Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: You might think that if you were a research subject,
Speaker 2: it would change your life, That being in a study
Speaker 2: would shape who you were, That because you are being observed,
Speaker 2: you would be compelled to become a better version of
Speaker 2: yourself then you might have otherwise. And all of that
Speaker 2: might be true. But at the same time, it might
Speaker 2: cause you to feel a great deal of internal pressure
Speaker 2: to be exceptional, to be more than who you were,
Speaker 2: to perform well inside the bell jar under which you
Speaker 2: were trapped. Or perhaps both of these things could be
Speaker 2: true simultaneously, an increased sense of your potential and the
Speaker 2: simmering terror that you might fail to fulfill it.
Speaker 3: That's Susannah Breslin, journalist and author of the memoir Data Baby,
Speaker 3: My life in a psychological experiment. Susanna's is a story
Speaker 3: about a childhood spent being studied, watched, in examined, and
Speaker 3: yet somehow not ever really seen. I'm Danny Shapiro, and
Speaker 3: this is family Secrets. The secrets that are kept from us,
Speaker 3: the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
Speaker 3: keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape of your childhood,
Speaker 3: the world that you were born into, and you know
Speaker 3: what kind of place that was.
Speaker 2: I was raised in Berkeley, California, in the late sixties
Speaker 2: and seventies. My parents were intellectuals. My father taught at
Speaker 2: the University of California, Berkeley. Both my parents were English professors,
Speaker 2: and so there were a lot of books in our house.
Speaker 2: There was a lot of encouragement of independent thinking, and
Speaker 2: there was also a sense at that time, I think
Speaker 2: that Berkeley was special, that the university was special, and
Speaker 2: that my two bright parents, who had found each other,
Speaker 2: were sort of special themselves and creating this special family,
Speaker 2: I think, is how they originally envisioned it. The house
Speaker 2: I grew up in was on a single block street
Speaker 2: in the lower tiers of the North Berkeley Hills. So
Speaker 2: it was stucco. Initially it was pink. Later my mother
Speaker 2: painted it orange, and it was kind of a funny house.
Speaker 2: It had a lot of French doors on the first floor,
Speaker 2: so it got a lot of light. It had a
Speaker 2: lot of sort of ornate wood carving, and then from
Speaker 2: my parents' bedroom upstairs, you got this expansive view of
Speaker 2: the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gay Bridge and
Speaker 2: the Bay Bridge, and we also had an enclosed porch
Speaker 2: on the second floor that we referred to as the study,
Speaker 2: which was where my father wrote his books, so he
Speaker 2: could often be found in there. He only ever learned
Speaker 2: you had a type with two fingers, so he would
Speaker 2: sit there and poke on the manual typewriter like a
Speaker 2: chicken pecking, and he would close the French doors that
Speaker 2: had these last panes on it. And so I would
Speaker 2: come in sometimes and see my father writing in the
Speaker 2: study and press my head against the glass, wishing I
Speaker 2: could be with him. I think when my parents met
Speaker 2: when they were getting their PhDs in Minnesota, there was
Speaker 2: very much a sense that they were equals, and that's
Speaker 2: part of why they liked each other. They were also
Speaker 2: both incredibly tall. My father was almost sixty four and
Speaker 2: my mother was five eleven, So I think they were
Speaker 2: they had these big brains, and they were these tall people,
Speaker 2: and I think they spelt well suited in that regard.
Speaker 2: And my father got an opportunity to teach English at
Speaker 2: UC Berkeley, so they came west. When my mother, once
Speaker 2: they were in Berkeley, accidentally got pregnant with my older sister.
Speaker 2: I think that the way she envisioned her life going
Speaker 2: and the way it actually went split into two different directions.
Speaker 2: Despite the fact that, you know, the feminist movement is
Speaker 2: in full gear at that time, and my mother was
Speaker 2: very much a feminist. The reality is she, you know,
Speaker 2: was also a mother to first my sister and then myself.
Speaker 2: I came along about three and a half years later,
Speaker 2: and it was consuming, and it meant that my father
Speaker 2: was able to pursue an intellectual and academic life the
Speaker 2: way that he dreamed. He was at this fantastic university.
Speaker 2: He was writing books, he was producing scholarly work and teaching,
Speaker 2: and my mother was changing diapers and dealing with screaming
Speaker 2: children and maintaining the house and shopping. I think she
Speaker 2: sed us on our budget at thirty five dollars a week,
Speaker 2: So her intellectual life suffered in support of his, which
Speaker 2: was in part more helpings were then, But I think
Speaker 2: she went along with it. But I think she was
Speaker 2: in a lot of ways bored by her domestic life
Speaker 2: and by her maternal life.
Speaker 3: When Susannah's four years old, while her sister attends a
Speaker 3: different school, she begins preschool at the Harold F. Jones
Speaker 3: Child Study Center located at UC Berkeley. This is a
Speaker 3: very special school, and it's thrilling to her parents that
Speaker 3: she's selected to attend.
Speaker 2: To me, it was just a preschool. It was an
Speaker 2: incredible complex, and I remember walking up this funny zigzagging
Speaker 2: ramp that takes you to this mess of concrete walkways.
Speaker 2: It was designed by this barrier architect named Joseph Esherich,
Speaker 2: and it had mid centry modern building. It had these
Speaker 2: soaring stealings and the south facing wall was these big
Speaker 2: glass doors that you could slide, so there was a
Speaker 2: lot of ability to do what they encouraged, which was
Speaker 2: self guided play, so you could play indoors, you could
Speaker 2: go outside, and it was just this bright and wonderful place.
Speaker 2: There was a lot of things to do. They understood that,
Speaker 2: you know, children could guide themselves and learn autonomously, so
Speaker 2: there was just a lot of freedom and I remember
Speaker 2: just being really happy there. What I didn't know at
Speaker 2: the time was that the preschool had been designed for
Speaker 2: studying children, So there was a hidden observation gallery tucked
Speaker 2: between these two bare classrooms, and researchers could go into
Speaker 2: this gallery undetected and observe the students through this mesh
Speaker 2: that had kind of an opaque screen over it. They
Speaker 2: could hear what we were saying, and they could see
Speaker 2: us playing, but we had no idea that they were there.
Speaker 2: So there was this long sort of expanse.
Speaker 4: On the east wall where unbeknownst to me, there were
Speaker 4: researchers who were studying me and the other children who
Speaker 4: were in the same studies.
Speaker 2: So there's a long history at the university of the
Speaker 2: children of the university's faculty and staff being studied by
Speaker 2: researchers and graduate students. Initially, this was done at this
Speaker 2: big house on one side of the campus, and so
Speaker 2: preschoolers would be studied by, say a professor who was
Speaker 2: studying early childhood development. He could go into this little
Speaker 2: shed and study the children playing in the yard. The
Speaker 2: same way another researcher in another building was studying rats
Speaker 2: in amaze. So the studying of children at the university
Speaker 2: dates back to the late twenties. Over time, you know,
Speaker 2: they sort of professionalized it, and the idea was, let's
Speaker 2: create this preschool dedicated to this that serves both our
Speaker 2: faculty and staff who need you know, convenient quality childcare
Speaker 2: that was you know, affordable, and that also supplies us
Speaker 2: with a sort of endless stream of children who researchers
Speaker 2: can actually come in and study them. So there's been
Speaker 2: many studies, and many researchers have studied various groups of
Speaker 2: children at the university. And it just so happened that
Speaker 2: by the time I showed up, they had created this
Speaker 2: beautiful preschool that had been outfitted just for studying kids.
Speaker 2: We would I also remember being taken out of the
Speaker 2: classroom periodically. An adult would guide me across the concrete
Speaker 2: walkway and we would go into what they called a
Speaker 2: game room. At the time, I thought we were just
Speaker 2: playing games in a room.
Speaker 3: Susanna's parents have signed the dotted Line, which permits her
Speaker 3: to be available as a research subject at ages three, four, five, seven, eleven,
Speaker 3: and into adulthood. When Susannah is four, this place is magical.
Speaker 3: It's just playing games in a room. But at around
Speaker 3: age six, there's a home visit, which seems a little
Speaker 3: odd to Susannah, but as many children do, she accepts
Speaker 3: the reality of the world with which she's presented a
Speaker 3: quote from the wonderful film The Truman Show, which is
Speaker 3: also the epigraph in Susanna's memoir. The next year, however,
Speaker 3: her acceptance of this reality begins to shift. She starts
Speaker 3: to into it that there's something more going on here.
Speaker 3: There's something she's sensing but not quite seeing.
Speaker 2: So when I was maybe seven years old, I was
Speaker 2: in one of the experiment rooms at Tolbenhall and sitting
Speaker 2: across from a table from a man who was asking
Speaker 2: me questions. I think one of the other researchers had
Speaker 2: picked me up from school and brought me there. It
Speaker 2: was right afternoon, and he was talking to me about myself.
Speaker 2: I just knew that this was a place that I
Speaker 2: was occasionally brought to. These people were very interested in me,
Speaker 2: and I think I didn't fully understand why. At a
Speaker 2: certain point, she said, do you want some candy? And
Speaker 2: there was a bowl of Eminem's between us on the table,
Speaker 2: and I in fact was starving because it was, you know,
Speaker 2: some hours after school. But I hesitated in my response
Speaker 2: to him. I sensed at the time that maybe this
Speaker 2: was some sort of a test. I said I didn't
Speaker 2: want any candy, even though I was hungry, because I
Speaker 2: think I wanted him to think I was like a
Speaker 2: big girl. I wasn't like a little kid, you know,
Speaker 2: who is candy? So I declined, He you know, went
Speaker 2: back to asking me these other questions, and then a
Speaker 2: few minutes later said, oh, I have to go take
Speaker 2: care of something. Do you mind waiting here while I
Speaker 2: go do that? So he left the room as soon
Speaker 2: as the door closed behind him. I leapt out of
Speaker 2: my chair and sort of dove across the table for
Speaker 2: the candy, and inadvertently knocked the bowl over in the process, which,
Speaker 2: to my horror, sent Eminem's bouncing across the tabletop. Not
Speaker 2: wanting to be caught making a mess, I grabbed candy
Speaker 2: and stucked it into my mouth. Then suddenly I froze
Speaker 2: and I could steel my cheeks getting hot, and I
Speaker 2: looked into this mirror on the opposite wall, and I
Speaker 2: could see my cheeks were pink, and I just had
Speaker 2: this scent that there was somebody on the other side
Speaker 2: of the mirror who was watching me. And I think
Speaker 2: that was the moment where I sort of started to
Speaker 2: understand there's more layers to this than I thought.
Speaker 3: That's amazing. I mean, the idea that there would be
Speaker 3: somebody on the other side of the mirror must have
Speaker 3: been building somewhere, you know, in your very bright little
Speaker 3: mind to then have that thought, because why would that
Speaker 3: enter the mind of a seven year old child, there's
Speaker 3: somebody watching me. It's just really interesting that, in terms
Speaker 3: of that feeling that you had that's so so powerful,
Speaker 3: that you saw your face, you saw your red cheeks,
Speaker 3: you flushed because you were mortified and embarrassed. But you
Speaker 3: were mortified, and we don't get mortified and embarrassed when
Speaker 3: we're alone in a room.
Speaker 2: That's right. I don't know what figured me two sense
Speaker 2: that somebody was on the other side of the mirror.
Speaker 2: I was very sensitive. I was very aware of the
Speaker 2: beneath of the adults around me, sort of as a child,
Speaker 2: and so I don't know if it was just some
Speaker 2: sort of intuitive sense, or if as happened, sometimes the
Speaker 2: person on the other side of the mirror cocked or sneezed,
Speaker 2: or you know, the one way mirror malfunctioned a little,
Speaker 2: and I actually, you know, could see some kind of
Speaker 2: a shadow. There are these sort of profound scenes in
Speaker 2: which all I have is the point of view of
Speaker 2: the seven year old, and I wish I knew more,
Speaker 2: but I am limited to what she knew.
Speaker 3: We'll be right back when Susanna's mother first drops her
Speaker 3: off as a four year old at the child's study center,
Speaker 3: she says something she repeats often over the course of
Speaker 3: their lives together. I don't want to be a mother anymore.
Speaker 3: This is, of course, a stunning thing to say and
Speaker 3: a stunning thing to hear. It's also impossible, whether one
Speaker 3: wants to be a parent anymore or not. Once one
Speaker 3: has a child, they're a parent no matter what happens.
Speaker 3: So Susanna's childhood is marked by two extremes, being raised
Speaker 3: by a mother who doesn't want to be a mother,
Speaker 3: and being observed and studied in a secret, special club
Speaker 3: for special care.
Speaker 2: It's the home life that I had was very austere.
Speaker 2: My parents were not warm, they were not touchy feely,
Speaker 2: They were often sort of avoidant of emotional expression. I
Speaker 2: was a creative, sensitive, emotional child who I think wanted
Speaker 2: to have physical affection and a warm family environment. But
Speaker 2: that's not what I got. So I spent a lot
Speaker 2: of time in my room by myself, engaged in imaginative play,
Speaker 2: you know, playing with my dollhouse, playing with my stuffed animals,
Speaker 2: and making up stories. My mother at a certain point
Speaker 2: started verbalizing that she didn't want to be a mother anymore,
Speaker 2: but I think long before that I sent that of her.
Speaker 2: I think when she said out loud, I don't want
Speaker 2: to be a mother anymore, what she was really saying
Speaker 2: was I don't want to be this person anymore. I
Speaker 2: don't want to be in this situation anymore. And I
Speaker 2: think in her mind that's reasonable. Her life had not
Speaker 2: gone the way she had wanted, and why couldn't she
Speaker 2: want things to be another way? She wasn't the type
Speaker 2: of person who was going to sit there and think
Speaker 2: by saying I don't want to be a mother anymore,
Speaker 2: how is my child going to hear that? Because the
Speaker 2: child is going to hear my mother wishes I didn't exist.
Speaker 2: And that was in a way I tried to conform
Speaker 2: to that. Okay, I'll make myself invisible, I'll make myself scarce,
Speaker 2: but it was impossible for me to make myself completely invisible.
Speaker 3: When Susanna's around eleven, her parents divorce. Naturally, this big
Speaker 3: life event becomes part of the study. Susannah's called in
Speaker 3: for meetings with researchers who perform a Rorschach test to
Speaker 3: try to understand how she's feeling about this new development
Speaker 3: in her family dynamic and if they could understand that,
Speaker 3: then maybe they could understand larger parts of Susanna's psychology
Speaker 3: and personality as a whole.
Speaker 2: When Jack and Jean Block conceived of the study in
Speaker 2: the late sixties, there was this paradigm crisis in personality
Speaker 2: psychology and there were these questions around whether or not
Speaker 2: personality traits were real. Did people have these traits that
Speaker 2: shaped their behavior or was people's behavior largely informed by
Speaker 2: the situation in which they found themselves. The Blocks believed
Speaker 2: that personalities shaped human behavior and remained relatively over the
Speaker 2: course of one's life. But that was a theory, and
Speaker 2: the only way to prove it is to study a
Speaker 2: cohort of children from childhood into adulthood. This is a
Speaker 2: herculean task, right, This is a thirty year project. It's
Speaker 2: a longitudinal study, by which its nature is that it's
Speaker 2: prone to failure. It's costly, you know, can you even
Speaker 2: make it to the finish line? And what have you
Speaker 2: found when you get there? And so that was the
Speaker 2: intention was to have this group of kids, of which
Speaker 2: I was wanted to demonstrate that when you study the
Speaker 2: personality traits of a preschooler, you will actually have a
Speaker 2: strong sense of who that child is going to be
Speaker 2: as an adult when you come back to them twenty
Speaker 2: years later, you'll see those same personality traits over the
Speaker 2: course of my growing up life. I was, in many ways,
Speaker 2: is an ideal labrat for their experiment. They were also
Speaker 2: interested in depression. So a teenager becomes depressed, can you
Speaker 2: if you look back at them in preschool, can you
Speaker 2: actually see signs of that depression coming? And it turns
Speaker 2: out the answer was yes. When they were studying us
Speaker 2: and our parents were getting divorced in like the late
Speaker 2: seventies and early eighties, this is coinciding with this big
Speaker 2: divorce boom. The study has already been you know, following
Speaker 2: us for over a decade, so it really, for the
Speaker 2: first time, gave them as researchers, a front row seat
Speaker 2: to how does divorce actually affect a child? Is it,
Speaker 2: you know, is a divorce fundamentally problematic to a child?
Speaker 2: Or is it the ways in which the parents navigate
Speaker 2: the force and their own independent relationships with the children
Speaker 2: and actually shape how the child responds to it. And
Speaker 2: another thing that they were interested in that was a
Speaker 2: fit for me when I became an adolescent was they
Speaker 2: were also interested in adolescent drug use and what the
Speaker 2: relationship was between our you know, experimenting with drugs and
Speaker 2: our mental well being. So there were a lot of ways.
Speaker 5: In which, you know, my parents divorced, my own struggles
Speaker 5: with depression, and then the you know, experimenting with drugs
Speaker 5: and sex, sort of out of control behavior as a teenager.
Speaker 2: It's not great for me, but for a research and
Speaker 2: there was like kids the gold mine. I really struggled
Speaker 2: a lot as a teen Once my parents got divorced,
Speaker 2: I think my world kind of imploded. My father started
Speaker 2: a new family, and my mother became terribly depressed and
Speaker 2: really didn't emerge from that depression about a decade. So
Speaker 2: I felt very much on my own.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: I would go as like a fifteen year old up
Speaker 2: to UC Berkeley sprat Row and allow myself to be
Speaker 2: led off into dark rooms by frat boys who had
Speaker 2: no idea how old I was, and I was running
Speaker 2: away from home and really got myself in quite a
Speaker 2: bit of trouble. I think that there was this kind
Speaker 2: of sea sawing or push pull because periodically I would
Speaker 2: be called by the Block study to be a set
Speaker 2: where they would occasionally send us birthday cards, or you
Speaker 2: would just get a call from them, or your parents
Speaker 2: would get a call from them, and they were just
Speaker 2: checking in to see if you're still living in the
Speaker 2: same place. They were checking their contact information. So the study,
Speaker 2: you know, was periodically a part of my life, but
Speaker 2: it was always sort of in my head. You know,
Speaker 2: I have these sort of absent minded professor parents, but
Speaker 2: I also have this kind of third parent, which was
Speaker 2: the study that I knew was following my life and
Speaker 2: had been for over a decade at that point, that
Speaker 2: was interested in who I was, that was keeping track
Speaker 2: of who I was, and that gave me a sense
Speaker 2: of myself as special. I am part of something bigger
Speaker 2: than myself. At that time, you know, I sort of
Speaker 2: know that I'm in a study. There's these other kids
Speaker 2: in the study. I don't know who they are, but
Speaker 2: we're all part of this research that's somehow going to
Speaker 2: you know, benefit humanity in terms of understanding how people
Speaker 2: become who they are, and that was meaningful to.
Speaker 3: Me years past. And the study continues. Susanna navigates adolescence
Speaker 3: under the watch of what feels like three very complicated parents, Mom, dad,
Speaker 3: and the study. But sometimes it seems like the study
Speaker 3: is the only one really watching where her parents, especially
Speaker 3: her mother, are less involved in her life. Her teenage
Speaker 3: years are fraught and reckless, but during college she develops
Speaker 3: an interest in writing. This bullies her and connects her
Speaker 3: to her parents in a way intellectuals that they are
Speaker 3: perhaps pursuing a career in writing and journalism is a
Speaker 3: way to get her parents approval or at the very least,
Speaker 3: their attention. In nineteen ninety six, Susanna's father suddenly dies.
Speaker 3: Susannah is twenty seven, embarking on her life as a writer.
Speaker 3: When this asteroid hits, she seeks a distraction, a vocation,
Speaker 3: something besides grief to fill her up.
Speaker 2: When my father died, I was really devastated. We have
Speaker 2: had a complicated relationship, but I felt like I knew
Speaker 2: my father at least liked me, which was not really
Speaker 2: the sense that I got from my mother. So when
Speaker 2: my father died suddenly of a heart attack, it just
Speaker 2: exploded my brain and I struggled a lot mentally. I
Speaker 2: had anxiety attacks, and at the same time, I think
Speaker 2: I had felt intimidated by the fact that my father
Speaker 2: was an English professor and a writer of books. And
Speaker 2: when he died it kind of opened up place for
Speaker 2: me to step into my own as a writer, having
Speaker 2: just graduated from a writing program where I'd gotten a
Speaker 2: master's and you know, I was looking for something to
Speaker 2: write about that was interesting and that it also on
Speaker 2: an emotional level, would allow me to escape from the
Speaker 2: unhappiness I felt in the wake of my father's death.
Speaker 2: I didn't want to think about hand lying dead on
Speaker 2: the floor. I wanted to think about anything but that.
Speaker 2: And within about a year of him dying, I ended
Speaker 2: up going to San Francisco with a girlfriend and we
Speaker 2: went into a strip club on Broadway, and it was
Speaker 2: totally fascinating to me to see this group of men
Speaker 2: that focused on this woman dancing on the stage. It
Speaker 2: was very voyeuristic, and it was all about people who
Speaker 2: were seeing and people were being seen. And I think
Speaker 2: there's a way in which that resonated for me as
Speaker 2: somebody who grew up being studied, being looked at. I was,
Speaker 2: you know, the child and the teenager and the young
Speaker 2: adult who people were looking at and considering. I was
Speaker 2: always the thing, the subject. I wasn't the one asking
Speaker 2: the questions, I was the one answering them. And when
Speaker 2: I found this sort of subterraine in sex world, in
Speaker 2: all its complexity, that I could write about and go
Speaker 2: through and be distracted from all the bad things in life.
Speaker 2: It was just a kind of revelation. And I was
Speaker 2: the one who was doing the looking, and I was
Speaker 2: the one who was asking the questions. So it was
Speaker 2: a way for me to sort of invert that paradigm
Speaker 2: from a passive position into an active position.
Speaker 3: This world becomes Susanna's beat as a journalist. One night,
Speaker 3: she goes to see the porn star Jenna Jamison dance
Speaker 3: at the Legendary of Pharaoh Theater in the Bay Area.
Speaker 3: Jenna's publicist invites Susanna to come visit one of the
Speaker 3: porn movie sets if she ever finds herself in La.
Speaker 3: Susanna does just that and falls in love with La.
Speaker 3: She stays for several years and becomes fascinated by the
Speaker 3: porn world. She dedicates herself to the porn beat, writes
Speaker 3: hundreds of compelling pieces about sex and the adult movie industry.
Speaker 2: The author Martin Amos once referred to the porn industry
Speaker 2: as a rough trade, and I think it is. It's
Speaker 2: a complicated place, but it's it's like there's a difference
Speaker 2: between having a chicken on your plate and going to
Speaker 2: the slaughterhouse where they kill the chickens. And I think
Speaker 2: seeing how porn got made and sort of what that
Speaker 2: did to people was a lot for me to look at.
Speaker 2: You know, Intellectually, it was fascinating, but it was sort
Speaker 2: of a rough place to be, and I think it
Speaker 2: became something that I kind of got burned out on.
Speaker 2: It made me feel negative about, you know, what people's
Speaker 2: human interests are when you kind of remove the constraint
Speaker 2: of polite society and see what people do when there's
Speaker 2: no rules at all, which is how the porn industry
Speaker 2: can feel at times. You see people do bad things
Speaker 2: to other people. So I think that took a toll
Speaker 2: on me. As we got older, I had less of
Speaker 2: a connection to the study. When we were thirty two,
Speaker 2: they wanted to do the final assessments of us, but
Speaker 2: they couldn't afford to, you know, bring us all back
Speaker 2: to Berkeley to be assessed in person, so they sent
Speaker 2: us these huge questionnaires for us to fill out that
Speaker 2: echoed a lot of what they had been asking us
Speaker 2: over the years, and so I dutifully filled mine out,
Speaker 2: and I think I sort of felt like, you know,
Speaker 2: I hope they think I turned out okay, they don't
Speaker 2: think I'm too too far out to the left. The
Speaker 2: study had been a part of my life for thirty years,
Speaker 2: which lives longer than my relationship with my father, right
Speaker 2: and father died when I was twenty seven, but it's
Speaker 2: not until I'm thirty two that the study ends, So
Speaker 2: the sense that that was coming to an end, I
Speaker 2: think it is bittersweet for me.
Speaker 3: Eventually, Susannah burns out on covering the porn industry in LA.
Speaker 3: She moves to New Orleans. Then two years later, Hurricane
Speaker 3: Katrina decimates the city. Of course, this catastrophe is all
Speaker 3: over the news. Susanna's mom knows she's living in New Orleans,
Speaker 3: and even though they're not close, even though her mom
Speaker 3: doesn't want to be a mother, still Susannah is stung
Speaker 3: that her mother doesn't call it a check and make
Speaker 3: sure she's okay. For Susannah, this is a breaking point,
Speaker 3: the ruin all around her and the ruin of a
Speaker 3: relationship with her mom.
Speaker 2: It became clear about forty eight hours before that Hurricane
Speaker 2: Katrina was just going to be unlike anything that had
Speaker 2: come before it, and I was able to get out
Speaker 2: of the city in time. I think the first bands
Speaker 2: were hitting as we were still trying to get away
Speaker 2: from the city, and it was harrowing to think about
Speaker 2: what would have happened if I had remained in New
Speaker 2: Orleans and I fled to Baton Rouge with a bunch
Speaker 2: of other refugees I didn't know. And during that time period,
Speaker 2: my mother never called to see if I was alive,
Speaker 2: and eventually I connected with my sister who said my
Speaker 2: mother had not called her either to see if I
Speaker 2: was alive. At this point, the city has flooded. It
Speaker 2: is on every you know channel on TV. It's hard
Speaker 2: to mince and I just could not. I was livid
Speaker 2: and could not understand how she could leave me for dead.
Speaker 5: Ye.
Speaker 2: At the same time, this is not out of character, right,
Speaker 2: I don't want to be a mother anymore. Is this
Speaker 2: sort of passive aggressive way of her saying I wish
Speaker 2: you didn't exist and yours?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 2: It seemed like she wished that I would just disappear,
Speaker 2: like the hurricane would just consume me, and she would
Speaker 2: be released from motherhood at least in part and I
Speaker 2: just essentially cut off contact with her. At that point,
Speaker 2: it seemed like maintaining a relationship with Hurricane at an
Speaker 2: incredibly high cost, and the cost was all mine to pay.
Speaker 2: It was extremely difficult for me to go no contact
Speaker 2: with her. My belief about what happened is that I
Speaker 2: actually paved my mother exactly what she wanted when I
Speaker 2: went no contact with her, and that it was actually
Speaker 2: still complying with what she wanted. So I don't know
Speaker 2: that it made things easier for her, but it may have.
Speaker 3: Will be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 3: Susannah leaves New Orleans and moves to Chicago. She's in
Speaker 3: her thirties. She doesn't have much of a family, she's
Speaker 3: estranged from her mother, doesn't really have a relationship with
Speaker 3: her sister, and isn't in a romantic relationship either. So
Speaker 3: she goes on a dating app without particularly high hopes.
Speaker 2: I went out on a date with a guy who
Speaker 2: I thought seemed moderately interesting. I couldn't discern whether or
Speaker 2: not he was interested in me, and kind of wrote
Speaker 2: it off as possibly a one off. He asked me
Speaker 2: out again A few days later. I went out again.
Speaker 2: We spent that day together going around Chicago, and spent
Speaker 2: the night with him, then spent the weekend with him,
Speaker 2: and I think fell in love with him very quickly.
Speaker 2: And so when he asked me nine days after our
Speaker 2: first date if I wanted to go to Las Vegas
Speaker 2: that weekend and get married, I thought, why not. I'm
Speaker 2: not getting any younger, and I didn't have kids and
Speaker 2: with their derby, and so Offrey went and got married
Speaker 2: in the same chapel on the south end of the
Speaker 2: Vegas Strip where Angelina had married Billy Bob Thornton. I
Speaker 2: believe with the vile of the blood around her neck, right,
Speaker 2: I remember that. You know, I was forty three by
Speaker 2: the time. And part of the reason for that was
Speaker 2: that my mother had said as far back as I
Speaker 2: can remember, probably starting around after my father left, she
Speaker 2: would say, never get married, you like Gloria's Dina. Never
Speaker 2: get married. She stopped saying that when Gloria's dne and
Speaker 2: got married, but her idea was, you know, men just
Speaker 2: sort of kill your life. They want you to take
Speaker 2: care of them, but they don't want to take care
Speaker 2: of you. And I sort of followed that missive for
Speaker 2: a long time, and then got married very quickly. I
Speaker 2: was diagnosed with breast cancer four days after I got married.
Speaker 2: It was very early stage, but it was a type
Speaker 2: of breast cancer that was more rare and more aggressive,
Speaker 2: and the type of cancer troubled the various doctors that
Speaker 2: I spoke to. So things went very quickly from being Oh,
Speaker 2: my god, I've met the love of my life and
Speaker 2: I'm married. Look at the ring on my finger, to uh,
Speaker 2: you know, am I going to have to have bulk
Speaker 2: my breast removed? Am I going to survive this? Do
Speaker 2: I have to do temo? Then I'll be bald? This
Speaker 2: is like a nightmare. Once I am told I have
Speaker 2: this raar and aggressive type of breast cancer, it becomes
Speaker 2: clear to being very quickly that I am of great
Speaker 2: interest to the oncologists who I'm coming into contact with.
Speaker 2: I assume that they spend their day is just dealing
Speaker 2: with boring, garden variety breast cancers. So when somebody shows
Speaker 2: up with some unique kind then you're of interest to them.
Speaker 2: They have, you know, their own research that they're doing
Speaker 2: and maybe you fit into that. So I was, you know,
Speaker 2: in this private room getting my chemo dose pumped into me,
Speaker 2: high on benz Adreen or whatever I was on, and
Speaker 2: an oncologist who wasn't my own collegist knocked on the door.
Speaker 2: He says, hey, I've got my interns today. Can we
Speaker 2: come in and I'm going to present your pace to them.
Speaker 2: So everyone files in, you know, in their little white
Speaker 2: jackets and staring at me, and they're in this half
Speaker 2: circle and he starts going over my case. They're asking
Speaker 2: me questions about, you know, my diagnosis and sort of
Speaker 2: remarking to each other about it. And I think that
Speaker 2: that very much resonated with me. This is not weird.
Speaker 2: This is totally familiar to me. This is exactly like
Speaker 2: when I was being studied, when I list in those
Speaker 2: experiment rooms of a kid in Tolman Hall. I am
Speaker 2: now a human lab rat for the second time in
Speaker 2: my life. Who would have thunk?
Speaker 3: And that really seems like it brought the study back
Speaker 3: to you in this way. It had, as you said,
Speaker 3: it had receded into the background, because after age thirty two,
Speaker 3: you had graduated out of the study. You know, that
Speaker 3: third parent was also gone, and yet now it felt
Speaker 3: like it had come back with some real questions for you. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, if you studied a kid, could you predict
Speaker 3: who that kid would grow up to be? Were the
Speaker 3: clues to who you became, or at least who you
Speaker 3: had become at that juncture in your life in your
Speaker 3: early forties? Was that always there? Could that have been predicted?
Speaker 2: I think until I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I'd
Speaker 2: had a pretty charmed life. Help wise, I had had
Speaker 2: not a single other major health issue in my life
Speaker 2: other than kidney stones. I'd never even broken a bone.
Speaker 2: So colliding in this very extreme way with something that
Speaker 2: you know was causing all these doctors concerned, was you know,
Speaker 2: making me sergeants open up my body and remove parts
Speaker 2: of myself? Was this head on collision with facing my
Speaker 2: own mortality and conjured up all those questions people have
Speaker 2: when they find themselves in those situations, which is who
Speaker 2: am I? What have I done? Is this who I
Speaker 2: was supposed to be? You know, I'm this bald, incapacitated
Speaker 2: person who is unclear if I'm going to make it
Speaker 2: through the next couple of years. You know, based on
Speaker 2: a mathematical equation that my oncologist keeps running through his brain.
Speaker 2: And I really forced me to take a look at
Speaker 2: who I was and how I had gotten there, and
Speaker 2: if I made it through this, what was I going
Speaker 2: to do with that opportunity, because obviously I wanted to
Speaker 2: make it through it. It wasn't really until we subsequently
Speaker 2: moved to Florida so my then husband could pursue work
Speaker 2: opportunity that these questions became even more cute and immediate.
Speaker 2: I was told I was cancer free, and I was
Speaker 2: happy to be that way. But I was living in
Speaker 2: a you know, plan development in southwest Florida, you know,
Speaker 2: behind a gate and a housemaid of cinder blocks, what
Speaker 2: is not working a lot. My husband was the breadwinner,
Speaker 2: and there was this view beyond our backyard pool of
Speaker 2: this man made lake that would periodically shoot a stream
Speaker 2: of water into the air. And it was so far
Speaker 2: flong from how I thought I would end up. You know,
Speaker 2: I had grown up in Berkeley, you know, the child
Speaker 2: of academics, and I was in the study that made
Speaker 2: me feel like, ah, you know that, like my life
Speaker 2: is sort of unique, special, this is promising. And then
Speaker 2: I'm just in Florida playing a supporting role in what
Speaker 2: feels like the story of someone else's life, story of
Speaker 2: the person I was married to and then I'm really
Speaker 2: started to think about the study and think it must
Speaker 2: have kept a file on me. There must be a
Speaker 2: file in some cabinet at UC Berkeley that had all
Speaker 2: this data about me. Did they foresee who I would become?
Speaker 2: Is there are there answers to the questions that I
Speaker 2: have that are locked in the study. I'm a journalist.
Speaker 2: I can find what they knew about me. Can that
Speaker 2: shed some light on how I understand myself? Yeah?
Speaker 3: That was such an extraordinary part of your story is
Speaker 3: that you have the skills, you know, you have a
Speaker 3: long career as a journalist that enables you to do
Speaker 3: essentially the detective work that you need to do.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So when I was in Florida, I sort of
Speaker 2: start to investigate the study and figure out what the
Speaker 2: story is behind the study. And by searching the block
Speaker 2: study online, I uncovered that there's an archive at Harvard
Speaker 2: that has some of the data from our study, and
Speaker 2: I'm able to access this data online. It was padlocked,
Speaker 2: but I was given permission to access the data. And
Speaker 2: it's really by digging around in the data that I'm
Speaker 2: able to sort of triangulate various sort of data points
Speaker 2: about myself to identify my sort of number in the study,
Speaker 2: or my code name in the study. To protect our anonymity,
Speaker 2: the study had given each one of the participants three
Speaker 2: digit number, and I was able to figure out that
Speaker 2: I was seven fifty eight, which was a really strange experience.
Speaker 2: I come to this thinking, yeah, study, you know, I'm
Speaker 2: very special to them. They're very special to me. They're
Speaker 2: kind of like this third parent. This is this meaningful
Speaker 2: part of how I understand myself, and in many ways
Speaker 2: I shaped the story of my life. But I'm actually
Speaker 2: just a number. Perhaps I was not special at all.
Speaker 2: I was actually just a data point, because that's what
Speaker 2: that looks like here. And that became part of a
Speaker 2: different way of understanding myself and relationship to the study,
Speaker 2: which was, you know, sort of like the researcher's point
Speaker 2: of view, where this is not so much a child,
Speaker 2: but a bucket of data from which I, the scientist,
Speaker 2: will extract the information that I need. And it did
Speaker 2: cause me to rethink some of my experiences in the study.
Speaker 2: For example, when I was an adolescent, I was telling
Speaker 2: my researchers things that my parents didn't know, like drugs,
Speaker 2: you know that I was experimenting with and people that
Speaker 2: I was having sex with, and the study knew those things,
Speaker 2: and I knew that, and there had been no intercession
Speaker 2: by them. Now, that wasn't their job, right. They were
Speaker 2: there to observe my life, not step in and change it.
Speaker 2: But it did make me feel more like the relationship
Speaker 2: with the study had been fundamentally transactional, and that I
Speaker 2: had offered up my data on a plate to an
Speaker 2: entity that had consumed it and used it for its
Speaker 2: own purposes which were not necessarily aligned. In twenty fifteen,
Speaker 2: I thought, you know, I've got to go to California
Speaker 2: and go back to the place where the study started,
Speaker 2: the place where my life started, and start seeing what
Speaker 2: I can find there. The first thing I did after
Speaker 2: I left the airport was I drove past the hospital
Speaker 2: in Oakland where I was born, and then from there
Speaker 2: I drove to Berkeley, where I went to the Child
Speaker 2: Study Center and stood in front of it, and a
Speaker 2: guy walked out of the building and was walking towards me,
Speaker 2: and I called out to him and said, are you
Speaker 2: a teacher here? And he was walking down the ram
Speaker 2: in front of me at that point like didn't look
Speaker 2: at me and shook his head, and then he sort
Speaker 2: of gave me a wide berth on the sidewalk and
Speaker 2: was starting to walk away towards campus, and I called
Speaker 2: after him, are you a researcher? And he stopped and
Speaker 2: he turned around halfway towards me, and I said I
Speaker 2: was one of the kids who had studied here, and
Speaker 2: he looks at me and then he says, yeah, a
Speaker 2: lot of you come around here. And I thought, it's
Speaker 2: like we're these little ghostly specters, like hovering around this
Speaker 2: place where you know, something happened to us that we
Speaker 2: don't fully understand. So I knew that I had a story,
Speaker 2: and I knew that there were other people who had
Speaker 2: shared in that experience, and that there was a way
Speaker 2: this sense of like you're just the subject. It was
Speaker 2: almost like being told that again, like we're the researchers.
Speaker 2: You don't you don't really get to access what we're doing,
Speaker 2: but we get to access everything that's going on in
Speaker 2: your brain.
Speaker 3: During this same trip, Susannah also arranges to see her
Speaker 3: mother for the first time in a decade, but this
Speaker 3: isn't a visit to reconnect. It's a formal interview. There's
Speaker 3: a tape recorder in between the two of them. When
Speaker 3: Susanna asks her mother why she'd put her in the study,
Speaker 3: her mother replies, well, I just wanted more time for myself.
Speaker 3: She said, she wanted to finish her pH d. She
Speaker 3: wanted to read books, she wanted to be doing something
Speaker 3: other than parenting.
Speaker 2: So I think that this study in a way for
Speaker 2: her was a kind of babysitter. And so it also
Speaker 2: sort of made sense that it sort of had this
Speaker 2: parental element in my life. It was pop to look
Speaker 2: back at my life and see how much of the
Speaker 2: influence came from people who are all all brains and
Speaker 2: low in heart, you know. And it was kind of like,
Speaker 2: I'm the person you get when you allow a human
Speaker 2: child to be raised by robots, you know, get this
Speaker 2: sort of hyper intellectual thing that like find meaning in
Speaker 2: life by being studied by researchers. It's a just weird.
Speaker 3: It strikes it strikes me that they didn't exercise the
Speaker 3: heart out of you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, my whole life. I thought it was my father's
Speaker 2: idea that i'd be put into the study, that he
Speaker 2: thought I was special, that his putting me in the
Speaker 2: study was sort of evidence of that. And I don't
Speaker 2: know that that's not true, because when I showed up
Speaker 2: and said to my mother, now, whose idea was it
Speaker 2: to put me in the study? And she says, oh,
Speaker 2: it was mine. I don't know if that's true. It's
Speaker 2: very in line with like my mother would seek to
Speaker 2: co opt any narrative she encountered that centered herself. So
Speaker 2: obviously at that point my father was dead, I couldn't
Speaker 2: ask him. It's still a bit of a mystery as
Speaker 2: to whose idea it was, or or maybe it was
Speaker 2: both of theirs. Don't really know.
Speaker 3: Was that the last time you saw your mother?
Speaker 5: It was.
Speaker 2: My mother, by and large, was an unhappy person the
Speaker 2: last time I saw her. She seemed unhappy. At that time,
Speaker 2: I was unhappily married, and I certainly saw from stunding
Speaker 2: time with my mother that if I didn't do something,
Speaker 2: I was going to end up like her, unhappy forever.
Speaker 2: And I did not want to spend any more time
Speaker 2: living any more of my life being unhappy, especially since
Speaker 2: I had had breast cancer and the future was uncertain.
Speaker 2: It felt like, you know, time was imperative. You know,
Speaker 2: this unspooled over a much longer period of time. But
Speaker 2: I think just a sense that things must be better
Speaker 2: than this situation that I found myself in. I was
Speaker 2: able to sort of with that belief project myself out
Speaker 2: of the marriage and back to California, the place where
Speaker 2: everything had started. So after my marriage, I moved back
Speaker 2: to Los Angeles, which I like because it's warm. And
Speaker 2: then I heard about this program, the Investigative Reporting Program
Speaker 2: at UC Berkeley, where you could work for them, be
Speaker 2: on campus for a year as an academic fellow while
Speaker 2: pursuing your investigative project. And I thought, God, that just
Speaker 2: sounds perfect for what I want to do. I would
Speaker 2: be on campus, I would have access to things I
Speaker 2: wouldn't have other wine, and this is just like going
Speaker 2: back to the epicenter at the original earthquake. I want
Speaker 2: to get this. At the same time, I didn't, and
Speaker 2: frankly still don't view myself as a serious investigative journalist,
Speaker 2: you know. Interest think of that as like a guy
Speaker 2: in a fedora for some reason. And so I didn't
Speaker 2: think I was going to get it, but did, and
Speaker 2: it just felt like something I had to pursue. And
Speaker 2: so I moved back to Berkeley to research this study
Speaker 2: in Berkeley for a year and moved into a in
Speaker 2: law apartment of a house that was, you know, less
Speaker 2: than a mile from the house in which I grew up.
Speaker 2: I'm a big believer in like immersion journalism, so being
Speaker 2: able to embed myself into, you know, the place where
Speaker 2: the book took place was important to me. I like
Speaker 2: to kind of live the story.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, you're like living the story of the story
Speaker 3: that you had lived. There's so many layers to it.
Speaker 3: And it also seems that getting the fellowship finally gives
Speaker 3: you the permission really to actually do the research.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So when I moved back to Berkeley, I was
Speaker 2: given part of a shared cubicle to work at, you know,
Speaker 2: and I set up my computer and I'm you know,
Speaker 2: I'm around all these people, you know, a Pulitzer, they
Speaker 2: write for important newspaper. There's all these important work being
Speaker 2: found here. And I sort of sat down to sort
Speaker 2: of work on this project writing it, and was as
Speaker 2: steinied there as I had ever been before. But what
Speaker 2: being there allowed me to do, I think three days
Speaker 2: after I got there, was to walk out the front door,
Speaker 2: across the street, down this wooded path on campus, across
Speaker 2: a bridge, over a river, up a hill, and stand
Speaker 2: on a rise where I could look at Tolman Hall,
Speaker 2: which coincidentally was empty and was about to be torn
Speaker 2: down over the exact period that I would be pursuing
Speaker 2: this s fellowship here. And I knew when I saw that,
Speaker 2: and when the guy and maintenance handled me a tee
Speaker 2: to the building so I could come and go as
Speaker 2: I please, that this one just an incredible opportunity for
Speaker 2: me to be able to go and revisit let somebody
Speaker 2: else refer to as a memory palace, to walk through
Speaker 2: the memory palace and sort of understand the story that way,
Speaker 2: before I got the key, I was able to sneak
Speaker 2: in to Tolman Hall and walk into rooms where I
Speaker 2: was now where the researchers had been on the other
Speaker 2: side of the one way mirror, and I could look
Speaker 2: into and stand in the very experiment rooms where I
Speaker 2: had been studied, and that sort of broke open the
Speaker 2: story for me in a way that wouldn't have been
Speaker 2: possible any other way. Finding my data from the study
Speaker 2: was more complicated than that. At a certain point I
Speaker 2: was able to track down my file from the preschool,
Speaker 2: and what should actually had to get somebody else's permission
Speaker 2: to access my own data but part of what was
Speaker 2: in that file was a whashler I believe it called
Speaker 2: IQ test that I I had been given when I
Speaker 2: was about four, and where I could see myself attempting
Speaker 2: to fill out these mazes, to draw this line between
Speaker 2: a baby chick and the mother hen who are separated
Speaker 2: by this maize. Through these series of increasingly complicated mazes,
Speaker 2: I'm able to follow the line. But in the last maze,
Speaker 2: which is the most complicated, I watched the pencil line
Speaker 2: where I'm trying to find my way through the maize,
Speaker 2: and a certain point I'd just give up.
Speaker 3: You really can't make this stuff up. On Susannah's third
Speaker 3: attempt with the maze, she finds no path from the
Speaker 3: baby chick to her mother. She simply can't find her
Speaker 3: way out. The metaphor here is breathtaking.
Speaker 2: When I was a little kid, cried a lot. My
Speaker 2: sister used to call me a cry baby, and I was,
Speaker 2: you know, I think, anxious and sad and lonely.
Speaker 6: And when I got through my adolescence and became an adult,
Speaker 6: I'm six 's one and became a journalist, and I
Speaker 6: kind of created a persona where I was, you know,
Speaker 6: this sort of unblinking.
Speaker 2: I don't give a shit. I'll go places where no
Speaker 2: one else will go. I'm a daredevil. I write these
Speaker 2: stories nobody else can get. Kind of a badass. And
Speaker 2: when I went back to look at my own true
Speaker 2: story of my life, I had to look at that
Speaker 2: little girl that I was, and that was agonizing forward
Speaker 2: me to see this sad, lonely, ignored, vulnerable child who
Speaker 2: clings to a study like it's sometime I love substitute parent.
Speaker 2: It is a kind of tragic story, and really there
Speaker 2: is no point at which someone sort of steps in
Speaker 2: to save her. Although you know, if you believe time
Speaker 2: at a flat circle, I do come home as an
Speaker 2: adult to bear witness to the child that I was.
Speaker 2: So in a way, I am creating my own observer
Speaker 2: effect by going back and looking at what happened, and
Speaker 2: in perhaps in some way by just seeing the truth
Speaker 2: of what happened, I'm transforming myself in the process. But
Speaker 2: it was really difficult, especially in regards to my mother,
Speaker 2: to admit and face how damaging her lack of maternalness
Speaker 2: towards me hadn't been and how she had never fixed it.
Speaker 2: That was something that I just had tried not to
Speaker 2: look at the story of the relationship between my mother
Speaker 2: and I is an American tragedy. It's just complicated. You know.
Speaker 2: She was smart, and she was feminist, and she was driven,
Speaker 2: and a lot of those things are great, but they've
Speaker 2: also had really negative consequences for a little girl that
Speaker 2: I was. It's incredibly difficult for me to talk about
Speaker 2: that little girl that I was, to share that story,
Speaker 2: to put that story out in the world.
Speaker 3: There were the specifics of your life, your particular father,
Speaker 3: your particular mother, the way that they were, the sort
Speaker 3: of emotional paucity of the way that you grew up,
Speaker 3: you know. And then there's the question posed by the
Speaker 3: block study, which is, you know, if you study a kid,
Speaker 3: can you predict who that kid will grow up to be?
Speaker 2: Yeah, even though I spent thirty years as a willing
Speaker 2: research subject, I sort of disagree fundamentally with even the
Speaker 2: concept of the block study, which is that a person
Speaker 2: can be understood as a constellation of data points, that
Speaker 2: by studying another human being you can somehow know them
Speaker 2: in their totality and even potentially foresee their entire life
Speaker 2: path or who they will become. And I think that
Speaker 2: there is something about people that is beyond the grasp
Speaker 2: of science, that science doesn't take into account. And I
Speaker 2: think there is something in myself that was beyond the
Speaker 2: studies grasp, which was sort of a will to survive
Speaker 2: all of these different things that I encountered. And they
Speaker 2: didn't fully appreciate how much studying me would shape my
Speaker 2: life and who I have become. And so in a way,
Speaker 2: I don't know how they can answer the question when
Speaker 2: by studying us they have played a role in shaping
Speaker 2: our lives.
Speaker 3: Here's Susannah reading one last passage from data Baby.
Speaker 2: A long time ago, in a city nicknamed Berserkly, we
Speaker 2: the cohort, were children. Our parents were professors and mail carriers,
Speaker 2: architects and bus drivers, civil servants and housewives. We were
Speaker 2: of different races, classes and ethnicities, raised Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim,
Speaker 2: or to be non believers, the daughters and sons of
Speaker 2: people who, by chunts or choice, happened to be living
Speaker 2: in the Bay Area. In the nineteen sixties. We were
Speaker 2: at ground zero of the free speech movement. As the
Speaker 2: civil rights movement and the feminist movement spread across the land.
Speaker 2: We were the kids prophesied in Free to Be You
Speaker 2: and Me, a nineteen seventy two album produced by Marla
Speaker 2: Thomas and the Msfoundation for Women that promotes gender equality, tolerance,
Speaker 2: and the radical notion that anyone can achieve anything, the
Speaker 2: title track of which foreshadows a land in which the
Speaker 2: children are free.
Speaker 3: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly z Acur
Speaker 3: is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
Speaker 3: If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
Speaker 3: please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
Speaker 3: on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
Speaker 3: eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
Speaker 3: find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder and if you'd
Speaker 3: like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
Speaker 3: check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.