Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. This episode contains
Speaker 1: discussion of suicide and self harm.
Speaker 2: Listener discretion is advice. For twenty years, I told no
Speaker 2: one her story. I tucked it into me like a
Speaker 2: grotesque treasure, a cold gem that I guarded with ferocious pride.
Speaker 2: Uncertain who else knew. Mom and I never talked about
Speaker 2: it again, and no one, not my father or his parents,
Speaker 2: or any of my mother's friends, ever asked me about
Speaker 2: the fire or what sense I, as a young girl,
Speaker 2: had made of it. People ask about my relationship with fire.
Speaker 2: You must be afraid of it, they say, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 2: My college roommate says, after she burns toast to a
Speaker 2: smoky crisp in the kitchen, releasing plumes of smoke. Who
Speaker 2: smell lingers for days? Does this trigger you? It's okay,
Speaker 2: I shrug, It's just toast. I have no relationship with fire. Really,
Speaker 2: relationships are cultivated, nurtured. This I inherited.
Speaker 1: That's Nina Saint Pierre, culture writer, essayist, editor, and author
Speaker 1: of the recent memoir Love Is a Burning Thing. Nina's
Speaker 1: is a story about surviving the people who precede us
Speaker 1: those we love but cannot emulate those we wish to protect,
Speaker 1: but not at the expense of destroying ourselves. It's a
Speaker 1: story of tenacity, resilience, and hope. I'm Danny Shapiro and
Speaker 1: this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
Speaker 1: the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
Speaker 1: keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape of your childhood.
Speaker 2: It was sort of a roving landscape. I'd say, it's
Speaker 2: kind of always in motion. And you know, I was
Speaker 2: born in a small Transcendental meditation community in Fairfield, Iowa.
Speaker 2: My parents sort of split but remained geographically close to
Speaker 2: each other and co parented for the first few years
Speaker 2: of my life. But my mom was, as my father
Speaker 2: puts it, constantly taking off. So we were pinging between
Speaker 2: Iowa and Washington, d c. In Detroit, where her family
Speaker 2: was from. She was deeply involved in the Transcendental Meditation movement.
Speaker 2: So there were these TM centers sort of all over
Speaker 2: the country, and so we would kind of go to
Speaker 2: those for little stints because she was working on projects
Speaker 2: with them. Then at four years old, four going on five,
Speaker 2: I'd moved to California with her, and from that point on.
Speaker 2: Our travel was sort of restricted to California, but we
Speaker 2: moved around a lot up and down the state, to
Speaker 2: little towns and cities, and we were just always on
Speaker 2: the move.
Speaker 1: At one point, you describe, I love this sentence you're write.
Speaker 1: My real memory begins in motion.
Speaker 2: I was living with my mom in the Tenderloine in
Speaker 2: San Francisco, was nineteen eighty six by then, which if
Speaker 2: you know anything about the Tenderloin in nineteen eighty six,
Speaker 2: it was a rough and colorful place. It was really
Speaker 2: a triangle of social services. Most people were living on welfare.
Speaker 2: We lived in what they go on SRO, so it's
Speaker 2: a single room occupancy. Most of them don't have kitchens.
Speaker 2: They were converted hotels, so people were really scraping by,
Speaker 2: and we had a very colorful life, you know, living
Speaker 2: in this sort of European style of hotel was sheer
Speaker 2: back through the hallways. Our neighbors were drag queens. They
Speaker 2: were queer day black Asian, straight white like my mother.
Speaker 2: There were many other single parents, mothers in particular, and
Speaker 2: their kids kind of became my friends. So it was
Speaker 2: sort of a bright, vivid, grimy world filled with colorful characters.
Speaker 2: We were really living a pretty broke life at that time,
Speaker 2: and she had gotten me into this private school called
Speaker 2: White Pony, which was in Walnut Creek, sort of a wealthy,
Speaker 2: primarily white suburb of San Francisco, and we would take
Speaker 2: like two buses and a bart. It was about an
Speaker 2: hour long trip each way to this kindergarten that was
Speaker 2: run by a branch of what they call Sufia's and
Speaker 2: Reoriented and it was just this very pristine, calm environment
Speaker 2: where everything felt sort of white and washed and everyone
Speaker 2: spoke in low tone. And so every day my mom
Speaker 2: and I would travel between the chaos and clatter of
Speaker 2: the Tenderloin and take this hour long trip to my
Speaker 2: school in the suburbs, and it was it was very calm,
Speaker 2: and I kind of settled in there, and then every
Speaker 2: day we would go back to the clatter of the Tenderloin.
Speaker 2: So I think that was the time that I really
Speaker 2: started to like hold this duality.
Speaker 1: And that was just the one year, right because after that,
Speaker 1: your mom, when you're in first grade, you know, said
Speaker 1: something to the effects of we're out of here, We're
Speaker 1: heading north.
Speaker 2: That was just the one year. And so it's interesting
Speaker 2: that is so outsized in my memory. But I think
Speaker 2: it was that age, you know, around five years old
Speaker 2: or they say you really start to have concrete memory,
Speaker 2: and because it was so full of contrast in life,
Speaker 2: it really stood out. But then yeah, at the end
Speaker 2: of that year, she was pregnant with my little brother
Speaker 2: and a friend had told her there was a cosmic
Speaker 2: mountain up north, and she said, now doesn't that sound cool?
Speaker 2: And five six years old, what did I know? So
Speaker 2: we were off again.
Speaker 1: Nina and her mom moved to the remote area of
Speaker 1: Siskiyou County, which is halfway between San Francisco and Portland.
Speaker 1: Siskiu is at the foot of Mount Shasta, an active volcano.
Speaker 1: Could there be a more perfect metaphor? Nina's mom has
Speaker 1: moved them here to be closer to the mystical mountain
Speaker 1: she's heard so much about. This is not new to Nina,
Speaker 1: her mom putting her spirituality at the forefront of their lives.
Speaker 2: There is something very cloistered about childhood. You just understand
Speaker 2: your life to be the way it is, so I'm
Speaker 2: sure there was some of that, but I think being
Speaker 2: born into a transcendental meditation community and it wasn't Camm
Speaker 2: you like in the way that some people might imagine.
Speaker 2: But it was a small town in which people were
Speaker 2: all practicing TM toye a day, and my parents were
Speaker 2: both very united in what they felt was their contribution
Speaker 2: to creating world peace and before so I think, before
Speaker 2: I even remember, that's kind of what I was born into,
Speaker 2: and I'm sure I was surrounded by this sort of language.
Speaker 2: My mother got into tarot and astrology and things like
Speaker 2: channeling very early on. That's part of why she left TM.
Speaker 2: So I think even if I don't remember this language
Speaker 2: consciously much before we got to Mount Shasta, it was
Speaker 2: sort of in me through osmosis, if nothing else. So,
Speaker 2: and she kind of had this great adventurous spirit. And
Speaker 2: much like my life in San Francisco, which felt like
Speaker 2: in a juxtaposition between this gritty, grimy, bright city life
Speaker 2: and the sort of calm, meditative tones of White Pony,
Speaker 2: my mom contained that duality as well. So you know,
Speaker 2: she could kind of like run with the people in
Speaker 2: the street and talk a little shit, but she is
Speaker 2: always reading about the saints and sort of spoke about
Speaker 2: the cosmos and enlightenment and angels in the same sentences.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, Nina's dad remarries a woman named Beth.
Speaker 1: While Nina and her mom live at the base of
Speaker 1: this magical mountain, her dad and Beth end up in
Speaker 1: the hill country in Texas. Living a spiritual life is
Speaker 1: important to her dad too, and he and Beth are
Speaker 1: part of a meditation community. But back at the volcanic rock,
Speaker 1: life goes on for Nina and her mom. Nina's mom
Speaker 1: has another child some years later, Nina's younger brother, Christopher.
Speaker 1: Finances are tight for the family, and Nina's mom, for
Speaker 1: better or worse, is not exactly shy about sharing this
Speaker 1: financial precarity with her daughter.
Speaker 2: It was sort of like, you know, the ticker on
Speaker 2: a news show was just the running tally. She she
Speaker 2: was always working out her finances on little pieces of
Speaker 2: paper at a cafe. And I knew, you know, very
Speaker 2: early on, what each little treat cost us. So I
Speaker 2: really learned not to ask for those things, and I
Speaker 2: knew that if I if I didn't I received them.
Speaker 2: There could sometimes be blowback because she, like most mothers,
Speaker 2: you know, I'm sure she wanted to treat me, so
Speaker 2: sometimes she might buy a pizzaen set of paying the
Speaker 2: electric Bill, but there was always a fallout for that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a really arresting moment where she's having trouble
Speaker 1: with a tooth and she just says, well, it's time
Speaker 1: to go to Tijuana because that's that's where you go
Speaker 1: for dentistry.
Speaker 2: Ninety nine dollars root canal.
Speaker 1: And so you were privy to all that, absorbed that
Speaker 1: as a child, and then you had your dad and
Speaker 1: Bess in Texas in this TM community. But it seems
Speaker 1: also in a more day to day stable life than
Speaker 1: your mom's life.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm. I think you know my dad from what
Speaker 2: I understand, it is own natural procurity at times, and
Speaker 2: they all did because they were very dedicated to this
Speaker 2: movement that they had made the center of their life,
Speaker 2: which was ultimately a movement toward, you know, achieving world peace.
Speaker 2: So no one was rolling in the dough. But the
Speaker 2: life that they eventually built, and as I came into,
Speaker 2: you know, being in second, third, fourth, fifth grade, was
Speaker 2: one that was very sort of quiet and stable. They
Speaker 2: lived in a rural sort of subdivision that they had
Speaker 2: all built as a community, and that was the place
Speaker 2: I would say I had the closest to an Americana childhood.
Speaker 2: I mean I had a little bike with the banana
Speaker 2: seat and the streamers. I would write it to my
Speaker 2: friend's house. And it was not a wealthy life by
Speaker 2: any means, but it was very comfortable. I mean, it
Speaker 2: felt kind of protected in middle class. After my mom
Speaker 2: and I moved to California. Most every summer from I'd
Speaker 2: say age five or six through toward the end of
Speaker 2: high school, I would fly out from California and go
Speaker 2: stay with my dad and Beth in Texas for the summer,
Speaker 2: maybe a month or so, and then after that I
Speaker 2: would fly to his parents' home in Miami for a
Speaker 2: couple of weeks and my grandfather, his father was a
Speaker 2: renowned surgeon, and they lived a very different life. Again,
Speaker 2: it wasn't ostentatious, but it was definitely the wealthiest environment
Speaker 2: that I was ever in as a child.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 1: When Nina is in the fifth grade, about ten or eleven,
Speaker 1: her mother says to her, I am a walk him.
Speaker 1: Her mother, whose name is Anita, also says something about
Speaker 1: the Anitas Anita one and Anita two. Nina isn't sure
Speaker 1: what to make of any of this, what is her
Speaker 1: mom talking about?
Speaker 2: That must have been, you know, the early nineties and
Speaker 2: on OPRAH there was a lot of talk shows doing
Speaker 2: segments on like past life progression, sort of memories of
Speaker 2: abuse emerging. Do you remember this? Yeah? Yeah, So I
Speaker 2: feel like this idea sort of was born of that time.
Speaker 2: So a walk in too, and you can find you know,
Speaker 2: sort of communities online that feel that they are Walking's
Speaker 2: Ruth Montgomery, I think sort of wrote a seminal book
Speaker 2: about that, describing what it is a person that feels
Speaker 2: like they are walking. It is a pre agreed upon
Speaker 2: contract that your soul makes with another soul before you're born.
Speaker 2: And that agreement is that at some point in your life,
Speaker 2: when your soul has completed its its tasks or its
Speaker 2: lessons or whatever it came here to do, so to speak,
Speaker 2: then your soul will exit the body and this new
Speaker 2: soul will enter it. So you will essentially be outwardly
Speaker 2: the same, but this new soul is in the body
Speaker 2: and it has its own sort of karmic lessons that
Speaker 2: it needs to learn and things that it needs to
Speaker 2: follow out.
Speaker 1: So your mom explains this to you, and what did
Speaker 1: that feel like for you? I mean, your mom was
Speaker 1: essentially saying to you, I look the same, but I'm
Speaker 1: a different person.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean terrifying, Like that is just I felt
Speaker 2: like I was in a horror film. You know. It
Speaker 2: just was so spooky. I remember that very viscerally, and
Speaker 2: but just remember having chills and being both scared and
Speaker 2: confused because the way that she presented it to me
Speaker 2: was sort of in this calming, assured way, like oh no,
Speaker 2: it's better now, you know. And because she said, you know,
Speaker 2: I was Anita one and now I'm Anita two, and
Speaker 2: looking back, I feel like she was trying to distill
Speaker 2: it into child terms. But that was terrifying, because you
Speaker 2: know what, Anita too is not my mom, who the
Speaker 2: hell is she? But the way she was explaining it
Speaker 2: was a very matter of fact and straightforward and like,
Speaker 2: you know, it's better now. Anita one wasn't doing well
Speaker 2: and Nita two is here, and she's like, you know,
Speaker 2: she has her stuff more together, she's healthier, she's grounded,
Speaker 2: she's going to take better care of you guys. And
Speaker 2: it felt, I don't know, like just a total schism.
Speaker 2: I just didn't know how to make sense of it.
Speaker 2: It was both like really frightening. But then what was
Speaker 2: I to do but just trust this new old person.
Speaker 1: By the time Nina is in the sixth grade, her
Speaker 1: mom has managed to scrape together a little money bought
Speaker 1: a house in a town called Weed, So in one sense,
Speaker 1: life is a bit more settled, But there's an undercurrent,
Speaker 1: something lurking. Up until that point in Nina's life, she's
Speaker 1: been aware of her mother's burns. She knows her mom
Speaker 1: wears turtlenecks no matter what the season, to cover the
Speaker 1: burns on her neck, but Nina's never known exactly what
Speaker 1: happened or why. Now her mom decides would be a
Speaker 1: good time to tell Nina the story of how her
Speaker 1: burns came to be.
Speaker 2: So that conversation, and I remember sitting on the couch
Speaker 2: with my mom, you know, we had these like kind
Speaker 2: of like dusty, old second hand tweed couches, and I
Speaker 2: remember sitting there with her, and she just said, it's
Speaker 2: time for me to tell you the story. And I said,
Speaker 2: the story of what? And she said my burn and
Speaker 2: I kind of brushed her off, like you were in
Speaker 2: a fire.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: I knew that I didn't know anything else about it,
Speaker 2: and I had honestly never thought about it, which people
Speaker 2: think seems strange. But as a child, you're like that
Speaker 2: frog in boiling water. You just accept what is. Often
Speaker 2: we don't question these things until much later in life,
Speaker 2: unless something really catalyzes that inquiry. So she just sat
Speaker 2: me down, and she just kind of launched into this story,
Speaker 2: which in retrospect was like, oh my god. I didn't
Speaker 2: ask for this story. But she told me how how
Speaker 2: she grew up in Detroit, and she had been a
Speaker 2: student at University of Michigan and after her freshman year,
Speaker 2: I think it was the summer before her sophomore year,
Speaker 2: her and some girlfriends decided to dig a road trip
Speaker 2: to Colorado. You know, it was nineteen seventy one, and
Speaker 2: you know, there was a lot going on politically. The
Speaker 2: Vietnam protests were happening. All these Buddhist monks had been
Speaker 2: self immolating. There was a lot of angst and sort
Speaker 2: of rage in the youth culture, and so they went
Speaker 2: out to Colorado to see what was happening. And it
Speaker 2: was a couple of her college roommates and then an
Speaker 2: older woman who at that time I think was like
Speaker 2: twenty five or twenty six, and this older woman named Rayelle.
Speaker 2: I don't know how they were friends. I don't know
Speaker 2: how they were connected, but you know, it was a
Speaker 2: university town, so who knows. So they all take this
Speaker 2: road trip to Colorado, and toward the end of the summer,
Speaker 2: they're coming back and Rail starts telling my mom these
Speaker 2: stories about these men that are after them. And my
Speaker 2: mom is telling me this as I'm sitting on the
Speaker 2: couch with her, you know, knees to chess, just listening,
Speaker 2: thinking like, where is this going? You know, what does
Speaker 2: this have to do? Is my mom's burns but kind
Speaker 2: of wrapped. So she tells me that Rail's has this
Speaker 2: story that these men are after them. I'm like, oh
Speaker 2: my god, you know, and that most of the other
Speaker 2: girls go home. They're kind of getting freaked out by
Speaker 2: Rail's stories. But my mom and ray all go back
Speaker 2: to ann Arbor and by that time it's the fall,
Speaker 2: but my mom never rear enrolls in school. They're just
Speaker 2: kind of wandering around town and Rayel is getting increasingly
Speaker 2: paranoid and saying, not only are these men after them,
Speaker 2: but if they find them, that they're going to torture
Speaker 2: them and eventually kill them, and my mom is getting
Speaker 2: really freaked out by this, and she just can't imagine this,
Speaker 2: and somehow she starts to believe this too, and then
Speaker 2: Rayelle says, you know, we should kill ourselves. It would
Speaker 2: be better to do that than to be tortured. And so,
Speaker 2: you know, my mom goes along with it, and they're
Speaker 2: staying in some kitchen and ann arbor, and you know,
Speaker 2: as my mom is telling me this, I'm thinking like,
Speaker 2: oh my god, who's this woman? Like what do you mean?
Speaker 2: How could you believe this? But I'm also really freaked out.
Speaker 2: And then she says, they found a roll butcher paper
Speaker 2: and just wrap themselves in it and let themselves on fire.
Speaker 2: You know, I've come to find out a lot later,
Speaker 2: a lot more about it as an adult, but in
Speaker 2: that moment, that's what she told me, and I just
Speaker 2: was like, you know, shell shocked, could not believe what
Speaker 2: she was telling me. And then by that point, you know,
Speaker 2: she'd been telling me the story and her the language
Speaker 2: was getting more frenetic, and I was just kind of
Speaker 2: getting caught up in it, sort of like full body
Speaker 2: chills and kind of like a not in the chest
Speaker 2: kind of sad and scared for my mom and confused
Speaker 2: and wondering who this wild lady was. And by that
Speaker 2: point she has kind of a far away look in
Speaker 2: her eyes, and then she says, you know, then the
Speaker 2: firemen came and they wrapped us in wool blankets. There
Speaker 2: were fire blankets. They wrapped us in fire blankets. It
Speaker 2: took us to the ambulance and rushed them to the
Speaker 2: University of Michigan Burn Center. And I think the last
Speaker 2: thing she said was something like, you know, he saved
Speaker 2: my life. That fireman saved my life. It was an
Speaker 2: eerie moment. I mean, I just didn't know what to
Speaker 2: do with that.
Speaker 1: I mean, how would you characterize what you felt at
Speaker 1: that time? And I know it's so hard because there
Speaker 1: are layers and layers, but I mean it was mostly
Speaker 1: concern for your mother? Or was it fear for yourself?
Speaker 2: Was it?
Speaker 1: I mean, in a way, I'm kind of connecting it
Speaker 1: back to Anita one and Anita two in the sense
Speaker 1: of like who are you Innita one?
Speaker 2: Anita too, that was felt like the first sort of
Speaker 2: like split. You know, my mother and I had been
Speaker 2: very tight. I think a lot of kids who are
Speaker 2: raised by single parents, I mean, maybe mothers in particular.
Speaker 2: I can't speak to it. It might be the same
Speaker 2: for any parent, but especially when you're raised by a
Speaker 2: single parent and you don't have much money, you kind
Speaker 2: of become their little partner in crime. You grow up
Speaker 2: with them in a way you know much more than
Speaker 2: maybe is healthy or appropriate at times, because they're just
Speaker 2: getting by and you're doing it all with them. They
Speaker 2: don't have the privilege of protecting you from information that
Speaker 2: maybe a broader or more stable or moneyed household might.
Speaker 2: So I don't begrudge her taking me along for for
Speaker 2: those things. I think some stories she told me were
Speaker 2: too psychologically advanced for the age at which she shared them.
Speaker 2: But the walking thing, yet, that was the first sort
Speaker 2: of glitch, like, oh my mother and I are not
Speaker 2: there's a divide between us. And then with this story,
Speaker 2: it really felt like, oh my god, my mom has
Speaker 2: this whole which we all experience at some point, right
Speaker 2: when you first start to understand your parents as a person.
Speaker 2: You know that moment comes for us all in different ways.
Speaker 2: But this was something more than that. Not only was
Speaker 2: my mother a person on her own who had lived
Speaker 2: this whole other life, but she'd been involved in something
Speaker 2: that just who could even wrap their mind around that.
Speaker 2: So I think that it created this sort of dissonance
Speaker 2: for me which became a part of my life as
Speaker 2: a person, as a thinker, as an artist, in which
Speaker 2: nothing was ever as it seemed. Not only was there
Speaker 2: always something below the surface, there was many, many lays
Speaker 2: and that was both sort of intellectually interesting, but as
Speaker 2: a person and as a child, it was totally destabilizing.
Speaker 1: Right, And it's happening as you're entering your teenage years, great,
Speaker 1: like right on the cusp there, and your mom came
Speaker 1: extremely close to dying, which she tells you at that time.
Speaker 1: And this woman, Rayel does die.
Speaker 2: Right, she dies, not that night, but they end up
Speaker 2: in the University of Michigan burn unit in two months
Speaker 2: in November, and two months later around the holidays, Rael dies.
Speaker 2: I'm not exactly sure from what I think it was
Speaker 2: complications in infection or something. And then my mom is
Speaker 2: in the burn unit for six months total before she
Speaker 2: gets out.
Speaker 1: It's a lot, in fact, it's too much. By the
Speaker 1: time she's in high school, Nina distances herself from her
Speaker 1: mother as much as possible. She doesn't exactly run away,
Speaker 1: she just doesn't come home, and this escape from home
Speaker 1: extends to other things, a kind of escape from herself.
Speaker 1: She drinks, does drugs, all the typical high school stuff,
Speaker 1: except Nina is rebelling with more than the usual teenage gusto.
Speaker 1: She's hell bent on self destruction. She's in this phase
Speaker 1: of CouchSurfing at friends homes, relying on the kindness of
Speaker 1: other people's families. When her mother decides that enough is enough,
Speaker 1: she insists that Nina come home, and in a way,
Speaker 1: Nina wants to come home, but once she does, she's
Speaker 1: overtaken by a rage she hasn't allowed herself to feel
Speaker 1: up until now, and she writes her mother a letter
Speaker 1: that begins with the salutation mommy dearest. Now, Mommy Dearest
Speaker 1: was a film, a biopic about Joan Crawford who had
Speaker 1: been a nightmarish mother, and Nina and her mom had
Speaker 1: watched this film together, so the phrase is a terrible blow.
Speaker 1: Nina leaves the letter for her mother and goes off
Speaker 1: to school.
Speaker 2: So when I came home from school and I felt,
Speaker 2: you know, this great flood of relief leaving that letter
Speaker 2: for her and thinking like, screwed it, you know, and
Speaker 2: finally saying all the things I didn't say, all the
Speaker 2: feelings that I ate, all the ways that I listened
Speaker 2: to you tell me these things I didn't want to hear,
Speaker 2: et cetera. Like it all came out and I felt
Speaker 2: very justified. And then I came home from school and
Speaker 2: she didn't say a thing to me, Like half of
Speaker 2: the things on my bedroom walls were gone, and there
Speaker 2: was a pile of boxes on the floor and she
Speaker 2: was packing up my room and she just turned around
Speaker 2: and said, you know, if that's how you feel, you
Speaker 2: can get the fuck out of my house. And I
Speaker 2: immediately felt like that sort of you know, righteous feeling
Speaker 2: I had just disappeared, and I just felt like kind
Speaker 2: of a hot flush of shame, and I just thought,
Speaker 2: oh my god, what have I done. You know, my
Speaker 2: mother is a lot of things, and was a lot
Speaker 2: of things, but she was not that woman. And I
Speaker 2: did it to hurt her, and because I was hurt,
Speaker 2: and I did deserve a voice in that conversation, but
Speaker 2: it had gone so far that that's how it came out,
Speaker 2: and so she said, you can get out, and I
Speaker 2: just felt totally ashamed. And I remember picking up the
Speaker 2: boxes and just not saying a word. We didn't say
Speaker 2: anything else to each other. I crammed some boxes in
Speaker 2: the trunk of my car and I went back in
Speaker 2: to get the rest, and as I was sort of
Speaker 2: closing the trunk, I saw one of the boxes flapped open,
Speaker 2: and on the top of you know, a pile of clothes,
Speaker 2: there was a copy of the book Mommy Dearest, like
Speaker 2: an old, you know, ratty copy from the thrift store
Speaker 2: or something. I don't know if she had it in
Speaker 2: her collection or if she went and bought it that day,
Speaker 2: which I would not put past my mother, like if
Speaker 2: you want to activate your petty, she will always win.
Speaker 2: The cover was missing, though, So I picked up this
Speaker 2: book and she had ripped the front cover off and
Speaker 2: on the first page, in her big sort of like
Speaker 2: flowering cursive, she had written love Mommy dearest. So she
Speaker 2: had signed the book to me.
Speaker 1: Do you still have that?
Speaker 2: Oh? No, God, I wish that could go on the archive.
Speaker 2: You know. So if you ever wanted to fight my
Speaker 2: mother with fire, you were not going to win.
Speaker 1: So this becomes the beginning of a rift. It sort
Speaker 1: of gets band aids on it, but it never really
Speaker 1: heals after that.
Speaker 2: That's right. Yeah, it feels strained. I kind of leave
Speaker 2: and I'm living out of a trailer, and then I
Speaker 2: have a temporary situation where I'm living with a friend,
Speaker 2: and eventually I moved back home with my mom, but
Speaker 2: you know, for a year or so, and we're kind
Speaker 2: of polite, like things have settled, but it were never
Speaker 2: close like we were again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's so interesting because she was obviously so ill
Speaker 1: and at the same time, the best part of her
Speaker 1: identity was very wrapped up in being a mother, even
Speaker 1: though you know, in like mothering one oh one, she
Speaker 1: failed in all sorts of ways. We were all such
Speaker 1: complicated human beings. She was an incredibly complicated human being. Yeah,
Speaker 1: of course, we'll be right back. Nina goes off to
Speaker 1: college and to Italy for a semester. Abroad, she's only
Speaker 1: a little bit in touch with her mom, whose reality
Speaker 1: is continuing to deteriorate. Nina gets worrying messages from her,
Speaker 1: but as she's finally experiencing some freedom in her adult life,
Speaker 1: she tries not to let her worry get in the way.
Speaker 1: She's in Italy. After all, how much can she really
Speaker 1: do to help her man? Now, When she gets back
Speaker 1: from studying abroad, she sees a blinking green light on
Speaker 1: her message machine. The message is from her mother's friend, March.
Speaker 2: March tells me that probably as my flight was returning
Speaker 2: from a semester abroad Italy, my mom has let her house,
Speaker 2: the house we were living in Weed, you know where.
Speaker 2: She had told me about the first fire, that she
Speaker 2: let her house on fire and been charged with fillanny
Speaker 2: arson and is now in county jail. And so I
Speaker 2: obviously freak out and call March back. And I don't
Speaker 2: get much more information than that, but just that, you know,
Speaker 2: my mom had some sort of psychotic break and let
Speaker 2: her house on fire. Came to sort of as it
Speaker 2: was happening, that's all, a little murky realized she didn't
Speaker 2: want to do this and kind of ran outside and
Speaker 2: called the fire department, and with fire department King, and
Speaker 2: I'm sure what they encountered was must have been a
Speaker 2: woman in great distress, but instead of getting her help,
Speaker 2: she was booked and put in the back of a
Speaker 2: squad car and charged.
Speaker 1: And she had also told your brother Chris to leave
Speaker 1: the house.
Speaker 2: She had, Yeah, I think because I you know, my
Speaker 2: brother was only fifteen at that time, and we weren't
Speaker 2: that close, because you know, I was away in college
Speaker 2: and at that point I was so deeply devoted to
Speaker 2: my family and would have done anything for them, but
Speaker 2: there was a part of me that was sort of,
Speaker 2: as you said, emotionally disconnected, sort of like fingers in
Speaker 2: the ears, la la la la la. So I could go,
Speaker 2: and I had to do that so I could build
Speaker 2: a life of my own. And I think while I
Speaker 2: was in Italy there was some of that denial coming
Speaker 2: into place, with the fact that she was writing these
Speaker 2: emails which were pretty unhinged, and I was still just
Speaker 2: you know, going for weekend trips to Waldough beaut in
Speaker 2: a and drinking per secon go and eating cheese, and
Speaker 2: I just didn't want to deal with it, to be
Speaker 2: honest by that point, which sounds harsh, but if you've
Speaker 2: lived a life anything like this, you can probably relate.
Speaker 2: So Marge said, Oh, don't worry. You know, your brother's
Speaker 2: with his friends, and I thought, oh, my god, my brother.
Speaker 2: And I found out later that my mom had him
Speaker 2: go to a friend's house. She just said, I'm not
Speaker 2: feeling good, you need to go to a friend's house.
Speaker 2: So I think in a few days leading up to
Speaker 2: the fire. She was really breaking down, and she was
Speaker 2: aware enough to know, like, you've got to get out
Speaker 2: of your I don't know what I'm going to do.
Speaker 1: So you go to pick Chris up at high school
Speaker 1: so that you can go see your mother. And there's
Speaker 1: a line in your book which I noted, which is
Speaker 1: someone older or wiser should have been driving that day.
Speaker 1: And I actually wrote in the margin I'm in like,
Speaker 1: I mean please, yeah, I mean, I'm end to that.
Speaker 1: You know that there's this fifteen year old and this
Speaker 1: twenty two year old going to see their mother who's
Speaker 1: been put in jail for suspected arson. And where were
Speaker 1: your father and Beth during that period of time, like
Speaker 1: during that crisis as the parents who much more were
Speaker 1: mentally together.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean they were, you know, still like physically,
Speaker 2: you know, they were in Texas. I think after I
Speaker 2: got that call, I left. I was in school in
Speaker 2: San Diego. I was at you see, San Diego, and
Speaker 2: I flew home. My final quarter of school I was
Speaker 2: about to graduate, was starting like two days later, So
Speaker 2: I email my professors, took a week off, and I
Speaker 2: flew home, borrowed a car from you know, an old
Speaker 2: friend's dad and drove and got my brother and was like,
Speaker 2: we're going to see mom and figure out, you know,
Speaker 2: what the hell's going on. It was like visiting hours.
Speaker 2: You know, you had to get there between you know,
Speaker 2: four thirty and five thirty years. So we got there.
Speaker 2: We talked to my mom through you know, the sort
Speaker 2: of soup caned phones that they have in jail, and
Speaker 2: she was in a jumpsuit and it was just so surreal.
Speaker 2: I mean, my brother hardly said anything, but she said,
Speaker 2: you know, I want you to get me a lawyer.
Speaker 2: And this was my mom. You know, She's like, I'm
Speaker 2: not going to get stuck with a public defender.
Speaker 1: The other thing that was very intense about seeing her
Speaker 1: in that orange jumpsuit was that it was maybe the
Speaker 1: first time that you had ever seen your mother, certainly
Speaker 1: in public, with her scars just out in the open. Right.
Speaker 2: She would wear turtlenecks every day, and she bore them
Speaker 2: under dresses, she bore them under a T shirt or
Speaker 2: you know, a button down. She was always covering, you know,
Speaker 2: because her scars went up her neck and they ended
Speaker 2: right at her jaw line, and she actually had the
Speaker 2: outer part of her ears had been burned off. Well,
Speaker 2: but if she wore you know, she had sort of
Speaker 2: like a chin lenk bob most of my life. So
Speaker 2: she wore it like that, and then she wore eternal
Speaker 2: neck to cover the neck, and her face was intact,
Speaker 2: and she was quite beautiful and you just would never
Speaker 2: know that. And so in that jumpsuit, her neck was
Speaker 2: totally exposed. And yeah, that was just such a poignant
Speaker 2: moment because it was almost as shocking to see my
Speaker 2: mother's neck exposed as it was to see her in jail.
Speaker 2: There were just so many levels of secrecy, I guess,
Speaker 2: but there were so many levels of covering, is what
Speaker 2: I would call it. Because my mom never said, you know,
Speaker 2: my body's a secret, or even this fire is a secret.
Speaker 2: She never my mother never asked me to keep a
Speaker 2: secret my whole life. But there were so many things
Speaker 2: that I just knew were secrets that I internalized. And
Speaker 2: maybe that was because of the environments around me didn't
Speaker 2: seem amenable to hearing those things. I'm not sure. I
Speaker 2: just kind of knew. So as we left the jail,
Speaker 2: I thought, okay, I needed to hire a lawyer, and
Speaker 2: her friend Marge had given me a number for a lawyer.
Speaker 2: So I called him and he said, you know, to
Speaker 2: retain me, it'll be three thousand dollars. So I went
Speaker 2: to a payphone. My brother was waiting the car. I
Speaker 2: went to a payphone and called the only person that
Speaker 2: I knew that I could ask for three thousand dollars,
Speaker 2: which was my father. I told him briefly what had happened.
Speaker 2: He was obviously in shock and just asked, if you know,
Speaker 2: we were okay, But I was very to business at
Speaker 2: that point, and I just said, I need this money.
Speaker 2: I have to get it by XYZ day. And he
Speaker 2: looked at the closest Western Union and said, you know,
Speaker 2: can you be there by seven o'clock? And I went
Speaker 2: and I did it, and he didn't ask any other questions.
Speaker 2: So to his credit, he really came through when we
Speaker 2: needed it. But then the fallout of that experience, which
Speaker 2: went on for several months afterward, I was kind of
Speaker 2: on my own in it. To be honest, I hope
Speaker 2: that's a fair memory, because that's how it is in
Speaker 2: my mind. My mom ended up spending three months in jail,
Speaker 2: even with the private attorney that we hired, and my
Speaker 2: brother was with his best friend's family who were close
Speaker 2: to my mom and knew her well, and she trusted
Speaker 2: them and they really took him in. And I went
Speaker 2: back to college to finish school, and the.
Speaker 1: Arson investigation found your mom temporarily insane was the phrase.
Speaker 2: That was a phrase. And I didn't meet I was.
Speaker 2: I think I was up in California, you know, because
Speaker 2: that was at the very top of the state, and
Speaker 2: I was at school in San Diego, very bottom of
Speaker 2: the state. So I think I was up there for
Speaker 2: a week or so, helping with details and getting my
Speaker 2: brother settled, and I met him. I remember meeting the
Speaker 2: insurance inspector at the house, and I don't even remember
Speaker 2: what kind of questions he asked, but they're basically trying
Speaker 2: to assess whether you were doing this for money, you know,
Speaker 2: whether she had burned the house down for insurance money.
Speaker 2: So we asked some questions, and then the verdict came back,
Speaker 2: and he went been met with her in the jail
Speaker 2: and you know, interviewed her, and the verdict came back
Speaker 2: temporarily insane. So they awarded a full money to rebuild
Speaker 2: the house, which was a sort of twisted blessing, you know.
Speaker 1: But yeah, and I imagine it must have been so surreal,
Speaker 1: like the way you describe it to You know that
Speaker 1: this house which was the sight of so much, and
Speaker 1: which you know had burned to cinders, then being rebuilt
Speaker 1: in this kind of everything new, you know, like your
Speaker 1: mother now had like her own meditation room. Right a
Speaker 1: week before Nina's twenty fourth birthday, her mother dies suddenly
Speaker 1: of a pulmonary embolism. Her death, even though foreshadowed in
Speaker 1: all sorts of ways by her life, is shocking, and
Speaker 1: Nina is at such a tender age on the cusp
Speaker 1: of adulthood. As she goes through her mother's things, Nina
Speaker 1: stumbles upon her grandfather's journal, which contains writing about their
Speaker 1: shared family history, particularly the time her mother set herself
Speaker 1: on fire. This time, instead of turning away, Nina leans in.
Speaker 1: She's ready in a sense to know the secrets she
Speaker 1: has kept from herself, and the way that tragedy when
Speaker 1: it comes, can spread like a virus or a fire,
Speaker 1: one terrible thing leading to the next and to the next.
Speaker 1: So what did you find when you did begin to
Speaker 1: look up everything that you could about your mother's story.
Speaker 2: With that journal? I was or reading that and somehow
Speaker 2: feeling connected to my grandfather and even imagining my uncle
Speaker 2: being there across time. I kind of I wanted to
Speaker 2: go back to that time, and I wanted to see
Speaker 2: the story for myself because everything I had ever known
Speaker 2: about this was just funneled directly from my mother to me,
Speaker 2: and I had never talked to my dad about it.
Speaker 2: I had never talked to anyone else about this, including
Speaker 2: my little brother. So I was just hungry for something grounding,
Speaker 2: like some real information about this. So I went home
Speaker 2: to Portland and I googled my mom, which I mean
Speaker 2: Google didn't exist when when you know, I was first
Speaker 2: hearing these stories, and it was something that back to
Speaker 2: the frog and boiling water thing, I had just never
Speaker 2: thought of. But with my mother gone, there was sort
Speaker 2: of like this this hole in the time space continuum
Speaker 2: for me, and it just felt like all these new
Speaker 2: ideas and possibilities sorted pouring out and I just thought, oh,
Speaker 2: I have to research and explore this on my own.
Speaker 2: So I remember being my apartment and googling my mom's name,
Speaker 2: and it was just all these articles came up from
Speaker 2: all over the country. I mean some of them were
Speaker 2: smaller or bigger, but there was a piece in the
Speaker 2: New York Times about the fire. There was something in
Speaker 2: you know, the Frisno newspapers. There was coverage of the
Speaker 2: fire from all over the country, and you know, they
Speaker 2: were calling them human torches and quoting one of the
Speaker 2: girls who said to another in the ambulance as they
Speaker 2: were holding their hands on the way to the burning unit, like,
Speaker 2: isn't it lovely to die together? I mean, it was
Speaker 2: just really arresting seeing all that on the screen. For
Speaker 2: some reason, it really concretized. The whole thing for me
Speaker 2: was that when.
Speaker 1: You began to find your way into writing about it.
Speaker 2: I was twenty four. Then I really didn't start writing
Speaker 2: about this until I was almost thirty, and I had
Speaker 2: gone through a big breakup someone that I was with
Speaker 2: for years, and I was living on my own for
Speaker 2: the first time, and I had done all this research
Speaker 2: on it when I first found that journal and was
Speaker 2: reading the articles in the newspaper, and I had a
Speaker 2: bunch of my mom's journals too, and I was reading
Speaker 2: them and really getting into her psyche and maybe how
Speaker 2: ill she had been at the end, and it was
Speaker 2: it kind of consumed my life for a while. But
Speaker 2: then I tucked it ou and I went back to
Speaker 2: trying to just live and make my life. And it
Speaker 2: wasn't until I went through a big breakup and moved
Speaker 2: out into an apartment on my own. I think I
Speaker 2: was like twenty nine by then that I really started
Speaker 2: to try to reckon with all these things that had happened.
Speaker 2: So it wasn't just oh, this is the information, this
Speaker 2: is a story that happened to my mother. It was like, well,
Speaker 2: what happened to me? And it wasn't until I was
Speaker 2: living in my first little apartment of my own, and
Speaker 2: you know, I was like doing the artist's way and
Speaker 2: starting to read self help books, which I had always
Speaker 2: avoided like the plague before, you know, growing up with
Speaker 2: like a very new age mother. I was just like, oh, god, whatever.
Speaker 2: But I sat down one morning. I had this old
Speaker 2: typewriter that a friend had left me, and I started
Speaker 2: just writing anything I could think of, like stories, scenarios, scenes,
Speaker 2: character just all these moments from my life that I
Speaker 2: had never really processed. I had just sort of lived
Speaker 2: through and survived and kept it moving. So I really
Speaker 2: didn't start to ask that what happened to me until
Speaker 2: I put it down on paper and for one year,
Speaker 2: every morning I just wrote and wrote, wrote, And then
Speaker 2: at the end of the year, I had like a
Speaker 2: stack of three hundred pages. I mean it was crude
Speaker 2: and wild and all over the place. But I sat
Speaker 2: down on my couch and I read the stack of
Speaker 2: pages from front to back. And that was an out
Speaker 2: of body experience. When I tell you that reading those
Speaker 2: pages was like reading the story of someone else's life,
Speaker 2: I mean I just thought, where was I How could
Speaker 2: I have been? You know, my mother was descending into madness,
Speaker 2: and that I was over here worried about like do
Speaker 2: I look cute in these genes? And does this guy
Speaker 2: like me? It just it was really stark to see
Speaker 2: it on paper. Eventually, I think then the real work
Speaker 2: of the book and where I came out the other
Speaker 2: end was forgiving myself for that, forgiving myself and my
Speaker 2: mother and understanding that we were all doing what we
Speaker 2: could to live.
Speaker 1: Yeah. You know, it strikes me when you said that
Speaker 1: about the writer's way and avoiding self help books and
Speaker 1: all the rest, is that there's another sentence from your
Speaker 1: book that struck me, which is, in a way, my
Speaker 1: mother's beliefs stole faith from me and it seems to
Speaker 1: use the word faith really loosely, like you needed to
Speaker 1: reclaim that for yourself, and writing is an act of faith.
Speaker 1: Writing every day, writing forward, not knowing where it's taking you,
Speaker 1: is making something out of nothing, and that requires something
Speaker 1: like faith. And in a way, it seems like that
Speaker 1: knitted back together for you, like something that had been
Speaker 1: taken from you or just simply not available to you
Speaker 1: because there was no room for it to be.
Speaker 2: No. I love that. I really feel like I reconstituted
Speaker 2: myself in the process of writing that story, and not
Speaker 2: just looking at what had happened and how it had
Speaker 2: affected me, but also who my mother was and what
Speaker 2: was and what was not allowed her or a woman
Speaker 2: like her in the culture in which we live, and
Speaker 2: so that really helped me understand her in context as well.
Speaker 1: Here's Nina reading one last passage from Love is a
Speaker 1: burning thing.
Speaker 2: Maybe those of us compelled to tell fractured family stories
Speaker 2: are the ones who feel unfinished. Maybe we take the
Speaker 2: ancestors into us and live out all possible lives, wandering
Speaker 2: down alleyways not ours, just to tie up storylines in
Speaker 2: the gap left by my mother's family, the Detroit people,
Speaker 2: the Canadians, the Catholic and the quebec Qua, the Hockey
Speaker 2: Lovers and Crown Royals, the La Bat Blues. I emerge
Speaker 2: as mother, father, brother's sister. I am the metallurgist, transforming
Speaker 2: alloy into cars, the alchemists, rendering mercury to gold. I
Speaker 2: am perfection and its destruction. I am flash over the
Speaker 2: whole damn room combusting. I am splitting this town. I
Speaker 2: am blowing this joint. I am a woman on the run,
Speaker 2: a neon flash. If you blink, we carry all of
Speaker 2: the story. See we are the whole scene.
Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly z Acur
Speaker 1: is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
Speaker 1: If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
Speaker 1: please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
Speaker 1: on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
Speaker 1: eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
Speaker 1: find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd
Speaker 1: like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
Speaker 1: check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
Speaker 1: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to your favorite shows,