May 22, 2020 • 24 mins
Dani and Gretchen respond to audience questions — including one from a former anonymous sperm donor, who wonders where his loyalties should lie after he’s asked not to tell one of his biological children the truth about her origins.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Hi,
Family Secrets listeners. It's me Danny here with part two
of my conversation with Gretchen Ruben, which we recorded live
back when live audiences were still a thing. This audience,
(00:23):
in particular, came prepared with some really thought provoking questions
about the ethics of secret keeping, informed by their own
personal experiences. I can't wait for you to listen, and
be sure to keep an eye out for more great
bonus content as we work hard on the new season
of Family Secrets coming in October. Hi, Gretchen and Danny,
(00:52):
thank you so much. My name is Sherry Hoft Tostad.
I'm a therapist and I spent One of my specialties
is infertility and third party reproduction. So I work with
individuals and couples who are pursuing UM using a donor
egg donor sperm donor embryout, and a lot of them struggle.
You know, I can tell them all of the research
behind disclosure and the importance of telling their child their
(01:13):
story from the beginning. What do you think it's the
most important thing I can impart to these these you
know individuals or couples about the importance of disclosing and
disclosing early. Thank yeah, thank you for that question. Um well,
I think the most motivating thing would be your child
is going to find out. And that's what I'm saying.
(01:34):
I actually for myself when I received letters and you know,
notes from people or people come up to me, I
leave the like you know, disclosure good, non disclosure bad
out of it and just say your child is going
to find out, because that's to me very convincing. It's
just do you want to be in a situation where
(01:54):
at some point your child is going to turn to
you and say, how could you have kept this information
from me? We all have a right to know as
much about our genetic identity as possible. And one other thing,
I remember the moment where I suddenly realized I have
been giving incorrect medical history all my life, confidently giving
(02:16):
incorrect medical history, um, for myself and for my own child, um,
in terms of family history, and it's just unacceptable. So
I think on the very practical levels of just horses
fled the barn, not going back. Hi, my name is
hadar Um. I you touched on this a little bit,
(02:36):
but what is if you're willing to share your personal
opinion on these donors that are maybe unknowingly having several
of these children out there. I mean, I've seen the
stories of you know, up to these seven half siblings,
and how do you feel like the medical community should
be addressing that and should they be limiting because I
(02:57):
feel like as far as I've seen, there has been
many limitations. Thank you for that question. Are so we
are in Canada are the only two countries in the
developed world that do not have a registry UM that
limits the number of offspring a donor can produce. In Europe,
In Asia, there are there's accountability, there's a registry. There's
(03:21):
a number in Taiwan. That number is one UM and
I think it goes up to maybe about twenty five
and like the Netherlands. But there's there's accountability, and there's
there's what and there's monitoring exactly and the monitoring actually
ends up accomplishing a lot. It means that donors have
to be truthful about their medical histories. There's a lot
of things that go that go into it. The agencies
(03:45):
that are um you know, selling donor sperm and donor
eggs are still promoting anonymity. There's still you can go
on these sites and see that donors are being listed
as anonymous when it's no longer possible for donors to
be anonymous, and um, to me, that's a kind of malpractice.
It's it's it's no pun intended. It is inconceivable to
(04:06):
me that that people are falling for it, um and
and that, and that it's being advertised and marketed in
that way. So it's one of the reasons why I
will continue to be a voice about this, because it
feels like it's part of the work of my life
now to say, do you realize there's no regulation in
this country about this? And combine no regulation with lack
(04:31):
of disclosure, and you end up with situations where I
mean a recent story that I heard a doctor who's
I guess probably in his sixties fifties, maybe sat his
teenage children down, um, because they were reaching an age
where they were starting to date, and and he said
to them, don't date anyone from Michigan. And he had
(04:58):
been a medical student, you know, Michigan, and he donated
his way through medical school as a young, poor medical student.
And he was basically he was trying to do the
right thing actually by letting his children know that he
had been a sperm donor. That's a very helpful thing
to know, um, as you make your way into the world.
But it's also like and nobody leaves Michigan that room.
(05:18):
I with interest lots of what you said, And you
just mentioned the similarity, but difference between the similarity and
difference between secrets and privacy in the same way i'm
I guess I'm struck by the fact that identity and
ancestry are not the same. And and so what you've
(05:44):
got from your father is identity, the ancestry is different.
That's right, and that's a very profound idea. UM. I
realized when I told my son what I had discovered,
and that it was actually not a big deal for him,
(06:06):
that oh, he was very happy to realize that he
might not be bald like my dad and my grandfather
and my great but all the all the men, I guess,
even staring at the portraits of my house and like
picturing his future bald self. But he wasn't perturbed. And
I what I realized was that my father, he had
never known my dad, so my father to him was
(06:27):
an ancestor. And I was very identified with my ancestors.
It's one of the reasons why this was so world
rocking for me. I come from a family on my
father's side that was very conscious of its own posterity,
and I had received many stories of the generations before me,
and I had kind of incorporated them into my identity.
(06:49):
We don't love our ancestors. We can't love our ancestors
because we never knew them, that we didn't walk the
world with them. We love the people that we walk
the world with. Who we grapple with, and who we
fight with, and we who we you know, engage with,
and who and who and who we love. They're the people.
Those are the people who form our identities. I mean,
(07:11):
I've come to the realization that really it took three
people to make me. You know, I am as formed
by my mother and my dad who raised me, um
and my biological father, with whom I have a great
deal of familiarity. I inherited a lot of traits from
him and a constitution from him in a certain way. Um.
(07:33):
But so, but identity wise, I mean, people ask me,
and as someone someone may have this question, so I'll
just answer it. So, do you feel less Jewish now?
Or more Jewish because I'm biologically half Jewish. Um, I
actually feel more Jewish now because I now understand all
the questions people were always asking that made me feel
(07:56):
like such an outsider. Now now it just all makes
sense to me. So my sense of self identity is
actually stronger and way more powerful than it was before
my discovery. We'll be back in a moment with more
family secrets. I was a donor at Pennsylvania Hospital, not
(08:20):
University of Pennsylvania Hospital, pensyl for in the seventies and eighties,
and it was anonymous. And then five years ago, because
my father's DNA before he died was in a mix,
they started contacting looking for their grandfather and discovered it
was me, and I have since been in touch and
(08:40):
met two of them. I am in writing touch with
several others. The question I have for you, and this
is a dilemma I'm having now, is UM, a woman
put her d N A in and is looking for
it is clearly me, and somehow I didn't her back.
So I found the mother and wrote to the mother
(09:03):
and to ask, and the mother wrote back, please don't
tell my daughter. It would ruin the family. Although the
daughter must see something already, and I don't know what
I should do do what it is my responsibility to
the mother who says it would wreck her family, or
to the daughter who wants to know. That's you see
(09:24):
the kinds of stories that are coming. I mean, it's extraordinary.
Thank you for sharing that, and thank you for asking that. Um,
it would seem to me that the daughter is searching
and your information is available, so she will find you
if she wants to. She will find you because she's
looking right. She she she took a DNA test, right,
(09:48):
So it would seem to me that making yourself discoverable
is your best, you know sort of action in a
way like I. I was approached by a man in
his eighties after a talk I did recently, who just
randomly was at the talk, knew nothing about what I
(10:09):
was going to be talking about, and it turned out
he had been a donor at the institute in Pennsylvania
where I was conceived at around the same time. And
after we talked, he said, you know, I'm going to
do a DNA test so that my biological children, if
I have any, can discover me, which I thought was,
you know, as the opposite of what some responses are right.
(10:30):
So you've made yourself, You've made yourself available, and that's
a beautiful thing. UM. And now I think it's like
up to the fullness of time to let it play out.
That's what I would say, Hi, Danny, I'm My name's Rina.
I'm a huge fan of writings. UM. I have a question.
Dr Van rccle says that when you have a traumatizing event,
(10:55):
that that trauma can become cellular UM and that shame carries.
My question is, have you carried any of the shame
that you speak of that your parents had, and if so,
what do you do to combat in That's a great question,
(11:15):
and I think the answer is yes. I think that's
one of the things that I really had to contend
with is I had to rethink and reimagine my history,
my history with my parents, UM, how they I found
it very painful to read The Body keeps the Score
reread it. I had read it once before. I, before
(11:37):
I had made this discovery. I didn't find it nearly
as painful to know that they were UM. My parents
themselves were in a dissociated state. UM. I think from
most of our shared lives together, because they were keeping
a secret. You know. The tagline for Family Secrets the
podcast is um to keep the secrets that are kept
(11:59):
from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
secrets we keep from ourselves, and the secrets we keep
from ourselves are in many ways, the most toxic of secrets. Yes, yeah,
Gretchen is mentioning my my Christmas card. When I was
a little girl, I was the Kodak Christmas poster child.
(12:21):
And there was a whole story when when you read
my book, you'll I write about it in Inheritance. There
was a whole story that went along with how an
Orthodox Jewish girl wound up wishing the entire world to
merry Christmas. Um. But when you actually look at the poster,
look at it with cold eyes, it's so clear that
(12:42):
it was set up, that I was set up to
be the Kodak Christmas poster child, which is not the
story that I ever understood. But if you just look
at it, I mean the confirmation bias, you know, it's
it's so clear that that's what it was. So my
parents when when my son was born, my mother walked
into the hospital room he was you know, hours old,
(13:02):
and she said he looks just like a Shapiro, and
she meant it. I believe she could have passed a
polygraph test. So we were in this world of the
unthought known. We existed in this world of the unsaid,
and I think I was really formed by that in
so many ways and in terms of how what I
(13:24):
do with it? Um, I do this with it, um.
I think I've written from that place for a long time.
I try to be as I try to take the
material that life has presented me with and shape it
into art, shape it into something that will touch other lives,
(13:47):
to connect, um, to to do it in as authentic
a way as I possibly can, so that I feel
like I'm I'm using it. It's not using me. Danny,
This is dan Um. Thank you not only for your books,
but for reading some of them for audible. My question
is about the cross section of secrets, lies, and privacy. Um.
(14:16):
So there's a certain energy that seems to be involved
with maintaining a lie or keeping a secret, and wondering,
as a memorist, when you are protecting someone's privacy, is
there any fear of, like not keeping your facts or
your identities straight? Which one you're gonna protect? Me which
(14:37):
one you're gonna make public? UM? Does it take a
similar kind of energy as keeping a secret other secrets?
That's interesting. It's in all of my memoirs I've had
different relationships to the question of UM, protecting or changing,
(15:03):
you know, the the identity, the the identifying details of
of people that I have written about I and it's
it's it's again as individual as this, the circumstances and
the book. For example, UM, in my first memoir, Slow Motion,
my mother was still living and UM and by the way,
(15:25):
it's going to be on audible two more I mean,
I mean it's going to be an audiobook. I have
two more UM of my backlist that are turning into audiobooks,
which is so pleasing to me, both Slow Motion and
still Writing. But in Slowmotion my mother was still living.
I was very conscious I did not want to hurt
my mother. You know, if any of you are writing memoirs, UM.
(15:49):
One of the things that like a really good tool
with which to think about this is the question of
motivation writing out of revenge. Gretchen was just saying, doesn't
this come up with wedding toasts too? It's like a
chance I've seen wedding toasts go very awry, right, and
it's like why why why are you choosing now to
(16:11):
recount the entire romantic history of the bride like that
kind of thing. Um. But the question of motivation, I
think if the writer is sitting there and thinking, I
can't wait until so and so read this, then it's
a really good indication that, um, you're writing like to
someone against someone. UM. When I mean I protected my
(16:35):
biological father's identity because it felt like that was completely
the right thing to do. It's one thing to be
contacted by a biological child, is another thing to have
that biological child, you know, plaster your name all over creation.
I mean, that was and there was no reason for it.
There was nothing, nothing to be gained by anybody in
(16:56):
terms of doing that. But when I've written about my parents,
my half sister who I grew up with, I mean
much older half sister, UM, I've felt that what I've
attempted to do is tell my story as UM, conscientiously
(17:19):
and in the most crafted way that I possibly can,
not to tell their story, but to tell my story
that also has them within my story. We don't live
in isolation, UM, My friend Andrea debuse Uh the third,
the wonderful writer. He I once heard him say when
(17:40):
somebody was saying, how could you have written about your
younger brother, his younger brother had been abused by a
high school teacher. How could you have written about him?
That you had no right to do that? And Andrea said,
you know, when I would come home after school to
our parentless empty house, and I would walk down the
hall and my brother's bedroom door was closed, and I
would hear what was going on on the other side
(18:00):
of that door. What was going on the other side
of the door is my brother's story to tell. But
what happened to me on my side of the door,
and my feelings about not being able to protect my
brother and my own sense of helplessness, that's my story
to tell. And I love that as a example because
it's actually a door and a knob and a hallway.
(18:21):
It's like, that's yours and this is mine. But again,
we don't live in isolation, so our stories touch each other.
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. HI,
how are you. My name is Sophia UM. I am
very interested in the idea that um when your father
(18:44):
discovered your success. I can imagine he was proud and
he wanted to get to know you. But your father,
biological father, is not a simple man. He's also very
accomplished person. So from your angle, how did your relation ship,
um flourish considering that he's not an average individual? And UM,
(19:05):
also where are you holding in your relationship now? You know,
I don't know that my biological father initially felt proud
or anything like that. I think he initially just felt like, oh, um,
this is just it's it's very hard to to make
that kind of leap with someone who's a stranger, even
(19:27):
though there's all of this you know, genetic you know, commonality,
and a sense of again the familiar. Um. I feel
that we were lucky in a lot of ways because
we both tried to do the right thing. Ultimately, there
(19:48):
was a lot of a sense of compassion and kindness
UM that flowed in both directions. And to go back
to privacy, I talk very openly about and I right,
very openly and inheritance about what that experience was of
finding him and eventually meeting him. But I'm never going
(20:09):
to talk or write about our relationship as it moves forward. Um.
Because that feels like we get to have that relationship
now and that he doesn't have to be the biological
father of a writer. He just gets to be the
biological father of Danny and I get to have him
as my you know, whatever that relationship is, it's not
(20:31):
he doesn't feel like my father, feels like we have
a special, unusual friendship for which there's no playbook. Hello,
So my name is Sarah and I have a question
on behalf of my family and my father who um
was most likely conceived at the with Star Institute, him
and his two siblings and found out that they were
(20:54):
to well not all of them, but he was, even
though he never knew it was part of his family history. UM.
So my question is, um, if you have any research ideas.
He's sort of hit a wall and UM he's been
down to the wes Star Institute and they deny any
sort of history. Um. He's been now multiple times and
(21:16):
even walked off the premises by security and just would
like to know where he can continue the research and
how he can figure out, UM, if my grandparents actually
did go down there for you know, infertility treatment. What
your was your father born? Um? He was born in
nineteen fifty and um my his siblings were born I
(21:37):
think nineteen fifty three and fifty five. It's so interesting
to me that Wister would um deny any knowledge of this,
because there are many newspaper articles about Um Edmund Farris.
I'll just give you a brief overview of this. You
understand the question. Um, I forgot how near Philadelphia we are,
(21:59):
so I was able to find out where I was conceived.
And it was an institute too, called the Faris Institute
for Parenthood, and it was um run by a man
named Edmund Ferris Um who had originally been at the
Whister Institute. This is all on the campus of penn Um.
Faris was the director of the Whister Institute. He was
(22:22):
performing regularly um donor inseminations there. He had an entire
lab set up there where he was This is what
he was doing. And when the church caught wind of
what he was doing, they put a lot of pressure
on him to shut down. And also, one of the
stranger things that I discovered that I write about an
(22:45):
inheritance is that Faris was not an m D. Which
means that he was practicing medicine without a license. He
was a scientist. He was a brilliant scientist that actually
never got his proper do um, largely because he was
disliked and he was also doing it was It's very
likely that it would would have been Edmund Farris who
(23:06):
your grandparents, your grandparents would have gone to. Right, So
it's undeniable. I mean it's in newspaper articles. I'm sure
your father has found those newspaper articles. The institutional lack
of culpability, I'm not even sure what to say about
(23:27):
that's it's because it's not there's no denying it. It
would seem to me in terms of learning more that
the answers are all going to be in the d
na um, that that if there's If that was the case,
then family tree wise, there ought to be someone, you know,
a really good genealogist to help your your your father
(23:51):
kind of sort that sort that out. Um. That's the
best I can offer. Thank you so much, Stretched and Danny.
(24:23):
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. Hi,
Family Secrets listeners. It's me Danny here with part two
of my conversation with Gretchen Ruben, which we recorded live
back when live audiences were still a thing. This audience,
(00:23):
in particular, came prepared with some really thought provoking questions
about the ethics of secret keeping, informed by their own
personal experiences. I can't wait for you to listen, and
be sure to keep an eye out for more great
bonus content as we work hard on the new season
of Family Secrets coming in October. Hi, Gretchen and Danny,
(00:52):
thank you so much. My name is Sherry Hoft Tostad.
I'm a therapist and I spent One of my specialties
is infertility and third party reproduction. So I work with
individuals and couples who are pursuing UM using a donor
egg donor sperm donor embryout, and a lot of them struggle.
You know, I can tell them all of the research
behind disclosure and the importance of telling their child their
(01:13):
story from the beginning. What do you think it's the
most important thing I can impart to these these you
know individuals or couples about the importance of disclosing and
disclosing early. Thank yeah, thank you for that question. Um well,
I think the most motivating thing would be your child
is going to find out. And that's what I'm saying.
(01:34):
I actually for myself when I received letters and you know,
notes from people or people come up to me, I
leave the like you know, disclosure good, non disclosure bad
out of it and just say your child is going
to find out, because that's to me very convincing. It's
just do you want to be in a situation where
(01:54):
at some point your child is going to turn to
you and say, how could you have kept this information
from me? We all have a right to know as
much about our genetic identity as possible. And one other thing,
I remember the moment where I suddenly realized I have
been giving incorrect medical history all my life, confidently giving
(02:16):
incorrect medical history, um, for myself and for my own child, um,
in terms of family history, and it's just unacceptable. So
I think on the very practical levels of just horses
fled the barn, not going back. Hi, my name is
hadar Um. I you touched on this a little bit,
(02:36):
but what is if you're willing to share your personal
opinion on these donors that are maybe unknowingly having several
of these children out there. I mean, I've seen the
stories of you know, up to these seven half siblings,
and how do you feel like the medical community should
be addressing that and should they be limiting because I
(02:57):
feel like as far as I've seen, there has been
many limitations. Thank you for that question. Are so we
are in Canada are the only two countries in the
developed world that do not have a registry UM that
limits the number of offspring a donor can produce. In Europe,
In Asia, there are there's accountability, there's a registry. There's
(03:21):
a number in Taiwan. That number is one UM and
I think it goes up to maybe about twenty five
and like the Netherlands. But there's there's accountability, and there's
there's what and there's monitoring exactly and the monitoring actually
ends up accomplishing a lot. It means that donors have
to be truthful about their medical histories. There's a lot
of things that go that go into it. The agencies
(03:45):
that are um you know, selling donor sperm and donor
eggs are still promoting anonymity. There's still you can go
on these sites and see that donors are being listed
as anonymous when it's no longer possible for donors to
be anonymous, and um, to me, that's a kind of malpractice.
It's it's it's no pun intended. It is inconceivable to
(04:06):
me that that people are falling for it, um and
and that, and that it's being advertised and marketed in
that way. So it's one of the reasons why I
will continue to be a voice about this, because it
feels like it's part of the work of my life
now to say, do you realize there's no regulation in
this country about this? And combine no regulation with lack
(04:31):
of disclosure, and you end up with situations where I
mean a recent story that I heard a doctor who's
I guess probably in his sixties fifties, maybe sat his
teenage children down, um, because they were reaching an age
where they were starting to date, and and he said
to them, don't date anyone from Michigan. And he had
(04:58):
been a medical student, you know, Michigan, and he donated
his way through medical school as a young, poor medical student.
And he was basically he was trying to do the
right thing actually by letting his children know that he
had been a sperm donor. That's a very helpful thing
to know, um, as you make your way into the world.
But it's also like and nobody leaves Michigan that room.
(05:18):
I with interest lots of what you said, And you
just mentioned the similarity, but difference between the similarity and
difference between secrets and privacy in the same way i'm
I guess I'm struck by the fact that identity and
ancestry are not the same. And and so what you've
(05:44):
got from your father is identity, the ancestry is different.
That's right, and that's a very profound idea. UM. I
realized when I told my son what I had discovered,
and that it was actually not a big deal for him,
(06:06):
that oh, he was very happy to realize that he
might not be bald like my dad and my grandfather
and my great but all the all the men, I guess,
even staring at the portraits of my house and like
picturing his future bald self. But he wasn't perturbed. And
I what I realized was that my father, he had
never known my dad, so my father to him was
(06:27):
an ancestor. And I was very identified with my ancestors.
It's one of the reasons why this was so world
rocking for me. I come from a family on my
father's side that was very conscious of its own posterity,
and I had received many stories of the generations before me,
and I had kind of incorporated them into my identity.
(06:49):
We don't love our ancestors. We can't love our ancestors
because we never knew them, that we didn't walk the
world with them. We love the people that we walk
the world with. Who we grapple with, and who we
fight with, and we who we you know, engage with,
and who and who and who we love. They're the people.
Those are the people who form our identities. I mean,
(07:11):
I've come to the realization that really it took three
people to make me. You know, I am as formed
by my mother and my dad who raised me, um
and my biological father, with whom I have a great
deal of familiarity. I inherited a lot of traits from
him and a constitution from him in a certain way. Um.
(07:33):
But so, but identity wise, I mean, people ask me,
and as someone someone may have this question, so I'll
just answer it. So, do you feel less Jewish now?
Or more Jewish because I'm biologically half Jewish. Um, I
actually feel more Jewish now because I now understand all
the questions people were always asking that made me feel
(07:56):
like such an outsider. Now now it just all makes
sense to me. So my sense of self identity is
actually stronger and way more powerful than it was before
my discovery. We'll be back in a moment with more
family secrets. I was a donor at Pennsylvania Hospital, not
(08:20):
University of Pennsylvania Hospital, pensyl for in the seventies and eighties,
and it was anonymous. And then five years ago, because
my father's DNA before he died was in a mix,
they started contacting looking for their grandfather and discovered it
was me, and I have since been in touch and
(08:40):
met two of them. I am in writing touch with
several others. The question I have for you, and this
is a dilemma I'm having now, is UM, a woman
put her d N A in and is looking for
it is clearly me, and somehow I didn't her back.
So I found the mother and wrote to the mother
(09:03):
and to ask, and the mother wrote back, please don't
tell my daughter. It would ruin the family. Although the
daughter must see something already, and I don't know what
I should do do what it is my responsibility to
the mother who says it would wreck her family, or
to the daughter who wants to know. That's you see
(09:24):
the kinds of stories that are coming. I mean, it's extraordinary.
Thank you for sharing that, and thank you for asking that. Um,
it would seem to me that the daughter is searching
and your information is available, so she will find you
if she wants to. She will find you because she's
looking right. She she she took a DNA test, right,
(09:48):
So it would seem to me that making yourself discoverable
is your best, you know sort of action in a
way like I. I was approached by a man in
his eighties after a talk I did recently, who just
randomly was at the talk, knew nothing about what I
(10:09):
was going to be talking about, and it turned out
he had been a donor at the institute in Pennsylvania
where I was conceived at around the same time. And
after we talked, he said, you know, I'm going to
do a DNA test so that my biological children, if
I have any, can discover me, which I thought was,
you know, as the opposite of what some responses are right.
(10:30):
So you've made yourself, You've made yourself available, and that's
a beautiful thing. UM. And now I think it's like
up to the fullness of time to let it play out.
That's what I would say, Hi, Danny, I'm My name's Rina.
I'm a huge fan of writings. UM. I have a question.
Dr Van rccle says that when you have a traumatizing event,
(10:55):
that that trauma can become cellular UM and that shame carries.
My question is, have you carried any of the shame
that you speak of that your parents had, and if so,
what do you do to combat in That's a great question,
(11:15):
and I think the answer is yes. I think that's
one of the things that I really had to contend
with is I had to rethink and reimagine my history,
my history with my parents, UM, how they I found
it very painful to read The Body keeps the Score
reread it. I had read it once before. I, before
(11:37):
I had made this discovery. I didn't find it nearly
as painful to know that they were UM. My parents
themselves were in a dissociated state. UM. I think from
most of our shared lives together, because they were keeping
a secret. You know. The tagline for Family Secrets the
podcast is um to keep the secrets that are kept
(11:59):
from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
secrets we keep from ourselves, and the secrets we keep
from ourselves are in many ways, the most toxic of secrets. Yes, yeah,
Gretchen is mentioning my my Christmas card. When I was
a little girl, I was the Kodak Christmas poster child.
(12:21):
And there was a whole story when when you read
my book, you'll I write about it in Inheritance. There
was a whole story that went along with how an
Orthodox Jewish girl wound up wishing the entire world to
merry Christmas. Um. But when you actually look at the poster,
look at it with cold eyes, it's so clear that
(12:42):
it was set up, that I was set up to
be the Kodak Christmas poster child, which is not the
story that I ever understood. But if you just look
at it, I mean the confirmation bias, you know, it's
it's so clear that that's what it was. So my
parents when when my son was born, my mother walked
into the hospital room he was you know, hours old,
(13:02):
and she said he looks just like a Shapiro, and
she meant it. I believe she could have passed a
polygraph test. So we were in this world of the
unthought known. We existed in this world of the unsaid,
and I think I was really formed by that in
so many ways and in terms of how what I
(13:24):
do with it? Um, I do this with it, um.
I think I've written from that place for a long time.
I try to be as I try to take the
material that life has presented me with and shape it
into art, shape it into something that will touch other lives,
(13:47):
to connect, um, to to do it in as authentic
a way as I possibly can, so that I feel
like I'm I'm using it. It's not using me. Danny,
This is dan Um. Thank you not only for your books,
but for reading some of them for audible. My question
is about the cross section of secrets, lies, and privacy. Um.
(14:16):
So there's a certain energy that seems to be involved
with maintaining a lie or keeping a secret, and wondering,
as a memorist, when you are protecting someone's privacy, is
there any fear of, like not keeping your facts or
your identities straight? Which one you're gonna protect? Me which
(14:37):
one you're gonna make public? UM? Does it take a
similar kind of energy as keeping a secret other secrets?
That's interesting. It's in all of my memoirs I've had
different relationships to the question of UM, protecting or changing,
(15:03):
you know, the the identity, the the identifying details of
of people that I have written about I and it's
it's it's again as individual as this, the circumstances and
the book. For example, UM, in my first memoir, Slow Motion,
my mother was still living and UM and by the way,
(15:25):
it's going to be on audible two more I mean,
I mean it's going to be an audiobook. I have
two more UM of my backlist that are turning into audiobooks,
which is so pleasing to me, both Slow Motion and
still Writing. But in Slowmotion my mother was still living.
I was very conscious I did not want to hurt
my mother. You know, if any of you are writing memoirs, UM.
(15:49):
One of the things that like a really good tool
with which to think about this is the question of
motivation writing out of revenge. Gretchen was just saying, doesn't
this come up with wedding toasts too? It's like a
chance I've seen wedding toasts go very awry, right, and
it's like why why why are you choosing now to
(16:11):
recount the entire romantic history of the bride like that
kind of thing. Um. But the question of motivation, I
think if the writer is sitting there and thinking, I
can't wait until so and so read this, then it's
a really good indication that, um, you're writing like to
someone against someone. UM. When I mean I protected my
(16:35):
biological father's identity because it felt like that was completely
the right thing to do. It's one thing to be
contacted by a biological child, is another thing to have
that biological child, you know, plaster your name all over creation.
I mean, that was and there was no reason for it.
There was nothing, nothing to be gained by anybody in
(16:56):
terms of doing that. But when I've written about my parents,
my half sister who I grew up with, I mean
much older half sister, UM, I've felt that what I've
attempted to do is tell my story as UM, conscientiously
(17:19):
and in the most crafted way that I possibly can,
not to tell their story, but to tell my story
that also has them within my story. We don't live
in isolation, UM, My friend Andrea debuse Uh the third,
the wonderful writer. He I once heard him say when
(17:40):
somebody was saying, how could you have written about your
younger brother, his younger brother had been abused by a
high school teacher. How could you have written about him?
That you had no right to do that? And Andrea said,
you know, when I would come home after school to
our parentless empty house, and I would walk down the
hall and my brother's bedroom door was closed, and I
would hear what was going on on the other side
(18:00):
of that door. What was going on the other side
of the door is my brother's story to tell. But
what happened to me on my side of the door,
and my feelings about not being able to protect my
brother and my own sense of helplessness, that's my story
to tell. And I love that as a example because
it's actually a door and a knob and a hallway.
(18:21):
It's like, that's yours and this is mine. But again,
we don't live in isolation, so our stories touch each other.
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. HI,
how are you. My name is Sophia UM. I am
very interested in the idea that um when your father
(18:44):
discovered your success. I can imagine he was proud and
he wanted to get to know you. But your father,
biological father, is not a simple man. He's also very
accomplished person. So from your angle, how did your relation ship,
um flourish considering that he's not an average individual? And UM,
(19:05):
also where are you holding in your relationship now? You know,
I don't know that my biological father initially felt proud
or anything like that. I think he initially just felt like, oh, um,
this is just it's it's very hard to to make
that kind of leap with someone who's a stranger, even
(19:27):
though there's all of this you know, genetic you know, commonality,
and a sense of again the familiar. Um. I feel
that we were lucky in a lot of ways because
we both tried to do the right thing. Ultimately, there
(19:48):
was a lot of a sense of compassion and kindness
UM that flowed in both directions. And to go back
to privacy, I talk very openly about and I right,
very openly and inheritance about what that experience was of
finding him and eventually meeting him. But I'm never going
(20:09):
to talk or write about our relationship as it moves forward. Um.
Because that feels like we get to have that relationship
now and that he doesn't have to be the biological
father of a writer. He just gets to be the
biological father of Danny and I get to have him
as my you know, whatever that relationship is, it's not
(20:31):
he doesn't feel like my father, feels like we have
a special, unusual friendship for which there's no playbook. Hello,
So my name is Sarah and I have a question
on behalf of my family and my father who um
was most likely conceived at the with Star Institute, him
and his two siblings and found out that they were
(20:54):
to well not all of them, but he was, even
though he never knew it was part of his family history. UM.
So my question is, um, if you have any research ideas.
He's sort of hit a wall and UM he's been
down to the wes Star Institute and they deny any
sort of history. Um. He's been now multiple times and
(21:16):
even walked off the premises by security and just would
like to know where he can continue the research and
how he can figure out, UM, if my grandparents actually
did go down there for you know, infertility treatment. What
your was your father born? Um? He was born in
nineteen fifty and um my his siblings were born I
(21:37):
think nineteen fifty three and fifty five. It's so interesting
to me that Wister would um deny any knowledge of this,
because there are many newspaper articles about Um Edmund Farris.
I'll just give you a brief overview of this. You
understand the question. Um, I forgot how near Philadelphia we are,
(21:59):
so I was able to find out where I was conceived.
And it was an institute too, called the Faris Institute
for Parenthood, and it was um run by a man
named Edmund Ferris Um who had originally been at the
Whister Institute. This is all on the campus of penn Um.
Faris was the director of the Whister Institute. He was
(22:22):
performing regularly um donor inseminations there. He had an entire
lab set up there where he was This is what
he was doing. And when the church caught wind of
what he was doing, they put a lot of pressure
on him to shut down. And also, one of the
stranger things that I discovered that I write about an
(22:45):
inheritance is that Faris was not an m D. Which
means that he was practicing medicine without a license. He
was a scientist. He was a brilliant scientist that actually
never got his proper do um, largely because he was
disliked and he was also doing it was It's very
likely that it would would have been Edmund Farris who
(23:06):
your grandparents, your grandparents would have gone to. Right, So
it's undeniable. I mean it's in newspaper articles. I'm sure
your father has found those newspaper articles. The institutional lack
of culpability, I'm not even sure what to say about
(23:27):
that's it's because it's not there's no denying it. It
would seem to me in terms of learning more that
the answers are all going to be in the d
na um, that that if there's If that was the case,
then family tree wise, there ought to be someone, you know,
a really good genealogist to help your your your father
(23:51):
kind of sort that sort that out. Um. That's the
best I can offer. Thank you so much, Stretched and Danny.
(24:23):
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Dani Shapiro
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