January 4, 2024 • 49 mins
Maggie made a life for herself as a successful poet, wife, and proud mother of two. But after years of marriage, she sensed something to be terribly off. When her intuition led to a painful discovery, she could finally claim her truth and grow.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. One afternoon, I
was listening to Derek DelGaudio, a master of sleight of hand,
on NPR. He talked about secrets, their weight, their heft.
He talked about how carrying them affects your breathing, your speech,
(00:23):
your movements. You have to remember who knows what. You
have to remember which versions of the stories you've told
and to whom and when. If you tell the truth,
there's nothing to keep straight, nothing to work at. The
truth isn't easy, but it's simple. What I wanted from
(00:45):
my husband was the truth. I asked for it, and
I waited for it, and eventually I stopped waiting. What
I was given was something different. It was shaped like,
It's not what you think. It held the weight of
You don't understand. How did I not see the heft?
(01:07):
How did I not hear it? The question I keep
asking myself is the same question we ask about someone
who's good at sleight of hand? How did he do that?
Speaker 2 (01:25):
That's Maggie Smith, poet, writer, editor, and teacher. Maggie's is
a story about secrecy and betrayal, deep inner knowing, groundedness,
and grace. Ultimately, It's the story of a woman coming
into her own. This episode was recorded in front of
a live audience at the Miami Book Fair at Miami
(01:47):
Dade College in Miami, Florida. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this
is Family Secrets. The secrets that are kept from us,
(02:07):
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves. So much of your story has to
do with the secrets that we keep from ourselves. There
are other kinds of secrets within it, too, But that
feeling of knowing and yet not being able to apprehend,
(02:31):
not being able to quite touch what's really happening, because
it's too scary, it's too frightening.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
It's too dangerous.
Speaker 4 (02:40):
But I want to start way back at the very beginning.
But the question that I always start with in Family Secrets,
which is tell me about the landscape of your childhood.
There's a line in your book which is, if you
opened me up, you'd find Ohio.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
It's true, Yeah, the heart of it all, I'll live
in my hometown. Basically, I grew up in central Ohio,
in the Columbus, Ohio area. I'm the oldest of three girls.
I have two younger sisters each two years apart, so
we're stairsteps. My parents still live in the house I
(03:20):
grew up in, and I have Sunday dinner there every Sunday,
except when I'm at the Miami Book Fair and I
won't make it back in time for Sunday dinners. I
had honestly a really traditional, blissfully boring childhood. You know,
I was born in seventy seven. I'm a gen xer.
(03:40):
I grew up in the eighties, your parents being able
to reach you when you were out playing, so we
would just sort of leave on our bikes in the morning,
come back at meals kind of scuffed up, and that
was pretty much it. I was bookish, as you can
probably imagine, an introverted, and when I wasn't playing with
(04:02):
my friends, I was either reading, listening to music, or
doing jigsaw puzzles in my bedroom. I was not cool.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
It's so much better to get cooler later, wasn't it.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
I mean, yeah, I definitely did not peak early, let's
just put it that way.
Speaker 4 (04:21):
So when you were in that sort of blissfully boring
childhood and this very stable kind of extended family family situation,
how did the feeling of that stability impact you as
a child.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
Honestly, I think it was just sort of the air
I breathed and the water I swam in, So I
don't think I recognized it as anything special. Now, as
an adult, I realized there's a sort of novelty to
having almost my entire extended family live in the same place,
and to all get together, and to have dinners thirteen
(04:59):
people on the weekends. It's not the norm. I think
it's not very twenty first century for sure, and maybe
not very twentieth century in a lot of ways. But
at the time it didn't seem strange to me, and
in fact, it probably didn't prepare me well for what
my own adult life would would look like.
Speaker 4 (05:22):
Did you ever think about leaving or did you always
know that you would stay in Ohio?
Speaker 1 (05:26):
I tried. I guess I would like to be like, no,
I'm so rooted. I never wanted to leave.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
I did.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
I considered MFA programs very far away from home, and
then a fellowship kept me, kept me in Columbus at
Ohio State, and since then, you know how it is.
You stay someplace and you meet someone, and then you
have kids, and then they're in school and then you
have a mortgage, and then your parents start aging, and
(05:54):
so I don't think when I was twenty, I didn't
really necessarily imagine my self living in Columbus, Ohio when
I was forty six, But here I am. I met
my husband at Ohio Wesleyan actually, which is where I
went to undergrad. I would have been nineteen or twenty.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
And you were both in a creative writing workshop, that's right.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
I think we had a couple of other classes together
in the English department before that class, but that was
the sort of smallest seminar, and that was around the
time that we became good friends.
Speaker 4 (06:33):
And did you both know that you wanted futures as
writers at that point?
Speaker 1 (06:39):
I knew when I was in college that I always
wanted to write, and then I probably always would because
I had been doing it for, you know, five or
six years already, and it didn't seem like something I
could quit even if I wanted to. I didn't know
what my work would be, though, and in my mind
it was still pretty separate. I need to find a
(07:01):
job in the world eventually, and also I'm going to
be a writer, and it's still kind of strange to me.
That those things have braided together in the ways that
they have, and I don't know what he thought he
was going to do.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
It's interesting.
Speaker 4 (07:16):
I mean, being a writer is something that we are,
not something that we aim for.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
It's not a career choice. I think.
Speaker 4 (07:26):
I don't think there's a writer out there who would say,
you know, when they were a little kid, that they
knew that they were going to build their life toward that,
because how do you know how to do that?
Speaker 1 (07:36):
That seems terribly impractical. I'm a Midwesterner. That's not something
we do.
Speaker 4 (07:42):
So in a way, it sounds like you initially replicate
that kind of solid family history by choosing the person
that you were going to be with very young, you know,
very young for your generation, and sticking sticking to him.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
I mean I really did think that what I was
building would end up looking a lot like what my
parents had in some ways and probably not in others,
because I'm not my mother.
Speaker 3 (08:15):
Tell me a little bit about your mother.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Oh my gosh, she's a firecracker. I love my mom.
My mom is someone I talked to almost every day.
She married my dad when she was twenty had me
at twenty four. My sister at twenty six, my other
sister at twenty eight. She was a stay at home
mom until we were old enough to get off the
(08:41):
school bus and get ourselves into the house, and so
she went back to work at some point, but even
then she was still the mom. So if I was sick,
she took care of me. If I needed food, she
made it, If there was laundry to be done, Mom
was the person you TalkTalk to. You if you need
a permission for something, you clear it with Mom. She
(09:04):
was sort of the CEO. And my dad went to
work every day and was sort of probably blissfully unaware
of most of what was going on. And so if
I wanted to do something I wasn't supposed to do,
I'd ask Dad, right like Mom probably wouldn't say no
because she knows, but Dad doesn't know, so maybe Dad'll
(09:25):
clear me for this. So he was, I mean, hilarious
and I'm very close to my dad, but a very
classic arrangement where the caretaking was very much my mother's
job and not my father's. Like I don't think he
changed a diaper until he had grandkids, and that was
a big deal when he finally did.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
But when you say that you imagined a life that
was somewhat like your mom's but not But you're not
your mom. I think part of what we're talking about
here is that your mom really wanted That was what
she wanted. Yes, that was that she wanted to be
a wife and a mom and to raise this family.
(10:10):
And so there was nothing conflicted about that.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
No, nothing conflicted at all. I mean, if you asked
my mom today, what did you want to be when
you grew up, she would say a mom and she
got to do it. So there wasn't that kind of
push and pull. And when she went back to work,
it was because she needed to and because we were
at school all day. But it wasn't because she had
some grand design on a career. You know, she's recently
(10:34):
retired and is so happy hanging out with her girlfriends
during the day and like traveling and doing all these things.
And I wish she had just been able to do
more of that. But yeah, I thought I could copy
paste my childhood into my home and have a completely
different kind of career. By the time my mom had
(10:57):
three kids at twenty eight, and I had just published
my first book to finish graduate school and didn't have
kids and was just getting married then. So the idea
that I could just replicate that template and sort of
overlay it on my life all these years later now
seems a little naive, But at the time I was like, sure,
(11:18):
it can look exactly like that, except I'll be doing
all these other things too.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Right.
Speaker 4 (11:23):
Well, it's such a classic and such a relatable story,
I think that because how else do we know, right,
I mean, we can only know what we were raised
with and what our hopes and dreams might be. And
why can't we quote unquote have it all?
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Have it all?
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Maggie and her husband embark on their lives together. She
finishes graduate school, he goes to law school. Maggie's first
book comes out, and they move into a house painted
the very optimistic color of Perrywinkle blue.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
I just actually painted the house charcoal gray. It's not
Perrywinkle anymore. So it's like now it's sort of memorialized
as a Periwinkle house.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
There's a metaphor in there somewhere.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Isn't there. Yeah, And there's a metaphor in everything.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
True.
Speaker 4 (12:16):
Tell me about the search for the house, because you
write about that in this book, And there's something that's
so lovely and hopeful about looking for the place that
you're going to just start your life as a young adult.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
I think my daughter Violet was one when we were
looking for houses because we'd been renting and the woman
we were renting from was putting the house on the
market and we couldn't afford to buy that house. It
was big Victorian and German village in this historic neighborhood,
and so we thought, Okay, now we have to buy
the house in the school district where we think we're
going to send her to kindergarten, even though she's one,
(12:52):
because that's how you do it, right, you do the thing.
And I thought, well, I still want to live in
a walkable neighborhood because all these years we've lived in
neighborhoods we can walk to a bookstore, a coffee shop,
a post office. You know. I didn't want to replicate
that part of my childhood and be out in the
suburbs and have to get in the car to go anywhere.
And so it came down to two things. One, we
(13:16):
visited this house on this street, and the house is
a very beloved money pit that I continue to work
on year after year earmarking and moving things around, like
is it the bathroom year or the roof year. But
I was completely charmed by it because there are like
thirty four windows in my house. It's all glass. The
(13:40):
whole street is a tunnel of sycamores or London plane trees,
which are kind of cousins, and in the summer they
make this arch of green and so it looks like
you're driving down this tunnel of trees. And it seems like,
of course, such a poetic thing to do to buy
a money pit of a house on a street with
(14:01):
a tunnel of sycamore trees. But that's exactly what we did.
And we also chose that house because it's Caddy corner
across the street from one of my best friends. I
love the house. It's just home. It's a constant project,
but there's lots of light and lots of trees and
friendly dogs and then albino squirrel. And I know it
(14:26):
sounds like I'm snow white. It's not that ucolic. You know.
Things are constantly breaking, but I love it.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
We'll be right back. Prior to this big hopeful move,
Maggie and her husband are still renting their home in
(14:58):
German Village when Violet is born. After Violet's birth, Maggie
has an extremely difficult time. She doesn't even realize what
plagues her postpartum depression until she has it for the
second time years later.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
I had pretty serious postpartum depression after Violet was born,
and we lived in the house in German Village then,
and I was just a shell of a human being.
I actually cut my maternity leave short because I couldn't
cope anymore. I actually chose to go back and sit
in a cubicle to just have a different kind of
(15:39):
day than I was having with a colicky child feeling
that bad.
Speaker 4 (15:44):
So I wonder, Maggie, you know, is in not knowing,
which I think is so true of people who are
suffering from something that they haven't experienced before. The instinct
is to think it's my baby's colloquy, or I'm impatient,
or there must be something wrong with me that I'm
not handling this better, and not to go to the
(16:06):
place of self compassion of maybe there really is something
going on that isn't my fault.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Yeah, I think that's right. I remember at one point,
and maybe it was my mother or one of my
sisters said, you don't talk about any of this with
any joy. You seem miserable and stressed out. And I mean,
granted I wasn't sleeping, but no parent sleeps, and a
lot of them still seem okay. And it didn't occur
(16:36):
to me that the way I was feeling was any
different from what anyone else was feeling. And one of them,
I remember, said to me, you need to go to
your doctor, like this isn't normal to feel this way,
and I remember saying something like there's no pill for
no sleep and a baby with acid reflux and colic
(16:56):
and a dairy allergy, like that's just my life and
there's nothing that anyone can do to make it any different.
But of course that was me speaking from a place
of not being well. And I know now that no,
those material aspects of my life would not have changed,
and probably if I had taken a bit of something
prescribed to me by a medical professional, I would have
(17:18):
been able to manage those bits better, because I then did.
When my son was.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
Born, and that was also a year of not writing.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
It was a whole year of not writing, and I
think about that, I'm like, well, no wonder I was depressed.
I had a baby. It didn't go the way I
thought it would. I thought, where's my bundle of joy?
This child screams at me all the time. I feel
like screaming all the time, but have the decency not to.
The poems are not happening. My husband is in law school,
(17:51):
and that's very demanding on his time. Even having family support,
even being in a place where I had lots of
people checking on me and coming over, bringing soup and
doing all the things. I couldn't get to a place
where anything was cooking up there for a year.
Speaker 4 (18:10):
Which is a vicious cycle, right, because I think for writers,
for poets, that feeling of It's one of my favorite
quotes from Joan Didion in her essay y I write,
if I had the remotest access to my own mind,
I never would have become a writer.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
I write in order to understand.
Speaker 4 (18:28):
What I think, what I feel, what I fear. And
there's no other path, there's no other way to get
at that. So to be feeling all that and not
have the tool to not be the instrument of being
able to do that kind of work is just a
prescription for disaster.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Yeah, I think about that now. And I'm like, why
wasn't I even journaling through that time? And I really wasn't.
The only writing I think I even have to this
day from that first year are lists, like nerotic lists
of when she slept or didn't sleep, what she ate,
and how much the color of her poop, because this
(19:10):
is what we do with newborns, you know. I just
was sort of like looking for patterns in anything she did,
thinking that if I can just find this pattern that,
like if she eats this and this, then she'll sleep,
if she does this and this, if I do this
then this, looking for some way to make sense of
(19:31):
it all. And it was just lists and charts and
nothing of any import really.
Speaker 4 (19:40):
You know, in reading your book, I was experiencing it
as this kind of slow erosion of identity, of intimacy,
of both intimacy in your marriage but intimacy with yourself.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (19:57):
So there's this, there's this period of which you go
through this postpartum depression. Then you move into the Periwinkle
House and you suffer two miscarriages. Yeah, in trying to
have another child and for Violet to have a sibling.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
Yeah, And of course I didn't know until after my
son was born, and I had postpartum depression again. I thought,
what are the odds? And he was colicky again and
had asked reflux, and I thought, what are the odds
that lightning will strike twice? Surely it will be different
the second time. And it was not. And I only
found out later that, you know, miscarriage is a huge
(20:43):
sort of predisposing condition for postpartum because of course it is.
I mean, being pregnant three times in a year and
a half does pretty wild things to your hormones and
also your grieving and terrified, and so the even the
sort of joy of pregnancy of even finally getting pregnant
(21:05):
and thinking is this going to stick? Is this going
to happen? I never relaxed that entire you know, ten months,
I never relaxed. Every day I woke up and thought,
this is the day. There's not going to be a heartbeat,
this is the day. There's going to be blood, this
is the day. And so it really it changed me
(21:27):
in ways I probably can't even articulate or understand myself.
It made me a very fearful person. I didn't trust
my body, and I didn't trust my mind. You know,
I didn't know what kind of mom I would be
the second time around, because I knew what happened the
(21:48):
first time, and so when rhet was born, it didn't
take very long for things to go downhill. And the
difference was I went to the doctor and it got better.
And that also gave me a little bit of regret
I would say about what didn't happen the first time,
because I thought, God, I didn't have to feel that way.
(22:09):
I didn't have to go through that.
Speaker 4 (22:12):
There's a point where you realize that you become more
mom than wife. And it was also a period. You
didn't write this, but it was my sense that you
became more mom than poet, more mom than Maggie.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
Yes, that became my primary identity. And I think there
are probably people listening who can relate to that sort
of eclipsing of the self that happens, particularly when your
children are small and need you for everything, including food,
like you are the person keeping them alive, and that
(22:51):
kind of daily, ongoing responsibility sort of shoves everything else
into the margins of the page, I suppose, And of
course I think this happens in marriages. You know some
of the and I you know, I think in general
my writing and my children are the greatest blessings of
(23:12):
my life. I feel both of them are sort of
miraculous to me. I in some ways have no idea
how that all happened. I mean, I know how it happened,
but I really in some ways don't. Like these human
beings live here now in my house and have their
own personalities in their own lives, and these pieces of
(23:33):
writing like come to me, like occur to me, and
then grow and unfold, and all of this still seems
very much like magic to me. That the greatest blessings
of my life. And I think they're also the things
that were hardest on my partnership in a lot of ways,
(23:54):
and probably because of the demands on my time right
and not just but bandwidth.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
During these years of young motherhood when Maggie's kids are little,
she has a job as an editor. Her husband is
working long hours as an associate in a law firm.
There's not a lot of time for her real work,
which is writing poems. She writes whenever she can grab
the time, in coffee shops, late at night, in the
school pickup line, the car. One day, when Violet and
(24:29):
Redd are seven and three, Maggie writes a poem titled
good Bones, and that poem changes everything.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
I had a preschooler who was going off to part
time preschool a couple days a week where I could
get a little writing done, and I think I was
in either kindergarten or first grade at that point, so
she was gone all day so I could get a
little bit more done. I was working from home. I
had quit my job and was freelancing, so I was
(25:01):
still working as an editor, but I was doing it
from my house, so as long as Rhett was at preschool,
I had a little bit of space. And that's around
the time that I wrote Good Bones.
Speaker 4 (25:15):
It also strikes me that good Bones, as is true
of other of your poems, is about being a mother.
It was the gift of being a mother meets the
gift of being a poet.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
I couldn't have written that poem without them. Really, anything
I've written since they were born, I couldn't have written
without them, in part because some of it's actually collaborative work,
like they will give me the idea, they will give
me a line of dialogue or a metaphor. But also
they've changed who I am as a person. So the
work that comes out of me since they've been in
(25:49):
the world is work that they made possible, which is
pretty wild to think about.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
Yeah, it is and beautiful.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
Thanks kids, I'll forgive you that colic. Yeah, they're like,
where's our allowance? Where are the residuals? Mom? Good Bones
was published online in June of twenty sixteen. I had
submitted it the year before it was rejected a few places.
A journal named Waxwing picked it up, and then they
(26:22):
did what journals do, which is slated for later publication.
So I don't even think I knew exactly when it
was coming out. It was just like spring or summer
of next year, so I forgot about it. It came
out that week in June, and that was the week
of the Pulse nightclub massacre, and that same week in
(26:45):
England Brexit madness was picking up, and a member of Parliament,
Joe Cox, who was a young mother of young children herself,
was murdered in northern England that same week, and so
the poem was published online, not in a print magazine.
And because it was published online the week that two
(27:07):
terrible things happened and two different continents, people started sharing
it and I it just absolutely caught and took off
in ways that I mean. I was pushing a stroller
around my neighborhood and the BBC was reaching out. I
(27:28):
didn't have an agent, I didn't have media training. I
just had a cell phone, and like a non napping
three year old, I really didn't know what to do
with it. It was the strangest lightning strike still really
of my life.
Speaker 4 (27:48):
And it just kept building and building. At one point,
you're told that Meryl Streep read it at a benefit.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
Yeah. I found that out because my now friend say
Joe tweeted, like, Yo, Maggie, Meryl Streep just read good
Bones at the Academy of American Poets gala at Lincoln Center.
And I had walked into my house and looked at
my phone and thought, I'm sorry, who did what? I'm
(28:17):
sure actually that was a lot more colorful language that
was used, but I was like, I'm sorry, my words
were in MARYL. Streep's perfect mouth, in that voice. I
mean again, I'm a poet, working a regular job, parenting
two kids, living in Central Ohio. Like, I just can't
(28:40):
stress enough how outside of the literary world I felt
it was incredibly bizarre and then it was on Madam's Secretary, Right, Yeah,
I mean.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
It was just it took on a life of its own.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
It took on a life of its own, and I
would meet people and they would say, oh my gosh,
I love your poem, and I had the sense not
to say which one, but it became. I mean, I
joke now that it's hard to give a reading and
not read Good Bones because it's kind of my free bird. Right.
Speaker 4 (29:17):
What was it like in your marriage during that time?
You do at one point write that your marriage was
never the same after that, meaning after the viral sensation
of Good Bones.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Yeah, that poem changed my life in both beautiful and
terrible ways, which is funny because the poem itself is
about the world being sort of equal parts beautiful and terrible,
and the impact that that poem had on my life
was equal parts beautiful and terrible.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
It had a.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Beautiful impact on my writing life and a pretty terrible
impact on my personal life. Maybe it's just that the
sudden attention and the sort of invitation or opportunity to
lean into my writing life and to spend more time
on writing, and maybe that was the crux. You know,
(30:13):
suddenly I can come to a book festival. Suddenly I'm
getting invited to go to a university to give a
reading or teach for a week someplace. Suddenly I had
a lecture agent, you know, who would help get me
speaking engagements or send me around the country or the
world to get to be a writer in the world,
(30:34):
not just at my local Starbucks between naps. It was
such a blessing, but it also meant as a primary caregiver,
not being available all the time, right, and needing to
kind of recalibrate some things in my relationship to say, like, hey, okay,
kind of like my mom was a stay at home
mom for a while, right, and then eventually she went
(30:56):
back to work. But she did that by choice because
we weren't sort of in her hair as much anymore.
I still had at least one child who was very
young at the time and who was not in full
time daycare, and so getting away was a lot of
a kind of a logistical nightmare for me Personally.
Speaker 4 (31:17):
You were going to be the primary caregiver and write
your poems on the side, and you know, this was
sort of the shape of your life that suddenly got disrupted.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Yeah, this wasn't the deal, right, This wasn't the deal,
Like the deal was one of us goes to work
and the other one works but also manages the children.
And if that's not happening, then that's not the deal.
And I think that's part of the strain. And yet
when I think about it, if I'm really honest with
(31:51):
myself and I do try, I do try to be
I think, Okay, well, what if I had traveled for
pharmaceutical sales. What if it had been incredibly lucrative, which frankly,
poetry isn't. What if it had taken me out of
my home on a regular basis but had nothing to
do with art making, had nothing to do with writing,
(32:14):
It had nothing to do with like being on stage
or signing books or doing anything that seemed fun or
attention seeking. Maybe it still would have been a problem
because it would have been an inconvenience that I don't
think it would have been the same kind of problem.
I think it was the perfect storm of a dream
being realized and not being able to sort of hold
(32:38):
up my end of the bargain quote unquote as far
as how much caregiving I could do on a daily basis.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
(33:10):
Maggie's husband isn't prepared to do some of the caretaking
without her. Once, when she's at a book festival, he
calls to tell her she needs to come home. Rhet
has a fever. Maggie, more mom than poet, tries to
get a last minute flight home, but she can't. Her
husband is left to muddle through this one on his own.
(33:31):
This is just one instance in which the rift between
Maggie and her husband deepens. Something's in the air, something's
not right. A while later, when Maggie is back home,
her family is asleep and she's awake. Downstairs, she sees
her husband's briefcase just sitting there. He's just come home
(33:52):
from a business trip. She's never done this before, but
something tells her to go over to that briefcase and
take a look, so she does.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
I hate that I did that. It's hard to admit
that you snooped into someone else's personal belongings that didn't
belong to you. Although I don't know, I suppose if
I had an open bag in my house, which I
often do now, my kids would probably be rifling through
it for gum or post it notes. Or something. So
(34:26):
maybe there's not quite the expectation of privacy in a
home where you have stuff lying around all the time.
Speaker 4 (34:33):
But you know what, snooping makes such an appearance on
this podcast.
Speaker 3 (34:39):
In so many as in life.
Speaker 4 (34:42):
So many episodes, to the point where I had to
at a certain point thing to myself, why is this
constantly coming up? Does everyone just simply snoop?
Speaker 1 (34:51):
Do?
Speaker 3 (34:52):
Is it to snoop? You know, to be human as
to snoop?
Speaker 4 (34:55):
I actually think when there is a secret that's somewhere
in in the atmosphere, that's lurking somewhere, we know it
without being able to sink it, and it's almost a
self protective thing to do. I'm not going to find
(35:16):
this out, this thing that I don't even know what
it is. I just know that there's something that I
need to know, and that seems to be the impulse.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
Yeah, I mean it's sort of like Spidey sense, you know,
like there's just some kind of prickle that tells you
something's off. Like I don't know what it is, but
something feels off, and likely there's no answer to the
offness in this bag, but it's here, So I'm going
to look and see if there's an answer to the offness.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
There was, and there was.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
There was an answer to the offness in the bag.
Speaker 3 (35:52):
So what did you find in the bag?
Speaker 1 (35:53):
I found a postcard addressed to a woman's name with
an address, so it had not been sent, like it
was ready to mail, but it had not been sent
in my husband's handwriting, addressed to a woman's name in
the place he had just visited and had been visiting
(36:14):
frequently for work. And then I kept looking because I thought, well,
maybe there's more glutton for punishment. And I do this.
I keep a book in my bag. I like to
have a notebook, and so did he. And so I
opened the blank book and sort of flipping through the pages,
(36:37):
and I flipped to the last entry and read basically
a kind of journal entry about taking a walk with
this particular person and being in her house. And so
I thought, okay, this is actually happening. And at first
I was telling myself, maybe these are ideas for like
(36:58):
a piece of writing, you know, like maybe it's a
novel start or a play, or this is a short story.
Of course it was not a short story.
Speaker 4 (37:11):
And there was also a pine cone that he had
brought back with him for your kids.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Yeah, so Rhet likes to collect nature treasures. So on
his last business trip, he had brought a pine cone
home as a souvenir, and the postcard and the entry
both referenced the pine cone, and so then I knew
that the pine cone was actually something picked up with
this other individual and then brought home to our house.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
So in that moment, what did it feel like in
your body?
Speaker 1 (37:48):
I don't know that I was in my body. Honestly,
I have such a hazy recollection. I mean I remember
standing there, I remember finding it, I remember going upstairs
like I have almost sort of polaroid or you know,
like flashes, almost like jump cuts in a film, but
nothing I could actually stitch together. And I'm sure that
(38:10):
is just protective, like we're just not gonna catalog all
of that in great detail for reasons that make perfect sense.
Speaker 4 (38:20):
So in that state, you went upstairs and you woke
him up, and.
Speaker 3 (38:28):
What did you share with him in that moment?
Speaker 1 (38:31):
I think I just yelled something like who is fill
in name on postcard? I brought up the postcard that night,
but did not tell him that I had looked in
the notebook, in part because I just really what I
wanted was for him to tell me the truth. And
so I kind of held that back and thought, i'll
(38:53):
know if he's telling me the truth if he discloses,
because now I can ask questions based on what I
know from these page and if he doesn't tell me
the truth, I'll know. I mean, I watch a lot
of true crime, so I just thought, now i'll know,
like I'm going to know if I'm being if there's
some gas lighting here, if there's some something else going
(39:15):
on here. And so I didn't bring up the journal,
and he didn't bring up the journal, and so then
I just thought, you know, we'll get to that eventually.
But the next day I did the same thing. I
repeated my actions. I went back into the bag. The
postcard was gone. Who knows, maybe it was mailed. I
really don't know. I don't know whatever happened to that.
(39:37):
And when I opened the pages of the journal, I
flipped to the last entry, and the pages were gone,
like you could see where there had been pages, and
they had been not ripped out, but like surgically removed,
like with the exact o knife.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
Now it's Maggie who is keeping a secret. She doesn't
tell her husband she's seen those pages that she knows,
she doesn't say anything at all. The temperature at home
is chili. Whenever they do communicate, it's about the kids.
They go to couple's therapy, but even there they refrain
(40:15):
from talking about the enormous elephant in the room. Maggie
does not tell the couple's therapist what she's found out.
This might be the most logical space for an issue
like this to surface, but still it remains buried. Instead,
with their therapist, they discuss all the rudimentary baseline marital tension,
(40:35):
which Maggie's husband believes to be effectively her fault.
Speaker 1 (40:42):
We go to counseling because I found these things. And
then in counseling we talk about that he's unhappy because
my career is taking up too much space, and I
don't bring up the fact that we're actually there for
this other reason, and we don't talk about it at all.
Speaker 3 (41:00):
So what really struck me about that?
Speaker 1 (41:02):
I'm asking because I'm just like, that's absurd.
Speaker 4 (41:05):
Like the doubleness of the secret keeping here. So you
discover a secret in the form of this postcard and
this journal entry, and then you keep the secret your husband,
and you don't speak about it. You don't tell your mother,
who you're very close to, You barely tell any friends.
(41:26):
You certainly don't tell your children, and you don't tell
the therapist. No, what were you waiting for? Or maybe
another way of putting it is, when we don't speak
of something of that magnitude, usually thrumbing underneath that is.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
Fear. Fear. Yeah, I think I was trying to keep
it intact, and so if I didn't tell my mother
what was going on, then she would never find out
what had happened. And therefore, when I I fixed it,
because I could fix it, I could fix it and
then she'd never have to know and it would never
(42:06):
affect their relationship. Because I really thought I could fix
it by fixing my own behavior. And if I fixed
it by fixing my own behavior, then no one would
ever have to know, and it wouldn't ripple, and we
could just go back to life being fine, and then
no one would have any hard feelings or ill will.
(42:28):
I didn't tell the counselor because I thought it would
anger him, my ex husband. I just remember thinking, I
feel like I'm holding this live grenade of all of
this knowledge, and if I speak up, it's like pulling
the pin.
Speaker 3 (42:49):
And if I just.
Speaker 1 (42:50):
Stay small and be as agreeable as possible, it breaks
my heart to say it now, Like if I just
make myself very sack small and acquiesced it as much
as humanly possible and basically bargain away everything that feels
essential to me as a human being, then maybe we
(43:11):
can make it work and then no one has to know.
Speaker 4 (43:14):
But the thing about secrets is they won't stay. No,
they won't. Another guest on the podcast said something that
I thought was just so perfect about what it is
to keep a secret, which is when you bury a secret,
you bury it alive, right, And this thing was alive
and wasn't going to go away.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
No it was not. I mean I did get to
a point where eventually I realized that all of the
acquiescing wasn't getting me anywhere, Like it wasn't actually like
canceling speaking engagements and agreeing not to travel and being
kind and cooking meals and taking the kids out like
it didn't matter. I could be the sort of best
(43:56):
version of myself, or not the best version of myself,
but the best version of myself. I thought that he wanted,
and it actually didn't change his behavior toward me, And
so I thought, why am I doing all of this
for nothing? Like it just feels pointless. And it struck
(44:16):
me eventually that it wasn't going to be enough. And
I think I also came around to the idea that
if your partner would happily let you let go of
things that matter a lot to you, then probably it's
not worth salvaging anyway. And so I talked to my
mom and then finally I just unloaded one day and
(44:41):
counseling and just said, by the way, I don't know
why we're this is a total charade.
Speaker 3 (44:47):
That therapist must have been dumbfounded.
Speaker 1 (44:49):
Why have you been coming in here for months taking
the blame and acting like it's all about that you're
not enough of a stay at home parent.
Speaker 2 (44:59):
That the charade is over and done with, so is
the marriage. After a lengthy separation, Maggie's soon to be
ex husband moves in with the address see of the postcard.
He communicates with Maggie only by email updates. In one
of these, he lets her know that he will be
moving five hundred miles away.
Speaker 4 (45:23):
This is so much a story of the coming hole
and these sharp fragments and this sort of puzzle like
structure of trying to come to an understanding of what happened.
My friend Andrea Debuse a bunch of years ago, Andrea
(45:45):
is talking about memoir, and he said, the question in
memoir is not what happened. The question in memoir is
what the fuck happened?
Speaker 1 (45:57):
I like him already.
Speaker 4 (45:58):
Yeah, And you're asking yourself that question, right, And in
asking yourself that question again and again, you're doing the
hard and profound work of knitting together all of yourselves
over time. This is the work that we all have
to do. Hopefully we do it, you know, until we
(46:18):
take our last breath. Is we're reconciling ourselves with all
of the different selves we've ever been. So that twenty
year old who met that, you know, that young woman
who wanted to replicate her life, and then the woman
that you became, and the mother and the wife, and
the poet and the grown ass woman you know who's
(46:39):
actually just putting together a life of meaning. And there's
so much in this book about making meaning that I
think is really extraordinary.
Speaker 2 (46:51):
Here's Maddie reading one of her poems. This one is
titled Bride.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
How long have I been wed to myself? Calling myself darling,
dressing for my own pleasure each morning, choosing perfume to
turn me on? How long have I been alone in
this house? But not alone? Married less to the man
(47:21):
than to the woman silvering with the mirror. I know
the kind of wife I need, and I become her,
the one who will leave this earth. At the same
instant I do, I am my own bride. Lifting the
veil to see my face, Darling, I say, I have
(47:45):
waited for you all my life.
Speaker 3 (47:49):
Thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zacre is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
This episode was recorded in front of a live audience
at the Miami Book Fair. The interview was engineered by
Mitch Mormon. If you have a family secret you'd like
to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story
could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is one
(48:30):
eight eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You
can also find me on Instagram at Danny Rider. And
if you'd like to know more about the story that
inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 4 (48:59):
For more podcasts us from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. One afternoon, I
was listening to Derek DelGaudio, a master of sleight of hand,
on NPR. He talked about secrets, their weight, their heft.
He talked about how carrying them affects your breathing, your speech,
(00:23):
your movements. You have to remember who knows what. You
have to remember which versions of the stories you've told
and to whom and when. If you tell the truth,
there's nothing to keep straight, nothing to work at. The
truth isn't easy, but it's simple. What I wanted from
(00:45):
my husband was the truth. I asked for it, and
I waited for it, and eventually I stopped waiting. What
I was given was something different. It was shaped like,
It's not what you think. It held the weight of
You don't understand. How did I not see the heft?
(01:07):
How did I not hear it? The question I keep
asking myself is the same question we ask about someone
who's good at sleight of hand? How did he do that?
Speaker 2 (01:25):
That's Maggie Smith, poet, writer, editor, and teacher. Maggie's is
a story about secrecy and betrayal, deep inner knowing, groundedness,
and grace. Ultimately, It's the story of a woman coming
into her own. This episode was recorded in front of
a live audience at the Miami Book Fair at Miami
(01:47):
Dade College in Miami, Florida. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this
is Family Secrets. The secrets that are kept from us,
(02:07):
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves. So much of your story has to
do with the secrets that we keep from ourselves. There
are other kinds of secrets within it, too, But that
feeling of knowing and yet not being able to apprehend,
(02:31):
not being able to quite touch what's really happening, because
it's too scary, it's too frightening.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
It's too dangerous.
Speaker 4 (02:40):
But I want to start way back at the very beginning.
But the question that I always start with in Family Secrets,
which is tell me about the landscape of your childhood.
There's a line in your book which is, if you
opened me up, you'd find Ohio.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
It's true, Yeah, the heart of it all, I'll live
in my hometown. Basically, I grew up in central Ohio,
in the Columbus, Ohio area. I'm the oldest of three girls.
I have two younger sisters each two years apart, so
we're stairsteps. My parents still live in the house I
(03:20):
grew up in, and I have Sunday dinner there every Sunday,
except when I'm at the Miami Book Fair and I
won't make it back in time for Sunday dinners. I
had honestly a really traditional, blissfully boring childhood. You know,
I was born in seventy seven. I'm a gen xer.
(03:40):
I grew up in the eighties, your parents being able
to reach you when you were out playing, so we
would just sort of leave on our bikes in the morning,
come back at meals kind of scuffed up, and that
was pretty much it. I was bookish, as you can
probably imagine, an introverted, and when I wasn't playing with
(04:02):
my friends, I was either reading, listening to music, or
doing jigsaw puzzles in my bedroom. I was not cool.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
It's so much better to get cooler later, wasn't it.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
I mean, yeah, I definitely did not peak early, let's
just put it that way.
Speaker 4 (04:21):
So when you were in that sort of blissfully boring
childhood and this very stable kind of extended family family situation,
how did the feeling of that stability impact you as
a child.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
Honestly, I think it was just sort of the air
I breathed and the water I swam in, So I
don't think I recognized it as anything special. Now, as
an adult, I realized there's a sort of novelty to
having almost my entire extended family live in the same place,
and to all get together, and to have dinners thirteen
(04:59):
people on the weekends. It's not the norm. I think
it's not very twenty first century for sure, and maybe
not very twentieth century in a lot of ways. But
at the time it didn't seem strange to me, and
in fact, it probably didn't prepare me well for what
my own adult life would would look like.
Speaker 4 (05:22):
Did you ever think about leaving or did you always
know that you would stay in Ohio?
Speaker 1 (05:26):
I tried. I guess I would like to be like, no,
I'm so rooted. I never wanted to leave.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
I did.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
I considered MFA programs very far away from home, and
then a fellowship kept me, kept me in Columbus at
Ohio State, and since then, you know how it is.
You stay someplace and you meet someone, and then you
have kids, and then they're in school and then you
have a mortgage, and then your parents start aging, and
(05:54):
so I don't think when I was twenty, I didn't
really necessarily imagine my self living in Columbus, Ohio when
I was forty six, But here I am. I met
my husband at Ohio Wesleyan actually, which is where I
went to undergrad. I would have been nineteen or twenty.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
And you were both in a creative writing workshop, that's right.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
I think we had a couple of other classes together
in the English department before that class, but that was
the sort of smallest seminar, and that was around the
time that we became good friends.
Speaker 4 (06:33):
And did you both know that you wanted futures as
writers at that point?
Speaker 1 (06:39):
I knew when I was in college that I always
wanted to write, and then I probably always would because
I had been doing it for, you know, five or
six years already, and it didn't seem like something I
could quit even if I wanted to. I didn't know
what my work would be, though, and in my mind
it was still pretty separate. I need to find a
(07:01):
job in the world eventually, and also I'm going to
be a writer, and it's still kind of strange to me.
That those things have braided together in the ways that
they have, and I don't know what he thought he
was going to do.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
It's interesting.
Speaker 4 (07:16):
I mean, being a writer is something that we are,
not something that we aim for.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
It's not a career choice. I think.
Speaker 4 (07:26):
I don't think there's a writer out there who would say,
you know, when they were a little kid, that they
knew that they were going to build their life toward that,
because how do you know how to do that?
Speaker 1 (07:36):
That seems terribly impractical. I'm a Midwesterner. That's not something
we do.
Speaker 4 (07:42):
So in a way, it sounds like you initially replicate
that kind of solid family history by choosing the person
that you were going to be with very young, you know,
very young for your generation, and sticking sticking to him.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
I mean I really did think that what I was
building would end up looking a lot like what my
parents had in some ways and probably not in others,
because I'm not my mother.
Speaker 3 (08:15):
Tell me a little bit about your mother.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Oh my gosh, she's a firecracker. I love my mom.
My mom is someone I talked to almost every day.
She married my dad when she was twenty had me
at twenty four. My sister at twenty six, my other
sister at twenty eight. She was a stay at home
mom until we were old enough to get off the
(08:41):
school bus and get ourselves into the house, and so
she went back to work at some point, but even
then she was still the mom. So if I was sick,
she took care of me. If I needed food, she
made it, If there was laundry to be done, Mom
was the person you TalkTalk to. You if you need
a permission for something, you clear it with Mom. She
(09:04):
was sort of the CEO. And my dad went to
work every day and was sort of probably blissfully unaware
of most of what was going on. And so if
I wanted to do something I wasn't supposed to do,
I'd ask Dad, right like Mom probably wouldn't say no
because she knows, but Dad doesn't know, so maybe Dad'll
(09:25):
clear me for this. So he was, I mean, hilarious
and I'm very close to my dad, but a very
classic arrangement where the caretaking was very much my mother's
job and not my father's. Like I don't think he
changed a diaper until he had grandkids, and that was
a big deal when he finally did.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
But when you say that you imagined a life that
was somewhat like your mom's but not But you're not
your mom. I think part of what we're talking about
here is that your mom really wanted That was what
she wanted. Yes, that was that she wanted to be
a wife and a mom and to raise this family.
(10:10):
And so there was nothing conflicted about that.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
No, nothing conflicted at all. I mean, if you asked
my mom today, what did you want to be when
you grew up, she would say a mom and she
got to do it. So there wasn't that kind of
push and pull. And when she went back to work,
it was because she needed to and because we were
at school all day. But it wasn't because she had
some grand design on a career. You know, she's recently
(10:34):
retired and is so happy hanging out with her girlfriends
during the day and like traveling and doing all these things.
And I wish she had just been able to do
more of that. But yeah, I thought I could copy
paste my childhood into my home and have a completely
different kind of career. By the time my mom had
(10:57):
three kids at twenty eight, and I had just published
my first book to finish graduate school and didn't have
kids and was just getting married then. So the idea
that I could just replicate that template and sort of
overlay it on my life all these years later now
seems a little naive, But at the time I was like, sure,
(11:18):
it can look exactly like that, except I'll be doing
all these other things too.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Right.
Speaker 4 (11:23):
Well, it's such a classic and such a relatable story,
I think that because how else do we know, right,
I mean, we can only know what we were raised
with and what our hopes and dreams might be. And
why can't we quote unquote have it all?
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Have it all?
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Maggie and her husband embark on their lives together. She
finishes graduate school, he goes to law school. Maggie's first
book comes out, and they move into a house painted
the very optimistic color of Perrywinkle blue.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
I just actually painted the house charcoal gray. It's not
Perrywinkle anymore. So it's like now it's sort of memorialized
as a Periwinkle house.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
There's a metaphor in there somewhere.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Isn't there. Yeah, And there's a metaphor in everything.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
True.
Speaker 4 (12:16):
Tell me about the search for the house, because you
write about that in this book, And there's something that's
so lovely and hopeful about looking for the place that
you're going to just start your life as a young adult.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
I think my daughter Violet was one when we were
looking for houses because we'd been renting and the woman
we were renting from was putting the house on the
market and we couldn't afford to buy that house. It
was big Victorian and German village in this historic neighborhood,
and so we thought, Okay, now we have to buy
the house in the school district where we think we're
going to send her to kindergarten, even though she's one,
(12:52):
because that's how you do it, right, you do the thing.
And I thought, well, I still want to live in
a walkable neighborhood because all these years we've lived in
neighborhoods we can walk to a bookstore, a coffee shop,
a post office. You know. I didn't want to replicate
that part of my childhood and be out in the
suburbs and have to get in the car to go anywhere.
And so it came down to two things. One, we
(13:16):
visited this house on this street, and the house is
a very beloved money pit that I continue to work
on year after year earmarking and moving things around, like
is it the bathroom year or the roof year. But
I was completely charmed by it because there are like
thirty four windows in my house. It's all glass. The
(13:40):
whole street is a tunnel of sycamores or London plane trees,
which are kind of cousins, and in the summer they
make this arch of green and so it looks like
you're driving down this tunnel of trees. And it seems like,
of course, such a poetic thing to do to buy
a money pit of a house on a street with
(14:01):
a tunnel of sycamore trees. But that's exactly what we did.
And we also chose that house because it's Caddy corner
across the street from one of my best friends. I
love the house. It's just home. It's a constant project,
but there's lots of light and lots of trees and
friendly dogs and then albino squirrel. And I know it
(14:26):
sounds like I'm snow white. It's not that ucolic. You know.
Things are constantly breaking, but I love it.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
We'll be right back. Prior to this big hopeful move,
Maggie and her husband are still renting their home in
(14:58):
German Village when Violet is born. After Violet's birth, Maggie
has an extremely difficult time. She doesn't even realize what
plagues her postpartum depression until she has it for the
second time years later.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
I had pretty serious postpartum depression after Violet was born,
and we lived in the house in German Village then,
and I was just a shell of a human being.
I actually cut my maternity leave short because I couldn't
cope anymore. I actually chose to go back and sit
in a cubicle to just have a different kind of
(15:39):
day than I was having with a colicky child feeling
that bad.
Speaker 4 (15:44):
So I wonder, Maggie, you know, is in not knowing,
which I think is so true of people who are
suffering from something that they haven't experienced before. The instinct
is to think it's my baby's colloquy, or I'm impatient,
or there must be something wrong with me that I'm
not handling this better, and not to go to the
(16:06):
place of self compassion of maybe there really is something
going on that isn't my fault.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Yeah, I think that's right. I remember at one point,
and maybe it was my mother or one of my
sisters said, you don't talk about any of this with
any joy. You seem miserable and stressed out. And I mean,
granted I wasn't sleeping, but no parent sleeps, and a
lot of them still seem okay. And it didn't occur
(16:36):
to me that the way I was feeling was any
different from what anyone else was feeling. And one of them,
I remember, said to me, you need to go to
your doctor, like this isn't normal to feel this way,
and I remember saying something like there's no pill for
no sleep and a baby with acid reflux and colic
(16:56):
and a dairy allergy, like that's just my life and
there's nothing that anyone can do to make it any different.
But of course that was me speaking from a place
of not being well. And I know now that no,
those material aspects of my life would not have changed,
and probably if I had taken a bit of something
prescribed to me by a medical professional, I would have
(17:18):
been able to manage those bits better, because I then did.
When my son was.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
Born, and that was also a year of not writing.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
It was a whole year of not writing, and I
think about that, I'm like, well, no wonder I was depressed.
I had a baby. It didn't go the way I
thought it would. I thought, where's my bundle of joy?
This child screams at me all the time. I feel
like screaming all the time, but have the decency not to.
The poems are not happening. My husband is in law school,
(17:51):
and that's very demanding on his time. Even having family support,
even being in a place where I had lots of
people checking on me and coming over, bringing soup and
doing all the things. I couldn't get to a place
where anything was cooking up there for a year.
Speaker 4 (18:10):
Which is a vicious cycle, right, because I think for writers,
for poets, that feeling of It's one of my favorite
quotes from Joan Didion in her essay y I write,
if I had the remotest access to my own mind,
I never would have become a writer.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
I write in order to understand.
Speaker 4 (18:28):
What I think, what I feel, what I fear. And
there's no other path, there's no other way to get
at that. So to be feeling all that and not
have the tool to not be the instrument of being
able to do that kind of work is just a
prescription for disaster.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Yeah, I think about that now. And I'm like, why
wasn't I even journaling through that time? And I really wasn't.
The only writing I think I even have to this
day from that first year are lists, like nerotic lists
of when she slept or didn't sleep, what she ate,
and how much the color of her poop, because this
(19:10):
is what we do with newborns, you know. I just
was sort of like looking for patterns in anything she did,
thinking that if I can just find this pattern that,
like if she eats this and this, then she'll sleep,
if she does this and this, if I do this
then this, looking for some way to make sense of
(19:31):
it all. And it was just lists and charts and
nothing of any import really.
Speaker 4 (19:40):
You know, in reading your book, I was experiencing it
as this kind of slow erosion of identity, of intimacy,
of both intimacy in your marriage but intimacy with yourself.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (19:57):
So there's this, there's this period of which you go
through this postpartum depression. Then you move into the Periwinkle
House and you suffer two miscarriages. Yeah, in trying to
have another child and for Violet to have a sibling.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
Yeah, And of course I didn't know until after my
son was born, and I had postpartum depression again. I thought,
what are the odds? And he was colicky again and
had asked reflux, and I thought, what are the odds
that lightning will strike twice? Surely it will be different
the second time. And it was not. And I only
found out later that, you know, miscarriage is a huge
(20:43):
sort of predisposing condition for postpartum because of course it is.
I mean, being pregnant three times in a year and
a half does pretty wild things to your hormones and
also your grieving and terrified, and so the even the
sort of joy of pregnancy of even finally getting pregnant
(21:05):
and thinking is this going to stick? Is this going
to happen? I never relaxed that entire you know, ten months,
I never relaxed. Every day I woke up and thought,
this is the day. There's not going to be a heartbeat,
this is the day. There's going to be blood, this
is the day. And so it really it changed me
(21:27):
in ways I probably can't even articulate or understand myself.
It made me a very fearful person. I didn't trust
my body, and I didn't trust my mind. You know,
I didn't know what kind of mom I would be
the second time around, because I knew what happened the
(21:48):
first time, and so when rhet was born, it didn't
take very long for things to go downhill. And the
difference was I went to the doctor and it got better.
And that also gave me a little bit of regret
I would say about what didn't happen the first time,
because I thought, God, I didn't have to feel that way.
(22:09):
I didn't have to go through that.
Speaker 4 (22:12):
There's a point where you realize that you become more
mom than wife. And it was also a period. You
didn't write this, but it was my sense that you
became more mom than poet, more mom than Maggie.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
Yes, that became my primary identity. And I think there
are probably people listening who can relate to that sort
of eclipsing of the self that happens, particularly when your
children are small and need you for everything, including food,
like you are the person keeping them alive, and that
(22:51):
kind of daily, ongoing responsibility sort of shoves everything else
into the margins of the page, I suppose, And of
course I think this happens in marriages. You know some
of the and I you know, I think in general
my writing and my children are the greatest blessings of
(23:12):
my life. I feel both of them are sort of
miraculous to me. I in some ways have no idea
how that all happened. I mean, I know how it happened,
but I really in some ways don't. Like these human
beings live here now in my house and have their
own personalities in their own lives, and these pieces of
(23:33):
writing like come to me, like occur to me, and
then grow and unfold, and all of this still seems
very much like magic to me. That the greatest blessings
of my life. And I think they're also the things
that were hardest on my partnership in a lot of ways,
(23:54):
and probably because of the demands on my time right
and not just but bandwidth.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
During these years of young motherhood when Maggie's kids are little,
she has a job as an editor. Her husband is
working long hours as an associate in a law firm.
There's not a lot of time for her real work,
which is writing poems. She writes whenever she can grab
the time, in coffee shops, late at night, in the
school pickup line, the car. One day, when Violet and
(24:29):
Redd are seven and three, Maggie writes a poem titled
good Bones, and that poem changes everything.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
I had a preschooler who was going off to part
time preschool a couple days a week where I could
get a little writing done, and I think I was
in either kindergarten or first grade at that point, so
she was gone all day so I could get a
little bit more done. I was working from home. I
had quit my job and was freelancing, so I was
(25:01):
still working as an editor, but I was doing it
from my house, so as long as Rhett was at preschool,
I had a little bit of space. And that's around
the time that I wrote Good Bones.
Speaker 4 (25:15):
It also strikes me that good Bones, as is true
of other of your poems, is about being a mother.
It was the gift of being a mother meets the
gift of being a poet.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
I couldn't have written that poem without them. Really, anything
I've written since they were born, I couldn't have written
without them, in part because some of it's actually collaborative work,
like they will give me the idea, they will give
me a line of dialogue or a metaphor. But also
they've changed who I am as a person. So the
work that comes out of me since they've been in
(25:49):
the world is work that they made possible, which is
pretty wild to think about.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
Yeah, it is and beautiful.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
Thanks kids, I'll forgive you that colic. Yeah, they're like,
where's our allowance? Where are the residuals? Mom? Good Bones
was published online in June of twenty sixteen. I had
submitted it the year before it was rejected a few places.
A journal named Waxwing picked it up, and then they
(26:22):
did what journals do, which is slated for later publication.
So I don't even think I knew exactly when it
was coming out. It was just like spring or summer
of next year, so I forgot about it. It came
out that week in June, and that was the week
of the Pulse nightclub massacre, and that same week in
(26:45):
England Brexit madness was picking up, and a member of Parliament,
Joe Cox, who was a young mother of young children herself,
was murdered in northern England that same week, and so
the poem was published online, not in a print magazine.
And because it was published online the week that two
(27:07):
terrible things happened and two different continents, people started sharing
it and I it just absolutely caught and took off
in ways that I mean. I was pushing a stroller
around my neighborhood and the BBC was reaching out. I
(27:28):
didn't have an agent, I didn't have media training. I
just had a cell phone, and like a non napping
three year old, I really didn't know what to do
with it. It was the strangest lightning strike still really
of my life.
Speaker 4 (27:48):
And it just kept building and building. At one point,
you're told that Meryl Streep read it at a benefit.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
Yeah. I found that out because my now friend say
Joe tweeted, like, Yo, Maggie, Meryl Streep just read good
Bones at the Academy of American Poets gala at Lincoln Center.
And I had walked into my house and looked at
my phone and thought, I'm sorry, who did what? I'm
(28:17):
sure actually that was a lot more colorful language that
was used, but I was like, I'm sorry, my words
were in MARYL. Streep's perfect mouth, in that voice. I
mean again, I'm a poet, working a regular job, parenting
two kids, living in Central Ohio. Like, I just can't
(28:40):
stress enough how outside of the literary world I felt
it was incredibly bizarre and then it was on Madam's Secretary, Right, Yeah,
I mean.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
It was just it took on a life of its own.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
It took on a life of its own, and I
would meet people and they would say, oh my gosh,
I love your poem, and I had the sense not
to say which one, but it became. I mean, I
joke now that it's hard to give a reading and
not read Good Bones because it's kind of my free bird. Right.
Speaker 4 (29:17):
What was it like in your marriage during that time?
You do at one point write that your marriage was
never the same after that, meaning after the viral sensation
of Good Bones.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Yeah, that poem changed my life in both beautiful and
terrible ways, which is funny because the poem itself is
about the world being sort of equal parts beautiful and terrible,
and the impact that that poem had on my life
was equal parts beautiful and terrible.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
It had a.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Beautiful impact on my writing life and a pretty terrible
impact on my personal life. Maybe it's just that the
sudden attention and the sort of invitation or opportunity to
lean into my writing life and to spend more time
on writing, and maybe that was the crux. You know,
(30:13):
suddenly I can come to a book festival. Suddenly I'm
getting invited to go to a university to give a
reading or teach for a week someplace. Suddenly I had
a lecture agent, you know, who would help get me
speaking engagements or send me around the country or the
world to get to be a writer in the world,
(30:34):
not just at my local Starbucks between naps. It was
such a blessing, but it also meant as a primary caregiver,
not being available all the time, right, and needing to
kind of recalibrate some things in my relationship to say, like, hey, okay,
kind of like my mom was a stay at home
mom for a while, right, and then eventually she went
(30:56):
back to work. But she did that by choice because
we weren't sort of in her hair as much anymore.
I still had at least one child who was very
young at the time and who was not in full
time daycare, and so getting away was a lot of
a kind of a logistical nightmare for me Personally.
Speaker 4 (31:17):
You were going to be the primary caregiver and write
your poems on the side, and you know, this was
sort of the shape of your life that suddenly got disrupted.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Yeah, this wasn't the deal, right, This wasn't the deal,
Like the deal was one of us goes to work
and the other one works but also manages the children.
And if that's not happening, then that's not the deal.
And I think that's part of the strain. And yet
when I think about it, if I'm really honest with
(31:51):
myself and I do try, I do try to be
I think, Okay, well, what if I had traveled for
pharmaceutical sales. What if it had been incredibly lucrative, which frankly,
poetry isn't. What if it had taken me out of
my home on a regular basis but had nothing to
do with art making, had nothing to do with writing,
(32:14):
It had nothing to do with like being on stage
or signing books or doing anything that seemed fun or
attention seeking. Maybe it still would have been a problem
because it would have been an inconvenience that I don't
think it would have been the same kind of problem.
I think it was the perfect storm of a dream
being realized and not being able to sort of hold
(32:38):
up my end of the bargain quote unquote as far
as how much caregiving I could do on a daily basis.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
(33:10):
Maggie's husband isn't prepared to do some of the caretaking
without her. Once, when she's at a book festival, he
calls to tell her she needs to come home. Rhet
has a fever. Maggie, more mom than poet, tries to
get a last minute flight home, but she can't. Her
husband is left to muddle through this one on his own.
(33:31):
This is just one instance in which the rift between
Maggie and her husband deepens. Something's in the air, something's
not right. A while later, when Maggie is back home,
her family is asleep and she's awake. Downstairs, she sees
her husband's briefcase just sitting there. He's just come home
(33:52):
from a business trip. She's never done this before, but
something tells her to go over to that briefcase and
take a look, so she does.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
I hate that I did that. It's hard to admit
that you snooped into someone else's personal belongings that didn't
belong to you. Although I don't know, I suppose if
I had an open bag in my house, which I
often do now, my kids would probably be rifling through
it for gum or post it notes. Or something. So
(34:26):
maybe there's not quite the expectation of privacy in a
home where you have stuff lying around all the time.
Speaker 4 (34:33):
But you know what, snooping makes such an appearance on
this podcast.
Speaker 3 (34:39):
In so many as in life.
Speaker 4 (34:42):
So many episodes, to the point where I had to
at a certain point thing to myself, why is this
constantly coming up? Does everyone just simply snoop?
Speaker 1 (34:51):
Do?
Speaker 3 (34:52):
Is it to snoop? You know, to be human as
to snoop?
Speaker 4 (34:55):
I actually think when there is a secret that's somewhere
in in the atmosphere, that's lurking somewhere, we know it
without being able to sink it, and it's almost a
self protective thing to do. I'm not going to find
(35:16):
this out, this thing that I don't even know what
it is. I just know that there's something that I
need to know, and that seems to be the impulse.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
Yeah, I mean it's sort of like Spidey sense, you know,
like there's just some kind of prickle that tells you
something's off. Like I don't know what it is, but
something feels off, and likely there's no answer to the
offness in this bag, but it's here, So I'm going
to look and see if there's an answer to the offness.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
There was, and there was.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
There was an answer to the offness in the bag.
Speaker 3 (35:52):
So what did you find in the bag?
Speaker 1 (35:53):
I found a postcard addressed to a woman's name with
an address, so it had not been sent, like it
was ready to mail, but it had not been sent
in my husband's handwriting, addressed to a woman's name in
the place he had just visited and had been visiting
(36:14):
frequently for work. And then I kept looking because I thought, well,
maybe there's more glutton for punishment. And I do this.
I keep a book in my bag. I like to
have a notebook, and so did he. And so I
opened the blank book and sort of flipping through the pages,
(36:37):
and I flipped to the last entry and read basically
a kind of journal entry about taking a walk with
this particular person and being in her house. And so
I thought, okay, this is actually happening. And at first
I was telling myself, maybe these are ideas for like
(36:58):
a piece of writing, you know, like maybe it's a
novel start or a play, or this is a short story.
Of course it was not a short story.
Speaker 4 (37:11):
And there was also a pine cone that he had
brought back with him for your kids.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Yeah, so Rhet likes to collect nature treasures. So on
his last business trip, he had brought a pine cone
home as a souvenir, and the postcard and the entry
both referenced the pine cone, and so then I knew
that the pine cone was actually something picked up with
this other individual and then brought home to our house.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
So in that moment, what did it feel like in
your body?
Speaker 1 (37:48):
I don't know that I was in my body. Honestly,
I have such a hazy recollection. I mean I remember
standing there, I remember finding it, I remember going upstairs
like I have almost sort of polaroid or you know,
like flashes, almost like jump cuts in a film, but
nothing I could actually stitch together. And I'm sure that
(38:10):
is just protective, like we're just not gonna catalog all
of that in great detail for reasons that make perfect sense.
Speaker 4 (38:20):
So in that state, you went upstairs and you woke
him up, and.
Speaker 3 (38:28):
What did you share with him in that moment?
Speaker 1 (38:31):
I think I just yelled something like who is fill
in name on postcard? I brought up the postcard that night,
but did not tell him that I had looked in
the notebook, in part because I just really what I
wanted was for him to tell me the truth. And
so I kind of held that back and thought, i'll
(38:53):
know if he's telling me the truth if he discloses,
because now I can ask questions based on what I
know from these page and if he doesn't tell me
the truth, I'll know. I mean, I watch a lot
of true crime, so I just thought, now i'll know,
like I'm going to know if I'm being if there's
some gas lighting here, if there's some something else going
(39:15):
on here. And so I didn't bring up the journal,
and he didn't bring up the journal, and so then
I just thought, you know, we'll get to that eventually.
But the next day I did the same thing. I
repeated my actions. I went back into the bag. The
postcard was gone. Who knows, maybe it was mailed. I
really don't know. I don't know whatever happened to that.
(39:37):
And when I opened the pages of the journal, I
flipped to the last entry, and the pages were gone,
like you could see where there had been pages, and
they had been not ripped out, but like surgically removed,
like with the exact o knife.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
Now it's Maggie who is keeping a secret. She doesn't
tell her husband she's seen those pages that she knows,
she doesn't say anything at all. The temperature at home
is chili. Whenever they do communicate, it's about the kids.
They go to couple's therapy, but even there they refrain
(40:15):
from talking about the enormous elephant in the room. Maggie
does not tell the couple's therapist what she's found out.
This might be the most logical space for an issue
like this to surface, but still it remains buried. Instead,
with their therapist, they discuss all the rudimentary baseline marital tension,
(40:35):
which Maggie's husband believes to be effectively her fault.
Speaker 1 (40:42):
We go to counseling because I found these things. And
then in counseling we talk about that he's unhappy because
my career is taking up too much space, and I
don't bring up the fact that we're actually there for
this other reason, and we don't talk about it at all.
Speaker 3 (41:00):
So what really struck me about that?
Speaker 1 (41:02):
I'm asking because I'm just like, that's absurd.
Speaker 4 (41:05):
Like the doubleness of the secret keeping here. So you
discover a secret in the form of this postcard and
this journal entry, and then you keep the secret your husband,
and you don't speak about it. You don't tell your mother,
who you're very close to, You barely tell any friends.
(41:26):
You certainly don't tell your children, and you don't tell
the therapist. No, what were you waiting for? Or maybe
another way of putting it is, when we don't speak
of something of that magnitude, usually thrumbing underneath that is.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
Fear. Fear. Yeah, I think I was trying to keep
it intact, and so if I didn't tell my mother
what was going on, then she would never find out
what had happened. And therefore, when I I fixed it,
because I could fix it, I could fix it and
then she'd never have to know and it would never
(42:06):
affect their relationship. Because I really thought I could fix
it by fixing my own behavior. And if I fixed
it by fixing my own behavior, then no one would
ever have to know, and it wouldn't ripple, and we
could just go back to life being fine, and then
no one would have any hard feelings or ill will.
(42:28):
I didn't tell the counselor because I thought it would
anger him, my ex husband. I just remember thinking, I
feel like I'm holding this live grenade of all of
this knowledge, and if I speak up, it's like pulling
the pin.
Speaker 3 (42:49):
And if I just.
Speaker 1 (42:50):
Stay small and be as agreeable as possible, it breaks
my heart to say it now, Like if I just
make myself very sack small and acquiesced it as much
as humanly possible and basically bargain away everything that feels
essential to me as a human being, then maybe we
(43:11):
can make it work and then no one has to know.
Speaker 4 (43:14):
But the thing about secrets is they won't stay. No,
they won't. Another guest on the podcast said something that
I thought was just so perfect about what it is
to keep a secret, which is when you bury a secret,
you bury it alive, right, And this thing was alive
and wasn't going to go away.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
No it was not. I mean I did get to
a point where eventually I realized that all of the
acquiescing wasn't getting me anywhere, Like it wasn't actually like
canceling speaking engagements and agreeing not to travel and being
kind and cooking meals and taking the kids out like
it didn't matter. I could be the sort of best
(43:56):
version of myself, or not the best version of myself,
but the best version of myself. I thought that he wanted,
and it actually didn't change his behavior toward me, And
so I thought, why am I doing all of this
for nothing? Like it just feels pointless. And it struck
(44:16):
me eventually that it wasn't going to be enough. And
I think I also came around to the idea that
if your partner would happily let you let go of
things that matter a lot to you, then probably it's
not worth salvaging anyway. And so I talked to my
mom and then finally I just unloaded one day and
(44:41):
counseling and just said, by the way, I don't know
why we're this is a total charade.
Speaker 3 (44:47):
That therapist must have been dumbfounded.
Speaker 1 (44:49):
Why have you been coming in here for months taking
the blame and acting like it's all about that you're
not enough of a stay at home parent.
Speaker 2 (44:59):
That the charade is over and done with, so is
the marriage. After a lengthy separation, Maggie's soon to be
ex husband moves in with the address see of the postcard.
He communicates with Maggie only by email updates. In one
of these, he lets her know that he will be
moving five hundred miles away.
Speaker 4 (45:23):
This is so much a story of the coming hole
and these sharp fragments and this sort of puzzle like
structure of trying to come to an understanding of what happened.
My friend Andrea Debuse a bunch of years ago, Andrea
(45:45):
is talking about memoir, and he said, the question in
memoir is not what happened. The question in memoir is
what the fuck happened?
Speaker 1 (45:57):
I like him already.
Speaker 4 (45:58):
Yeah, And you're asking yourself that question, right, And in
asking yourself that question again and again, you're doing the
hard and profound work of knitting together all of yourselves
over time. This is the work that we all have
to do. Hopefully we do it, you know, until we
(46:18):
take our last breath. Is we're reconciling ourselves with all
of the different selves we've ever been. So that twenty
year old who met that, you know, that young woman
who wanted to replicate her life, and then the woman
that you became, and the mother and the wife, and
the poet and the grown ass woman you know who's
(46:39):
actually just putting together a life of meaning. And there's
so much in this book about making meaning that I
think is really extraordinary.
Speaker 2 (46:51):
Here's Maddie reading one of her poems. This one is
titled Bride.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
How long have I been wed to myself? Calling myself darling,
dressing for my own pleasure each morning, choosing perfume to
turn me on? How long have I been alone in
this house? But not alone? Married less to the man
(47:21):
than to the woman silvering with the mirror. I know
the kind of wife I need, and I become her,
the one who will leave this earth. At the same
instant I do, I am my own bride. Lifting the
veil to see my face, Darling, I say, I have
(47:45):
waited for you all my life.
Speaker 3 (47:49):
Thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zacre is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
This episode was recorded in front of a live audience
at the Miami Book Fair. The interview was engineered by
Mitch Mormon. If you have a family secret you'd like
to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story
could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is one
(48:30):
eight eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You
can also find me on Instagram at Danny Rider. And
if you'd like to know more about the story that
inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 4 (48:59):
For more podcasts us from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
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Dani Shapiro
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
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