November 5, 2020 • 45 mins
Nick Flynn was 7 years old when his house burned down. The official story, the one everyone laughed about, was that raccoons had knocked over the family’s Hibachi grill and set the house on fire. Decades later, Nick learned that’s not what happened at all—and started to understand the depth of his mother’s desperation.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Warning.
This episode contains discussions of suicide. Listener discussion is advised.
If you are a loved one is struggling with suicidal thoughts,
please call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at three. When
(00:22):
I tell my daughter about the fire, she looks at
the sun. I won't tell her that my mother, her grandmother,
said it, just as when she asked how she died,
I won't tell her about the gun. I'll say simply,
she had a bad heart. This is the only jar
I'll offer. If you're reading this now, I'm sorry I
(00:43):
lied to you. You're only seven. I didn't want you
to know, before you had even fully landed on this
planet a grandmother had chosen to leave it. I didn't
want you to know that it was an option, it
was something in our blood. I didn't want you to
know that at one when I was your age, she
might considered, with one match to suit be fold me
(01:06):
us everything back into the universe, just as I didn't
want you to know at that moment that I too
had considered leaving. That's Nick Flynn, poet, memoirist, teacher, and
author of the recent memoir This is the night our
(01:28):
house will catch fire. Nick's story is like an intricate
piece of origami, secrets folded into secrets, folded into secrets,
until finally, over the course of a lifetime, a shape emerges.
It's tough and shocking and ultimately beautiful. This is one
man's journey to assemble the shards of memory into something
(01:51):
whole and coherent, something he can live with. I'm Danny Shapiro,
and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept
from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
(02:12):
secrets we keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape
of your childhood. I grew up in a small town
in New England, in Massachusetts on the coast. For beautiful,
(02:33):
I mean I can see that I knew it was beautiful,
then I can still see it's beautiful, although I don't
go back very much. So. The ocean was a big
part of the Atlantic Ocean, and uh the beach and
even more specifically, salt marsh that the sort of body
is landform that separated the ocean from the mainland. I
spent a lot of time in the salt marshes, and
(02:53):
another part of the landscape was the woods behind my
grandmother's house. Those are sort of the main places. It
was a small town. It was a small town. It
didn't you know one street town called the center town,
the harbor, a lot of fishing boats in it. Um. Yeah,
I spent a lot of time in the harbor. So
you just went back and forth down the one street.
And your family had deep roots in this town, right, Yeah,
(03:17):
deep roots. Yeah, it's funny when you say that, because
I don't think of them. There was a deep because
we felt like like interlopers or that we didn't belong
there in some way. I think as my mother broke
away from her family in some way, and we dropped
several class notches from her being raised probably upper class
down to like very working class poor by the time
(03:39):
I came along. But yeah, I know that her father
and grandfather at least grew up in the town or
had roots in the town. And then my father's also
his father grandfather, so I know it goes back at
least that far, you know, at least two or three generations.
So tell me about the mother of your childhood. Describe
(04:00):
her for me what she was like. By the time
she was twenty, she had two kids, I was a
second child after you know, probably six months after I
was born, she left my father, which is a good thing,
a necessary thing, and then she was on her own. Really,
she had this wealthy father, but she didn't take any
(04:20):
help or get any help from him. She was kind
of on her own. But she stayed in the same
town that she grew up in and well that at
least the grandfather wasn't and her mother, I think mostly
just two, so she does some childcare. Like we often
stayed at her mother's house, at my grandmother's house. Because
my mother got three jobs, you know, three lousy jobs,
as Philippine would say. She worked at a making donuts
(04:43):
at the supermarket, and she worked waiting tables and restaurants,
and eventually she got her more secure job, which was
a bank teller, and that gave us health insurance. So
she was young. She was very young and beautiful and
vivacious and fun, and she had a series of boyfriends
growing up. She had these, you know, men that would
sort of be in our life, and they'd usually be
in a life for like maybe a year or so,
(05:05):
or maybe a little bit longer, and you know, I
got to know each of these guys, and the guys
that she went with were for the most part kind
of great guys, um gentle. For the most part, that
wasn't like violence being brought into the house. And for
the most part, I say there was something. Yeah, what
was the reason behind the riffed with her father with
(05:25):
your grandfather? Well, you know, my mother married my father,
or got pregnant by my father. She was probably seventeen
and he was probably twenty seven, and he was pretty
clearly you know, for my grandfather to see he was
maybe not the right guy. He was on his way
to pretty serious alcoholism. He didn't really have a job.
(05:47):
He just sort of drifted around. One of the things
that he called himself a writer, which became a point
of contention in my family. When I started to call
myself a writer, it wasn't like a sign of something
noble to do, so it sort of met you are disreputable.
I think it was mostly that, and mostly that she
sort of and she was rebellious when she was young.
She was rebellious I think because the house she grew
(06:07):
up in was there was a lot of alcohol. There
was a lot of alcoholism. Her mother and her father
were both alcoholics. And even if they had money, so
there wasn't the consequences that come with alcoholism, you know,
certain consequences, But at a certain point, I think by
the time she was like fifteen or so, she was
just really rebellious and we kept getting kicked out of schools,
(06:28):
out of private schools, and it was just kind of
a little bit wild, and I think that he they
didn't have the tools as parents to deal with the
young woman and their pardon what they were doing to
adding to her her struggles. You know. It's interesting though,
because she does leave your father, and so if he's
the problem was sort of the last straw, then that's gone,
(06:51):
but her relationship with them never really improves. Yeah, there
was also I think by the time she was with
my father, around the same time my grandparents got divorced,
and so there was the grandmother who was Irish, the
grandfather who was you know, waspy English. He was the
one who had the money, and the grandmother, who is
(07:12):
the one who also helped raise us. She didn't have
much money then once they got divorced, and so I
think from the waspy side, it's a little incomprehensible to
some of my friends, and they just there's a thing
about like not supporting the children, like they have to
make it on their own, that they have to prove themselves,
or you know, not even to the point of just
(07:35):
offering her an education. You know, like I would think
that you would think she's twenty years old, just two kids,
like you just stepped in and say that we want
to put you through college or something, just do something
that would basically set her on the right track. They
just didn't do that. I don't It's a little bit
incomprehensible to me. My grandfather in some ways was the
strange in that way, Like I think he had a
(07:56):
strange relationship to money. He inherited his money and he
just went through it like in his life. He sort
of was nominally a businessman, but he just kind of
spent the money that he had, and I think he
felt like he hadn't earned it and so maybe his
kids should earn it. It's really hard for me to say,
tell me a little bit about your father. Well he
(08:18):
was I didn't know him growing up at all. He
left when I was six months old, or we left him.
And the stories I heard you just tell there was
bad blood, like if you brought him up. And I
began getting letters from him when I was fifteen or so,
fourteen or fifteen, and he was in federal prison at
that point he'd gone to jail, but at this point
he was in federal prison for passing bad checks, robbing
(08:41):
banks with these bad checks across state lines. Was federal.
And he began writing me letters and the letters were,
you know, confusing, and my mother would give me the letters,
but she was given some resentment like, you know, your
father's in prison, did this thing. Um, it was sort
of making a connection. But he's very um. You know,
(09:01):
if he had to diagnose him, probably know, narcissism would
probably be high on the on the list. He was
an alcoholic but also narcissistic. And so he really just
talked about himself in the letters, like he didn't seem
like he was really that interested in me my life,
and he was just sort of go on about himself,
you know. So the letters stopped he got out of prison.
You know, through some certain strange coincidences, I knew who
(09:23):
he was and where he was, you know, I document
that in one of my earlier books. And then at
a certain point I began after my mother died when
I was twenty two. I began working in homeless shelter,
and after I'd been there for three years, he showed
up at the homeless shelter. At that point he was homeless.
It was well into his alcoholism, and he was homeless
for about five years. And you know, he and I
(09:44):
were sort of wrestled in the homeless shelter for for
about three years until I finally got sober, and then
I left the shelter, and then a little while after that,
we got him into housing, into a subsidized housing. We'll
be right back. When Nick is seven years old. His
(10:12):
house catches fire. That's how it's talked about. The house
catches fire, as if this is something that happens passively
all by itself. Nick writes quite a bit about cover stories.
He quotes another guest on this podcast, Dr Bessel vander Kolch,
from his seminal book on trauma, The Body keeps the score. Trauma,
(10:35):
by its nature, drives us to the edge of comprehension.
Sooner or later, most survivors come up with what many
of them call their cover story that offers some explanation
for their symptoms and behaviors for public consumption. These stories, however,
rarely capture the inner truth of the experience. It's enormously
(10:58):
difficult to organize ins traumatic experiences into a coherent account,
a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
The truth Nick will come to realize later, much later,
is that the fire didn't just happen. His mother said
(11:19):
it herself. Well, Nick and his brother were asleep upstairs.
The story of the fire is something I've been wrestling with.
That it happened, and it also it appears in every
book that I've written, actually is a there's a fire,
there's a house on fire. This's you know, it's it's
something that he sort of has always been hovering in
(11:39):
my subconscious and and I did, you know, like vessel
Vandicle and that really struck me, that passage from vessel Vandricle.
He's done a lot of work with with veterans with
post traumatic stress, and I really felt the thing that
had this book arise was this sort of moment of
sort of really seeing the fire for what it was
(11:59):
in a way as much as I could at that moment,
which was that my mother had said it, and that
that was a really kind of a terrifying thing to do,
and I hadn't really felt the terror of it, or
the directicus of it, or the the layers the danger
of that until that moment. And it's strange to say
that what compelled me to see it, or what fortunate
to see it, was that my daughter turned the same
age I had bed and I sort of looked at
(12:21):
her when she was set and I was just like, well,
that's that's a really that's kind of a crazy thing
to do, to set a house on fire with a
kid in it. And it's a little embarrassing to say
because before that moment, before my daughter turned seven, you know,
in the beginning, when the house got fire, the story
for the family was that raccoons had knocked out her
botti over, we had a grill, the raccoons came knocked
(12:43):
to have bought you over, and the house got fire.
And then several years later I interviewed her boyfriend at
the time, who was in the house of the night
at the fire, and he just laughed at the story
of the raccoon as he said, well, you know, the
raccoons did say your house on fire, your mother did.
And that was when I was about thirty five. Yeah,
so it was more than several years later. It was
a whole lot of years later, right, so like a
(13:04):
lifetime later. Three years later, thirty years later. I lived
with this story of the of the raccoons for like
thirty years, and that seemed like a good story. It
made sense, you know. I didn't think about the fire
on a conscious level that much, because you know, there
was an accident. I reckon said the house on fire, Like,
we escaped, my mother got the insurance money and got
the house fixed. It was it was kind of a
(13:25):
good thing. But then even after I heard the story
that she had set the house on fire, I still
held onto that thing that it was a good story that,
you know, because it worked out. We got the money
and we got the house fixed, and you know, my
mother was broke, she was young. Our house was really
not in good shape, and it became a little bit better.
I held onto that story until my daughter was the
(13:48):
same age I was, and then I was like, well, wait,
that's a strange thing for a parent to do. Like,
you know, I don't know about you, but I had
no idea what it was to be a parent until
I became one. And then suddenly you're you know, one
day you're not a parent, the next day you are one.
And then you sort of figured out as you go along.
And as she got to that age, the fire rose
up again in my subconscious it rose up. Remember what
(14:11):
I said about origami. When he's thirty five, Nick goes
on a pilgrimage of sorts, traveling the country to interview
each of his mother's ex boyfriends. He does this in
a journalistic way and actually decides to make a documentary
about it. This is his own way of giving himself
permission to dig deeper, show up on the front steps
(14:32):
of strangers, learn more about all he doesn't yet know.
It's like in a dream, when there's a door and
a dream you have the choice way to open it
or leave it closed, And you know, it just seems
if just to note to know what's beyond it, you
open the door, and it might be something that's you
don't want to see, or something that's somewhere terrifying. But
(14:53):
if you don't open the door, then you're you'll never know. So,
you know, when I was thirty five and I got
a notice, a friend of mine told me that there
was a organization in New York called The Kitchen, which
is a performance arts space, and they put out a
call to artists and writers who were not video we're
not filmmakers, and they would train you to how to
make films, how to make a videos, and they gave
(15:17):
you editing, and they gave you equipment, and you know,
you met and so I submitted a proposal. And the
proposal I submitted was that I would go track down
my mother's ex boyfriends. Which the reason I did that
was because it really seemed like it gave me the creeps.
It seemed like a really strange proposal. Just suddenly show up,
you know, suddenly you're seven, and now that these guys
are probably fifty or something, and now you're thirty five,
(15:38):
and like, hi, do you remember me? And I think
it was because of that they were such a strange
proposal that they let me in. I made the film,
and um, there's a documentary film. And I went and
found these men. He's like about a dozen men all
up and down the Eastern Seaboard down to Florida, from
Florida to almost to the Canadian border. And you know,
I rented cars and flew and didn't really relatively, you know,
(16:01):
maybe two week or a month long period. I just
canted all these interviews and then edited it into a film.
I decided to just steal it down just for to
make it more streamline to two questions. I just asked
them how they had met her and then how they
find out she had died, and that just sort of
was enough to get them going to tell the story
about what she was to do. And I remember them
all too like, they all like, you know, I could
(16:22):
even recognize them when I was with them. They were
like these father figures in my life growing up, this
rotating cast of father figures. So that's how I met
I call him Vernon in the book. His name is
in Vernon, but I called him Vernon in the book.
That's so how I met him. And he told the story,
the story being that it wasn't Raccoon's tipping over the habachi,
(16:43):
it was Nick's mother setting the house on fire to
be able to collect the insurance money. I sometimes wonder,
you know, when it comes to being a writer and
digging into material, opening the door and not knowing what's
going to be on the other side of it, that
sometimes it feels like the writing, or the assignment or
(17:04):
the proposal, is the thing that gives you permission to
go ahead and do the thing that scares you, because
now it's work, now it's art, but it's something that
you actually really want to know, but you would never
just go do on your own. It has to have
a form and a shape. Are you thinking of inheritance?
(17:26):
I'm thinking of inheritance. I'm thinking of a piece I
wrote for The New Yorker many years ago when I
was just trying to understand my father better again after
his death, where I knew he had been married to
a woman who died shortly after they got married, and
I never knew anything about her, anything about it. It
was a subject that we never broached. And I pitched
(17:47):
it to The New Yorker and I got an assignment.
So I had to pick up the phone. I had
to get in the car, I had to go. I
had to find her family, and and my heart was
in my throat. I was absolutely terrified. I really wanted
to know. But the only way that I could bring
myself to push it, to push myself was to feel
(18:07):
like I had a purpose. Yeah, I mean, I think,
and there there is terror involved in it too. I mean,
there are a couple of the men that I interviewed
that I that I tracked down. I had feared, like
my mother's second husband was a Vietnam VET and he
was just back in Vietnam at the time, and you know,
he was he was suffering from PTSD and he was
(18:28):
just a little bit scary, or you know, that's that's
sort of minimizing it. He was. He was a lot scary,
and he's also great. He was also a really great guy.
And so when I found him, it was frightening until
we actually were face to face, and then suddenly it
all melted away. I saw this, this human being. When
you're eighteen, your then girlfriend, who you referred to as
(18:50):
the initial oh, is looking for a pad of paper
to write something down on and she finds a pad
of paper and on it is in your mother's handwriting
is a suicide note. And it's written at some time earlier,
and it's not something that your mother carried through with.
She had not committed suicide at that time. But there's
(19:14):
this note and there's a really powerful moment where you
go outside and you burn it more fire, And how
does that then sort of play within you during this
period of time. I mean, you've you're in the midst
of your addiction, you're drinking really heavily. Is it something
that at that time stayed with you and haunted you?
(19:35):
Or did it burn up with the paper that you
set fire too? You know, I think I had a
sense at the time that you know, I could tell
you again, you can tell yourself a story. And the
story that I told myself is that when you know,
the Vietnam vette had left, had left our house, that
my mother fell into a depression. And that had been
probably two or three years before I found that note,
(19:57):
and so I didn't know how ng that. No, there
was like a yellow legal pad had been kicking around
the house and maybe just somehow surfaced. And I attributed
to that because she didn't seem in that state at
that time when I was eighteen, and so I really
was like, this is something that she went through and
I'm just gonna get rid of it. I'm just gonna
burn this, and that it was like a like a ritual.
(20:20):
And I assumed in my teenage mind, my teenage cosmology,
that by burning it it somehow would send it back
out into the universe, and it wouldn't be real. Somehow
that released the energy of it, and rather than just
deny it, just like exilely to a place of denial.
We you're just not going to think about this because
it's too much to think about. And so that's what
(20:43):
I did. And I did I think about it. Yeah,
I thought about it, you know, quite a bit. Like
when I after I got that note, I was eighteen,
and I decided not to go to college. I was
just gonna stay sort of closer to home to keep
an eye on my mother. And so I worked for
a couple of years and I ended up working for her,
her boyfriend at the time, it was a gangster. Worked
for those guys for about five years ago, but a
lot of it was to keep an eye of my mother.
(21:04):
And then I eventually did go to school. I eventually
did end up admitted to you mass Amherst, and it
just made sense to go. There was a couple years later,
I was like twenty. At that point, your mom was
she was home and tending bar and laundering money for
this gangster. Right, Yeah, you're off in college and you're
(21:25):
also in the thrones of your own alcoholism. Yeah, it
was early on, you know, I think you can get
away with a lot not everyone. But I was functional.
I was doing well in school and greeting and that
I just kidding. I push it at night and stuff.
But I hadn't reached the bottom of my alcoholism. Yeah.
And you also it sounds like, well you're in school
that you really you kind of find yourself in books,
(21:47):
in literature, and do you start to know that this
is what you want to do, especially given that you've
got this legacy of your father, you know, being quote
unquote a writer, and that not being an okay thing
to be or a thing to be or pretending to be. Yeah,
I mean it seemed like there was a lot of
pretend things like the Vietnam Vetpan came home Vietnam, you
just put a sign in his car that said carpenter.
(22:10):
He really wasn't a carpenter. At that point, it seemed
like writers were the same thing. You just sort of
put a sign up and say, yeah, I'm a writer,
and then just then you just go try to do it.
But I had been interested in writing though for probably
at least since I was early teens, ten twelve. It
was something that interested me that I was really circling around.
And when I went to school, I already I've been
working for a couple of years and I had become
(22:32):
an electrician, so I knew that I could make money.
I knew I could sort of support myself, and it
allowed me the financial freedom to study poetry and to
study uh you know, it wasn't poetry at first and
became poetry, but just just to read it just seemed
like such a you know, such a gift after working
for a few years after high school, just to be
able to live in one place and you just have
(22:52):
to read books. It was amazing. We'll be back in
a moment with more family secrets. Nix and his junior
year of college twenty one years old, steeped in literature
(23:13):
but also ooze when his mother dies by suicide advance
school for I think I was finishing my junior year.
I had left home, which is you know, one of
those codependent nightmares. You think you're you know, you're in
charge of keeping someone alive, and then you leave and
then I do die. Um, so that wasn't a good thing.
But she did the games to this year is with
(23:35):
He was a really sweet guy. I still know him
I'm still friends with him, but they were, you know,
he just sort of had morphed into cocaine, had become
a big part of it. And so she was doing
cocaine and he was in prison. Actually he actually got
busted and he was in federal prison. He got through
to five years and he was about to get out
of prison. He had been in for you know, usually
three or five he served too, and he was about
(23:57):
to get out. And she was seeing someone else at
that time, and it was right before Christmas, and I
think she was doing cocaine and she went through with it.
She went through with her her suicide, which you know,
I feel that she had always been that had always
been lingering as part of her one of her ways
out from whatever she was suffering from. You know, some
(24:20):
of the things would go back to her family. I
think she you know, I say in the book that
you can see from the age that she's like six
to seven or something, that something happened, Like it looks
like her face just changes and she becomes harder. And
you know, she was always incredibly beautiful, but you could
see there was like a look like the world is
much darker than I imagined. So I don't know what
that is. You know, I'm not sure what that is
(24:40):
had happened, but we can guess, and I think it
followed her through and you can see that she had
even some of the boyfriends. I talked to it and
said that she had actually attempted to aside even you know,
when I was very younger, even when she was carrying me.
I mean, there's always it was not the first time,
and then this time she succeeded. But it wasn't something
she talked about. It wasn't like when we were when
(25:01):
I was a kid. It wasn't like. That's why the letter.
That's why I could burn the letter and feel that
it was like somehow releasing, because it wasn't. She wasn't
like she was very fun to be around. She was
very loving, she was very uh vivacious and fun and
uh so it wasn't like she was like, for the
most part, like expressing suicidal intent to anyone. It was
really something she kept herself. It was a secret. The
(25:26):
long wake of his mother's suicide follows Nick through his
twenties and into rock bottom alcoholism. So often when there's trauma,
there's also addiction. The two states of being go together
hand in glove. It's excruciating to feel the feelings, and
here is a way to number them. Nick quotes the
(25:48):
great British psychoanalyst D W. Winnicott, who writes, it's a
joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.
Nick needed to stay hidden for a good long while.
He finally gets sober, and in many respects he is
found by recovery and eventually by marriage and fatherhood. But
(26:14):
over the years trauma, that tricky shape shifting state of
being takes many forms, including a long affair that begins
when his daughter is two. Because trauma and secrecy also
go together, hand in glove. My relationship to sobriety just
(26:35):
came in a necessary time. I think I started to
feel it around the same age that my mother had been.
You know, if you have any astrology beliefs or anything
that sort of sadom return the late or so where
and then you go for another twenty seven years and
that's when there's a whole creation destruction happens, so you
have to sort of rethink your entire life or to it.
(26:56):
So around when my father showed up at the shelter
or I wrestled with that for a couple of years.
My drinking just increased, and then I quit. I don't
want to make it sound easy that I quit. It was.
It was a long process of including drugs and alcohol.
You know. It was actually the just say the obvious,
but or say things that you always hear, But it
was the thing the same. I can't imagine what my
(27:18):
life would be if I had not quick drinking doing drugs.
I certainly would have written probably anything. I was trying
to be a writer all through my twenties, but I
really couldn't write anything coherent, which I feel very lucky
about also because that's the reason I went to therapy,
and the therapist is the one who told me to
get sober, because I was just I knew I could
write something, but I just couldn't quite get the clarity
to do it. So there was that, And then the
(27:41):
thing about going to therapy and getting sober is suddenly
there's a certain clarity. You know, it's a slow building clarity,
but it does whatever trauma you have suddenly begins to
rise up a little bit more. And it it does
with PTSD type stuff, which probably escaping from a burning
house and uh, you know, your mother committing suicide, you know,
probably could definitely trigger a PTSD reaction, even though you know,
(28:05):
I might not have been used that language at the time.
But it lodges in your brain, you know, from what
I read about a neuroscience that lodges in your brain
in different place. Like trauma doesn't sort of always active.
It's always sort of hyper vigilant and sort of reading
for this traumas or to happen again. And it's very
hard because it doesn't go into the deeper long term
MEMBORI just sort of stays and like the other part
(28:27):
of the brand, I'm Avigdala. Yeah. Yeah, the fight flight
or freeze part of the bran, the idea of like
hidings that was so important, It is so important to
my life as an addict. I was one of those
acts that, like, really I thought the best thing, the
most clever thing, was like to be fucked up and
I don't know if you could swear on this and
(28:49):
to yet to have no one know, you know, you
sort of put on dark glasses. You just sort of
go and you're like no one knows you are, and
that's like you're so you have two lives. It's like
a very dual existence. You know though, when I quit,
when I got sober and quit, pretty much everyone I
knew said, oh, we knew you were sucked up all
the time. You know, I wasn't really fooling anyone. There
was so much I think from my childhood that was
(29:11):
like hidden, like where my mother came from, what her
childhood was, like what she was holding inside with the
you know, with her relationship, her grip on life when
she started dating the gangster and what she was going on.
I mean, I knew, you know, gangsters only do a
few things. I mean, I guess there was drugs, because
you know, either it's guns, drugs, or prostitutes. I guess,
(29:32):
so they have a limited talent of things they do,
so I guess drugs. We didn't talk about it. We
didn't like it. Seemed like you had to keep things
sort of in this very sort of the asthma where
you could deny things and you could sort of have
other lives that's sort of happening outside of it. So
that's what I grew up with. I really grew up
with that. That's what slowly, very very slowly, and then
(29:55):
I can return to that too. I can return to
that double life very easily if I'm not vigilant, I
can sort of that can seem like the best place
to be still, you know, maybe not today. I think
this book was part of me trying to drag that
into the light too, and trying to say, like, yeah,
there's this part of me that like really is comfortable
with just closing a hotel room door and you know,
(30:16):
being alone in there, or being with a lover that
I probably shouldn't be with that feels to me like
familiar in this way, that seems to me like the
real definition of love. Maybe, well yeah, and it's like home,
It's like what that's all we know. All we know
is what we got way back then. That's a good,
that's a good that could that could be ship bumpers.
(30:38):
All we know is what we've got. So you're a
writer and you're a teacher, you have this full of
professional life, you're sober, You fall in love with the
woman who becomes your wife. You have a daughter, and
when your daughters too, you begin an affair that asked
(31:01):
for a whole bunch of years. Yeah, off and on
for five years. Yeah. Yeah. When my daughter turned too,
I began this affair, and you know, part of it
it had to do with the person I had the
affair with. It was a lovely person who is a
lovely person, but also probably a person who's comfortable with
having a double life, at least was at that point.
(31:24):
It happened also with a traumatic moment in my life.
It was right at the moment when they began filming
my first book that began making into a film, and
I was on set every day and to day that
um and I knew this was kind of part of
you know, writing the scripts and there's a day where
Juliette Moore, who plays my mother, and it would re
(31:44):
enact my mother's suicide and being a set that day,
like it's not like again, it's like almost like going
and tracking down your mother's explore friends and asking him questions,
which it's it's a strange thing to be and that
even the director was like, you don't have to be
here today, But I again, I was like, well where
else would I be? Like it? I'll always wonder what
this was if I don't stay here. And so I
stayed through that, but I think it did some restimulated
(32:08):
or reactivated that trauma in the and one of the
ways this woman we have been friends for a while,
you know, for a year or so, and we became
lovers like right around then, and then it was off
and on for the next several years taxt to five years.
I mean, it makes so much emotional sense to me
(32:28):
that being on the set watching that re enactment and
somehow needing to like where else would you be as
you said, what is the nature of that trigger? Like
what would you call it? Is it like a funking
I'm going to do what I want? Is itself desse
itself destruction? Is it I've been through so much? This
(32:52):
is you know, because in a way, like when you're
describing the re enactment, it's a little bit like you know,
when you're outter turned seven having the thought, wait a minute,
that was really really not a good story. That was
not okay. You know. It's like I mean, and obviously
your mother suicide wasn't okay, But somehow it's now being
(33:15):
literally played out by an Academy Award winning actress, like
in front of your eyes. I just wonder what you
would say about like what that was that then triggered
the beginning of this long affair. It's really hard to
categorize because it's you know, like most of my life.
(33:36):
You know, I would say it is mundane in a way,
or at least comprehensible. Like you know, everyone struggles with
trying to figure out who your parents are, and like
people get lost at the parish points in their lives,
and you know, my parents got lost at various points
and their consequences were maybe more intense than some other people.
But it's it's within the realm of comprehension. But you know,
(33:57):
somehow being on the set, well you're seeing this amazing
actor saying lines that you've actually helped a craft that
are based on things that your mother said. There was
no precedent for it. There's not nothing I could sort
of look back on and say like, oh, yeah, this
is I know what to do with this, because I
really didn't. It was really like sort of like you're
(34:18):
in like a very strange dream that just doesn't end,
because then you know, it really doesn't end because then
for the next year you're editing that scene. You know,
you're in the editing room with the with the director
in the editor, you're working on the scene. So you're
seeing it over and or then you go into the
premiere and you're seeing it again, and then you're it
keeps rising up in a way that like memory does too,
but memory sort of changes, you know, memories more like
(34:42):
a play where every performance is a little bit different,
whereas this is like your I mean, it's different because
you bring something different to it every time, but you're
really seeing that that moment and then remembering that moment,
you know. But it occurs to me this was utterly
surreal and singular experience, and it wasn't like you could
call one of your friends and been like, you know, so,
(35:03):
so when when you've had that situation, how did you feel?
You're so solitary within that and it's also playing out
over and over and over again. I haven't thought about that,
but that, you know, that reminds me of another line
of vessel Vandercolks, where he he says, um, it's the
nature of trauma that it doesn't allow a story to
(35:23):
be told. It doesn't allow us to hold onto stories.
So again and again, it's why we repeat so much.
It's why we go back to either the cover story
or the real story, and as a way of I'm
going to try to tell the story again so that
I can hold onto it because it keeps on slipping
through our fingers. But there you are, and you're actually
(35:44):
seeing the same scene played over and over and over again,
honed and perfected. Yeah, and I'm not even sure if like,
you know, I wouldn't want to argue with Vessel Vandercole,
because you know, we created a story with the film.
I mean, there's a wrote a book, so those are
they have the beginning, middle, and end. But you know,
the moment of trauma, I think, is what really gets
(36:06):
sort of you know, you snap awake at even though
it's embedded in a story, the moment of trauma sort
of always sort of like brings you back to like
that very moment, whatever it was was lost. So this
relationship plays out over off and on over a period
of five years, in trips and travel and motels and
(36:30):
talking on the phone while your daughter is like, you know,
swinging nearby on a playground and in Texas and you
know down where where I teach. And after five years,
you go to therapy, back to therapy, back to therapy, right, different,
different therapists, different and this therapist tells you that you
have the ethics of a drowning man. Yeah, I mean,
(36:54):
you don't go near a drowning man, right, If you
try to save a drowning man will probably are you under.
He's just trying to stay alive. So take us to
the moment where your wife asks you if you're having
an affair, and she's asked you before and you've said no,
but this time you say yes, after these five years,
(37:16):
and what is that moment? Yeah, the moment I revealed
to my wife that I was having an affair was
right around Christmas, which my mother kind of suicide right
around Christmas, and so it's always it's a historically a
difficult time in a year from me. But that fall
I had, I started to go through the sense that
(37:37):
I talked about before about realizing that it was her
reckless thing my mother did sitting in the house on
fire with us inside, maybe even worse than reckless. And
that's how ar wrestled with that in the book, like
what was going on in her head. You can also
have many You can have some very dark thoughts in
your head, and you can have some little less thought
like maybe maybe will all be saved, or maybe some
people will die. So that was hit me and it
(38:00):
was feeling like, um, you know, I'd call it some
sort of a breakdown, a psychic breakdown, and I've been
going through the fall, and my wife knew that, and
as she knew that, it was about partially about the revelation,
my own interim revelations about my mother and the fire,
but it was also like, you know, I was also
considering leaving the family too. I was considering on a
metaphoric level, burning down the house that I had created,
(38:24):
the home I created with my family. It wasn't making sense,
Like what I was considering doing didn't really make sense
in a way in a larger sense, like is that
really what I wanted? Or set doors? I just trying
to go? It was I trying to run away? Was
I trying to hide more? Was I trying to get
away from the pain. So therapy really helped me. I
got into the therapist and he sort of recognized, you know,
(38:45):
what I was going through and told me that I
had the ethics of a drowning man with thout are
struggling with and yeah, he's he's a he's a young
Gian therapist, which was really helpful. Also, because he would
really would really go into like dreams and into the
subconscious until get to see these things pull pull it out.
So that was that was it. So I came clean
and then you know, likely getting sober. You know, takes
(39:07):
a little while for it to stick. And h here
we are, like five hour, six years later. Towards the
end of your book, there's a really moving passage where
you essentially address it to your daughter. It's really arresting
and interesting moment because you know, those of us who
have children who right have some tucked away, very far
(39:27):
tucked away awareness that our children are probably going to
read these words someday, you know, and we can't think
about it while we're writing or it would completely stop us.
Yet it's there, and I mean I actually think of
it in my own life as a hedge against secrecy.
(39:49):
Secrecy when you are a writer who is a parent
is actually really not so possible ultimately, And the way
I think of it in my own life, it really
keeps be honest. I mean, I if my son wants
to he can go read you know, some really difficult
stuff about you know, what his mother was like as
(40:09):
a very young woman his age. So you address your
daughter a future version of her reading this someday. And also,
I was struck by you had made a decision, at
least to this point, to not tell her how your
mother had died. You told her that she had a
(40:29):
bad heart. And then your daughter sees the title of
a poem of yours, and she learns how your mother
died by seeing the title of one of your poems,
which is on the anniversary of my mother's suicide. My
daughter and I take the A train to the Museum
of Natural History. Yeah, and that was, like, you know,
in the writing of the book, that's what happens when
(40:51):
it takes five years throughout a book. In the beginning,
she didn't know, and at this point she doesn't know
until she listens to this podcast that but my mother,
her grandmother had said fire to our house. She knows
about the fire, but she doesn't know about that. It
felt like too much. She knew about my father being homeless, homeless, alcoholic,
mostly because she saw, you know, we live in New York,
(41:14):
we travel and we see homeless people, and it's just
she she got to meet my father also before he died,
when she was very young. It just seemed important for
a note to know that's like to give her empathy, like,
this is not far from our lives. These people are not.
Each one is related to someone that they have, you know,
they have children that have parents to have you know,
they connected to not just these these satellites floating drifting
(41:35):
in space. It seemed important for her to know that.
But somehow the idea of my grandmother or her grandmother
make suicide it felt like too much for her at
the age. And then she she sorry, I was I
forget I think I had a I guess I was
at a piece of paper and she just said it.
She doesn't always read my poems, but I was just
sitting I think it's just sitting at the top and
she read it. I actually burst into tears. So I
(41:58):
didn't I didn't want to find out like that. But
it was really good though, like she just really sort
of got it. And I have this sense that our
children sort of know everything about us anyway, like there's
really nothing that they don't know. Is I don't think
there's anything that spoken that she'd be like, Oh, that's
that's shocking. I mean, you know the problem because I've
been working on not being so you know, having a
(42:18):
double life, and so she gets to see moments of
struggle and working things out. And I think that's important.
I think that's important for Case to see that one
can struggle, and one can you know, suffer, and yet
can come out of it and the next day or
even the next minute, can be laughing about something. Here's
(42:41):
Nick reading one last passage from his extraordinary book, one
which his daughter may hold in her hands one day
and not have to wonder who her father really is.
And that is what I meant when I said at
the start that this story is tough and ultimately beautiful. Mhm.
(43:03):
A thousand and one times I've told this story why
because it happened, because I escaped, as it involves fire
and firemen and sirens. Sometimes still, this story starts with
just me, barefoot in the next door neighbor's yard, looking
back at the house we've just tumbled out of. All
(43:23):
I can do now is watch as it burns. Phantasmagoria
they need to freeze makes sense of the story of
being six and running through a burning house. I need
to contain it like a firefly in a jar. And
I don't contain it. I don't know if I can
move away from it. And if I can't move away
from it, I don't know if I'll ever believe that
(43:45):
it made it out of in one piece. If here
I am, I stand before you, intact whole, holy, everything
that lives is holy. Family Secrets is an I Heeart
(44:12):
Media production. Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer and Bethan
Mcaluso is the executive producer. We'd also like to give
a special thanks to Tyler Klang and Tristan McNeil. If
you have a family secret you'd like to share, leave
us a voicemail and your story could appear on an
upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight secret zero.
(44:35):
That's secret and then the number zero. You can also
find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder and Facebook at
facebook dot com slash Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at
FAMI Secrets Pod, m HMM. For more podcasts for My
(45:08):
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. Warning.
This episode contains discussions of suicide. Listener discussion is advised.
If you are a loved one is struggling with suicidal thoughts,
please call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at three. When
(00:22):
I tell my daughter about the fire, she looks at
the sun. I won't tell her that my mother, her grandmother,
said it, just as when she asked how she died,
I won't tell her about the gun. I'll say simply,
she had a bad heart. This is the only jar
I'll offer. If you're reading this now, I'm sorry I
(00:43):
lied to you. You're only seven. I didn't want you
to know, before you had even fully landed on this
planet a grandmother had chosen to leave it. I didn't
want you to know that it was an option, it
was something in our blood. I didn't want you to
know that at one when I was your age, she
might considered, with one match to suit be fold me
(01:06):
us everything back into the universe, just as I didn't
want you to know at that moment that I too
had considered leaving. That's Nick Flynn, poet, memoirist, teacher, and
author of the recent memoir This is the night our
(01:28):
house will catch fire. Nick's story is like an intricate
piece of origami, secrets folded into secrets, folded into secrets,
until finally, over the course of a lifetime, a shape emerges.
It's tough and shocking and ultimately beautiful. This is one
man's journey to assemble the shards of memory into something
(01:51):
whole and coherent, something he can live with. I'm Danny Shapiro,
and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept
from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
(02:12):
secrets we keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape
of your childhood. I grew up in a small town
in New England, in Massachusetts on the coast. For beautiful,
(02:33):
I mean I can see that I knew it was beautiful,
then I can still see it's beautiful, although I don't
go back very much. So. The ocean was a big
part of the Atlantic Ocean, and uh the beach and
even more specifically, salt marsh that the sort of body
is landform that separated the ocean from the mainland. I
spent a lot of time in the salt marshes, and
(02:53):
another part of the landscape was the woods behind my
grandmother's house. Those are sort of the main places. It
was a small town. It was a small town. It
didn't you know one street town called the center town,
the harbor, a lot of fishing boats in it. Um. Yeah,
I spent a lot of time in the harbor. So
you just went back and forth down the one street.
And your family had deep roots in this town, right, Yeah,
(03:17):
deep roots. Yeah, it's funny when you say that, because
I don't think of them. There was a deep because
we felt like like interlopers or that we didn't belong
there in some way. I think as my mother broke
away from her family in some way, and we dropped
several class notches from her being raised probably upper class
down to like very working class poor by the time
(03:39):
I came along. But yeah, I know that her father
and grandfather at least grew up in the town or
had roots in the town. And then my father's also
his father grandfather, so I know it goes back at
least that far, you know, at least two or three generations.
So tell me about the mother of your childhood. Describe
(04:00):
her for me what she was like. By the time
she was twenty, she had two kids, I was a
second child after you know, probably six months after I
was born, she left my father, which is a good thing,
a necessary thing, and then she was on her own. Really,
she had this wealthy father, but she didn't take any
(04:20):
help or get any help from him. She was kind
of on her own. But she stayed in the same
town that she grew up in and well that at
least the grandfather wasn't and her mother, I think mostly
just two, so she does some childcare. Like we often
stayed at her mother's house, at my grandmother's house. Because
my mother got three jobs, you know, three lousy jobs,
as Philippine would say. She worked at a making donuts
(04:43):
at the supermarket, and she worked waiting tables and restaurants,
and eventually she got her more secure job, which was
a bank teller, and that gave us health insurance. So
she was young. She was very young and beautiful and
vivacious and fun, and she had a series of boyfriends
growing up. She had these, you know, men that would
sort of be in our life, and they'd usually be
in a life for like maybe a year or so,
(05:05):
or maybe a little bit longer, and you know, I
got to know each of these guys, and the guys
that she went with were for the most part kind
of great guys, um gentle. For the most part, that
wasn't like violence being brought into the house. And for
the most part, I say there was something. Yeah, what
was the reason behind the riffed with her father with
(05:25):
your grandfather? Well, you know, my mother married my father,
or got pregnant by my father. She was probably seventeen
and he was probably twenty seven, and he was pretty
clearly you know, for my grandfather to see he was
maybe not the right guy. He was on his way
to pretty serious alcoholism. He didn't really have a job.
(05:47):
He just sort of drifted around. One of the things
that he called himself a writer, which became a point
of contention in my family. When I started to call
myself a writer, it wasn't like a sign of something
noble to do, so it sort of met you are disreputable.
I think it was mostly that, and mostly that she
sort of and she was rebellious when she was young.
She was rebellious I think because the house she grew
(06:07):
up in was there was a lot of alcohol. There
was a lot of alcoholism. Her mother and her father
were both alcoholics. And even if they had money, so
there wasn't the consequences that come with alcoholism, you know,
certain consequences, But at a certain point, I think by
the time she was like fifteen or so, she was
just really rebellious and we kept getting kicked out of schools,
(06:28):
out of private schools, and it was just kind of
a little bit wild, and I think that he they
didn't have the tools as parents to deal with the
young woman and their pardon what they were doing to
adding to her her struggles. You know. It's interesting though,
because she does leave your father, and so if he's
the problem was sort of the last straw, then that's gone,
(06:51):
but her relationship with them never really improves. Yeah, there
was also I think by the time she was with
my father, around the same time my grandparents got divorced,
and so there was the grandmother who was Irish, the
grandfather who was you know, waspy English. He was the
one who had the money, and the grandmother, who is
(07:12):
the one who also helped raise us. She didn't have
much money then once they got divorced, and so I
think from the waspy side, it's a little incomprehensible to
some of my friends, and they just there's a thing
about like not supporting the children, like they have to
make it on their own, that they have to prove themselves,
or you know, not even to the point of just
(07:35):
offering her an education. You know, like I would think
that you would think she's twenty years old, just two kids,
like you just stepped in and say that we want
to put you through college or something, just do something
that would basically set her on the right track. They
just didn't do that. I don't It's a little bit
incomprehensible to me. My grandfather in some ways was the
strange in that way, Like I think he had a
(07:56):
strange relationship to money. He inherited his money and he
just went through it like in his life. He sort
of was nominally a businessman, but he just kind of
spent the money that he had, and I think he
felt like he hadn't earned it and so maybe his
kids should earn it. It's really hard for me to say,
tell me a little bit about your father. Well he
(08:18):
was I didn't know him growing up at all. He
left when I was six months old, or we left him.
And the stories I heard you just tell there was
bad blood, like if you brought him up. And I
began getting letters from him when I was fifteen or so,
fourteen or fifteen, and he was in federal prison at
that point he'd gone to jail, but at this point
he was in federal prison for passing bad checks, robbing
(08:41):
banks with these bad checks across state lines. Was federal.
And he began writing me letters and the letters were,
you know, confusing, and my mother would give me the letters,
but she was given some resentment like, you know, your
father's in prison, did this thing. Um, it was sort
of making a connection. But he's very um. You know,
(09:01):
if he had to diagnose him, probably know, narcissism would
probably be high on the on the list. He was
an alcoholic but also narcissistic. And so he really just
talked about himself in the letters, like he didn't seem
like he was really that interested in me my life,
and he was just sort of go on about himself,
you know. So the letters stopped he got out of prison.
You know, through some certain strange coincidences, I knew who
(09:23):
he was and where he was, you know, I document
that in one of my earlier books. And then at
a certain point I began after my mother died when
I was twenty two. I began working in homeless shelter,
and after I'd been there for three years, he showed
up at the homeless shelter. At that point he was homeless.
It was well into his alcoholism, and he was homeless
for about five years. And you know, he and I
(09:44):
were sort of wrestled in the homeless shelter for for
about three years until I finally got sober, and then
I left the shelter, and then a little while after that,
we got him into housing, into a subsidized housing. We'll
be right back. When Nick is seven years old. His
(10:12):
house catches fire. That's how it's talked about. The house
catches fire, as if this is something that happens passively
all by itself. Nick writes quite a bit about cover stories.
He quotes another guest on this podcast, Dr Bessel vander Kolch,
from his seminal book on trauma, The Body keeps the score. Trauma,
(10:35):
by its nature, drives us to the edge of comprehension.
Sooner or later, most survivors come up with what many
of them call their cover story that offers some explanation
for their symptoms and behaviors for public consumption. These stories, however,
rarely capture the inner truth of the experience. It's enormously
(10:58):
difficult to organize ins traumatic experiences into a coherent account,
a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
The truth Nick will come to realize later, much later,
is that the fire didn't just happen. His mother said
(11:19):
it herself. Well, Nick and his brother were asleep upstairs.
The story of the fire is something I've been wrestling with.
That it happened, and it also it appears in every
book that I've written, actually is a there's a fire,
there's a house on fire. This's you know, it's it's
something that he sort of has always been hovering in
(11:39):
my subconscious and and I did, you know, like vessel
Vandicle and that really struck me, that passage from vessel Vandricle.
He's done a lot of work with with veterans with
post traumatic stress, and I really felt the thing that
had this book arise was this sort of moment of
sort of really seeing the fire for what it was
(11:59):
in a way as much as I could at that moment,
which was that my mother had said it, and that
that was a really kind of a terrifying thing to do,
and I hadn't really felt the terror of it, or
the directicus of it, or the the layers the danger
of that until that moment. And it's strange to say
that what compelled me to see it, or what fortunate
to see it, was that my daughter turned the same
age I had bed and I sort of looked at
(12:21):
her when she was set and I was just like, well,
that's that's a really that's kind of a crazy thing
to do, to set a house on fire with a
kid in it. And it's a little embarrassing to say
because before that moment, before my daughter turned seven, you know,
in the beginning, when the house got fire, the story
for the family was that raccoons had knocked out her
botti over, we had a grill, the raccoons came knocked
(12:43):
to have bought you over, and the house got fire.
And then several years later I interviewed her boyfriend at
the time, who was in the house of the night
at the fire, and he just laughed at the story
of the raccoon as he said, well, you know, the
raccoons did say your house on fire, your mother did.
And that was when I was about thirty five. Yeah,
so it was more than several years later. It was
a whole lot of years later, right, so like a
(13:04):
lifetime later. Three years later, thirty years later. I lived
with this story of the of the raccoons for like
thirty years, and that seemed like a good story. It
made sense, you know. I didn't think about the fire
on a conscious level that much, because you know, there
was an accident. I reckon said the house on fire, Like,
we escaped, my mother got the insurance money and got
the house fixed. It was it was kind of a
(13:25):
good thing. But then even after I heard the story
that she had set the house on fire, I still
held onto that thing that it was a good story that,
you know, because it worked out. We got the money
and we got the house fixed, and you know, my
mother was broke, she was young. Our house was really
not in good shape, and it became a little bit better.
I held onto that story until my daughter was the
(13:48):
same age I was, and then I was like, well, wait,
that's a strange thing for a parent to do. Like,
you know, I don't know about you, but I had
no idea what it was to be a parent until
I became one. And then suddenly you're you know, one
day you're not a parent, the next day you are one.
And then you sort of figured out as you go along.
And as she got to that age, the fire rose
up again in my subconscious it rose up. Remember what
(14:11):
I said about origami. When he's thirty five, Nick goes
on a pilgrimage of sorts, traveling the country to interview
each of his mother's ex boyfriends. He does this in
a journalistic way and actually decides to make a documentary
about it. This is his own way of giving himself
permission to dig deeper, show up on the front steps
(14:32):
of strangers, learn more about all he doesn't yet know.
It's like in a dream, when there's a door and
a dream you have the choice way to open it
or leave it closed, And you know, it just seems
if just to note to know what's beyond it, you
open the door, and it might be something that's you
don't want to see, or something that's somewhere terrifying. But
(14:53):
if you don't open the door, then you're you'll never know. So,
you know, when I was thirty five and I got
a notice, a friend of mine told me that there
was a organization in New York called The Kitchen, which
is a performance arts space, and they put out a
call to artists and writers who were not video we're
not filmmakers, and they would train you to how to
make films, how to make a videos, and they gave
(15:17):
you editing, and they gave you equipment, and you know,
you met and so I submitted a proposal. And the
proposal I submitted was that I would go track down
my mother's ex boyfriends. Which the reason I did that
was because it really seemed like it gave me the creeps.
It seemed like a really strange proposal. Just suddenly show up,
you know, suddenly you're seven, and now that these guys
are probably fifty or something, and now you're thirty five,
(15:38):
and like, hi, do you remember me? And I think
it was because of that they were such a strange
proposal that they let me in. I made the film,
and um, there's a documentary film. And I went and
found these men. He's like about a dozen men all
up and down the Eastern Seaboard down to Florida, from
Florida to almost to the Canadian border. And you know,
I rented cars and flew and didn't really relatively, you know,
(16:01):
maybe two week or a month long period. I just
canted all these interviews and then edited it into a film.
I decided to just steal it down just for to
make it more streamline to two questions. I just asked
them how they had met her and then how they
find out she had died, and that just sort of
was enough to get them going to tell the story
about what she was to do. And I remember them
all too like, they all like, you know, I could
(16:22):
even recognize them when I was with them. They were
like these father figures in my life growing up, this
rotating cast of father figures. So that's how I met
I call him Vernon in the book. His name is
in Vernon, but I called him Vernon in the book.
That's so how I met him. And he told the story,
the story being that it wasn't Raccoon's tipping over the habachi,
(16:43):
it was Nick's mother setting the house on fire to
be able to collect the insurance money. I sometimes wonder,
you know, when it comes to being a writer and
digging into material, opening the door and not knowing what's
going to be on the other side of it, that
sometimes it feels like the writing, or the assignment or
(17:04):
the proposal, is the thing that gives you permission to
go ahead and do the thing that scares you, because
now it's work, now it's art, but it's something that
you actually really want to know, but you would never
just go do on your own. It has to have
a form and a shape. Are you thinking of inheritance?
(17:26):
I'm thinking of inheritance. I'm thinking of a piece I
wrote for The New Yorker many years ago when I
was just trying to understand my father better again after
his death, where I knew he had been married to
a woman who died shortly after they got married, and
I never knew anything about her, anything about it. It
was a subject that we never broached. And I pitched
(17:47):
it to The New Yorker and I got an assignment.
So I had to pick up the phone. I had
to get in the car, I had to go. I
had to find her family, and and my heart was
in my throat. I was absolutely terrified. I really wanted
to know. But the only way that I could bring
myself to push it, to push myself was to feel
(18:07):
like I had a purpose. Yeah, I mean, I think,
and there there is terror involved in it too. I mean,
there are a couple of the men that I interviewed
that I that I tracked down. I had feared, like
my mother's second husband was a Vietnam VET and he
was just back in Vietnam at the time, and you know,
he was he was suffering from PTSD and he was
(18:28):
just a little bit scary, or you know, that's that's
sort of minimizing it. He was. He was a lot scary,
and he's also great. He was also a really great guy.
And so when I found him, it was frightening until
we actually were face to face, and then suddenly it
all melted away. I saw this, this human being. When
you're eighteen, your then girlfriend, who you referred to as
(18:50):
the initial oh, is looking for a pad of paper
to write something down on and she finds a pad
of paper and on it is in your mother's handwriting
is a suicide note. And it's written at some time earlier,
and it's not something that your mother carried through with.
She had not committed suicide at that time. But there's
(19:14):
this note and there's a really powerful moment where you
go outside and you burn it more fire, And how
does that then sort of play within you during this
period of time. I mean, you've you're in the midst
of your addiction, you're drinking really heavily. Is it something
that at that time stayed with you and haunted you?
(19:35):
Or did it burn up with the paper that you
set fire too? You know, I think I had a
sense at the time that you know, I could tell
you again, you can tell yourself a story. And the
story that I told myself is that when you know,
the Vietnam vette had left, had left our house, that
my mother fell into a depression. And that had been
probably two or three years before I found that note,
(19:57):
and so I didn't know how ng that. No, there
was like a yellow legal pad had been kicking around
the house and maybe just somehow surfaced. And I attributed
to that because she didn't seem in that state at
that time when I was eighteen, and so I really
was like, this is something that she went through and
I'm just gonna get rid of it. I'm just gonna
burn this, and that it was like a like a ritual.
(20:20):
And I assumed in my teenage mind, my teenage cosmology,
that by burning it it somehow would send it back
out into the universe, and it wouldn't be real. Somehow
that released the energy of it, and rather than just
deny it, just like exilely to a place of denial.
We you're just not going to think about this because
it's too much to think about. And so that's what
(20:43):
I did. And I did I think about it. Yeah,
I thought about it, you know, quite a bit. Like
when I after I got that note, I was eighteen,
and I decided not to go to college. I was
just gonna stay sort of closer to home to keep
an eye on my mother. And so I worked for
a couple of years and I ended up working for her,
her boyfriend at the time, it was a gangster. Worked
for those guys for about five years ago, but a
lot of it was to keep an eye of my mother.
(21:04):
And then I eventually did go to school. I eventually
did end up admitted to you mass Amherst, and it
just made sense to go. There was a couple years later,
I was like twenty. At that point, your mom was
she was home and tending bar and laundering money for
this gangster. Right, Yeah, you're off in college and you're
(21:25):
also in the thrones of your own alcoholism. Yeah, it
was early on, you know, I think you can get
away with a lot not everyone. But I was functional.
I was doing well in school and greeting and that
I just kidding. I push it at night and stuff.
But I hadn't reached the bottom of my alcoholism. Yeah.
And you also it sounds like, well you're in school
that you really you kind of find yourself in books,
(21:47):
in literature, and do you start to know that this
is what you want to do, especially given that you've
got this legacy of your father, you know, being quote
unquote a writer, and that not being an okay thing
to be or a thing to be or pretending to be. Yeah,
I mean it seemed like there was a lot of
pretend things like the Vietnam Vetpan came home Vietnam, you
just put a sign in his car that said carpenter.
(22:10):
He really wasn't a carpenter. At that point, it seemed
like writers were the same thing. You just sort of
put a sign up and say, yeah, I'm a writer,
and then just then you just go try to do it.
But I had been interested in writing though for probably
at least since I was early teens, ten twelve. It
was something that interested me that I was really circling around.
And when I went to school, I already I've been
working for a couple of years and I had become
(22:32):
an electrician, so I knew that I could make money.
I knew I could sort of support myself, and it
allowed me the financial freedom to study poetry and to
study uh you know, it wasn't poetry at first and
became poetry, but just just to read it just seemed
like such a you know, such a gift after working
for a few years after high school, just to be
able to live in one place and you just have
(22:52):
to read books. It was amazing. We'll be back in
a moment with more family secrets. Nix and his junior
year of college twenty one years old, steeped in literature
(23:13):
but also ooze when his mother dies by suicide advance
school for I think I was finishing my junior year.
I had left home, which is you know, one of
those codependent nightmares. You think you're you know, you're in
charge of keeping someone alive, and then you leave and
then I do die. Um, so that wasn't a good thing.
But she did the games to this year is with
(23:35):
He was a really sweet guy. I still know him
I'm still friends with him, but they were, you know,
he just sort of had morphed into cocaine, had become
a big part of it. And so she was doing
cocaine and he was in prison. Actually he actually got
busted and he was in federal prison. He got through
to five years and he was about to get out
of prison. He had been in for you know, usually
three or five he served too, and he was about
(23:57):
to get out. And she was seeing someone else at
that time, and it was right before Christmas, and I
think she was doing cocaine and she went through with it.
She went through with her her suicide, which you know,
I feel that she had always been that had always
been lingering as part of her one of her ways
out from whatever she was suffering from. You know, some
(24:20):
of the things would go back to her family. I
think she you know, I say in the book that
you can see from the age that she's like six
to seven or something, that something happened, Like it looks
like her face just changes and she becomes harder. And
you know, she was always incredibly beautiful, but you could
see there was like a look like the world is
much darker than I imagined. So I don't know what
that is. You know, I'm not sure what that is
(24:40):
had happened, but we can guess, and I think it
followed her through and you can see that she had
even some of the boyfriends. I talked to it and
said that she had actually attempted to aside even you know,
when I was very younger, even when she was carrying me.
I mean, there's always it was not the first time,
and then this time she succeeded. But it wasn't something
she talked about. It wasn't like when we were when
(25:01):
I was a kid. It wasn't like. That's why the letter.
That's why I could burn the letter and feel that
it was like somehow releasing, because it wasn't. She wasn't
like she was very fun to be around. She was
very loving, she was very uh vivacious and fun and
uh so it wasn't like she was like, for the
most part, like expressing suicidal intent to anyone. It was
really something she kept herself. It was a secret. The
(25:26):
long wake of his mother's suicide follows Nick through his
twenties and into rock bottom alcoholism. So often when there's trauma,
there's also addiction. The two states of being go together
hand in glove. It's excruciating to feel the feelings, and
here is a way to number them. Nick quotes the
(25:48):
great British psychoanalyst D W. Winnicott, who writes, it's a
joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.
Nick needed to stay hidden for a good long while.
He finally gets sober, and in many respects he is
found by recovery and eventually by marriage and fatherhood. But
(26:14):
over the years trauma, that tricky shape shifting state of
being takes many forms, including a long affair that begins
when his daughter is two. Because trauma and secrecy also
go together, hand in glove. My relationship to sobriety just
(26:35):
came in a necessary time. I think I started to
feel it around the same age that my mother had been.
You know, if you have any astrology beliefs or anything
that sort of sadom return the late or so where
and then you go for another twenty seven years and
that's when there's a whole creation destruction happens, so you
have to sort of rethink your entire life or to it.
(26:56):
So around when my father showed up at the shelter
or I wrestled with that for a couple of years.
My drinking just increased, and then I quit. I don't
want to make it sound easy that I quit. It was.
It was a long process of including drugs and alcohol.
You know. It was actually the just say the obvious,
but or say things that you always hear, But it
was the thing the same. I can't imagine what my
(27:18):
life would be if I had not quick drinking doing drugs.
I certainly would have written probably anything. I was trying
to be a writer all through my twenties, but I
really couldn't write anything coherent, which I feel very lucky
about also because that's the reason I went to therapy,
and the therapist is the one who told me to
get sober, because I was just I knew I could
write something, but I just couldn't quite get the clarity
to do it. So there was that, And then the
(27:41):
thing about going to therapy and getting sober is suddenly
there's a certain clarity. You know, it's a slow building clarity,
but it does whatever trauma you have suddenly begins to
rise up a little bit more. And it it does
with PTSD type stuff, which probably escaping from a burning
house and uh, you know, your mother committing suicide, you know,
probably could definitely trigger a PTSD reaction, even though you know,
(28:05):
I might not have been used that language at the time.
But it lodges in your brain, you know, from what
I read about a neuroscience that lodges in your brain
in different place. Like trauma doesn't sort of always active.
It's always sort of hyper vigilant and sort of reading
for this traumas or to happen again. And it's very
hard because it doesn't go into the deeper long term
MEMBORI just sort of stays and like the other part
(28:27):
of the brand, I'm Avigdala. Yeah. Yeah, the fight flight
or freeze part of the bran, the idea of like
hidings that was so important, It is so important to
my life as an addict. I was one of those
acts that, like, really I thought the best thing, the
most clever thing, was like to be fucked up and
I don't know if you could swear on this and
(28:49):
to yet to have no one know, you know, you
sort of put on dark glasses. You just sort of
go and you're like no one knows you are, and
that's like you're so you have two lives. It's like
a very dual existence. You know though, when I quit,
when I got sober and quit, pretty much everyone I
knew said, oh, we knew you were sucked up all
the time. You know, I wasn't really fooling anyone. There
was so much I think from my childhood that was
(29:11):
like hidden, like where my mother came from, what her
childhood was, like what she was holding inside with the
you know, with her relationship, her grip on life when
she started dating the gangster and what she was going on.
I mean, I knew, you know, gangsters only do a
few things. I mean, I guess there was drugs, because
you know, either it's guns, drugs, or prostitutes. I guess,
(29:32):
so they have a limited talent of things they do,
so I guess drugs. We didn't talk about it. We
didn't like it. Seemed like you had to keep things
sort of in this very sort of the asthma where
you could deny things and you could sort of have
other lives that's sort of happening outside of it. So
that's what I grew up with. I really grew up
with that. That's what slowly, very very slowly, and then
(29:55):
I can return to that too. I can return to
that double life very easily if I'm not vigilant, I
can sort of that can seem like the best place
to be still, you know, maybe not today. I think
this book was part of me trying to drag that
into the light too, and trying to say, like, yeah,
there's this part of me that like really is comfortable
with just closing a hotel room door and you know,
(30:16):
being alone in there, or being with a lover that
I probably shouldn't be with that feels to me like
familiar in this way, that seems to me like the
real definition of love. Maybe, well yeah, and it's like home,
It's like what that's all we know. All we know
is what we got way back then. That's a good,
that's a good that could that could be ship bumpers.
(30:38):
All we know is what we've got. So you're a
writer and you're a teacher, you have this full of
professional life, you're sober, You fall in love with the
woman who becomes your wife. You have a daughter, and
when your daughters too, you begin an affair that asked
(31:01):
for a whole bunch of years. Yeah, off and on
for five years. Yeah. Yeah. When my daughter turned too,
I began this affair, and you know, part of it
it had to do with the person I had the
affair with. It was a lovely person who is a
lovely person, but also probably a person who's comfortable with
having a double life, at least was at that point.
(31:24):
It happened also with a traumatic moment in my life.
It was right at the moment when they began filming
my first book that began making into a film, and
I was on set every day and to day that
um and I knew this was kind of part of
you know, writing the scripts and there's a day where
Juliette Moore, who plays my mother, and it would re
(31:44):
enact my mother's suicide and being a set that day,
like it's not like again, it's like almost like going
and tracking down your mother's explore friends and asking him questions,
which it's it's a strange thing to be and that
even the director was like, you don't have to be
here today, But I again, I was like, well where
else would I be? Like it? I'll always wonder what
this was if I don't stay here. And so I
stayed through that, but I think it did some restimulated
(32:08):
or reactivated that trauma in the and one of the
ways this woman we have been friends for a while,
you know, for a year or so, and we became
lovers like right around then, and then it was off
and on for the next several years taxt to five years.
I mean, it makes so much emotional sense to me
(32:28):
that being on the set watching that re enactment and
somehow needing to like where else would you be as
you said, what is the nature of that trigger? Like
what would you call it? Is it like a funking
I'm going to do what I want? Is itself desse
itself destruction? Is it I've been through so much? This
(32:52):
is you know, because in a way, like when you're
describing the re enactment, it's a little bit like you know,
when you're outter turned seven having the thought, wait a minute,
that was really really not a good story. That was
not okay. You know. It's like I mean, and obviously
your mother suicide wasn't okay, But somehow it's now being
(33:15):
literally played out by an Academy Award winning actress, like
in front of your eyes. I just wonder what you
would say about like what that was that then triggered
the beginning of this long affair. It's really hard to
categorize because it's you know, like most of my life.
(33:36):
You know, I would say it is mundane in a way,
or at least comprehensible. Like you know, everyone struggles with
trying to figure out who your parents are, and like
people get lost at the parish points in their lives,
and you know, my parents got lost at various points
and their consequences were maybe more intense than some other people.
But it's it's within the realm of comprehension. But you know,
(33:57):
somehow being on the set, well you're seeing this amazing
actor saying lines that you've actually helped a craft that
are based on things that your mother said. There was
no precedent for it. There's not nothing I could sort
of look back on and say like, oh, yeah, this
is I know what to do with this, because I
really didn't. It was really like sort of like you're
(34:18):
in like a very strange dream that just doesn't end,
because then you know, it really doesn't end because then
for the next year you're editing that scene. You know,
you're in the editing room with the with the director
in the editor, you're working on the scene. So you're
seeing it over and or then you go into the
premiere and you're seeing it again, and then you're it
keeps rising up in a way that like memory does too,
but memory sort of changes, you know, memories more like
(34:42):
a play where every performance is a little bit different,
whereas this is like your I mean, it's different because
you bring something different to it every time, but you're
really seeing that that moment and then remembering that moment,
you know. But it occurs to me this was utterly
surreal and singular experience, and it wasn't like you could
call one of your friends and been like, you know, so,
(35:03):
so when when you've had that situation, how did you feel?
You're so solitary within that and it's also playing out
over and over and over again. I haven't thought about that,
but that, you know, that reminds me of another line
of vessel Vandercolks, where he he says, um, it's the
nature of trauma that it doesn't allow a story to
(35:23):
be told. It doesn't allow us to hold onto stories.
So again and again, it's why we repeat so much.
It's why we go back to either the cover story
or the real story, and as a way of I'm
going to try to tell the story again so that
I can hold onto it because it keeps on slipping
through our fingers. But there you are, and you're actually
(35:44):
seeing the same scene played over and over and over again,
honed and perfected. Yeah, and I'm not even sure if like,
you know, I wouldn't want to argue with Vessel Vandercole,
because you know, we created a story with the film.
I mean, there's a wrote a book, so those are
they have the beginning, middle, and end. But you know,
the moment of trauma, I think, is what really gets
(36:06):
sort of you know, you snap awake at even though
it's embedded in a story, the moment of trauma sort
of always sort of like brings you back to like
that very moment, whatever it was was lost. So this
relationship plays out over off and on over a period
of five years, in trips and travel and motels and
(36:30):
talking on the phone while your daughter is like, you know,
swinging nearby on a playground and in Texas and you
know down where where I teach. And after five years,
you go to therapy, back to therapy, back to therapy, right, different,
different therapists, different and this therapist tells you that you
have the ethics of a drowning man. Yeah, I mean,
(36:54):
you don't go near a drowning man, right, If you
try to save a drowning man will probably are you under.
He's just trying to stay alive. So take us to
the moment where your wife asks you if you're having
an affair, and she's asked you before and you've said no,
but this time you say yes, after these five years,
(37:16):
and what is that moment? Yeah, the moment I revealed
to my wife that I was having an affair was
right around Christmas, which my mother kind of suicide right
around Christmas, and so it's always it's a historically a
difficult time in a year from me. But that fall
I had, I started to go through the sense that
(37:37):
I talked about before about realizing that it was her
reckless thing my mother did sitting in the house on
fire with us inside, maybe even worse than reckless. And
that's how ar wrestled with that in the book, like
what was going on in her head. You can also
have many You can have some very dark thoughts in
your head, and you can have some little less thought
like maybe maybe will all be saved, or maybe some
people will die. So that was hit me and it
(38:00):
was feeling like, um, you know, I'd call it some
sort of a breakdown, a psychic breakdown, and I've been
going through the fall, and my wife knew that, and
as she knew that, it was about partially about the revelation,
my own interim revelations about my mother and the fire,
but it was also like, you know, I was also
considering leaving the family too. I was considering on a
metaphoric level, burning down the house that I had created,
(38:24):
the home I created with my family. It wasn't making sense,
Like what I was considering doing didn't really make sense
in a way in a larger sense, like is that
really what I wanted? Or set doors? I just trying
to go? It was I trying to run away? Was
I trying to hide more? Was I trying to get
away from the pain. So therapy really helped me. I
got into the therapist and he sort of recognized, you know,
(38:45):
what I was going through and told me that I
had the ethics of a drowning man with thout are
struggling with and yeah, he's he's a he's a young
Gian therapist, which was really helpful. Also, because he would
really would really go into like dreams and into the
subconscious until get to see these things pull pull it out.
So that was that was it. So I came clean
and then you know, likely getting sober. You know, takes
(39:07):
a little while for it to stick. And h here
we are, like five hour, six years later. Towards the
end of your book, there's a really moving passage where
you essentially address it to your daughter. It's really arresting
and interesting moment because you know, those of us who
have children who right have some tucked away, very far
(39:27):
tucked away awareness that our children are probably going to
read these words someday, you know, and we can't think
about it while we're writing or it would completely stop us.
Yet it's there, and I mean I actually think of
it in my own life as a hedge against secrecy.
(39:49):
Secrecy when you are a writer who is a parent
is actually really not so possible ultimately, And the way
I think of it in my own life, it really
keeps be honest. I mean, I if my son wants
to he can go read you know, some really difficult
stuff about you know, what his mother was like as
(40:09):
a very young woman his age. So you address your
daughter a future version of her reading this someday. And also,
I was struck by you had made a decision, at
least to this point, to not tell her how your
mother had died. You told her that she had a
(40:29):
bad heart. And then your daughter sees the title of
a poem of yours, and she learns how your mother
died by seeing the title of one of your poems,
which is on the anniversary of my mother's suicide. My
daughter and I take the A train to the Museum
of Natural History. Yeah, and that was, like, you know,
in the writing of the book, that's what happens when
(40:51):
it takes five years throughout a book. In the beginning,
she didn't know, and at this point she doesn't know
until she listens to this podcast that but my mother,
her grandmother had said fire to our house. She knows
about the fire, but she doesn't know about that. It
felt like too much. She knew about my father being homeless, homeless, alcoholic,
mostly because she saw, you know, we live in New York,
(41:14):
we travel and we see homeless people, and it's just
she she got to meet my father also before he died,
when she was very young. It just seemed important for
a note to know that's like to give her empathy, like,
this is not far from our lives. These people are not.
Each one is related to someone that they have, you know,
they have children that have parents to have you know,
they connected to not just these these satellites floating drifting
(41:35):
in space. It seemed important for her to know that.
But somehow the idea of my grandmother or her grandmother
make suicide it felt like too much for her at
the age. And then she she sorry, I was I
forget I think I had a I guess I was
at a piece of paper and she just said it.
She doesn't always read my poems, but I was just
sitting I think it's just sitting at the top and
she read it. I actually burst into tears. So I
(41:58):
didn't I didn't want to find out like that. But
it was really good though, like she just really sort
of got it. And I have this sense that our
children sort of know everything about us anyway, like there's
really nothing that they don't know. Is I don't think
there's anything that spoken that she'd be like, Oh, that's
that's shocking. I mean, you know the problem because I've
been working on not being so you know, having a
(42:18):
double life, and so she gets to see moments of
struggle and working things out. And I think that's important.
I think that's important for Case to see that one
can struggle, and one can you know, suffer, and yet
can come out of it and the next day or
even the next minute, can be laughing about something. Here's
(42:41):
Nick reading one last passage from his extraordinary book, one
which his daughter may hold in her hands one day
and not have to wonder who her father really is.
And that is what I meant when I said at
the start that this story is tough and ultimately beautiful. Mhm.
(43:03):
A thousand and one times I've told this story why
because it happened, because I escaped, as it involves fire
and firemen and sirens. Sometimes still, this story starts with
just me, barefoot in the next door neighbor's yard, looking
back at the house we've just tumbled out of. All
(43:23):
I can do now is watch as it burns. Phantasmagoria
they need to freeze makes sense of the story of
being six and running through a burning house. I need
to contain it like a firefly in a jar. And
I don't contain it. I don't know if I can
move away from it. And if I can't move away
from it, I don't know if I'll ever believe that
(43:45):
it made it out of in one piece. If here
I am, I stand before you, intact whole, holy, everything
that lives is holy. Family Secrets is an I Heeart
(44:12):
Media production. Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer and Bethan
Mcaluso is the executive producer. We'd also like to give
a special thanks to Tyler Klang and Tristan McNeil. If
you have a family secret you'd like to share, leave
us a voicemail and your story could appear on an
upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight secret zero.
(44:35):
That's secret and then the number zero. You can also
find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder and Facebook at
facebook dot com slash Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at
FAMI Secrets Pod, m HMM. For more podcasts for My
(45:08):
Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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