May 14, 2020 • 29 mins
On this special bonus episode of Family Secrets, Dani speaks with Libby Copeland, author and journalist, about the psychological and emotional complexities that face families who have kept secrets, and families who have had secrets kept from them. This is an intimate conversation about the deepest parts of identity exposed by unexpected DNA results.
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Episode Transcript
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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 special bonus episode of
Family Secrets. My guest today is journalist Libby Copeland, author
(00:22):
of the recently published book The Lost Family. How DNA
is uncovering secrets, reuniting relatives, and up ending who we are. Libby,
thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Oh,
it's such a thrill to be here, it really is.
Thank you. Well, I've been really looking forward to this conversation.
I read I don't know how many months ago. I
(00:45):
read an early advanced copy of your book, which I
underlined and dog eared and scribbled. I actually went to
to find the the early Galley copy today rather than
the beautiful finished copy that just came out, because I
wanted to see what I had underlined and dog eared
and scribbled exclamation points and asterisks in the margins. You
(01:06):
and I were initially planning on actually having a public
conversation together that we would have recorded for the podcast
in early March when the book came out, which, of
course you know, very quickly became impossible. So I'm just
so glad to be able to have this conversation with
you now, and I wanted to start by you know,
(01:27):
one of the places in your book that I dog
eared and underlined was a quote that you included from
Margaret Atwood, and the quote is, all new technologies have
a good side, a bad side, and a stupid side.
You hadn't considered. So could you tell us what made
(01:48):
you initially decided to write The Lost Family and what
was the impetus for exploring this world of the unintended
consequences of DNA testing? Yeah? So, you know, I'm really
interested in human behavior, the push pull of what causes
people to do the things that they do, and the
(02:08):
intersection with technology and and kind of culture and human
behavior like that. That kind of nexis is really interesting
to me. Um. So, I had been that the Washington
Post as a staffer, and then um left the Post
and was still writing for them, and my editor there
was interested in writing having me write a piece about
DNA testing and kind of the the unexpected consequences of
(02:33):
DNA testing and how it plays out for people. And
I did wind up writing a piece about a woman
that I found who had an incredibly remarkable story. Her
name is Alice, and she wound up becoming UM the
central narrative of the book. But UM, this was back
in when the DNA databases were much smaller, UM and
UM and even so many many people were having this
(02:54):
kind of experience. Now it's UM, you know, just leagues
beyond what it was even just three years years ago.
As you know, so I write this story comes out
in the post and UM. I had put an email
address at the bottom where people could contact me and
share their stories if they wanted to, and I literally
got hundreds of them within a very short amount of time.
(03:15):
I found myself totally underwater with these stories, and I
found them so moving, I found them so intimate. And
I guess what struck me about the stories that I
was hearing from from readers writing in about their experiences
with DNA testing and often the surprises and the revelations
that can come with it, was how, you know, these
(03:35):
experiences touch at the heart of who we are, and
their experiences that don't end. They they sort of become
a thing that you process and then reprocess and continually
discussed with family, and so it's something that goes on
and on and on. UM. It's not like you get
closure on it. And I just was really struck by
the idea that somebody could go into um an experience
(03:59):
with you know, just bucks and you spin in a tube,
but it's a very low investment and get this really
profound outcome. And I thought, man, that's like a cultural change.
This is like a sociological moment um. We're going to
look back at this. And I just started to think
about this in terms of a book and wanting to
gather more stories and tell them. Yeah, and as you say, um,
(04:21):
you know, you were somewhat early to the party in
the sense of like just the exponential growth of these
discoveries and the hundreds of thousands of people now a
year who are who are making these discoveries and they range.
I mean, I I totally relate to what you're saying,
because when my Memory Inheritance came out and I started
(04:44):
traveling for it, I was so struck by all of
the different kinds of stories that there were that had
in common that somebody blithely recreationally sent away for a
kid and or received it for a holiday gift. And
then Pandora's box opened, and you know, it ranged from
(05:08):
late discovery adoptees to people who hadn't known that they
were conceived using donors, to people where a parent had
an affair, UM, to fathers who had children. They hadn't
known about two women who had put up children for
adoption and you know, as teenagers and had never told
(05:29):
a soul. And then our our found and it just
went on and on the stories. But what they had
in common was what connects us? Where? Where? Where do
we derive our sense of identity from? What do secrets
due to us? Is that some of what you found? Yeah?
I mean absolutely, I mean I found a lot of
(05:52):
people struggled with these questions of thinking about genetics versus
you know, experience and basically which should dominate? Right? So, um,
does DNA determine who your father is? Or um? You know,
as you write so movingly in your book, UM you know,
(06:12):
is is fatherhood a position occupied by the man who
raises you, who loves you into being um? Which was
a beautiful line from your from your books that I
quoted in mind. Um. You know, I I think that we,
as human beings, we have a tendency to think about
things in in binary terms, and we definitely struggle a
(06:32):
little bit with a sense of UM. Genetic essentialism, so
that your genes are who you are, or they're predictor
of the future, or they are your fate. And over
and over. What I found when talking to people was
that that we, each person, each individual person, each family
is carving out their own nuanced, an emotionally sensitive and
(06:54):
careful definition of how they want to think about identity
and how they want to think about love and familiar terms.
And um, that we can choose. We can choose um
more rather than less. It doesn't have to be in
either war. It's not me defining, uh that you know
that that this is my father and this is not
(07:15):
my father, or these are my birth parents and these
are my adoptive parents. It's yes and um and and
it's not always the case, especially for the people on
the other side, right, the keepers of the secrets who
are being sought out, who might be elderly. Uh, you know,
it's very difficult for them, and UM, understandably so. But
you know, my stories were primarily the people who are
(07:36):
doing the seeking, right, the people who are at testing
and who were who have a great deal of agency
in the search, and therefore um, you know very much
want the truth. And for them I found that there
was an incredible amount of care that they that they
took in terms of how they defined you know, how
they thought about what makes a family and UM an
inclusiveness and also you know, when they thought about you know,
(07:57):
ethnic identity. UM. You know, the the main character of
my book believes herself to be almost entirely Irish, turns
out to be half Ashkenazi Jewish. UM. There's a man
in my book who's UM has a story similar to
one of your guests, Racye Short who he has African
ancestry and he, you know, it wasn't it wasn't disclosed
to him as a sort of an in a bid
(08:18):
to protect him. So UM. You know, it seems to
me that people seem to do better when they can
approach these these UM questions with an expansiveness. But of
course that's not always possible, and there's a great deal
of trauma I think that goes along with these discoveries
on on both sides. So it's a it's a profound
(08:41):
it's a profound tricky I guess bioethical territory. We'll be
back in a moment with more family secrets. One of
the things that I thought a lot about after I
made my discovery about my dad and as I was
writing Inheritance, and which I'll probably think about for the
(09:04):
rest of my life, is that we are in this
moment in time where these secrets were held. They were kept,
It was considered for many years in the best interests
of the child, or just in the best interest of
everyone involved to keep the secret, and no one could
(09:26):
have imagined, you know, like an at Atwood's term, you know,
the stupid things we hadn't thought about. I mean, it's
just a funny at Woody end thing to say, but really,
the the unintended, you know, the the no one could
have imagined that there would be a future in which
that you could spit into a plastic vial and sent
it off through the mail, and that there would be
this thing called the Internet where you could pretty much
(09:47):
find out anything about anything any time. Um that would
have been you know, like the stuff of science fiction.
And I think that there will be a time that
will happen in our lifetimes where the idea that these
kinds of secrets were ever kept will seem ludicrous and wrong.
(10:09):
You know, it'll be you know, something that people look
at and think, no secrets. Are they what we don't
know can hurt us, it does hurt us. Or there's
there's a line in your book, UM that one of
your subjects, UM, one of your subjects says it's a secret.
But at some point it becomes a lie too, you know.
And we're like, we're formed by things that are kept
(10:31):
from us. When when there's something as profound as like
on the level of identity that's kept from us. But
there will be a point where I think the fact
of these DNA tests will make it impossible parents. Now
I've seen it starting to happen parents even contemporary you know,
people having raising families now who have been on the
(10:54):
fence about whether to tell their children the truth about
doing or conception or I think less so with adopt
because it's been truer for much longer that that, you know,
the received wisdom being UM that people who are adopted
should be told, and they should be told from the
time that it can be woven into their consciousness, their identity,
from the time you're very small. But there still are
(11:16):
quite a lot of people, at least anecdotally in my experience,
who are choosing not to tell their children UM and
what's starting to happen is that those people are having
to come face to face with the fact that it
is likely that their children will find out right. Yeah,
(11:37):
not a question of if, but when right, And so
that changes everything. Yeah, I mean it. You know, it's
interesting because, um, you know, a few years ago, I
think when I started writing my book, there was a
kind of a framing um that I would see and
that I kind of even, you know, approached certain questions
(11:58):
with which was, you know, um, what should people know
before they do a DNA test? And I don't even
think of it like that anymore because I think that
increasingly it doesn't matter whether or not a person does
a DNA test, because if they there's a genetic secret
in their family, it's going to come out because somebody
close to them does a DNA test. So you know,
(12:20):
you don't do it, but your sister does, and then
you find out your half siblings or you don't you
you know, you don't do a genetic test, but your
adult child does and informs you that you are don't
are conceived. I've seen that happen, um, And so you know,
it could even be like a first cousin um or
a second cousin, you know it. So the point is
(12:42):
that I think we're all implicated by a technology that
makes it inevitable that we have to have conversations that
may seem difficult, that their conversations about transparency and about
you know, the origins of people's lives. And so it's
increasingly not a question of like, what do you have
to think about before you take a DNA test? It's
it's actually a conversation framed around UM, the people who
(13:06):
are the keepers of the genetic secrets, UM who again,
you know, at one point in time, it was considered
the right thing to do to not tell your child
perhaps about you know, certain ways which they came into
the world. But now now it's there's a moment where
they're kind of have to start thinking about how are
they going to have a conversation with their child, UM
before that child finds out by spitting into a tube.
(13:29):
Because because over and over people have told me that
it is so much better to find out the news,
albeit late, from people who love you, than to find out,
you know, sort of by backing into it by spitting
into a tube and then having to have that conversation
with your parents and say, why didn't you tell me this?
That's such an important point, um, And I would take
(13:50):
it one step further, which is, you know my story
a many people's stories, which is you know your parents
are gone and and you're left holding the mystery. That's
so I can feel the truth in what you're saying.
In people's experience, I'm imagining, um, you know, being told
and the reckonings that are going on, you know, all
(14:11):
over mostly this country, because where the where the where
the country obsessed with DNA tests. It was like something
like of the consumers of DNA testing worldwide are are American?
I think that's something like or to go back to
what you were saying before about the the yes and
like the way that we tend to like we human
(14:33):
beings tend to think in these binary ways. And the
the parents who made those choices did so at a
time where they felt that it was in their family's
best interests, in their child's best interests. So for them
to have to experience this reckoning, I mean I get
heartbreaking letters and emails from people all the time saying,
(14:56):
I read your book, I can see how hard it
would be for my grown children to find this out.
After I'm gone, but I don't know how to sit
them down and tell them, you know, And I'm not
I mean, I'm not an expert. I'm I'm an expert
from the inside of the emotional experience, of my emotional
(15:18):
experience of what it was to be left holding a
massive mystery. And in my case, I was incredibly fortunate
because there were just enough clues and I was able
to figure it out instead of staying in this kind
of limbo state of not knowing. And you know, I
(15:39):
think it's true too that many people have asked, like
during Q and as and my events, why was it
so important to know? And what I find myself um
trying to explain is that when you've spent your life
in one certainty, a biological certainty, that your parents who
(16:00):
raise you are your biological parents, that's your identity as
you are their biological child, and then you find out
that that's not the case, it's extraordinarily unmooring as opposed
to always knowing. So, for example, adoptees who have had
the story of their origin woven into their consciousness from
(16:25):
the time that they were sentient beings, even if that
story was we don't know, they grow up knowing that
there is not a biological connection between them and their family,
and that is not easy, but it's the truth. And
so they're growing up like inside of the truth. And
(16:47):
when you grow up inside of a secret or inside
of a lie, a deception, two then make that discovery,
whether it's by accident or you know, I mean, it's
it's almost to always. I mean, I suppose there's some
people who take these DNA tests because they suspect something,
but it's much more, it seems much much more common
(17:10):
that people are taking them just for fun. And so
the messaging of you know, uh, Kelly rip A, you know,
waiving the Italian flag, you know that she's like one
eight Italian and fun facts that you may find out.
That's sort of the inverse side of what you were
talking about, UM of people UM saying well, uh, you know,
(17:33):
there should be you know, people should have much more
informed consent going into this, or much more of a
sense that, well, you may discover, you know, some things
that are challenging, and that's in the fine print, But nobody,
very few people go in actually thinking I may discover
something really sort of earth shattering, right, I mean, over
(17:55):
and over the people I talked to, even if they
read the warning, you know, you may discover unexpected work relatives,
or you may discover something about yourself that you were
not expecting to learn. Um. You know, they do give
the warnings, but over and over I found people assumed
that that that wasn't that it wasn't gonna happen to them,
was going to apply to them, because why why would
you It would take a feat of extreme cognitive dissonance
(18:16):
for you to imagine that your entire life was about
to be up ended in all your assumptions and your
your origin story was about to be turned on its head.
Why would you assume that? And so we go, you know,
we go into this assuming that the greatest cost is
going to be the ninety nine bucks that you pay
and um and and it's it's it's a low investment.
I mean, it's become very very inexpensive. And um, as
(18:40):
you say, the marketing is all um, it's you know,
it's marketed as an entertainment vehicle, which it is for
many people. UM, you know, just a sort of a
vehicle for family history. And yet for that significant minority
of people it's um, you know, it contains a revelation
that is so much more meaningful than the price that
they paid going in. And yes, ultimately maybe something that
(19:02):
they UM. I found, as you've said, the vast majority
of people, ultimately, if it's something about them, they're glad
to know. And yet that's not to say that the
process is not um man. It's just it's a profound
one that goes on and on and um. You know.
Just one of the things I noticed as I was
(19:23):
interviewing people was the commonality of the language. So you know,
over and over I heard something that I've started thinking
about as the lonely boat metaphor. And the lonely boat
metaphor is this description of feeling a drift. And it's
often accompanying when you when you take the test and
you find out you're maybe not related to um you know,
your paternal side, for instance, or you're you know you're
(19:46):
related right, you're you know half of your roots are
not what you thought um. Or your siblings are not
your full siblings, are not at all your siblings. UM.
A lot of people would voice the sense of feeling
a drift or cut off, like they were on a
raft been pushed out to see UM. So what what
that told me? That sort of language over and over
(20:06):
again from different people who had not been discussing their
you know, conferring with one another in advance. That told
me that there was a kind of I guess the psychological,
emotional even maybe like a spiritual um human links there
between these experiences, that that experience is maybe intrinsic. It's
(20:27):
not just a cultural it's not just a cultural importance.
It's kind of like a like a primal human response
to finding out that you're not genetically related to people
that you feel your you know, you assumed that you were. Um.
And then this description and this is what made me
think of it, because you use the word rootedness. That
word I also heard over and over again literally that word,
(20:49):
and then words that go along with it. You know,
this idea that you have roots into the ground that
you are, you are unstable ground upon discovering you know,
you're or genetic origins right, or or who your birth
parents were, for instance, for an adoptee. So that language
too was very um. It was echoed over and over again,
and I just thought it was really interesting. I think
(21:12):
going forward, there's gonna be a body of research from
psychologists who study this, and they're going to treat this
and maybe it will be a subspecialty. You know, the
DNA surprise or finding out your you know, you know
your your your origins weren't what you thought, or in
the search for your genetic identity or however whatever terms
it it, you know, minds up falling under. I think
(21:33):
there will be um research that looks at the emotions
that a company this experience and then the language that
that accompany is it, And I just think it's going
to be I don't know. I think this is a
moment in time we're going to look back on and
we're going to say, this is the moment when everything changed.
You know, Um, this is the moment when the way
(21:55):
families talked about certain difficult things changed. The is the
moment when really painful conversations had to be had all
across the United States will be right back. I'm just
thinking about the lonely boat metaphor and then the language
(22:17):
around rooted nous and how opposite those are, you know,
the floating at sea, the you know, the being on
the surface of something that is moving, and the rooted
nous of being um, you know, like tethered to the
earth or part of something solid, and that's so that's
really powerful, and it doesn't it doesn't surprise me at
(22:38):
all that you would hear that again and again. Um.
You know, there's also the something else that I think
will be studied, which is in many of the stories
of people who make these discoveries, there are childhood feelings
(22:59):
that are very much in common. There's um, I mean
stunning lee. So because I remember starting to do research
and reading everything that there was that I could find,
any testimony, any essay, any any any piece of journalism
of people who had who had made these discoveries, and
the language around childhood of feeling other or different or
(23:24):
something not adding up, something just not feeling right, but
not knowing what it could possibly be because it didn't
make any sense. This feeling was echoed again and again.
But you know, I mean, one of the things to
go back to what you were saying about the the binary,
the nature nurture, I feel like I want I want
listeners who are thinking about this to really understand that
(23:48):
what we're not talking about is the not talking about
the primacy of nature. We're talking about the um the
damage that secret can do? You know, I would find
myself in almost you know, contentious situations with people coming
(24:09):
to my events who would sometimes say, and often these
were adoptive parents, parents who had adopted. Um, say, you
seem to be saying that nature is all that matters.
And I have never felt that way. I have felt,
but I had to really think about that, right, like
what why do we want to discount nature? And at
(24:35):
least as far as my thinking about that has come
so far, I think we want to discount nature because
we can't control it. And we think we can control nurture,
like we can love our children and provide a value
system for them and raise them, you know, within what
we consider to be, you know, a safe and nurturing
(24:56):
environment and that that means that all will be well. Um,
we can control nurture, but nature is a wild card always.
I mean, you have more than one kid? Are they?
Are they the same? No? They're different, right right, like
any I only have one, so I don't have direct
knowledge of that, but I've see, like all my friends
who have a bunch of, you know, more than one child,
(25:19):
that it's nature is nature and nature is kind of
like the way the cook the way the cookie crumbles
to some degree. So so all I'm ever saying when
I'm talking about this stuff is that we can't discount nature.
We can't um as much as we would like to say,
it doesn't matter. And I think that the people who
(25:40):
have held these secrets are doing so out of the
desperate wish to have nature and not matter at all.
To eradicate it. Yeah, I mean I I definitely have
encountered as well this kind of approach where it's like, well,
what does it matter if you didn't know that you
(26:01):
were um Ashkenazi Jewish, and you thought you were completely
Irish and you were raised Irish, what does it matter? Um?
And you know, one of the women that I interviewed
for the books was like, it's everything, right, It's it's
it's it's so not nothing, it's everything. It is entirely
my story. UM. And maybe that's hard to understand when
(26:24):
you have never had, like face a disruption to your
origin story or or or going even farther back to
your family history. UM. But narratives are what makes human
beings human beings, you know. And I don't think that
you can tell the story of yourself if you if
(26:45):
you don't know your beginning, if you don't know your
once upon a time, and if you discover that you're
once upon a time is completely dislocated, then then the
experience that I heard people voicing over no Or was
that they literally didn't know where they were standing on
the earth. It was as if they had stood up
and the earth had spun under them like a marble,
(27:06):
and then they were plopped back down. They were like,
where am I right? So how you know? And again,
you know, make it? Maybe this is for for people
who haven't experienced this. It seems kind of abstract. So
what you thought you were one thing, but you're really another. Um?
So what you know? That's your dad, the guy who
raised you. He did the hard work. Well, yes, and
also and also and if you look at the experiences
(27:29):
of adoptees UM, you know, going back from forever um,
you know they they can love their adopted parents deeply
and also want to know about their birth parents. And
that doesn't supplant their love for their parents. It doesn't
supplant the love for the people who raised them. It's
it's an adjunct. But but it's about I guess, like
(27:51):
self knowledge, right, and um. And to use another piece
of language that I heard over and over again, the
word the sort of phrase of the imagery that I
heard over and over with, I had a hole in
my heart and now it's filled. And people would talk
about this sense of loss, like like there was a
piece missing from them UM, and that when they had
(28:11):
the knowledge didn't have to be by the way, a
relationship with their genetic parents, if the genetic parent, say,
was no longer alive or didn't want to have a relationship,
and that that would happen, and that was painful, but
it was It was the the seeking was in the
sort of this the knowledge, the knowing, the understanding, or
at least having a shot at understanding, even if you
couldn't really know, because you couldn't ask your genetic parents
(28:34):
certain questions about, you know, the circumstances of your birth,
but just sort of to know that. People would tell
me that it kind of approached the beginnings of putting
the puzzle piece into place or or you know, plugging
up that hole in their heart. UM. That kind of
self knowledge, I just don't think there's any substitute for it.
(29:00):
M HM for more podcasts for My Heart Radio visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. I'm
Danny Shapiro and this is a special bonus episode of
Family Secrets. My guest today is journalist Libby Copeland, author
(00:22):
of the recently published book The Lost Family. How DNA
is uncovering secrets, reuniting relatives, and up ending who we are. Libby,
thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Oh,
it's such a thrill to be here, it really is.
Thank you. Well, I've been really looking forward to this conversation.
I read I don't know how many months ago. I
(00:45):
read an early advanced copy of your book, which I
underlined and dog eared and scribbled. I actually went to
to find the the early Galley copy today rather than
the beautiful finished copy that just came out, because I
wanted to see what I had underlined and dog eared
and scribbled exclamation points and asterisks in the margins. You
(01:06):
and I were initially planning on actually having a public
conversation together that we would have recorded for the podcast
in early March when the book came out, which, of
course you know, very quickly became impossible. So I'm just
so glad to be able to have this conversation with
you now, and I wanted to start by you know,
(01:27):
one of the places in your book that I dog
eared and underlined was a quote that you included from
Margaret Atwood, and the quote is, all new technologies have
a good side, a bad side, and a stupid side.
You hadn't considered. So could you tell us what made
(01:48):
you initially decided to write The Lost Family and what
was the impetus for exploring this world of the unintended
consequences of DNA testing? Yeah? So, you know, I'm really
interested in human behavior, the push pull of what causes
people to do the things that they do, and the
(02:08):
intersection with technology and and kind of culture and human
behavior like that. That kind of nexis is really interesting
to me. Um. So, I had been that the Washington
Post as a staffer, and then um left the Post
and was still writing for them, and my editor there
was interested in writing having me write a piece about
DNA testing and kind of the the unexpected consequences of
(02:33):
DNA testing and how it plays out for people. And
I did wind up writing a piece about a woman
that I found who had an incredibly remarkable story. Her
name is Alice, and she wound up becoming UM the
central narrative of the book. But UM, this was back
in when the DNA databases were much smaller, UM and
UM and even so many many people were having this
(02:54):
kind of experience. Now it's UM, you know, just leagues
beyond what it was even just three years years ago.
As you know, so I write this story comes out
in the post and UM. I had put an email
address at the bottom where people could contact me and
share their stories if they wanted to, and I literally
got hundreds of them within a very short amount of time.
(03:15):
I found myself totally underwater with these stories, and I
found them so moving, I found them so intimate. And
I guess what struck me about the stories that I
was hearing from from readers writing in about their experiences
with DNA testing and often the surprises and the revelations
that can come with it, was how, you know, these
(03:35):
experiences touch at the heart of who we are, and
their experiences that don't end. They they sort of become
a thing that you process and then reprocess and continually
discussed with family, and so it's something that goes on
and on and on. UM. It's not like you get
closure on it. And I just was really struck by
the idea that somebody could go into um an experience
(03:59):
with you know, just bucks and you spin in a tube,
but it's a very low investment and get this really
profound outcome. And I thought, man, that's like a cultural change.
This is like a sociological moment um. We're going to
look back at this. And I just started to think
about this in terms of a book and wanting to
gather more stories and tell them. Yeah, and as you say, um,
(04:21):
you know, you were somewhat early to the party in
the sense of like just the exponential growth of these
discoveries and the hundreds of thousands of people now a
year who are who are making these discoveries and they range.
I mean, I I totally relate to what you're saying,
because when my Memory Inheritance came out and I started
(04:44):
traveling for it, I was so struck by all of
the different kinds of stories that there were that had
in common that somebody blithely recreationally sent away for a
kid and or received it for a holiday gift. And
then Pandora's box opened, and you know, it ranged from
(05:08):
late discovery adoptees to people who hadn't known that they
were conceived using donors, to people where a parent had
an affair, UM, to fathers who had children. They hadn't
known about two women who had put up children for
adoption and you know, as teenagers and had never told
(05:29):
a soul. And then our our found and it just
went on and on the stories. But what they had
in common was what connects us? Where? Where? Where do
we derive our sense of identity from? What do secrets
due to us? Is that some of what you found? Yeah?
I mean absolutely, I mean I found a lot of
(05:52):
people struggled with these questions of thinking about genetics versus
you know, experience and basically which should dominate? Right? So, um,
does DNA determine who your father is? Or um? You know,
as you write so movingly in your book, UM you know,
(06:12):
is is fatherhood a position occupied by the man who
raises you, who loves you into being um? Which was
a beautiful line from your from your books that I
quoted in mind. Um. You know, I I think that we,
as human beings, we have a tendency to think about
things in in binary terms, and we definitely struggle a
(06:32):
little bit with a sense of UM. Genetic essentialism, so
that your genes are who you are, or they're predictor
of the future, or they are your fate. And over
and over. What I found when talking to people was
that that we, each person, each individual person, each family
is carving out their own nuanced, an emotionally sensitive and
(06:54):
careful definition of how they want to think about identity
and how they want to think about love and familiar terms.
And um, that we can choose. We can choose um
more rather than less. It doesn't have to be in
either war. It's not me defining, uh that you know
that that this is my father and this is not
(07:15):
my father, or these are my birth parents and these
are my adoptive parents. It's yes and um and and
it's not always the case, especially for the people on
the other side, right, the keepers of the secrets who
are being sought out, who might be elderly. Uh, you know,
it's very difficult for them, and UM, understandably so. But
you know, my stories were primarily the people who are
(07:36):
doing the seeking, right, the people who are at testing
and who were who have a great deal of agency
in the search, and therefore um, you know very much
want the truth. And for them I found that there
was an incredible amount of care that they that they
took in terms of how they defined you know, how
they thought about what makes a family and UM an
inclusiveness and also you know, when they thought about you know,
(07:57):
ethnic identity. UM. You know, the the main character of
my book believes herself to be almost entirely Irish, turns
out to be half Ashkenazi Jewish. UM. There's a man
in my book who's UM has a story similar to
one of your guests, Racye Short who he has African
ancestry and he, you know, it wasn't it wasn't disclosed
to him as a sort of an in a bid
(08:18):
to protect him. So UM. You know, it seems to
me that people seem to do better when they can
approach these these UM questions with an expansiveness. But of
course that's not always possible, and there's a great deal
of trauma I think that goes along with these discoveries
on on both sides. So it's a it's a profound
(08:41):
it's a profound tricky I guess bioethical territory. We'll be
back in a moment with more family secrets. One of
the things that I thought a lot about after I
made my discovery about my dad and as I was
writing Inheritance, and which I'll probably think about for the
(09:04):
rest of my life, is that we are in this
moment in time where these secrets were held. They were kept,
It was considered for many years in the best interests
of the child, or just in the best interest of
everyone involved to keep the secret, and no one could
(09:26):
have imagined, you know, like an at Atwood's term, you know,
the stupid things we hadn't thought about. I mean, it's
just a funny at Woody end thing to say, but really,
the the unintended, you know, the the no one could
have imagined that there would be a future in which
that you could spit into a plastic vial and sent
it off through the mail, and that there would be
this thing called the Internet where you could pretty much
(09:47):
find out anything about anything any time. Um that would
have been you know, like the stuff of science fiction.
And I think that there will be a time that
will happen in our lifetimes where the idea that these
kinds of secrets were ever kept will seem ludicrous and wrong.
(10:09):
You know, it'll be you know, something that people look
at and think, no secrets. Are they what we don't
know can hurt us, it does hurt us. Or there's
there's a line in your book, UM that one of
your subjects, UM, one of your subjects says it's a secret.
But at some point it becomes a lie too, you know.
And we're like, we're formed by things that are kept
(10:31):
from us. When when there's something as profound as like
on the level of identity that's kept from us. But
there will be a point where I think the fact
of these DNA tests will make it impossible parents. Now
I've seen it starting to happen parents even contemporary you know,
people having raising families now who have been on the
(10:54):
fence about whether to tell their children the truth about
doing or conception or I think less so with adopt
because it's been truer for much longer that that, you know,
the received wisdom being UM that people who are adopted
should be told, and they should be told from the
time that it can be woven into their consciousness, their identity,
from the time you're very small. But there still are
(11:16):
quite a lot of people, at least anecdotally in my experience,
who are choosing not to tell their children UM and
what's starting to happen is that those people are having
to come face to face with the fact that it
is likely that their children will find out right. Yeah,
(11:37):
not a question of if, but when right, And so
that changes everything. Yeah, I mean it. You know, it's
interesting because, um, you know, a few years ago, I
think when I started writing my book, there was a
kind of a framing um that I would see and
that I kind of even, you know, approached certain questions
(11:58):
with which was, you know, um, what should people know
before they do a DNA test? And I don't even
think of it like that anymore because I think that
increasingly it doesn't matter whether or not a person does
a DNA test, because if they there's a genetic secret
in their family, it's going to come out because somebody
close to them does a DNA test. So you know,
(12:20):
you don't do it, but your sister does, and then
you find out your half siblings or you don't you
you know, you don't do a genetic test, but your
adult child does and informs you that you are don't
are conceived. I've seen that happen, um, And so you know,
it could even be like a first cousin um or
a second cousin, you know it. So the point is
(12:42):
that I think we're all implicated by a technology that
makes it inevitable that we have to have conversations that
may seem difficult, that their conversations about transparency and about
you know, the origins of people's lives. And so it's
increasingly not a question of like, what do you have
to think about before you take a DNA test? It's
it's actually a conversation framed around UM, the people who
(13:06):
are the keepers of the genetic secrets, UM who again,
you know, at one point in time, it was considered
the right thing to do to not tell your child
perhaps about you know, certain ways which they came into
the world. But now now it's there's a moment where
they're kind of have to start thinking about how are
they going to have a conversation with their child, UM
before that child finds out by spitting into a tube.
(13:29):
Because because over and over people have told me that
it is so much better to find out the news,
albeit late, from people who love you, than to find out,
you know, sort of by backing into it by spitting
into a tube and then having to have that conversation
with your parents and say, why didn't you tell me this?
That's such an important point, um, And I would take
(13:50):
it one step further, which is, you know my story
a many people's stories, which is you know your parents
are gone and and you're left holding the mystery. That's
so I can feel the truth in what you're saying.
In people's experience, I'm imagining, um, you know, being told
and the reckonings that are going on, you know, all
(14:11):
over mostly this country, because where the where the where
the country obsessed with DNA tests. It was like something
like of the consumers of DNA testing worldwide are are American?
I think that's something like or to go back to
what you were saying before about the the yes and
like the way that we tend to like we human
(14:33):
beings tend to think in these binary ways. And the
the parents who made those choices did so at a
time where they felt that it was in their family's
best interests, in their child's best interests. So for them
to have to experience this reckoning, I mean I get
heartbreaking letters and emails from people all the time saying,
(14:56):
I read your book, I can see how hard it
would be for my grown children to find this out.
After I'm gone, but I don't know how to sit
them down and tell them, you know, And I'm not
I mean, I'm not an expert. I'm I'm an expert
from the inside of the emotional experience, of my emotional
(15:18):
experience of what it was to be left holding a
massive mystery. And in my case, I was incredibly fortunate
because there were just enough clues and I was able
to figure it out instead of staying in this kind
of limbo state of not knowing. And you know, I
(15:39):
think it's true too that many people have asked, like
during Q and as and my events, why was it
so important to know? And what I find myself um
trying to explain is that when you've spent your life
in one certainty, a biological certainty, that your parents who
(16:00):
raise you are your biological parents, that's your identity as
you are their biological child, and then you find out
that that's not the case, it's extraordinarily unmooring as opposed
to always knowing. So, for example, adoptees who have had
the story of their origin woven into their consciousness from
(16:25):
the time that they were sentient beings, even if that
story was we don't know, they grow up knowing that
there is not a biological connection between them and their family,
and that is not easy, but it's the truth. And
so they're growing up like inside of the truth. And
(16:47):
when you grow up inside of a secret or inside
of a lie, a deception, two then make that discovery,
whether it's by accident or you know, I mean, it's
it's almost to always. I mean, I suppose there's some
people who take these DNA tests because they suspect something,
but it's much more, it seems much much more common
(17:10):
that people are taking them just for fun. And so
the messaging of you know, uh, Kelly rip A, you know,
waiving the Italian flag, you know that she's like one
eight Italian and fun facts that you may find out.
That's sort of the inverse side of what you were
talking about, UM of people UM saying well, uh, you know,
(17:33):
there should be you know, people should have much more
informed consent going into this, or much more of a
sense that, well, you may discover, you know, some things
that are challenging, and that's in the fine print, But nobody,
very few people go in actually thinking I may discover
something really sort of earth shattering, right, I mean, over
(17:55):
and over the people I talked to, even if they
read the warning, you know, you may discover unexpected work relatives,
or you may discover something about yourself that you were
not expecting to learn. Um. You know, they do give
the warnings, but over and over I found people assumed
that that that wasn't that it wasn't gonna happen to them,
was going to apply to them, because why why would
you It would take a feat of extreme cognitive dissonance
(18:16):
for you to imagine that your entire life was about
to be up ended in all your assumptions and your
your origin story was about to be turned on its head.
Why would you assume that? And so we go, you know,
we go into this assuming that the greatest cost is
going to be the ninety nine bucks that you pay
and um and and it's it's it's a low investment.
I mean, it's become very very inexpensive. And um, as
(18:40):
you say, the marketing is all um, it's you know,
it's marketed as an entertainment vehicle, which it is for
many people. UM, you know, just a sort of a
vehicle for family history. And yet for that significant minority
of people it's um, you know, it contains a revelation
that is so much more meaningful than the price that
they paid going in. And yes, ultimately maybe something that
(19:02):
they UM. I found, as you've said, the vast majority
of people, ultimately, if it's something about them, they're glad
to know. And yet that's not to say that the
process is not um man. It's just it's a profound
one that goes on and on and um. You know.
Just one of the things I noticed as I was
(19:23):
interviewing people was the commonality of the language. So you know,
over and over I heard something that I've started thinking
about as the lonely boat metaphor. And the lonely boat
metaphor is this description of feeling a drift. And it's
often accompanying when you when you take the test and
you find out you're maybe not related to um you know,
your paternal side, for instance, or you're you know you're
(19:46):
related right, you're you know half of your roots are
not what you thought um. Or your siblings are not
your full siblings, are not at all your siblings. UM.
A lot of people would voice the sense of feeling
a drift or cut off, like they were on a
raft been pushed out to see UM. So what what
that told me? That sort of language over and over
(20:06):
again from different people who had not been discussing their
you know, conferring with one another in advance. That told
me that there was a kind of I guess the psychological,
emotional even maybe like a spiritual um human links there
between these experiences, that that experience is maybe intrinsic. It's
(20:27):
not just a cultural it's not just a cultural importance.
It's kind of like a like a primal human response
to finding out that you're not genetically related to people
that you feel your you know, you assumed that you were. Um.
And then this description and this is what made me
think of it, because you use the word rootedness. That
word I also heard over and over again literally that word,
(20:49):
and then words that go along with it. You know,
this idea that you have roots into the ground that
you are, you are unstable ground upon discovering you know,
you're or genetic origins right, or or who your birth
parents were, for instance, for an adoptee. So that language
too was very um. It was echoed over and over again,
and I just thought it was really interesting. I think
(21:12):
going forward, there's gonna be a body of research from
psychologists who study this, and they're going to treat this
and maybe it will be a subspecialty. You know, the
DNA surprise or finding out your you know, you know
your your your origins weren't what you thought, or in
the search for your genetic identity or however whatever terms
it it, you know, minds up falling under. I think
(21:33):
there will be um research that looks at the emotions
that a company this experience and then the language that
that accompany is it, And I just think it's going
to be I don't know. I think this is a
moment in time we're going to look back on and
we're going to say, this is the moment when everything changed.
You know, Um, this is the moment when the way
(21:55):
families talked about certain difficult things changed. The is the
moment when really painful conversations had to be had all
across the United States will be right back. I'm just
thinking about the lonely boat metaphor and then the language
(22:17):
around rooted nous and how opposite those are, you know,
the floating at sea, the you know, the being on
the surface of something that is moving, and the rooted
nous of being um, you know, like tethered to the
earth or part of something solid, and that's so that's
really powerful, and it doesn't it doesn't surprise me at
(22:38):
all that you would hear that again and again. Um.
You know, there's also the something else that I think
will be studied, which is in many of the stories
of people who make these discoveries, there are childhood feelings
(22:59):
that are very much in common. There's um, I mean
stunning lee. So because I remember starting to do research
and reading everything that there was that I could find,
any testimony, any essay, any any any piece of journalism
of people who had who had made these discoveries, and
the language around childhood of feeling other or different or
(23:24):
something not adding up, something just not feeling right, but
not knowing what it could possibly be because it didn't
make any sense. This feeling was echoed again and again.
But you know, I mean, one of the things to
go back to what you were saying about the the binary,
the nature nurture, I feel like I want I want
listeners who are thinking about this to really understand that
(23:48):
what we're not talking about is the not talking about
the primacy of nature. We're talking about the um the
damage that secret can do? You know, I would find
myself in almost you know, contentious situations with people coming
(24:09):
to my events who would sometimes say, and often these
were adoptive parents, parents who had adopted. Um, say, you
seem to be saying that nature is all that matters.
And I have never felt that way. I have felt,
but I had to really think about that, right, like
what why do we want to discount nature? And at
(24:35):
least as far as my thinking about that has come
so far, I think we want to discount nature because
we can't control it. And we think we can control nurture,
like we can love our children and provide a value
system for them and raise them, you know, within what
we consider to be, you know, a safe and nurturing
(24:56):
environment and that that means that all will be well. Um,
we can control nurture, but nature is a wild card always.
I mean, you have more than one kid? Are they?
Are they the same? No? They're different, right right, like
any I only have one, so I don't have direct
knowledge of that, but I've see, like all my friends
who have a bunch of, you know, more than one child,
(25:19):
that it's nature is nature and nature is kind of
like the way the cook the way the cookie crumbles
to some degree. So so all I'm ever saying when
I'm talking about this stuff is that we can't discount nature.
We can't um as much as we would like to say,
it doesn't matter. And I think that the people who
(25:40):
have held these secrets are doing so out of the
desperate wish to have nature and not matter at all.
To eradicate it. Yeah, I mean I I definitely have
encountered as well this kind of approach where it's like, well,
what does it matter if you didn't know that you
(26:01):
were um Ashkenazi Jewish, and you thought you were completely
Irish and you were raised Irish, what does it matter? Um?
And you know, one of the women that I interviewed
for the books was like, it's everything, right, It's it's
it's it's so not nothing, it's everything. It is entirely
my story. UM. And maybe that's hard to understand when
(26:24):
you have never had, like face a disruption to your
origin story or or or going even farther back to
your family history. UM. But narratives are what makes human
beings human beings, you know. And I don't think that
you can tell the story of yourself if you if
(26:45):
you don't know your beginning, if you don't know your
once upon a time, and if you discover that you're
once upon a time is completely dislocated, then then the
experience that I heard people voicing over no Or was
that they literally didn't know where they were standing on
the earth. It was as if they had stood up
and the earth had spun under them like a marble,
(27:06):
and then they were plopped back down. They were like,
where am I right? So how you know? And again,
you know, make it? Maybe this is for for people
who haven't experienced this. It seems kind of abstract. So
what you thought you were one thing, but you're really another. Um?
So what you know? That's your dad, the guy who
raised you. He did the hard work. Well, yes, and
also and also and if you look at the experiences
(27:29):
of adoptees UM, you know, going back from forever um,
you know they they can love their adopted parents deeply
and also want to know about their birth parents. And
that doesn't supplant their love for their parents. It doesn't
supplant the love for the people who raised them. It's
it's an adjunct. But but it's about I guess, like
(27:51):
self knowledge, right, and um. And to use another piece
of language that I heard over and over again, the
word the sort of phrase of the imagery that I
heard over and over with, I had a hole in
my heart and now it's filled. And people would talk
about this sense of loss, like like there was a
piece missing from them UM, and that when they had
(28:11):
the knowledge didn't have to be by the way, a
relationship with their genetic parents, if the genetic parent, say,
was no longer alive or didn't want to have a relationship,
and that that would happen, and that was painful, but
it was It was the the seeking was in the
sort of this the knowledge, the knowing, the understanding, or
at least having a shot at understanding, even if you
couldn't really know, because you couldn't ask your genetic parents
(28:34):
certain questions about, you know, the circumstances of your birth,
but just sort of to know that. People would tell
me that it kind of approached the beginnings of putting
the puzzle piece into place or or you know, plugging
up that hole in their heart. UM. That kind of
self knowledge, I just don't think there's any substitute for it.
(29:00):
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