April 20, 2023 • 67 mins
In this special bonus episode, the tables are turned as veteran journalist and podcast host Kimi Culp interviews Dani about her own family history and the secret at its core.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Well, here's something special I promised you all a while
back in our final bonus episode before the eighth season
of Family Secrets launches in just a few weeks. The
tables are turned, and today I'm the guest. The wonderful
Kimmy Cope, writer, motivational speaker, former OPRAH producer and host
(00:26):
of the podcast All the Wiser is sitting in my
seat today and asking all the questions about my family Secrets.
I hope you enjoy our conversation. I'm Danny Shapiro and
this is family Secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
(00:47):
keep from ourselves.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Hello Danny, Welcome to Family Secrets.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Hi Kimmy, It's nice to be on Family Secrets.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yes, yes, familiar territory for you. My intention for this
conversation is really for this beautiful community you have built,
your listening audience to know you a little deeper and yeah,
hopefully find some pieces of themselves in stories that perhaps
will here for the first time. And the origin story
(01:22):
of Family Secrets in this podcast was you as a secret.
And I know so many of your listeners are familiar,
but for anyone who's listening and does not know that
story of the life changing secret that you learned in
twenty sixteen, can you briefly share?
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Yeah? Absolutely so.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
In twenty sixteen, my husband Michael was sending away for
a DNA test, a home DNA test, and he asked
me if I wanted to do it too, and I just,
on a whim, said sure. It wasn't out of any
real curiosity or you know, I could easily have said no,
because I thought I knew everything that there was to
(02:05):
know about my family and its ancestry and my origins,
my ancestors.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
But I went ahead and did it.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
And when the results came back, I actually didn't even
remember that I had done it, That's how insignificant it
was to me. The results revealed to me that my
dad hadn't been my biological father, the dad who raised me,
and I.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
Learned a lot.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
I uncovered a great deal about secrets that my parents
kept all their lives that I feel certain they intended
to take to the grave with them, which they did
after a lifetime of writing a bad secrets, or writing
novels and memoirs of bad secrets, and always also feeling
(02:47):
like something didn't totally add up, just something I felt
slightly adjacent to myself. Somehow it all suddenly became.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Clear, and you described, you know, growing up having this
really easy love for your father and just this deep adoration,
where your mother was more distant at times, it was
much more contentious. And you had even pondered that question,
you know, is she my mom? Does she feel like
(03:19):
my mom? I'm curious sort of, you know, you've described
a sense of loneliness as a kid, wandering around the neighborhood,
peering in windows, looking at families, large families with siblings,
and so I know you were an only child, and
I'm curious about Danny in the outer world versus your
(03:45):
inner world and what that was like during that time.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
So Danny in the outer world apparently looked like she belonged.
People who I've enco it over the years, who knew
me when I was a kid, are really shocked to
learn how out of step I felt. And you know
that I didn't feel that I belonged. You know, people
(04:11):
I went to middle school with, people I went to
high school with, all really professed shock about that, because
I guess I had a kind of contained nature and
I sort of looked to the part, but I felt
really like a creature visiting from outer space. A lot
of the time, I didn't feel like people really knew me,
(04:34):
or that I really knew myself in many ways, and
the environment of my home was so awkward and uncomfortable.
One of the things I've really learned on you know,
hosting this podcast is that what we experience as children,
(04:54):
whatever the environment is of our home, we just think
that that's the way it is, and that's normal, and
maybe that's the way everybody lives. At a certain point,
when I was probably in high school, I started realizing
that that wasn't the case, and that the atmosphere in
our home was markedly different from you know, my friends
(05:17):
whose homes I would visit. It felt to me, and
I think this has to do with my own extreme sensitivity,
you know, just too behavior and tone and actions of others.
It felt to me like it was a tinder box.
It felt like it was always ready to just sort
(05:39):
of explode. My parents were miserable with each other, and
there was something in the way that each of them
was with me, very different in the way that they
treated me, But there was something that just didn't feel
easy or comfortable.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
You know, as we have this conversation, I've thought a
lot about how your present work, this podcast included is
deeply informed by your past. I think all of our
work is. But I also from hearing you and how
you talk about your son Jacob and your husband Michael,
(06:17):
the deep love and connection that I hear in the
family you've created. You know, I think so often in
generational stories, we either repeat, or for lack of a
better language, we write the wrong and create something very different.
And that appears to me that you very much created that.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
It certainly feels to me like the greatest achievement of
my life that I didn't repeat and that I did
create something different. And I do think that probably from
the time that I was a teenager, I was forming
myself in counter identification to my mom. I understood that
(06:57):
she was somebody who very often put people off, chronically
felt misunderstood, was very angry a lot of the time,
this kind of just simmering, low level, ready to be
dissed at the slightest notice. You know, the world had
something against her in her mind, and she sort of
(07:18):
built the life that she saw in a way like
she felt that way about the world, and so the
world reflected that back at her. And you know, I'm
not trying to throw her under the bus. I have
a lot more understanding of her now than I did
when I was younger. But as a mother, she wanted
me to be a certain way, and if I didn't
(07:43):
conform to the way that she wanted me to be,
which was essentially a reflection of her, then there was
trouble if I couldn't do that.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
And I'm sure and then for you it then said
not enough and not enough for her right.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
And something that's occurred to me recently, I've been thinking
a lot about my father. The anniversary of his death
was just last week, and always a time where he's
very much on my mind. And because of his religiosity,
I mean, it was really the defining characteristic of my
father was that he was an Orthodox Jew. It's how
he would have defined himself, I think, before any other
(08:18):
way of defining himself. It was the landscape that he
was brought up in, and you know, there were generations
preceding him, you know, where that was the way they lived.
And in order to please my father, I think my
father would have loved me no matter what because he
knew how to love, which was something that I think
(08:40):
saved me in a lot of ways. But in terms
of his approval, I had a really hard time being
a good little Orthodox Jewish girl. If you had asked me,
I think even when I was like a child, whether
I thought that I would grow up and marry an
Orthodox man and you know, have a whole bunch of
Orthodox children and live that life, I think I would
(09:01):
have known from a very early age that that wasn't
going to be my path. And that was really problematic
between my father and me, because that was the most
important thing to him. So in a way I was
sort of squeezed between both of my parents and failing
them each with my mother because I was unable to
be her perfect mirror, and with my father because I
(09:24):
just wasn't that Orthodox Jewish girl.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
That makes so much sense to me. And yeah, this
idea of just the radical acceptance for you exactly as
who you are and who you came into this world.
So you mentioned being the anniversary of your father's death,
and you know, as I research and as I told you,
(09:49):
it's been such a joy and privilege to learn about
you through your work. I see these sort of tempole
moments in your life, and some of them are of
deep suffering and trauma, and certainly the loss of your father.
Your parents were in a car crash that killed your dad,
(10:10):
and your mom survived. So for what you're comfortable sharing,
what do you remember about that period, about that day
and sort of how it shaped you.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
That day I've described in my writing as the moment
that divided my life into before and after. And when
I wrote those words, I was probably in my thirties
and I was writing about my twenties. I was writing about,
you know, February nineteen eighty six, and I was young
enough to not understand that lives contain more than one
of these before and after moments if we live long enough.
(10:47):
But for me, that was the first, and a huge one.
I just want to preface what I'm about to say
with I've been very aware lately that I recently had
a big birthday and I turned sixty, which is still
a complete shock to me. It was, you know, it
was a big milestone birthday, and I entered the decade
(11:12):
that my father died in. He was sixty four years
old when he died, and My mother was sixty two
when she was widowed, and my son is twenty three,
which is the age I was when all of this happened,
and I suddenly realized all of that recently that.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Wow, yeah, of all the ages and the pieces and.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
Exactly like the perfect storm of that. And on family
secrets it comes up often the whole idea of anniversaries
and the anniversary of a loss through the anniversary of
a shock. And you know, it's easy, I think to
dismiss what that is, but the body remembers always, you know.
So I might not remember on February twenty third of
(11:55):
any given year that it's February twenty third, but my
body remembers. I mean, I'll be out of sorts all
day and then suddenly I'll realize what the date is
and understand, you know, or I'll remember what the weather
was like on that particular February day. So the main
thing about that day and that time is that I
(12:15):
was such a mess in my life. And also looking
at my twenty three year old son now and seeing
that he is not a mess, you know that he
knows who he is, and he has courage of his
own convictions and he's his own person. I wasn't that yet.
I was really kind of unformed.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
You know.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
When I started teaching university, when I was around twenty
nine or thirty years old, I remember looking around the
workshop table I was teaching at Columbia University, and I
looked around the table at these young women, these young
Barnard and Columbia women, and I could identify. It was
like this little game I played in my head, you know,
the ones who never have let themselves get into so
(13:04):
much trouble or never would have sort of like followed
the path that I followed, and then the ones who
would I could feel and see and pick them out,
you know, and tried to mentor the ones I thought
I could help.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
But I had dropped out of college.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
I was modeling and acting and doing TV commercials, or
at least that's what I told myself I was doing.
I did that for a while, but I was terrible
at it.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
If I was going to cast you for anything in life,
knowing your deep soul and commercials, I love that.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Commercials like you know, for Coca Cola, you know, for
York peppermint patties. I actually had to like jump up
and down on a beach and say California loved New
York with more chocolate. I mean, I was terrible and
uncomfortable in my own skin and awkward. But because again
(14:01):
going back to sort of mirroring my mother, a big
part of the fuss that was made over me when
I was growing up was the way that I looked
and that I was a pretty little girl and I
was a pretty teenager, and I kind of just went
with that. I thought, well, I guess that's what I
have to offer. I don't want to sound like I'm
blaming anybody, because I'm not. Like I had a lot
(14:22):
of longing for other things, but I didn't know.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Well, maybe that's the disconnect I just felt, because I
know you right for your brilliant mind, and so much
of that work is on the physical appearance, especially when
you're young and youthful, and yeah, that's so interesting. You know,
this expectation that you were beautiful and that people identified
(14:45):
you with that, and it's perhaps there was some unconscious
expectation around that to do something with that physical beauty.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Mm hm. Well, and that was complicated by the fact
that that focus on my looks had a lot to
do with my not looking to Iwish quote unquote, you
know that that's what people were constantly, constantly saying, And
so really what they were saying was that I didn't
look like who I thought I was, or like my
physical appearance was some sort of crazy, weird gift, like
(15:15):
some sort of nutty fluke, that I looked the way
that I looked, and I didn't look like my family,
and instead I was, you know, very fair and had
blue eyes and features. It just didn't look like, you know,
anybody that I was surrounded by. So I think somewhere
within that there was this hard kernel of confusion.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
You've described as inner knowing, which I think when I
hear you talk about it, it feels so relevant and
real to me as I look back on my life,
and you know, part of it, as you share, is
was your physical appearance almost this whisper of your heart. Right,
(15:55):
something's off and that subconscious knowing, and you've described with
the discovery that your father was not your biological father,
that it was almost as if the puzzle piece it
all came into focus, all that little subconju the whisper
of the heart and the mind. So yeah, I'm deeply
(16:17):
curious about that and what your heart was saying to
your mind.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
I think that's that's where that disconnect that didn't enable
me to really come to know myself when I was younger.
I think that that's where it resided, because there was
this feeling that I didn't belong and I didn't know.
(16:45):
Why in the world would I feel that way? Why
would I feel that way? I mean, I was the
ultimate insider in terms of, you know, the Jewish world.
My family had a lot of prestige in that world.
My ancestors on my dad's side were just storied, legendary people. Well,
why in the world would I feel like I didn't belong?
Why would I go to a wedding or a bar
mitzvah in my family and feel that I did not belong?
(17:09):
Why were people constantly commenting in some sort of what
was meant to be flattering way about my not looking Jewish,
my not looking like where I come from. I mean,
underneath that, I must have been hearing you're not one
of us. What would happen is I would double down.
Anytime somebody would say something like that to me, I
would nicely bite back and I would say, oh, yeah, no,
(17:32):
raised Orthodox, you know, went to a yeshiva, a Jewish
day school, you know, kept a kosher home, never tasted
bacon until I was a senior in high school. Had
two sinks and two dishwashers. I mean really seriously kosher home,
fluent in Hebrew. I would say all these things, like
list them like a litany, which was my way of
saying stop it, you know, stop it. Stop saying that.
(17:54):
And after my discovery about my dad, a couple of
years later, I was at a dinner, a big awards
dinner that was honoring a friend of mine, and it
was in the Jewish world. It was like sponsored by
one of the Jewish newspapers, and I was there to
you know, congratulate and cheer on my friend. My husband
(18:16):
and I got there. It was a you know, fancy
cocktail party attire, and it was in one of those
old New York City hotels that has kind of cloudy
glass behind the bar and like sort of modeled glass mirror.
And I went over to the bar to get a drink,
and I caught a glimpse of myself, you know, unexpectedly,
and I was wearing a little black dress and had
long blonde hair, and I looked the way I looked,
(18:39):
and all of a sudden, I thought, oh, that this
is what they were seeing. I mean, in this room,
everyone would assume that I'm the wife of a Jewish
man who's here, or they would have a story. It
was plain as day.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
But I.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
Didn't see it, couldn't see it. It was too dangerous
to see it. We believe what our parents tell us.
We believe the stories that were told about ourselves from
the time that were tiny, and those become our identities.
And that was my identity, you know, when Inheritance came out,
you know, which is the books that I wrote about
this discovery and the secret. One of the first comments
(19:23):
I saw was on my Facebook page, and it was
from the wife of my seventh grade English teacher who
I was friends with. Them. They were like one of
those young, cool, young English teacher couples in high school.
And I was always looking for my mentors. I was
always looking for like somebody to take me in like
a stray dog and just you know, make me part
(19:44):
of their family. And this couple, Peter and Nancy Cowan,
they were like that for me. And Nancy wrote on
my Facebook page hashtag always wondered, you know, only child,
older parents, physically so different from what I was supposed
to look like and what my ethnicy he was supposed
to be, so hashtag always wondered. So there was a
part of me that was working, over time, always to
(20:07):
try to figure out to belong. Yeah, I think there
was a kind of profound anxiety that I couldn't recognize
or label. I mean, I was well into my twenties
before I even could define the word anxiety. But it
ruled me, and it shaped that feeling of not belonging,
(20:28):
not fitting in, not adding up being other. When that's
the case and we can't supply a reason for it,
then we turn it against ourselves. And that was the
story of you know, I would call those sort of
almost lost decades of my life. I mean, from the
time that I was a child, through my adolescence and
(20:50):
into my early twenties and culminated with a thunderclap and
ended for all intents and purposes when my parents were
in their car crash and my dad died, and it
was a shock to my system that actually rebooted my system,
(21:10):
you know, sort of reshaped my system, and was the
very very beginning of my figuring out who I had
always been but had never allowed myself to be.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
Well, Yeah, and I the deep wounds and the reconciliation
of your identity of belonging with the discovery that your
father was not your biological father, It makes so so
much sense, How much when you can textualize it with
(21:43):
the decades before and the knowing, It just really to
me just almost highlights how powerful and layered the wave
of emotions must have been with the discovery. And you know,
there's something that in the wake of that discovery about
(22:04):
your family and your identity. You talk about you had
a flight the next day that you're on the plane
and you're sort of looking around and people are eating
pretzels and peanuts and going about their business, and in
your body, you were in crisis, almost looking around, How
(22:25):
is how is everyone just going about their business. I
had lunch with my mother in law days after her
husband died, and I remember her having that experience. She
turned to me and she said, it's just so bizarre.
You know, people were going about having and meanwhile she
is sitting there experienced this wave of disbelief and grief
(22:48):
and heartbreak that is unbearable in the world is just
moving by. So that scene was really powerful for me.
But what you spoke to, which I think is really
important to this community, is that the specific discovery about
your father was unrelatable and unrecognizable to people. Whereas the
death of your father, the car crash, some of these
(23:10):
other moments you've had in life. When Jacob was sick
are immediately there's the sense of empathy and understanding. But
this certain piece discovery that was heartbreaking to you was
harder for people to grasp, to empathize with, to identify
or understand. And you know, for a podcast that is
(23:33):
about secrets of all shapes and forms, and you know,
the nuance of what a secret can be. I just
thought it would be great to hear what was helpful
and what was not, so as we moved through the
world and people share their secrets, we can show up
better for them.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
I love that.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Yeah, I mean, there's so much I've learned along the
way in this regard that feeling of you know, happen
to be your peanuts And watching the in Flight movie,
the thought that went through my mind is that is
the experience of grief, of immediate grief is you know,
how can the world still be turning? And there are
so many ways in which I think we as human beings,
(24:16):
we want to make it better for someone who's going
through something, and if it makes us uncomfortable, we tend
to fall prey to platitudes. I mean, we do that
even with things that are relatable, like grief, like the
loss of somebody like you know, death, will you know
say things like you know she's in a better place,
(24:38):
or we tend to often say something that's easy, that
doesn't cost us very much, just to actually deal with
our own discomfort that somebody else is suffering. And you know,
one of the things that happened with my discovery and
I thought about it even really early on too, because
(24:59):
I know, I knew that I was going to write
about it. I was aware that it was not instantly relatable,
as you say, to feel sympathy or compassion for somebody
who's lost someone very close to them is not a stretch.
But this felt and I realized very quickly because I
started almost immediately, I sprang into action, which is it
(25:20):
tends to be my way when something's really hard, is
I kind of go into fix it mode or research mode,
or what can I do. And in that case, as
we were moving through airports, and because of where we live,
we had to make connecting flights, so you know, there
were planes, there were airports, there were terminals, there was Starbucks,
(25:41):
there was you know, there are hours to sort of
observe people and also to talk to people. And I
remember calling one of my aunts, my mother's older brother's wife,
and I was calling them because I was trying to
figure out whether anybody had ever known anything, you know,
had my parents told anyone? How big a secret was this?
Was this a secret that everybody was keeping and I
(26:03):
was the only person who didn't know or did everybody
not know? And did they not have that you know
hashtag always wondered experience. And on the phone this happened
as well with my mother's best friend, who I called,
said you know, well, you know, whatever happened, Danny, your
father still your father. And that was profoundly not helpful.
(26:25):
I ultimately, over the course of years and a tremendous
amount of thought and work and questioning and living with
it and metabolizing and processing, absolutely feel that my father
is still my father. But on the day, you know,
within twenty four hours of discovering that in fact he
was not. In point of fact, there was somebody else
(26:49):
out there in the world who was my biological father
that was a total stranger to me, and I had
no idea that that had been the case until that day.
That's not a helpful thing to hear. It made me enraged.
I felt just absolute rage at the don't try to
fix this for me right now. I'm trying to understand
(27:09):
everything that I can possibly come to understand.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Well, what you say which is so powerful is this
idea that we're sure about the past, or at least
reasonably sure, and uncertain about the future, and that when
you're past became completely uncertain, how disabling and wobbly, that
(27:36):
nothingness almost on both sides, And again the reckoning and
the knowing that in a whisper becoming real and proof.
Then you're absolutely right. It's people's own discomfort with pain
and suffering that we so often can't just sit with
someone in it. But the idea of acceptance, you know,
(28:01):
I see how hard this is. This is painful versus
oh you're still you know, you're still part of the family,
or everything worked out fine, right, This missive of that
extraordinary grief and confusion and uncertainty and trauma that you
were experiencing. It's minimizing something that was really significant.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
I learned so much about human nature through that experience,
and then through the writing of Inheritance and then the
publishing of Inheritance, which meant that I was having many,
many conversations with people, and you know, and everybody had
different opinions, and the world really divided between people. Fortunately,
most people who sat back and thought, huh, what would
(28:44):
that be like? Let me see if I can imagine
what it would be like to wake up one day
and discover that everything that I had believed, my entire history,
my memories, all need to be reordered now, and there's
no one to ask about it. There's no one My
(29:06):
parents were both gone. There was no one to sit
down and say what happened? And why didn't you tell me?
And how did you feel about it? And did it
matter to you? And was this always hard or did
you forget it ever happened, just you know, to have
that conversation. I think that in writing Inheritance, which was
(29:26):
the hardest books that I've ever written, I had to
stay conscious as a writer about the universality. I had
to constantly ask myself the question, what is universal about
my experience? How can I invite the reader into my
experience in a way that the reader's going to understand?
(29:47):
And as a writer, and as somebody who had written
a whole bunch of books prior, I was able to
really focus on doing that as a writer.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
How painful was the dismissal When it was.
Speaker 3 (29:59):
This, Oh, it still happens.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
People will say something like, you know, what's the big deal?
Or you know, they'll somehow turn the volume up on
the privilege argument, which is like, look at everything that
you have. You know, you got great genes, you know,
you're so fortunate. Are you glad you're here? That sort
of thing. I what I experienced that as is very
(30:24):
wounding because what it boils down to is not being seen,
not being seen, not being understood.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
You know.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
I always begin my Family Secrets episodes with asking my
guests to tell me about the landscape of their childhood.
That was the landscape of my childhood. My hair could
have been on fire, and I could have been, you know,
walking on my hands, and nobody would have noticed. And
so I think when those moments come up or someone
will say to me as happened recently, someone told me
(30:57):
that they have a grown child who was conceived using
a donor and that they have never told that child
and asked me what I.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
Thought they should do. And it gets very tricky.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
For me because I almost feel like I'm having a
conversation with my own mother when somebody says something like
that to me. And I do have very strong opinions
about the corrosive power of secrets. And look, I understand
why my parents didn't tell me, and I am very
happy to be here.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
I really love my life.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
And even when I didn't love my life and was
feeling sort of like a just like an alien, as
a result of this discovery, I would look at my son,
who's just this magnificent person, and I would think, without
any of this, you wouldn't be here. You change one
single thing about any of this, you would not exist.
So I'm very happy that everything happened exactly the way
(31:50):
it happened. I understand that my parents couldn't tell me
because no one in that generation did.
Speaker 3 (31:58):
No one.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
You know, we live in a culture and in a
society that so badly wants to put everything into its
basket and have everything like remain in its lane. And
once that is the ground that you spring from. Once
there is that wound, there always is that wound. Closure
is a myth, healing is incomplete. There are always scars.
(32:24):
When my son was little, we used to play this
game Shoots and Ladders, and you know, you're kind of
moving your little piece along on the on the board
and then you know, you roll the dice and you
you hit a certain square and it's a shoot, and
all of a sudden, you were on that square. Youre
in the you were in the present, you were making
progress on the path, and boom, you're back down to
(32:46):
like where you began. And sometimes there's a ladder and
you get to climb up. I feel like that's a
metaphor for what we commonly, you know, and probably over
use the term triggering, Like something will trigger that feeling,
that very solitary, lonely, not being seen, not being understood feeling.
(33:10):
And even though I'm sixty years old and even though
I have this big, rich, wonderful life, I can be
brought right back there.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
Yeah, And the intensity of it, because as you said,
your body remembers, so it's so amplified because of that,
the intensity and the amplification because of the history and
the wiring of the story in your body.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
Right, and it remains as alive as it's ever been.
I mean, you know Besil vander Kulk, who was a
guest in a bonus episode of Family Secrets a while back.
You know, the body keeps the score. I mean, it's
one of the great titles of all time. I mean,
the body does keep the score. And no amount of
knowledge or intellectualizing.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
Or meditating or lemon juice at.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
All, meditation, lemon juice, yoga therapy, talk therapy, you know,
cognitive behavioral therapy, e MDR. You know, it all helps,
but it's never going to make it go away.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
And and that's okay.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
I really feel like to have that go away would
actually be what would what would that even mean? It
would be like I'd be like sort of amputating a
part of myself that that lived, you know, that lived
that story.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
Yeah. And the work is the softening of it, right,
not the eradication exactly exactly.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
I love that word soften and I think about it
a lot and try to sort of model it in
my life, that that feeling of yoga teacher friend of mine,
Elena Brower, once said to me as I was getting
ready to go on book tour, and I pulled my back,
you know, like picking my suitcase off my bed. And
I called her, because she travels all the time, and said,
(34:55):
how do you do it? And she said, move softly
through the world. And I constantly it's like a mantra.
I think about that when I'm moving through the world,
when I'm having an off day, just move softly, just
you know, be gentle with yourself.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
We'll be right.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
Back in thinking about the discovery of you, you being
the secret, as you have said, and eventually that you
would meet your biological father, and that as a result,
you would create a podcast called Family Secrets, which would
(35:34):
reach millions of people around the world. And I can
only imagine the ripple effect of the families and the
conversations and the healing and that have occurred. And I
couldn't not think deeply about for all of the realities
of technology and the world, and the good and the bad,
the intersection of technology and humanity and technology and human story,
(35:59):
and particular arc that at this time and place, the
identity would have never been exposed because the technology didn't
exist to understand your genes in the way that we
can now by simply your husband telling you in the kitchen, hey,
spodness vile, that you meeting your biological father, and you
(36:22):
paint in the book you peering into each other's world.
I mean, he's really getting to know you through your
writing and seeing pictures and almost I think this sense
of safety and security and looking at that you and
your the pictures and your words, that this is a
safe person to meet in person and connect or at
least that was my experience. And then you turn to
(36:45):
podcasting and had this been twenty years ago, none of
that would have existed or been available in a way
that it is now and the reach that it is now.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
Absolutely yeah, and it would have been you know, one
of my favorite quotes from sort of Buddhist literature has
to do with dharma, and it's you know, when it
comes to dharma or your life's calling, if you're off
by a centimeter, you might as well be off by
a mile. And if I had lived my whole life,
especially given what I've done in my life and the
(37:21):
excavating that I've done and the writing book after book
about you know, family and identity and different kinds of
you know, novels and memoirs that all really kind of
dealt with secrets in one way or another. And if
I had never known, I think there always would have
been something that was off by a centimeter. It's what
(37:41):
it felt like, even though I had reached a point
in my life where I had a you know, tremendous
amount of stability and love and family and work that
I love and you know, felt and feel very blessed
in that way, but that centimeter would have been there.
And the thing about the podcast and also about publishing Inheritance,
(38:04):
it is one of the things I realized. And this
actually goes back to Besil vander Kolk again. In The
Body Keeps the Score, he talks about trauma and the
different ways that people recover from or have trouble recovering
from traumatic events. Is that if it's a traumatic event
that has trapped you, say, you know, something where you
(38:27):
were powerless. You know, you're in a car watching someone
you know and someone in another car not make it,
or you know, a crash. You know, there are many
examples that I don't want to trigger my listeners with,
but you know, if you're in a state of powerlessness
when you are traumatized, there tends to be a more difficult,
challenging outcome in terms of dealing with that trauma as
(38:52):
opposed to the kind of trauma that allows for a
kind of agency. And when I was reading that, I
was rereading The Body Keeps the Score before Bessel came
on my show, and I thought, Oh, that's what I've done.
I wrote a book about this experience that has helped
(39:12):
hundreds of thousands of people and has actually had an impact.
You know, parents have told their children when they never planned.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
On time, you wrote it the book you needed on
the shelf at that very moment.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
And it turned out that a lot of other people
did too, And I started hearing about that, and so
there was this tremendousness of purpose to what had been
extremely painful and hard and traumatic and shocking. And then
Family Secrets, which has been like really one of the
great gifts in my life. I started this podcast by accident.
(39:45):
I had no idea what I was doing. I was
on the phone with my friend Sylvia Borstein, who whose
episode is in the first season of Family Secrets. She
is an early reader of mine. She read a draft
of Inheritance, and she proceeded to tell me a story
about it family secret, and I just thought, oh my god,
I wish everyone could hear this. This is a really moving,
(40:07):
beautiful story, and she's an amazing storyteller. And the next
thought that went through my mind as I was sitting
on the phone was, Huh, I wonder if there's a
podcast about family secrets. And there wasn't you know, there
are times in our lives where the dominoes just all
fall in a certain direction, you know, in a good
way or in a not good way. That was in
an extremely good way. And then there was this coincidence,
(40:29):
which is that she was coming to visit me. She
lives in the Bay Area. She was coming to New
England to visit me in a few weeks. And so
the podcast company that I was connected to said, you know,
we'll send a sound engineer. Let's just give it a
let's give it a whirl. Why don't you have a conversation.
We'll see what we've got. And we did that, and
(40:50):
then everybody got really excited. I never had a dream
that it would be a huge successful podcast. I didn't
even know what that meant when it hit the iTunes
top ten the week it came out, I thought maybe
all podcasts did that.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
I truly had.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
No idea, because we all have secrets, right, so I
would think, because it's so deeply universal, and to focus
in and zoom in on a beautiful, inspiring and uplifting
aspect of your work and secrets, so often there is liberation,
and certainly in your work and inheritance, you write a
(41:28):
lot about the liberation in the sense it sort of
created this blank page for you to be and explore
who you want to be, including changing your name, a tattoo,
all of these these things because you weren't as tethered
(41:50):
to your story of origin or your generational story. And
certainly we know obviously in this community that that secrets
can be deeply freeing in a sense and healing, as
difficult as the process is to move through them.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
Yeah, I mean, well, the knowledge is a kind of
its own kind of superpower, no matter how hard it is,
the knowledge, after a long time of being shoved under
the rug, being in some way compartmentalized, because I really
do think that most of the time the secret's being
kept from us on some level, we do know that?
(42:27):
And if we are the secret keeper, were haunted by
the burden of carrying that secret, And then you know
the secrets that we keep from ourselves, you know. That
was the story of my life. I mean, I was
having a secret keft from me, but I was also
keeping a secret from myself because it was impossible and
too dangerous to know. So I used to ask my
guests in every episode, I would ask them in the interview,
(42:50):
do you wish you hadn't found out? And not one
single one of my guests said, yeah, I wish I
hadn't found out.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
I kept a secret for twenty four years and I
shared it on my podcast three years ago that I
have bipolar disorder, and the amount of the weight, the
shame and the secrecy and the work of covering it
up I was. I mean, I would go on a
(43:17):
girl's trip and leave my little makeup bag that had
all my meds in it and leave it unzipped. And
when I thought my hand would shake, that somebody had,
you know, as if they would spend their time googling
with all the medications. But that was my level of
fear of being seen, of being known for who I
(43:39):
really am, and the brain I was given in this world.
And you know, on the outside, I was working for Oprah,
I had three kids, happily married. Obviously my three kids
and my love of my husband is very real, but
there were pieces of my mental health that were really
hard to manage, and so stepping out of that shame.
(44:06):
I cannot tell you the freedom, the liberation, the healing
and what I think about your work on this podcast,
and it certainly was not my intention when I shared,
but the message it sends generationally, I believe to my
kids is that not that there's no place for it,
(44:27):
but shame and secrecy will not win stepping into your truth.
I just think, you know, my daughter even said to
me she was talking about a friend talking about her
mom's mental health, and she was curious, like, I'm confused
why everyone keeps it a secret and you talk about
it so openly. So I think the work that you
(44:49):
are doing, the impact will live on as people share
their secrets and heal from them and are move into
this place of freedom, which I deeply sensed that you've experienced.
And for me, it's been perhaps one of the greatest
gifts I've given myself in my life. Was no longer
(45:10):
keeping it a secret.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
I love hearing that, and it makes me think really
like it's all of a piece, right, Because if you
keep a secret like the one that you kept out
of shame, out of fear that you won't be perfect,
if you won't see you as the perfect shiny exterior
(45:31):
with the amazing career and the amazing.
Speaker 2 (45:33):
Family acted, you'll be judge to see us rights.
Speaker 3 (45:36):
And that's not what happens.
Speaker 2 (45:38):
Is it. Oh, it is the opposite. People are drawn
to you in a way that is unexplainable. I mean,
within weeks of hitting published and you know, tens of
thousands of people hearing the thing, I'd hit my whole life.
I mean, people in the grocery store I would run
into in town would lean in a little closer. I
(46:00):
mean I thought people would run, and instead they were
drawn in. It was fascinating.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
That's a little bit of what I was describing in
terms of the superpower. There's something that feels there's like
radiates a kind of humanity, humility, transparency that makes other
people feel more comfortable with whatever their own stuff is,
(46:30):
because everybody has stuff.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
Brene Brown says, you know, when in her work around vulnerability.
You share it with the people who earn the right
to try. And I always am careful to say not
everyone has to shout it on a podcast or from
the mountain. It may just be your family, your friend,
you know. But but the liberation and having it no
(46:56):
longer be a secret, moving it into the light is
where the magic hap exactly. So I listened to your
interview with Jamie Lee Curtis, and you talked about faith,
and faith is a huge part of your story of
your discovery and you being a secret because of your
family's deep lineage and story of their faith, devout faith.
(47:20):
So your book Devotion, you had said in the interview
that that changed you the most, So I'm curious why
and how did it change you.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
Devotion was a book that I really did not want
to write. It wanted to be written. I think that's
true with all of my books, but with Devotion. When
I realized what I was embarking on, the title came
to me first, and I realized that I wanted to grapple,
or needed to grapple with my own history.
Speaker 3 (47:51):
You know, my son was very young.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
He was asking me questions about what I believed, and
I realized I had absolutely nothing to say, because I
had pushed back so hard word against that complicated childhood
of my own that you know, I hadn't replaced it
with anything. I had just rebelled against it. And so
I was raising my son with no rituals. And you know,
(48:15):
certainly I had a spiritual life, and I'm a longtime
practicer of yoga, and I meditate every day. But there
was something I felt like I was not fully doing
for him as his mother that I wanted to be.
And so I started writing this book and it came
out in these little pieces, like little breadcrumbs through a forest.
(48:37):
My mandate to myself was that I was trying to
look at every single passage, every single scene or incident,
as does this pose a spiritual question that I can
grapple with?
Speaker 3 (48:52):
And if it does, it doesn't belong in this book.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
And along the way, as I was writing it, I thought,
I am I really think I'm writing a book that
no one will read. It's so deeply idiosyncratically me and
I felt and feel a little bit like a unicorn.
So unless you're a unicorn with the same exact unicorn
properties as me, you're not going to be able to
(49:15):
relate to this book. That's what I thought, And then
devotion came out. And what started happening pretty much immediately
was that I started hearing from people readers of every
different stripe, of every different age, gender, you know, nationality, background,
(49:40):
and they all said the same thing, which was, you've
told my story. And that was what was life changing
because it was the first time, and it happened many
times since, but it was the first time that I
understood just how alike we are all are on the inside,
(50:03):
that we carry the same anxieties and fears and burdens
and longings, and the content of them may be different,
but the you know, the human experience is not as
distinct or different from each other as as we think
it is.
Speaker 3 (50:19):
And and what that did. I had been.
Speaker 1 (50:22):
Terrified of public speaking before that, couldn't stand getting up
in front of crowds, which is not great. If you
do what I do, you need to be able to
do that. And it cured that for me. And the
reason why it cured that for me was because I
would look out into an audience and just think we
are connected.
Speaker 3 (50:44):
There. There really isn't this, Yeah, yeah, this is safe.
There isn't You're not sitting there.
Speaker 1 (50:53):
Judging me. You're sitting there ready to feel something. And
I'm here wanting to offer you that, wanting to give
you that. And so that's what I meant in that
conversation with Jamie about the way it changed me. But
it was really the beginning of that has been true
now throughout these years, since twenty ten when that book
(51:15):
came out, that feeling of if you really tell your story,
and if you tell it true, then what the listener
is going to hear is, oh, that's my story too.
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 2 (51:39):
I found a piece of myself in Inheritance, And the
interesting thing is it was such kind of subplot in
your story, but it was these few sentences and I
highlighted and it literally changed the way I view myself
as a mother. It didn't change, it gave me language
(52:00):
to it. And you were talking about meeting your biological
half sister, and you said something along the lines of
your illustrating kind of your immediate bond and some of
the things you had in common. And you said serious
about our work and fierce about our children. And I have,
for whatever reason, is somebody who has loved working, who
(52:22):
has been really deeply passionate and ambitious in her work.
I had this deep guilt because I live in a
community where most moms are stay at home moms, that
there was a choice I was making and I had
to be one or the other. And you saying that
it was okay to be serious about your work and
fierce about your kids. I literally went on a walk
(52:44):
that night and said, that is me. I'm both. I mean,
it was unbelievable, Danny, But I think when you look
out into that sea of people, they're looking for little
pieces of themselves, their little answers or clarity, and it
is something as little as a few sentences gave me
such peace.
Speaker 3 (53:03):
Oh I love hearing that.
Speaker 1 (53:04):
And it's been my experience that either in teaching or
speaking or writing, you never know exactly what's going to
land or who is going to land with. And in
a way, it's kind of none of your business as
the writer. You said something too about like finding yourself
in a description or in the language, and you know,
(53:27):
I just want to say one thing because I feel
like it might be helpful, which is that when it
comes to the secrets that we keep from ourselves. I
know no better tool, you know, I mean, listeners will
know that so many of my guests on Family Secrets
are writers.
Speaker 3 (53:46):
And that is not.
Speaker 1 (53:47):
Because if I wanted to create a literary podcast. It's
not a literary podcast. It's a podcast about family secrets.
But it's often writers because writers, and in this case,
have written books. But the very act of setting words
down on the page, the very act of just trying
(54:08):
to write it out, the very act of attempting to
write it out, actually unlocks things. I think, probably you know,
in the in the top few gifts in my life,
the fact that I became a writer, and that I
got to spend my days and my months and my
(54:29):
years actually following the line of words and not even
knowing where the line of words was going to lead
me has a lot to do with my having been
able to unlock. Of course, I would never have unlocked
it without a DNA test. But you know, when I
look back at my early work, it's actually there on
the page. You know, if I look at my first novel,
(54:50):
it takes my breath away. On some level I knew.
And if I look at my little book on writing
still writing, there are lines in there, like there's there's
there's a line in there where I'm snow being through
my parents' things, and I write, what was I looking
for a clue? A reason? And the word reason is italicized,
and it's like, what I didn't I didn't know anything?
(55:11):
What did I even mean by that when I wrote
that book that I wrote years before the discovery about
my dad? So there's something about the you know, the
act of the act of writing, and the act of
reading and sort of finding yourself, and the act of
listening to podcasts and this sort of the intimacy of
what that is of you're doing it by yourself. When
(55:34):
you're listening to a podcast, you're listening to it by yourself.
There's no such thing as as far as I know,
as like podcast listening parties, you know, or podcast groups,
like there are book groups. It's intimate and the act
of reading. When you're reading a book, you're doing it
by yourself. Nobody can do that for you. And when
you're writing something, you're writing it by yourself and for yourself.
(55:57):
So I think all of these things are ways in
which things get unlocked.
Speaker 2 (56:01):
I'm so glad you brought up the intimacy of podcasting,
because I wanted to ask you about this community and
what it's meant to you and how it's contributed to
your healing. But what I've learned as a podcaster is
I love the work of sharing, being a conduit and
sharing other people's stories. And when you think of the
(56:24):
intimacy of being in someone's ear on a walk as
they fold their laundry as they drive to work, and
having these really deeply intimate conversations, and the connection and
the opportunity right in a world that's moving so fast,
with so many distractions, to be able to connect that way.
(56:49):
It's a really really powerful medium, and I think it
is really impactful when done with intention, as you do
on this And on that note, I'm really curious. You know,
we've talked about a lot of tent pole moments in
your life, but I know your husband, your great love,
(57:14):
had cancer recently.
Speaker 1 (57:17):
Is he in remission, he's considered cured. It was three
years ago.
Speaker 2 (57:22):
Three years ago, so I know your husband had cancer.
There was a global pandemic. As much as you're showing
up for this podcast, you are dealing with a real
life and difficulties and pain, and in creating this community
and that connection and intimacy. What has this community meant
(57:45):
to you? How has it changed you? And how has
it healed you.
Speaker 1 (57:50):
When I'm doing one of these interviews for episodes, time
stops for me. I go so deep inside story. I'm
like my entire being is an instrument that is in
the service of the story that my guest is sharing
with me. And so the actual act of doing the
(58:13):
interview itself feels like a sacred act to me, and
it's it's very intentional. I don't use zoom. I know
a lot of podcasters do, and I don't because it
feels to me more intimate in each other's ears. I mean,
like my eyes are closed right now as I'm talking
to you. I want to be able to go as
(58:35):
deep as I can into the story of my guest.
And I feel honored that my guest trusts me with
their story. And I think a big part of why
they do is because I'm not approaching it as a journalist,
and I'm not approaching it. You know, people who have
never listened to the podcast think, ooh, family secrets. You know,
like it must be a kind.
Speaker 2 (58:55):
Of sensational elation.
Speaker 1 (58:57):
Sensational salacious purient, you know, rubbernecking, watching other people's tragedies,
you know, go by, and that is the very very
last thing that I'm interested in. And so I'm with
my guests very much, with the feeling of me too.
And at the same time, you know, over the course
(59:18):
of the seven thus far, it's about to be eight
seasons of family Secrets, I've realized that I actually recede
into the background more and more, and my guests stories
become more and more. I mean, they've always been front
and center, but I think in the beginning I would
insert myself more, and I've done that less and less.
(59:40):
I mean, I'm sure there's vo but it's about the
story itself, and that's been just really interesting for me
to notice. I just feel like I'm so completely in
the service of the stories, and the person who I
most want to reach and to love the episode when
it comes out is my guest. If I've done my job,
(01:00:02):
my guest. You know, often somebody who's been interviewed many
many times before will say I never thought that before,
I never made that connection, I never said that, or
I've never cried before while I'm being interviewed. Whatever, it
is just a feeling of like, I want you to
see your story in a new way. I want you
to see your story maybe with a different dimension or
(01:00:25):
a little bit more illuminated for you. Then before we
had this conversation and then, you know, one of the
amazing things to me about having a podcast that has
millions of listeners is that it's kind of abstract. I mean,
I know that there are all these listeners, but as
(01:00:45):
I said, like, I could be walking down the street
and somebody could be walking up the street passing me
with their AirPods in their ears, and they could be
listening to me and I wouldn't know it.
Speaker 2 (01:00:55):
I've never thought about that, and so there's.
Speaker 1 (01:00:58):
There's no you know, if if you write a book,
you know, somebody took a picture the other day of
somebody on the subway reading my most recent novel, is like, okay,
somebody's reading my novel on the subway. If they were
listening to my podcast, there would be no picture and
no one would know that. And so there have been
these moments and they are so meaningful to me. But
I was at a wedding last summer when a young
(01:01:19):
woman came up to me and she said, you're Danny
Shapiro right said yeah, and she said, my entire family,
like you've changed our lives. We've all listened to Family
Secrets and it enabled us to talk about things that
we had never been able to talk about before.
Speaker 3 (01:01:33):
And what an immense.
Speaker 1 (01:01:36):
Privilege to have anything to do with helping people to
feel less alone in there, you know, whatever it is
that is making them feel a part or alone, and
that's just amazing to me and wonderful, and it does
feel you know, sometimes I record bonus episodes and I'll
refer to my world of listeners as the Family Secrets family,
(01:01:59):
because that's what it feels like to me.
Speaker 2 (01:02:01):
And the privilege on both ends, I mean, I often think,
and you just express this, the privilege and the honor
for someone in our case, the guest, to trust you
with their hearts. I mean, the bravery and courage it
takes to not only share the most vulnerable pieces of yourself,
(01:02:24):
but to share it knowing it'll be broadcast, you know,
around the world, and who you choose to trust that
story with. So I think, you know the privilege of
being the conduit between the family that was changed and
the person, the guest, who chose you right, who trusted
(01:02:44):
you with their heart, And it really is like when
you think about it deeply, the work is it makes
you hurtful.
Speaker 3 (01:02:51):
It's really true. It's really true.
Speaker 1 (01:02:54):
And it's the way that I think of myself when
I'm putting together episodes and when I'm pairing for them
and when I'm doing the interview, is I'm trying to
do my best to hold the story, like to hold
it in my arms, to be the container for it,
to make the container for it. And you know, to
(01:03:16):
be trusted with doing that is just a really wonderful thing.
Speaker 2 (01:03:21):
So my last question. You write so lovingly about your aunt,
who has played, you know, such a exquisite role in
your life, and I heard you on the podcast that
she says, go where it's warm, So my last question
is what does that mean to you? And where do
(01:03:44):
you go to be warm?
Speaker 1 (01:03:46):
I think that there are people and places for all
of us where we feel our safest, where we feel
seen and known, where we feel the absence of certain things,
like the absence of competitiveness, the absence of envy, the
absence of comparison, where we are with people that we
(01:04:10):
know are rooting for us and want the best for us.
And I think sometimes when we don't come from when
the initial landscape of our childhoods isn't that it's a
learning experience along the way, because we can be drawn
to places where it isn't warm because it's familiar. And
(01:04:35):
one of the benefits of living long enough and learning
enough and getting older is that I really don't have
the patience for that anymore in my life. To the
degree that I can choose who I want to, but
we can't always choose who are going to be around.
But to the degree that I can, I want to
(01:04:56):
choose to be with people who who love me and
who I love and really to have time with them,
to not be racing, to not be always onto the next.
And we live in a world that you know, that
doesn't reward depths or quiet. I think increasingly there is
(01:05:21):
a I think there's there's a bit of a move
toward understanding how important depths and quiet, And you know,
sitting with the Danish have this beautiful word that I
never pronounced right. It's spelled hygge, and I think it's
yuga yuga, and it's the meaning is a kind of
like a relaxed, open, warm, inviting environment, and that's that's
(01:05:46):
what I want to create for the people around me,
and that's how I want to live my life and
spend my time in whatever way I can.
Speaker 2 (01:05:54):
That's beautiful. I just interviewed a depth Dula and she,
you know, walks with the dying in the last weeks
and months of their lives, and she referred to them
as the wisdom keepers. And I asked her, you know,
if there was one piece of advice and wisdom, and
that was exactly what she said. She said, just to
(01:06:14):
slow down and make space to just be with your people.
Speaker 1 (01:06:18):
Because really time is all we have. And you learn that,
I mean, you mentioned my husband's illness. If I didn't
know that already, it was completely brought home to me
that when you're facing something terrifying like that, all you
really want is time.
Speaker 2 (01:06:36):
Well, Danny, you have made such beautiful meaning out of
your discovery of your secret and the work of Family
Secrets and the community you have built which feels very
warm to me, a very warm place to go. So
thank you for that, and thank you for trusting me
to have this conversation and yeah, hopefully share some new
(01:07:00):
pieces of yourself with your Family Secrets Family.
Speaker 3 (01:07:04):
Oh, Kimmy, thank you so much. It was really interesting
to have the tables turned. Phew.
Speaker 1 (01:07:17):
Well, that was meaningful and intense. I'm reminded of the
courage it takes to share oneself fully, openly, with vulnerability
and heart. My thanks to Kimmy Kulp as well as
to my amazing team. Family Secrets is an iHeartMedia production.
Mollie's a Core is story editor and Dylan Fagan is
(01:07:39):
executive producer. We'll be back in your ears on May
fourth with our all new season. I couldn't be more
excited to share it with you.
Well, here's something special I promised you all a while
back in our final bonus episode before the eighth season
of Family Secrets launches in just a few weeks. The
tables are turned, and today I'm the guest. The wonderful
Kimmy Cope, writer, motivational speaker, former OPRAH producer and host
(00:26):
of the podcast All the Wiser is sitting in my
seat today and asking all the questions about my family Secrets.
I hope you enjoy our conversation. I'm Danny Shapiro and
this is family Secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
(00:47):
keep from ourselves.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Hello Danny, Welcome to Family Secrets.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Hi Kimmy, It's nice to be on Family Secrets.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yes, yes, familiar territory for you. My intention for this
conversation is really for this beautiful community you have built,
your listening audience to know you a little deeper and yeah,
hopefully find some pieces of themselves in stories that perhaps
will here for the first time. And the origin story
(01:22):
of Family Secrets in this podcast was you as a secret.
And I know so many of your listeners are familiar,
but for anyone who's listening and does not know that
story of the life changing secret that you learned in
twenty sixteen, can you briefly share?
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Yeah? Absolutely so.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
In twenty sixteen, my husband Michael was sending away for
a DNA test, a home DNA test, and he asked
me if I wanted to do it too, and I just,
on a whim, said sure. It wasn't out of any
real curiosity or you know, I could easily have said no,
because I thought I knew everything that there was to
(02:05):
know about my family and its ancestry and my origins,
my ancestors.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
But I went ahead and did it.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
And when the results came back, I actually didn't even
remember that I had done it, That's how insignificant it
was to me. The results revealed to me that my
dad hadn't been my biological father, the dad who raised me,
and I.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
Learned a lot.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
I uncovered a great deal about secrets that my parents
kept all their lives that I feel certain they intended
to take to the grave with them, which they did
after a lifetime of writing a bad secrets, or writing
novels and memoirs of bad secrets, and always also feeling
(02:47):
like something didn't totally add up, just something I felt
slightly adjacent to myself. Somehow it all suddenly became.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Clear, and you described, you know, growing up having this
really easy love for your father and just this deep adoration,
where your mother was more distant at times, it was
much more contentious. And you had even pondered that question,
you know, is she my mom? Does she feel like
(03:19):
my mom? I'm curious sort of, you know, you've described
a sense of loneliness as a kid, wandering around the neighborhood,
peering in windows, looking at families, large families with siblings,
and so I know you were an only child, and
I'm curious about Danny in the outer world versus your
(03:45):
inner world and what that was like during that time.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
So Danny in the outer world apparently looked like she belonged.
People who I've enco it over the years, who knew
me when I was a kid, are really shocked to
learn how out of step I felt. And you know
that I didn't feel that I belonged. You know, people
(04:11):
I went to middle school with, people I went to
high school with, all really professed shock about that, because
I guess I had a kind of contained nature and
I sort of looked to the part, but I felt
really like a creature visiting from outer space. A lot
of the time, I didn't feel like people really knew me,
(04:34):
or that I really knew myself in many ways, and
the environment of my home was so awkward and uncomfortable.
One of the things I've really learned on you know,
hosting this podcast is that what we experience as children,
(04:54):
whatever the environment is of our home, we just think
that that's the way it is, and that's normal, and
maybe that's the way everybody lives. At a certain point,
when I was probably in high school, I started realizing
that that wasn't the case, and that the atmosphere in
our home was markedly different from you know, my friends
(05:17):
whose homes I would visit. It felt to me, and
I think this has to do with my own extreme sensitivity,
you know, just too behavior and tone and actions of others.
It felt to me like it was a tinder box.
It felt like it was always ready to just sort
(05:39):
of explode. My parents were miserable with each other, and
there was something in the way that each of them
was with me, very different in the way that they
treated me, But there was something that just didn't feel
easy or comfortable.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
You know, as we have this conversation, I've thought a
lot about how your present work, this podcast included is
deeply informed by your past. I think all of our
work is. But I also from hearing you and how
you talk about your son Jacob and your husband Michael,
(06:17):
the deep love and connection that I hear in the
family you've created. You know, I think so often in
generational stories, we either repeat, or for lack of a
better language, we write the wrong and create something very different.
And that appears to me that you very much created that.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
It certainly feels to me like the greatest achievement of
my life that I didn't repeat and that I did
create something different. And I do think that probably from
the time that I was a teenager, I was forming
myself in counter identification to my mom. I understood that
(06:57):
she was somebody who very often put people off, chronically
felt misunderstood, was very angry a lot of the time,
this kind of just simmering, low level, ready to be
dissed at the slightest notice. You know, the world had
something against her in her mind, and she sort of
(07:18):
built the life that she saw in a way like
she felt that way about the world, and so the
world reflected that back at her. And you know, I'm
not trying to throw her under the bus. I have
a lot more understanding of her now than I did
when I was younger. But as a mother, she wanted
me to be a certain way, and if I didn't
(07:43):
conform to the way that she wanted me to be,
which was essentially a reflection of her, then there was
trouble if I couldn't do that.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
And I'm sure and then for you it then said
not enough and not enough for her right.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
And something that's occurred to me recently, I've been thinking
a lot about my father. The anniversary of his death
was just last week, and always a time where he's
very much on my mind. And because of his religiosity,
I mean, it was really the defining characteristic of my
father was that he was an Orthodox Jew. It's how
he would have defined himself, I think, before any other
(08:18):
way of defining himself. It was the landscape that he
was brought up in, and you know, there were generations
preceding him, you know, where that was the way they lived.
And in order to please my father, I think my
father would have loved me no matter what because he
knew how to love, which was something that I think
(08:40):
saved me in a lot of ways. But in terms
of his approval, I had a really hard time being
a good little Orthodox Jewish girl. If you had asked me,
I think even when I was like a child, whether
I thought that I would grow up and marry an
Orthodox man and you know, have a whole bunch of
Orthodox children and live that life, I think I would
(09:01):
have known from a very early age that that wasn't
going to be my path. And that was really problematic
between my father and me, because that was the most
important thing to him. So in a way I was
sort of squeezed between both of my parents and failing
them each with my mother because I was unable to
be her perfect mirror, and with my father because I
(09:24):
just wasn't that Orthodox Jewish girl.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
That makes so much sense to me. And yeah, this
idea of just the radical acceptance for you exactly as
who you are and who you came into this world.
So you mentioned being the anniversary of your father's death,
and you know, as I research and as I told you,
(09:49):
it's been such a joy and privilege to learn about
you through your work. I see these sort of tempole
moments in your life, and some of them are of
deep suffering and trauma, and certainly the loss of your father.
Your parents were in a car crash that killed your dad,
(10:10):
and your mom survived. So for what you're comfortable sharing,
what do you remember about that period, about that day
and sort of how it shaped you.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
That day I've described in my writing as the moment
that divided my life into before and after. And when
I wrote those words, I was probably in my thirties
and I was writing about my twenties. I was writing about,
you know, February nineteen eighty six, and I was young
enough to not understand that lives contain more than one
of these before and after moments if we live long enough.
(10:47):
But for me, that was the first, and a huge one.
I just want to preface what I'm about to say
with I've been very aware lately that I recently had
a big birthday and I turned sixty, which is still
a complete shock to me. It was, you know, it
was a big milestone birthday, and I entered the decade
(11:12):
that my father died in. He was sixty four years
old when he died, and My mother was sixty two
when she was widowed, and my son is twenty three,
which is the age I was when all of this happened,
and I suddenly realized all of that recently that.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Wow, yeah, of all the ages and the pieces and.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
Exactly like the perfect storm of that. And on family
secrets it comes up often the whole idea of anniversaries
and the anniversary of a loss through the anniversary of
a shock. And you know, it's easy, I think to
dismiss what that is, but the body remembers always, you know.
So I might not remember on February twenty third of
(11:55):
any given year that it's February twenty third, but my
body remembers. I mean, I'll be out of sorts all
day and then suddenly I'll realize what the date is
and understand, you know, or I'll remember what the weather
was like on that particular February day. So the main
thing about that day and that time is that I
(12:15):
was such a mess in my life. And also looking
at my twenty three year old son now and seeing
that he is not a mess, you know that he
knows who he is, and he has courage of his
own convictions and he's his own person. I wasn't that yet.
I was really kind of unformed.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
You know.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
When I started teaching university, when I was around twenty
nine or thirty years old, I remember looking around the
workshop table I was teaching at Columbia University, and I
looked around the table at these young women, these young
Barnard and Columbia women, and I could identify. It was
like this little game I played in my head, you know,
the ones who never have let themselves get into so
(13:04):
much trouble or never would have sort of like followed
the path that I followed, and then the ones who
would I could feel and see and pick them out,
you know, and tried to mentor the ones I thought
I could help.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
But I had dropped out of college.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
I was modeling and acting and doing TV commercials, or
at least that's what I told myself I was doing.
I did that for a while, but I was terrible
at it.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
If I was going to cast you for anything in life,
knowing your deep soul and commercials, I love that.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Commercials like you know, for Coca Cola, you know, for
York peppermint patties. I actually had to like jump up
and down on a beach and say California loved New
York with more chocolate. I mean, I was terrible and
uncomfortable in my own skin and awkward. But because again
(14:01):
going back to sort of mirroring my mother, a big
part of the fuss that was made over me when
I was growing up was the way that I looked
and that I was a pretty little girl and I
was a pretty teenager, and I kind of just went
with that. I thought, well, I guess that's what I
have to offer. I don't want to sound like I'm
blaming anybody, because I'm not. Like I had a lot
(14:22):
of longing for other things, but I didn't know.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Well, maybe that's the disconnect I just felt, because I
know you right for your brilliant mind, and so much
of that work is on the physical appearance, especially when
you're young and youthful, and yeah, that's so interesting. You know,
this expectation that you were beautiful and that people identified
(14:45):
you with that, and it's perhaps there was some unconscious
expectation around that to do something with that physical beauty.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Mm hm. Well, and that was complicated by the fact
that that focus on my looks had a lot to
do with my not looking to Iwish quote unquote, you
know that that's what people were constantly, constantly saying, And
so really what they were saying was that I didn't
look like who I thought I was, or like my
physical appearance was some sort of crazy, weird gift, like
(15:15):
some sort of nutty fluke, that I looked the way
that I looked, and I didn't look like my family,
and instead I was, you know, very fair and had
blue eyes and features. It just didn't look like, you know,
anybody that I was surrounded by. So I think somewhere
within that there was this hard kernel of confusion.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
You've described as inner knowing, which I think when I
hear you talk about it, it feels so relevant and
real to me as I look back on my life,
and you know, part of it, as you share, is
was your physical appearance almost this whisper of your heart. Right,
(15:55):
something's off and that subconscious knowing, and you've described with
the discovery that your father was not your biological father,
that it was almost as if the puzzle piece it
all came into focus, all that little subconju the whisper
of the heart and the mind. So yeah, I'm deeply
(16:17):
curious about that and what your heart was saying to
your mind.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
I think that's that's where that disconnect that didn't enable
me to really come to know myself when I was younger.
I think that that's where it resided, because there was
this feeling that I didn't belong and I didn't know.
(16:45):
Why in the world would I feel that way? Why
would I feel that way? I mean, I was the
ultimate insider in terms of, you know, the Jewish world.
My family had a lot of prestige in that world.
My ancestors on my dad's side were just storied, legendary people. Well,
why in the world would I feel like I didn't belong?
Why would I go to a wedding or a bar
mitzvah in my family and feel that I did not belong?
(17:09):
Why were people constantly commenting in some sort of what
was meant to be flattering way about my not looking Jewish,
my not looking like where I come from. I mean,
underneath that, I must have been hearing you're not one
of us. What would happen is I would double down.
Anytime somebody would say something like that to me, I
would nicely bite back and I would say, oh, yeah, no,
(17:32):
raised Orthodox, you know, went to a yeshiva, a Jewish
day school, you know, kept a kosher home, never tasted
bacon until I was a senior in high school. Had
two sinks and two dishwashers. I mean really seriously kosher home,
fluent in Hebrew. I would say all these things, like
list them like a litany, which was my way of
saying stop it, you know, stop it. Stop saying that.
(17:54):
And after my discovery about my dad, a couple of
years later, I was at a dinner, a big awards
dinner that was honoring a friend of mine, and it
was in the Jewish world. It was like sponsored by
one of the Jewish newspapers, and I was there to
you know, congratulate and cheer on my friend. My husband
(18:16):
and I got there. It was a you know, fancy
cocktail party attire, and it was in one of those
old New York City hotels that has kind of cloudy
glass behind the bar and like sort of modeled glass mirror.
And I went over to the bar to get a drink,
and I caught a glimpse of myself, you know, unexpectedly,
and I was wearing a little black dress and had
long blonde hair, and I looked the way I looked,
(18:39):
and all of a sudden, I thought, oh, that this
is what they were seeing. I mean, in this room,
everyone would assume that I'm the wife of a Jewish
man who's here, or they would have a story. It
was plain as day.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
But I.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
Didn't see it, couldn't see it. It was too dangerous
to see it. We believe what our parents tell us.
We believe the stories that were told about ourselves from
the time that were tiny, and those become our identities.
And that was my identity, you know, when Inheritance came out,
you know, which is the books that I wrote about
this discovery and the secret. One of the first comments
(19:23):
I saw was on my Facebook page, and it was
from the wife of my seventh grade English teacher who
I was friends with. Them. They were like one of
those young, cool, young English teacher couples in high school.
And I was always looking for my mentors. I was
always looking for like somebody to take me in like
a stray dog and just you know, make me part
(19:44):
of their family. And this couple, Peter and Nancy Cowan,
they were like that for me. And Nancy wrote on
my Facebook page hashtag always wondered, you know, only child,
older parents, physically so different from what I was supposed
to look like and what my ethnicy he was supposed
to be, so hashtag always wondered. So there was a
part of me that was working, over time, always to
(20:07):
try to figure out to belong. Yeah, I think there
was a kind of profound anxiety that I couldn't recognize
or label. I mean, I was well into my twenties
before I even could define the word anxiety. But it
ruled me, and it shaped that feeling of not belonging,
(20:28):
not fitting in, not adding up being other. When that's
the case and we can't supply a reason for it,
then we turn it against ourselves. And that was the
story of you know, I would call those sort of
almost lost decades of my life. I mean, from the
time that I was a child, through my adolescence and
(20:50):
into my early twenties and culminated with a thunderclap and
ended for all intents and purposes when my parents were
in their car crash and my dad died, and it
was a shock to my system that actually rebooted my system,
(21:10):
you know, sort of reshaped my system, and was the
very very beginning of my figuring out who I had
always been but had never allowed myself to be.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
Well, Yeah, and I the deep wounds and the reconciliation
of your identity of belonging with the discovery that your
father was not your biological father, It makes so so
much sense, How much when you can textualize it with
(21:43):
the decades before and the knowing, It just really to
me just almost highlights how powerful and layered the wave
of emotions must have been with the discovery. And you know,
there's something that in the wake of that discovery about
(22:04):
your family and your identity. You talk about you had
a flight the next day that you're on the plane
and you're sort of looking around and people are eating
pretzels and peanuts and going about their business, and in
your body, you were in crisis, almost looking around, How
(22:25):
is how is everyone just going about their business. I
had lunch with my mother in law days after her
husband died, and I remember her having that experience. She
turned to me and she said, it's just so bizarre.
You know, people were going about having and meanwhile she
is sitting there experienced this wave of disbelief and grief
(22:48):
and heartbreak that is unbearable in the world is just
moving by. So that scene was really powerful for me.
But what you spoke to, which I think is really
important to this community, is that the specific discovery about
your father was unrelatable and unrecognizable to people. Whereas the
death of your father, the car crash, some of these
(23:10):
other moments you've had in life. When Jacob was sick
are immediately there's the sense of empathy and understanding. But
this certain piece discovery that was heartbreaking to you was
harder for people to grasp, to empathize with, to identify
or understand. And you know, for a podcast that is
(23:33):
about secrets of all shapes and forms, and you know,
the nuance of what a secret can be. I just
thought it would be great to hear what was helpful
and what was not, so as we moved through the
world and people share their secrets, we can show up
better for them.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
I love that.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Yeah, I mean, there's so much I've learned along the
way in this regard that feeling of you know, happen
to be your peanuts And watching the in Flight movie,
the thought that went through my mind is that is
the experience of grief, of immediate grief is you know,
how can the world still be turning? And there are
so many ways in which I think we as human beings,
(24:16):
we want to make it better for someone who's going
through something, and if it makes us uncomfortable, we tend
to fall prey to platitudes. I mean, we do that
even with things that are relatable, like grief, like the
loss of somebody like you know, death, will you know
say things like you know she's in a better place,
(24:38):
or we tend to often say something that's easy, that
doesn't cost us very much, just to actually deal with
our own discomfort that somebody else is suffering. And you know,
one of the things that happened with my discovery and
I thought about it even really early on too, because
(24:59):
I know, I knew that I was going to write
about it. I was aware that it was not instantly relatable,
as you say, to feel sympathy or compassion for somebody
who's lost someone very close to them is not a stretch.
But this felt and I realized very quickly because I
started almost immediately, I sprang into action, which is it
(25:20):
tends to be my way when something's really hard, is
I kind of go into fix it mode or research mode,
or what can I do. And in that case, as
we were moving through airports, and because of where we live,
we had to make connecting flights, so you know, there
were planes, there were airports, there were terminals, there was Starbucks,
(25:41):
there was you know, there are hours to sort of
observe people and also to talk to people. And I
remember calling one of my aunts, my mother's older brother's wife,
and I was calling them because I was trying to
figure out whether anybody had ever known anything, you know,
had my parents told anyone? How big a secret was this?
Was this a secret that everybody was keeping and I
(26:03):
was the only person who didn't know or did everybody
not know? And did they not have that you know
hashtag always wondered experience. And on the phone this happened
as well with my mother's best friend, who I called,
said you know, well, you know, whatever happened, Danny, your
father still your father. And that was profoundly not helpful.
(26:25):
I ultimately, over the course of years and a tremendous
amount of thought and work and questioning and living with
it and metabolizing and processing, absolutely feel that my father
is still my father. But on the day, you know,
within twenty four hours of discovering that in fact he
was not. In point of fact, there was somebody else
(26:49):
out there in the world who was my biological father
that was a total stranger to me, and I had
no idea that that had been the case until that day.
That's not a helpful thing to hear. It made me enraged.
I felt just absolute rage at the don't try to
fix this for me right now. I'm trying to understand
(27:09):
everything that I can possibly come to understand.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Well, what you say which is so powerful is this
idea that we're sure about the past, or at least
reasonably sure, and uncertain about the future, and that when
you're past became completely uncertain, how disabling and wobbly, that
(27:36):
nothingness almost on both sides, And again the reckoning and
the knowing that in a whisper becoming real and proof.
Then you're absolutely right. It's people's own discomfort with pain
and suffering that we so often can't just sit with
someone in it. But the idea of acceptance, you know,
(28:01):
I see how hard this is. This is painful versus
oh you're still you know, you're still part of the family,
or everything worked out fine, right, This missive of that
extraordinary grief and confusion and uncertainty and trauma that you
were experiencing. It's minimizing something that was really significant.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
I learned so much about human nature through that experience,
and then through the writing of Inheritance and then the
publishing of Inheritance, which meant that I was having many,
many conversations with people, and you know, and everybody had
different opinions, and the world really divided between people. Fortunately,
most people who sat back and thought, huh, what would
(28:44):
that be like? Let me see if I can imagine
what it would be like to wake up one day
and discover that everything that I had believed, my entire history,
my memories, all need to be reordered now, and there's
no one to ask about it. There's no one My
(29:06):
parents were both gone. There was no one to sit
down and say what happened? And why didn't you tell me?
And how did you feel about it? And did it
matter to you? And was this always hard or did
you forget it ever happened, just you know, to have
that conversation. I think that in writing Inheritance, which was
(29:26):
the hardest books that I've ever written, I had to
stay conscious as a writer about the universality. I had
to constantly ask myself the question, what is universal about
my experience? How can I invite the reader into my
experience in a way that the reader's going to understand?
(29:47):
And as a writer, and as somebody who had written
a whole bunch of books prior, I was able to
really focus on doing that as a writer.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
How painful was the dismissal When it was.
Speaker 3 (29:59):
This, Oh, it still happens.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
People will say something like, you know, what's the big deal?
Or you know, they'll somehow turn the volume up on
the privilege argument, which is like, look at everything that
you have. You know, you got great genes, you know,
you're so fortunate. Are you glad you're here? That sort
of thing. I what I experienced that as is very
(30:24):
wounding because what it boils down to is not being seen,
not being seen, not being understood.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
You know.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
I always begin my Family Secrets episodes with asking my
guests to tell me about the landscape of their childhood.
That was the landscape of my childhood. My hair could
have been on fire, and I could have been, you know,
walking on my hands, and nobody would have noticed. And
so I think when those moments come up or someone
will say to me as happened recently, someone told me
(30:57):
that they have a grown child who was conceived using
a donor and that they have never told that child
and asked me what I.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
Thought they should do. And it gets very tricky.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
For me because I almost feel like I'm having a
conversation with my own mother when somebody says something like
that to me. And I do have very strong opinions
about the corrosive power of secrets. And look, I understand
why my parents didn't tell me, and I am very
happy to be here.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
I really love my life.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
And even when I didn't love my life and was
feeling sort of like a just like an alien, as
a result of this discovery, I would look at my son,
who's just this magnificent person, and I would think, without
any of this, you wouldn't be here. You change one
single thing about any of this, you would not exist.
So I'm very happy that everything happened exactly the way
(31:50):
it happened. I understand that my parents couldn't tell me
because no one in that generation did.
Speaker 3 (31:58):
No one.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
You know, we live in a culture and in a
society that so badly wants to put everything into its
basket and have everything like remain in its lane. And
once that is the ground that you spring from. Once
there is that wound, there always is that wound. Closure
is a myth, healing is incomplete. There are always scars.
(32:24):
When my son was little, we used to play this
game Shoots and Ladders, and you know, you're kind of
moving your little piece along on the on the board
and then you know, you roll the dice and you
you hit a certain square and it's a shoot, and
all of a sudden, you were on that square. Youre
in the you were in the present, you were making
progress on the path, and boom, you're back down to
(32:46):
like where you began. And sometimes there's a ladder and
you get to climb up. I feel like that's a
metaphor for what we commonly, you know, and probably over
use the term triggering, Like something will trigger that feeling,
that very solitary, lonely, not being seen, not being understood feeling.
(33:10):
And even though I'm sixty years old and even though
I have this big, rich, wonderful life, I can be
brought right back there.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
Yeah, And the intensity of it, because as you said,
your body remembers, so it's so amplified because of that,
the intensity and the amplification because of the history and
the wiring of the story in your body.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
Right, and it remains as alive as it's ever been.
I mean, you know Besil vander Kulk, who was a
guest in a bonus episode of Family Secrets a while back.
You know, the body keeps the score. I mean, it's
one of the great titles of all time. I mean,
the body does keep the score. And no amount of
knowledge or intellectualizing.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
Or meditating or lemon juice at.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
All, meditation, lemon juice, yoga therapy, talk therapy, you know,
cognitive behavioral therapy, e MDR. You know, it all helps,
but it's never going to make it go away.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
And and that's okay.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
I really feel like to have that go away would
actually be what would what would that even mean? It
would be like I'd be like sort of amputating a
part of myself that that lived, you know, that lived
that story.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
Yeah. And the work is the softening of it, right,
not the eradication exactly exactly.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
I love that word soften and I think about it
a lot and try to sort of model it in
my life, that that feeling of yoga teacher friend of mine,
Elena Brower, once said to me as I was getting
ready to go on book tour, and I pulled my back,
you know, like picking my suitcase off my bed. And
I called her, because she travels all the time, and said,
(34:55):
how do you do it? And she said, move softly
through the world. And I constantly it's like a mantra.
I think about that when I'm moving through the world,
when I'm having an off day, just move softly, just
you know, be gentle with yourself.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
We'll be right.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
Back in thinking about the discovery of you, you being
the secret, as you have said, and eventually that you
would meet your biological father, and that as a result,
you would create a podcast called Family Secrets, which would
(35:34):
reach millions of people around the world. And I can
only imagine the ripple effect of the families and the
conversations and the healing and that have occurred. And I
couldn't not think deeply about for all of the realities
of technology and the world, and the good and the bad,
the intersection of technology and humanity and technology and human story,
(35:59):
and particular arc that at this time and place, the
identity would have never been exposed because the technology didn't
exist to understand your genes in the way that we
can now by simply your husband telling you in the kitchen, hey,
spodness vile, that you meeting your biological father, and you
(36:22):
paint in the book you peering into each other's world.
I mean, he's really getting to know you through your
writing and seeing pictures and almost I think this sense
of safety and security and looking at that you and
your the pictures and your words, that this is a
safe person to meet in person and connect or at
least that was my experience. And then you turn to
(36:45):
podcasting and had this been twenty years ago, none of
that would have existed or been available in a way
that it is now and the reach that it is now.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
Absolutely yeah, and it would have been you know, one
of my favorite quotes from sort of Buddhist literature has
to do with dharma, and it's you know, when it
comes to dharma or your life's calling, if you're off
by a centimeter, you might as well be off by
a mile. And if I had lived my whole life,
especially given what I've done in my life and the
(37:21):
excavating that I've done and the writing book after book
about you know, family and identity and different kinds of
you know, novels and memoirs that all really kind of
dealt with secrets in one way or another. And if
I had never known, I think there always would have
been something that was off by a centimeter. It's what
(37:41):
it felt like, even though I had reached a point
in my life where I had a you know, tremendous
amount of stability and love and family and work that
I love and you know, felt and feel very blessed
in that way, but that centimeter would have been there.
And the thing about the podcast and also about publishing Inheritance,
(38:04):
it is one of the things I realized. And this
actually goes back to Besil vander Kolk again. In The
Body Keeps the Score, he talks about trauma and the
different ways that people recover from or have trouble recovering
from traumatic events. Is that if it's a traumatic event
that has trapped you, say, you know, something where you
(38:27):
were powerless. You know, you're in a car watching someone
you know and someone in another car not make it,
or you know, a crash. You know, there are many
examples that I don't want to trigger my listeners with,
but you know, if you're in a state of powerlessness
when you are traumatized, there tends to be a more difficult,
challenging outcome in terms of dealing with that trauma as
(38:52):
opposed to the kind of trauma that allows for a
kind of agency. And when I was reading that, I
was rereading The Body Keeps the Score before Bessel came
on my show, and I thought, Oh, that's what I've done.
I wrote a book about this experience that has helped
(39:12):
hundreds of thousands of people and has actually had an impact.
You know, parents have told their children when they never planned.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
On time, you wrote it the book you needed on
the shelf at that very moment.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
And it turned out that a lot of other people
did too, And I started hearing about that, and so
there was this tremendousness of purpose to what had been
extremely painful and hard and traumatic and shocking. And then
Family Secrets, which has been like really one of the
great gifts in my life. I started this podcast by accident.
(39:45):
I had no idea what I was doing. I was
on the phone with my friend Sylvia Borstein, who whose
episode is in the first season of Family Secrets. She
is an early reader of mine. She read a draft
of Inheritance, and she proceeded to tell me a story
about it family secret, and I just thought, oh my god,
I wish everyone could hear this. This is a really moving,
(40:07):
beautiful story, and she's an amazing storyteller. And the next
thought that went through my mind as I was sitting
on the phone was, Huh, I wonder if there's a
podcast about family secrets. And there wasn't you know, there
are times in our lives where the dominoes just all
fall in a certain direction, you know, in a good
way or in a not good way. That was in
an extremely good way. And then there was this coincidence,
(40:29):
which is that she was coming to visit me. She
lives in the Bay Area. She was coming to New
England to visit me in a few weeks. And so
the podcast company that I was connected to said, you know,
we'll send a sound engineer. Let's just give it a
let's give it a whirl. Why don't you have a conversation.
We'll see what we've got. And we did that, and
(40:50):
then everybody got really excited. I never had a dream
that it would be a huge successful podcast. I didn't
even know what that meant when it hit the iTunes
top ten the week it came out, I thought maybe
all podcasts did that.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
I truly had.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
No idea, because we all have secrets, right, so I
would think, because it's so deeply universal, and to focus
in and zoom in on a beautiful, inspiring and uplifting
aspect of your work and secrets, so often there is liberation,
and certainly in your work and inheritance, you write a
(41:28):
lot about the liberation in the sense it sort of
created this blank page for you to be and explore
who you want to be, including changing your name, a tattoo,
all of these these things because you weren't as tethered
(41:50):
to your story of origin or your generational story. And
certainly we know obviously in this community that that secrets
can be deeply freeing in a sense and healing, as
difficult as the process is to move through them.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
Yeah, I mean, well, the knowledge is a kind of
its own kind of superpower, no matter how hard it is,
the knowledge, after a long time of being shoved under
the rug, being in some way compartmentalized, because I really
do think that most of the time the secret's being
kept from us on some level, we do know that?
(42:27):
And if we are the secret keeper, were haunted by
the burden of carrying that secret, And then you know
the secrets that we keep from ourselves, you know. That
was the story of my life. I mean, I was
having a secret keft from me, but I was also
keeping a secret from myself because it was impossible and
too dangerous to know. So I used to ask my
guests in every episode, I would ask them in the interview,
(42:50):
do you wish you hadn't found out? And not one
single one of my guests said, yeah, I wish I
hadn't found out.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
I kept a secret for twenty four years and I
shared it on my podcast three years ago that I
have bipolar disorder, and the amount of the weight, the
shame and the secrecy and the work of covering it
up I was. I mean, I would go on a
(43:17):
girl's trip and leave my little makeup bag that had
all my meds in it and leave it unzipped. And
when I thought my hand would shake, that somebody had,
you know, as if they would spend their time googling
with all the medications. But that was my level of
fear of being seen, of being known for who I
(43:39):
really am, and the brain I was given in this world.
And you know, on the outside, I was working for Oprah,
I had three kids, happily married. Obviously my three kids
and my love of my husband is very real, but
there were pieces of my mental health that were really
hard to manage, and so stepping out of that shame.
(44:06):
I cannot tell you the freedom, the liberation, the healing
and what I think about your work on this podcast,
and it certainly was not my intention when I shared,
but the message it sends generationally, I believe to my
kids is that not that there's no place for it,
(44:27):
but shame and secrecy will not win stepping into your truth.
I just think, you know, my daughter even said to
me she was talking about a friend talking about her
mom's mental health, and she was curious, like, I'm confused
why everyone keeps it a secret and you talk about
it so openly. So I think the work that you
(44:49):
are doing, the impact will live on as people share
their secrets and heal from them and are move into
this place of freedom, which I deeply sensed that you've experienced.
And for me, it's been perhaps one of the greatest
gifts I've given myself in my life. Was no longer
(45:10):
keeping it a secret.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
I love hearing that, and it makes me think really
like it's all of a piece, right, Because if you
keep a secret like the one that you kept out
of shame, out of fear that you won't be perfect,
if you won't see you as the perfect shiny exterior
(45:31):
with the amazing career and the amazing.
Speaker 2 (45:33):
Family acted, you'll be judge to see us rights.
Speaker 3 (45:36):
And that's not what happens.
Speaker 2 (45:38):
Is it. Oh, it is the opposite. People are drawn
to you in a way that is unexplainable. I mean,
within weeks of hitting published and you know, tens of
thousands of people hearing the thing, I'd hit my whole life.
I mean, people in the grocery store I would run
into in town would lean in a little closer. I
(46:00):
mean I thought people would run, and instead they were
drawn in. It was fascinating.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
That's a little bit of what I was describing in
terms of the superpower. There's something that feels there's like
radiates a kind of humanity, humility, transparency that makes other
people feel more comfortable with whatever their own stuff is,
(46:30):
because everybody has stuff.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
Brene Brown says, you know, when in her work around vulnerability.
You share it with the people who earn the right
to try. And I always am careful to say not
everyone has to shout it on a podcast or from
the mountain. It may just be your family, your friend,
you know. But but the liberation and having it no
(46:56):
longer be a secret, moving it into the light is
where the magic hap exactly. So I listened to your
interview with Jamie Lee Curtis, and you talked about faith,
and faith is a huge part of your story of
your discovery and you being a secret because of your
family's deep lineage and story of their faith, devout faith.
(47:20):
So your book Devotion, you had said in the interview
that that changed you the most, So I'm curious why
and how did it change you.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
Devotion was a book that I really did not want
to write. It wanted to be written. I think that's
true with all of my books, but with Devotion. When
I realized what I was embarking on, the title came
to me first, and I realized that I wanted to grapple,
or needed to grapple with my own history.
Speaker 3 (47:51):
You know, my son was very young.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
He was asking me questions about what I believed, and
I realized I had absolutely nothing to say, because I
had pushed back so hard word against that complicated childhood
of my own that you know, I hadn't replaced it
with anything. I had just rebelled against it. And so
I was raising my son with no rituals. And you know,
(48:15):
certainly I had a spiritual life, and I'm a longtime
practicer of yoga, and I meditate every day. But there
was something I felt like I was not fully doing
for him as his mother that I wanted to be.
And so I started writing this book and it came
out in these little pieces, like little breadcrumbs through a forest.
(48:37):
My mandate to myself was that I was trying to
look at every single passage, every single scene or incident,
as does this pose a spiritual question that I can
grapple with?
Speaker 3 (48:52):
And if it does, it doesn't belong in this book.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
And along the way, as I was writing it, I thought,
I am I really think I'm writing a book that
no one will read. It's so deeply idiosyncratically me and
I felt and feel a little bit like a unicorn.
So unless you're a unicorn with the same exact unicorn
properties as me, you're not going to be able to
(49:15):
relate to this book. That's what I thought, And then
devotion came out. And what started happening pretty much immediately
was that I started hearing from people readers of every
different stripe, of every different age, gender, you know, nationality, background,
(49:40):
and they all said the same thing, which was, you've
told my story. And that was what was life changing
because it was the first time, and it happened many
times since, but it was the first time that I
understood just how alike we are all are on the inside,
(50:03):
that we carry the same anxieties and fears and burdens
and longings, and the content of them may be different,
but the you know, the human experience is not as
distinct or different from each other as as we think
it is.
Speaker 3 (50:19):
And and what that did. I had been.
Speaker 1 (50:22):
Terrified of public speaking before that, couldn't stand getting up
in front of crowds, which is not great. If you
do what I do, you need to be able to
do that. And it cured that for me. And the
reason why it cured that for me was because I
would look out into an audience and just think we
are connected.
Speaker 3 (50:44):
There. There really isn't this, Yeah, yeah, this is safe.
There isn't You're not sitting there.
Speaker 1 (50:53):
Judging me. You're sitting there ready to feel something. And
I'm here wanting to offer you that, wanting to give
you that. And so that's what I meant in that
conversation with Jamie about the way it changed me. But
it was really the beginning of that has been true
now throughout these years, since twenty ten when that book
(51:15):
came out, that feeling of if you really tell your story,
and if you tell it true, then what the listener
is going to hear is, oh, that's my story too.
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 2 (51:39):
I found a piece of myself in Inheritance, And the
interesting thing is it was such kind of subplot in
your story, but it was these few sentences and I
highlighted and it literally changed the way I view myself
as a mother. It didn't change, it gave me language
(52:00):
to it. And you were talking about meeting your biological
half sister, and you said something along the lines of
your illustrating kind of your immediate bond and some of
the things you had in common. And you said serious
about our work and fierce about our children. And I have,
for whatever reason, is somebody who has loved working, who
(52:22):
has been really deeply passionate and ambitious in her work.
I had this deep guilt because I live in a
community where most moms are stay at home moms, that
there was a choice I was making and I had
to be one or the other. And you saying that
it was okay to be serious about your work and
fierce about your kids. I literally went on a walk
(52:44):
that night and said, that is me. I'm both. I mean,
it was unbelievable, Danny, But I think when you look
out into that sea of people, they're looking for little
pieces of themselves, their little answers or clarity, and it
is something as little as a few sentences gave me
such peace.
Speaker 3 (53:03):
Oh I love hearing that.
Speaker 1 (53:04):
And it's been my experience that either in teaching or
speaking or writing, you never know exactly what's going to
land or who is going to land with. And in
a way, it's kind of none of your business as
the writer. You said something too about like finding yourself
in a description or in the language, and you know,
(53:27):
I just want to say one thing because I feel
like it might be helpful, which is that when it
comes to the secrets that we keep from ourselves. I
know no better tool, you know, I mean, listeners will
know that so many of my guests on Family Secrets
are writers.
Speaker 3 (53:46):
And that is not.
Speaker 1 (53:47):
Because if I wanted to create a literary podcast. It's
not a literary podcast. It's a podcast about family secrets.
But it's often writers because writers, and in this case,
have written books. But the very act of setting words
down on the page, the very act of just trying
(54:08):
to write it out, the very act of attempting to
write it out, actually unlocks things. I think, probably you know,
in the in the top few gifts in my life,
the fact that I became a writer, and that I
got to spend my days and my months and my
(54:29):
years actually following the line of words and not even
knowing where the line of words was going to lead
me has a lot to do with my having been
able to unlock. Of course, I would never have unlocked
it without a DNA test. But you know, when I
look back at my early work, it's actually there on
the page. You know, if I look at my first novel,
(54:50):
it takes my breath away. On some level I knew.
And if I look at my little book on writing
still writing, there are lines in there, like there's there's
there's a line in there where I'm snow being through
my parents' things, and I write, what was I looking
for a clue? A reason? And the word reason is italicized,
and it's like, what I didn't I didn't know anything?
(55:11):
What did I even mean by that when I wrote
that book that I wrote years before the discovery about
my dad? So there's something about the you know, the
act of the act of writing, and the act of
reading and sort of finding yourself, and the act of
listening to podcasts and this sort of the intimacy of
what that is of you're doing it by yourself. When
(55:34):
you're listening to a podcast, you're listening to it by yourself.
There's no such thing as as far as I know,
as like podcast listening parties, you know, or podcast groups,
like there are book groups. It's intimate and the act
of reading. When you're reading a book, you're doing it
by yourself. Nobody can do that for you. And when
you're writing something, you're writing it by yourself and for yourself.
(55:57):
So I think all of these things are ways in
which things get unlocked.
Speaker 2 (56:01):
I'm so glad you brought up the intimacy of podcasting,
because I wanted to ask you about this community and
what it's meant to you and how it's contributed to
your healing. But what I've learned as a podcaster is
I love the work of sharing, being a conduit and
sharing other people's stories. And when you think of the
(56:24):
intimacy of being in someone's ear on a walk as
they fold their laundry as they drive to work, and
having these really deeply intimate conversations, and the connection and
the opportunity right in a world that's moving so fast,
with so many distractions, to be able to connect that way.
(56:49):
It's a really really powerful medium, and I think it
is really impactful when done with intention, as you do
on this And on that note, I'm really curious. You know,
we've talked about a lot of tent pole moments in
your life, but I know your husband, your great love,
(57:14):
had cancer recently.
Speaker 1 (57:17):
Is he in remission, he's considered cured. It was three
years ago.
Speaker 2 (57:22):
Three years ago, so I know your husband had cancer.
There was a global pandemic. As much as you're showing
up for this podcast, you are dealing with a real
life and difficulties and pain, and in creating this community
and that connection and intimacy. What has this community meant
(57:45):
to you? How has it changed you? And how has
it healed you.
Speaker 1 (57:50):
When I'm doing one of these interviews for episodes, time
stops for me. I go so deep inside story. I'm
like my entire being is an instrument that is in
the service of the story that my guest is sharing
with me. And so the actual act of doing the
(58:13):
interview itself feels like a sacred act to me, and
it's it's very intentional. I don't use zoom. I know
a lot of podcasters do, and I don't because it
feels to me more intimate in each other's ears. I mean,
like my eyes are closed right now as I'm talking
to you. I want to be able to go as
(58:35):
deep as I can into the story of my guest.
And I feel honored that my guest trusts me with
their story. And I think a big part of why
they do is because I'm not approaching it as a journalist,
and I'm not approaching it. You know, people who have
never listened to the podcast think, ooh, family secrets. You know,
like it must be a kind.
Speaker 2 (58:55):
Of sensational elation.
Speaker 1 (58:57):
Sensational salacious purient, you know, rubbernecking, watching other people's tragedies,
you know, go by, and that is the very very
last thing that I'm interested in. And so I'm with
my guests very much, with the feeling of me too.
And at the same time, you know, over the course
(59:18):
of the seven thus far, it's about to be eight
seasons of family Secrets, I've realized that I actually recede
into the background more and more, and my guests stories
become more and more. I mean, they've always been front
and center, but I think in the beginning I would
insert myself more, and I've done that less and less.
(59:40):
I mean, I'm sure there's vo but it's about the
story itself, and that's been just really interesting for me
to notice. I just feel like I'm so completely in
the service of the stories, and the person who I
most want to reach and to love the episode when
it comes out is my guest. If I've done my job,
(01:00:02):
my guest. You know, often somebody who's been interviewed many
many times before will say I never thought that before,
I never made that connection, I never said that, or
I've never cried before while I'm being interviewed. Whatever, it
is just a feeling of like, I want you to
see your story in a new way. I want you
to see your story maybe with a different dimension or
(01:00:25):
a little bit more illuminated for you. Then before we
had this conversation and then, you know, one of the
amazing things to me about having a podcast that has
millions of listeners is that it's kind of abstract. I mean,
I know that there are all these listeners, but as
(01:00:45):
I said, like, I could be walking down the street
and somebody could be walking up the street passing me
with their AirPods in their ears, and they could be
listening to me and I wouldn't know it.
Speaker 2 (01:00:55):
I've never thought about that, and so there's.
Speaker 1 (01:00:58):
There's no you know, if if you write a book,
you know, somebody took a picture the other day of
somebody on the subway reading my most recent novel, is like, okay,
somebody's reading my novel on the subway. If they were
listening to my podcast, there would be no picture and
no one would know that. And so there have been
these moments and they are so meaningful to me. But
I was at a wedding last summer when a young
(01:01:19):
woman came up to me and she said, you're Danny
Shapiro right said yeah, and she said, my entire family,
like you've changed our lives. We've all listened to Family
Secrets and it enabled us to talk about things that
we had never been able to talk about before.
Speaker 3 (01:01:33):
And what an immense.
Speaker 1 (01:01:36):
Privilege to have anything to do with helping people to
feel less alone in there, you know, whatever it is
that is making them feel a part or alone, and
that's just amazing to me and wonderful, and it does
feel you know, sometimes I record bonus episodes and I'll
refer to my world of listeners as the Family Secrets family,
(01:01:59):
because that's what it feels like to me.
Speaker 2 (01:02:01):
And the privilege on both ends, I mean, I often think,
and you just express this, the privilege and the honor
for someone in our case, the guest, to trust you
with their hearts. I mean, the bravery and courage it
takes to not only share the most vulnerable pieces of yourself,
(01:02:24):
but to share it knowing it'll be broadcast, you know,
around the world, and who you choose to trust that
story with. So I think, you know the privilege of
being the conduit between the family that was changed and
the person, the guest, who chose you right, who trusted
(01:02:44):
you with their heart, And it really is like when
you think about it deeply, the work is it makes
you hurtful.
Speaker 3 (01:02:51):
It's really true. It's really true.
Speaker 1 (01:02:54):
And it's the way that I think of myself when
I'm putting together episodes and when I'm pairing for them
and when I'm doing the interview, is I'm trying to
do my best to hold the story, like to hold
it in my arms, to be the container for it,
to make the container for it. And you know, to
(01:03:16):
be trusted with doing that is just a really wonderful thing.
Speaker 2 (01:03:21):
So my last question. You write so lovingly about your aunt,
who has played, you know, such a exquisite role in
your life, and I heard you on the podcast that
she says, go where it's warm, So my last question
is what does that mean to you? And where do
(01:03:44):
you go to be warm?
Speaker 1 (01:03:46):
I think that there are people and places for all
of us where we feel our safest, where we feel
seen and known, where we feel the absence of certain things,
like the absence of competitiveness, the absence of envy, the
absence of comparison, where we are with people that we
(01:04:10):
know are rooting for us and want the best for us.
And I think sometimes when we don't come from when
the initial landscape of our childhoods isn't that it's a
learning experience along the way, because we can be drawn
to places where it isn't warm because it's familiar. And
(01:04:35):
one of the benefits of living long enough and learning
enough and getting older is that I really don't have
the patience for that anymore in my life. To the
degree that I can choose who I want to, but
we can't always choose who are going to be around.
But to the degree that I can, I want to
(01:04:56):
choose to be with people who who love me and
who I love and really to have time with them,
to not be racing, to not be always onto the next.
And we live in a world that you know, that
doesn't reward depths or quiet. I think increasingly there is
(01:05:21):
a I think there's there's a bit of a move
toward understanding how important depths and quiet, And you know,
sitting with the Danish have this beautiful word that I
never pronounced right. It's spelled hygge, and I think it's
yuga yuga, and it's the meaning is a kind of
like a relaxed, open, warm, inviting environment, and that's that's
(01:05:46):
what I want to create for the people around me,
and that's how I want to live my life and
spend my time in whatever way I can.
Speaker 2 (01:05:54):
That's beautiful. I just interviewed a depth Dula and she,
you know, walks with the dying in the last weeks
and months of their lives, and she referred to them
as the wisdom keepers. And I asked her, you know,
if there was one piece of advice and wisdom, and
that was exactly what she said. She said, just to
(01:06:14):
slow down and make space to just be with your people.
Speaker 1 (01:06:18):
Because really time is all we have. And you learn that,
I mean, you mentioned my husband's illness. If I didn't
know that already, it was completely brought home to me
that when you're facing something terrifying like that, all you
really want is time.
Speaker 2 (01:06:36):
Well, Danny, you have made such beautiful meaning out of
your discovery of your secret and the work of Family
Secrets and the community you have built which feels very
warm to me, a very warm place to go. So
thank you for that, and thank you for trusting me
to have this conversation and yeah, hopefully share some new
(01:07:00):
pieces of yourself with your Family Secrets Family.
Speaker 3 (01:07:04):
Oh, Kimmy, thank you so much. It was really interesting
to have the tables turned. Phew.
Speaker 1 (01:07:17):
Well, that was meaningful and intense. I'm reminded of the
courage it takes to share oneself fully, openly, with vulnerability
and heart. My thanks to Kimmy Kulp as well as
to my amazing team. Family Secrets is an iHeartMedia production.
Mollie's a Core is story editor and Dylan Fagan is
(01:07:39):
executive producer. We'll be back in your ears on May
fourth with our all new season. I couldn't be more
excited to share it with you.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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