February 4, 2021 • 48 mins
In this special bonus episode, recorded as part of the Two Writers Talking virtual series, Dani and journalist Robert Kolker—author of the instant New York Times bestseller Hidden Valley Road—discuss the delicate work of writing about family secrets, whether they're your own or someone else's.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets as a production of I Heart Radio High
Family Secrets. Family It's Danny. Last week I had the
pleasure of being part of an ongoing series produced by
(00:20):
Penguin Random House called Two Writers Talking. The writers in
this case were myself and Bob Colcher, author of the
blockbuster Hidden Valley Road. Bob and I were moderated by
New York Times journalist and critic Jennifer sr. The subject,
you guessed it, Family Secrets. I'm excited to share this
(00:41):
special bonus episode with you, and remember April one, we'll
be dropping a whole new season Between now and then,
though we have a few surprises in store, so keep
your eyes and ears out. What were you most responsive
(01:03):
to in each other's books? And they may or may
not have had to do with secrecy. I'm happy to
go first. That's all right, Thank you, Danny for the
chance to talk with you about your book. I I
really was was blown away by it. I thought that
the the part about it that really struck me was
sort of the the two reactions that you had to
(01:27):
this news about your about your biological heritage. Your first,
the first thing you do is you look in the
mirror and you wonder if you're still yourself, you know,
if this you're wondering how this news actually changes you.
And then the ripple effects start and you start to
wonder if the information was there all along and you've
only wielded away. You know that remark your mother made
(01:49):
several years earlier, why didn't you see that? And several
other clues that you almost wilfully didn't um, I didn't notice,
and I recognized in the family I reported on and
in Hidden Valley Road, you have you have children who
learn more and more secrets as they get older. The
mother in the book, Mimi Galvin, she she tends to
(02:12):
let loose new pieces of information when they're back is
against the wall. So so the revelations keep coming into
her nineties and after a while, uh, they're so whipsawed
by all the new information they start to wonder if
if the in certain cases, that there are things they
should have known all along, if they really had been
trying to assemble a narrative. And it's this assembling of
(02:34):
your own personal narrative that interests me the most, and
how fragile it can be. But I had I had
a very similar response reading Hidden Valley Road, and um
thinking about the ways in which I which I loved. Yeah,
I cried multiple times, especially towards the end. The sisters,
(02:54):
the two the two youngest children, the only girls in
the family, um are I think the ones who grapple most,
each in their own way with what they didn't know,
what they might have known, what what each of them? Uh,
(03:15):
you know that there's a conversation that they have fairly
not early, but like in the middle, in the middle
of the book, where one asked the other, did this
happen to you too? I don't know spoilers, but you know,
did this happen to you too? And the answer is no,
I have no idea what you're talking about. And then
way later, as adults, they have the same conversation again
(03:37):
and the answer, of course is yes, and and and
the sister who was asked that doesn't even remember being
asked that. And So there's this way in which I
think that family secrets um or or secrets in general,
the toxicity of them renders them like young call secrets
(03:57):
psychic poison, right, So it renders them um something that
we may know on some level but can't touch. And
the family in Hi Valley Road is just it's full
of so many secrets that ricochet off of each other
and can't touch each other. And you know, in my case,
(04:18):
inheritances is a is a memoir, and it's it's my
own story. But because I have written nine books prior,
I actually have a body of evidence for what I
actually new but couldn't think because it's in my fiction,
(04:41):
it's in my earlier memoirs. It's like the thing that
was always there that I was digging for without knowing
that I was digging. I I really did not consciously
know it, but I now see there was a trail
of breadcrumbs. Danny, what was that term that you had
as I go, analytic term unsought the unthought known, unthought
(05:05):
coined by a psychoanalyst named Christopher Bolas has written a
great deal about it. The unthought known, which is just
one of my favorite phrases ever, I think is really
defines what we absolutely in our gut, you know, in
our um. You know that we know it, but we
(05:25):
can't think it because it's too dangerous. So you mentioned
that young had this young who, by the way, had
a psychotic break and may in fact of vin schizophrenic himself,
which is an interesting through line through all of the
um you mentioned that Young talked about called secrets psychic poison.
(05:46):
They're good for books, though, right, I mean there, I
feel like some of the best literature is about deceit
if not all of it. And so I am wondering
if you, before we dive into your books, if you
have favorite books of about deceit um, and if you
think secrets are at least useful in helping structure a narrative,
(06:08):
you know, I mean, if you were looking to the
anything in particular. They certainly offer a surprise ending sometimes
in um in Danny's case of surprise beginning in inheritance,
but the sort of like the end of a mystery,
you know, hindsight twenty. But I look back on many
years of magazine writing and writing, you know, crime stories,
and I see more and more stories about families in crisis,
(06:30):
and quite often with information that's been tamped down because
of scandal and then comes out again because of the narrative.
And I'm writing about so, you know, I wrote about
a young man who was on trial for a gay
hate crime, and in the middle of the trial, he
stands up and declares that he himself is gay, comes
out of the closet and reveals his secret. And UM,
(06:51):
one woman's life being molested by her father culminates with
her murdering her father and then going on trial so
that the secret she couldn't keep closed up for ever. UM.
I think about it a lot in terms of its
narrative power. But UM, and I see it everywhere. When
I started reporting on the Galvins, I thought about American pastoral,
(07:12):
which you know, has a has a family calamity that
that feels so hard to explain, but it's also quite scandalous,
and and secrets are kept and then the parents or
the father in particular, is searching, you know what, what
is it you know in the past that might have
caused this? What secret relationship with his daughter might have
(07:33):
triggered this. I think it's an effort to find clarity
in an effort to write the story. UM. You know,
I had listened to to a bonus episode of Family
Secrets with with Bessel vander Kolke, who is no relation
to Coker and UM. But but he said something that
really really hit me about and I'm going to mangle it,
but it's about trauma. Is a story that can't be written.
(07:55):
So so the you know, your effort to write your
book and the Galvin's determination to tell their story is
to me, it's a way of moving through trauma and
to try to give it a give it, uh, if
not a happy ending, at least to help it settle
down a little bit. I love that Um and the vessels.
The quote is um, it's a nature of trauma that
(08:18):
it doesn't allow a story to be told, which is
why when we're when we're traumatized by something, all of us,
our our our first instinct is to tell the story
again and again and again to whoever will listen, because
we're trying to we're trying to contain it, and it's
like water running through our open fingers. It's it feels impossible.
(08:41):
And of course, you know, narrative ultimately like finding a
way to shape trauma into art, you know, or you know,
chaos into some kind of you know, shape or clarity
is um the work of literature and the work of life,
I think. But you know, people me all the time
about family secrets and my podcast and my like do
(09:05):
I go hunting to those searching for my guests? And
you know, I don't because the stories keep on coming,
and they are very often wonderful books that either I
you know, I find them, I read them, I know them,
or the authors or friends of mine and I suddenly think, oh,
(09:29):
that would be Nick Flynn, that would be an amazing story.
Or Jenny Boylan that would be an amazing story. Or
Ti Kira Madden that would be an amazing story. K
s A. Lehman that we could go on. It's just
it's why there are so many writers on my show.
It's not because it's a literary podcast. It's because the
(09:49):
work I think that writers do of finding a way
to take a secret, a trauma, multiple secrets, multiple multiple traumas,
and shaped them so that then you know, what we
have is not only the mess, but the transcendence, you know,
(10:10):
the redemption in some way from that, the the the
turning it into something that has meaning and that will
have meaning for others. That actually, excuse me, it's funny
written right on my she'd here is The next thing
that I wanted to ask you is what do you
what do you think the hardest thing is about writing
about family secrets? Like what what makes it? What are
(10:32):
the biggest challenges and I think that each of you
are going to have very different answers. Obviously, Bob, you
were trying to earn the confidence of the family, and
you are Danny. This is very personal to you. So, Bob,
I mean, do you want to go first? I mean,
it's going to be idiosyncratic, and it's going to vary
from story to story and what advantage point you're telling
it from, obviously, But for for you in this project, Bob,
(10:53):
what was it? I certainly certainly believe the stakes for
Danny must have been very personal and very high, as
you're writing about friends and loved ones, Whereas with with me,
I'm I'm encountering these sisters who are the first people
I met in the family, who are determined to be transparent.
They want to smash all the secrets to bits. They
(11:13):
want to be in the open. But I am you know,
I'm not them. I'm I'm I'm a reporter, and so
I need to make sure that they trust me. But
more importantly, I need to talk to everybody in the
family to make sure that I'm telling an accurate and
fair story. And that took a year before I before
I even got the book deal. Uh, talking to various
(11:35):
family members because I was very skeptical. I was convinced
that one family member at least would stand up and say,
you've got to be kidding me. I don't want my
family secrets in a book. And Um, I hadn't been
prepared for just how much the rest of the family
would defer to the sisters, and also how optimistic they
were that they had something to to tell the world
(11:56):
about the science of mental illness and and about how
they moved through their traumas as a family. So I
was happily surprised when they did it. But but the
biggest risk is that you that you'd say betrayed that
trust or that or that you you skew it in
some way where it it quite clearly as a self
(12:18):
serving work of journalism. I had to be removed enough
from the situation so that I didn't I didn't write
something to um, can you know too completely flimsy. But
I also wanted to report as intimately as possible about
these people's thoughts and feelings. So that was my challenge. Bob,
(12:39):
Can I ask you why you think that they all
really did come on board? That's that that's so unusual
that they all did. Was it was that out of
a kind of sense of duty in a way to
the two sisters, or was it also as you you
touched upon, like in the name of science, that there
was this extraordinary opportunity to uh, you know, for the
(13:00):
world to learn something about schizophrenia. And can I just
jump on and also say, was there I can't remember anywhere?
Was who was the toughest cell, if there was a
kind of cell. I mean, there were three or four
things that The first was that that most of the
horrible events in the family had happened thirty or years
ago or more so, I hadn't really considered how how
(13:22):
long ago the events were. The second was deferring to
the sisters who were the youngest in the family, and
so older brothers who were had left the house earlier,
felt guilty frankly that so much had trickled down and
things that they never knew happened had happened to the sisters.
Family secrets had happened to the sisters, and so they said, okay,
if they wanted, then that's fine. And then there was
(13:43):
late breaking scientific information about the family genetic UH code.
Two different groups of researchers found out two different things
that were really stunning, all at the same time. And
then finally the big one is that Mimi the mother
was on board UM for the first time. She was
not interested for a very long time, but she was
around ninety now and in very frail health, and everybody
(14:05):
thought it was an hour never And I think the
scientific breakthroughs were very validating to her. It made her,
you know, it made her feel comfortable saying this was genetic,
this wasn't my fault. And so she was fine talking
to me about about what she wanted to talk about.
What was toughest for you. I mean, Danny, this is
going to be a very different I can't even imagine. Yeah,
(14:28):
And there were a couple of different layers one and
both of my parents were gone UM. And people have
sometimes asked me how I think the story might have
been different if my parents were alive, or if one
of them had been alive, if my father had still
been living, there wouldn't be a book. I just wouldn't
(14:50):
have written it while he was living. UM. He I
believe very much. UM wanted this distayed married. It was
something he was both of my parents were going to
take to the grave with them and they did. And
then I remember when Inherent was about to come out,
(15:12):
and the first piece that was published was in Time magazine,
and it was a big thing, and there was this
photograph of my dad and me um on the beach,
happy like playful, loving photograph. And when the piece came out,
I had such a pang because I thought, like that
(15:32):
young father, if he could have had a crystal ball
and seeing a future where his this secret that I
think was so deep that he perhaps was even keeping
it from himself, that that would have been there in
a magazine that he read, you know, religiously every week,
(15:53):
there for all the world to see. I was. I
was just very aware of the that was painful for me,
but all so felt to me in terms of like, well,
what right do I have to tell this story? I
have grappled with that in other books. With Inheritance, I
never grappled with it, because it literally felt like the
(16:15):
story of my life, Like this was that I had
a right to tell it and to explore it and
to you know, go deeply and as a journalist into
you know, the his who who were my parents before
I was born? And what was the world that they
lived in? But the other piece of it was I
discovered my biological father and um, he This is not
(16:41):
a spoiler. I mean he had been an anonymous sperm
donor as a twenty two year old medical student and
was very conscious of his privacy, as was I. And
from the time that he and I started having any
contact with each other, it was very clear that I
(17:01):
was going to write a book about this. I mean
it was it was the book that everything else had
led to. UM and I was transparent about that with
my biological father and with his family, that his wife
and the kids that I was in touch with. But
when I promised that I would protect his his identity,
(17:24):
and I worked very hard to protect his identity. When
I finished the manuscript and before it started going down
the pipeline towards being published, I did something that is
such a memoir one oh one. You don't do this,
but I had to, which was I sent it to
him and I asked him to read it. Really for
(17:48):
a sense. I wanted to know that he felt that
that I hadn't missed anything, that there was no little
tell in there where somebody who really wanted to and
became obsessed configure out who he was, but I think
I was also looking for his blessing, which I which
I received from him. I received an extraordinary long let
her back from him after he had read it, with
(18:10):
a list of all the things that he liked, some
of which were things that were very tough in the book, um,
but really saying I feel that you've been fair. This
reflects my experience too, and he felt that his identity
had been protected. So that was that was this piece
of that process that was very different from me, because
even with my own mother, when she was living and
(18:32):
I published earlier memoirs, I did not submit them to
her for her approval before they came out. I love
the part in your book where you infer I'm sure
correctly that they've googled you. You know that your your
your biological father and his family that that that they
all and I just imagine, you know, with a smile
(18:54):
and saying, oh my god, she's going to write about this.
There's no reas not going to write about this. I
kind of breaks on everything for a little while. Yeah,
I mean I think initially, when when I think the
reticence about having any contact with me was like Oprah
could be lurking in the bushes and jumping out with
a camera crew. Yeah, I was like, wow, this is great.
(19:14):
She's a writer. How interesting? Oh this is terrible. She
writes about her family and identity. And yeah, although I
had this thought that like that happened, and then they
started reading you and they were like, oh, but maybe
this will be wonderful, and maybe this will be just
the thing. You know, he clearly is one over, like
he's he understands how everything is so well considered in
(19:37):
your writing, So he he gets it. Yet yet it's complicated, right,
because what does it mean to be? And I was
very aware of this when the book came out. You know,
he was just about eighty when the book came out,
and this very private person, and it was kind of
you know, it was kind of hard to miss. He
(19:58):
would turn on the TV or there would be a
magazine and these things. I think we're a little intense
because it was also a story that was in a
way part of his story too. But he was certainly
choosing anonymity and and I was offering it so on
(20:20):
a human level. I mean, it's just I mean, he
and I have spoken about it, but will never speak
about it publicly. I don't think, but it's just an
interesting thing to grapple with. And we were all googling
each other, like, Matt, Meanwhile, your father, like the man
who brought you up, is is all over inheritance you know.
He it's dedicated to him, your your relationship with him,
(20:45):
and your new thoughts on how you how how will
you relate to him now that you have this news.
It's something you wrestle with so openly and cogently all
the way through it really, um, I feel like it
keeps coming back to him. It's another part that really
struck me. Thank you. Yeah. And when people ask me
the dedication page of inheritances is it's books dedicated to
(21:09):
my father. And I don't specify which father which because
of course I didn't specify which father. Of course it
should be a parent. That I have one father, I
have one dad, uh, and that's the dad who raised me.
But people would bring that up and I'm like, no,
that's the whole point. Can I just point something out
you said, of course it would it should be a parent.
(21:31):
That's no. I mean, it's just one of these weird
oral accidents. That's not the you know, you were talking
to This is going to apply to both you, and
I think it is going to be the final question
actually before we go on and look at some of
the audience questions. But um so, Danny, you obviously went
to extraordinary lens to make sure that you know your
(21:51):
biological father was comfortable with this, and he's probably had
some instinctive sense of what you owed him. What do
you think we owe the people who actually in our
families who might deceive us, like, what do we owe them?
It's got to be a question you've wrestled with, and
I mean, certainly the two youngest sisters had very different
(22:12):
approaches to what they believed they owe their families. So
I think i'll I'll leave it on that. I think
it's And Danny, you also are now you're an aficionado
of of family secret stories. You've seen You've talked with
a couple of dozen people now who have been through
revelations and found new ways to interprelate with their family.
(22:35):
In the case of the Galvin's um that in the beginning,
I met the sisters together, and I thought that perhaps
this would be a story about two sisters who hobbled
together and made it through a very difficult childhood, that
they could be some of the people we would root
for in this story as they grow up. And then
once I interviewed them separately, I found that they were
(22:56):
quite different people, that they had had many years of
closeness and then many years of not so closeness, that
they had been through very similar traumas as children, but
had processed them differently. And I was thrown by it
for a moment or two. UM, But then I sat
up and said, this is this is reality. Different people
experience their families in different ways. UM. I have a
(23:19):
you know, a sister and brother who might be watching
on the zoom. Now, you know, we grew up in
the same house, but in different houses, you know, and
we have different memories that may each of which are
probably self serving. And so when the privilege I had
in writing the Galvin story is to be able to
write about these um, these women's lives over decades and
also their brothers, and to see how their perceptions of
(23:41):
their family change, and how they're the way they decided
to relate to their family changes. Um. They Lindsay starts
out wanting to leave UM and never come back. She
ends up coming back and being the caregiver for her brothers.
Margaret it grabs her chance to escape the trauma, and
then feels a certain amount of rejection and ambivalence about
(24:03):
what happened. She feels a little locked out, and that
colors her relationship with their family going forward. And and
she decides once all the secrets spill out, that becomes
further fuel for her to declare some boundaries and some independence,
a little like um, like like Tara west Over and educated.
So I see two different models in the book that
(24:26):
I was really very pleased to be able to to
portray year by year almost as they moved through their lives. Yeah,
I was. I was so struck by that. Um by um,
they're the tracking of their different experiences. And you know,
like if if you were if you were tracking them
as a novelist and this word fiction, I think a
(24:49):
novelist might have come up with a very different response
in each of those women as adults, and or maybe
a great novelist would have come up with exactly the
response that that happened. Um. But you know, one of
the things in having become um, you know, sort of
a student of family secrets unexpectedly is that one of
(25:12):
the things I've learned, especially in the podcast, is that
when we discover something is at least as important as
what we discover, like how these things break over the
course of our lives. I had a moment that really
took me back as I was researching and reporting and
processing my own experience, where I thought I had felt
(25:34):
so betrayed by my parents. UM. Initially, I felt like,
how could you have kept this a secret? It's such
a fundamental human right to know if it's possible to know,
to know where you know, where we come from. And
and then at some point I realized what would have
happened to me if I had learned this at sixteen
(25:55):
or at twenty three? What if my mother had blurted
it out to me? Um after my father died when
I mean, that was a time in my life where
I was a hot mess of a human being, and
I don't think I would have survived it. Um. I
found out what I found out at an extremely stable
(26:17):
time in my life, you know, when in a in
a in a long time marriage and with a with
a a child who was already seventeen at the time
I made this discovery. Um, in a you know, just
in in midlife, I had a lot of life behind
me with a very solid foundation, and so I end
(26:39):
up feeling like I found out at a really miraculous
moment where there was enough time, still, enough people living
who I might be able to learn something from. I
also hear stories from people regularly who are making these
kinds of discoveries and there in their eighties. What do
you do with that? Um, you know, with the time
(27:02):
that's left and what there is to process. So I
think it has I think it has a lot to
do with the with the with the wind, and and
not only with the with the what. I'm also reminded
of something you said in your book Anywhere. You said
that sometimes family secrets are um, they're kept out of love.
We're going to take a quick break here for a
(27:24):
word from our sponsor. I'm going to go into m
Q and a function here. What does Bob believe is
the biggest obstacle to progress in the treatment of schizophrenia. Well,
(27:44):
there's been some strides in early intervention and a little
bit of the stigma has gone now so that families
aren't blamed for the disease. UM. There's family support now
if you're lucky enough to have good health care. Um
so those have improved, but for a variety of reasons,
it's just, um, there's been very little movement on the
pharmaceutical front. I mean I came up in and we
(28:07):
all did, in an era where when I when you
think about mental illness, I thought of it as a
brain chemistry issue, and that the idea was to through
hard work and trial and error, in the right therapist
and psychopharmacologist, you'd find the right pill that would perhaps
help you become more functional. And that might be true
for things like anxiety or depression. But um, but schizophrenia
(28:28):
is still working with the same basic drugs that the
Galvin family were treated with back in the late sixties
and early seventies, and that part is hard, and there
are a lot of reasons for that. One is um Uh,
some disappointing outcomes from the Human Genome Project. Instead of
finding one big genetic issue that could be zapped with
(28:48):
the drug, they've found more than a hundred potential variants
that all have very limited effects size. So it's hard
to know what gene to zap with a pharmaceutical drug.
And then also you can't really test it on mice,
you have to test it on humans, and that's risky
and expensive. And then finally, the constituency can't really advocate
for themselves the same way that people with cancer can,
(29:13):
for instance, and so that things are sluggish and all
those fronts. I just found one for Danny that I
think is really kind of great. UM. What questions would
you ask your father and mother, knowing what you do now?
I would ask how conscious they were of UM, what
they were signing on for what they were doing in UM,
(29:37):
in going to an institute and and using donor sperm UM.
I'm fascinated by that time in reproductive medicine, where so
many people who wanted to be parents were deceived, though
often with the best of intentions. Bye bye the doctors
(30:00):
that they went to see, who really believed it would
be best if they forgot it ever happened. I wonder
how closely they kept that knowledge in their consciousness. In
Family Secrets, the tagline of every episode is the secrets
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
(30:21):
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. I wonder which
of those categories my parents fell into and what that
meant for the three of us. What that meant for
the way that we interacted with each other during my childhood. Yes,
so last would like to know Hi, Robert, thanks so
much for your amazing word giant passing around to other
(30:43):
psychiatry residents. What you wanted to know was how did
the Galvins react. What was the response? Well, there came
a point a couple of months before the book came
out when People magazine wanted to write a feature about
the family and to put a small excerpt in it,
And so I was I was getting on the phone
with the mall saying, hey, can you meet a reporter
(31:05):
and and I That's that's when I said to myself,
you know, I can't ask them to take time out
of their day and to do all of this with
with the book they haven't even read. So a couple
of months before it came out, I did send advanced
copies to them, and I think that there was first
there was in general, there was relief that I delivered
what I said I would, which is something that that
(31:25):
dealt with the tender and sensitive issues of their family,
of the family secrets in a way that wasn't like
rubber necking that that was tasteful, and that was really
about the possible good that the family could do. And
then there were individual difficulties that some of them had
with placement. You know, this was a group portrait of
a family with some people foregrounded and some people backgrounded.
(31:48):
You know, I was here too at that dinner. Why
why wasn't I, you know, why didn't you talk to
Why aren't my thoughts and feelings about that in there?
And so I think that that is the inherent difficulty
with journalism in general, but also with with intimately reported
narrative journalism, that that the reporter ends up being the
one who makes the calls and and they they we're
(32:11):
kind enough to give up that control to someone and
trust in them. But then something amazing happened, which is
Oprah's Book Club, and and that kind of set everyone's
mind at ease in the family about how this book
would be received in the world. The last thing they
wanted was for it to be something toddry or something
(32:31):
that would be kind of like a grizzly gross book.
And so as soon as Oprah's Book Club accepted the
book and started to flag the book, everyone including myself,
we also kind of you know how to cigh of relief,
saying we know, we know that that it will be
seen as a product with goodwill and that was important.
Did it alter their dynamics at all? I'm just curious.
(32:52):
I mean, I think it gave them jet fuel to
do the things that they always wanted to do. Lindsay
the youngest is now a very active advocate for rights
for the mentally ill, for advocating for families who are
dealing with acutely mentally ill family members. She's joined the
boards of two different organizations and she's looking to join
a third. She's very active. And then Margaret has doubled
(33:15):
down on her artwork, has pulled away for now from
her regular family and is and is you know, sort
of come close to her immediate family and her chosen family,
and she is counseling people on how to move through
trauma and there in her own one on one way. Um,
these are things that I think they were on their
way to doing, if you've read to the end of
(33:37):
the book. These are things they've wanted to do for
a while, but but the book has sort of given
them permission to do it. It's done. I hope I'd
like to think on a good day that it's done.
That that thing that Bessel Vanderkolt talked about, that it's about,
it's it's written, the thing that they couldn't right themselves
so that they can feel that the story is somewhat
complete and they can go to the next chapter and
(33:59):
Bob isn't isn't there the next generation? Um, the grandchildren? Who?
I mean, that was one of the things that when
I said, your book maybe cry, that's that that was
I can identify that as a place where it really
it really did. I I the idea that this is.
I mean, one of the things about family secrets is
(34:19):
when you can actually own your story, you know, you
own the whole thing, in all of its messiness and
all of its complexity. And that was something that and
you can't do that when it's a secret. When it's secret,
all it is is toxic poison, leaking over everything and
creating all sorts of behaviors in ways that people can't
(34:42):
you know, they don't even know why they're behaving in
a way that they are. And so the fact that
this was so in the open ultimately in this family
is also it would seem to me what allowed those
grandchildren to um start owning it as well. Yes, but
I hope I also hit it, hit it some of
the mixed blessing of that that Lindsay was so interested
(35:03):
in not hiding things, so interested in transparency. I wanted
her children to know so much that they ended up
assuming some of the burdens she carried and felt a
little scarred themselves. So I was, you know, it never
gets simple. It might get better, but it definitely it
doesn't get wrapped up in a bow. Although there was
a very lovely little moment at the end with with
(35:25):
Lindsay's daughter that I won't reveal here before I go
to Danny, know that reminds me of a question that
I didn't ask you. But that has to do with
the idea of at any given time, I think when
people are keeping secrets. Um, Danny, you actually cautioned against this.
You said, we shouldn't fall, we shouldn't be guilty of
(35:47):
present is. Um, we shouldn't hold people in the past
accountable to present day standards of moral and ethical behavior
because they were probably doing the best they can and
they were doing as they were counseled. So the Galvin's
may have been you know, uh, sort of behaving the
way they we thought they were supposed to behave. Your
parents probably thought it was in your interest to keep
(36:08):
this stuff a secret. I'm very interested in how and
you both wrote with tremendous compassion about your respective families,
one that you were reporting on, one that was your own.
How did you manage to drum out that kind of compassion?
Were their previous versions where you were kind of angrier
Danny and you kind of had to hit select all delete,
(36:29):
And but you know, Bob, where there, you know, moments
where you held out the matriarch Mimi was with more
contempt and then kind of toned it back. Just curious
because transparency, of course now seems like the right and
ethical thing to do, but as Bob was pointing out,
that can also backfire. We don't know, if you know,
obviously when you want to earn the side of sharing.
I mean, transparency is good, but it can have its
(36:51):
you know, too much could also be harmful. So I'm
just curious. Yeah, I mean for me, Yeah, I did
hit control whatever that thing is two pages because um,
I didn't yet have the necessary distance. You know, there's
(37:14):
a very very slight but very very necessary distance between
myself and the story as I was telling it. And
I think one of the gifts of of of of
writing the book is that I developed more and more,
ever deepening compassion for both of my parents as I
(37:34):
was writing it, because my reporting was leading me to
these places where I I understood what it must have
been to be um an infertile, childless couple in the
early nineteen sixties, and in their milieu and the and
the the shame and the you know, the distress of that.
(37:55):
It just it felt it must have felt to them
like the absolute end of the world old and so
when you were faced with the absolute end of the world,
you know, you you you, you take desperate measures. And
I'm sure this felt like a desperate measure to them.
But the gift was and I think I do I
do write this in the book. We don't often have
(38:19):
the need or um the desire or the circumstances two
really be able to empathetically imagine our parents as people
aside from being our parents who they were before us.
We just don't do it. There are parents and that's
just not something that's not a place where we go.
(38:41):
And I had to go there in order to be
able to walk with them, like walk that walk with
them through that process, and that was that was a
great gift the here. I think there's a lot of
parallels with with the part of the work that I
was doing to try to discover the law lives of
Mimi and her husband Don, the parents in the book,
(39:04):
because there was archival work and there were interviews, and
then there was you know, really really um deep speculation
about what their challenges might have been, and then interrogating
those speculations to try to report them out. Um the mother,
Mimi was still around as I was reporting. She she
(39:24):
died in the middle of my work, but the father
had died close to twenty years earlier. Many of the
children started out in my early conversations, had many critical
things to say about their mother. She was in a
lot of denial. She preferred the sick children to the
well ones. She put us in harm's way. But um,
I was on high alert at that time because I
(39:46):
feel like mothers get a really raw deal in nonfiction
and in fiction when you write about families, and I
didn't want to necessarily run to her as a scapegoat.
And sure enough, the more I talked with everyone the
more I saw that over time and they understood the
subtleties of what she was dealing with. And also she
was the one who was dealing with it. The father
who everyone had put on a pedestal, actually wasn't so great.
(40:08):
And Mimi, who had her hands dirty, making lots and
lots of decisions, some of them bad, some of them good.
You know, she wasn't so bad. And I wanted to
to get it that ambiguity and also avoid the present
is m I mean that the options this family had,
like the options your parents had, were very, very narrow,
and the stigma that your parents were dealing with, and
(40:30):
that this family we're dealing with, we're you know, considerable.
We'll be right back, Danny. I like to question that
I saw here for you, which is um from Tom
did Inheritance, which which solves the secret make you look
at your earlier books any differently? Oh that's a great question.
(40:51):
I know, yeah, it's really a good gues Well, first
of all, it made me revisit them, which you know,
you really don't necessarily want to revisit a first novel
that you wrote, you know, it's but I did not
for the fainthearted and what I feel reading my earlier work.
I wondered at first whether inheritance would render all of
(41:15):
my earlier work moot in some way, Like you know,
I had that kind of strange fear of what are
those books now somehow inauthentic because I didn't know um.
And I wrote a great deal about my father, a
great deal about my parents, a great deal about secrets,
(41:36):
but I was missing this essential piece. I actually end
up feeling like not all of them, I mean, not
the early novels, but they're more interesting to me now
in a certain way, because every book is I mean,
certainly memoirs most of all, is like holding time still
(41:57):
within the covers of a book. This is this is
all I know. Now it's going into this this story.
And I've always known that, which is why I've written
multiple memoirs. But now I look back and I think, wow,
that really is all I knew in two thousand and ten,
and that was all I knew and so forth, and
(42:20):
so it actually makes for a really interesting um kind
of body of work. Someday I may try to do
something with that, like annotate them, or like, just because
there is this this past summer, I recorded the audiobook
of Slow Motion, which is my first memoir that came out.
It's never been an audiobook, so I I was recording
(42:43):
it and I had to stop so many times in
the studio, just stunned by a sentence that I just read,
realizing how much I knew, how much subconsciously was right there.
So that's thrilling in a way. They don't feel like
like I was mistaken. They just feel like that's what
(43:04):
I knew then, and this is what I know now.
If you wrote an essay about that, I just want
to say I'd be here for that. I would read it. No,
really like just reviewing what the things that sort of
jump off the page, like crickets now that sort of
tell you that you were dropping yourself clues. And if
you annotated an early book, to have it on audio
would be fun too. Hey hold the phone. Wait, whoa,
(43:29):
we need two narrators. I was just gonna say they
had the anxiety Danny narrator translator, Like you can peel
like I'm not doing the right but you know what
I mean. Oh, this is nice, Robert. When I read
a book like yours, I always think about Janet Malcolm's
assertion that journalism is always an act of betrayal. Did
(43:51):
you ever have a moment of doubting what you were doing?
Did it affect your decisions and you were writing as
you were writing or in writing? There there is a
question of who are you working for? Right? And I
very specifically, I am not an advocacy journalist. Journalist I
write books that are The reviewers seem to use the
word empathy a lot, but I find my the way
(44:12):
I look at it, the word empathy is, you know,
a certain amount of intimacy and the ability to walk
in someone's shoes. But that's different from advocacy. And and
I'm right up against the line the entire time. So
I kind of live in that, in that Janet Malcolm
world where where some people might wonder, am I going
to be betrayed by you? And and I never make
(44:32):
that promise that I will never betray them, because I am,
after all, independent, and I am not working for them.
And so that's tough. It's a tough thing to do,
and and it often means that some people were just
going to say no, They're not going to do it,
And and and moments when I like to laugh at myself.
I think like journalists are like vampires, Like they only
(44:54):
come where they're invited in, Like they can't just barge
into the house. Someone actually has to let them in
and u and And that's why I was so tentative
with this family. I said, let's take let's take months.
Let's let me get on the phone once a week
with a different member of the family and speak in
an open ended way about what you might expect from
a book like this, and we'll all know one way
(45:15):
or another. At the end of ten weeks, you know
whether this is possible or not. And if it is impossible,
I'll move on and do something else. And you have
to be ready to walk away that way, Danny, I'm
gonna end it. I think we have two minutes, so
I'm gonna end it with you. I'm going to take
the liberty of summarizing a number of the questions here,
which are kind of more comments than questions, but there's
(45:37):
a theme running through them. A lot of people are
saying I was conceived by a sperm donor, or I
do know anything about sperm donation laws in Georgia in
the nineteen sixties, all sorts of like very specific things,
and I'm wondering how much you've become I can ask
both of you this question and you know, but how
much you've become people's confessors. It's an awesome responsibility to
(45:59):
take done and maybe, um, what kind of repository of
information you have become in? You know, what kind of
function you serve for people now? In this way? I mean,
I couldn't have imagined what happened when when when this
book came out, and and it happened from day one,
from the very first event that I did, where I
looked around the room and I thought, who is everybody here?
(46:20):
This is not my usual literary demographic. There were old men,
and there were middle aged couples, and there were young people,
and the people crying before I even opened my mouth. Um,
this period of time that we're in regarding people discovering
everything that we're discovering because of the one to punch
of easy accessible DNA testing plus the Internet has meant
(46:46):
that there's there's a huge number of people who are
trying to navigate all of these questions. Can I find
anything out? What are the laws? Do I have any rights?
And yes, I mean I feel very much activated you know,
like like I began two years ago feeling like I
(47:09):
would never really become polemical about this, and I would
stay on the literary side of things. But I do
and have become somewhat polemical about the state of the
secrecy and the lack of regulation in this country. Um,
which I can't get into in two minutes, but it's
just stunning the way that we are not like sort
(47:31):
of prepared for this reckoning that we're in. I mean,
I'm going to have to leave it at that, but um,
but I will say to everyone who's listening, who is
grappling with these kinds of issues, you know this, I'm sure,
but you are far from alone. And there are a
lot of there are a lot a lot of resources
and and and more more every day. We'll be back
(47:58):
with season five Family Secrets, beginning April one.
Family Secrets as a production of I Heart Radio High
Family Secrets. Family It's Danny. Last week I had the
pleasure of being part of an ongoing series produced by
(00:20):
Penguin Random House called Two Writers Talking. The writers in
this case were myself and Bob Colcher, author of the
blockbuster Hidden Valley Road. Bob and I were moderated by
New York Times journalist and critic Jennifer sr. The subject,
you guessed it, Family Secrets. I'm excited to share this
(00:41):
special bonus episode with you, and remember April one, we'll
be dropping a whole new season Between now and then,
though we have a few surprises in store, so keep
your eyes and ears out. What were you most responsive
(01:03):
to in each other's books? And they may or may
not have had to do with secrecy. I'm happy to
go first. That's all right, Thank you, Danny for the
chance to talk with you about your book. I I
really was was blown away by it. I thought that
the the part about it that really struck me was
sort of the the two reactions that you had to
(01:27):
this news about your about your biological heritage. Your first,
the first thing you do is you look in the
mirror and you wonder if you're still yourself, you know,
if this you're wondering how this news actually changes you.
And then the ripple effects start and you start to
wonder if the information was there all along and you've
only wielded away. You know that remark your mother made
(01:49):
several years earlier, why didn't you see that? And several
other clues that you almost wilfully didn't um, I didn't notice,
and I recognized in the family I reported on and
in Hidden Valley Road, you have you have children who
learn more and more secrets as they get older. The
mother in the book, Mimi Galvin, she she tends to
(02:12):
let loose new pieces of information when they're back is
against the wall. So so the revelations keep coming into
her nineties and after a while, uh, they're so whipsawed
by all the new information they start to wonder if
if the in certain cases, that there are things they
should have known all along, if they really had been
trying to assemble a narrative. And it's this assembling of
(02:34):
your own personal narrative that interests me the most, and
how fragile it can be. But I had I had
a very similar response reading Hidden Valley Road, and um
thinking about the ways in which I which I loved. Yeah,
I cried multiple times, especially towards the end. The sisters,
(02:54):
the two the two youngest children, the only girls in
the family, um are I think the ones who grapple most,
each in their own way with what they didn't know,
what they might have known, what what each of them? Uh,
(03:15):
you know that there's a conversation that they have fairly
not early, but like in the middle, in the middle
of the book, where one asked the other, did this
happen to you too? I don't know spoilers, but you know,
did this happen to you too? And the answer is no,
I have no idea what you're talking about. And then
way later, as adults, they have the same conversation again
(03:37):
and the answer, of course is yes, and and and
the sister who was asked that doesn't even remember being
asked that. And So there's this way in which I
think that family secrets um or or secrets in general,
the toxicity of them renders them like young call secrets
(03:57):
psychic poison, right, So it renders them um something that
we may know on some level but can't touch. And
the family in Hi Valley Road is just it's full
of so many secrets that ricochet off of each other
and can't touch each other. And you know, in my case,
(04:18):
inheritances is a is a memoir, and it's it's my
own story. But because I have written nine books prior,
I actually have a body of evidence for what I
actually new but couldn't think because it's in my fiction,
(04:41):
it's in my earlier memoirs. It's like the thing that
was always there that I was digging for without knowing
that I was digging. I I really did not consciously
know it, but I now see there was a trail
of breadcrumbs. Danny, what was that term that you had
as I go, analytic term unsought the unthought known, unthought
(05:05):
coined by a psychoanalyst named Christopher Bolas has written a
great deal about it. The unthought known, which is just
one of my favorite phrases ever, I think is really
defines what we absolutely in our gut, you know, in
our um. You know that we know it, but we
(05:25):
can't think it because it's too dangerous. So you mentioned
that young had this young who, by the way, had
a psychotic break and may in fact of vin schizophrenic himself,
which is an interesting through line through all of the
um you mentioned that Young talked about called secrets psychic poison.
(05:46):
They're good for books, though, right, I mean there, I
feel like some of the best literature is about deceit
if not all of it. And so I am wondering
if you, before we dive into your books, if you
have favorite books of about deceit um, and if you
think secrets are at least useful in helping structure a narrative,
(06:08):
you know, I mean, if you were looking to the
anything in particular. They certainly offer a surprise ending sometimes
in um in Danny's case of surprise beginning in inheritance,
but the sort of like the end of a mystery,
you know, hindsight twenty. But I look back on many
years of magazine writing and writing, you know, crime stories,
and I see more and more stories about families in crisis,
(06:30):
and quite often with information that's been tamped down because
of scandal and then comes out again because of the narrative.
And I'm writing about so, you know, I wrote about
a young man who was on trial for a gay
hate crime, and in the middle of the trial, he
stands up and declares that he himself is gay, comes
out of the closet and reveals his secret. And UM,
(06:51):
one woman's life being molested by her father culminates with
her murdering her father and then going on trial so
that the secret she couldn't keep closed up for ever. UM.
I think about it a lot in terms of its
narrative power. But UM, and I see it everywhere. When
I started reporting on the Galvins, I thought about American pastoral,
(07:12):
which you know, has a has a family calamity that
that feels so hard to explain, but it's also quite scandalous,
and and secrets are kept and then the parents or
the father in particular, is searching, you know what, what
is it you know in the past that might have
caused this? What secret relationship with his daughter might have
(07:33):
triggered this. I think it's an effort to find clarity
in an effort to write the story. UM. You know,
I had listened to to a bonus episode of Family
Secrets with with Bessel vander Kolke, who is no relation
to Coker and UM. But but he said something that
really really hit me about and I'm going to mangle it,
but it's about trauma. Is a story that can't be written.
(07:55):
So so the you know, your effort to write your
book and the Galvin's determination to tell their story is
to me, it's a way of moving through trauma and
to try to give it a give it, uh, if
not a happy ending, at least to help it settle
down a little bit. I love that Um and the vessels.
The quote is um, it's a nature of trauma that
(08:18):
it doesn't allow a story to be told, which is
why when we're when we're traumatized by something, all of us,
our our our first instinct is to tell the story
again and again and again to whoever will listen, because
we're trying to we're trying to contain it, and it's
like water running through our open fingers. It's it feels impossible.
(08:41):
And of course, you know, narrative ultimately like finding a
way to shape trauma into art, you know, or you know,
chaos into some kind of you know, shape or clarity
is um the work of literature and the work of life,
I think. But you know, people me all the time
about family secrets and my podcast and my like do
(09:05):
I go hunting to those searching for my guests? And
you know, I don't because the stories keep on coming,
and they are very often wonderful books that either I
you know, I find them, I read them, I know them,
or the authors or friends of mine and I suddenly think, oh,
(09:29):
that would be Nick Flynn, that would be an amazing story.
Or Jenny Boylan that would be an amazing story. Or
Ti Kira Madden that would be an amazing story. K
s A. Lehman that we could go on. It's just
it's why there are so many writers on my show.
It's not because it's a literary podcast. It's because the
(09:49):
work I think that writers do of finding a way
to take a secret, a trauma, multiple secrets, multiple multiple traumas,
and shaped them so that then you know, what we
have is not only the mess, but the transcendence, you know,
(10:10):
the redemption in some way from that, the the the
turning it into something that has meaning and that will
have meaning for others. That actually, excuse me, it's funny
written right on my she'd here is The next thing
that I wanted to ask you is what do you
what do you think the hardest thing is about writing
about family secrets? Like what what makes it? What are
(10:32):
the biggest challenges and I think that each of you
are going to have very different answers. Obviously, Bob, you
were trying to earn the confidence of the family, and
you are Danny. This is very personal to you. So, Bob,
I mean, do you want to go first? I mean,
it's going to be idiosyncratic, and it's going to vary
from story to story and what advantage point you're telling
it from, obviously, But for for you in this project, Bob,
(10:53):
what was it? I certainly certainly believe the stakes for
Danny must have been very personal and very high, as
you're writing about friends and loved ones, Whereas with with me,
I'm I'm encountering these sisters who are the first people
I met in the family, who are determined to be transparent.
They want to smash all the secrets to bits. They
(11:13):
want to be in the open. But I am you know,
I'm not them. I'm I'm I'm a reporter, and so
I need to make sure that they trust me. But
more importantly, I need to talk to everybody in the
family to make sure that I'm telling an accurate and
fair story. And that took a year before I before
I even got the book deal. Uh, talking to various
(11:35):
family members because I was very skeptical. I was convinced
that one family member at least would stand up and say,
you've got to be kidding me. I don't want my
family secrets in a book. And Um, I hadn't been
prepared for just how much the rest of the family
would defer to the sisters, and also how optimistic they
were that they had something to to tell the world
(11:56):
about the science of mental illness and and about how
they moved through their traumas as a family. So I
was happily surprised when they did it. But but the
biggest risk is that you that you'd say betrayed that
trust or that or that you you skew it in
some way where it it quite clearly as a self
(12:18):
serving work of journalism. I had to be removed enough
from the situation so that I didn't I didn't write
something to um, can you know too completely flimsy. But
I also wanted to report as intimately as possible about
these people's thoughts and feelings. So that was my challenge. Bob,
(12:39):
Can I ask you why you think that they all
really did come on board? That's that that's so unusual
that they all did. Was it was that out of
a kind of sense of duty in a way to
the two sisters, or was it also as you you
touched upon, like in the name of science, that there
was this extraordinary opportunity to uh, you know, for the
(13:00):
world to learn something about schizophrenia. And can I just
jump on and also say, was there I can't remember anywhere?
Was who was the toughest cell, if there was a
kind of cell. I mean, there were three or four
things that The first was that that most of the
horrible events in the family had happened thirty or years
ago or more so, I hadn't really considered how how
(13:22):
long ago the events were. The second was deferring to
the sisters who were the youngest in the family, and
so older brothers who were had left the house earlier,
felt guilty frankly that so much had trickled down and
things that they never knew happened had happened to the sisters.
Family secrets had happened to the sisters, and so they said, okay,
if they wanted, then that's fine. And then there was
(13:43):
late breaking scientific information about the family genetic UH code.
Two different groups of researchers found out two different things
that were really stunning, all at the same time. And
then finally the big one is that Mimi the mother
was on board UM for the first time. She was
not interested for a very long time, but she was
around ninety now and in very frail health, and everybody
(14:05):
thought it was an hour never And I think the
scientific breakthroughs were very validating to her. It made her,
you know, it made her feel comfortable saying this was genetic,
this wasn't my fault. And so she was fine talking
to me about about what she wanted to talk about.
What was toughest for you. I mean, Danny, this is
going to be a very different I can't even imagine. Yeah,
(14:28):
And there were a couple of different layers one and
both of my parents were gone UM. And people have
sometimes asked me how I think the story might have
been different if my parents were alive, or if one
of them had been alive, if my father had still
been living, there wouldn't be a book. I just wouldn't
(14:50):
have written it while he was living. UM. He I
believe very much. UM wanted this distayed married. It was
something he was both of my parents were going to
take to the grave with them and they did. And
then I remember when Inherent was about to come out,
(15:12):
and the first piece that was published was in Time magazine,
and it was a big thing, and there was this
photograph of my dad and me um on the beach,
happy like playful, loving photograph. And when the piece came out,
I had such a pang because I thought, like that
(15:32):
young father, if he could have had a crystal ball
and seeing a future where his this secret that I
think was so deep that he perhaps was even keeping
it from himself, that that would have been there in
a magazine that he read, you know, religiously every week,
(15:53):
there for all the world to see. I was. I
was just very aware of the that was painful for me,
but all so felt to me in terms of like, well,
what right do I have to tell this story? I
have grappled with that in other books. With Inheritance, I
never grappled with it, because it literally felt like the
(16:15):
story of my life, Like this was that I had
a right to tell it and to explore it and
to you know, go deeply and as a journalist into
you know, the his who who were my parents before
I was born? And what was the world that they
lived in? But the other piece of it was I
discovered my biological father and um, he This is not
(16:41):
a spoiler. I mean he had been an anonymous sperm
donor as a twenty two year old medical student and
was very conscious of his privacy, as was I. And
from the time that he and I started having any
contact with each other, it was very clear that I
(17:01):
was going to write a book about this. I mean
it was it was the book that everything else had
led to. UM and I was transparent about that with
my biological father and with his family, that his wife
and the kids that I was in touch with. But
when I promised that I would protect his his identity,
(17:24):
and I worked very hard to protect his identity. When
I finished the manuscript and before it started going down
the pipeline towards being published, I did something that is
such a memoir one oh one. You don't do this,
but I had to, which was I sent it to
him and I asked him to read it. Really for
(17:48):
a sense. I wanted to know that he felt that
that I hadn't missed anything, that there was no little
tell in there where somebody who really wanted to and
became obsessed configure out who he was, but I think
I was also looking for his blessing, which I which
I received from him. I received an extraordinary long let
her back from him after he had read it, with
(18:10):
a list of all the things that he liked, some
of which were things that were very tough in the book, um,
but really saying I feel that you've been fair. This
reflects my experience too, and he felt that his identity
had been protected. So that was that was this piece
of that process that was very different from me, because
even with my own mother, when she was living and
(18:32):
I published earlier memoirs, I did not submit them to
her for her approval before they came out. I love
the part in your book where you infer I'm sure
correctly that they've googled you. You know that your your
your biological father and his family that that that they
all and I just imagine, you know, with a smile
(18:54):
and saying, oh my god, she's going to write about this.
There's no reas not going to write about this. I
kind of breaks on everything for a little while. Yeah,
I mean I think initially, when when I think the
reticence about having any contact with me was like Oprah
could be lurking in the bushes and jumping out with
a camera crew. Yeah, I was like, wow, this is great.
(19:14):
She's a writer. How interesting? Oh this is terrible. She
writes about her family and identity. And yeah, although I
had this thought that like that happened, and then they
started reading you and they were like, oh, but maybe
this will be wonderful, and maybe this will be just
the thing. You know, he clearly is one over, like
he's he understands how everything is so well considered in
(19:37):
your writing, So he he gets it. Yet yet it's complicated, right,
because what does it mean to be? And I was
very aware of this when the book came out. You know,
he was just about eighty when the book came out,
and this very private person, and it was kind of
you know, it was kind of hard to miss. He
(19:58):
would turn on the TV or there would be a
magazine and these things. I think we're a little intense
because it was also a story that was in a
way part of his story too. But he was certainly
choosing anonymity and and I was offering it so on
(20:20):
a human level. I mean, it's just I mean, he
and I have spoken about it, but will never speak
about it publicly. I don't think, but it's just an
interesting thing to grapple with. And we were all googling
each other, like, Matt, Meanwhile, your father, like the man
who brought you up, is is all over inheritance you know.
He it's dedicated to him, your your relationship with him,
(20:45):
and your new thoughts on how you how how will
you relate to him now that you have this news.
It's something you wrestle with so openly and cogently all
the way through it really, um, I feel like it
keeps coming back to him. It's another part that really
struck me. Thank you. Yeah. And when people ask me
the dedication page of inheritances is it's books dedicated to
(21:09):
my father. And I don't specify which father which because
of course I didn't specify which father. Of course it
should be a parent. That I have one father, I
have one dad, uh, and that's the dad who raised me.
But people would bring that up and I'm like, no,
that's the whole point. Can I just point something out
you said, of course it would it should be a parent.
(21:31):
That's no. I mean, it's just one of these weird
oral accidents. That's not the you know, you were talking
to This is going to apply to both you, and
I think it is going to be the final question
actually before we go on and look at some of
the audience questions. But um so, Danny, you obviously went
to extraordinary lens to make sure that you know your
(21:51):
biological father was comfortable with this, and he's probably had
some instinctive sense of what you owed him. What do
you think we owe the people who actually in our
families who might deceive us, like, what do we owe them?
It's got to be a question you've wrestled with, and
I mean, certainly the two youngest sisters had very different
(22:12):
approaches to what they believed they owe their families. So
I think i'll I'll leave it on that. I think
it's And Danny, you also are now you're an aficionado
of of family secret stories. You've seen You've talked with
a couple of dozen people now who have been through
revelations and found new ways to interprelate with their family.
(22:35):
In the case of the Galvin's um that in the beginning,
I met the sisters together, and I thought that perhaps
this would be a story about two sisters who hobbled
together and made it through a very difficult childhood, that
they could be some of the people we would root
for in this story as they grow up. And then
once I interviewed them separately, I found that they were
(22:56):
quite different people, that they had had many years of
closeness and then many years of not so closeness, that
they had been through very similar traumas as children, but
had processed them differently. And I was thrown by it
for a moment or two. UM, But then I sat
up and said, this is this is reality. Different people
experience their families in different ways. UM. I have a
(23:19):
you know, a sister and brother who might be watching
on the zoom. Now, you know, we grew up in
the same house, but in different houses, you know, and
we have different memories that may each of which are
probably self serving. And so when the privilege I had
in writing the Galvin story is to be able to
write about these um, these women's lives over decades and
also their brothers, and to see how their perceptions of
(23:41):
their family change, and how they're the way they decided
to relate to their family changes. Um. They Lindsay starts
out wanting to leave UM and never come back. She
ends up coming back and being the caregiver for her brothers.
Margaret it grabs her chance to escape the trauma, and
then feels a certain amount of rejection and ambivalence about
(24:03):
what happened. She feels a little locked out, and that
colors her relationship with their family going forward. And and
she decides once all the secrets spill out, that becomes
further fuel for her to declare some boundaries and some independence,
a little like um, like like Tara west Over and educated.
So I see two different models in the book that
(24:26):
I was really very pleased to be able to to
portray year by year almost as they moved through their lives. Yeah,
I was. I was so struck by that. Um by um,
they're the tracking of their different experiences. And you know,
like if if you were if you were tracking them
as a novelist and this word fiction, I think a
(24:49):
novelist might have come up with a very different response
in each of those women as adults, and or maybe
a great novelist would have come up with exactly the
response that that happened. Um. But you know, one of
the things in having become um, you know, sort of
a student of family secrets unexpectedly is that one of
(25:12):
the things I've learned, especially in the podcast, is that
when we discover something is at least as important as
what we discover, like how these things break over the
course of our lives. I had a moment that really
took me back as I was researching and reporting and
processing my own experience, where I thought I had felt
(25:34):
so betrayed by my parents. UM. Initially, I felt like,
how could you have kept this a secret? It's such
a fundamental human right to know if it's possible to know,
to know where you know, where we come from. And
and then at some point I realized what would have
happened to me if I had learned this at sixteen
(25:55):
or at twenty three? What if my mother had blurted
it out to me? Um after my father died when
I mean, that was a time in my life where
I was a hot mess of a human being, and
I don't think I would have survived it. Um. I
found out what I found out at an extremely stable
(26:17):
time in my life, you know, when in a in
a in a long time marriage and with a with
a a child who was already seventeen at the time
I made this discovery. Um, in a you know, just
in in midlife, I had a lot of life behind
me with a very solid foundation, and so I end
(26:39):
up feeling like I found out at a really miraculous
moment where there was enough time, still, enough people living
who I might be able to learn something from. I
also hear stories from people regularly who are making these
kinds of discoveries and there in their eighties. What do
you do with that? Um, you know, with the time
(27:02):
that's left and what there is to process. So I
think it has I think it has a lot to
do with the with the with the wind, and and
not only with the with the what. I'm also reminded
of something you said in your book Anywhere. You said
that sometimes family secrets are um, they're kept out of love.
We're going to take a quick break here for a
(27:24):
word from our sponsor. I'm going to go into m
Q and a function here. What does Bob believe is
the biggest obstacle to progress in the treatment of schizophrenia. Well,
(27:44):
there's been some strides in early intervention and a little
bit of the stigma has gone now so that families
aren't blamed for the disease. UM. There's family support now
if you're lucky enough to have good health care. Um
so those have improved, but for a variety of reasons,
it's just, um, there's been very little movement on the
pharmaceutical front. I mean I came up in and we
(28:07):
all did, in an era where when I when you
think about mental illness, I thought of it as a
brain chemistry issue, and that the idea was to through
hard work and trial and error, in the right therapist
and psychopharmacologist, you'd find the right pill that would perhaps
help you become more functional. And that might be true
for things like anxiety or depression. But um, but schizophrenia
(28:28):
is still working with the same basic drugs that the
Galvin family were treated with back in the late sixties
and early seventies, and that part is hard, and there
are a lot of reasons for that. One is um Uh,
some disappointing outcomes from the Human Genome Project. Instead of
finding one big genetic issue that could be zapped with
(28:48):
the drug, they've found more than a hundred potential variants
that all have very limited effects size. So it's hard
to know what gene to zap with a pharmaceutical drug.
And then also you can't really test it on mice,
you have to test it on humans, and that's risky
and expensive. And then finally, the constituency can't really advocate
for themselves the same way that people with cancer can,
(29:13):
for instance, and so that things are sluggish and all
those fronts. I just found one for Danny that I
think is really kind of great. UM. What questions would
you ask your father and mother, knowing what you do now?
I would ask how conscious they were of UM, what
they were signing on for what they were doing in UM,
(29:37):
in going to an institute and and using donor sperm UM.
I'm fascinated by that time in reproductive medicine, where so
many people who wanted to be parents were deceived, though
often with the best of intentions. Bye bye the doctors
(30:00):
that they went to see, who really believed it would
be best if they forgot it ever happened. I wonder
how closely they kept that knowledge in their consciousness. In
Family Secrets, the tagline of every episode is the secrets
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
(30:21):
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. I wonder which
of those categories my parents fell into and what that
meant for the three of us. What that meant for
the way that we interacted with each other during my childhood. Yes,
so last would like to know Hi, Robert, thanks so
much for your amazing word giant passing around to other
(30:43):
psychiatry residents. What you wanted to know was how did
the Galvins react. What was the response? Well, there came
a point a couple of months before the book came
out when People magazine wanted to write a feature about
the family and to put a small excerpt in it,
And so I was I was getting on the phone
with the mall saying, hey, can you meet a reporter
(31:05):
and and I That's that's when I said to myself,
you know, I can't ask them to take time out
of their day and to do all of this with
with the book they haven't even read. So a couple
of months before it came out, I did send advanced
copies to them, and I think that there was first
there was in general, there was relief that I delivered
what I said I would, which is something that that
(31:25):
dealt with the tender and sensitive issues of their family,
of the family secrets in a way that wasn't like
rubber necking that that was tasteful, and that was really
about the possible good that the family could do. And
then there were individual difficulties that some of them had
with placement. You know, this was a group portrait of
a family with some people foregrounded and some people backgrounded.
(31:48):
You know, I was here too at that dinner. Why
why wasn't I, you know, why didn't you talk to
Why aren't my thoughts and feelings about that in there?
And so I think that that is the inherent difficulty
with journalism in general, but also with with intimately reported
narrative journalism, that that the reporter ends up being the
one who makes the calls and and they they we're
(32:11):
kind enough to give up that control to someone and
trust in them. But then something amazing happened, which is
Oprah's Book Club, and and that kind of set everyone's
mind at ease in the family about how this book
would be received in the world. The last thing they
wanted was for it to be something toddry or something
(32:31):
that would be kind of like a grizzly gross book.
And so as soon as Oprah's Book Club accepted the
book and started to flag the book, everyone including myself,
we also kind of you know how to cigh of relief,
saying we know, we know that that it will be
seen as a product with goodwill and that was important.
Did it alter their dynamics at all? I'm just curious.
(32:52):
I mean, I think it gave them jet fuel to
do the things that they always wanted to do. Lindsay
the youngest is now a very active advocate for rights
for the mentally ill, for advocating for families who are
dealing with acutely mentally ill family members. She's joined the
boards of two different organizations and she's looking to join
a third. She's very active. And then Margaret has doubled
(33:15):
down on her artwork, has pulled away for now from
her regular family and is and is you know, sort
of come close to her immediate family and her chosen family,
and she is counseling people on how to move through
trauma and there in her own one on one way. Um,
these are things that I think they were on their
way to doing, if you've read to the end of
(33:37):
the book. These are things they've wanted to do for
a while, but but the book has sort of given
them permission to do it. It's done. I hope I'd
like to think on a good day that it's done.
That that thing that Bessel Vanderkolt talked about, that it's about,
it's it's written, the thing that they couldn't right themselves
so that they can feel that the story is somewhat
complete and they can go to the next chapter and
(33:59):
Bob isn't isn't there the next generation? Um, the grandchildren? Who?
I mean, that was one of the things that when
I said, your book maybe cry, that's that that was
I can identify that as a place where it really
it really did. I I the idea that this is.
I mean, one of the things about family secrets is
(34:19):
when you can actually own your story, you know, you
own the whole thing, in all of its messiness and
all of its complexity. And that was something that and
you can't do that when it's a secret. When it's secret,
all it is is toxic poison, leaking over everything and
creating all sorts of behaviors in ways that people can't
(34:42):
you know, they don't even know why they're behaving in
a way that they are. And so the fact that
this was so in the open ultimately in this family
is also it would seem to me what allowed those
grandchildren to um start owning it as well. Yes, but
I hope I also hit it, hit it some of
the mixed blessing of that that Lindsay was so interested
(35:03):
in not hiding things, so interested in transparency. I wanted
her children to know so much that they ended up
assuming some of the burdens she carried and felt a
little scarred themselves. So I was, you know, it never
gets simple. It might get better, but it definitely it
doesn't get wrapped up in a bow. Although there was
a very lovely little moment at the end with with
(35:25):
Lindsay's daughter that I won't reveal here before I go
to Danny, know that reminds me of a question that
I didn't ask you. But that has to do with
the idea of at any given time, I think when
people are keeping secrets. Um, Danny, you actually cautioned against this.
You said, we shouldn't fall, we shouldn't be guilty of
(35:47):
present is. Um, we shouldn't hold people in the past
accountable to present day standards of moral and ethical behavior
because they were probably doing the best they can and
they were doing as they were counseled. So the Galvin's
may have been you know, uh, sort of behaving the
way they we thought they were supposed to behave. Your
parents probably thought it was in your interest to keep
(36:08):
this stuff a secret. I'm very interested in how and
you both wrote with tremendous compassion about your respective families,
one that you were reporting on, one that was your own.
How did you manage to drum out that kind of compassion?
Were their previous versions where you were kind of angrier
Danny and you kind of had to hit select all delete,
(36:29):
And but you know, Bob, where there, you know, moments
where you held out the matriarch Mimi was with more
contempt and then kind of toned it back. Just curious
because transparency, of course now seems like the right and
ethical thing to do, but as Bob was pointing out,
that can also backfire. We don't know, if you know,
obviously when you want to earn the side of sharing.
I mean, transparency is good, but it can have its
(36:51):
you know, too much could also be harmful. So I'm
just curious. Yeah, I mean for me, Yeah, I did
hit control whatever that thing is two pages because um,
I didn't yet have the necessary distance. You know, there's
(37:14):
a very very slight but very very necessary distance between
myself and the story as I was telling it. And
I think one of the gifts of of of of
writing the book is that I developed more and more,
ever deepening compassion for both of my parents as I
(37:34):
was writing it, because my reporting was leading me to
these places where I I understood what it must have
been to be um an infertile, childless couple in the
early nineteen sixties, and in their milieu and the and
the the shame and the you know, the distress of that.
(37:55):
It just it felt it must have felt to them
like the absolute end of the world old and so
when you were faced with the absolute end of the world,
you know, you you you, you take desperate measures. And
I'm sure this felt like a desperate measure to them.
But the gift was and I think I do I
do write this in the book. We don't often have
(38:19):
the need or um the desire or the circumstances two
really be able to empathetically imagine our parents as people
aside from being our parents who they were before us.
We just don't do it. There are parents and that's
just not something that's not a place where we go.
(38:41):
And I had to go there in order to be
able to walk with them, like walk that walk with
them through that process, and that was that was a
great gift the here. I think there's a lot of
parallels with with the part of the work that I
was doing to try to discover the law lives of
Mimi and her husband Don, the parents in the book,
(39:04):
because there was archival work and there were interviews, and
then there was you know, really really um deep speculation
about what their challenges might have been, and then interrogating
those speculations to try to report them out. Um the mother,
Mimi was still around as I was reporting. She she
(39:24):
died in the middle of my work, but the father
had died close to twenty years earlier. Many of the
children started out in my early conversations, had many critical
things to say about their mother. She was in a
lot of denial. She preferred the sick children to the
well ones. She put us in harm's way. But um,
I was on high alert at that time because I
(39:46):
feel like mothers get a really raw deal in nonfiction
and in fiction when you write about families, and I
didn't want to necessarily run to her as a scapegoat.
And sure enough, the more I talked with everyone the
more I saw that over time and they understood the
subtleties of what she was dealing with. And also she
was the one who was dealing with it. The father
who everyone had put on a pedestal, actually wasn't so great.
(40:08):
And Mimi, who had her hands dirty, making lots and
lots of decisions, some of them bad, some of them good.
You know, she wasn't so bad. And I wanted to
to get it that ambiguity and also avoid the present
is m I mean that the options this family had,
like the options your parents had, were very, very narrow,
and the stigma that your parents were dealing with, and
(40:30):
that this family we're dealing with, we're you know, considerable.
We'll be right back, Danny. I like to question that
I saw here for you, which is um from Tom
did Inheritance, which which solves the secret make you look
at your earlier books any differently? Oh that's a great question.
(40:51):
I know, yeah, it's really a good gues Well, first
of all, it made me revisit them, which you know,
you really don't necessarily want to revisit a first novel
that you wrote, you know, it's but I did not
for the fainthearted and what I feel reading my earlier work.
I wondered at first whether inheritance would render all of
(41:15):
my earlier work moot in some way, Like you know,
I had that kind of strange fear of what are
those books now somehow inauthentic because I didn't know um.
And I wrote a great deal about my father, a
great deal about my parents, a great deal about secrets,
(41:36):
but I was missing this essential piece. I actually end
up feeling like not all of them, I mean, not
the early novels, but they're more interesting to me now
in a certain way, because every book is I mean,
certainly memoirs most of all, is like holding time still
(41:57):
within the covers of a book. This is this is
all I know. Now it's going into this this story.
And I've always known that, which is why I've written
multiple memoirs. But now I look back and I think, wow,
that really is all I knew in two thousand and ten,
and that was all I knew and so forth, and
(42:20):
so it actually makes for a really interesting um kind
of body of work. Someday I may try to do
something with that, like annotate them, or like, just because
there is this this past summer, I recorded the audiobook
of Slow Motion, which is my first memoir that came out.
It's never been an audiobook, so I I was recording
(42:43):
it and I had to stop so many times in
the studio, just stunned by a sentence that I just read,
realizing how much I knew, how much subconsciously was right there.
So that's thrilling in a way. They don't feel like
like I was mistaken. They just feel like that's what
(43:04):
I knew then, and this is what I know now.
If you wrote an essay about that, I just want
to say I'd be here for that. I would read it. No,
really like just reviewing what the things that sort of
jump off the page, like crickets now that sort of
tell you that you were dropping yourself clues. And if
you annotated an early book, to have it on audio
would be fun too. Hey hold the phone. Wait, whoa,
(43:29):
we need two narrators. I was just gonna say they
had the anxiety Danny narrator translator, Like you can peel
like I'm not doing the right but you know what
I mean. Oh, this is nice, Robert. When I read
a book like yours, I always think about Janet Malcolm's
assertion that journalism is always an act of betrayal. Did
(43:51):
you ever have a moment of doubting what you were doing?
Did it affect your decisions and you were writing as
you were writing or in writing? There there is a
question of who are you working for? Right? And I
very specifically, I am not an advocacy journalist. Journalist I
write books that are The reviewers seem to use the
word empathy a lot, but I find my the way
(44:12):
I look at it, the word empathy is, you know,
a certain amount of intimacy and the ability to walk
in someone's shoes. But that's different from advocacy. And and
I'm right up against the line the entire time. So
I kind of live in that, in that Janet Malcolm
world where where some people might wonder, am I going
to be betrayed by you? And and I never make
(44:32):
that promise that I will never betray them, because I am,
after all, independent, and I am not working for them.
And so that's tough. It's a tough thing to do,
and and it often means that some people were just
going to say no, They're not going to do it,
And and and moments when I like to laugh at myself.
I think like journalists are like vampires, Like they only
(44:54):
come where they're invited in, Like they can't just barge
into the house. Someone actually has to let them in
and u and And that's why I was so tentative
with this family. I said, let's take let's take months.
Let's let me get on the phone once a week
with a different member of the family and speak in
an open ended way about what you might expect from
a book like this, and we'll all know one way
(45:15):
or another. At the end of ten weeks, you know
whether this is possible or not. And if it is impossible,
I'll move on and do something else. And you have
to be ready to walk away that way, Danny, I'm
gonna end it. I think we have two minutes, so
I'm gonna end it with you. I'm going to take
the liberty of summarizing a number of the questions here,
which are kind of more comments than questions, but there's
(45:37):
a theme running through them. A lot of people are
saying I was conceived by a sperm donor, or I
do know anything about sperm donation laws in Georgia in
the nineteen sixties, all sorts of like very specific things,
and I'm wondering how much you've become I can ask
both of you this question and you know, but how
much you've become people's confessors. It's an awesome responsibility to
(45:59):
take done and maybe, um, what kind of repository of
information you have become in? You know, what kind of
function you serve for people now? In this way? I mean,
I couldn't have imagined what happened when when when this
book came out, and and it happened from day one,
from the very first event that I did, where I
looked around the room and I thought, who is everybody here?
(46:20):
This is not my usual literary demographic. There were old men,
and there were middle aged couples, and there were young people,
and the people crying before I even opened my mouth. Um,
this period of time that we're in regarding people discovering
everything that we're discovering because of the one to punch
of easy accessible DNA testing plus the Internet has meant
(46:46):
that there's there's a huge number of people who are
trying to navigate all of these questions. Can I find
anything out? What are the laws? Do I have any rights?
And yes, I mean I feel very much activated you know,
like like I began two years ago feeling like I
(47:09):
would never really become polemical about this, and I would
stay on the literary side of things. But I do
and have become somewhat polemical about the state of the
secrecy and the lack of regulation in this country. Um,
which I can't get into in two minutes, but it's
just stunning the way that we are not like sort
(47:31):
of prepared for this reckoning that we're in. I mean,
I'm going to have to leave it at that, but um,
but I will say to everyone who's listening, who is
grappling with these kinds of issues, you know this, I'm sure,
but you are far from alone. And there are a
lot of there are a lot a lot of resources
and and and more more every day. We'll be back
(47:58):
with season five Family Secrets, beginning April one.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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