Family Secrets

In this bonus episode we hear from listeners in the Family Secrets community. To share your secret, call 1-888-SECRET-0.

In this bonus episode we hear from listeners in the Family Secrets community. To share your secret, call 1-888-SECRET-0.

A Unitarian Universalist minister advocates for a new kind of spiritual practice—gratitude—one even the least religious among us can draw comfort from.

Dani and Liz respond to questions from the audience about shame, the power of the unthought known, and the growing community of people who find out later in life they were donor-conceived. 

On this special live episode of Family Secrets, recorded in Los Angeles in January, Dani sits down with indie rock icon Liz Phair to talk about the stories we choose to tell ourselves—and how the act of writing can lead to a deeper, more nuanced understanding of both our pasts and the people we’ve become.

Dani and Gretchen respond to audience questions — including one from a former anonymous sperm donor, who wonders where his loyalties should lie after he’s asked not to tell one of his biological children the truth about her origins.

On part two of Dani’s conversation with Libby Copeland, Dani and Libby discuss the fallout on the other side of a major DNA revelation, and why DNA testing could make secrecy around a person’s origins a thing of the past.

On this special bonus episode of Family Secrets, Dani speaks with Libby Copeland, author and journalist, about the psychological and emotional complexities that face families who have kept secrets, and families who have had secrets kept from them. This is an intimate conversation about the deepest parts of identity exposed by unexpected DNA results. 

A writer and cancer survivor, leaning on lessons she learned while battling leukemia in her 20s, now helps others make meaningful connections as they adjust to life in isolation.

Dani and Bessel respond to questions from the audience about trauma, and how art—and writing in particular—can help people heal.

Janny Scott grew up on an 800-acre British-style estate outside Philadelphia with a loving, gregarious father who was always the life of the party. But underneath her father’s light exterior was a darkness he struggled to keep at bay—a lifelong effort that would eventually cause him to self-destruct.

Growing up, Adam Frankel idolized his father and his father’s father, eventually following in their footsteps to become a successful speechwriter for politicians like John Kerry and Barack Obama. But at the age of 25, Adam discovered a truth that caused him to question everything—including his place in the lineage he’d molded his life around. 

Addiction breeds denial, in both the addict and his loved ones. And when that addiction comes wrapped in a busy, successful, ambitious package like Eilene Zimmerman’s ex-husband, a respected Silicon Valley attorney, it’s especially easy to ignore the warning signs. Until it’s too late.