that
Speaker 1: I had that capacity and I should be mindful of that. Well.
Speaker 1: And you're also owning it because I mean, I don't
Speaker 1: just mean with Amanda and with yourself, but making the
Speaker 1: decision to to go there in this book means that
Speaker 1: you're not sweeping anything under any rock. You're just like
Speaker 1: no sweeping, and that, you know, strikes me as very brave,
Speaker 1: um and necessary. If you were if you were going
Speaker 1: to write this book, the book wouldn't be true if
Speaker 1: you know you wrote about about days infidelities and then
Speaker 1: pretending that it wasn't another generational layer to that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it felt, even when I was writing the second version
Speaker 1: of the book like it felt that I was aware
Speaker 1: of that I was sweeping my own behavior under the rug,
Speaker 1: and it felt that help falls to me and wrong,
Speaker 1: I'd like it, but I didn't. Also at that point,
Speaker 1: I feel like, oh, well, it's a great opportunity for
Speaker 1: me to write about this um because um, you know,
Speaker 1: you know that would be revealing my shame to everyone,
Speaker 1: and now I am. And you know, I would never
Speaker 1: have done it if Amanda hadn't agreed with me that
Speaker 1: we should, that I should do it, and hadn't wanted
Speaker 1: me to do it, and hadn't read it and made sure,
Speaker 1: you know, like the last thing I would ever want
Speaker 1: to do it. Having hurt her so badly has hurt
Speaker 1: her more with the book. And so if she hadn't
Speaker 1: wanted me to, I would have just helped it and
Speaker 1: that would have been that that she did. And I
Speaker 1: feel like Amanda has been the one who has been
Speaker 1: brave to like take me on again, knowing that I
Speaker 1: was not the person that she thought it wasn't I
Speaker 1: was living with for all those years, and that I
Speaker 1: had unexplored rooms that she didn't know about. And I
Speaker 1: think that's that's the big act of bravery, because she
Speaker 1: would have been would have been perfectly reasonable and emotionally
Speaker 1: plausible for her to say, no way, I'm out. So
Speaker 1: I'm grateful every day that she didn't. You know, you
Speaker 1: right towards the end of your book being exposed was
Speaker 1: a harrowing but necessary precursor to being seen and having
Speaker 1: those unexposed rooms be exposed, it seems like a great gift. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It was the thing I probably most feared and before
Speaker 1: it happened, and the thing I am most grateful for
Speaker 1: now that it has happened. It was the great psychoanalyst
Speaker 1: and writer Donald Winnicott, who once wrote, it is a
Speaker 1: joy to be hidden, but disaster not to be found.
Speaker 1: Here's Tad who has been found and found himself at last,
Speaker 1: reading one last passage from his stirring book. But I
Speaker 1: identified his wrongly. With those baby monkeys, I couldn't stop
Speaker 1: thinking about them at the legettive air in my eyes
Speaker 1: and black vertigoes. I felt the way. The feeling was
Speaker 1: so intrusive that I stepped it into the memory hole,
Speaker 1: or it wouldn't trouble me anymore. Now, I wonder if
Speaker 1: given time, the monkeys would have eventually retreated to the
Speaker 1: corners of their cages, because that's what I did. I
Speaker 1: retreated with many a backward look. But I took the
Speaker 1: compressed air hose with me. I'm afraid I left you
Speaker 1: alone a good deal when you were young, mom said
Speaker 1: to me once, dreadfully brightening, she added, but the result
Speaker 1: is that you learned to read very early and now
Speaker 1: you're a writer. Family Secrets is a production of I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Molly Zachor is the story editor and Dylan
Speaker 1: Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family
Speaker 1: secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail
Speaker 1: and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our
Speaker 1: number is one eight Secret zero. That's the number zero.
Speaker 1: You can also find me on Instagram at Danny writer.
Speaker 1: And if you'd like to know more about the story
Speaker 1: that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 1: favorite shows.