April 18, 2019 • 14 mins
On this bonus episode, Dani shares an excerpt from her New York Times best-selling novel ‘Inheritance.’
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. I'm
Danny Shapiro and this is a bonus episode of Family Secrets.
In the last bonus episode, you heard from Jennifer Mendelssohn
(00:21):
about what it means to explore d NA and genetic roots. Today,
I am so excited to share with you a special
excerpt from my audio book of Inheritance. Recording this audio
book was an intense experience three days in a sound
proof booth narrating the story of my life, a story
I had never known until I stumbled upon it as
(00:43):
a result of a DNA test. Get ready for the
exact moment that I discover the truth of my own
genetic identity, the truth my parents had never wanted me
to know, the truth they took to the grave with them.
This excerpt is Curtis See of Penguin Random House Audio
from the audiobook of my memoir Inheritance. Michael came over
(01:16):
to the bed and sat next to me. It had
been thirty six hours since we had sat side by
side on the chaise in my office, since I had
discovered that my father hadn't been my father, Doctor Benjamin Walden.
I entered his name my fingers cold and shaking. Benjamin
Walden ben Walden, Doctor ben Walden. There was no part
(01:38):
of me that believed this was happening, even as it
unfolded with a sense of inevitability so profound that I
will later come to think of it as a kind
of fate. On the page for a medical website. Doctor
ben Walden is a thoracic surgeon who retired from active
practice in two thousand three. He is a well respected
(02:00):
speaker on the subject of medical ethics. He is a
graduate of the Medical School at the University of Pennsylvania.
In the months to come, indeed, I suspect for the
rest of my life, I will hear stories. Friends will
send me links to news items. Experts will share their experience.
(02:20):
I'll be told of people who have searched for their
sperm donors, their biological fathers, all their lives. When these
searches have been unsuccessful, some have had their anonymous donors
identification numbers tattooed on their bodies, a way of marking
themselves with their only clue. I've seen photos of arms, ankles,
(02:41):
shoulders inked with stark series of numbers, and with each
story of a dead end a locked door. I am
stunned anew A favorite poem Otherwise by Jane Kenyon, begins
like this, I got out of bed on two strong legs.
It might have been otherwise. I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe,
(03:05):
flawless peach. It might have been otherwise. The poet goes
on to regard ways in which the bounty of her
daily life contained within it the shadow of a darker possibility.
My daughter was conceived in Philadelphia, my mother had said
that long ago evening, not a pretty story. When pressed
(03:27):
the word institute, her language was precise. The thing she
never planned to say that slipped out on the second
anniversary of my father's death, and only because I introduced
her to my friend from Philadelphia was an enormous piece
of luck. What if that friend had been from Detroit.
What if I hadn't brought my mother to the graduate
(03:48):
student reading that night. A seam ripped open in my
mother that night that allowed me access to a vital clue,
though I didn't know it at the time. A moment,
a split second, and then it closed up again. If
she hadn't said those exact words, but if everything else
had remained the same when I got the results from
(04:11):
ancestry nearly thirty years later, I would have discovered that
my father wasn't my biological father, but known nothing more,
I would have come to the conclusion that my mother
must have had an affair. I would have supplied yet
another false narrative to the story of my life. What
if Adam Thomas hadn't shown up on my ancestry page?
(04:31):
What then all would have been a yawning, cavernous emptiness,
devoid of possibility, like the baby bird that fell from
its nest. I might have wandered through the world, never
knowing where I came from. I would have been left
with a hole inside me in the shape of a father,
or rather two fathers, the father who raised me, who
(04:53):
died too young, too sad, too lost, and the anonymous
man I came from but would never be able to identify. Five.
Instead of a false narrative, there would be an infinity
of narratives. Michael kicked off his sneakers and sat in
bed next to me. My laptop was balanced between us
as we waited for a YouTube ad to finish. Doctor
(05:16):
Benjamin Walden five syllables seven. If you included the prefix
A nice molifluous name. He had a website. It took
three clicks to get there. It was a simple site,
a repository of blog posts and essays he had written
about medical ethics, along with links to a couple of videos.
(05:37):
The screen went black, and then his name, in white
sam seraph type appeared. Dr ben Walden speaking at Reed College, Portland, Oregon.
An old man with white hair and blue eyes was
standing at a lectern. My God, I whispered. Time slowed
(05:57):
to a near stand still. I could compute what I
was seeing, or rather who I was seeing. The man
was wearing khakis, a blue button down shirt, and a
fleece vest. He had a pale complexion, but his cheeks
were pink. His color high, my exact coloring somewhere in
(06:18):
the background the comments I had fielded just about every
day for fifty four years. Are you sure you're Jewish?
There's no way you're Jewish? Did your mother have an
affair with the Swedish milkman? I saw my jaw, my nose,
my forehead, and eyes. I heard something familiar in the
timbre of his voice. It wasn't merely a resemblance. It
(06:41):
was a quality. The way he held himself his pattern
of speech. He was recommending a book to the audience
at toll Gowande's Being Mortal. He referenced an article in
the Onion. I had the bizarre thought that he had
good literary taste. I ran my hands down the length
of my legs. Who was I? What was I? I
(07:05):
felt as if I might disintegrate right there in that
hotel room, floating high above the city. This wasn't what
I wanted to see, But now that I had seen it,
I would never be able to unsee it. Dr ben Walden,
his name, continued to appear beneath the lectern, the glint
of eyeglasses a wedding ring. Michael raised the volume. The
(07:30):
man's voice moved through me and around me, like something
invisible stitched into the air. In just a moment, I'll
open it up to questions, Jesus, Michael was saying, Jesus Christ.
Now ben Walden was gesticulating. He held both his hands
in front of him, as if bracketing the air in parentheses,
(07:54):
a gesture that I suddenly recognized as my own. I knew,
in a place beyond thought, that I was seeing the truth,
the answer to the unanswerable questions I had been exploring
all my life. The audience in Portland was now raising
their hands. He called on someone in the back row,
(08:15):
then nodded, smiling slightly as he listened. Do you see that,
I asked Michael, the way he's he even runs a
Q and A like you. Michael said, the following summer,
there will be a total eclipse of the sun, and Michael,
Jacob and I will take turns looking at it through
(08:37):
NASA approved glasses. But I will not trust the NASA
approved glasses. I will still look at the eclipse for
only a fraction of a second at a time. This
is the way I watched the YouTube video on that
June morning, A glimpse, then away, another glimpse, as if
the old man in the blue button down shirt and
(08:58):
Patagonia vest who he was and what that meant might
blind me forever. I slipped out of bed and walked
barefoot into the bathroom. My mind and body seemed to
be disconnected. My body wasn't the body I had believed
it to be for fifty four years. My face wasn't
(09:19):
my face. That's what it felt like. If my body
wasn't my body, and my face wasn't my face? Who
was I? In several weeks, once I'm back East, I'll
meet my best friend from college for dinner, and when
I walk into her apartment, I'll realize I'm afraid that
her feelings for me will have somehow changed, that I
(09:40):
am now unknowable to her. I'll stand in her living room,
tears streaming down my face, and ask, do you still
see me as the same person? And she will look
at me, amused, compassionate. You are the same person, She'll say.
But on that morning in Japantown, I encountered my own
(10:02):
face in the mirror and understood for the first time
that the information reflected back at me had always told
a different story than the one I had believed, no
more than believed known. I didn't feel like the same person.
The white haired, blue eyed doctor from Portland's was now
staring back at me. He had always been staring back
(10:25):
at me, and it wasn't only a physical thing certain
common features. Watching him on YouTube, I felt, with my
entire being something I could barely understand come from him.
I wrapped myself in a robe and sat at the
small desk where Michael had made the discovery about Bethany
(10:46):
and Adam Thomas. Less than an hour earlier, I closed
the tab for the YouTube video and opened my email
two Dr Benjamin Walden from Danny Shapiro, subject important letter.
It had been easy, just as everything else had been
insanely easy, to find his contact information. He had a blog,
(11:11):
He was out there in the world, a well respected physician,
a public speaker. He was a man who would probably
have no reason to think his inbox would contain any
huge surprises. How old was too old for a surprise.
He was seventy eight. Dear doctor Walden, I'm writing to
you about something that may come as a shock. My
(11:34):
name is Danny Shapiro, and I am a fifty four
year old novelist, memoirist, wife, and mother of a seventeen
year old son. I live in Litchfield County, Connecticut. I
recently took a DNA test as nothing more than a lark.
I have always believed my parents to be my biological parents,
but now I have reason to believe that you may
(11:54):
be my biological father. I won't write more and less. Ah,
this may sense to you, and be you're willing to
communicate with me about it. I so hope you're willing.
I'm going to send you a link to my website
so you can see something of who I am. Www
dot Danny Shapiro dot com. Thank you. Danny. Michael was
(12:21):
in the shower. I waited, my finger hovering for a
moment before I hit senned. Before she got off the phone,
Jennifer Mendelssohn had asked me what I was going to
do now that I had zeroed in on my biological father.
She urged me to be methodical to do research. Apparently
there was a right way and a wrong way to
(12:42):
go about this. There were, she told me, templates. But
I wasn't feeling careful or methodical. In fact, quite the opposite.
I was feeling wild and reckless. I needed not to
sit back and cogitate, but to take any and every
kind of action. As long as I was in motion,
(13:03):
my fingers against the keyboard, the pen across the page,
dressing for the day, swiping lipstick across my now unfamiliar lips,
strapping on my sandals, I was able to hold onto
the belief that I was propelling myself forward rather than
falling backward into the abyss. My publisher has a special
(13:30):
offer for Family Secrets listeners off my book and a
selection of other great reads when you shop from Penguin
Random House. Just visit www dot Penguin Random House slash
Inheritance and use the code p r H Family Secrets.
Family Secrets is an I Heeart media production. Dylan Fagin
(13:53):
is the supervising producer and Julie Douglas is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
you can get in touch with us at listener mail
at Family Secrets podcast dot com, and you can also
find us on Instagram at Danny Writer, and Facebook at
Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fam Secrets Pod. That's
(14:13):
fam Secrets Pod. For more about my book, Inheritance, visit
Danny Shapiro dot com.
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. I'm
Danny Shapiro and this is a bonus episode of Family Secrets.
In the last bonus episode, you heard from Jennifer Mendelssohn
(00:21):
about what it means to explore d NA and genetic roots. Today,
I am so excited to share with you a special
excerpt from my audio book of Inheritance. Recording this audio
book was an intense experience three days in a sound
proof booth narrating the story of my life, a story
I had never known until I stumbled upon it as
(00:43):
a result of a DNA test. Get ready for the
exact moment that I discover the truth of my own
genetic identity, the truth my parents had never wanted me
to know, the truth they took to the grave with them.
This excerpt is Curtis See of Penguin Random House Audio
from the audiobook of my memoir Inheritance. Michael came over
(01:16):
to the bed and sat next to me. It had
been thirty six hours since we had sat side by
side on the chaise in my office, since I had
discovered that my father hadn't been my father, Doctor Benjamin Walden.
I entered his name my fingers cold and shaking. Benjamin
Walden ben Walden, Doctor ben Walden. There was no part
(01:38):
of me that believed this was happening, even as it
unfolded with a sense of inevitability so profound that I
will later come to think of it as a kind
of fate. On the page for a medical website. Doctor
ben Walden is a thoracic surgeon who retired from active
practice in two thousand three. He is a well respected
(02:00):
speaker on the subject of medical ethics. He is a
graduate of the Medical School at the University of Pennsylvania.
In the months to come, indeed, I suspect for the
rest of my life, I will hear stories. Friends will
send me links to news items. Experts will share their experience.
(02:20):
I'll be told of people who have searched for their
sperm donors, their biological fathers, all their lives. When these
searches have been unsuccessful, some have had their anonymous donors
identification numbers tattooed on their bodies, a way of marking
themselves with their only clue. I've seen photos of arms, ankles,
(02:41):
shoulders inked with stark series of numbers, and with each
story of a dead end a locked door. I am
stunned anew A favorite poem Otherwise by Jane Kenyon, begins
like this, I got out of bed on two strong legs.
It might have been otherwise. I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe,
(03:05):
flawless peach. It might have been otherwise. The poet goes
on to regard ways in which the bounty of her
daily life contained within it the shadow of a darker possibility.
My daughter was conceived in Philadelphia, my mother had said
that long ago evening, not a pretty story. When pressed
(03:27):
the word institute, her language was precise. The thing she
never planned to say that slipped out on the second
anniversary of my father's death, and only because I introduced
her to my friend from Philadelphia was an enormous piece
of luck. What if that friend had been from Detroit.
What if I hadn't brought my mother to the graduate
(03:48):
student reading that night. A seam ripped open in my
mother that night that allowed me access to a vital clue,
though I didn't know it at the time. A moment,
a split second, and then it closed up again. If
she hadn't said those exact words, but if everything else
had remained the same when I got the results from
(04:11):
ancestry nearly thirty years later, I would have discovered that
my father wasn't my biological father, but known nothing more,
I would have come to the conclusion that my mother
must have had an affair. I would have supplied yet
another false narrative to the story of my life. What
if Adam Thomas hadn't shown up on my ancestry page?
(04:31):
What then all would have been a yawning, cavernous emptiness,
devoid of possibility, like the baby bird that fell from
its nest. I might have wandered through the world, never
knowing where I came from. I would have been left
with a hole inside me in the shape of a father,
or rather two fathers, the father who raised me, who
(04:53):
died too young, too sad, too lost, and the anonymous
man I came from but would never be able to identify. Five.
Instead of a false narrative, there would be an infinity
of narratives. Michael kicked off his sneakers and sat in
bed next to me. My laptop was balanced between us
as we waited for a YouTube ad to finish. Doctor
(05:16):
Benjamin Walden five syllables seven. If you included the prefix
A nice molifluous name. He had a website. It took
three clicks to get there. It was a simple site,
a repository of blog posts and essays he had written
about medical ethics, along with links to a couple of videos.
(05:37):
The screen went black, and then his name, in white
sam seraph type appeared. Dr ben Walden speaking at Reed College, Portland, Oregon.
An old man with white hair and blue eyes was
standing at a lectern. My God, I whispered. Time slowed
(05:57):
to a near stand still. I could compute what I
was seeing, or rather who I was seeing. The man
was wearing khakis, a blue button down shirt, and a
fleece vest. He had a pale complexion, but his cheeks
were pink. His color high, my exact coloring somewhere in
(06:18):
the background the comments I had fielded just about every
day for fifty four years. Are you sure you're Jewish?
There's no way you're Jewish? Did your mother have an
affair with the Swedish milkman? I saw my jaw, my nose,
my forehead, and eyes. I heard something familiar in the
timbre of his voice. It wasn't merely a resemblance. It
(06:41):
was a quality. The way he held himself his pattern
of speech. He was recommending a book to the audience
at toll Gowande's Being Mortal. He referenced an article in
the Onion. I had the bizarre thought that he had
good literary taste. I ran my hands down the length
of my legs. Who was I? What was I? I
(07:05):
felt as if I might disintegrate right there in that
hotel room, floating high above the city. This wasn't what
I wanted to see, But now that I had seen it,
I would never be able to unsee it. Dr ben Walden,
his name, continued to appear beneath the lectern, the glint
of eyeglasses a wedding ring. Michael raised the volume. The
(07:30):
man's voice moved through me and around me, like something
invisible stitched into the air. In just a moment, I'll
open it up to questions, Jesus, Michael was saying, Jesus Christ.
Now ben Walden was gesticulating. He held both his hands
in front of him, as if bracketing the air in parentheses,
(07:54):
a gesture that I suddenly recognized as my own. I knew,
in a place beyond thought, that I was seeing the truth,
the answer to the unanswerable questions I had been exploring
all my life. The audience in Portland was now raising
their hands. He called on someone in the back row,
(08:15):
then nodded, smiling slightly as he listened. Do you see that,
I asked Michael, the way he's he even runs a
Q and A like you. Michael said, the following summer,
there will be a total eclipse of the sun, and Michael,
Jacob and I will take turns looking at it through
(08:37):
NASA approved glasses. But I will not trust the NASA
approved glasses. I will still look at the eclipse for
only a fraction of a second at a time. This
is the way I watched the YouTube video on that
June morning, A glimpse, then away, another glimpse, as if
the old man in the blue button down shirt and
(08:58):
Patagonia vest who he was and what that meant might
blind me forever. I slipped out of bed and walked
barefoot into the bathroom. My mind and body seemed to
be disconnected. My body wasn't the body I had believed
it to be for fifty four years. My face wasn't
(09:19):
my face. That's what it felt like. If my body
wasn't my body, and my face wasn't my face? Who
was I? In several weeks, once I'm back East, I'll
meet my best friend from college for dinner, and when
I walk into her apartment, I'll realize I'm afraid that
her feelings for me will have somehow changed, that I
(09:40):
am now unknowable to her. I'll stand in her living room,
tears streaming down my face, and ask, do you still
see me as the same person? And she will look
at me, amused, compassionate. You are the same person, She'll say.
But on that morning in Japantown, I encountered my own
(10:02):
face in the mirror and understood for the first time
that the information reflected back at me had always told
a different story than the one I had believed, no
more than believed known. I didn't feel like the same person.
The white haired, blue eyed doctor from Portland's was now
staring back at me. He had always been staring back
(10:25):
at me, and it wasn't only a physical thing certain
common features. Watching him on YouTube, I felt, with my
entire being something I could barely understand come from him.
I wrapped myself in a robe and sat at the
small desk where Michael had made the discovery about Bethany
(10:46):
and Adam Thomas. Less than an hour earlier, I closed
the tab for the YouTube video and opened my email
two Dr Benjamin Walden from Danny Shapiro, subject important letter.
It had been easy, just as everything else had been
insanely easy, to find his contact information. He had a blog,
(11:11):
He was out there in the world, a well respected physician,
a public speaker. He was a man who would probably
have no reason to think his inbox would contain any
huge surprises. How old was too old for a surprise.
He was seventy eight. Dear doctor Walden, I'm writing to
you about something that may come as a shock. My
(11:34):
name is Danny Shapiro, and I am a fifty four
year old novelist, memoirist, wife, and mother of a seventeen
year old son. I live in Litchfield County, Connecticut. I
recently took a DNA test as nothing more than a lark.
I have always believed my parents to be my biological parents,
but now I have reason to believe that you may
(11:54):
be my biological father. I won't write more and less. Ah,
this may sense to you, and be you're willing to
communicate with me about it. I so hope you're willing.
I'm going to send you a link to my website
so you can see something of who I am. Www
dot Danny Shapiro dot com. Thank you. Danny. Michael was
(12:21):
in the shower. I waited, my finger hovering for a
moment before I hit senned. Before she got off the phone,
Jennifer Mendelssohn had asked me what I was going to
do now that I had zeroed in on my biological father.
She urged me to be methodical to do research. Apparently
there was a right way and a wrong way to
(12:42):
go about this. There were, she told me, templates. But
I wasn't feeling careful or methodical. In fact, quite the opposite.
I was feeling wild and reckless. I needed not to
sit back and cogitate, but to take any and every
kind of action. As long as I was in motion,
(13:03):
my fingers against the keyboard, the pen across the page,
dressing for the day, swiping lipstick across my now unfamiliar lips,
strapping on my sandals, I was able to hold onto
the belief that I was propelling myself forward rather than
falling backward into the abyss. My publisher has a special
(13:30):
offer for Family Secrets listeners off my book and a
selection of other great reads when you shop from Penguin
Random House. Just visit www dot Penguin Random House slash
Inheritance and use the code p r H Family Secrets.
Family Secrets is an I Heeart media production. Dylan Fagin
(13:53):
is the supervising producer and Julie Douglas is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
you can get in touch with us at listener mail
at Family Secrets podcast dot com, and you can also
find us on Instagram at Danny Writer, and Facebook at
Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fam Secrets Pod. That's
(14:13):
fam Secrets Pod. For more about my book, Inheritance, visit
Danny Shapiro dot com.
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