May 21, 2020 • 35 mins
On this special live episode of Family Secrets, recorded in Philadelphia in January, author and podcast host Gretchen Rubin interviews Dani about uncovering the family secret that became the subject of her bestselling memoir Inheritance: that her beloved father was not related to her by blood. Gretchen and Dani discuss the aftermath of that discovery — including what it was like to forge a connection with her biological dad — plus the ethics of anonymous sperm donation, and what the rise of DNA testing means for those guarantees of anonymity.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio High
Family Secrets listeners. It's Danny here to share another incredible
conversation with you, the second in our series of live episodes.
(00:20):
Recorded in January. During my paperback tour, I sat down
with author and podcast host Gretchen Reuben, who interviewed me
about my own family secret. We also talked about the
still almost totally unregulated world of sperm and egg donation
and why the era of recreational DNA tests could mean
(00:41):
the end of secrets for anyone who wondering where they
really come from. Stay tuned for the second half of
my conversation with Gretchen. We opened the discussion up to
our audience, who had incredibly moving stories of their own
to share. That's out tomorrow. My first question, Danny, is
(01:10):
I mean, you're a writer, You're having this intense experience.
Did you know from the beginning that you would write
about it? I really did, I really did. I It
wasn't knowledge like I thought, Oh goody, my next book.
It was my life has turned upside down. This is
great copy, right, That's what Nora says. And I even
(01:34):
had writer friends saying, like, boy, this is going to
be an amazing book, and I was almost insulted initially,
like this doesn't feel like a book. This is my
life that's been so upended. But as a writer, I
have always um written in order to understand what I feel,
what I know, what I think, what I the world
(01:56):
around me. It's how I it's literally how I how
I process. And so I began writing very quickly, even
just scribbling on index cards, because I wanted to remember
what it was that I was feeling, because my um,
my emotional life was moving sort of so rapidly. Um,
(02:16):
I don't know that we can remember what shock feels like,
you know, months later, that kind of thing. But there
also was a ticking clock because I was aware that
anything that I might learn about the truth of my identity,
about what my parents had known or not known, about
what the world of medicine was like at the time
(02:39):
of my conception, literally the story of my life and
how I came to be. Anyone who still knew anything
about that was going to be elderly. And so my
my husband and I like, forgive me for this. My
my husband I had a running joke because I'm I'm
a writer. I don't like picking up the phone and
calling people who don't want to hear from me. Um.
(02:59):
I would or make a good investigative journalist that way.
And if you're reaching out to people in their nineties
that they probably don't have email, which was always like
the writer's first refugees, I can just send an email.
It's uh, the easier way to go about it. So
I would be in the position of having to pick
up the phone and call people and I was dragging
my feet, and my husband Michael would say, he may
(03:19):
be dead by Friday. Yeah, so that that that guy
made that that definitely got me going yes. Um. And
one of the things that was interesting was as you
approached your biological father and he and his family became
sort of comfortable with connecting with you, how did they
(03:42):
respond to the book And also sort of the two
stages of the book, because it's one thing to be like, hey,
there's gonna be this book, and then it's like, hey,
this book is actually like a huge runaway bestseller, and
now I have a podcast and maybe there's gonna be
a TV show and I'm giving lectures all around the country.
I mean, it's one he may not have, they may
not have conceived of what the book might become. So
(04:04):
how did they how they grappled with that? Well, to
begin with, I was transparent with them from the time
that we were conversing with each other that that I
would be writing about it. I mean, all they would
need to do is that's a good example, like do
the right thing right away, because if you had just
(04:24):
sprung a book on them, slid that by. Yeah. And
also I think energetically it wouldn't have it would have
polluted the air between us because I would have really
been secretly taking notes. I was never doing that. I
was and anyone who knew anything about my history as
a writer that I've always written about family secrets, I've
always written about identity. These have been my subjects. And
(04:47):
then it turns out that I was the family secret
and that my identity has been upended. Of course I'm
going to write about it. So I was transparent about
it from the beginning. Um, what I did when I
finished the book and it was really done and ready
to be turned into my publisher is I sent it
to them. I sent it to my biological though. Note
(05:09):
that's pretty unusual usually with memoirs there they really don't
do that. It's unusual to allow someone the opportunity to
weigh it. Well, it's a little dangerous because it's like
giving someone wet clay. I'm like, here, you can shape
this now. It can feel like, um, it's giving permission
to really kind of make changes. What I was interested
(05:33):
in mostly was that he felt that his privacy was protected. UM.
I had taken great pains to protect his privacy. It
was very important to me to do that. UM. But
I wanted him to feel that his privacy was protected.
I wanted to make sure that there was nothing I
had missed. Uh. I guess I wanted his blessing too.
I wanted him to like it. I wanted him to
(05:53):
feel that it accurately reflected what it happened between us.
But mostly it was that I wanted his privacy to
be protected. And so the second part of this, which
is that UM, the book came out and did strike
a chord and did start to be a book that
(06:15):
you would know about, you know that you couldn't really
avoid knowing about. I was on a lot of TV shows,
and there were a lot of pieces written, and there
was a big piece in Time magazine right before the
book came out, So the question of like, how did
that feel too, Um, people who were in the book,
even with their identities protected, but they were in the book.
(06:39):
They've been wonderful and I think actually proud, I would say,
and UM in a certain way, very interested in following along.
So that's another way in which this has been a
kind of remarkable. Um. I you know, one of the
things that I've said often since the book came out,
and I've met so many people who are having these
(07:03):
discoveries of various kinds because of easy, accessible DNA testing
and the impact that it's having on our society and
on so many families. My story is a good one.
Not all of the stories are easy. A lot of
them are quite painful. There's pain in all of these
(07:23):
stories of discovery. I mean, it was a very very
hard thing for me to metabolize that my dad, who
raised me and who I adored and who loved me
into being and is a huge part of why I
am the person that I am, UM, that he wasn't
my biological father, and that I had never known it.
(07:44):
That was really hard. But then there have been so
many gifts in the wake of this discovery, and one
of them really is that my biological father and his
family have been as kind and as open as they
have been. Well, Um, I have a podcast called Happier
with Grudge and Ruben and Elizabeth at My Cost and
I interviewed you for our book book club, and one
(08:08):
of our listeners asked a question that I thought was
really interesting, which was, do you think that your biological
father and his family would have been as willing to
meet with you if they couldn't have seen that you
were so accomplished, Like they could just look you up
and see like And then I remember in your first
letter to him, you say I'm a wife, I'm a mother,
(08:29):
I'm a writer. You know you sort of say I'm
a ordinary, stable person with a good life, a rich life.
But he could also look that up and see that
you were very accomplished. Do you think if you hadn't
been so google able they might not have been willing
to open themselves up to you. One of the things
that I'm hearing a lot um as I've been traveling
(08:51):
for the last year since Inheritance came out, UM, is
that whenever there is a situation like this in a
family of any kind of someone sending an email or
calling or writing a letter saying I'm confused. I mean,
but I have this information. I think we're related. I
(09:13):
think i'm your biological daughter, or I think i'm your
half sibling, or you know, I got these results from
my DNA test and they point to some kind of
genetic connection. The very first response that across the board
every family that I have encountered UM has is feeling threatened,
(09:34):
every single one. And I think it's hardwired into us.
It's a primal reaction. It's a primitive reaction. It's like,
you know, we're sitting here in a synagogue. It's like
it's the outsider, you know, it's it's the it's the
it's the outlier. It's the stranger in our midst that
kind of feeling. But it's more than a stranger. It's
(09:55):
somebody who might have a claim, and that's even more
threatening in a way. And and the threat usually UM
goes straight to financial. What do you want from me?
You want my money? Um, even if it's you know,
I know a story where the person who has made
the discovery was a extremely wealthy person, uh, and the
(10:19):
the discovered biological family was not. But there's still that
feeling of what do you want from me? I, um,
I have nothing for you, and the times that families
are able to get past that. I mean, it's just
my I mean my biological family. The same thing that
(10:39):
was the first response was what do you want? No, No,
I I donated anonymously. I signed a contract. I was
guaranteed an anonymity. You know you're you're you're intruding into
my life. Yes, I was google able. I also when
I initially wrote to him, I was very conscious of
wanting him to understand that I was a human being,
(11:02):
you know, a wife, a mother, living in Connecticut. You
know that I was um that I came in peace.
But at the same time, on my website, the very
first thing you would have seen at that time on
the home page of my website would have been a
picture of me with Oprah with her arm around me,
because I had recently been on super Soon Sunday. Now,
(11:25):
that is both good news and bad news. And I
really think, as someone very concerned about his privacy, that
the idea that Oprah could come bring out spring out
from the bushes with a microphone episodes. So I do think,
and and and also he started, I think digging into
my history a little bit as a writer and seeing
(11:47):
that I've written about family all my life will be
back in a moment with more family secrets. So talk
for a moment about what this was. You write about
this so beautifully in the book, and it's it's the moment.
It's this tremendously thrilling, terrifying moment when you and your husband,
(12:11):
and your husband's like, here we go, here we go,
and you're opening up the page and there's a little
video of him and you see that it's your father
and it's your features, and your husband says, oh my goodness.
He even runs a question an answer session the way
you do, and you recognize yourself in his gestures. I mean,
talk about what that was like after all this time
(12:32):
of feeling the sort of sense of not quite fitting
in and now suddenly seeing your face in someone else's face.
I think it will stand forever as the most surreal
moment of my life because it wasn't so much looking
at someone who looked like me and gestured like me.
(12:52):
It was also realizing that I hadn't had that familiarity before.
And you know, when we grow up in our biological
family and we know it's our biological family. There's that
thing that we do just as human beings that's sort
of like, oh, he walks like Uncle Mo. You know,
oh he has Grammy's nose, or oh, you know, we
(13:15):
don't even think it. It's just when we know that
we're part of a biological family, that is part that
familiarity is part of being part of a biological family.
If we are adopted, and we've always known that we
were adopted, and it's been woven into our identity from
the time that we're very small, then we know why
(13:36):
we don't look like our biological family or why there
is this sense of unfamiliarity. In an adoption literature, there's
a beautiful phrase called um genealogical bewilderment. We know why
there is this geneological bewilderment. But if our identity has
(13:57):
actually not been told to us, as you know, our
identities are formed by the stories were told from the
time were very small, and it's a story that we're
told is this is your biological family. But in my case,
on my father's side, it was not. I did not
have that familiarity. I did not have that recognition. In fact,
(14:20):
I looked completely unlike a Shapiro and and that was
a big part of the story of my life. People
constantly telling me that I didn't look Jewish, that I
didn't look like my father's family. Um. I was constantly
mistaken for, you know, just being not not not being Jewish.
(14:43):
And meanwhile, and I would come back with raised kosher
you know, when to achieve us, you know, like, don't
talk to me about not being Jewish. Um. But it
was the story of my life. So when I saw
my biological fathers phase for the first time and was
lecturing for those of you who haven't read the book yet,
he was standing by, you know, behind a lectern, delivering
(15:06):
a lecture on medical ethics, and you can't make it up.
You can't know. I couldn't. I changed identifying details. But
that wasn't one of them. That would be cheating, that
wouldn't have been fair. Um, But there was. I saw
his gestures, and when I saw his gestures, I recognized
my gestures. And that was like a heart stopping moment
(15:29):
because it was seeing the familiar in a stranger. He's
a stranger. But it was also like I wasn't looking
at a video of a fireman. You know, I wasn't
looking at a video of something I've never done. I
stand behind podiums all the time, and I deliver lectures
all the time, and I run q and as all
the time. So he was doing something that was very
(15:50):
familiar to me. So I could see I could see
myself in that way. Well, in speaking of medical ethics,
it's interesting since the book has come out, and since
it's it's made such an pression on people, you have
become sort of the voice of kind of all the
people who are experiencing what we might call like technology
(16:11):
enabled UM secret discovery, and you are starting to talk
to people about medical ethics and bio ethics. How has
that been for you to kind of be pulled into
this expertise UM? And and also in kind of a
larger way, you are also sort of a a person
where many people who have secrets like this want to
(16:33):
confide the secret in you. And now with your your
podcast Family Secrets, that's given you a way to sort
of give boys to that. UM. How has it been
for you to sort of be thrust into these roles
by what happened to you personally? You know, it's interesting.
The other night I was in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and
(16:53):
I was having UM an onstage conversation with Dr Bessel
Andrew Kolke, who is the leading expert on t mamma
UM in the world. And one of the things that
Dr Vander Kolch writes about in his book, which is
called The Body Keeps the Score, he writes about the
necessity when you've experienced a trauma of some sort one
(17:16):
of the ways that people recover best is if they're
able to take action, um, if they're not in some
way trapped, either physically or emotionally. And I was reading
Dr Bandicooke's book, and I was thinking about what I
was able to do in the wake of my discovery.
(17:38):
I was able to do something with it. First, by
I mean, my journey and my book are the same
in many ways. I was trying to understand what it
meant that my dad wasn't my biological father. Both of
my parents were dead. I was trying to piece together
(18:00):
as best as I could what they had known and
whether they had consciously kept this from me. I was,
you know, there were so many mysteries that I was
kind of trying to untangle and I as a writer,
that's what I do, that's that's my toolbox. And then
the book came out, and from the very first event,
it was clear that people were coming who had their
(18:22):
own stories and had their own discoveries, and and they
were from all different kinds of discoveries and different roles
in the discovery process. There were older men who were
coming to my events, and I would realize that they
had been sperm donors and they were trying to figure
out how to deal with the fact that they might
(18:44):
be contacted. I would see couples sitting together and looking
kind of stricken, and I would realize, Oh, you have
donor conceived children who don't know, and you're trying to
figure out what to do about that. And then I
would see many people who were had recently discovered that
they were adopted, or recently discovered half siblings, or recently
(19:06):
discovered fathers who discovered children that they had never known about,
um adopted children, discovering birth parents and vice versa. All
of this was happening. And I think that for me
becoming having this voice and ending up having you know,
a megaphone in a way, has been the action that
(19:28):
has allowed me to process, metabolize, and heal from what
was really a very shocking UM discovery. And in terms
of the bioethics of this, I mean, we're in this
moment where can I ask a question, just show of hands,
how many people have bought a DNA test in this room? Yeah?
(19:55):
A lot of you. Yeah. So the number are I
think last year was twelve million kits were sold this year.
I think it was a little bit. They were expecting
it to be higher, and I don't think it was
at least I read an article about twenty three and
me laying off some of its staff because they were
(20:19):
expecting a bigger explosion. But I can tell you that
of those many millions of people who are gifting families,
gifting each other at Hanukkah and Christmas. You know that's
what my mother in law gave it to me for Christmas. UM.
I saw on Twitter recently somebody posted something like, you know,
all all those people who who got their DNA test
(20:41):
for the holidays, Easter is gonna suck. But they're they're
hundreds of thousands of people who are making versions of
this discovery and the bioethics community, I mean I've spoken
at Harvard and at Stanford, i was us at Johns Hopkins.
I'm going to pen speaking with the head of the
(21:04):
program at Colombia. It is one of the I mean,
we have many ethical issues of our time, but it's
one of the big ones, because what does it mean
that the science has changed everything and that men and
women to now because of egg donation who were promised
anonymity no longer have it. Secrets are are no longer possible.
(21:27):
There's a huge stream of people who are making really
difficult identity shifting discoveries and the question of what is
our moral responsibility to each other. I think one of
the reasons why Inheritance has resonated so much is because
I have become an expert on this from the inside,
from the inside, right, it's it's not a research project,
(21:50):
it's um And you know. One of the things that
happens that I feel that I can give voice to is,
for example, in the adoption community. I think a lot
of people thought who hadn't read the book yet, I
thought that I was saying that nature is all important, right,
it mattered to me to meet my biological father. I
actually had people saying to me like, why would that matter?
(22:12):
And it was usually people who grew up with their
biological parents, you know, who just couldn't kind of imagine
themselves in my shoes. But one of the things that
I feel like I'm here to say is my mother,
who was my biological mother. I actually double checked. Um.
She and I weren't close. I never felt connected to her.
(22:35):
We were just kind of oil and water. She was
my biological mother. My dad, who it turns out is
not my biological father, is like a soul connection to me. Um.
He died when I was twenty three years old, and
there hasn't been a day that's gone by that I
haven't spoken to him and thought about him. My books
(22:57):
have been for him in a certain way. I've written
about him, I've wrestled with him. I've tried to understand him.
He's on the cover of your book now. He is
now on the paperback that you all have that is
a picture of myself as UM a little girl with
my dad, and you can see the connection between us.
I love that picture so much because there's so much
unfettered joy. It matters not at all that he's not
(23:21):
my biological father. That it didn't matter. Then I'm sure
that didn't matter to him. I didn't know. The problem
is not knowing um And that's what I really kind
of feel like I am trying to give voice to
because there was a huge amount of secrecy in those days.
It's just it's what was counseled, it was what was believed.
(23:41):
Everyone felt that they were doing the right thing. And
and I've come to understand one of the gifts of
this process for me is there's this great term um
in in ethics, which is retrospective moral judgment. We can't
judge the past by the standards of the present. And
(24:02):
when I first found this out, I really thought, how
could they? How could they? How could they? Everyone has
a right to know their own identity as much as possible.
How could they have kept this? For me? My journey
was to get to a place of imagining my parents
as people, as people of their time, as people who
existed before me. And that's a great gift. We don't
(24:24):
often get to do that about our parents. We don't
think of our parents as people separate from us. And
I had to think of them as this traumatized, deeply
ashamed couple who were childless in the late nineteen fifties
and early nineteen sixties, male infertility was so shameful it
didn't exist. You couldn't get a doctor to diagnose it.
(24:48):
And that was the beautiful scene with the rabbi when
you go to find out sort of describe that where
he says, no, I would have thought that if my
wife had wanted a baby, you know, all honor to
him for having been willing to do this. That was
such a beautiful moment. Explained that a little bit. I'm
so glad you brought that up. Yeah. So one of
the elderly people that I reached out to early on
(25:10):
was Rabbi Haskel Lukstein, who is one of these sort
of venerable Orthodox rabbis in Manhattan, UM. His father founded
the Roma's School UM. His father and my grandfather knew
each other. Haskel and my father, he was a bit
younger than my father, but they knew each other and
they were in the same social circles. And I went
(25:31):
to see him in part because I thought, maybe my
my father was an Orthodox Jew, maybe he would have gone,
maybe he would have sought rabbinic advice, and if he had,
maybe he would have gone to Rabbi Lukstein. I was
looking for anyone who could tell me. Yes, I spoke
to your father about this or um. But instead what
(25:52):
happened was I explained what had happened. I explained my discovery.
I explained what I knew um, and Rabbi Lupstein, once
he understood it, his immediate response was colaka, voted to
your father all the honor. If God forbidd it had
(26:12):
been my wife and I who had struggled with this,
I would have done the same thing. And what was
so interesting to me over the course of my journey
was expected. It was not because I had read the Hallaja.
I had read the body of Jewish law around this stuff,
and it was it called um sperm donation an abomination,
(26:35):
which was a terrible thing to read, because then I
felt like, well, am i am? I am an abomination?
Did my father think of me as an abomination? It
was awful. And both Rabbi Lukstein and another elderly person
who I visited and sought out was my my aunt Shirley,
my father's younger sister, who is devout. Both of them
(26:59):
were so completely willing to throw the rule book out.
You know it was so interesting to me, Like I thought, like, yes,
there's the law, and then there's the humanity, Like, yes,
there's the law, and then there's the what's right? And
I saw that with the two most um religious people
whose insights I saw it. We'll be back in a
(27:19):
moment now. One of the things you make a point
in the book that you felt that when you were
approaching your biological father, you were you were fortunate that
you were the first, because in many cases, when these
secrets come out, they come out in large groups, and
(27:39):
that that makes the bioethics of it and the human
problem of it more complex. Um. I'm sure people are curious,
have you found any other have siblings and um like?
And how do we think about these people who find
each other? Some grow up knowing each other, but then
(28:01):
some are find out about it much later. Yea, So
there's a number of different layers to that. UM. No,
I have not um discovered any other biological half siblings,
which makes me fairly unusual. Most people who are making
these discoveries are discovering significant numbers of half siblings because
(28:26):
often donors donated over a long period of time, or
in more recent years, because of frozen sperm. There could
be half siblings that are generations apart, right, And I
have regularly encountered people who make a discovery like this
and then discover that they have half siblings, twenty three
(28:50):
half siblings, some cases half siblings numbering in the three digits.
My sister's writing partners a single mother by choice, and
there are twenty three known done our siblings and that
in their group. And it's getting you know. But one
of the things that you're bringing up that is interesting
and sort of different from sort of the older generations
(29:11):
where this is these discoveries are happening, is that today,
for the most part, people understand that it's important for
their children to know, you know, to be told the
truth from an early age. There are tools. There are
books that can be read to children, you know, that
have illustrations of trees and seeds and leaves and you know,
(29:35):
just ways for children to process this information. And there's
also much more transparency lead I think, initially by the
same sex community, where there's got to be somebody else, right,
so they've got to tell. And then there are communities
of these kids who grow up who are half siblings
(29:55):
with biologically with each other, who get to know each other,
and it's all this sense of normalcy around it. It's
it's a different way of making family and of of
processing this. And that's a beautiful thing because it's because
it's out in the open and there's no shame involved.
As soon as there is this secrecy, this non disclosure,
(30:19):
their shame underneath it, their shame because it means that
why does it need to be kept a secret? Now
in my generation and generations older than me and a
little bit younger than me, it was I mean, I'm
constantly people in their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties and older
are making these discoveries and then discovering half siblings. What
(30:44):
does it mean to be related when there are more
of you than there ever would be in a traditional family?
The last question I want to ask you, and then
we're going to open it up for questions. Just um
coming up of that. So you have your podcast Family Secrets,
which if you haven't listened to you should just run
and listen. It's so interesting. You highlight, you do long,
(31:07):
hot interviews with people who have a secret. And then
you've also been doing this fascinating thing where people has
mentioned in the introduction, people can call in and just
sort of like tell their secret. So, given all of
the thinking that you've done about this kind of what's
your bottom line about how to think about a secret? Like,
(31:30):
how do you know when it's your secret to keep,
when it's not your secret to keep? How do you
how do you think about secrets? It's so individual? Um,
there are you know? It's interesting. I actually UM did
a bonus episode with the therapist and writer Laurie gottlieb
Um between my first season and second season, and I
(31:52):
asked Lorie if she thinks it's ever okay to keep
a secret? And her response I was asking her as
a therapist, and her sponse was really no, never. Secrets
are simply just toxic. UM. I think it was Carl
Young who referred to them as UM toxic poison, which
is kind of redundant, isn't it. Uh, it's a curative UM.
(32:15):
I think when a secret is revealed is as important
as what the secret is or that it's revealed. I
think there are times in UM someone's life where they're
too vulnerable to handle the information. UM. I feel very
fortunate that when I discovered this secret, I was very
(32:38):
much a mature adult. I had a family, I had stability,
I had my life's work. Um, I was in a
place where I was as grounded as I had ever been.
If I had made that discovery when I was in
my twenties and I was not in that kind of
shape at all, I don't know what it would have
done to me. So I think we have to take
(32:58):
care with the secrets that we hold if we're holding them.
And yet, at the same time, because of the combination
of the Internet and I remember you said that on
your podcast one time in Passing, You're like, well, with
the Internet there there's not going to be any more secrets. Well,
I think we're Yeah, we're heading into an era that
(33:20):
I really do think is the the end of the secret,
because you know, it's it's a misunderstanding that people have
that if if they haven't had their DNA tested, it
means that they couldn't be discoverable. Um in any family.
I mean, I've had people who were donors say to me, well,
I don't want to I'm not going to do my
DNA testing because I don't want to be found. It's like, well,
(33:40):
your nephew could do it. Your first cousin, your second cousin,
even your third cousin could do it and somebody would
be able to figure that out. Your your grandchild could
do it. It's it's the it's the unintended consequence of
this development in science and what's complicated. Um, many things
are complicated about it. But there's secrecy and then there's privacy, right,
(34:03):
and they're very connected and they're not the same thing.
And you know, I think we can agree the privacy
is important and we want to have privacy. UM. And
secrecy I think is toxic. But there's you know, there
are families now in which there are some people keeping
secrets from others because some people want to know and
(34:26):
some people don't want to know. UM. And it's it's
it's very complicated. So I think it's as individual as
um the person and the family that it's happening to.
(34:54):
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 High
Family Secrets listeners. It's Danny here to share another incredible
conversation with you, the second in our series of live episodes.
(00:20):
Recorded in January. During my paperback tour, I sat down
with author and podcast host Gretchen Reuben, who interviewed me
about my own family secret. We also talked about the
still almost totally unregulated world of sperm and egg donation
and why the era of recreational DNA tests could mean
(00:41):
the end of secrets for anyone who wondering where they
really come from. Stay tuned for the second half of
my conversation with Gretchen. We opened the discussion up to
our audience, who had incredibly moving stories of their own
to share. That's out tomorrow. My first question, Danny, is
(01:10):
I mean, you're a writer, You're having this intense experience.
Did you know from the beginning that you would write
about it? I really did, I really did. I It
wasn't knowledge like I thought, Oh goody, my next book.
It was my life has turned upside down. This is
great copy, right, That's what Nora says. And I even
(01:34):
had writer friends saying, like, boy, this is going to
be an amazing book, and I was almost insulted initially,
like this doesn't feel like a book. This is my
life that's been so upended. But as a writer, I
have always um written in order to understand what I feel,
what I know, what I think, what I the world
(01:56):
around me. It's how I it's literally how I how
I process. And so I began writing very quickly, even
just scribbling on index cards, because I wanted to remember
what it was that I was feeling, because my um,
my emotional life was moving sort of so rapidly. Um,
(02:16):
I don't know that we can remember what shock feels like,
you know, months later, that kind of thing. But there
also was a ticking clock because I was aware that
anything that I might learn about the truth of my identity,
about what my parents had known or not known, about
what the world of medicine was like at the time
(02:39):
of my conception, literally the story of my life and
how I came to be. Anyone who still knew anything
about that was going to be elderly. And so my
my husband and I like, forgive me for this. My
my husband I had a running joke because I'm I'm
a writer. I don't like picking up the phone and
calling people who don't want to hear from me. Um.
(02:59):
I would or make a good investigative journalist that way.
And if you're reaching out to people in their nineties
that they probably don't have email, which was always like
the writer's first refugees, I can just send an email.
It's uh, the easier way to go about it. So
I would be in the position of having to pick
up the phone and call people and I was dragging
my feet, and my husband Michael would say, he may
(03:19):
be dead by Friday. Yeah, so that that that guy
made that that definitely got me going yes. Um. And
one of the things that was interesting was as you
approached your biological father and he and his family became
sort of comfortable with connecting with you, how did they
(03:42):
respond to the book And also sort of the two
stages of the book, because it's one thing to be like, hey,
there's gonna be this book, and then it's like, hey,
this book is actually like a huge runaway bestseller, and
now I have a podcast and maybe there's gonna be
a TV show and I'm giving lectures all around the country.
I mean, it's one he may not have, they may
not have conceived of what the book might become. So
(04:04):
how did they how they grappled with that? Well, to
begin with, I was transparent with them from the time
that we were conversing with each other that that I
would be writing about it. I mean, all they would
need to do is that's a good example, like do
the right thing right away, because if you had just
(04:24):
sprung a book on them, slid that by. Yeah. And
also I think energetically it wouldn't have it would have
polluted the air between us because I would have really
been secretly taking notes. I was never doing that. I
was and anyone who knew anything about my history as
a writer that I've always written about family secrets, I've
always written about identity. These have been my subjects. And
(04:47):
then it turns out that I was the family secret
and that my identity has been upended. Of course I'm
going to write about it. So I was transparent about
it from the beginning. Um, what I did when I
finished the book and it was really done and ready
to be turned into my publisher is I sent it
to them. I sent it to my biological though. Note
(05:09):
that's pretty unusual usually with memoirs there they really don't
do that. It's unusual to allow someone the opportunity to
weigh it. Well, it's a little dangerous because it's like
giving someone wet clay. I'm like, here, you can shape
this now. It can feel like, um, it's giving permission
to really kind of make changes. What I was interested
(05:33):
in mostly was that he felt that his privacy was protected. UM.
I had taken great pains to protect his privacy. It
was very important to me to do that. UM. But
I wanted him to feel that his privacy was protected.
I wanted to make sure that there was nothing I
had missed. Uh. I guess I wanted his blessing too.
I wanted him to like it. I wanted him to
(05:53):
feel that it accurately reflected what it happened between us.
But mostly it was that I wanted his privacy to
be protected. And so the second part of this, which
is that UM, the book came out and did strike
a chord and did start to be a book that
(06:15):
you would know about, you know that you couldn't really
avoid knowing about. I was on a lot of TV shows,
and there were a lot of pieces written, and there
was a big piece in Time magazine right before the
book came out, So the question of like, how did
that feel too, Um, people who were in the book,
even with their identities protected, but they were in the book.
(06:39):
They've been wonderful and I think actually proud, I would say,
and UM in a certain way, very interested in following along.
So that's another way in which this has been a
kind of remarkable. Um. I you know, one of the
things that I've said often since the book came out,
and I've met so many people who are having these
(07:03):
discoveries of various kinds because of easy, accessible DNA testing
and the impact that it's having on our society and
on so many families. My story is a good one.
Not all of the stories are easy. A lot of
them are quite painful. There's pain in all of these
(07:23):
stories of discovery. I mean, it was a very very
hard thing for me to metabolize that my dad, who
raised me and who I adored and who loved me
into being and is a huge part of why I
am the person that I am, UM, that he wasn't
my biological father, and that I had never known it.
(07:44):
That was really hard. But then there have been so
many gifts in the wake of this discovery, and one
of them really is that my biological father and his
family have been as kind and as open as they
have been. Well, Um, I have a podcast called Happier
with Grudge and Ruben and Elizabeth at My Cost and
I interviewed you for our book book club, and one
(08:08):
of our listeners asked a question that I thought was
really interesting, which was, do you think that your biological
father and his family would have been as willing to
meet with you if they couldn't have seen that you
were so accomplished, Like they could just look you up
and see like And then I remember in your first
letter to him, you say I'm a wife, I'm a mother,
(08:29):
I'm a writer. You know you sort of say I'm
a ordinary, stable person with a good life, a rich life.
But he could also look that up and see that
you were very accomplished. Do you think if you hadn't
been so google able they might not have been willing
to open themselves up to you. One of the things
that I'm hearing a lot um as I've been traveling
(08:51):
for the last year since Inheritance came out, UM, is
that whenever there is a situation like this in a
family of any kind of someone sending an email or
calling or writing a letter saying I'm confused. I mean,
but I have this information. I think we're related. I
(09:13):
think i'm your biological daughter, or I think i'm your
half sibling, or you know, I got these results from
my DNA test and they point to some kind of
genetic connection. The very first response that across the board
every family that I have encountered UM has is feeling threatened,
(09:34):
every single one. And I think it's hardwired into us.
It's a primal reaction. It's a primitive reaction. It's like,
you know, we're sitting here in a synagogue. It's like
it's the outsider, you know, it's it's the it's the
it's the outlier. It's the stranger in our midst that
kind of feeling. But it's more than a stranger. It's
(09:55):
somebody who might have a claim, and that's even more
threatening in a way. And and the threat usually UM
goes straight to financial. What do you want from me?
You want my money? Um, even if it's you know,
I know a story where the person who has made
the discovery was a extremely wealthy person, uh, and the
(10:19):
the discovered biological family was not. But there's still that
feeling of what do you want from me? I, um,
I have nothing for you, and the times that families
are able to get past that. I mean, it's just
my I mean my biological family. The same thing that
(10:39):
was the first response was what do you want? No, No,
I I donated anonymously. I signed a contract. I was
guaranteed an anonymity. You know you're you're you're intruding into
my life. Yes, I was google able. I also when
I initially wrote to him, I was very conscious of
wanting him to understand that I was a human being,
(11:02):
you know, a wife, a mother, living in Connecticut. You
know that I was um that I came in peace.
But at the same time, on my website, the very
first thing you would have seen at that time on
the home page of my website would have been a
picture of me with Oprah with her arm around me,
because I had recently been on super Soon Sunday. Now,
(11:25):
that is both good news and bad news. And I
really think, as someone very concerned about his privacy, that
the idea that Oprah could come bring out spring out
from the bushes with a microphone episodes. So I do think,
and and and also he started, I think digging into
my history a little bit as a writer and seeing
(11:47):
that I've written about family all my life will be
back in a moment with more family secrets. So talk
for a moment about what this was. You write about
this so beautifully in the book, and it's it's the moment.
It's this tremendously thrilling, terrifying moment when you and your husband,
(12:11):
and your husband's like, here we go, here we go,
and you're opening up the page and there's a little
video of him and you see that it's your father
and it's your features, and your husband says, oh my goodness.
He even runs a question an answer session the way
you do, and you recognize yourself in his gestures. I mean,
talk about what that was like after all this time
(12:32):
of feeling the sort of sense of not quite fitting
in and now suddenly seeing your face in someone else's face.
I think it will stand forever as the most surreal
moment of my life because it wasn't so much looking
at someone who looked like me and gestured like me.
(12:52):
It was also realizing that I hadn't had that familiarity before.
And you know, when we grow up in our biological
family and we know it's our biological family. There's that
thing that we do just as human beings that's sort
of like, oh, he walks like Uncle Mo. You know,
oh he has Grammy's nose, or oh, you know, we
(13:15):
don't even think it. It's just when we know that
we're part of a biological family, that is part that
familiarity is part of being part of a biological family.
If we are adopted, and we've always known that we
were adopted, and it's been woven into our identity from
the time that we're very small, then we know why
(13:36):
we don't look like our biological family or why there
is this sense of unfamiliarity. In an adoption literature, there's
a beautiful phrase called um genealogical bewilderment. We know why
there is this geneological bewilderment. But if our identity has
(13:57):
actually not been told to us, as you know, our
identities are formed by the stories were told from the
time were very small, and it's a story that we're
told is this is your biological family. But in my case,
on my father's side, it was not. I did not
have that familiarity. I did not have that recognition. In fact,
(14:20):
I looked completely unlike a Shapiro and and that was
a big part of the story of my life. People
constantly telling me that I didn't look Jewish, that I
didn't look like my father's family. Um. I was constantly
mistaken for, you know, just being not not not being Jewish.
(14:43):
And meanwhile, and I would come back with raised kosher
you know, when to achieve us, you know, like, don't
talk to me about not being Jewish. Um. But it
was the story of my life. So when I saw
my biological fathers phase for the first time and was
lecturing for those of you who haven't read the book yet,
he was standing by, you know, behind a lectern, delivering
(15:06):
a lecture on medical ethics, and you can't make it up.
You can't know. I couldn't. I changed identifying details. But
that wasn't one of them. That would be cheating, that
wouldn't have been fair. Um, But there was. I saw
his gestures, and when I saw his gestures, I recognized
my gestures. And that was like a heart stopping moment
(15:29):
because it was seeing the familiar in a stranger. He's
a stranger. But it was also like I wasn't looking
at a video of a fireman. You know, I wasn't
looking at a video of something I've never done. I
stand behind podiums all the time, and I deliver lectures
all the time, and I run q and as all
the time. So he was doing something that was very
(15:50):
familiar to me. So I could see I could see
myself in that way. Well, in speaking of medical ethics,
it's interesting since the book has come out, and since
it's it's made such an pression on people, you have
become sort of the voice of kind of all the
people who are experiencing what we might call like technology
(16:11):
enabled UM secret discovery, and you are starting to talk
to people about medical ethics and bio ethics. How has
that been for you to kind of be pulled into
this expertise UM? And and also in kind of a
larger way, you are also sort of a a person
where many people who have secrets like this want to
(16:33):
confide the secret in you. And now with your your
podcast Family Secrets, that's given you a way to sort
of give boys to that. UM. How has it been
for you to sort of be thrust into these roles
by what happened to you personally? You know, it's interesting.
The other night I was in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and
(16:53):
I was having UM an onstage conversation with Dr Bessel
Andrew Kolke, who is the leading expert on t mamma
UM in the world. And one of the things that
Dr Vander Kolch writes about in his book, which is
called The Body Keeps the Score, he writes about the
necessity when you've experienced a trauma of some sort one
(17:16):
of the ways that people recover best is if they're
able to take action, um, if they're not in some
way trapped, either physically or emotionally. And I was reading
Dr Bandicooke's book, and I was thinking about what I
was able to do in the wake of my discovery.
(17:38):
I was able to do something with it. First, by
I mean, my journey and my book are the same
in many ways. I was trying to understand what it
meant that my dad wasn't my biological father. Both of
my parents were dead. I was trying to piece together
(18:00):
as best as I could what they had known and
whether they had consciously kept this from me. I was,
you know, there were so many mysteries that I was
kind of trying to untangle and I as a writer,
that's what I do, that's that's my toolbox. And then
the book came out, and from the very first event,
it was clear that people were coming who had their
(18:22):
own stories and had their own discoveries, and and they
were from all different kinds of discoveries and different roles
in the discovery process. There were older men who were
coming to my events, and I would realize that they
had been sperm donors and they were trying to figure
out how to deal with the fact that they might
(18:44):
be contacted. I would see couples sitting together and looking
kind of stricken, and I would realize, Oh, you have
donor conceived children who don't know, and you're trying to
figure out what to do about that. And then I
would see many people who were had recently discovered that
they were adopted, or recently discovered half siblings, or recently
(19:06):
discovered fathers who discovered children that they had never known about,
um adopted children, discovering birth parents and vice versa. All
of this was happening. And I think that for me
becoming having this voice and ending up having you know,
a megaphone in a way, has been the action that
(19:28):
has allowed me to process, metabolize, and heal from what
was really a very shocking UM discovery. And in terms
of the bioethics of this, I mean, we're in this
moment where can I ask a question, just show of hands,
how many people have bought a DNA test in this room? Yeah?
(19:55):
A lot of you. Yeah. So the number are I
think last year was twelve million kits were sold this year.
I think it was a little bit. They were expecting
it to be higher, and I don't think it was
at least I read an article about twenty three and
me laying off some of its staff because they were
(20:19):
expecting a bigger explosion. But I can tell you that
of those many millions of people who are gifting families,
gifting each other at Hanukkah and Christmas. You know that's
what my mother in law gave it to me for Christmas. UM.
I saw on Twitter recently somebody posted something like, you know,
all all those people who who got their DNA test
(20:41):
for the holidays, Easter is gonna suck. But they're they're
hundreds of thousands of people who are making versions of
this discovery and the bioethics community, I mean I've spoken
at Harvard and at Stanford, i was us at Johns Hopkins.
I'm going to pen speaking with the head of the
(21:04):
program at Colombia. It is one of the I mean,
we have many ethical issues of our time, but it's
one of the big ones, because what does it mean
that the science has changed everything and that men and
women to now because of egg donation who were promised
anonymity no longer have it. Secrets are are no longer possible.
(21:27):
There's a huge stream of people who are making really
difficult identity shifting discoveries and the question of what is
our moral responsibility to each other. I think one of
the reasons why Inheritance has resonated so much is because
I have become an expert on this from the inside,
from the inside, right, it's it's not a research project,
(21:50):
it's um And you know. One of the things that
happens that I feel that I can give voice to is,
for example, in the adoption community. I think a lot
of people thought who hadn't read the book yet, I
thought that I was saying that nature is all important, right,
it mattered to me to meet my biological father. I
actually had people saying to me like, why would that matter?
(22:12):
And it was usually people who grew up with their
biological parents, you know, who just couldn't kind of imagine
themselves in my shoes. But one of the things that
I feel like I'm here to say is my mother,
who was my biological mother. I actually double checked. Um.
She and I weren't close. I never felt connected to her.
(22:35):
We were just kind of oil and water. She was
my biological mother. My dad, who it turns out is
not my biological father, is like a soul connection to me. Um.
He died when I was twenty three years old, and
there hasn't been a day that's gone by that I
haven't spoken to him and thought about him. My books
(22:57):
have been for him in a certain way. I've written
about him, I've wrestled with him. I've tried to understand him.
He's on the cover of your book now. He is
now on the paperback that you all have that is
a picture of myself as UM a little girl with
my dad, and you can see the connection between us.
I love that picture so much because there's so much
unfettered joy. It matters not at all that he's not
(23:21):
my biological father. That it didn't matter. Then I'm sure
that didn't matter to him. I didn't know. The problem
is not knowing um And that's what I really kind
of feel like I am trying to give voice to
because there was a huge amount of secrecy in those days.
It's just it's what was counseled, it was what was believed.
(23:41):
Everyone felt that they were doing the right thing. And
and I've come to understand one of the gifts of
this process for me is there's this great term um
in in ethics, which is retrospective moral judgment. We can't
judge the past by the standards of the present. And
(24:02):
when I first found this out, I really thought, how
could they? How could they? How could they? Everyone has
a right to know their own identity as much as possible.
How could they have kept this? For me? My journey
was to get to a place of imagining my parents
as people, as people of their time, as people who
existed before me. And that's a great gift. We don't
(24:24):
often get to do that about our parents. We don't
think of our parents as people separate from us. And
I had to think of them as this traumatized, deeply
ashamed couple who were childless in the late nineteen fifties
and early nineteen sixties, male infertility was so shameful it
didn't exist. You couldn't get a doctor to diagnose it.
(24:48):
And that was the beautiful scene with the rabbi when
you go to find out sort of describe that where
he says, no, I would have thought that if my
wife had wanted a baby, you know, all honor to
him for having been willing to do this. That was
such a beautiful moment. Explained that a little bit. I'm
so glad you brought that up. Yeah. So one of
the elderly people that I reached out to early on
(25:10):
was Rabbi Haskel Lukstein, who is one of these sort
of venerable Orthodox rabbis in Manhattan, UM. His father founded
the Roma's School UM. His father and my grandfather knew
each other. Haskel and my father, he was a bit
younger than my father, but they knew each other and
they were in the same social circles. And I went
(25:31):
to see him in part because I thought, maybe my
my father was an Orthodox Jew, maybe he would have gone,
maybe he would have sought rabbinic advice, and if he had,
maybe he would have gone to Rabbi Lukstein. I was
looking for anyone who could tell me. Yes, I spoke
to your father about this or um. But instead what
(25:52):
happened was I explained what had happened. I explained my discovery.
I explained what I knew um, and Rabbi Lupstein, once
he understood it, his immediate response was colaka, voted to
your father all the honor. If God forbidd it had
(26:12):
been my wife and I who had struggled with this,
I would have done the same thing. And what was
so interesting to me over the course of my journey
was expected. It was not because I had read the Hallaja.
I had read the body of Jewish law around this stuff,
and it was it called um sperm donation an abomination,
(26:35):
which was a terrible thing to read, because then I
felt like, well, am i am? I am an abomination?
Did my father think of me as an abomination? It
was awful. And both Rabbi Lukstein and another elderly person
who I visited and sought out was my my aunt Shirley,
my father's younger sister, who is devout. Both of them
(26:59):
were so completely willing to throw the rule book out.
You know it was so interesting to me, Like I thought, like, yes,
there's the law, and then there's the humanity, Like, yes,
there's the law, and then there's the what's right? And
I saw that with the two most um religious people
whose insights I saw it. We'll be back in a
(27:19):
moment now. One of the things you make a point
in the book that you felt that when you were
approaching your biological father, you were you were fortunate that
you were the first, because in many cases, when these
secrets come out, they come out in large groups, and
(27:39):
that that makes the bioethics of it and the human
problem of it more complex. Um. I'm sure people are curious,
have you found any other have siblings and um like?
And how do we think about these people who find
each other? Some grow up knowing each other, but then
(28:01):
some are find out about it much later. Yea, So
there's a number of different layers to that. UM. No,
I have not um discovered any other biological half siblings,
which makes me fairly unusual. Most people who are making
these discoveries are discovering significant numbers of half siblings because
(28:26):
often donors donated over a long period of time, or
in more recent years, because of frozen sperm. There could
be half siblings that are generations apart, right, And I
have regularly encountered people who make a discovery like this
and then discover that they have half siblings, twenty three
(28:50):
half siblings, some cases half siblings numbering in the three digits.
My sister's writing partners a single mother by choice, and
there are twenty three known done our siblings and that
in their group. And it's getting you know. But one
of the things that you're bringing up that is interesting
and sort of different from sort of the older generations
(29:11):
where this is these discoveries are happening, is that today,
for the most part, people understand that it's important for
their children to know, you know, to be told the
truth from an early age. There are tools. There are
books that can be read to children, you know, that
have illustrations of trees and seeds and leaves and you know,
(29:35):
just ways for children to process this information. And there's
also much more transparency lead I think, initially by the
same sex community, where there's got to be somebody else, right,
so they've got to tell. And then there are communities
of these kids who grow up who are half siblings
(29:55):
with biologically with each other, who get to know each other,
and it's all this sense of normalcy around it. It's
it's a different way of making family and of of
processing this. And that's a beautiful thing because it's because
it's out in the open and there's no shame involved.
As soon as there is this secrecy, this non disclosure,
(30:19):
their shame underneath it, their shame because it means that
why does it need to be kept a secret? Now
in my generation and generations older than me and a
little bit younger than me, it was I mean, I'm
constantly people in their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties and older
are making these discoveries and then discovering half siblings. What
(30:44):
does it mean to be related when there are more
of you than there ever would be in a traditional family?
The last question I want to ask you, and then
we're going to open it up for questions. Just um
coming up of that. So you have your podcast Family Secrets,
which if you haven't listened to you should just run
and listen. It's so interesting. You highlight, you do long,
(31:07):
hot interviews with people who have a secret. And then
you've also been doing this fascinating thing where people has
mentioned in the introduction, people can call in and just
sort of like tell their secret. So, given all of
the thinking that you've done about this kind of what's
your bottom line about how to think about a secret? Like,
(31:30):
how do you know when it's your secret to keep,
when it's not your secret to keep? How do you
how do you think about secrets? It's so individual? Um,
there are you know? It's interesting. I actually UM did
a bonus episode with the therapist and writer Laurie gottlieb
Um between my first season and second season, and I
(31:52):
asked Lorie if she thinks it's ever okay to keep
a secret? And her response I was asking her as
a therapist, and her sponse was really no, never. Secrets
are simply just toxic. UM. I think it was Carl
Young who referred to them as UM toxic poison, which
is kind of redundant, isn't it. Uh, it's a curative UM.
(32:15):
I think when a secret is revealed is as important
as what the secret is or that it's revealed. I
think there are times in UM someone's life where they're
too vulnerable to handle the information. UM. I feel very
fortunate that when I discovered this secret, I was very
(32:38):
much a mature adult. I had a family, I had stability,
I had my life's work. Um, I was in a
place where I was as grounded as I had ever been.
If I had made that discovery when I was in
my twenties and I was not in that kind of
shape at all, I don't know what it would have
done to me. So I think we have to take
(32:58):
care with the secrets that we hold if we're holding them.
And yet, at the same time, because of the combination
of the Internet and I remember you said that on
your podcast one time in Passing, You're like, well, with
the Internet there there's not going to be any more secrets. Well,
I think we're Yeah, we're heading into an era that
(33:20):
I really do think is the the end of the secret,
because you know, it's it's a misunderstanding that people have
that if if they haven't had their DNA tested, it
means that they couldn't be discoverable. Um in any family.
I mean, I've had people who were donors say to me, well,
I don't want to I'm not going to do my
DNA testing because I don't want to be found. It's like, well,
(33:40):
your nephew could do it. Your first cousin, your second cousin,
even your third cousin could do it and somebody would
be able to figure that out. Your your grandchild could
do it. It's it's the it's the unintended consequence of
this development in science and what's complicated. Um, many things
are complicated about it. But there's secrecy and then there's privacy, right,
(34:03):
and they're very connected and they're not the same thing.
And you know, I think we can agree the privacy
is important and we want to have privacy. UM. And
secrecy I think is toxic. But there's you know, there
are families now in which there are some people keeping
secrets from others because some people want to know and
(34:26):
some people don't want to know. UM. And it's it's
it's very complicated. So I think it's as individual as
um the person and the family that it's happening to.
(34:54):
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 News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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