Speaker 1: I think probably it's about fifteen years ago that I
Speaker 1: realized that my mind, when left to its own devices,
Speaker 1: would move toward comparing. And it's just really such a
Speaker 1: useless thing to do and creates such separation or distance
Speaker 1: between people, between me and the person I might be
Speaker 1: comparing myself to. Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time,
Speaker 1: great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have,
Speaker 1: quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what
Speaker 1: you think, ring true. And yet for many of us,
Speaker 1: our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 1: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 1: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 1: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 1: just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscience, consistent
Speaker 1: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 1: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 1: the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks
Speaker 1: for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Danny Shapiro,
Speaker 1: the author of eleven books and the host and creator
Speaker 1: of the hit podcast Family Secrets. Her most recent novel
Speaker 1: Signal Fires was named Best book of two by Time Magazine,
Speaker 1: Washington Post, Amazon, and others, and is a national bestseller.
Speaker 1: Danny's most recent memoir, Inheritance, was an instant New York
Speaker 1: Times bestseller and named best book of two thousand nineteen
Speaker 1: by l Vanity, Fair, Wired, and Real Simple. Danny's work
Speaker 1: has been published in fourteen languages, and she's currently developing
Speaker 1: Signal Fires or its television adaptation. Danny's book on the
Speaker 1: process and craft of writing, Still Writing, is being reissued
Speaker 1: on the occasion of its tenth anniversary. She occasionally teaches
Speaker 1: workshops and retreats, and as the co founder of the
Speaker 1: Siren Land Writer's Conference in Positano, Italy. Being consistent with
Speaker 1: your habits is the engine that drives your transformation and growth.
Speaker 1: Think about it. You can't feed your good wolf one
Speaker 1: big meal a year and expect it to thrive. Consistent
Speaker 1: steady bits of food fuel a good, healthy wolf, but
Speaker 1: it's hard to create consistency. You might listen to this
Speaker 1: podcast on a Thursday feel really inspired, but then life
Speaker 1: takes over and by Saturday night you've forgotten all about it.
Speaker 1: That's why I'm hosting a free live Q and a
Speaker 1: town hall zoom meeting on Thursday February, where I'll be
Speaker 1: answering your questions about how to take what you know
Speaker 1: and turn it into what you consistently do. Had to
Speaker 1: when you feed dot net slash town hall to register
Speaker 1: for this free live session with me. During this town hall,
Speaker 1: you'll ask me your specific question and I'll answer it.
Speaker 1: It's that simple. So if you would like my help
Speaker 1: creating some tools to deal with real life when it
Speaker 1: gets in the way of your best intentions, let me
Speaker 1: help you. If changing habits feels overwhelming, if you struggle
Speaker 1: to make time for things because life is so busy,
Speaker 1: if it's easy to get caught up with your to
Speaker 1: do list, you feel consistently behind and taking time for
Speaker 1: yourself feel selfish, then let's talk The things we do
Speaker 1: consistently are more important than the things we do once
Speaker 1: in a while. In this free town hall session, you'll
Speaker 1: ask me your questions and I'll help you find what
Speaker 1: works for you, how you might look at things differently
Speaker 1: and create the structure to help you do the thing
Speaker 1: you really want to do. And if you don't have
Speaker 1: a specific question, just come listen to the conversation a
Speaker 1: little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing.
Speaker 1: Truth is, you can make a lot of progress by
Speaker 1: doing just a little bit. To register for this free
Speaker 1: zoom session on February, go to one you feed dot
Speaker 1: net slash town hall. That's when you feed dot net
Speaker 1: slash town hall. I hope I get the chance to
Speaker 1: meet you there. Hi, Danny, Welcome to the show. Thanks,
Speaker 1: it's great to be with you. I'm so happy to
Speaker 1: have you on again. I can't believe how long it's
Speaker 1: been since we talked. It has been a good number
Speaker 1: of years, and a great number of things have transpired
Speaker 1: in your life and my life since then that we'll
Speaker 1: talk about. We're also going to talk about your outstanding
Speaker 1: new novel called Signal Fires. But before we do that,
Speaker 1: let's start like we always do with the Parable. In
Speaker 1: the Parable, there is a grandparent who's talking with a
Speaker 1: grandchild and they say, in life, there's two wolves inside
Speaker 1: of us that are always at battle. One is a
Speaker 1: good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love,
Speaker 1: and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things
Speaker 1: like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops
Speaker 1: and thinks about it for a second and looks up
Speaker 1: at their grandparents says, well, which one wins, and the
Speaker 1: grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd like to
Speaker 1: start off by asking you what that parable means to
Speaker 1: you in your life and in the work that you do.
Speaker 1: I love that parable. It's so resonant. That's one of
Speaker 1: those questions. I think the answer changes probably, if not
Speaker 1: day to day or week to week, certainly year to year.
Speaker 1: I would say, for me, in my life and in
Speaker 1: my work, that directing myself or inclining myself in the
Speaker 1: direction of compassion, of kindness, of generosity, of openness. And
Speaker 1: in Buddhism they talk about the you know, the the
Speaker 1: near enemy and the far enemy, of various traits, and
Speaker 1: I think I used to in my life get caught
Speaker 1: up a lot more in comparison. And where does comparison lead.
Speaker 1: That doesn't sound like such a bad wealth necessarily comparison,
Speaker 1: but it can lead to greed, it can lead to envy,
Speaker 1: it can lead to a lot of ego defining things.
Speaker 1: And I think probably it's about fifteen years ago that
Speaker 1: I realized that my mind, when left to its own devices,
Speaker 1: would move toward comparing. And it's just really such a
Speaker 1: useless thing to do and creates such separation or distance
Speaker 1: between people, between me and the person I might be
Speaker 1: comparing myself too. So I really pretty much catch myself
Speaker 1: if I'm ever doing that, and I have found over
Speaker 1: the years that that just brings me so much more
Speaker 1: peace and contentment and joy and sense of connectedness. Comparison
Speaker 1: is definitely, I think, a bad wolf for a lot
Speaker 1: of people. And what's kind of amazing to me about
Speaker 1: comparison is that it doesn't matter who we are, if
Speaker 1: we engage in that game, it's a losing battle. Like
Speaker 1: there's a lot of people that would look at you
Speaker 1: in the life you have and be like, that's it.
Speaker 1: That's everything, right, A great writer and a good marriage
Speaker 1: and a successful career, and you know, it would be like,
Speaker 1: what does you have to compare to? But you certainly
Speaker 1: and absolutely could. We all can. And that's why I
Speaker 1: think it's one of those things that just ends up
Speaker 1: being kind of a losing game all the time. I'm
Speaker 1: so glad you said that, because that is exactly the
Speaker 1: lesson or the turning point for me where I really
Speaker 1: started to understand that is. I remember once an agent
Speaker 1: of mine saying that she had clients authors who were
Speaker 1: number three on the New York Times bestseller list, and
Speaker 1: they were obsessed with you know whoever was number two
Speaker 1: or number one. I was a young writer when she
Speaker 1: said that to me, and at the time I thought,
Speaker 1: that's ridiculous. I would never do something like that. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you hit the New York Times best seller list,
Speaker 1: then you are set. There's no other mountain to climb.
Speaker 1: And then I did hit the New York Times best
Speaker 1: seller list, and I realized how easy it was to
Speaker 1: do that. How wherever we are in our lives, if
Speaker 1: that's a way that we're thinking, we can always be
Speaker 1: doing that. And if we're doing it, we're generally comparing
Speaker 1: ourselves to one aspect of someone's life. Which is why
Speaker 1: a kind of close cousin to comparison is is envy.
Speaker 1: I've never been an envious person. I mean, that's just
Speaker 1: not a particular quality that I've had. But whenever I
Speaker 1: have the sense that someone is envious of me, what
Speaker 1: I really want to say to them is do you
Speaker 1: want all of it? Or do you just want this
Speaker 1: good moment in my career? Or do you just want
Speaker 1: my long and happy marriage, or do you just want
Speaker 1: some aspect of whatever you think I have that you want,
Speaker 1: because there's been a great deal of pain and shock
Speaker 1: and hard things and complicated things and grief, and so
Speaker 1: the idea of saying I want that, really would you
Speaker 1: just completely trade lives because these are what the stakes are. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's interesting. I watch TV series on say Netflix or HBO,
Speaker 1: you know, really high quality ones, and there's been a
Speaker 1: couple that have really made me think. And the two
Speaker 1: that I think about a lot are The Crown and Succession.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of things to think about those shows
Speaker 1: that are deeply layered and really amazing shows. But what
Speaker 1: I think about is I look at in The Crown,
Speaker 1: I particularly looked at Princess Margaret, and I went by
Speaker 1: any standard in the world, she's in the top one
Speaker 1: percent of one percent of one percent of people's wonderful lives,
Speaker 1: and yet she compares herself to her sister, and thus
Speaker 1: she's always losing and it's just heartbreaking to watch. Succession
Speaker 1: is another example. Those people all have what we think
Speaker 1: we want money, just the stupid amounts of it, but
Speaker 1: they're deeply unhappy people. Or you look at someone like
Speaker 1: Robin Williams, that's so tragic who had so much commercial success,
Speaker 1: so much critical excess, was widely seen as a genius,
Speaker 1: and still couldn't find a way to stay here. And
Speaker 1: those are really sobering and teachable moments for me, where
Speaker 1: I go, ah, look, that doesn't matter what you get.
Speaker 1: If you don't know how to appreciate it, then it's
Speaker 1: not going to matter. That's so true. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: a few years ago, my husband was sick. He was
Speaker 1: diagnosed with a very serious kind of cancer, and we
Speaker 1: moved from our home, which is in rural Connecticut, into
Speaker 1: a borrowed department, which was its own kind of miracle,
Speaker 1: but a borrowed apartment that friends had in New York
Speaker 1: City and it was in this building. It was an
Speaker 1: empty apartment. They lived elsewhere, and they have bought it
Speaker 1: as an investment. It was just sitting there in a
Speaker 1: building full of billionaires. I think it would be safe
Speaker 1: to say that part of Manhattan is actually called Billionaires Row.
Speaker 1: And there's this very very skinny, very very very tall building.
Speaker 1: My call it the fun You Building because it looks
Speaker 1: like a middle finger going straight up all the way
Speaker 1: to the sky, like the New York City skyline is
Speaker 1: giving heaven the finger, and the reason why I'm mentioning
Speaker 1: it is, you know, we were in this devastating, terrifying
Speaker 1: time and we lived in that building for the better
Speaker 1: part of a year, and every time I walked into
Speaker 1: the elevator of this building, I encountered unhappy people. They
Speaker 1: were very very rich people who were very very unhappy,
Speaker 1: and who were like looking each other over in the elevator.
Speaker 1: There was so much like comparison going on or which
Speaker 1: floor you're getting off on, you know, are you are
Speaker 1: you on a very very high floor, Are you on
Speaker 1: the penthouse floor? I mean, it was all penthouses, basically,
Speaker 1: but I just was so struck by, as I have
Speaker 1: been many times, none of these things bring us happiness.
Speaker 1: Great wealth doesn't bring us happiness. Beauty doesn't bring us happiness.
Speaker 1: Whatever the thing is huge success, a claim, different kinds
Speaker 1: of a claim. I think what brings us happiness is
Speaker 1: purpose and meaning making and love, and those things are
Speaker 1: really kind of all up to us to some degree, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, purpose is up to us. Making meaning of
Speaker 1: whatever life has presented us with is up to us.
Speaker 1: And how loving we are, maybe not how we are
Speaker 1: loved to some degree, but how loving we are is
Speaker 1: also up to us. Yeah, yeah, And as you were
Speaker 1: talking about your husband being sick, it also made me
Speaker 1: think about there's I think it's an old Chinese proverb
Speaker 1: or Chinese philosopher said it, which is the healthy man
Speaker 1: wants many things and the sick person wants only one thing.
Speaker 1: You know, illness has a tendency to sort of really
Speaker 1: make clear, like if you've got health, that is a lot.
Speaker 1: That is a lot, because the minute it goes away,
Speaker 1: nothing else matters. I always think about that super clarif tying.
Speaker 1: It's a lesson that we were able to learn and
Speaker 1: continue to apply to our lives, for which I feel
Speaker 1: incredibly grateful. My husband recovered. And you know the neighborhoods
Speaker 1: around hospitals. You know the neighborhood around Mount Sni Hospital
Speaker 1: in New York City where he was being treated, it's
Speaker 1: a neighborhood full of It's like several square city blocks
Speaker 1: that are full of illness, except for the people who
Speaker 1: were there are having babies. Actually, that is the hospital
Speaker 1: where I was born. It's the hospital where I gave
Speaker 1: birth to my son. It's the hospital where my mother,
Speaker 1: when she was operated on for cancer, was treated and
Speaker 1: now I was there as a you know, women in
Speaker 1: my fifties with my up until then, very healthy, you know,
Speaker 1: relatively young. You know, we had been living such ordinarily
Speaker 1: lucky lives. You know Joan Didion calls it ordinary blessings,
Speaker 1: and you know, bam, we were suddenly in that several
Speaker 1: square block territory of the unwell and the very unfortunate,
Speaker 1: the stricken, and you could just feel that. And this
Speaker 1: is now three years later. I carry that with me,
Speaker 1: not as a burden, but really as a feeling of
Speaker 1: my desire to see at the moment, to be in
Speaker 1: the moment, to be really awake to the moment, to
Speaker 1: really think. And it's such a privilege to be able
Speaker 1: to ask this question, but to think, how do I
Speaker 1: want to live? What do I want to accomplish? Who
Speaker 1: do I want to surround myself with? How do I
Speaker 1: want to be in the world, and how can I
Speaker 1: make that happen. So let's change directions here. I want
Speaker 1: to bring up a line from Signal Fires and allow
Speaker 1: it to lead us into sort of what a big
Speaker 1: portion of your work before Signifiers, most recent has been about,
Speaker 1: which is your podcast Family Secrets and all that, But
Speaker 1: one of the characters is musing on something and they
Speaker 1: say silence may have been a mistake. No, silence was
Speaker 1: definitely a mistake. And so you talk very eloquently about
Speaker 1: how damaging secrets are. And that's part of Signal Fiers,
Speaker 1: and it's a part of your podcast Family Secrets, and
Speaker 1: part of your book Inheritance. For people who are not
Speaker 1: up to speed, can you give us the two minute
Speaker 1: version of what led you into that territory. From the
Speaker 1: beginning of my writing life, I was writing about secrets.
Speaker 1: I didn't know why. They were very much a theme
Speaker 1: of mine. And you know something I've often thought about,
Speaker 1: you know, theme is sort of a fancy literary term
Speaker 1: for obsession, you know. And we don't choose what obsesses us.
Speaker 1: It chooses us. That's why it's an obsession. And I
Speaker 1: was writing always about secrets and family is the corrosive
Speaker 1: power of secrets, why we keep secrets, and different kinds
Speaker 1: of secrets. But I kept coming back to them, and
Speaker 1: then in I took a DNA test for no particular
Speaker 1: reason at all. It was completely random and recreational. My
Speaker 1: husband was sending away for one prices have come down
Speaker 1: over the holidays, that sort of thing and I was
Speaker 1: incurious about my family history, mostly because I knew it.
Speaker 1: I knew it cold, I knew everything about it. I
Speaker 1: came from a family that was very interested in its
Speaker 1: own history, particularly on my dad's side, and it was
Speaker 1: a history that I was very invested in. I cared
Speaker 1: a great deal about. I was proud of in a
Speaker 1: certain way, which is his own weird thing, Like, what
Speaker 1: is there to be proud of in terms of, you know,
Speaker 1: history or ancestry. It's got nothing to do with us, really.
Speaker 1: So I took this DNA test, and when it came act,
Speaker 1: I learned that my dad had not been my biological father,
Speaker 1: and that I had been the family secret. I was
Speaker 1: the secret that my parents had both known that my
Speaker 1: dad wasn't my biological father. It wasn't an affair. It
Speaker 1: became crystal clear very quickly that they had used a
Speaker 1: sperm donor because they had trouble conceiving me. And at
Speaker 1: that time in history and the history of reproductive medicine,
Speaker 1: parents were told never tell the child, never tell a soul,
Speaker 1: never talk about it ever. Again. It doesn't matter. It's
Speaker 1: not even a secret. It's as if it never happened.
Speaker 1: And what we don't know doesn't hurt us, which is
Speaker 1: just one of the most erroneous, cliched pieces of wisdom
Speaker 1: that there has ever been, or non wisdom. So I
Speaker 1: grew up as my parents biological child, except I wasn't
Speaker 1: a father's biological child. I looked nothing like either of
Speaker 1: my parents. I looked nothing like any of my family,
Speaker 1: and this was something that was commented on all the
Speaker 1: time when I was growing up, and so on some level,
Speaker 1: I think I intuited that there was something amiss, that
Speaker 1: there was something that I couldn't quite piece together, that
Speaker 1: there was something what it felt like. You know, when
Speaker 1: you're a child and you feel like something's wrong and
Speaker 1: you don't know what it is, you tend to blame yourself.
Speaker 1: And that was the story of my life. It was
Speaker 1: hugely formative for me. It ran all the way through
Speaker 1: my childhood, my teens, in my early twenties. I now
Speaker 1: feel like some of the rough patches that I went
Speaker 1: through and some of the rebellion that I really put
Speaker 1: myself through, stemmed from this thing that was forming me,
Speaker 1: you know, from the inside out that I was unaware of,
Speaker 1: but I was, you know, that I intuited. And so
Speaker 1: when I made that discovery, it was like the lid
Speaker 1: blew off all of that. It was painful and shocking
Speaker 1: and challenging, but it was also enriching, liberating. I remember
Speaker 1: really early on after making that discovery actually out loud
Speaker 1: saying to myself, uh, like it made the whole of
Speaker 1: my childhood and history kind of come into such sharp focus.
Speaker 1: It was like I was wearing the right prescription glasses
Speaker 1: for the first time in my life. And it also
Speaker 1: led me to really understand why secrecy and secrets had
Speaker 1: been so front and center for me and why I
Speaker 1: continued to write about them. Yeah, it's remarkable that secrets
Speaker 1: who were such a focus and then, as you said,
Speaker 1: you kind of were the secret. And you know, I
Speaker 1: found out through your work that what I'm about to
Speaker 1: describe is not as outlanded as I thought it was.
Speaker 1: You've heard countless of these stories. But I also, like,
Speaker 1: you took a DNA test. I think Ancestry sponsored our show,
Speaker 1: and so they're like, here's a free test, and so
Speaker 1: I thought, right, fine, whatever, And you know, I didn't
Speaker 1: think much of it, and I didn't think that they
Speaker 1: offer you a choice. Do you want to keep this
Speaker 1: data private? And I didn't think anything about it. I thought, well,
Speaker 1: who cares, right, Like, I just wasn't giving it any thought.
Speaker 1: And I didn't give it any thought. It took the
Speaker 1: test that it came back and it said you're German
Speaker 1: and your English primarily, and I was like, I kind
Speaker 1: of knew that, you know, carried on well. After a while,
Speaker 1: I got an email from a woman and she said,
Speaker 1: I have been looking for my mother, and you know,
Speaker 1: it appears that we have some matches. I was wondering
Speaker 1: if there's anybody in your family that you might know about,
Speaker 1: and I said, well, I'll ask around, but I don't,
Speaker 1: you know, I just didn't give any thought. But then
Speaker 1: I started looking a little bit more closely at the
Speaker 1: nature of the match, and I was like, this is
Speaker 1: not a like a third cousin or a second cousin
Speaker 1: or a cousin. It's saying that this is either a
Speaker 1: grandparent or a sibling. And I still thought, well, whatever,
Speaker 1: But then I asked her for a little more detail.
Speaker 1: She said, well, I was born in New York City
Speaker 1: in this year, and I went my mom was in
Speaker 1: New York City in that year. So after a little
Speaker 1: while sort of looking at all this I went, well,
Speaker 1: this is really strange. And so I was like, how
Speaker 1: do I approach my mother with this? You know? And
Speaker 1: I tried to do it in the most general like, Mom,
Speaker 1: I you know, took this DNA test, and you know,
Speaker 1: there's this woman who thinks that maybe somewhere in our
Speaker 1: family there might be somewhere like as general and nonchalant
Speaker 1: as could be. I didn't have two sentences out of
Speaker 1: my mouth, and my mom went, that's my daughter, and
Speaker 1: I went, excuse me. And sure enough, my mom, a
Speaker 1: year before I was born, was in New York City,
Speaker 1: got pregnant, had the baby, gave it up for adoption.
Speaker 1: Her parents came and picked her up and said, we
Speaker 1: will never talk about this again. And so a year later,
Speaker 1: my mom is married to a very unsupportive husband and
Speaker 1: has me. And it was kind of stunning. I'm a
Speaker 1: pretty easy going person, so I wasn't like very judgmental
Speaker 1: or anything. But what it turned out to be is
Speaker 1: that this woman and my mom have formed a beautiful relationship,
Speaker 1: and I I so think that something that has plagued
Speaker 1: my mom for so many years. You know, my mom
Speaker 1: has had lots of battles with depression and lots of
Speaker 1: you know, and it's not like that's all gone, but
Speaker 1: I feel like this thing that was this deep secret
Speaker 1: for her finally got opened up. Not only did it
Speaker 1: get opened up, but it really got healed. And it's
Speaker 1: been a remarkable sort of thing to have this new
Speaker 1: sister in my life. And it's really been beautiful. And again,
Speaker 1: you know, I know you've heard a version of that story,
Speaker 1: you know, countless times from so many people. This whole
Speaker 1: DNA testing is just opened up like a It's like
Speaker 1: the great secret box opener. That's exactly right, And that's
Speaker 1: a beautiful story, right. I mean, your mom was haunted
Speaker 1: and plagued by having put up a child for adoption
Speaker 1: and not knowing whatever happened to her. One of the
Speaker 1: things that I've thought about a lot in these last
Speaker 1: several years is that we're in a moment in time
Speaker 1: because of these DNA tests and the unintended consequences of
Speaker 1: you know, what was really something that was done for
Speaker 1: science and you know, sort of very much billed as recreational.
Speaker 1: And I mean, I can tell you ancestry dot com
Speaker 1: has not sponsored my podcast. You can be sure. You
Speaker 1: can be sure because there also are a lot of
Speaker 1: really hard stories and and some stories that are unresolvable
Speaker 1: for people, which is, you know, where it can get
Speaker 1: extremely hard and painful. I mean, I've heard stories of
Speaker 1: people in their eighties who find out that they were
Speaker 1: adopted and they had never known what are you going
Speaker 1: to do at that point in terms of meaning making
Speaker 1: or purpose or any kind of resolution. But the thing
Speaker 1: about this period of time that we're living in is
Speaker 1: that it was unthinkable twenty years ago that you could
Speaker 1: spit into a vial and said the thing off in
Speaker 1: the mail for less than a bucks, and it would
Speaker 1: come back and and and you know, would be the
Speaker 1: great secret box opener. But twenty years from now it
Speaker 1: will also be unthinkable because all of these secrets will
Speaker 1: have they will all have tumbled out. The idea that
Speaker 1: anyone could keep this kind of secret will be like
Speaker 1: something like the cassette tape, or like plastics or you know,
Speaker 1: a cigarette smoking, or you know, bad for you, bad
Speaker 1: for you, And that will happen eventually. I mean, I
Speaker 1: really do think there's this huge course correction going on
Speaker 1: right now that really does have to do with secrecy,
Speaker 1: which of course is totally different from privacy and that's
Speaker 1: a whole other conversation. But but secrecy, I really think
Speaker 1: anybody today in saying what we don't know can't hurt us,
Speaker 1: that's just silly. We now know that what we don't
Speaker 1: know really cannon does hurt us. But you know, when
Speaker 1: your mother had her first child, her parents, I'm sure
Speaker 1: that that was well meaning advice. We're not going to
Speaker 1: talk about this. It's going to go away. We're not
Speaker 1: just going to shove it under the rug. We're gonna
Speaker 1: disappear it. And that was true with my parents too,
Speaker 1: completely different story. But when we're just we will never
Speaker 1: speak of this again. Yep. And my story is very fortunate.
Speaker 1: It turns out with a happy ending. I can see
Speaker 1: plenty that don't. A funny part of this is right
Speaker 1: after I told my other sister my sister I've known,
Speaker 1: I've had she she went, oh, no, I really feel
Speaker 1: bad now because she said that she used to say
Speaker 1: to my mom all the time, like can you give
Speaker 1: Matt our brother up for adoption? Like it was a
Speaker 1: constant theme. She hit my mom on and she was like,
Speaker 1: I had no idea what sort of torment I might
Speaker 1: have been causing her? Right right, And amazing that of
Speaker 1: all the things that she might said, that that was
Speaker 1: the one she did say. You know, so, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: I love this idea that you say, that Carl Young
Speaker 1: talks about secrets is psychric poison. And I heard you
Speaker 1: say something on another show recently that someone said to you,
Speaker 1: which is that the problem with secrets is when you
Speaker 1: buried them, you bury them alive. That was actually the
Speaker 1: epigraph of one of my upcoming guests in the next
Speaker 1: season of Family Secrets, Carmen Rita Wong. Oh, I'm talking
Speaker 1: to her sometime in the new year. I think, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: goody good, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that doesn't surprise me
Speaker 1: that we would have that kind of overlap. But that
Speaker 1: was this phrase of hers that I thought was probably
Speaker 1: the most powerful description of what it is two quote
Speaker 1: unquote bury a secret. It doesn't die, and it doesn't
Speaker 1: stay buried, you know, you bury it alive. So now
Speaker 1: let's move into signifiers, which I said to you is
Speaker 1: just a stunningly beautiful book. And I want to start
Speaker 1: with a paragraph or two that happens very very early
Speaker 1: in the book. And I don't want to give too
Speaker 1: much of the plot away, but you can set up
Speaker 1: to whatever extent you want to set this little paragraph up,
Speaker 1: or you can just sort of bring it on its own,
Speaker 1: because I think it stands alone. So however you think
Speaker 1: is the best way to go into it. So I
Speaker 1: guess the way that I would set it up is
Speaker 1: simply to say that there are three teenagers in a car,
Speaker 1: and here we are in the head of my fai
Speaker 1: genio old boy named Theo, who is behind the wheel
Speaker 1: of the car, and I think I can just read
Speaker 1: from there there's a girl he wants to impress. Her
Speaker 1: name is Misty Zimmerman. And if she lives through this night,
Speaker 1: she will grow up to be a magazine editor, or
Speaker 1: a high school teacher, or a defense lawyer. She will
Speaker 1: be a mother of three, or remain childless. She will
Speaker 1: die young of ovarian cancer, or live to know her
Speaker 1: great grandchildren. But these are only a few possible arcs
Speaker 1: to a life. A handful of shooting stars in the
Speaker 1: night sky. Change one thing, and everything changes. A tremor
Speaker 1: here sets off an earthquake there, a fault line deepens,
Speaker 1: a wire gets tripped. Let's dive into that idea of
Speaker 1: change one thing and everything changes. What's the significance of
Speaker 1: that to you. I think that's also something that I've
Speaker 1: thought about all my life, that everything we do matters,
Speaker 1: sometimes greatly and sometimes hardly at all, and we won't know,
Speaker 1: we won't know until later. And if we were to
Speaker 1: walk around with consciousness of that, you know, idea that
Speaker 1: everything we do matters, that every decision that we make,
Speaker 1: is every choice, every action has consequences or or leads
Speaker 1: to the next action or thought. If we lived thinking
Speaker 1: about that all the time, we would be hiding under
Speaker 1: our beds and never live our lives. And we would,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of psychically speaking, like burn to a crisp,
Speaker 1: you know, just out of that sheer weight of that idea.
Speaker 1: So we can't live that way all the time on
Speaker 1: that level. And yet the idea of change one thing
Speaker 1: and everything changes, that everything that we do matters, can
Speaker 1: actually really impact the way that we move through life,
Speaker 1: the way that we experience life. And in the case
Speaker 1: of that moment really early on in signal fires, you know,
Speaker 1: these teenagers, I mean they're teenagers. I mean, no teenager
Speaker 1: thinks about consequences, I think it's safe to say, including
Speaker 1: myself as a teenager. And there's the sense of immortality
Speaker 1: the sense that nothing bad can possibly happen, and then
Speaker 1: something does. And you know, these characters spend in some
Speaker 1: way a great deal of the rest of their lives
Speaker 1: wishing that they could roll back time to that one
Speaker 1: moment when they make the choices that they make and
Speaker 1: sort of begin again, which, of course is one thing
Speaker 1: we don't get to do. Yeah, that made me think
Speaker 1: of the poet Mark Nepo, who describes something called the
Speaker 1: terrible knowledge, which is basically the knowledge that anything can
Speaker 1: happen to any of us at any time. It's just terrifying, right,
Speaker 1: And it made me actually think back to a previous
Speaker 1: book of Yours, Devotion, and in Devotion you say that
Speaker 1: the world could be divided into two kinds of people. Right,
Speaker 1: there's people who are aware of the inherent fragility of life.
Speaker 1: And you were one of those people at this point
Speaker 1: you had gone through having when your son was born,
Speaker 1: he was really really ill. And so there's these people
Speaker 1: who have this real intense and intimate closeness with this
Speaker 1: terrible knowledge. And then you describe there's other people just
Speaker 1: doesn't seem to occur to them, and they seem like
Speaker 1: different people, a different species. But then you went on
Speaker 1: to say, but there was a third way of being.
Speaker 1: Do you remember that? Do you want me to read
Speaker 1: it or do you want to sort of talk about it?
Speaker 1: I do remember it, but I love and I think
Speaker 1: about that actually quite a bit. But if you would
Speaker 1: read that last little bit about the third way of being,
Speaker 1: that'd be great. Yeah. I didn't know there was a
Speaker 1: third way of being. Life was unpredictable. Yes, a speeding car,
Speaker 1: a slip on the ice, a ringing phone, and suddenly
Speaker 1: everything changes forever. To deny that is to deny life,
Speaker 1: but to be consumed by it is also to deny life.
Speaker 1: The third way, inaccessible to me as I slunk down
Speaker 1: the halls at that moment in your life, had to
Speaker 1: do with holding this paradox lightly in one's hands, to
Speaker 1: think it is true. The speeding car, the slip on
Speaker 1: the ice, the ringing phone, It is true. And yet
Speaker 1: here I am listening to my boys sing as we
Speaker 1: walked down the corridor. Here I am giving him a hug.
Speaker 1: Here we are together in this our only moment. Yeah,
Speaker 1: thanks for reading that. I think that that might encapsulate
Speaker 1: sort of everything that I believe. And I'm sort of
Speaker 1: proud of my younger self for having that awareness, because
Speaker 1: I have it, you know, a hundredfold now. I've thought
Speaker 1: about that actually a lot during the last few years
Speaker 1: of the pandemic, because you know, the people that I
Speaker 1: described in devotion as it never having occurred to them
Speaker 1: that anything bad could ever happen, We're really you know,
Speaker 1: some of whom are friends of mine, were really so
Speaker 1: completely flattened. I mean, we were all flattened by the pandemic,
Speaker 1: but they were flattened in a different way. It was
Speaker 1: almost as if they took it personally or you know,
Speaker 1: like just the idea that when the unimaginable happens, Like
Speaker 1: there are always are things that are unimaginable. But when
Speaker 1: my husband was diagnosed with cancer, the kind of cancer
Speaker 1: he was diagnosed with, I was like, that's a thing
Speaker 1: that wasn't on my list of things. And I mean
Speaker 1: so much of life is like that, but with the pandemic,
Speaker 1: I mean, I know people who absolutely imagine something like
Speaker 1: that coming, you know, for years and years. I have
Speaker 1: a dear friend, the writer Jim Shepherd, whose work is
Speaker 1: you know, pretty much all about that kind of imagining.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's imagining it because he's a fiction writer,
Speaker 1: but it came as no surprise or you know, months
Speaker 1: before the pandemic. I was with a friend of mine,
Speaker 1: well not months, maybe a month before the pandemic, who
Speaker 1: was supposed to come to Italy with us to our
Speaker 1: writer's conference, and she said, you know about this thing
Speaker 1: out there, right, this virus. And I remember even me thinking, oh,
Speaker 1: come on, it's gonna be fine. It's so far away,
Speaker 1: it's not happening here. And I mean even I, who
Speaker 1: tend to imagine a lot of what is hard to imagine,
Speaker 1: fell into that kind of um hubris, I guess I
Speaker 1: would call it. And so during the pandemic, the people
Speaker 1: who had the muscles for that period of time that
Speaker 1: we all found ourselves in and into some degree still
Speaker 1: are in, were better equipped to not hold it lightly.
Speaker 1: I mean everything was very heavy, and there was so
Speaker 1: much heaviness that was happening during that time. But somehow
Speaker 1: we're able to have that feeling of this and that,
Speaker 1: you know, can we hold that there is joy and
Speaker 1: there's pain, that there is beauty and there is terror
Speaker 1: to quote Rilka, you know, like at the same time,
Speaker 1: can we hold that because that is in fact the
Speaker 1: truth of our lives? Always always, that's the third way, right,
Speaker 1: it's to hold both. And this is maybe a little
Speaker 1: bit of an oversimplification, but I sometimes think of it
Speaker 1: like I've told the story before about my dog Ralph passing,
Speaker 1: and you know, he had cancer. He passed younger than
Speaker 1: he should have. He passed like nine months after my
Speaker 1: first dog passed, And there was a part of me
Speaker 1: that started to protest, you know, that started to be like,
Speaker 1: what's not fair, and it's but I don't really react
Speaker 1: that way, and I kind of went, well, he's a
Speaker 1: living being. Living beans get sick. You know, it happens.
Speaker 1: So I am incredibly sad, But I don't have a
Speaker 1: quarrel with the universe over this, right, And I think
Speaker 1: living with this terrible knowledge in a health the or
Speaker 1: a helpful way is when we realize that, like, that's
Speaker 1: the nature of life. Terrible things happen. They happen all
Speaker 1: the time, and I can't live scared of them all
Speaker 1: the time. But I don't also have to deny that
Speaker 1: that's possible. And when it happens, to not be sort of,
Speaker 1: as you say, like caught off guard or surprised of
Speaker 1: course anything when something terrible happens it's always jarring, but
Speaker 1: I think it is a little less jarring with a
Speaker 1: particular world view that says, if you're really paying attention
Speaker 1: to reality, how do you not see that? Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: glad you brought up that word fair, you know, fair, unfair?
Speaker 1: I have, I think for a very long time. You know.
Speaker 1: For example, I I lost my father when I was
Speaker 1: quite young, when he was quite young. I mean I
Speaker 1: was twenty three and he was sixty four, and that
Speaker 1: is just it's it's too young. And never once did
Speaker 1: I think why him? Why in me? Actually I did
Speaker 1: think why him, I did, but I never had that
Speaker 1: sense of that's not fair. It's not fair that we
Speaker 1: didn't have more time together. It's not fair that he
Speaker 1: didn't get to know me as a grown woman, that
Speaker 1: he never got to know his grandchild, even when my
Speaker 1: baby was sick. I didn't have that particular way of
Speaker 1: thinking about fairness or unfairness, because one of the things
Speaker 1: that that leads to is then if that were a
Speaker 1: way that I thought, I would look at other babies
Speaker 1: and think, well, why not you? Why couldn't have been you?
Speaker 1: Why did it have to be? You know? Or you know,
Speaker 1: look at other people you know, I have friends in
Speaker 1: my life who are my age with kids who are
Speaker 1: you know, heading towards being grown people who still have
Speaker 1: all their parents, and I've never looked at them. I
Speaker 1: have felt a pang knowing that there are families out
Speaker 1: there who have multiple, multiple generations around, you know, they're
Speaker 1: all day tables, and I don't. But I've never thought
Speaker 1: that's not fair that I don't have that and that
Speaker 1: you do, because then we go back to the whole
Speaker 1: idea of like coveting or envy and all of that
Speaker 1: is just so useless if we think about what it
Speaker 1: is to be here. Every time I'm on a flight
Speaker 1: that takes off, I mean just yesterday, I was on
Speaker 1: a flight that was taking off. I do this every time,
Speaker 1: I say the meta blessing for everybody on the plane.
Speaker 1: And I'm aware that very few planes crash, but this
Speaker 1: could be one of them. And it probably won't be,
Speaker 1: but it could be. And I think that that's really
Speaker 1: kind of the way that I moved through life is
Speaker 1: with that feeling. Yeah, I don't want to spend too
Speaker 1: much more time here because I want to get to
Speaker 1: some other parts of the novel, but I do think
Speaker 1: there is something about learning to really not deny the
Speaker 1: difficulty of life, but also not be overwhelmed by it,
Speaker 1: and that, in many ways, you could say, is perhaps
Speaker 1: the whole of the spiritual quest. And in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways, you know, I think, is how do I
Speaker 1: reckon with the difficulties in life but not be broken
Speaker 1: by them? Yeah? I think that when I finally arrived
Speaker 1: at a way to tell this story, which is in
Speaker 1: this completely sort of a chronological way where I'm moving
Speaker 1: through time in a more sort of kaleidoscopic way, that
Speaker 1: is really what I was trying to get at was
Speaker 1: We're looking at one particular character, say an eleven year
Speaker 1: old boy, who is you know, in some pain and
Speaker 1: is lonely and sad and special and brilliant. And because
Speaker 1: as the novelist, I get to play god and you know,
Speaker 1: create this sort of omniscient container for the story, we
Speaker 1: get to glimpse that low, only special, brilliant boy at
Speaker 1: other stages of his life, when he's a grown man,
Speaker 1: or when he's a college student, when he's an esteemed
Speaker 1: professor many years later, and we get these glimpses, and
Speaker 1: that makes it tolerable in a way more than tolerable.
Speaker 1: To be with him as he's going through these harder things.
Speaker 1: Except the thing about actually living as opposed to being
Speaker 1: inside the world of a novel, is that we don't
Speaker 1: get those glimpses. I would occasionally like them, and I'd
Speaker 1: like to, you know, just have a word with the future.
Speaker 1: Can just have a little window shade go up? And
Speaker 1: or maybe I wouldn't. I don't know. But in the
Speaker 1: structuring of the book, that's something that I was able
Speaker 1: to do. That was what allowed me to tell the story.
Speaker 1: And I think that that was I mean, if a
Speaker 1: structure could be spiritual, I think that this structure has
Speaker 1: a spiritual quality. Yeah, I mean it points to a
Speaker 1: core idea, which is that I think the bigger perspective
Speaker 1: that we can take on things, whatever ways we can
Speaker 1: broaden our perspective, tend to be a way of seeing
Speaker 1: and dealing with the world that leads to more peace
Speaker 1: and wisdom. Right, And in this case, in the book,
Speaker 1: as a novelist, you have sort of the God's eye view, right,
Speaker 1: when we can take more of that view in our
Speaker 1: own lives, whether it be like this thing that's happening
Speaker 1: right this very minute isn't going to matter in five days,
Speaker 1: from the very littlest things to the very big things.
Speaker 1: You know, that idea of zooming out, at least for me,
Speaker 1: is one of the core elements of living a life
Speaker 1: that has some degree of wisdom in it, which is
Speaker 1: to be able to take that much bigger perspective absolutely,
Speaker 1: and I think that that's why the sort of ever
Speaker 1: widening circles of you know, this is what's going on
Speaker 1: in my life, in this room that I'm in, in
Speaker 1: this house that I'm in, on this hill that the
Speaker 1: house is sitting on, in this town, in this community,
Speaker 1: in this state, in this country, on this continent, in
Speaker 1: this world. And I think it's the human condition to
Speaker 1: always struggle with that. We don't get to walk around
Speaker 1: feeling that way all the time. I mean, maybe the
Speaker 1: most enlightened among us maybe do, but I think that
Speaker 1: is always the challenge. And I think one of the
Speaker 1: great great pleasures of writing this book for me was
Speaker 1: that there is this character who does have that view,
Speaker 1: and that enabled me to see the world of these
Speaker 1: characters over the course of the fifty years in which
Speaker 1: the story takes place, as this very capacious place and time,
Speaker 1: and you know, the ability to move in and out
Speaker 1: of their lives in that way, you know, through time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the book does that. I think it's two core elements,
Speaker 1: which I'm not saying anything that you don't already know
Speaker 1: and hasn't already been pointed out by other people have
Speaker 1: looked at the book. Is the two core elements to
Speaker 1: me are the idea of sort of interconnectedness, right, and
Speaker 1: that all time kind of exists all at once, right,
Speaker 1: or a huge view of time. Both those are much
Speaker 1: wider perspectives than we normally take. We normally take a
Speaker 1: perspective that says I'm concerned about me and mine. This
Speaker 1: is a view that says, hey, that's much bigger than that,
Speaker 1: and I'm concerned about this particular moment in time generally,
Speaker 1: and you sort of break that out too. I'm wondering
Speaker 1: if maybe we could now move into a piece of
Speaker 1: writing that does explain some of Waldo's This is the
Speaker 1: young man who does you know, in many ways talk
Speaker 1: like an enlightened zen Master. We could see some of
Speaker 1: his perspective on the world, and it starts with the sentence. Also,
Speaker 1: he doesn't really know how to talk about it up through.
Speaker 1: He wants the conversation that they have together in the car,
Speaker 1: are every day to go on without end. Also, he
Speaker 1: doesn't really know how to talk about it. Once Mrs
Speaker 1: Wolfe was dead, she was no longer in her body.
Speaker 1: Her body was just a thing, like the discarded carapace
Speaker 1: of an insect. But she wasn't gone. She had escaped.
Speaker 1: Within the walls of the playhouse. There was a field
Speaker 1: of energy he could almost reach out and touch. No
Speaker 1: more than that. It was as if the two of them,
Speaker 1: he and Mrs Wolfe, were enveloped by that field of energy.
Speaker 1: It wasn't exactly like time stopped. More that time had
Speaker 1: seemed to expand, so that they were a part of
Speaker 1: everything that had ever happened or ever would happen. She
Speaker 1: would never really be gone, this new knowledge, and it
Speaker 1: felt like knowledge has stayed with him like a superpower.
Speaker 1: If when we die, we don't just vanish, then there's
Speaker 1: nothing to be afraid of. Right, He doesn't know what
Speaker 1: to call them. Not spirits exactly, not beings, but a
Speaker 1: barely visible web like those intricate spider webs that glisten
Speaker 1: when the sun hits them. Those glistening strands form patterns
Speaker 1: just like constellations. But now he's being put to the test.
Speaker 1: He wants more time with his mom, a lot more time.
Speaker 1: He doesn't want her to be a glistening strand part
Speaker 1: of the invisible pattern. No, he wants her to be
Speaker 1: at his high school graduation. He wants her to take
Speaker 1: him to college. He wants the conversations that they have
Speaker 1: together in the car every day to go on without end.
Speaker 1: M I think that's so beautiful, And what I love
Speaker 1: about it is this idea that we can take this
Speaker 1: broader and more expansive view of life. We can take
Speaker 1: this sense that everything's connected, that that all is one,
Speaker 1: and at the very same time, we can absolutely not
Speaker 1: want our mother to be gone. And I just love
Speaker 1: that paragraph because it calls up to me something that
Speaker 1: sits kind of at the heart of a lot of
Speaker 1: the spiritual life. We keep coming back to this. But
Speaker 1: the idea that the goal of this isn't that we
Speaker 1: just now float over everything and don't feel anything. It's
Speaker 1: the both. And yes, there is a bigger and a
Speaker 1: deeper and inner connection. You know, he doesn't want his
Speaker 1: mom to go. I don't want my dog Beans, he
Speaker 1: who's laying behind me, to go. In a couple of weeks, right,
Speaker 1: I desperately don't want her to go, and so it
Speaker 1: feels to me the both and we talked about how
Speaker 1: do I carry both those things at the same time,
Speaker 1: not make one more important than the other, but not
Speaker 1: lose sight or get stuck in one side or the other. Well,
Speaker 1: that's the sweet spot, right, That's the place where I
Speaker 1: don't know if it's paradoxical, it might be, but that's
Speaker 1: the place in which we are absolutely the most alive,
Speaker 1: is when we are in holding both of those pieces
Speaker 1: of knowledge. And it does feel like knowledge, I think
Speaker 1: when you're in that sweet spot, the feeling of absolute
Speaker 1: connection to this body, these loved ones, this specificity, these creatures,
Speaker 1: and at the same time that sense of the greater
Speaker 1: vastness and the feeling that it all has always been
Speaker 1: and will always be. I've started sending a couple of
Speaker 1: text messages after each podcast listener with positive reminders about
Speaker 1: what's discussed and invitations to apply the wisdom to your life.
Speaker 1: It's free, and listener have told me that these texts
Speaker 1: really helped to pull them out of autopilot and reconnect
Speaker 1: them with what's important. When you get a text for
Speaker 1: me during your day, to day life. It's one more
Speaker 1: thing that helps you further bridge that gap between what
Speaker 1: you know and what you do. Positive messages when you
Speaker 1: need them from me to you. So if you'd like
Speaker 1: to hear from me a few times a week via text,
Speaker 1: go to one you feed dot net slash text and
Speaker 1: sign up for free. I could stay on this topic
Speaker 1: for the next four hours because it's so right in
Speaker 1: my interest, in my heart. But I want to hit
Speaker 1: a couple other aspects of the book that I thought
Speaker 1: were really I don't know if I want to use
Speaker 1: the word beautiful, because this next part is not beautiful,
Speaker 1: but it's very I would call this part a little
Speaker 1: bit wrenching. There's a character in the book by the
Speaker 1: name of Shankman. He's just is called Shankman, and he's
Speaker 1: Waldo's dad. And let's say that Shankman is a fairly
Speaker 1: highly competitive man and sees life in terms of winning
Speaker 1: and losing, and he's a man's man to a certain degree, right,
Speaker 1: And Waldo is, as we've just witnessed from that last paragraph,
Speaker 1: a guy who sees you know, a little boy who
Speaker 1: sees the world very differently. And you know, in the book,
Speaker 1: what was so difficult to listen to. Was to hear
Speaker 1: Shankman trying so hard to be a good father to
Speaker 1: Waldo and failing and failing and failing. If I were
Speaker 1: to put myself in either of those characters shoes, I
Speaker 1: would put myself in Waldo shoes. And I had a
Speaker 1: father who was a pretty angry man who I have
Speaker 1: no doubt loved me and didn't understand me. And so
Speaker 1: reading that for me it was kind of healing in
Speaker 1: a way, even though I've had some of those insights,
Speaker 1: but it was healing to recognize that Shankman, there's a
Speaker 1: line he says his love for his son is a
Speaker 1: vast and forceful thing. Whatsoever threatens Waldo must be destroyed.
Speaker 1: But given that it is Waldo who seems to be
Speaker 1: hurting himself, what can he do? And that's just really
Speaker 1: st una because he wants to love his son and
Speaker 1: he just can't, and he has to face that over
Speaker 1: and over and over in himself. When I started Signal Fires,
Speaker 1: which I actually began a long time ago, and kind
Speaker 1: of like lost my way, I couldn't figure it out,
Speaker 1: but I Shankman was a fully blown character in my imagination.
Speaker 1: I was the mother of a boy around Waldo's age,
Speaker 1: who's now, you know, just graduated from college. And I
Speaker 1: would see Dad's on the sidelines of little league games
Speaker 1: and hockey games and school functions and stuff, and and
Speaker 1: moms too, But it was mostly Dad's, this idea of
Speaker 1: what love can transform into when there's this desire or need.
Speaker 1: In Shankman's case, he is so profoundly and secure in
Speaker 1: some way himself that he values more than anything quote
Speaker 1: unquote normalcy, and he actually can't imagine a life in
Speaker 1: which special illness would be a good thing. And Shankman
Speaker 1: is enormously comparative in his nature. He compares himself to
Speaker 1: everyone around him and finds himself wanting in some way.
Speaker 1: And he loves Waldo, and he recognizes that Waldo is different,
Speaker 1: and he wants to like excise that difference, that special illness,
Speaker 1: and he's unable to meet Waldo where he is. And
Speaker 1: to me, I had a lot of compassion for Shankman
Speaker 1: as the novelist or in some way as the omniscient
Speaker 1: rader myself. I loved him, I felt for him. I
Speaker 1: kept on wishing that he could get out of his
Speaker 1: own way. Um And to me, he's the tragic character
Speaker 1: in the novel because he can't, and he recognizes that
Speaker 1: he can't, and he realizes that he at one point
Speaker 1: he says, or he thinks, you know, that he's failed
Speaker 1: at the one thing that you can't fail and kind
Speaker 1: of do over in life, which is that he's been
Speaker 1: a lousy father and his son has grown up really
Speaker 1: to not want to be around him. He's resigned to
Speaker 1: that by the end of the book. And I'm it's
Speaker 1: not really a spoiler. I mean, it's just the way
Speaker 1: it is. You kind of know it's not gonna go
Speaker 1: well in that relationship, but Waldo has survived him, which
Speaker 1: was also to me really key is that it's possible
Speaker 1: to not be parented well, to not grow up. Mean.
Speaker 1: Waldo actually has this whole speech about this, not speech
Speaker 1: but an inner an inner monologue about this, and in
Speaker 1: the book, you know, that's possible to grow up in
Speaker 1: the wrong place, at the wrong time, you know, with
Speaker 1: the wrong parents, but still be able to hold onto
Speaker 1: this like one ray of light and like a beam,
Speaker 1: and hold onto it. And in his case that beam
Speaker 1: is you know, his across the street neighbor and his
Speaker 1: mother who loves him. I heard it said to me once,
Speaker 1: not that long ago, and it really stayed with me, Like,
Speaker 1: go where it's warm. This as a piece of advice
Speaker 1: that I just loved. Go where it's warm, Like just
Speaker 1: don't go where it's called, don't go where it's sharp.
Speaker 1: Don't go. I mean to the degree that you have
Speaker 1: the capacity to make those choices, go where it's warm.
Speaker 1: And Waldo was ultimately able to do that in his life.
Speaker 1: And Shankman did not destroy his son. God knows he
Speaker 1: did not want to destroy his son, and he did not.
Speaker 1: But where they end up with each other, nobody's singing
Speaker 1: Kumbaya at the end of what we see of their relationship. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I love that little section in the book. You say,
Speaker 1: Wado is having the rumination it's possible to be born
Speaker 1: in the wrong house, town, the wrong dad, to be
Speaker 1: pushed to do the wrong things, but it's possible to
Speaker 1: survive all these psychic indignities. I love that phrase, psychic indignities.
Speaker 1: If you have one or maybe two people who recognize
Speaker 1: you for who you are, and that is such a
Speaker 1: true thing, you know. I know that to be true
Speaker 1: for me. And it's not like I was horrifically abused
Speaker 1: we mentioned my mom her depression, my dad is sort
Speaker 1: of depression that showed up as anger and me being
Speaker 1: sort of a highly sensitive kid. But there came a
Speaker 1: time where there were a couple of people throughout the years,
Speaker 1: and they were primarily school teachers. God bless them, who
Speaker 1: saw me for who I was, and that was enough,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean it didn't stop me from a
Speaker 1: multi year skin into serious addiction, but nonetheless it got
Speaker 1: me through high school and it gave me something to
Speaker 1: sort of reference back to. And I just love that idea.
Speaker 1: And I do think Shankman is is heartbreaking, and I
Speaker 1: think that all of us have a little Shankman in us. Right.
Speaker 1: You can't be a parent for me, I feel like
Speaker 1: I was constantly pushed up against my limits, up against
Speaker 1: my ability, you know. I feel like I'm pretty happy
Speaker 1: with the way I was as a dad, but not entirely,
Speaker 1: and no one is. And so I think to be
Speaker 1: a parent is to know that you could do better,
Speaker 1: or you wish you could do better. You know, I
Speaker 1: guess that's what it is. You wish you could do better,
Speaker 1: but you don't currently have the capacity to. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: parent child relationship is to its own set of lessons
Speaker 1: that begin, you know, at the moment of of you know,
Speaker 1: first meeting one another, all throughout our lives, and Shankman
Speaker 1: didn't have the tools of self inquiry the well, actually
Speaker 1: that's not really true. Shankman knows that he's messing up.
Speaker 1: It's not like he's in denial. He's not oblivious to that.
Speaker 1: But he can't change. Yeah, that's the heartbreaking part. He
Speaker 1: would have been far less tragic if he just hadn't known.
Speaker 1: But he knows as that's happening. He makes resolution after
Speaker 1: resolution after resolution himself. I'm not going to yell at Waldo.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna yell at Waldo and the next day
Speaker 1: he's screaming at Waldo. I mean, that's what is just
Speaker 1: so painful. And I think we all know to some
Speaker 1: degree what it's like to be like I really want
Speaker 1: to change, but for whatever reason right now, I can't
Speaker 1: seem to. And that's a painful place to be. Yeah, painful,
Speaker 1: and I think completely relatable and human. I don't think
Speaker 1: there's anyone among us who has not contended with that
Speaker 1: about something that's absolutely right. So I think the last
Speaker 1: thing that we can maybe end on is I told
Speaker 1: you in the email I sent you after I read
Speaker 1: your book that my partner Jenny and I listened to
Speaker 1: it on our drive to Atlanta, and we've driven back
Speaker 1: and forth from Columbus to Atlanta for six years. Her
Speaker 1: mom has been in Atlanta at Alzheimer's. My mom is
Speaker 1: needed care here, and her mom passed a few weeks ago,
Speaker 1: which finally I will say, you know, it's always hard
Speaker 1: and it was a mercy that she went. But your chapter,
Speaker 1: or I don't remember, it was one chapter of multiple chapter,
Speaker 1: there's about this character who has Alzheimer's. I was kind
Speaker 1: of blown away by that you got into the head
Speaker 1: of someone who has Alzheimer's to the degree you did. Now,
Speaker 1: of course we don't actually know if that's what someone
Speaker 1: who has Alzheimer's is like, but watching from the outside,
Speaker 1: there was so much of it that seemed like I
Speaker 1: could totally see, like I see that in her. How
Speaker 1: did you do that? Did you have that experience in
Speaker 1: your life of having been around someone at Alzheimer's. Yeah,
Speaker 1: my mother in law at Alzheimer's, as did a number
Speaker 1: of her sisters. Um, so that you know, sort of
Speaker 1: the specter of Alzheimer's is very much in our family.
Speaker 1: What I watched over the years was first the confusion
Speaker 1: like early stages and the almost covering up of it,
Speaker 1: that very heartbreaking time of the Alzheimer's patient who knows
Speaker 1: that they have Alzheimer's yes, and is kind of trying
Speaker 1: to fake being okay. I think one of the things
Speaker 1: that I really noticed as my mother in law went
Speaker 1: on her journey that sounds like it was about as
Speaker 1: long as your mother in law's, was that she did
Speaker 1: not forget who she loved. And there was something in
Speaker 1: this character of Mimi when I did enter her head.
Speaker 1: I mean, there were a couple of times writing this
Speaker 1: novel where I really thought can I do this? You know,
Speaker 1: can I do this? And that was certainly one of them.
Speaker 1: But she was a character who very much wanted life
Speaker 1: to be lovely. It's a family that sort of kept
Speaker 1: a secret for all these years, never spoke of it again,
Speaker 1: even with each other, because if we don't speak of it,
Speaker 1: then maybe we can just had life be lovely and
Speaker 1: go back to nothing ever happened. And to enter her
Speaker 1: mind once she sort of lost her ability to control
Speaker 1: her thoughts, her memory, the way that I thought of it,
Speaker 1: time becomes a jumble for her. And so her children,
Speaker 1: who are grown at the point that she's in the
Speaker 1: throes of Alzheimer's, are every age they've ever been, and
Speaker 1: she is everywhere she's ever been. So as she's walking
Speaker 1: in the snow, you know, on the side of a highway,
Speaker 1: in her mind, she's looking for her children, which is
Speaker 1: what I found so incredibly poignant. There's somewhere she she's
Speaker 1: misplaced her children. Meanwhile, her children are in their forties,
Speaker 1: but she's thinking that she's on a beach and that
Speaker 1: they must be in you know, that little shack over there.
Speaker 1: And the closer she gets in her memory to a
Speaker 1: moment where they are at an age where this really difficult, scary,
Speaker 1: tragic thing happened, the more she's like, oh no, no,
Speaker 1: don't go there, don't go there, you know, Like she
Speaker 1: even has that feeling in her own mind where her
Speaker 1: memory kind of wants to go. But it's the jumble
Speaker 1: of it that it's kind of all in there. It's
Speaker 1: just like sand through an hour glass, like there's nothing
Speaker 1: to hold onto. I mean, memories not narrative to begin with.
Speaker 1: I mean, our memories are not narrative. Nobody's memories are narrative.
Speaker 1: That's why in literature when somebody remember something and it's
Speaker 1: an entire story, I always feel like, no, that's not
Speaker 1: how that's not how our memories work. So that's what
Speaker 1: I was trying to do, was create this kind of
Speaker 1: kaleidoscopic sense of the way that she was experiencing both
Speaker 1: time and and what she was doing. But mostly she
Speaker 1: knew exactly who she loved, which was something that was
Speaker 1: very true in my own life and my own experience
Speaker 1: with my mother in law. Yeah, I would concur I
Speaker 1: think Jenny's mom to the very end. I mean, there
Speaker 1: was a point which she slipped beyond knowing anyone or anything,
Speaker 1: although you know, we would still talk to her as
Speaker 1: if she did, you know, and there was still a
Speaker 1: belief that, you know, Jenny's voice would maybe in some
Speaker 1: way be comforting to her. But even up to the
Speaker 1: very end, that was what remained was the love. It
Speaker 1: was very clear. And then the other piece of it was,
Speaker 1: as you described, the thing that I found fascinating was
Speaker 1: to watch the way that her mind would bring things
Speaker 1: together that simply don't belong together in the normal reality,
Speaker 1: whether it be a memory from fifty years ago and
Speaker 1: a memory of two minutes ago, and they're combined into
Speaker 1: this new thing, and you're like, I sort of see
Speaker 1: how she arrived there. It was just fascinating to kind
Speaker 1: of watch. The other thing that I found completely fascinating
Speaker 1: about it was, you know, there's this idea that like,
Speaker 1: there's a part of our brain that all it does
Speaker 1: is it basically makes meaning out of things. It basically
Speaker 1: is the part of us that just says, you know,
Speaker 1: this is what happened and why. And what I was
Speaker 1: amazed to watch in her was how it was clear
Speaker 1: from the outside that she had absolutely no idea why
Speaker 1: something occurred, but she was instantly and a hundred percent
Speaker 1: certain of what had happened and why. And it wasn't
Speaker 1: that she was lying, but that was not it at all.
Speaker 1: It was like the brain simply could not tolerate not
Speaker 1: having an explanation of what happened, so she would grab
Speaker 1: it one, no matter how crazy it was from the outside,
Speaker 1: but then defend it to the death and be completely
Speaker 1: convinced of with certainty. And what I saw in that
Speaker 1: was we are all doing that all the time, not
Speaker 1: to that extent. We might be a little bit more
Speaker 1: anchored in reality, but that is what we are doing.
Speaker 1: We are interpreting the world, we are creating a meaning
Speaker 1: out of it, and we believe it without doubt. I
Speaker 1: love what you just said, and it actually helped me
Speaker 1: to make a connection that I hadn't made before. This
Speaker 1: novel is the combination of not just of all of
Speaker 1: my work, but really of all of my life experience
Speaker 1: and all of my spiritual work, and just pretty much
Speaker 1: everything is in it. And one of the things that
Speaker 1: I realized after I discovered that my dad hadn't been
Speaker 1: my biological father was that I had been putting together
Speaker 1: pieces of the puzzle of my life and of my
Speaker 1: family's life, creating narratives. I mean, both on the page
Speaker 1: and off the page, creating narratives. This is why my
Speaker 1: dad was sad. This is why my dad was depressed, um,
Speaker 1: this is why he took pills, this is why this
Speaker 1: is why my mother was angry. You know, this is
Speaker 1: why my parents marriage was the way it was. And
Speaker 1: the thing that I realized after I made my discovery
Speaker 1: about what they had been through and the secret that
Speaker 1: they had kept, is that all of that was true,
Speaker 1: it just wasn't the whole truth, and that I also
Speaker 1: had to get comfortable with and truly make peace with
Speaker 1: the fact that I will never have the whole truth.
Speaker 1: You know, when I was writing Inheritance, the book based
Speaker 1: on that journey, I had to find a place within
Speaker 1: me that didn't want to tie it all up, you know,
Speaker 1: or that real is that I couldn't, and that some
Speaker 1: of the beauty was in not being able to do that.
Speaker 1: But the desire, the desire to do that was very strong,
Speaker 1: And I think that with Mimi, probably a big part
Speaker 1: of what seemed into her internal life for me as
Speaker 1: a novelist was her desire to find a way to
Speaker 1: make these pieces fit together, to tell a story that
Speaker 1: she could hold on to. Yeah, well, Danny, thank you
Speaker 1: so much for coming on. I've been looking forward to
Speaker 1: this one. I loved the book. I could not recommend
Speaker 1: it higher as a beautiful work of fiction that is
Speaker 1: a beautiful and philosophical and spiritual and also a great read.
Speaker 1: I could not wait to finish it. Bravo. That means
Speaker 1: a lot to me, and I've been looking forward to
Speaker 1: this conversation to Eric's really good to talk to you again.
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