Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: This episode contains discussion of suicide. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 1: William was a boy. The way they used to make
Speaker 1: them what he would call the platonic ideal of a
Speaker 1: boy building things and breaking them, fixing them back up again.
Speaker 1: But there were two Williams. One was the man with
Speaker 1: no name, the William all of us knew. There was
Speaker 1: another we didn't know, a man who wanted to be named,
Speaker 1: to be known, the William who lived in his own
Speaker 1: secret room. The narrow confines of an interior life with
Speaker 1: space for only one, and a much darker space than
Speaker 1: I'd ever imagined it would be.
Speaker 2: That's Daniel Wallace, author and professor of English at the
Speaker 2: University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, reading from his recent
Speaker 2: memoir This Isn't Going to End well, the true story
Speaker 2: of a man I thought I knew. Sometimes, in our
Speaker 2: most impressionable years, a person comes along who changes the
Speaker 2: course of our lives. We develop a kind of crush
Speaker 2: on that person and model ourselves after them. Daniels is
Speaker 2: a story of just such a relationship, one of emulation
Speaker 2: and unknowability, and finally, the uncovering of a very secret life.
Speaker 2: I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets
Speaker 2: that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
Speaker 2: and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 1: I grew up in Birmingham, in Suburbsingham, Homewood at first,
Speaker 1: and then Mountain Brook. Birmingham is this constellation of neighborhoods
Speaker 1: and doesn't really feel like one place, but just this
Speaker 1: collection of places. And my father, when I was in
Speaker 1: sixth grade, after many false starts, started making money, became
Speaker 1: very successful at the work he was doing. He was
Speaker 1: a great salesman. So we moved from Homewood, which is
Speaker 1: a sweet little neighborhood, to a metrorieskier place called Mountain Brook,
Speaker 1: and it had everything. It was a vaunted place to
Speaker 1: live and my mother and father and I lived there
Speaker 1: with my little sister Barry and my two older sisters,
Speaker 1: Holly and Rangely. And it was through this mix and
Speaker 1: mingling of people in ages that was definitely not sequestered.
Speaker 1: We were all part of this hive. I started growing up.
Speaker 2: What was your mother like?
Speaker 1: She was a lot of fun. She was for the
Speaker 1: first few years of my life until I was probably
Speaker 1: in sixth or seventh grade, not employed, worked at home,
Speaker 1: and she and my father had a kind of tepid relationship.
Speaker 1: She was not an admirer I don't think of my father,
Speaker 1: and they were not always at odds, but they were
Speaker 1: always sort of dueling with each other, and there was
Speaker 1: this shimmering hostility and competition that sometimes would boil over.
Speaker 1: But she was really affectionate and did anything, almost anything
Speaker 1: that we asked of her, very very supportive, and was
Speaker 1: there in the beginning in my early life a lot
Speaker 1: more often then my dad was. He had to travel
Speaker 1: so much for his business that he was gone in
Speaker 1: a way that made his return to the house feel
Speaker 1: as if he were a border. We established this routine
Speaker 1: while he was gone, and if he was gone, you know,
Speaker 1: eighteen nineteen days out of the month, we would have
Speaker 1: our own little routines which he would interrupt when he
Speaker 1: would get back. And so he felt that, I think,
Speaker 1: and we felt his presence too, as being something of
Speaker 1: an imposition on the freedoms that my mother allowed us
Speaker 1: to have, as much as we wanted to believe that
Speaker 1: it was this kind of ideal Kennedy esque sort of family,
Speaker 1: which is, you know how we would imagine ourselves being,
Speaker 1: you know, smarter, better looking. Whatever it is that we
Speaker 1: wanted to believe about ourselves wasn't true. When my dad
Speaker 1: found his success, he became the person that he wanted
Speaker 1: to become because he was so so ambitious and so
Speaker 1: hard working. He sort of filled his own shoes and
Speaker 1: saw me, I think, as the next chapter. He never
Speaker 1: had the success that he needed in order to see
Speaker 1: me in his sights as a potential follow up to
Speaker 1: who he was. So one we moved from Homewood, I
Speaker 1: left public school and went to the private school a
Speaker 1: couple of miles away. He and my mother actually were
Speaker 1: no happier with his success. She wasn't really supportive, I
Speaker 1: believe it or not. She had said to him that
Speaker 1: she didn't want him to make more than twenty thousand
Speaker 1: dollars a year because if he did, he would become insufferable.
Speaker 1: So I was in this position of being in this
Speaker 1: private school beginning in sixth grade, wearing ties every day,
Speaker 1: and not really in touch with any sense of myself.
Speaker 1: I tend to think of these years leading up to
Speaker 1: the seventh grade as this continual, almost fetal evolution that
Speaker 1: I am still growing, that I haven't assumed a real
Speaker 1: self yet, and that's when I met William. So I
Speaker 1: came home from school and was standing at the back
Speaker 1: door in the kitchen looking out, and the perspective was
Speaker 1: at the roof of the house where we lived, in
Speaker 1: addition to the house where we lived, which is my parents' bedroom,
Speaker 1: and it was a flat surface with the rest of
Speaker 1: the house was not And on the edge of that roof,
Speaker 1: looking down twenty five feet or so to the pool below,
Speaker 1: was William. He was cut off, jeans, nothing else, spotlighted
Speaker 1: in the sun, his long golden hair draping over his shoulders.
Speaker 1: I remember it as being this moment of a heightened reality,
Speaker 1: kind of a movie moment in a way that just
Speaker 1: wasn't the kind of experience that I usually had in
Speaker 1: my life. He was about to jump, and that in
Speaker 1: and of itself, this idea of this potential act that
Speaker 1: was about to take place, was so antithetical to my
Speaker 1: own experience as a boy in the world, which was
Speaker 1: illustrated by me at the back door in the air
Speaker 1: conditioning with my tie on, looking at an almost naked
Speaker 1: man about to jump off the roof. And he did that.
Speaker 1: He dove off the roof into the pool and lived.
Speaker 1: It wasn't clear to me whether that was going to
Speaker 1: be how this all turned out, but he did it.
Speaker 1: He got out of the pool, climbed the house again,
Speaker 1: which was no easy feet, walked across the hot tar
Speaker 1: to my parent bedroom and jumped off again.
Speaker 2: And your parents, they had removed a diving board from
Speaker 2: the pool, right right. This was a pool that was
Speaker 2: not meant to be dived into in any way, much
Speaker 2: less from twenty five feet above in the roof exactly.
Speaker 1: And that was another aspect of my life which was choreographed.
Speaker 1: My mother lived in a very cautious kind of fear
Speaker 1: that something terrible was going to happen to her trol
Speaker 1: and so she choreographed, tried to choreograph our life so
Speaker 1: that chances for harm were diminished. And one of the
Speaker 1: ways that she did that was by removing the diving board,
Speaker 1: which again was just maybe two feet above the water.
Speaker 1: But before we could even get in the pool, she
Speaker 1: had that removed. So this was the life that I
Speaker 1: understood is being safe and sane. And then here comes
Speaker 1: William jumping off the roof ten and a half times
Speaker 1: higher than I was allowed to go.
Speaker 2: Well, this is the first time Daniel is really seeing
Speaker 2: William up close, spotlet by the sun. He's not a
Speaker 2: total stranger. Daniel knows him sort of. He knows of
Speaker 2: him as a ghostly presence who's dating his older sister Holly.
Speaker 2: Daniel has seen them leave together, come back together, but
Speaker 2: that's been about it until now. On this day, in
Speaker 2: this movie moment, he is captivated, spellbound in a way
Speaker 2: that will continue for many years to come.
Speaker 1: After that, I saw him more and more. He was
Speaker 1: would be in the kitchen when I got home from
Speaker 1: school with Holly and a couple of their friends, or
Speaker 1: I would see him drive up on his motorcycle. He
Speaker 1: had a look that is hard to pull off, and
Speaker 1: it was at once kind of poetic and tough. I
Speaker 1: compare him to this a commingling or confluence of all
Speaker 1: these different ideas of maleness which abounded back then and
Speaker 1: I guess still do in a lot of ways. But
Speaker 1: there was this Shacob varas James Dean Himmingway kind of
Speaker 1: feeling to him that was attractive in part because he
Speaker 1: wasn't asking you to pay attention to him. He wasn't
Speaker 1: the kind of person who was trying to get attention,
Speaker 1: as hard as that maybe to believe by how I'm
Speaker 1: describing him. He was very quiet and was not the
Speaker 1: first person to walk in a room, maybe the last.
Speaker 1: Because when he did say something, it was smart, it
Speaker 1: was important, it was usually always right, and he didn't
Speaker 1: need to be loud, and that, to me, not being
Speaker 1: allowed person myself, was phenomenally attractive. That you could have
Speaker 1: this presence without turning up the volume. So he would
Speaker 1: come over and eventually, the way that kind of a
Speaker 1: sidekick does, I'd hang around with them until they told
Speaker 1: me that that was enough, and later as they were
Speaker 1: getting more and more serious. It was really important for
Speaker 1: Holly to have William accepted by my father, who, as
Speaker 1: any father would in what is this now eighteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: when his daughter brings home a long hair hippy on
Speaker 1: her motorcycle, it's not your first choice for a mate.
Speaker 1: So she would have him do tasks around the house
Speaker 1: that none of us could do. He would build things
Speaker 1: for us, he would fix things for us.
Speaker 2: If something needs fixing in Daniel's family, they either hire
Speaker 2: somebody to do it or it doesn't get done at all.
Speaker 2: So the fact that William is handy and resourceful adds
Speaker 2: to his particular brand of magic and allure. Daniel has
Speaker 2: carved out his own special place in the basement of
Speaker 2: his family's home that he thinks of as his secret room.
Speaker 2: It's not a secret in the sense that people don't
Speaker 2: know it exists. They do, but it is secret in
Speaker 2: the sense that it becomes a place for Daniel to
Speaker 2: call his own, his space, to keep secrets and to
Speaker 2: live his adolescent life. At one point, he decides he
Speaker 2: wants a water bit in his secret room. I mean,
Speaker 2: who wouldn't. His mom actually says okay and gets him one.
Speaker 2: But of course, what a better tricky and perhaps cooler
Speaker 2: in theory than practice. The bed slashes all around and
Speaker 2: is uncomfortable. But one day William comes to pay Daniel
Speaker 2: a visit in a secret room, and William notices the
Speaker 2: waterbed has no frame, a crucial detail missing. So he
Speaker 2: steps in and saves the day.
Speaker 1: And that is perfect illustration of who he was, contrasting
Speaker 1: with who I was. I am the kind of person
Speaker 1: who says I'm going to get a waterbed. They're cool,
Speaker 1: and I'll get a big plastic bag and fill it
Speaker 1: full of water without reading the other side. Of the directions,
Speaker 1: which is you need a frame otherwise you're going to
Speaker 1: feel like you're in the middle of the Atlantic and
Speaker 1: a typhoon. So William knows these things. He knows what's
Speaker 1: necessary to make things work. I think probably that is
Speaker 1: if there was one way to sum him up that
Speaker 1: with him, he knew how things work and he knew
Speaker 1: how to make them work. So he measured, got the wood,
Speaker 1: brought it back. He brought all the hammers, the tools
Speaker 1: that saws, everything that he needed. I watched as he
Speaker 1: assembled it and handed him nails, whatever he needed. But
Speaker 1: again I was passive in the background while he was
Speaker 1: building this beautiful frame for my waterbed. William and Holly
Speaker 1: Day had taken me to see my first rock and
Speaker 1: roll concert I was thirteen. Up until that point in
Speaker 1: my life was the Apex. The Apergy did not get
Speaker 1: much better than that. To be with these two incredibly
Speaker 1: cool people that made me feel completely bulletproof. There was
Speaker 1: nobody in the world who was cooler, and therefore I
Speaker 1: was cool too, when the fact is I was really
Speaker 1: just running their fumes. But the concert itself was wild.
Speaker 1: It was else Cooper who decapitated baby heads on stage
Speaker 1: and hung himself on stage and walked around on stage
Speaker 1: with this bowl constrictor on his shoulders around his neck.
Speaker 1: It makes sense in that respect that later I would
Speaker 1: want a Boa Constrictor of my own. I wonder how
Speaker 1: many Boa Constrictors Alice Cooper actually sold, But you know,
Speaker 1: I mean he kids that bowl constrictor's because of Alice Cooper.
Speaker 1: But I was one of them. And I asked my
Speaker 1: mother if I could have a Boa constrictor, and she said,
Speaker 1: of course not. Snakes were one pass that she would
Speaker 1: not go down. But I had my secret room, so
Speaker 1: I had a place to keep my secret snake. And
Speaker 1: Holly and William and I went shopping. They were in
Speaker 1: on it. I got a bowl Constrictor. I brought it
Speaker 1: home in this little aerated box, and William built this
Speaker 1: beautiful terrarium for I'm shocked Off, as I named him,
Speaker 1: because I was reading Slaughterhouse live by for Bonnigut and
Speaker 1: schlucked Off didn't work out in the and for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: my snake would not eat the mice that I gave him,
Speaker 1: So eventually, of course I got tired of the snake
Speaker 1: and gave him to William. I wouldn't be surprised if
Speaker 1: that was his goal all along, because he knew me,
Speaker 1: he knew the wallaces, our family, and we didn't have
Speaker 1: a ton of staying power. So after he built the
Speaker 1: frame for the waterbed, and after he built the terrarium
Speaker 1: for the bowl constrictor, I was a co worker with
Speaker 1: a friend of mine in high school who had a
Speaker 1: family business selling pot. His cousins had done it, and
Speaker 1: every generation of cousins had sort of passed it on
Speaker 1: to the next, and it was his turn. He would
Speaker 1: bring the pot over to my room, my secret room,
Speaker 1: where it was safe for us to clean it, get
Speaker 1: the stems and seeds out, bag it up into ounces
Speaker 1: or lids, as we called them then. I don't know
Speaker 1: if anybody calls them that now, but he would leave
Speaker 1: the stems and seeds in a hefty bag under my
Speaker 1: bed because there was always something left behind. There was
Speaker 1: always something left on those stems that you could in dire,
Speaker 1: dry times, you could sort of salvage enough to throw
Speaker 1: a joint. And William would sometimes be in those dire
Speaker 1: situations himself, and so he came down to my secret
Speaker 1: room occasionally and he would say, what what's in the bag,
Speaker 1: And I knew even then that he would not be
Speaker 1: there chatting with me were it not for this hefty
Speaker 1: bag I had underneath my bed of stems and seeds.
Speaker 1: It didn't bother me. I think I knew enough to
Speaker 1: realize that I was not going to be as buddy
Speaker 1: the way that people his age for his buddy. So
Speaker 1: whatever I could do to get him into my life,
Speaker 1: it was fine. I was you know, I would definitely
Speaker 1: bribe somebody if it meant getting him to spend more
Speaker 1: time with me. So while I had a nice bag
Speaker 1: of stems and seats, he would visit. He made me
Speaker 1: a pipe. It's beautiful, beautiful, precious pipe out of a
Speaker 1: jina tile where he had Again, this is just a
Speaker 1: way that a lovely minor illustration of his ability to
Speaker 1: create eight things out of the world, which is, he
Speaker 1: drilled a hole in the side of a jina tile,
Speaker 1: carved out a bowl in the top, and got a
Speaker 1: little top of a coat can, the pop top of
Speaker 1: a metal can for the carburetor on top, so in
Speaker 1: you know, tacit trade. One day he gave me this
Speaker 1: pipe and I still have it, and that's fifty years.
Speaker 2: I guess where do you keep it?
Speaker 1: I have it up in my office and the top
Speaker 1: drawer to the left, I've got it up there with
Speaker 1: my glass eyes, which I also collect. I guess that's
Speaker 1: another story. But I've got, you know, little valuables in
Speaker 1: this drawer, and that's right there when I'm working. We
Speaker 1: went to see Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns they were called,
Speaker 1: and one was just fulve dollars for a few dollars
Speaker 1: more and the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. And
Speaker 1: we were in the theater by ourselves, nobody else was there.
Speaker 1: Of course, he was wearing his sunglasses he always wore sunglasses,
Speaker 1: even inside, and his leather jacket which had all these
Speaker 1: lovely pockets and them suitable for bringing beer into the theater.
Speaker 1: First beer I had was watching Clint Easwood in the
Speaker 1: Green Springs for Theater in Birmingham, Alabama, when I was
Speaker 1: fourteen or so. With William I love the movies, and
Speaker 1: the character of Clint Eastwood in those movies, those early
Speaker 1: movies that he made were eerily like who I later
Speaker 1: saw William as this really strong but detached force of
Speaker 1: not necessarily good but not definitely not evil, somebody who
Speaker 1: was so quiet sometimes as Clint Eastwood was in these
Speaker 1: movies that his character was called the Man with No Name.
Speaker 2: Tell me a bit about Holly, you know, there's so
Speaker 2: much about Holly and William. But Holly as she was
Speaker 2: as your much older sister. Was she cool on her own?
Speaker 2: Were they like cool squared together or did his magic
Speaker 2: fairy dust sort of wrap off on her or did
Speaker 2: they each have that?
Speaker 1: Oh no, they each had it, one without the other.
Speaker 1: It's hard to imagine. Actually, he was perfect for her
Speaker 1: in many ways, but she was more perfect for him.
Speaker 1: She was the person who could enter a room and
Speaker 1: every head return. She was beautiful, She was sharp and
Speaker 1: funny and fearless, and she would say anything, and she
Speaker 1: would answer any question you asked her. The more intimate,
Speaker 1: the better. There's nothing that was off limits. And William,
Speaker 1: he would fade back behind her. His nature was not
Speaker 1: to be a front person anyway. So she did that.
Speaker 1: She was able to go into a room and by
Speaker 1: the time he got into the room behind her, she
Speaker 1: would have already made friends and something he didn't have
Speaker 1: to do. The vital never known any more body more
Speaker 1: vital or open to take a chance in life. So yeah,
Speaker 1: she definitely brought her own bag of tricks.
Speaker 2: We'll be right back. When Holly is twenty one, a
Speaker 2: terrifying thing happens to her physically. Daniel is only fourteen
Speaker 2: at the time. After a series of tests, Holly receives
Speaker 2: diagnosis that will change the course of her whole life
Speaker 2: and William's two.
Speaker 1: It wasn't clear what was going on at first, because
Speaker 1: she actually woke up one morning and couldn't move. She
Speaker 1: was like ossified. She had been at school, but she
Speaker 1: was at home at the time and was in my
Speaker 1: room and could not be moved from the room. And
Speaker 1: we finally discovered what it was, a rumator arthritis, which
Speaker 1: at the time there was nothing you could do for it.
Speaker 1: You could ameliorate it with these gold shots and other treatments.
Speaker 1: It was just totally pernicious and a disease which beats
Speaker 1: you up, or it used to do that every joint
Speaker 1: in her body. So William around the same time, a
Speaker 1: little bit before this actually, but in the same era,
Speaker 1: had become a kayaker. He was always an outdoorsman. He
Speaker 1: loved camping, he loved being in nature, mountain climbing, fishing.
Speaker 1: He was an eagle scout, of course, and so he
Speaker 1: knew everything about knots. He knew plant jugit eat, and
Speaker 1: he loved this solo adventure that kayaking, wise and canoeing,
Speaker 1: and the two of them would go kayaking together. She
Speaker 1: was out on the river as much as he was,
Speaker 1: but this disease of course, made that impossible. She couldn't
Speaker 1: do that anymore. Her life in every way was changed.
Speaker 1: She had to make other plans. William, also being who
Speaker 1: he was, he had an idea about what his life
Speaker 1: was going to look like, which was one of being
Speaker 1: outside of doing boy things with his girl. And there
Speaker 1: was this moment where we were all sure that he
Speaker 1: was going to leave because she was not what he
Speaker 1: had in mind for his life. And they were still young.
Speaker 1: If she was twenty one he was twenty two. He
Speaker 1: could have easily gone off to school and just let
Speaker 1: things sort of cool off. But he doubled down and
Speaker 1: started taking care of her, started allowing her to have
Speaker 1: the kind of life that appeared to be lost.
Speaker 2: After the magical high school years of being Holly and
Speaker 2: William's sidekick, Daniel goes off to study at Emory, where
Speaker 2: he spends his first two years of college. When he's there,
Speaker 2: William and Holly moved to Chapel Hill in North Carolina.
Speaker 2: Daniel ends up moving to Chapel Hill as well and
Speaker 2: finishes his final two years of college at UNC.
Speaker 1: They moved to Chapel Hill so that Holly could go
Speaker 1: to graduate school in political science, and for the first
Speaker 1: two years I lived in a cinder block house where
Speaker 1: graduate students lived. But then, through the large ass of
Speaker 1: my father, who was really devastated by what had happened
Speaker 1: to Holly and this ongoing deterioration of her body and
Speaker 1: the way that her life was being made smaller and smaller,
Speaker 1: paid for a house to be built by William So.
Speaker 1: William designed and built a house on twenty acres of
Speaker 1: land out in the country, down the trees, removed all
Speaker 1: the copperheads. My hand didn't kill any of them. He
Speaker 1: designed it so that it would be the perfect place
Speaker 1: to what they call now aging in place. It's the
Speaker 1: perfect place for somebody whose body was basically going to
Speaker 1: betray them to live. Everything is on one story, totally
Speaker 1: accessible well if there was a pool, hot tub. Once
Speaker 1: you got in, it was this joyous, art filled, weird
Speaker 1: different world. They lived in their art. They both made things.
Speaker 1: Holly was be a wonderful arts herself. By this time, though,
Speaker 1: William had actually discovered what his path in life was
Speaker 1: going to be, which was as an artist on the river.
Speaker 1: He's always drawn. He was always a cartoonist, a playful cartoonist,
Speaker 1: all through high school and into his truncated college years,
Speaker 1: but he had never been able to harness that into
Speaker 1: any way to make a living. And what he discovered
Speaker 1: is that he could kiak these rivers and understand them
Speaker 1: in this holistic way and draw them so that you
Speaker 1: could know what to do when you got to a
Speaker 1: bend in the river. You knew how to good around
Speaker 1: a rock, you knew where the dangerous rapids were, where
Speaker 1: the takeouts were. And along with the maps, there were
Speaker 1: this little narrative of characters that he would draw, so
Speaker 1: they were instructive and funny at the same time. He
Speaker 1: was drawing these maps and traveling and taking Holly with
Speaker 1: him to every river in North Carolina and Tennessee and
Speaker 1: drawing every single one of them.
Speaker 2: And he becomes over a pretty short period of time,
Speaker 2: once he discovers exactly what it is that he is
Speaker 2: meant to do and how to harness it. He's found
Speaker 2: the perfect subject for his unique skills and passions, and
Speaker 2: sort of a subculture seems to kind of spring up
Speaker 2: around his art in some way.
Speaker 1: Yes, isn't that rare too. It's such an accident sometimes
Speaker 1: that you fall into the thing that you are supposed
Speaker 1: to do or the thing that you're supposed to be.
Speaker 1: And William was able to bring his love of outdoors
Speaker 1: of the river, of kayaking with his love of art
Speaker 1: of cartooning, and they met in a way that took
Speaker 1: William into a completely different zone. He did become a
Speaker 1: cult hero in the adrenaline sports world. He became this
Speaker 1: mysterious artist in the Whitewater culture, which back then was
Speaker 1: predominantly macho and male. He's hewed that in his books.
Speaker 1: His first book was a compilation of his maps. Then
Speaker 1: he did a book of cartoons that were about reflecting
Speaker 1: on what the culture of the Whitewater world really was.
Speaker 1: And the next ten years he published ten books and
Speaker 1: became iconic and still is remarkably, even though it's been
Speaker 1: so long since he had published a book on anything
Speaker 1: happy to do with with Whitewater. Yeah, he had really
Speaker 1: found a way to make the life that if he
Speaker 1: had the ability to, he would have created that is,
Speaker 1: he'd created the life that he only could imagine, that
Speaker 1: that habit. He seemed to have it.
Speaker 2: All really in this life, in this home on twenty
Speaker 2: acres that he built himself, where he and Holly were
Speaker 2: doing their art. There's also this menagerie of animals that
Speaker 2: they have with them, right.
Speaker 1: Right Without animals, who wouldn't feel alive, there are always
Speaker 1: animals around. They of course had dogs, cats, They had snakes,
Speaker 1: obviously not the Bowlken stricture anymore, but William had a
Speaker 1: couple of copperheads. They had pigs, two pot bellied pigs,
Speaker 1: Sherman and Harold. They were rabbits. There were turtles. There
Speaker 1: really was a kind of an Edenic menagerie of animals
Speaker 1: they had, And occasionally they would take a blanket out
Speaker 1: into the banks of this little river that ran through
Speaker 1: the back of their yard and have a picnic with
Speaker 1: all their animals. Holly said that was the highlight.
Speaker 2: William had another highlight, extreme adrenaline sports, river running, mountain climbing,
Speaker 2: mountain biking, all bringing him to the edge of death.
Speaker 2: At one point, he tells Daniel he considers this edging
Speaker 2: up to death as a healthy way to truly feel alive.
Speaker 2: One day in two thousand and one, he calls Daniel
Speaker 2: and tells him to go over to the house to
Speaker 2: be with Holly. He won't be there and makes up
Speaker 2: an excuse about why he doesn't want Holly to be alone.
Speaker 2: This is the day William dies by suicide.
Speaker 1: What's really unique about suicide or knowing somebody who actually
Speaker 1: does take their own life. It changes everything that happened
Speaker 1: before it. Do you have a different perspective on it?
Speaker 1: When somebody chooses to end their life that way, you say, oh,
Speaker 1: that's why he was so quiet, or oh that's why
Speaker 1: I didn't see him for a week. You know, things
Speaker 1: that wouldn't necessarily have seen significant suddenly become significant. So
Speaker 1: after William took his own life, you immediately start revising
Speaker 1: your life in light of that, trying to make sense
Speaker 1: of it. At the same time, it is a shock.
Speaker 1: There's nobody that I've spoken to, and I did a
Speaker 1: lot of research talking to folks in his life. No
Speaker 1: one saw him as a person who would do this,
Speaker 1: So for a long time it was a mystery, and
Speaker 1: it was even a mystery to my sister Holly Widow
Speaker 1: now who knew him better than anybody else. She lived
Speaker 1: for another ten years after he died, and when she died,
Speaker 1: and her death of course was related to room to
Speaker 1: arthritis and a lot of other autoimmune diseases that she had.
Speaker 1: We were cleaning out her house, my wife and i'm
Speaker 1: and I found in the back of a closet in
Speaker 1: her home two big boxes of journals that turned out
Speaker 1: to be William's journals. I showed them to everybody. I said,
Speaker 1: look look what I found. And we decided together that
Speaker 1: it wasn't our business. Whatever was in these journals, whatever
Speaker 1: William wrote, there were kids, and we should leave it
Speaker 1: be and put them in the stea dumpster where so
Speaker 1: much stuff was going. So I agreed, and I took
Speaker 1: the journals outside and on the way to the dimpsty dumpster,
Speaker 1: took a detour to the trunk of my car and
Speaker 1: put them in the trunk without telling anybody, and took
Speaker 1: them home and put them at a bookcase. Eventually I
Speaker 1: told Laura, my wife, that they were there, but didn't
Speaker 1: look at them. I felt like, these are things that
Speaker 1: should not be disposed of. He was a writer, he
Speaker 1: was an artist. These are books by a published author.
Speaker 1: But I was also a writer myself, and it was
Speaker 1: important for me to understand this person, this man who
Speaker 1: had been so integral to the choices that I'd made
Speaker 1: in the world. He was so integral in that my
Speaker 1: father sent me to go work for him in Japan
Speaker 1: for two years. I was twenty one to twenty three.
Speaker 1: I didn't want to turn down an opportunity to live
Speaker 1: incredible country, and I went without any strings attached. I
Speaker 1: said I would go there live and work, but it
Speaker 1: didn't mean that I was going to go into his
Speaker 1: business with him. And he said that's fine, just try
Speaker 1: it out. And after two years he said, well, now
Speaker 1: there are strings, and I need to know whether you
Speaker 1: were going to come into the business or not. My
Speaker 1: eventual decision was no, of course, I'm not going to
Speaker 1: do it. The only reason I could have made that
Speaker 1: decision was because of William. If I had an idea
Speaker 1: of what the life of an artist should be, the
Speaker 1: only way that I would know what that looked like
Speaker 1: was because of William. I did not want to be
Speaker 1: William because I never could be William. I knew that
Speaker 1: from the get go. You know, I did not have
Speaker 1: his No, how I did not have his strength. I
Speaker 1: didn't have most of the virtues that I saw in him.
Speaker 1: But he was a type of person who lived on
Speaker 1: the fringes, outside of the mainstream, who made his own life.
Speaker 1: He was a self made man, and he did it
Speaker 1: through his art, and that's what I wanted to do.
Speaker 1: I wanted to make myself through arc. But if you
Speaker 1: don't have that person, if you don't have that example
Speaker 1: in your life, it's difficult. It's not impossible, but it's
Speaker 1: just much more difficult to come up with it on
Speaker 1: your own.
Speaker 2: We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 2: William's journals sit on Daniel's bookshelves for two years before
Speaker 2: he decid to read them.
Speaker 1: I thought about them all the time. They were in
Speaker 1: this old antigue bookcase with glass doors, and I could
Speaker 1: see them every time I walked to my office. They
Speaker 1: were there, and I was well aware that they were there.
Speaker 1: It was crossing the rubicon. I didn't know if we
Speaker 1: weren't right in the beginning and our family decision that
Speaker 1: we'd made to get rid of them, because I think
Speaker 1: there's a real arguments be made that they're not my business,
Speaker 1: that they're not anybody's business, that they were his private journals.
Speaker 1: How can you do that? How can you broadcast or
Speaker 1: read at the time, just read the private thoughts of
Speaker 1: somebody else who didn't share them with you on his own.
Speaker 1: And what happened was it was a parallel experience that
Speaker 1: really led me to do it. Is after Holly died,
Speaker 1: and as I experienced so inanimately with her her last
Speaker 1: ten years, which were terrible, I started having a shift
Speaker 1: in my feelings toward William. I hated him for leaving Holly,
Speaker 1: for leaving Holly, Yeah, for doing this to Holly. And
Speaker 1: of course I mean I missed him terribly, But it
Speaker 1: wasn't my life that was dependent upon him the way
Speaker 1: that hers was. He was her other half. He allowed
Speaker 1: her to live in the world. You have a really
Speaker 1: big life in the world. And when he died, that died,
Speaker 1: and then she lost everything.
Speaker 2: When you actually did, like take that leap and open
Speaker 2: that first journal, was it coming from that rage or
Speaker 2: was it coming from the kind of profound need to
Speaker 2: solve this mystery, this conundrum, this not just of William,
Speaker 2: but of yourself as well.
Speaker 1: When I was finally able to get them out of
Speaker 1: the bookcase and start reading them, I was tired of
Speaker 1: hating him, and I wanted to understand what had happened.
Speaker 1: And I didn't know what was in the journals, but
Speaker 1: there were a lot of them, and he was brilliant,
Speaker 1: and he was a great writer, and I knew that
Speaker 1: there was something there. And sure enough, as soon as
Speaker 1: I opened the very first one, it was there, from
Speaker 1: the very first page, that he had been thinking considering
Speaker 1: taking his own life since he was twenty five years old.
Speaker 1: It could have happened before this, and I missed some
Speaker 1: of the earlier journals, but from the very first page,
Speaker 1: this is what he's talking about, a suicidal ideation, and
Speaker 1: this sense of his place in the world as being
Speaker 1: so tentative and fragile, as if he were a stranger
Speaker 1: in a strange land, so much so that he created
Speaker 1: self consciously created the person that we've been talking about,
Speaker 1: this capable, brilliant man. Who is that person that you
Speaker 1: would want with you if your plane goes down in
Speaker 1: the Amazon and all you have is a piece of
Speaker 1: gum and a half piece of string and he can
Speaker 1: somehow get you out of that. He's the guy that
Speaker 1: you want with you. He had created this very real persona.
Speaker 1: I mean, it wasn't false. You can't pretend to build
Speaker 1: a house. You can't pretend to be an artist. You
Speaker 1: either are one or you're not. He was one. These
Speaker 1: are the things that he really did in the world.
Speaker 1: But it was a very very willful creation of this
Speaker 1: secondary personality or person that allowed the other part of
Speaker 1: him to be completely perfectly shrouded.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, there's this moment where he writes the
Speaker 2: only place in all of the journals and all in
Speaker 2: caps in nineteen ninety five, this entry, I must not
Speaker 2: let them see who I really am exactly.
Speaker 1: And then after that he says they couldn't handle the
Speaker 1: real meed, which was astounding to read, because the truth
Speaker 1: was he was the only person that couldn't handle the
Speaker 1: real him. We could have handled him, for sure. But
Speaker 1: again it's this old story that we struggle with, which
Speaker 1: is that if I show you who I really am,
Speaker 1: you will not love me. You will not like me anymore.
Speaker 1: You like me because I've created this idea which you're
Speaker 1: attracted to. But if you actually sell the real need,
Speaker 1: you know, you wouldn't give me the time of day.
Speaker 1: And so he was that person, but in a very
Speaker 1: sophisticated and on another plane, an exaggerated kind of invention
Speaker 1: of self that I don't know anyone else who had
Speaker 1: done what he did, perfected the second self as well
Speaker 1: as he did, and by doing good, what's remarkable about
Speaker 1: William is that the second self he created was so good.
Speaker 1: It was great, you know, he was great, but it
Speaker 1: ended up being the reason why I couldn't live anymore.
Speaker 2: Do you think that that second self, that there were
Speaker 2: a periods of time in his life where that second
Speaker 2: self did feel like the real William to William or
Speaker 2: was it always something that he worked to, you know,
Speaker 2: sort of like the deepest cover of who he felt
Speaker 2: he really was, as outlined in his journals.
Speaker 1: I don't think that he was ever able to escape that,
Speaker 1: because that was him, that was as real a part
Speaker 1: of him as the self that we all knew. I
Speaker 1: never have liked this idea that when you talk about
Speaker 1: somebody like William as having the interior unseen persons the
Speaker 1: real William. I don't see that as being the case.
Speaker 1: I think that they were both real. But because of that,
Speaker 1: there was no way that he was going to be
Speaker 1: able to on his own separate the two. So we
Speaker 1: can't live like that. It's just unsustainable. Something is going
Speaker 1: to give. And when you wake up every morning and
Speaker 1: have to make a decision, as I feel like he did,
Speaker 1: whether today was going to be the day he was
Speaker 1: going to take his own life or live, and then
Speaker 1: decide to live as he did for decades. It was
Speaker 1: a decision that he had to make every day. That
Speaker 1: cannot sustain itself.
Speaker 2: Daniel describes the journals as the longest suicide note in
Speaker 2: the history of the world. But there's more. There's an
Speaker 2: envelope that is unlike anything Daniel has ever held in
Speaker 2: his hands. On the front of the envelope, in Holly's handwriting,
Speaker 2: is the phrase William's intense self hatred. It's clear that
Speaker 2: Holly opened and read the contents of this envelope shortly
Speaker 2: after William's death.
Speaker 1: Yes, she read the envelope just a few weeks after
Speaker 1: he died, and clearly had also read all the journals.
Speaker 1: But the envelope was different. It was separate from the journals.
Speaker 1: It was all by itself, and the envelope itself was
Speaker 1: taped shut, and in the tape were three of hairs
Speaker 1: from her head that she had taped there. And I
Speaker 1: thought about it a lot. I don't know why she
Speaker 1: did that, why she taped her hair on there. It's
Speaker 1: one of those things that private eyes do or to
Speaker 1: discover whether anybody got into something. You know, the hair
Speaker 1: is broken, the seal is broken. So I would not
Speaker 1: break that seal. I could not open that envelope even
Speaker 1: after I'd read the rest of the journals. But I
Speaker 1: knew that I was going to read it one day,
Speaker 1: and I couldn't at the same time break that seal
Speaker 1: that had Hi's sister's hair in it. So I did
Speaker 1: this kind of a cheat maneuver where I took a
Speaker 1: razor blade and sliced the top the side of the
Speaker 1: envelope open, so that you couldn't tell that it had
Speaker 1: been opened. And if Holly, Say, came back to life
Speaker 1: and looked at the envelope, she wouldn't necessarily know by
Speaker 1: looking that I had gotten into it. Said, this is
Speaker 1: one of those weird choices that a person makes that
Speaker 1: essentially doesn't make any sense, but it seems to make sense.
Speaker 1: And still I still feel like if I had to
Speaker 1: do it again, I would definitely do the same thing.
Speaker 1: I would not break that seal, and I haven't broken
Speaker 1: that seal, but sliced open the top of the envelope
Speaker 1: and got the three pages line paper from a notebook
Speaker 1: in which William had written everything that he was most
Speaker 1: ashamed of in his life. It was a list of
Speaker 1: things that he had done, but also things that had
Speaker 1: been done to him. And it was a key. It
Speaker 1: was a key to who had made him, maybe not entirely,
Speaker 1: but defined for me the moment that his life became intenable.
Speaker 1: When William was a boy, he had bright red hair
Speaker 1: his mother cut into a bowl cut. He was very,
Speaker 1: very skinny. He had white skin, really white, with freckles.
Speaker 1: He wore coke bottle glasses. He had terrible eye sight,
Speaker 1: and he was the kid that was really the punching bag, right,
Speaker 1: and his parents never came to his aide, apparently, you know,
Speaker 1: they never put a stop to it. They never helped him.
Speaker 1: And he could have been like that, you know, a
Speaker 1: helpless character who was brutalized. But he didn't stay that way.
Speaker 1: He got into the Scouts, got into the boy Scouts,
Speaker 1: and he found this is a place where he really
Speaker 1: excelled doing things on his own solo time, not you know,
Speaker 1: life saving techniques, how to get it around in the woods,
Speaker 1: how to build things. This was a world where he
Speaker 1: was gaining power, He was coming into another self, a
Speaker 1: bigger and better William than he was before. And then
Speaker 1: he is abused, sexually abused by his hero a counselor
Speaker 1: that they were on a camping trip with. And that's
Speaker 1: all William says about it. He doesn't go into detail
Speaker 1: about the before for the after. He just goes on
Speaker 1: to another humiliating moment in his life.
Speaker 2: And all of the other humiliations are basically your garden
Speaker 2: variety humiliations that everybody walks around with who's been on
Speaker 2: the planet for any length of time. The sense of
Speaker 2: private shame being that which you can't speak about because
Speaker 2: you're afraid of being shunned. But that really is, in
Speaker 2: fact no big deal as opposed to this piece of information,
Speaker 2: which is a whole different holoax.
Speaker 1: It's the only thing that is done to him in
Speaker 1: this list of shame, which is not really a very
Speaker 1: scary list, it is a very human list. But this
Speaker 1: one thing that was done to him is included with
Speaker 1: him stealing his grandfather's medals from World War two, you know,
Speaker 1: and having read the journals and having been writing about
Speaker 1: it for years. I realized that his path to this
Speaker 1: other William was destroyed, then that he was not going
Speaker 1: to become a full fledged William. There was no path
Speaker 1: that way.
Speaker 2: So did that go a long way for you to understand,
Speaker 2: you know, to the degree forensically that you can, you
Speaker 2: know after the fact, to understand more of what made
Speaker 2: William William.
Speaker 1: Yes, if everyone who had lost someone by suicide had
Speaker 1: the opportunity to do what I had been able to
Speaker 1: do reading his journals, families would feel differently about everything.
Speaker 1: Most people who do this, who die in this way,
Speaker 1: die mysteriously. Even people who leave notes, they leave more
Speaker 1: questions than answers behind. I had a thousand pages of
Speaker 1: journals to read and to understand William, and all of
Speaker 1: this anger that I had for him toward him, and
Speaker 1: for a time, this overwhelming hatred, all that diminished. And
Speaker 1: when you can really understand somebody, you can't not forget them.
Speaker 1: Understanding his life changed my life.
Speaker 2: And I would imagine since Holly had also clearly had
Speaker 2: read the List of Shame and never spoke about it
Speaker 2: from the time that she would have read that until
Speaker 2: the time that she died, that she must have also
Speaker 2: had some greater sense of what made William William.
Speaker 1: Yes, she did. I don't think that for her it
Speaker 1: was enough. Sometimes understanding it's not enough, and I think
Speaker 1: that forgiveness is possible, but her sense of being not
Speaker 1: just abandoned but culpable, she felt in some ways for
Speaker 1: the choice that he made, that she became too much
Speaker 1: for him. Perhaps that's really really hard to let go of.
Speaker 2: You talk about the nature of influence and the profound
Speaker 2: influence that this man, your brother in law, William, had
Speaker 2: in shaping your life, so much of your life now
Speaker 2: more than ten years since Holly's death and more than
Speaker 2: twenty years since William's Where does that sit with you?
Speaker 1: This book is kind of a mystery story, right. It's
Speaker 1: trying to figure out what happened with William, what led
Speaker 1: him to do what he did, And through the course
Speaker 1: of that, of my reading the journals and writing and
Speaker 1: talking to people, I try to come to an answer
Speaker 1: of a kind. But the other mystery is how all
Speaker 1: of us become who we are, and this me that
Speaker 1: I've become is its own mystery story. But through writing
Speaker 1: this book, Through writing this book, which initially was all
Speaker 1: about William, it really wasn't about much about me at all.
Speaker 1: In the early drafts, I was able to understand not
Speaker 1: just myself, but also what the nature of influence is,
Speaker 1: or what I think it is, and how in the
Speaker 1: same way that I didn't want to become William, I
Speaker 1: wanted to become like William. I wanted to become my
Speaker 1: version of William. I was able to take the bravery
Speaker 1: that he had in his own life, but not take
Speaker 1: it to a river. You know, I could do it
Speaker 1: on the page. I had the ability to not be
Speaker 1: overwhelmed and frightened by the idea of leaving behind something
Speaker 1: like my father's business, which would have been the logical
Speaker 1: choice for me to make, and it would have been,
Speaker 1: you know, financially the better choice. But we're all little
Speaker 1: Frankenstein monsters, you know, we're all made of different parts
Speaker 1: of different people. I am and for that, you know,
Speaker 1: I have so many people to think because it's not
Speaker 1: just one person to so many people to think. But
Speaker 1: William and to the degree that he is an influence
Speaker 1: in my life, I didn't really fully understand until I
Speaker 1: wrote about it.
Speaker 2: Here's Daniel reading one more passage from his probing revolutory memoir.
Speaker 1: Without William I wouldn't be who I am, but I
Speaker 1: am not him, which is a blessing. Without William, I
Speaker 1: would be something wholly different, possibly unrecognizable, a distant relative
Speaker 1: of myself, writing invoices instead of novels. And though I
Speaker 1: can't imagine what my life would be like if I
Speaker 1: weren't a writer, being one is in a way, not
Speaker 1: like living at all on a dark and stormy night.
Speaker 1: A writer arrives at a way station between experience and
Speaker 1: understanding and really never leaves it. But writing is better
Speaker 1: than living in one way. At least, there are an
Speaker 1: infinite number of opportunities to correct your worst mistakes.
Speaker 2: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zacour is
Speaker 2: the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
Speaker 2: If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
Speaker 2: please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
Speaker 2: on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
Speaker 2: eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
Speaker 2: find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd
Speaker 2: like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
Speaker 2: check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
Speaker 2: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 2: to your favorite shows.