Speaker 1: Family Secrets as a production of I Heart Radio High
Speaker 1: Family Secrets Listeners. It's Danny here to share something I
Speaker 1: think is really special. As we're hard at work creating
Speaker 1: amazing new episodes for the seventh season of Family Secrets,
Speaker 1: I am so excited to be able to share with
Speaker 1: you an episode from one of my absolute favorite podcasts
Speaker 1: which tells the story of my own family secret in
Speaker 1: a way no one has done before. And that's because
Speaker 1: Nora McNerney and her hit show Terrible Thanks for Asking,
Speaker 1: is brilliant. She tells stories like no one else in
Speaker 1: a way. Nora is like the godmother of my show.
Speaker 1: When I was first starting out and had no idea
Speaker 1: how to create a podcast, I reached out to her
Speaker 1: and she walked me through the process with so much
Speaker 1: kindness and generosity. We've become friends. I adore her and
Speaker 1: felt completely safe in this far reaching conversation was her.
Speaker 1: So here's Terrible Thanks for Asking. Lacuna manuscripts a missing
Speaker 1: piece of text, Lacuna music an extended silence in a
Speaker 1: piece of music. Lacuna linguistics a lexical gap in a language.
Speaker 1: Lacuna law the lack of law or of a legal
Speaker 1: source addressing a situation Lacuna histology, a small space containing
Speaker 1: an osteo syte. In bone, there's an uneasy sense a
Speaker 1: person gets when something is missing, that gap in the text,
Speaker 1: in music, in language, in law, in bone. We like
Speaker 1: when the pieces fit together, and we like when we
Speaker 1: have them all laid out neatly before us. And I
Speaker 1: know that puzzle is a lazy metaphor to use, but
Speaker 1: I'm going to use it many times in this episode
Speaker 1: because I love puzzles and I am not great at them,
Speaker 1: but I know we like when pieces fit together in music,
Speaker 1: in podcasts, in puzzles, in life. And today's episode is
Speaker 1: about that gap, that chasm, that open and unfilled space,
Speaker 1: and what happens when it finally all comes together. I'm
Speaker 1: Nora McNerney, and this is terrible. Thanks for asking. And
Speaker 1: this is Danny Shapiro. I remember so little about my childhood.
Speaker 1: I think in part because I didn't have any witnesses
Speaker 1: to it, and the two witnesses I did have to
Speaker 1: it were my parents, and I was like a lost
Speaker 1: to myself. UM didn't have a real sense of my
Speaker 1: two feet on the ground like my I can't summon
Speaker 1: what it felt like to be me as a child,
Speaker 1: and that's been always true for me. I can remember
Speaker 1: certain things or have certain flashes of images, but not
Speaker 1: inhabit what it was to be me, you know, growing
Speaker 1: up in this house in New Jersey with my two
Speaker 1: parents and a lot of quiet, and you know, a
Speaker 1: sense that there were secrets kind of hanging in the air,
Speaker 1: and that there was just so much that I knew,
Speaker 1: I knew, I didn't know, and I but you know
Speaker 1: that feeling Nora, like that feeling of being lost to oneself,
Speaker 1: feeling like other kids had a sense of their families,
Speaker 1: in a sense of belonging in a sense of their
Speaker 1: lives and of fitting in and of just having a
Speaker 1: right to be there. I guess I would say I didn't.
Speaker 1: I didn't have that. I did have a feeling somehow
Speaker 1: of a kind of special nous because I was, in
Speaker 1: one way or another, always being told that I was
Speaker 1: somehow special. But you know, specialness in isolation is a
Speaker 1: very strange and painful place to be. What does it
Speaker 1: even mean? Mhm. That's such a good way to put it,
Speaker 1: because what does it mean to be special? You're only
Speaker 1: special in comparison to something. But if you don't know
Speaker 1: what you're being compared to. What good does it do you? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I felt like a hothouse flower, like I
Speaker 1: would die under the wrong conditions. I was very shivered
Speaker 1: over by both of my parents and by really all
Speaker 1: of the adults around me who were related to me,
Speaker 1: you know, really on my mother's side. But the feeling
Speaker 1: that there was something very fragile about me and that
Speaker 1: I might just kind of vanish, and that contributed to
Speaker 1: that sense of special illness, you know, like like a
Speaker 1: very delicate but perhaps not prepared for the elements in
Speaker 1: some way, kind of little human being. Danny was the
Speaker 1: only child of an Orthodox Jewish couple. She went to
Speaker 1: a yeshiva, a Jewish day school, from kindergarten to seventh grade.
Speaker 1: All around her were kids who dressed and prayed and
Speaker 1: looked alike, and there was Danny. I was very fair,
Speaker 1: sort of pink cheeked and blue eyed and very delicate looking,
Speaker 1: and a lot was made of that all the time,
Speaker 1: both by my family and by other adults around me,
Speaker 1: and by teachers and by other children. It really was
Speaker 1: commented on all the time that I didn't look like
Speaker 1: I was Jewish, and that I didn't look like I belonged,
Speaker 1: and that somehow the the message underneath all that was
Speaker 1: you're not one of us, and you're from someplace else entirely,
Speaker 1: you know, there was just this feeling of like complete
Speaker 1: and utter being kind of alien, like an alien hothouse
Speaker 1: flower creature. I think what made it even more complicated
Speaker 1: is that I knew that it was meant as a compliment,
Speaker 1: but it somehow felt like an insult. Because I adored
Speaker 1: my father, I felt very much like being part of
Speaker 1: his world and being part of his family was a
Speaker 1: tethering kind of rooted thing. UM. I very much wanted
Speaker 1: to feel that way, and I didn't feel that way
Speaker 1: about my mother. I was not connected to her. UM
Speaker 1: such a strange thing for a daughter to feel about
Speaker 1: a mother. But we really were kind of like a
Speaker 1: total mismatch, and I tried. I loved her, she was
Speaker 1: my mother, but I didn't relate to her, and I
Speaker 1: didn't feel that I was like her at all. I
Speaker 1: felt like I was like my dad, and I wanted
Speaker 1: to be part of his family. And so when somebody
Speaker 1: would say to me, you don't look Jewish, or you
Speaker 1: don't you don't look like your cousins, or you don't
Speaker 1: look like you belong in this group of people. It
Speaker 1: would feel insulting to me or hurtful. But I did
Speaker 1: understand that what they were saying is, oh, you're so pretty,
Speaker 1: Oh you're so fair. Um, oh you you know you
Speaker 1: look like you know, I mean in Judaism, and it's
Speaker 1: a really it's tricky territory because there's kind of a
Speaker 1: self hating aspect of that. You know, there's the the
Speaker 1: realm of the the chicksa is the word that is
Speaker 1: always used, and you know, Jewish boy ways are raised
Speaker 1: to kind of stay away from but revere. You know,
Speaker 1: the chicksa goddess. You see all of Woody Allen, you
Speaker 1: see Philip Roth. And that's what I looked like. And
Speaker 1: that was something that I was supposed to be flattered by,
Speaker 1: but instead felt kind of that it was I didn't
Speaker 1: understand it, and and it was hurtful to me in
Speaker 1: some way. It is natural to want to fit in,
Speaker 1: especially when fitting in means fitting into your family and
Speaker 1: into your culture. And people who are lonely who want
Speaker 1: to fit in do not need to be told the
Speaker 1: ways that they don't fit. And when it is pointed out,
Speaker 1: whether it is that your shoes are the wrong brand
Speaker 1: or your hair is the wrong color. It wouldn't be
Speaker 1: surprising if you wanted to throw your shoes in the
Speaker 1: trash or grab a box of hair dye. But when
Speaker 1: the thing that doesn't fit is just you in general,
Speaker 1: and there's no way to chameleon yourself into the right form,
Speaker 1: that feeling can just boomerang back into you. Just what,
Speaker 1: and it's your problem now? And not fitting in is
Speaker 1: Danny's problem. I absolutely internalized it and felt that there
Speaker 1: must be something very wrong with me. And that is
Speaker 1: something that I carried with me through my childhood. And
Speaker 1: you know, I don't know that I wore it on
Speaker 1: the surface. When I've encountered people who I went to
Speaker 1: grade school with or I went to high school with,
Speaker 1: they didn't see me that way, which I find completely fascinating.
Speaker 1: They saw me as somehow confident or somehow you know,
Speaker 1: are surprised by the degree to which I felt like
Speaker 1: I didn't belong. I think I also had a pretty good,
Speaker 1: a pretty solid mask or you know, a veneer um.
Speaker 1: You know, I didn't wear any of this on my sleeve.
Speaker 1: There weren't the external things that sometimes happened with kids.
Speaker 1: You know, I didn't show my anxiety. I didn't have uh,
Speaker 1: you know, ticks. It was all much more subtle than that.
Speaker 1: And I didn't talk to anybody about it. I wasn't
Speaker 1: somebody who spoke a lot about my feelings. I kind
Speaker 1: of buried them, and they just became more and more
Speaker 1: toxic to me. I found this whole box of many,
Speaker 1: many things that my mother saved, and it was like
Speaker 1: the most radioactive box. And there was this one list
Speaker 1: that my mother had clearly had me make and I
Speaker 1: sign it and it's like a confession. It has a title,
Speaker 1: and the title is six reasons of why I should
Speaker 1: be happy. And I can't quote you the whole thing,
Speaker 1: but the first, you know, on the list were things
Speaker 1: like I have a dog, I have a mother who
Speaker 1: drives me everywhere, I have everything I need. And this
Speaker 1: was clearly an assignment that I was given of, you know,
Speaker 1: coming up with reasons why I should be happy. And
Speaker 1: the thing that was so striking about them, and it's
Speaker 1: like in a child's handwriting. It couldn't have been more
Speaker 1: than you know, six years old, seven years old. You know,
Speaker 1: I have piano lessons, and it just felt like I
Speaker 1: was almost being coached, like, here are reasons why you
Speaker 1: should be happy, as opposed to let's understand what's really
Speaker 1: going on. Yeah, let's explore why you could be sad,
Speaker 1: right right, But it was never okay to be sad,
Speaker 1: to be upset, to be angry. And so I think
Speaker 1: I really learned like that, Veneer. I learned that there
Speaker 1: was a kind of composure that I could And this
Speaker 1: wasn't conscious. I mean, let me just be you know,
Speaker 1: really clear. This was not something I sat down and thought,
Speaker 1: how do I appear composed? It was more like composure
Speaker 1: was survival um that if I could find a way
Speaker 1: to sort of moved through the world and moved through
Speaker 1: my family in a kind of composed way and not
Speaker 1: reveal my my sorrow, my guilt, my fear, my anxiety,
Speaker 1: that that was going to be you know, the way
Speaker 1: through for me. It is a way through, but not
Speaker 1: the healthiest way through, because that sorrow, that guilt, that fear,
Speaker 1: that anxiety, they royal beneath her composed surface. Danny does
Speaker 1: all of the right things in the right order, right
Speaker 1: up until she's sent to college, and anyone who knew
Speaker 1: me at Xavier University from two thousand to two thousand
Speaker 1: and five can tell you that this is a period
Speaker 1: in life where many of us, many of us try
Speaker 1: on different versions of ourselves like paper dolls, trying to
Speaker 1: see what fits and what will stick. But that feeling
Speaker 1: that she's different, that she doesn't belong it stays unsaid,
Speaker 1: and it leaks outsideways as Danny flails through her teens
Speaker 1: and twenties. But Danny isn't simply doing keg stands in
Speaker 1: the basement of a former morgue and falling out of
Speaker 1: a stolen grocery card on the way home like some
Speaker 1: people on today's podcast. She's unraveling in a very New
Speaker 1: York City in the eighties kind of way. She has
Speaker 1: an affair with her college roommates married father, she gets
Speaker 1: into acting. Both of her parents die when she's still
Speaker 1: in her early twenties, and then she's not alone like
Speaker 1: she was as a little girl in that big house
Speaker 1: in New Jersey. She's alone, Lauren Gough wrote in the
Speaker 1: novel Fates and Furies, green is for the strong who
Speaker 1: use it as fuel for burning. The death of Danny's
Speaker 1: parents become the fuel that propels her out of that affair,
Speaker 1: out of acting and back into college and then grad
Speaker 1: school and into a career as a novelist, building worlds
Speaker 1: and stories and characters and finding the right place for
Speaker 1: every piece. Danny falls in love and gets married, and
Speaker 1: builds a career and has a son, and together their
Speaker 1: family of three are their own universe, far from that
Speaker 1: world where she grew up, feeling simultaneously pressed between the
Speaker 1: slides of a microscope and gazing through the lens at
Speaker 1: her community. Here in this farmhouse in Connecticut, many decades
Speaker 1: removed from the little girl who was forced to write
Speaker 1: a gratitude list with a list of published books and
Speaker 1: essays and articles a mile long, she is home. I'm
Speaker 1: fifty four years old. I'm a writer of many books,
Speaker 1: a professor of writing. I'm married for twenty plus years.
Speaker 1: I have a seventeen year old son, and have really
Speaker 1: built a life I love. And I am genuinely content
Speaker 1: to the degree that contentment is possible. There's always a
Speaker 1: sense that I have that somehow, not everything clicks into place,
Speaker 1: not everything makes sense. There's some kind of subtle disconnect
Speaker 1: that I've learned how to live with. It's just the
Speaker 1: way it is. But I am the happiest and the
Speaker 1: most fulfilled that I've ever been in my life. I
Speaker 1: live in rural Connecticut in house I love, you know,
Speaker 1: with my husband and my son and a dog, and
Speaker 1: my husband who's also a writer and a journalist and
Speaker 1: a filmmaker. And he's a former foreign correspondent, so he
Speaker 1: really has the journalistic instinct, and and he's also an
Speaker 1: early adopter of technology, always kind of early to the
Speaker 1: party on all things technological. Danny's husband, Michael, is about
Speaker 1: to be an early adopter of at home DNA tests.
Speaker 1: They're ubiquitous now. I'm pretty sure you can get them
Speaker 1: at target. But at this point these tests are just
Speaker 1: gaining steam and all across America. We were thrilled to
Speaker 1: be able to prove that actually you should kiss me
Speaker 1: because I am Irish, or definally know our heritage after
Speaker 1: a private adoption as a child, or to you just
Speaker 1: you know, hand over our personal DNA to a giant
Speaker 1: data company. Whatever. Michael and Danny already know everything there
Speaker 1: is to know about their own heritage, but it could
Speaker 1: be an interesting experiment. So Michael tells Danny, Hey, I
Speaker 1: ordered some of those DNA tests. You want to do one?
Speaker 1: And I could so easily have said no. To this day,
Speaker 1: I'm marvel that I said yes. It was just in
Speaker 1: the spirit of, like, oh, what the hell. You know,
Speaker 1: the testing companies bring their prices down every year, right
Speaker 1: around the holidays, and it was not a big ticket item,
Speaker 1: and I thought, well, you know, okay. So he sent
Speaker 1: away for two of these tests, and they arrived, and
Speaker 1: you know, as many people know, you have to spit
Speaker 1: into a plastic vial. They sat on my kitchen counter
Speaker 1: for weeks actually, because they were that unimportant. And then
Speaker 1: at some point one night after dinner, he you know,
Speaker 1: opened mine and he told me to spit in the
Speaker 1: vial and and I did. And I felt sort of
Speaker 1: vaguely ridiculous and like why am I doing this? And
Speaker 1: how much spit do you need? And but I did it,
Speaker 1: and and he sealed mine up, and he sealed his
Speaker 1: up and sent them back off, you know, to be evaluated.
Speaker 1: And a while later, I don't know, six weeks eight
Speaker 1: weeks later, one night we were watching TV after dinner,
Speaker 1: just sitting there and he had his laptop sitting on
Speaker 1: his lap, as he often does, and and he said, oh,
Speaker 1: your results are in. And I didn't even know what
Speaker 1: he was talking about. It wasn't like there was any
Speaker 1: since I have had at all that I was waiting
Speaker 1: for these results. But he opened my results and started
Speaker 1: looking at them. I wasn't even looking at them. I
Speaker 1: was incurious, and he was like huh. I was like,
Speaker 1: huh what And he said, well, look like it says here.
Speaker 1: Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but it seems to be
Speaker 1: saying here that you are fifty percent Eastern European Ashkenazi.
Speaker 1: And I was like, well, that's ridiculous, that's not right.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm probably Eastern European Ashkenazi. Both of my
Speaker 1: parents are from that background. And he's like, yeah, it's weird.
Speaker 1: But I just thought like there were no, like even
Speaker 1: faint warning bills. I just thought there must be some mistake.
Speaker 1: Testing company must you know, have mixed up my results
Speaker 1: or gotten it wrong, or maybe all people are a
Speaker 1: little of this and a little of that. We're just
Speaker 1: learning that now. I just had no nothing. But it
Speaker 1: actually did from my husband. I think it's set off
Speaker 1: a little bit of his journalistic kind of m also science.
Speaker 1: I mean he was like, yeah, the science of this
Speaker 1: is pretty clear. Um, they don't make they don't really
Speaker 1: make mistakes. And he didn't say that, but when you
Speaker 1: take one of these tests, you can opt in, and
Speaker 1: most people do to see other people that you share
Speaker 1: DNA with that you're related to genetically, and almost everybody
Speaker 1: opts in. And I did. And a little while later,
Speaker 1: maybe a week later, Michael, my husband, I'm sitting there
Speaker 1: having tea with a friend and he comes in to
Speaker 1: where we're sitting and interrupts and says, you have a
Speaker 1: first cousin on your ancestry dot com page. And I
Speaker 1: was like, yeah, I have lots of first cousins and
Speaker 1: he said, no, no no, no, like you have a first cousin.
Speaker 1: Who isn't for your first cousin? I mean, you don't
Speaker 1: know who's on here? And he points to this icon
Speaker 1: and I'm basically my mood at that moment is irritated.
Speaker 1: He's interrupting my tea date with this, like, what do
Speaker 1: you mean first cousin? I want to just finish having
Speaker 1: my tea with my friend. And he points out this
Speaker 1: little blue icon blue for boys, actually blue for boys
Speaker 1: and pink for girls. The only way we could possibly
Speaker 1: know that's right, that's right. There's no you know, there's
Speaker 1: no yellow or lime green. So there's a little blue
Speaker 1: icon and it only has initials on it. It doesn't
Speaker 1: have a name, it just has initials. And it's not
Speaker 1: somebody that I know that I at that point, I'm
Speaker 1: certain that the testing company has just simply mixed up
Speaker 1: my results with the results of somebody else who is
Speaker 1: wondering what this first cousin isn't appearing on their page
Speaker 1: and there must be a mix up. Still, no no
Speaker 1: alarm bells, no danger, danger feeling at all. But my
Speaker 1: husband starts exploring this a little bit more and he
Speaker 1: sees that there is a name connected to um the
Speaker 1: first cousins initials. There's actually a name, and he starts
Speaker 1: kind of digging into that name, and he's not really
Speaker 1: getting anywhere, and finally he says to me, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, we could really get to the bottom of this.
Speaker 1: Michael's pitch is to reach out to Susie, Danny's much
Speaker 1: older half sister, her father's daughter from an earlier marriage.
Speaker 1: That two of them had not grown up together, but
Speaker 1: Susie was someone that Danny had always admired. She was
Speaker 1: intelligent and sophisticated, part of a world that was wildly
Speaker 1: different from the one that Danny grew up in. I
Speaker 1: kind of revered her in a lot of ways. We
Speaker 1: had not been close for a number of years. Susie
Speaker 1: and my mother hated each other, which was something that
Speaker 1: always left me feeling of very divided loyalty. And after
Speaker 1: my mother died, we hadn't talked in a few years.
Speaker 1: But Michael said to me, why don't you reach out
Speaker 1: to Susie. Do you think she's done a DNA test?
Speaker 1: And I remembered that she had told me years earlier,
Speaker 1: she being an even more of an earlier after adapter
Speaker 1: of technology. Then my husband is that she had done
Speaker 1: one of the early back when it was pretty unusual
Speaker 1: DNA home tests, mostly for health reasons, wanting to know
Speaker 1: if she had, you know, any genetic diseases that she
Speaker 1: could know about. So I sent an email this is
Speaker 1: now happening very very quickly. It's nighttime. We had been
Speaker 1: out to dinner with friends. I had told them the
Speaker 1: whole story about how there was this crazy thing with
Speaker 1: this first cousin, and the friends we were out with
Speaker 1: later told me like they went home and said, Danny
Speaker 1: doesn't know what what's about to happen to her because
Speaker 1: Danny really didn't know what was about to happen to her.
Speaker 1: I still thought, this is just, you know, kind of
Speaker 1: nutty stuff. This is your husband just like chasing a
Speaker 1: rabbit hole. You're like, are you bored? Are you between projects?
Speaker 1: But like that, get a life. Yeah, totally totally just
Speaker 1: a feeling of like, this is this is just too much,
Speaker 1: this is this is like a conspiracy theory almost um.
Speaker 1: But I did reach out to Susie. I sent her
Speaker 1: an email asking if my memory was correct that she
Speaker 1: had in fact done DNA testing and if so, did
Speaker 1: she have any information regarding that? And I heard back
Speaker 1: from her within an hour that yes, she had done
Speaker 1: DNA testing and that she was actually away she was
Speaker 1: at a TED conference in um Canada, but that she
Speaker 1: would look on her computer that she had with her
Speaker 1: to see if she had her results with her, and
Speaker 1: another email saying she indeed did, and there's a site
Speaker 1: that exists that she knew about and that Michael also
Speaker 1: knew about. That's called um jet match, and jet match
Speaker 1: exists entirely for the purpose of comparing DNA results. So
Speaker 1: you can upload a kit number you know your name
Speaker 1: isn't on it or anything like that. Just your your
Speaker 1: kit number of your d n A results and the
Speaker 1: kit number of someone else's DNA results, and see how
Speaker 1: closely you are related. And that's when everything went kind
Speaker 1: of at warp speed. So Susie sent her kit number.
Speaker 1: Michael knew about this technology. We were leaving the next
Speaker 1: day on a trip. I was upstairs packing and putting
Speaker 1: everything in its proper place. All of a sudden, here
Speaker 1: Michael like running up the stairs with his laptop, and
Speaker 1: I think the moment that I saw his face, I
Speaker 1: began to hear warning bills because he looked that kind
Speaker 1: of wide open look I had only seen on his
Speaker 1: face a couple of times. I saw it on his
Speaker 1: face the moment our son was born. I saw it
Speaker 1: on his face. I came home one day and my
Speaker 1: mother had been terminally ill. But I like, he was
Speaker 1: standing on the porch and I looked at his face,
Speaker 1: and I knew my mother had died. I had seen
Speaker 1: it on his face in moments of like huge before
Speaker 1: and after kind of moments good and you know, the
Speaker 1: most beautiful and the most terrible, and and what I
Speaker 1: saw in his face was that. And he sat down
Speaker 1: next to me, and he pointed to this whole series
Speaker 1: of numbers on his computer screen and I was like,
Speaker 1: I don't know what this means. And he pointed to
Speaker 1: a line and he said, right there, and there was
Speaker 1: a series of letters, a series of numbers. And I
Speaker 1: said what is that And he said, that's your most
Speaker 1: recent common ancestor with Susie. And I said what does
Speaker 1: that mean? He said, you're not sisters. You're not related.
Speaker 1: You're not related. And I was like, well, what do
Speaker 1: you mean, like, no kind of sisters? And because you know,
Speaker 1: we had always very studiously referred to each other as
Speaker 1: half sisters, something that I've later discovered that in many
Speaker 1: families happier than our family, people don't feel the need
Speaker 1: to do. You know, you can be step siblings, half
Speaker 1: siblings of a family is kind of healthy and intact
Speaker 1: and feels good about each other. You just are sisters
Speaker 1: or brothers, your siblings. It's not like that, but it
Speaker 1: had always been like that for us. So I said,
Speaker 1: no kind of siblings and he said, no, you're not related,
Speaker 1: And at that moment I knew what that meant. Like
Speaker 1: all of the noise in my head, all of the
Speaker 1: I guess one would have to say denial. All of
Speaker 1: that vanished, and I knew that it meant that if
Speaker 1: we did not share a father, that it meant that
Speaker 1: our father was not my father. I never entertained the thought, oh, well,
Speaker 1: maybe he's my father and not Susie's father. I knew instantly,
Speaker 1: like in this deep way, um, like, ah, we don't.
Speaker 1: My father wasn't my biological father. Danny's father was not
Speaker 1: her biological father. Danny's parents saw fertility doctor when her
Speaker 1: mother was trying to conceive, and as was the custom
Speaker 1: in the fifties and the sixties, the doctor makes donor
Speaker 1: sperm from a young medical student, in this case with
Speaker 1: her father's sperm, a way of preserving a patient's ego
Speaker 1: while also giving them what their hearts so desperately wanted.
Speaker 1: It is not great, not great, not a great practice.
Speaker 1: Definitely wouldn't happen now, but it happened then. I think
Speaker 1: my parents were both kind people. I think they were
Speaker 1: decent people. I think that each of them, in their
Speaker 1: own ways, were doing the best they could with what
Speaker 1: they had been given. But I think, particularly my mother,
Speaker 1: when she looked at me from the time that I
Speaker 1: was born, when she looked at me she looked at
Speaker 1: a secret that she was keeping, or something that she
Speaker 1: was very afraid aid of, something she didn't want to
Speaker 1: think about. She was keeping, I believe, on some level,
Speaker 1: a secret from herself that she buried so deeply. She
Speaker 1: so desperately just wanted me to be, you know, both
Speaker 1: of my parents biological child, and forget that that whole
Speaker 1: thing ever had happened. But of course it had happened,
Speaker 1: and pushing it away doesn't make it go away. And
Speaker 1: you know, I used to wonder why when I would
Speaker 1: look at my mother her eyes all my life as
Speaker 1: a child, I do remember feeling this way. Her eyes
Speaker 1: were always darting. She had very giggle ee eyes. I
Speaker 1: don't know how else to put it. They were always
Speaker 1: moving very very quickly from not like glancing from side
Speaker 1: to side, but literally like there was a little earthquake
Speaker 1: going on in her eyes and like a little seismic quality,
Speaker 1: and it always like kind of disturbed me. And I
Speaker 1: didn't understand it, but I think I do now. I
Speaker 1: think that that's how she looked at me, was that
Speaker 1: I was always kind of creating a little seismic explosion
Speaker 1: inside of her, whether she was aware of it or not.
Speaker 1: This secret was one her parents had assumed would stay
Speaker 1: with them in their graves, not be resurrected by a
Speaker 1: science that was unimaginable at the time. But the secret
Speaker 1: is out, and the secret this whole time was Danny. Danny,
Speaker 1: who thought she was nine percent Eastern European Ashkenazi, is
Speaker 1: actually part English, French, German, Irish and Scandinavian. There's this
Speaker 1: beautiful John Didion line about feeling like she's navigating the
Speaker 1: world on a borrowed passport. Um. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: it's one of the reasons why it's one of my
Speaker 1: favorite of her descriptions or her sentences, is because that
Speaker 1: was the feeling. It's like I don't have a right
Speaker 1: to be here, and one of the things that I've
Speaker 1: thought a great deal about and I probably will think
Speaker 1: about for the rest of my life. And it's something
Speaker 1: that a lot of people who have had experiences not
Speaker 1: unlike my own report feeling, which is, you know, people
Speaker 1: who have had a huge secret that has to do
Speaker 1: with their identity kept from them. Is growing up with
Speaker 1: that feeling of like having a borrowed passport, of being
Speaker 1: an interloper of you know, again, the not belonging, and
Speaker 1: it's something I think that is intuited and that is
Speaker 1: kind of like sort of a deeply buried feeling. But
Speaker 1: I think it also comes from the fact that there
Speaker 1: are parents or a parent in some cases, who have
Speaker 1: kept that kind of magnitude of a secret from child,
Speaker 1: so that in fact, the child becomes the secret. This
Speaker 1: is a stunning, dizzying, absolute wrecking ball of a revelation.
Speaker 1: And Danny does what she has done for decades. She writes,
Speaker 1: She writes about this, She pulls it all apart and
Speaker 1: puts it back together and tries to make sense of it.
Speaker 1: And the full story is detailed in her best selling
Speaker 1: memoir Inheritance, which you probably have read, but if you haven't,
Speaker 1: absolutely should. But I've been reading Danny Shapiro since forever.
Speaker 1: Hers were some of the first memoirs to grab me
Speaker 1: by the throat and pin me to my chair until
Speaker 1: I was finished. I actually can't overstate what reading Slow Motion,
Speaker 1: the memoir of her twenties, did for me in my twenties,
Speaker 1: when I was spinning out and wondering if I would
Speaker 1: ever just stop. Danny has her own podcast, Family Secrets,
Speaker 1: which is You'll Never Guess what it's about. Actually, you'll
Speaker 1: never guess m and she knows that every day there
Speaker 1: are people having their past and their present in their
Speaker 1: future rearranged without their consent, learning truths that turn the
Speaker 1: puzzle pieces of their life into one of the boxes
Speaker 1: that's always in rental cabins, where literally none of the
Speaker 1: pieces are from the same puzzle. But you don't realize
Speaker 1: that until you've spent three hours trying to find edge
Speaker 1: pieces and none of them fit. Lots of people go
Speaker 1: through this, but most people aren't writers. What you have
Speaker 1: that other people don't is this record of your life.
Speaker 1: It might be the Maybe the only good thing about
Speaker 1: being a writer is um is having so much documentation,
Speaker 1: not just of what happened, but of how it felt.
Speaker 1: You know. People always ask me when I knew um
Speaker 1: that I was a writer, and I think I mean,
Speaker 1: I was always a writer. I was always If a
Speaker 1: writer is someone who has the compulsion to write in
Speaker 1: order to figure out what she knows, to figure out
Speaker 1: what's going on inside of her. That was always my
Speaker 1: tool for self examination or self illumination, or understanding anything
Speaker 1: about the world that I lived in. I didn't know
Speaker 1: that I could grow up in and and actually, you know,
Speaker 1: make books, write books, you know, as what I do
Speaker 1: in the world. I had no idea that that was possible.
Speaker 1: But from the time that I did, from the time
Speaker 1: that I first started trying to tell stories that other
Speaker 1: people would read from practically word one, my subject matter,
Speaker 1: my themes really so often had to do with secrets
Speaker 1: and a family. Um and I I didn't know why,
Speaker 1: It's just what I did. I really didn't look too
Speaker 1: carefully at my motivations for why I was writing what
Speaker 1: I was writing, because I was almost superstitious about doing that.
Speaker 1: It's like taking a car apart and then suddenly the
Speaker 1: engine doesn't work anymore. I didn't I was wilfully not
Speaker 1: wanting to know why I was compelled or even obsessed
Speaker 1: to explore what I wanted to explore. And what I
Speaker 1: wanted to explore was almost inevitably secrets within a family,
Speaker 1: the corrosive power of secrets, and what we do to
Speaker 1: each other in the name of keeping secrets or having
Speaker 1: secrets or having secrets kept from us. And you know,
Speaker 1: earlier when I said that there was this subtle disconnect
Speaker 1: that I always felt as a child, I think that
Speaker 1: the subtle disconnect ran directly along the fault lines of
Speaker 1: what was beneath those secrets. And I mean, writers, you know,
Speaker 1: we never want to revisit our earlier work. It's like
Speaker 1: it's it's it's like hearing your own voice or seeing,
Speaker 1: you know, seeing pictures of your it's like, it's kind
Speaker 1: of vaguely embarrassing. It's you know, the self that wrote
Speaker 1: that book has long since been left in the dust,
Speaker 1: and hopefully has been both cellularly and intellectually and philosophically
Speaker 1: and emotionally and psychologically um evolved into the self that
Speaker 1: writes the next one, and then that self gets left
Speaker 1: in the dust for the self who can write the
Speaker 1: next one. I mean, I think it's it's true of writers,
Speaker 1: it's true of all of us, that you know, we
Speaker 1: are hopefully constantly evolving, and that we are we are
Speaker 1: many different versions of ourselves over the course of a lifetime.
Speaker 1: But Danny did go back, and so did I, to
Speaker 1: all her previous works, except for her first novel, which
Speaker 1: she did not have a copy of it, neither did
Speaker 1: I until I had earthed one in the depths of
Speaker 1: the internet. Long after we had this interview. Danny went
Speaker 1: back to see what she knew before she knew. I
Speaker 1: am holding in my hands the most the most mortifying
Speaker 1: paperback of Playing with Fire, my first novel, which was
Speaker 1: first published in hardcover. But I don't think I have
Speaker 1: any so I um, I'm holding the sort of pale
Speaker 1: pink paperback of Playing with Fire. I think of my
Speaker 1: Christmas card displayed across the nation, my six year old
Speaker 1: Scandinavian self, my father receiving phone calls from friends in Boston, Richmond, Phoenix, Minneapolis. Joe,
Speaker 1: do you know that, Lucy Is? They would trail off,
Speaker 1: not knowing what to say, as if it was some
Speaker 1: sort of sin. Daddy would laugh, wishing you a merry Christmas.
Speaker 1: It was a story he loved. Imagine. I can almost
Speaker 1: hear him say, Jacob Gleenberg's granddaughter a regular little ships
Speaker 1: and you didn't know you were a Scandinavian when you
Speaker 1: wrote that. Nope, that's fiction, but the story of that
Speaker 1: Christmas photo is real. Little Jewish Danny was a model
Speaker 1: in a Christmas ad, a little taste of fame that
Speaker 1: her mother was exceptionally proud of. But even in her
Speaker 1: earliest memoir, written after her parents have died, there's that
Speaker 1: sense that she had in her childhood, the sense of
Speaker 1: not quite fitting hints that now look like clues. I
Speaker 1: have so much from slow motion underlined. So I've got
Speaker 1: the paperback from that Danny I bought from a library
Speaker 1: sidewalk sale when I couldn't afford books in New York.
Speaker 1: I was so excited to have this book. Okay, um,
Speaker 1: if you go to page seventy at the bottom, I
Speaker 1: rummaged through her purse for a compact. Rummaging through my
Speaker 1: mother's purse is nothing new to me. As a child.
Speaker 1: My desire to find out the real truth, which I
Speaker 1: also defined as whatever I didn't know, began with my
Speaker 1: mother's handbag, the romance of little slips of paper, contents
Speaker 1: of wallets, to do lists, lipsticks. When I think of
Speaker 1: myself as a child, even though I can't fully put
Speaker 1: myself back there, it was always as this sort of
Speaker 1: you know, like Nancy drew of my own life, constantly
Speaker 1: looking for clues. I mean I rummaged through everything. I
Speaker 1: rumaged through her desk drawers, I rummaged through her papers,
Speaker 1: but there was something in you know. She had beautiful clothes,
Speaker 1: and she had beautiful jewelry and a lot of everything
Speaker 1: like a lot of You know, there wouldn't be a
Speaker 1: perfume bottle like what I might have on my vanity.
Speaker 1: There would be dozens of them. And it was as
Speaker 1: if I could as if I knew that she was
Speaker 1: holding something that like maybe that these objects could clue
Speaker 1: me in or give me a sense of what what
Speaker 1: was missing, what I didn't know. But it was obsessive
Speaker 1: and it was wordless. I wasn't I couldn't have told
Speaker 1: you why I was doing it. It was like I
Speaker 1: was sleepwalking when I would do these things. My side
Speaker 1: of the family heals well. My mother tells me proudly,
Speaker 1: your father's family scars like nothing you've ever seen, but
Speaker 1: we're survivors. We snap right back as if nothing's happened.
Speaker 1: She tells me this as if I were not also
Speaker 1: my father's daughter, when the fact is I have inherited
Speaker 1: that particular trait from him. I am not as physically
Speaker 1: strong as my mother, and I don't bounce back as
Speaker 1: if nothing has happened. If I had been in the
Speaker 1: passenger's seat of the audi that night, I doubt I
Speaker 1: would have lived. The room swims. All my life, I've
Speaker 1: felt as if I've done something wrong when I see
Speaker 1: a police car on the highway, even if I'm not speeding,
Speaker 1: I think I'll be pulled over. And when walking through
Speaker 1: metal detectors and airports, I imagine that the alarmal sound
Speaker 1: and a gun or bomb will be pulled out from
Speaker 1: my luggage. Doesn't everybody feel that way? Are you telling me?
Speaker 1: You're telling me that's that One's just me many years
Speaker 1: from now, when my father is a skeleton in the ground,
Speaker 1: when my mother strides the streets of New York City
Speaker 1: with her arms swinging, when Lenny Kline is reduced to
Speaker 1: a colorful, if painful story. In my mind, there will
Speaker 1: occasionally be a day when I feel the fear. Then
Speaker 1: not inside me will unravel, and suddenly my heart will
Speaker 1: pound uncontrollably, my palms will dampen, and my ears will
Speaker 1: begin to ring. Wherever I am, I will be desperate
Speaker 1: to escape. The urge will be to run as far
Speaker 1: as I can, as fast as I can, away from
Speaker 1: my own body, like a tidal wave. It will come
Speaker 1: out of nowhere, this nameless, faithless terror. I will try
Speaker 1: every so called panacea, every cure, meditation, homeopathy, behavioral therapy,
Speaker 1: and nothing will make it go away. Not really. Sometimes
Speaker 1: I will be lulled into thinking that it's gone for good,
Speaker 1: but then years will pass and suddenly it will be
Speaker 1: there again, haunting me like an old lover. It will
Speaker 1: return to remind me that I am my father's daughter,
Speaker 1: that I inherited his terror along with my mother's will
Speaker 1: to survive. Booh. You know the I feel, in some ways,
Speaker 1: in many ways, like an object lesson in nature versus
Speaker 1: nurture um. And I feel such sadness and compassion for
Speaker 1: the young woman who wrote those words, and the still
Speaker 1: younger woman herself. You know that she was writing about
Speaker 1: because I was always looking for reasons. You know, why
Speaker 1: did I have that terrible anxiety at the point that
Speaker 1: I wrote Slow Motion? I was very much in that place.
Speaker 1: I believed that I came by it genetically. My father
Speaker 1: was an extremely phobic, anxious person who would suddenly, you know,
Speaker 1: in the middle of dinner, at the dinner table, check
Speaker 1: his pulse. I mean, his father dropped dead of a stroke,
Speaker 1: and I think he was always afraid that that was
Speaker 1: going to happen to him, and he monitored himself. He
Speaker 1: was acutely aware, sort of hyper vigilant about his own heartbeat, literally,
Speaker 1: and I was laboring under false information. I mean, did
Speaker 1: I grow up to be anxious at that stage in
Speaker 1: my life because I grew up watching a father who
Speaker 1: took his pulse at the dinner table. Very possibly that
Speaker 1: that was part of it, um, but it was not
Speaker 1: something I inherited genetically from him. And yet that story,
Speaker 1: the story that I did, you know, it became important
Speaker 1: to me. You know, people who are raised in families
Speaker 1: where they're biologically connected to their parents never really have
Speaker 1: cause to unpack any of this or think about it,
Speaker 1: because it's just the way it is. You know, you
Speaker 1: kind of understand, Oh I walk like that, or I
Speaker 1: sound like that, or you know, I share this sensibility
Speaker 1: with or you know, there's like a wider net that
Speaker 1: actually really does have to do with biology and genetics.
Speaker 1: And then people who are raised by families that they're
Speaker 1: not biologically related to but they know that also know, well,
Speaker 1: I don't look like my father or my mother, or
Speaker 1: I I don't have these traits in common with my
Speaker 1: parents who are raising me, my adoptive parents or my
Speaker 1: you know, my social parents. But I know why. I'm
Speaker 1: not saying that that's easy, but I think that that's
Speaker 1: it's true that there's that knowledge, and that knowledge becomes
Speaker 1: woven into identity. But when you don't know, and you
Speaker 1: don't know that you don't know, then, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: become really interesting for me to have to go to
Speaker 1: doctor's appointments now in the last five or six years,
Speaker 1: where I have to actually go, you know, I need
Speaker 1: to revise my medical history, father living, you know, family history,
Speaker 1: you know, pretty pretty darn healthy as opposed to I mean,
Speaker 1: my father died when I was twenty three years old
Speaker 1: in a car accident, but not, according to you a
Speaker 1: physician's interests, you know, a physician's interests is my father
Speaker 1: is living and eighty something years old and in good health.
Speaker 1: So it's a very very you know, I read this
Speaker 1: and I just see the burdens that I was carrying
Speaker 1: and the desire to make narrative, you know, And I think,
Speaker 1: to go back to the subtle disconnect, I was always
Speaker 1: trying to create narratives that would make sense of myself
Speaker 1: and would make sense of where I came from, and
Speaker 1: I was always coming up short, which I think is
Speaker 1: in a way a great gift, because it propelled me
Speaker 1: book after book to try to fill in the pieces
Speaker 1: of the puzzle that I didn't understand all the while,
Speaker 1: not knowing that there was kind of this essential piece,
Speaker 1: you know, that I was sort of whistling in the
Speaker 1: dark in some way, which also is why I feel
Speaker 1: now so um, I mean it's it's I don't remotely
Speaker 1: disavow my earlier books. I kind of love them as
Speaker 1: um like artifacts of my unconscious and I stand by them,
Speaker 1: and you know, and I know people care about them
Speaker 1: as books in their own right. But I feel like
Speaker 1: I've been liberated in the last five years by knowing
Speaker 1: a much fuller truth, so that the kind of digging
Speaker 1: that I was doing, I feel like the world opened
Speaker 1: up to me. And I finished, in a way a
Speaker 1: lifelong project when I wrote Inheritance, because I finally like,
Speaker 1: why the turn from novels to memoir? You know, you
Speaker 1: started reading me with slow emotion. Most people did. But
Speaker 1: there was three novels before slow motion, um, that were
Speaker 1: like my baby novels that were my like learning how
Speaker 1: to write in fact a public way. But they were, um,
Speaker 1: there's a reason why those books are out of print.
Speaker 1: There out of print because I was being led around.
Speaker 1: I was being you know, when you like walk down
Speaker 1: the streets sometimes when you see a dog walking a person.
Speaker 1: But the feeling in a literary sense, in a creative sense,
Speaker 1: that I began to have, and it's why I wrote
Speaker 1: Slow Motion, was the dog was walking me. My unconscious
Speaker 1: material was in charge of me, not me in charge
Speaker 1: of it, which you know, any novelist will tell you
Speaker 1: that's tricky territory. You never want to be in full
Speaker 1: charge of your unconscious material because then you know there's
Speaker 1: no magic. But I was really really not in control,
Speaker 1: and beginning with Slow Motion, I felt like I was
Speaker 1: big inning to be more and more in control, and
Speaker 1: I and I do think that that's true. But I
Speaker 1: really veered into the territory of memoir as a writer,
Speaker 1: and I wrote two more novels that I think are
Speaker 1: good novels and where I definitely felt like I was
Speaker 1: writing in a more mature way and more in control
Speaker 1: of my material. But then I went back to memoir.
Speaker 1: I wrote my memoir Devotion, and then I wrote still Writing,
Speaker 1: and all the while I kept on thinking why I
Speaker 1: didn't set out to be a memoirist. Why did I
Speaker 1: return to the form again and again? And the image
Speaker 1: that I always have when I think of myself during
Speaker 1: all of those years, is like I was literally digging,
Speaker 1: like digging on my knees in the ground with a shovel,
Speaker 1: and I would dig, dig, dig, and I would make
Speaker 1: a nice, you know, some kind of nice big hole
Speaker 1: with like you know, inelegant metaphor, but like a pile
Speaker 1: of dirt. You know, it was kind of pretty big pile.
Speaker 1: But I would not have kind of hit. I would
Speaker 1: not have found the thing that I was digging for.
Speaker 1: I would have approximated finding the thing that I was
Speaker 1: digging for, but I hadn't found it. And then one day,
Speaker 1: because of this random recreational DNA testing, suddenly I'm like there,
Speaker 1: and I'm on my knees and I'm digging, and like
Speaker 1: my shovel hits the fucking black box. My my shovel
Speaker 1: just hits this metal thing, and inside it is like
Speaker 1: the story of literally my existence. Everything that wouldn't fit
Speaker 1: in your mom's purse, everything that wouldn't fit in my
Speaker 1: mom's purse exactly, or in her jewelry box or in
Speaker 1: her closet or in you know the rooms of the
Speaker 1: you know, the home that I grew up in that
Speaker 1: was like a kind of you know, wax museum, where
Speaker 1: I've described it that way in my writing, where you know,
Speaker 1: look too closely and it doesn't add up, or look
Speaker 1: too closely and it's not real. In Danny's second memoir,
Speaker 1: detailing her infant son's diagnosis with a rare seizure disorder,
Speaker 1: you can sense Danny trying to look more closely, not
Speaker 1: quite knowing what she's even looking for. No wonder. I
Speaker 1: had been running as hard and as fast as I could.
Speaker 1: Anxiety was my fuel. When I stopped, it was all
Speaker 1: waiting for me. Fear, anger, grief, despair, and that terrible,
Speaker 1: terrible loneliness. What was it about? I was hardly alone.
Speaker 1: I loved my husband and son. I had great friends, colleagues, students.
Speaker 1: In the quiet in the extra hours, I was forced
Speaker 1: to ask the question and to listen carefully to the answer.
Speaker 1: I was lonely for myself. Now, I'm not saying all
Speaker 1: of your writing you you deserve fear, anger, grief, despair
Speaker 1: over losing your parents and having your child to be
Speaker 1: diagnosed with a very rare seizure disorder that he just
Speaker 1: through through the eye of a needle, like escaped from.
Speaker 1: But does that feel like something else to you when
Speaker 1: you read it. I think, when I'm most struck by
Speaker 1: is is the um the loneliness, because all those other
Speaker 1: feelings I could explain as you just did. You know,
Speaker 1: I had experienced a great deal of maternal terror, and
Speaker 1: you know, a fair amount of of loss and grief
Speaker 1: and trauma in my life at a relatively young age
Speaker 1: and certainly as a young mother. The thing we are all,
Speaker 1: you know, so terrified of is you know, something being
Speaker 1: very very wrong with my baby. But the loneliness that
Speaker 1: I think about now as something that had to do
Speaker 1: was not my connection with other people, but was my
Speaker 1: connection with myself, because you know, I mean, I think
Speaker 1: in writing Devotion, I mean Devotion was such a deep
Speaker 1: dive for me into, Like when I realized that I
Speaker 1: was I felt almost called upon to write this book.
Speaker 1: I saw the word devotion before I started writing the book,
Speaker 1: and I realized what it meant and that I was
Speaker 1: going to write this book that had to do with
Speaker 1: my sort of early midlife spiritual existential crisis, and I
Speaker 1: just thought, oh, ship, like it was the last thing
Speaker 1: the world I wanted to do was delve into. That
Speaker 1: was dive into that was tune out the world and
Speaker 1: get very very quiet and try to tune into um
Speaker 1: my religious upbringing and what it had meant to me,
Speaker 1: and you know, and to just go wherever, like the
Speaker 1: deep questions took me. And one of the places I
Speaker 1: think that I came to understand in writing Devotion, but
Speaker 1: not as deeply as I later understood, was that that
Speaker 1: feeling of loneliness was something that was kind of endemic
Speaker 1: to me. I would have diagnosed it at the time
Speaker 1: as a kind of spiritual malaise, like, oh, what I'm
Speaker 1: missing is a connection to a greater being, a higher
Speaker 1: power God. And and perhaps the reason is because so
Speaker 1: much was made of that when I was a child,
Speaker 1: and it was you know, our way or the highway.
Speaker 1: It was all or nothing. It was believe in, you know,
Speaker 1: in this God in this way and in this very
Speaker 1: strict ritualized religious way, or not at all. You don't
Speaker 1: get to make your own path. So I think I
Speaker 1: attributed that sense of loneliness to that. But when I
Speaker 1: read it now, I and again feel sad for the
Speaker 1: Danny who who felt that and who wrote that, because
Speaker 1: I think it was a deeper feeling um, when the
Speaker 1: very essence of our identity is something that is kept
Speaker 1: secret from us. I mean my identity. The stories that
Speaker 1: I was told from the time that I was a
Speaker 1: very small child about who I was and where I
Speaker 1: came from, We're not true. They were hidden and secret
Speaker 1: and obfuscated and pushed into the remoteist corners in the
Speaker 1: hopes that they would disappear. And I think that created
Speaker 1: in me a kind of void that couldn't be filled.
Speaker 1: Lacuna geology a large gap in the stratigraphic record, Lacuna amnesia, psychology,
Speaker 1: amnesia about a specific event Petrovsky, Lacuna mathematics a region
Speaker 1: where the fundamental solution of a differential equation vanishes. MS
Speaker 1: has been terrible. Thanks for asking. I'm Nora McNerney. Our
Speaker 1: producer is Marcel Malikibu. Our team is me Marcel jacob Aldo,
Speaker 1: Nato Medina, Jordan Turgin, Megan Palmer, um Beth Proman is
Speaker 1: our executive producer. Our executives in charge our Lily Kim,
Speaker 1: Alex Shaffer and Joan Griffith. We are a production of
Speaker 1: a PM Studios at American Public Media. Our theme music
Speaker 1: is by Geoffrey Lamar Wilson. I recorded this in the
Speaker 1: coldest closet in my house. I am so cold. Um. Oh,
Speaker 1: if you guys want to call in, leave comments, questions, concerns,
Speaker 1: um compliments. That's another See can call six four four
Speaker 1: four one or email podcast at Nora Borealist dot com.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to you our show. We appreciate
Speaker 1: you a lot. Um. Have you haven't listened to Danny's podcast?
Speaker 1: We link that in the show notes. We also linked
Speaker 1: to her books, including Inheritance, which is brilliant, but all
Speaker 1: of her books are lovely, wonderful, and oh my god,
Speaker 1: her voice. Don't you want to take a nap in it?
Speaker 1: That's what I've always said, I want to take a
Speaker 1: nap in Danny Shapiro's voice. Okay, bye you