I Think You Should Stop Talking

When Emily returns from a family trip, she tells people she has a “crazy story” but it’s more than that. It’s always more than that. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. We are about
ten minutes into watching Missus Doubtfire, the good natured nineteen
ninety three family comedy about a divorcee who impersonates a
no nonsense Scottish nanny so he can spend time with
his family. I see a flash and movement in the
corner of my vision, and suddenly the men are there.

(00:22):
The film continues to play in the background as they
whisper in our ears. We don't want to hurt you,
but we will.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
That's Emily Labarge, a Canadian writer based in London, an
author of the recent memoir dog Days.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
Emily's is a.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
Story about trauma, memory, and the impulse to make a
violent and harrowing story somehow a good story, a tolerable story,
the ways we attempt to minimize what has happened to
us in order to get on with our lives. It's
also a story about the failure of language and ultimately
the harnessing power of making art. I'm Danny Shapiro and

(01:11):
this is Family Secrets. The secrets that are kept from us,
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
I grew up in Ottawa, Ontario. Ottawa is very beautiful
and very nice. That's what people always say. Ottawa is
very nice, but it's also very beige. It wasn't the
most exciting place to grow up, but it has a
very good quality of life because there's a kind of
feeling of stability. It's a very outdoorsy place. My family

(01:48):
was really interested in outdoors activities. But alongside that, my
mother worked for the government with the Inuit Art Department.
So I grew up with a sense of arts and culture, sure,
in a diverse way, being I think, part of the
Canadian imagination, but also part of sort of what you
had around you. She studied art history, so we spent

(02:10):
a lot of time in museums and galleries. Although she
was from a family where she and her siblings were
the first to go to university on scholarships and with
part time jobs, so I don't think in her house,
I don't think they had any books. I think she
told me that her first book that she owned was
given to her when she was a teenager by her

(02:31):
eldest sister, and it was a book on Picasso, which
is kind of peculiar. I don't know why she would
have chosen it, So that's her side. My dad is
a lawyer, business tax and estates lawyer. I think he
cycled through a bunch of other legal genres I guess
we would call them before he settled on that, but
he found sort of family law and other versions of

(02:52):
that practice too personally onerous. Everything always sounds a bit
sort of small potatoes in the Canadian version, but auto
what is the kind of dot com boom? It's like
our sort of Silicon Valley, which really doesn't compare at
all to the actual Silicon Valley. But he worked with
a lot of sort of tech startup companies like Corral,
word Processing, early versions of that. So that's sort of

(03:16):
my beginning memory of what they did with their lives.
I have a sister who is almost nine years older
than I am, and she left a home for university
when I was nine. We have one of those relationships
where one person was a child and one person was
a teenager or an adult sort of quite a bit
ahead of the other. I desperately wanted to leave. I

(03:39):
wanted to be somewhere bigger. I wanted to be in
a big city, and I'm not really sure why I
chose the university that I did because it's a small
town university. But I guess I thought, oh, I'll only
have that experience once, and in hindsight, I would have
been much better suited to go to Montreal or Toronto
for university. But you know, past his prologue. But yes,

(04:01):
I wanted to leave Otto. I wanted to be somewhere else.
So I ended up living in Toronto for a couple
of years, where I worked in a restaurant and saved
money and tried to figure out what I was going
to do with my life. I had studied art history
and English literature a double major for my undergrad which
was an amazing experience, but as most people in the

(04:23):
humanities know, doesn't lead you directly into an obvious job.
So I was sort of hanging out, living in a
bigger city, going to galleries, meeting new people, just kind
of living somewhere different on my own. And then I
realized that I wanted to do a master's in art history,

(04:43):
but with a focus on modern and contemporary art, and
so sort of on a whim, I applied, amongst other places,
to a university in London, and I thought I would
just come here for a year, but I ended up
staying afterwards.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
How old were you when you moved to London and
started the master's.

Speaker 1 (05:01):
I was twenty four. It was two thousand and eight.

Speaker 2 (05:06):
Tell me how you would characterize yourself at that time
you moved to London. You're at university, you're getting your masters,
you had begun to sort of identify a path, as
it were. What were you like, you know, young women
moving through the world.

Speaker 1 (05:24):
Yeah, it's interesting. I thought about that quite a bit
as you you know, as you get older, you look
back and sort of think, how did I get to
be where I am? At what point in time was
I making specific choices or just kind of going with
what was presented to me. I think that moving to
London it was huge for me. I had been not
very happy in university. I think I felt very stifled

(05:46):
by the smallness of the town that I was living
in and the kind of demographic of the student body,
which wasn't very adventurous. I found it quite conservative, and
I think, you know, Toronto gave me a taste of
a place where there was a lot of different stuff
going on and you didn't know everything that was happening
in the place that you were. There's this sense of freedom,

(06:08):
and London obviously is like that kind of on steroids,
and it's also a foreign country. I mean obviously I
speak English, but I would say there was like a
degree of culture shock, partly because there was so much available,
but also, you know, I didn't really understand the politics
the customs. Two thousand and eight was a big year

(06:30):
politically because of the financial crisis, and also there was
an election the first year that I lived here, and
I could vote because I'm a Commonwealth citizen. So I
spent ages and ages, you know, reading the newspaper, reading
these political parties, different platforms, because I'm quite obsessed with voting.
I guess it's one of your inalienable rights, we like

(06:50):
to think. So I was sort of wide open for
what was presented to me, and I think that I
felt sort of new. When you move countries, you really
get a different sense of where you grew up, where
you came from, what things looked like. There's this kind
of as if you're jettisoned out of yourself. I guess

(07:11):
maybe it's James Adgie who says, you know, you can
never go home once you've left, and I think it
made me really understand that there was a whole world
that I had no real understanding of, that world being Europe,
which is quite different once you actually live there than
I think the kind of North American view of what
it's like in London Paris, that it was incredibly diverse,

(07:33):
not always attractive, and really historically fraud and I think
I found that shocking and fascinating. And of course the
arts and culture scene here is extraordinary. So I think,
you know, I think I did something every single night
by myself. I would see what lecture I could go to.
I think I took, like, you know, thousands of notes

(07:53):
in my little notebooks, which I've I've not looked at again,
but it felt so exciting to have all of this possibility.

Speaker 2 (08:07):
It's almost Christmas two thousand and nine. Emily is twenty
five years old, living in London with three flatmates, just
embarking on her life in the art world, a master's
degree freshly behind her and working in a small gallery
and sculptor's studio. It's a life she'll have to leave
briefly to go celebrate the holidays with her family. They

(08:28):
have a tradition of spending the holidays. On well holiday,
the four of them together in some destination setting this Christmas.
The destination is a Caribbean island. Everyone is coming from
different directions, different lives, different continents. Now they meet at
a rented house. Some of the details of that trip

(08:49):
remain hazy to Emily even now, but others she will
never forget.

Speaker 1 (08:55):
There are some things that I don't remember, partly because
it was many years ago now, sixteen years ago, seventeen
years ago, so I don't remember, for instance, like what
day we got there. We would usually fly around the
twentieth or twenty first or something, and I think we
usually liked to stay over New Years, so that we

(09:16):
had that nice span of time. So we had been
there for a couple of days, and you know, you
developed these like patterns and habits on your trips, such
as like you know, finding the grocery store that you
want to go to, like stalking up on basic foods
and such. And we had spent a couple of days
doing that. We had actually been to this island before

(09:39):
a few years previous, and we stayed in a different
area and we really loved it because it's a really
great place for snorkeling and scuba diving, so there's a
really rich aquatic life, and we were excited to be back.
It's very beautiful and we were just settling in and
I mean, this is a bit peculiar. This will tell

(09:59):
you something about what my family is like. But we
had developed this habit of every Christmas bringing DVDs to
watch in the evening, so like choosing films, and there
quickly became some tension as to which films should be brought.
So I think my sister, who's a you know, business professor,

(10:20):
developed this like elaborate spreadsheet where you would put in
the films that you wanted and then like people could
rate them sort of like one to four, and then
we would narrow down the top choices and we would
sort of take turns who got to choose the movie
for the evening, And this was kind of like one
of the rituals. My family really likes the cinema and

(10:41):
films in general. So we were watching. It was my choice,
and I had fought for years to get Missus Doubtfire
on the list. I don't know why I was twenty
five instead of like a childish choice, but I love
Robin Williams, and so I was like, finally my choice,
missus doubtfire. And we were sitting in the living room

(11:01):
I guess maybe we had been there for two nights,
three nights maximum, and we were watching the film. We
were maybe about ten minutes in or something, when all
of a sudden, I kind of saw this movement in
the corner of my eye, and I looked over to
the right and there was a what seemed to me
like a huge group of men. I think there were seven,

(11:24):
there might have been just six, it's hard to say,
coming into the room out of the dark. Actually they
came from the driveway, but there was a sort of
passageway between the kitchen and some of the bedrooms, so
they came through the middle of the house and then
turned the corner through the open doors into the living
room and just started yelling at us that you know,

(11:46):
this was a robbery and to get down on the ground,
and so we did, and we waited there for several
hours while they ransacked the house, stole people's bank cards,
stole our clothes, passports. It was very peculiar because they

(12:07):
were obviously locals and it's not a big place, but
they seemed to think that it was our house, and
they kept asking us like where the silverware and stuff
was and we had been sort of laughing because it
wasn't a really high end rental and there were actually
only like four forks and forest moods and four knives,
so we had to keep washing them every time we
used them. And then these people were asking us, you know,

(12:29):
where's your silverware and where's all your other valuables and
we kept saying, you know, we're just renting this house.
This isn't our house. So half of the men left
with bank cards to go try and take out money,
and the other half stayed there and waited, And so
we waited and waited as well, sort of lying on
the ground with blankets over our heads. My dad they

(12:52):
tied his hands because I suppose they thought, well, he's
the male, so he's more threatening. And we just waited
and waited and waited, and then suddenly they left, and
basically that was it.

Speaker 2 (13:05):
In the waiting. What was the feeling to the degree
that you even know, and what was kind of the
tenor of whatever orders or conversation went on, I mean,
were you feeling did you have any communication during those
hours with your parents or your sister, and also how

(13:27):
threatened did you feel? Well?

Speaker 1 (13:30):
I think at first I sort of had this weird
feeling that like they were just going to rob us
and leave, you know, fifteen minutes later and I remember
thinking to myself, like, you know, I wonder if people
will be too upset to watch the rest of the movie.
I don't know why I was so attached to watching
Missus doutfire, And then it became clear that they weren't

(13:52):
going to leave right away, especially when they left half
of the people there. I guess I don't know why,
maybe be to threaten us if we had given them
the wrong pin numbers or something. Although we found out
later that the bank flagged the attempt to withdraw whatever
amount of money is suspicious, so they didn't actually end
up getting anything, which sort of makes it feel very futile.

(14:15):
And I think after some of them left, we sort
of thought, like I thought, they're going to kill us,
you know, I thought my life is over. These people
are probably going to kill us. Maybe they'll rape me
and my sister and my mom first, who knows, like
why else would they be here? What are they going
to do when they come back? I mean, all you
kind of have to go on is like horror stories

(14:39):
or you know, horror films or hostage films that you've seen.
This is where our kind of imagination of things come from.
But my sense that my life was genuinely over was
so profound that I don't you know, I think people
talk about near death experiences or being afraid that they
were going to die during turbulence or something, which you know,

(14:59):
maybe is true, But I had never expected ever to
have this feeling of being dead basically, you know, and
just waiting, wondering sort of what would happen to your family?
Was I going to see them torture my family? Would
I have to watch them kill my family? Would I
prefer to be killed first? You know, these kind of
horrible things that you just sort of think, I can't

(15:21):
believe this, Like I'm twenty five and I don't get
to live any longer. And I think that was the
sort of biggest shock. We weren't really able to communicate
with each other. My dad was over in a different
corner of the room, so we couldn't really reach him,
and my mom and my sister and I were all
sort of in a row under this like blankets that

(15:43):
they had put over our heads. And I remember when
they made us lie down on the ground on our fronts,
and my sister said was whispering, you know, is this real?
And I was like, I don't know, you know, That's
the only thing I really remember her saying. Later on,
we had only little bits of communication. We were quite
worried about my dad because he had had a year

(16:05):
previous quadruple bypass heart surgery, so we knew that his
hands were tied behind his back and obviously he was
lying on his front, so we were, you know, worried
he was going to have a heart attack or be
seriously injured. And so I can't remember who was probably
my mom yelled, you know, he's got a heart condition.
Like I think they hit him on the head with

(16:26):
the butt of a machete or something too, although he
wasn't seriously injured, but he was abused by them, and
so at some point in time we were yelling at
them that and so they actually made him more comfortable.
They are these peculiar moments. I don't think they really
knew what they were doing either. It became clear to
us that, you know, at least one of them. Who
had remained behind from this gang was a teenager. And

(16:49):
then I think, you know, at one other point in time,
we yelled at them that we had to go to
the bathroom because it had been at that point, you know,
six hours or something like that, and so they let
us go sort of one by one, and the teenager
watched each one of us, and my mom at one
point yelled out to make sure that we were okay,
because I think it was taking a long time or

(17:09):
something and she couldn't figure out what was happening. And
when I got back, I think I said to my sister,
you know, I have this wine glass stem in my
pocket because I had been holding a wine glass and
it smashed on the ground when I went to lie down,
and I was like, I have this wine glass stem.
I have these pieces of glass, because I had realized

(17:32):
that one of these teenagers all he had was like
a screwdriver or something, and I think I had developed
some kind of deranged, you know, escape fantasy where I
sort of thought, you know, we better do something or
we're just going to die here. And so I was
whispering to her about my plan, and she was like,
I think you should stop talking because she could see
behind me through one of the holes in the blanket

(17:54):
a guy with a machete. And so obviously my plan
did not my plan to escape did not transpire. But
those are really the only things that I remember, you know,
being able to say. And then at one point, my mother,
who was quite feisty, she's a very small, intense person,

(18:14):
started yelling at them, like, you know, why are you
still here? Because I think we just didn't, you know,
It just went on and on and on, and there
seemed to be no reason, and sometimes you could hear
something when one of them watched all of missus doubtfire,
like laughing at the parts that are funny. And then
they put on this sort of Christmas music that we
had brought with us and played it over and over

(18:35):
and over again, but we couldn't really figure out. You
could hear someone walking around. The teenager I think was
obviously getting drunk because we could hear him making drinks,
but we couldn't tell, you know, what on earth was happening.
And I think my mom just maybe her sort of
protective instincts took over and she was like telling them
to get out and stuff, and they did eventually leave

(18:58):
for reasons I also don't know. So this kind of
interminable waiting sort of stretched on and on and took
on this kind of really muscular sort of presence that
then just was over as soon as it had begun.

Speaker 2 (19:13):
I would imagine too, that time must have done some
really funky things. You know, it was six hours, it
likely it would seem to me felt like twice as long,
and also in retrospect, like it was like a second.

Speaker 1 (19:26):
Yeah, it was. I think it was about eight hours total,
and at one point I fell asleep, I sort of
drifted off. It's a really long time, and I assumed
that we had all had an adrenaline rush and that
it kind of disappears, and then you drift off for
a moment, and you know, you wake up on the floor,
on this tile floor. So when I look back and

(19:47):
try and like sort of reconstruct during that time what
I was thinking or doing, there are some kind of
intense feelings or images and remembrances. But it's quite a
long time. Yeah, as you said, it kind kind of
expands and contracts all at once.

Speaker 2 (20:04):
So then what happened after the intruders finally left.

Speaker 1 (20:09):
I guess it must have been like three in the
morning or something like that. We did not have cell
phones there. There was just a landline at the house
and it had been cut, so my sister tried to
go to the neighbor's house to use the phone. And
I don't really know what the rest of us were doing.
I think we were just looking around at what had happened.
I mean, the whole place was trashed. They like cut

(20:31):
open sofa cushions, there was chocolate cakes mirrored on the walls.
I think we were trying to see what else they
had taken. And my sister went next door to see
if we could use the phone, and the people who
lived there wouldn't let her in. I suppose they thought
that maybe she was being held at gunpoint or something
like that, which you know, these people had had guns

(20:52):
and machetes and who knows what else. So they said, well,
we'll call the police for you. So she came back.
We just waited there for the police to show up.
And again, you know, I don't remember how many, two,
maybe three. But also this man named Arthur, whose partner
owned the house, arrived at the same time, and I

(21:15):
don't think we had his phone number. Maybe we did.
I don't think that we called him, so it was
obvious that the police had told him to come. You know,
it's a small place, small island, right, yeah, exactly, And
Arthur came. He said that the woman whose house it
was was unwell, so she couldn't come. He had a
bag with like a searchlight in it and a gun

(21:37):
of his own and some other tools, I think, And
he told us that his father was a tracker, so
he was going to go down to the beach and
see if he could see their footprints and follow them
or something, which was all very strange. And the police
meantime we're asking us questions looking at the house. They
told us that they had heard there was going to
be a siege in the area, which is a very

(21:59):
peculiar your word to hear people use about something that
has happened to you, because it sounds like a sort
of battle. But I think also this is common on
this island home invasions. It's more dangerous now and people
have been you know, home invaded and actually killed. So
we were in any ways extremely fortunate. And then you know,
I think we sort of were looking around trying to

(22:21):
figure out what to take with us because we were
going to go to a hotel for the night because
we obviously couldn't stay at the house. And I remember
looking around and finding very odd things, like in the
front yard there was a duffel bag that didn't belong
to any of us, and in it was like a
roast chicken, someone's undershirt, and my dad's kindle, which he

(22:43):
was really really happy about finding. You know, you find
yourself in these moments sort of dissociated. You know, I
don't think when you have a kind of trauma, you know,
people aren't just sitting around breaking down in tears. You're
sort of just kind of stumbling around and thinking like, oh, gee,
like my kindle is still here, how fantastic. You know.
So we were all sort of trying to figure out
what had just happened and what we were going to

(23:06):
do next. So we went to a hotel and slept
for a couple of hours, and then the police or
Arthur came to meet us at the hotel in the morning.
He had brought some friends, two or three younger guys
who were helping bring us around. I don't really understand
the politics of what was going on, but you know,

(23:29):
there are gangs on the island. I assume it's very
frustrating and also violent and scary for the people who
live there. I assume that people know who did this
or might have done this, but we were not told
any of that information. There was a sense that these
guys were looking for the people who might have done it,

(23:50):
that since it was Arthur's house, there was some kind
of internecine politics amongst them about the fact that it
had been wrong. But I don't know. This is me
looking back and also thinking at the time that I
could feel that something weird, that I was lodged in
an ecosystem that was quite foreign to me, and obviously

(24:10):
it was you know, we were tourists, and so I
think there was this sort of embarrassment on our part
as well, sort of like, you know, we're in this
place of our own choosing maybe we should have expected
that this would have happened, or maybe we should have
been more careful, or you know, were these fortunate people
in a place where there's quite a lot of privation,

(24:31):
which is so often the case with sort of Western tourism.
But then obviously there's a kind of domestic political situation
unfolding at the same time that was not super clear.
The island is a British overseas territory, which, like many
British overseas territories, has been sort of structurally abandoned, but
still retains vestiges of the British legal system, including you know,

(24:56):
expatriots or British people who work there in governing roles
or as judges, et cetera, et cetera. So there was
obviously another issue in terms of the local population, which
was black, and then the kind of colonial overseers or
the hangover of a kind of colonial rule that were

(25:16):
at odds sometimes and then at other times working with
each other. So there are a lot of things, you know,
I just don't understand about this place, and I think
that made it more bizarre to figure out what to do.
I mean, I don't think that going to the police
in any country, including you know, the UK, or Canada
or the US, is like an easy or necessarily useful experience.

(25:36):
But feeling totally confused about the other subtexts that you know,
we could all tell were unfolding, being confused about what
those were and what wasn't being said and which was
not really graspable to us I think made it feel
also very confusing, nefarious, you know, for lack of a

(25:58):
better word.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
Was the feeling among you and your family just wanting
to get the hell off the island or did the
feeling of trappedness kind of continue from when you were
literally being held captive You still couldn't leave the island
for a bit.

Speaker 1 (26:16):
Yeah, our passports had been stolen, except my sisters, so
we needed to go through the process of filing a
police report, which you can use to travel back to
your country of origin with. So you have to present
it to the border guards, which is also a weird experience.
At every juncture, instead of handing someone your passport, you
hand them a police report. But also the governor of

(26:38):
the island wanted to see how quickly they might apprehend
people and if it would be worth us staying there
to identify anyone. My sister and my dad and I
really badly wanted to leave. Whether it was because you know,
it made it feel like it would finally end. You
go to a really physically different place, you go back home,

(26:59):
it's over behind you. Obviously, there's this massive juxtaposition between
you know, Ottawa in the snow and this kind of
idyllic Caribbean island. There's this strange dysjuncture moving between the
one and the two in any case, and my mother,
who as I said, is an intense and very feisty person,

(27:20):
I think, just wanted to stay and be on holiday
still because she probably felt like you know, not because
it didn't matter to her. But she's the one who
hit a lot of the planning. I think she really
cared about spending the time together. She felt it had
been ruined, because it obviously had been more than the
holiday itself had been ruined. So I think there was

(27:40):
this sense that it could maybe be recovered if we
just stayed there, but obviously we would have to stay
in a hotel. I think that the governor and whomever
else offered to put us up in this hotel, but
I just don't think any of us could really fathom
doing that other than my mother, and she was outvoted,
and so we left as soon as we could think.
I think two days later it must have been. So

(28:02):
we stayed another night in the hotel and then left
and we got home. I guess on the twenty third
or the twenty fourth of December.

Speaker 2 (28:19):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Emily's stuck in Ottawa. She can't return to London because
her UK visa is printed in her passport and it
takes time and paperwork to get a new one. She
basically has no idea at all, not even the kind

(28:42):
of identification to get new identification. It's a strange and
lonely time. Her parents had sold the family home and
are temporarily staying in a different house in a different
part of town she doesn't know well. Her sister returns
to Kingston, where she lives, and Emily is left with
her attempt to process her story and how she can
possibly talk about it. To top it off, it's Christmas.

Speaker 1 (29:07):
It's kind of bumping up against these things that then
further complicate situation that you're already in. And I guess
you know, they're kind of designed to be difficult, right,
They're not designed to be easy. But then when you're
feeling like you need them in order to move or
live somewhere or prove who you are, and you're in
this kind of desperate situation, that's when that becomes quite clear.

(29:30):
You know how difficult it is for some people all
of the time. Nonetheless, I was stuck there, and it
very much felt stuck. I think I had this sense, oh,
I'm going to get back to London. I can go
back to my life, which I was so excited about.
I just need to get out of here. But at
the same time, I think I was very sort of dissociated.
No one was visibly upset. I think everyone was stoic

(29:51):
and probably in shock. I mean, sometimes I look back
and think, maybe it would have been a better idea
to stay there and process what happened, rather than just
eject ourselves, as if that would somehow put an end
to it. But maybe not. Also, you know, twenty twenty hindsighted.
I don't know what would have made it easier. What
was very weird was that it was obviously Christmas, like

(30:13):
literally at this point, you know, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day,
and we didn't have any plans. We didn't have any
food in the house, we had no plans to see
anybody because we were supposed to be away. Most of
my friends were not reachable because they were with their
families having Christmas. So we were also in this strange
bubble of our routine that we had become so attached

(30:36):
to every year, our way of celebrating had dysfunctioned, you know,
and kind of exploded in this spectacular way. We were
back somewhere that we weren't supposed to be, and we
also had nothing to do or nothing to celebrate, and
you're sort of in all these places with Christmas music
and lights and decorations, and it was very uncanny. I
think that that time of year became really haunted for

(30:59):
me for some time, because you have this over the
top the celebration and cheer alongside this kind of dystopian,
totally unpredictable situation that nobody was equipped to understand still
what had happened or what we should do next. And
so I think for me, thinking about this good story,

(31:19):
I wanted to tell my closest friends what had happened,
because that felt like what you should do somehow. And
I don't actually even remember what I told them. If
I looked back through emails that I had sent at
the time, and they were quite spare in details, and
I think they must have been really odd to actually receive,

(31:39):
because it was sort of like, well, I'm back home,
because actually, you know, I don't know if I was
trying to make it easy, which I guess is what
the good story is, which I sort of came up
with that phrase because you know, people would really say,
that's such a good story, that's a crazy story. As
if a story is something outside of your life. It's

(32:00):
something that you tell. It's not something that when you're
telling it is something that you're living through. At the
same time, it's sort of encapsulated as something with the
beginning and an end. And I don't think it's because
people were trying to be callous or unkind. I just
think that no one really knows how to frame these
unnarratable things. And also it's not like I could say, oh,

(32:22):
you know, my grandmother has died or I'm getting divorced.
It wasn't something quantifiable that our culture or society understands
or know as many people who have been through I
certainly didn't know anyone who had been through a similar situation.
And so I don't know if I was trying to
make it easy for people to grasp and then just

(32:43):
say are you okay, which is probably all that I
wanted to hear, But I suspect I didn't know what
else to say. But the idea of not telling people
who are close to me felt like a secret, you know.
And I think you're sort of suspended between these two
states of not necessarily knowing how to share something, but
feeling that if you don't, you're sort of it's some

(33:04):
kind of indictment and that you're hiding something. And I
think this is common for a lot of people who
have experienced lost grief trauma, is that they're living their
lives and they have this sense that there's something they
know that makes them different that other people can't tell.
And I think that for me was a huge struggle,

(33:25):
like if you meet a new person, are you supposed
to just tell them right away that you were held
hosted on your holiday because it's something that you're thinking
about all the time, or do you pretend it didn't happen,
or do you wait six months or knowing them for
a year before you say, actually, once, this horrible thing
happened to me. And this, in this sense, the kind
of way that we explain ourselves to people and who

(33:46):
we are became very muddled because this good story that
I couldn't understand even really what had happened or what
I was supposed to say, you know, I lay on
the floor for eight hours thinking I was going to die,
which isn't really great party conversation. This became something that
I had to turn over and over, and I think
sometimes felt like a kind of revelation, sometimes felt like

(34:08):
a kind of shame, sometimes felt like a burden, and
sometimes felt like something I really wanted to pretend had
never happened, as if I could leave it behind in
this other place that we had left so quickly and
that I didn't really always remember details about.

Speaker 2 (34:24):
Yeah, I think there's an impulse too. When the story,
the good story is something that isn't part of every
day most people's lived experience, there's like a desire to
make it palatable in some way, or to control their
reaction so that you don't see the horror on their faces.

(34:48):
No matter what you do, there can be this sense
of isolation and shame, either by not telling or by telling.
And the other thought I'm having is that it's like
finding a version of the story that will cost you nothing. Yeah,
you know, where you know, there's language that becomes sort
of fluid and rehearsed and familiar, but there's no such

(35:10):
thing as it costing you nothing.

Speaker 1 (35:13):
Yeah, I mean, you know, Trauma is relational, and it's
very difficult because we experience it usually individually, even if
it's done by us to other people, and those other
people who do it witnessing it being part of the trauma,
or what's done to a victim to humiliate them, to
injure them, to control them. But after that is over,

(35:34):
trauma is still relational because we live in a world
with other people, and we have relationships with other people,
including ideas of political representation or spirituality or whatever. The
things that we think make up the world is the
place that we land back in, and I think feeling
like I couldn't relate to other people was part of

(35:56):
the inability to speak to them in a deep way.
I think feeling a sense of shame about having been victimized,
you know, which is a word that I really didn't
even think about until much later, because I sort of thought, well,
you know, no one was seriously physically harmed, and of

(36:17):
course being held hostage is like a kind of form
of torture in itself, so it took me a long
time to understand that that was a word that might
have to be used in some contexts. But I think
feeling that I couldn't talk about the worst parts, the
scariest parts, this kind of death feeling, or these sense
that I had died and maybe I was still dead.

(36:39):
The aftermath of trauma is part of trauma, and I
think not knowing how to share it because you either
perceive shame or once you tell it, you think maybe
that's all people will think about you. Oh, that's the
girl that X y Z happened to, sort of like
how we now say someone has depression rather than someone
is depressed, so it's like this thing that can come

(37:01):
and go rather than that you're kind of marked with
this experience. But of course I was marked by the
experience and I could probably tell that. And you know,
the longer you repeat this three word, Pracie, the more
everything else falls away beneath as unutterable. Whereas once it
might have been easier to say. But there was no

(37:21):
place to say that, you know, I didn't have like
a funeral to go to or a support group, which
perhaps I could have found, but there was no obvious way,
especially as a twenty five year old who was living
in you know, a different city where I knew very
few people, and I had only lived for a year.
I think perhaps that made it easier for me to
just shove it down because no one knew me, So

(37:43):
maybe I didn't have to know that about myself either
until it kind of bubbled over and became obviously a
problem because I wasn't coping with the experience.

Speaker 2 (37:56):
Emily has returned to London, but she's not the same
person who left to go on holiday. She might look
the same, sound, the same, walk the same, but she
is profoundly altered. She develops severe insomnia along with paridolia,
which is a psychological tendency to see patterns in everyday
objects and occurrences. Her psyche is working overtime, but there's

(38:18):
no quick fix. It's a process, as she writes, meaning
is a crude not bestowed and this is the work
of time and narrative.

Speaker 1 (38:29):
It's interesting, this thing of the event. When this happened,
it was two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine,
I mean there was then and there still is now
a big discourse around trauma narratives. I think I did
not see what had happened as taking part in that,
because it was this really amorphous thing, you know, it

(38:53):
was this really weird, flexible, disgusting sticky span of time
that was mostly just filled with horror and dread, and
I felt like we had escaped. And I didn't understand
that the psychological aspect of it was the trauma. And
I didn't understand that re entering the world and not

(39:15):
knowing how to be in it and suffering as a
result because of that, such as insomnia or hallucinations or
hearing or seeing things, I did not understand that those
were forms of you know, psychoses basically, So I think
calling it the event, I mean maybe it was a
way to make it less horrible, but also to sort

(39:35):
of disavow the other things that I thought it might
have to sit alongside that I probably felt were shameful
or not things I wanted to be associated with because
I didn't want them to have happened to me. I
didn't want to be a victim. I didn't want to be,
you know, someone who had been psychologically tortured. I didn't

(39:56):
want someone else to have had control over my body
in my mind. I didn't want someone to have watched
me go to the bathroom. You know, this is the
form of humiliation, and so I think the event had
to do with that. But it's also, you know, really
specifically had to do with this feeling that it was
this precise thing that ruptured a kind of before and

(40:20):
divided life into a kind of before and after. And again,
you know, I think this is common for victims of
trauma unless it's been you know, a really durational trauma,
of which there are obviously many. But if there's a
kind of single incident, you know, people feel, oh, I
used to be this person, now i'm this person. This
was the moment where something changed. And of course we're

(40:43):
also taught to think that way through the narratives that
we read. Right, there's a climax, there's a there's a
defining moment where the narrative turns. In the cinema, there's
an event that forms the crux of a motion picture
and it tells us where we're going and what the
point of it is. And I think that I had

(41:04):
borrowed or somehow inherited that as this warping idea, that
what had happened also had to be this kind of
rupture with great significance, and I didn't really know how
to see it in a different way. I also didn't
know how to see that it was unfolding. I think
because of this sense that time is chronological, there's a
beginning and end, there's an event that happened, there's the

(41:26):
time after you move on from it, life continues. But
none of those were really the things that I felt.
And I think that quote that you read about meaning
accruing rather than being bestowed really has to do with
the complexity around that idea of what the event was
and why it helped and also did not help. To
use it as a way to think about what had happened.

Speaker 2 (41:48):
Yeah, it's so interesting that the popular literature of trauma
hadn't really been written yet. So the way I'm hearing
this is almost like, first of all, I think it's
a hallmark of trauma to minimize it to again because
of what you said, you know, it's kind a story
you just want to send back to the story story.
You don't want it a good story or no. And
there's comparison. There is the sense that, well, there's always

(42:08):
somebody who's had a bigger trauma, so this isn't really
that bad. So it's like trauma becomes the secret that
one keeps from oneself in a certain way, even while
it's impossible and we live in a world that tells
us that closure is a thing. The good story has
an ending.

Speaker 1 (42:26):
Yeah, it's over, it's over. Why can't you just move on?

Speaker 2 (42:32):
Besil vander Kolk writes about this. Judas Hermann writes about
this the specific cruelty of a trauma rooted in being
trapped in the total collapse of agency. There is no fighting,
there is no fleeing, and you're not freezing exactly either.
You can only endure, you can only wait, And that

(42:54):
kind of helplessness, research tells us, is among the hardest
to integrate. To find some way of carrying it inside
a life that still has to be lived. For Emily,
the carrying takes almost a decade, the dog days, she
calls them, and only slowly, gradually does she begin to
understand and confront the reality that shame has attached itself

(43:18):
to what happened. Shame, of course, being one of trauma's
most unwelcome companions, the pervasive feeling that you have done
wrong after you have been wronged. As if the wound
itself isn't enough, the shame follows her lurks, and years
after the island incident, Emily is working at another gallery

(43:41):
in London when her agency is yet again threatened, but
she won't let it collapse entirely. Not this time. She's
mugged and thinks, no, you can't do this to me.

Speaker 1 (43:54):
That was particularly unfortunate, not just because of being mugged
and losing my laptop, but all so. I think, you know,
most people who've had a trauma that's like a kind
of near death event, let's say, like you know, a
car crash or whatever, you sort of think, well, the
likelihood of this happening again is slim to none. I've survived,

(44:17):
and now I'm safe because I'm probably not going to
get mugged or held hostage like a bunch more times
in my life. Of course, there's no guarantee, right, nothing
happens to any one person for any reason, which is
I think another one of the questions that's really attached
to that of trappedness that you mentioned that besil vander Kolk,
and to determine talk about this kind of there is

(44:38):
no why so what are you going to do with
that question? But in any case, I was sort of thinking, oh,
you know, I'm managing okay, I have this job, I've
done my time circling the drain or having this terrible experience.
And we were installing a show at the gallery, and
so the desk that we used had been moved to
the front of the room because we were installing in

(44:59):
the back. So I was visible from the window. But
it was very small and quite a busy street because
there's a lunch market. And someone came in. This guy
came in wearing a motorcycle helmet, and I thought that
was odd because you would think that someone would take
it off. This was before there were so many delivery
uber eats people, you know, who are now in these

(45:19):
really time pressure jobs where they're picking up food. So
they run in with their helmet on, and I found
it unusual, and I had this feeling in my stomach like,
what is this guy even coming in here? For we're
an art gallery. It's not open. And he asked me
for directions, and so I told him, and I had
this feeling that I should shut my laptop and pull
it towards me, but I didn't because I don't know.

(45:40):
I was naive and didn't think, oh, this guy's going
to try and steal my laptop. And he asked me again,
and I told him again, and then he sort of
lunged towards me and grabbed my laptop, and I had
headphones on that were plugged into the computer, and so
it kind of pulled me out of my seat towards
the door as he was running out, and there was
like a getaway a motorcycle outside with someone else on it,

(46:03):
and so he went to go jump onto the back.
And I don't recommend this, by the way. I think
I was just on a kind of like massive adrenaline
insert and I was so angry that I ran after
him and grabbed his coat and he almost fell off
the motorcycle and then I slipped in a puddle and
fell on the ground and he got away. And this
man who lived across the street, who this is funny,

(46:28):
but years later I ended up living in the same
area and near the barbicane and in the barbicane for
part of the time, and I used to see this
same man around who had come and helped me, and
I remembered that it was him because he had two
of those very high tech prosthetic legs from the knee down,
you know, like the ones that kind of like Olympian

(46:49):
runners have. And I had never really seen them before,
so he was quite distinctive looking. He came over and said,
are you okay. He helped me call the police. I
don't really remember what happened. My boss was down this
getting his hair cut and getting like a shave or
something at this Turkish barber because we had an opening
the next day, and I had said, yeah, go ahead,
and I was trying to lock the door and I

(47:09):
just could not hole. I was throwing the keys around,
they were all over the ground, and I just did
not have control of my hands. And that was a
very weird moment. I mean, I've said weird a lot.
I realized Trink this conversation, but it was, you know
these things you sort of look at yourself and not
know what you were doing or what was happening to you.

(47:29):
People talk about how a trauma resurfaces later in a
subsequent experience, and I suppose you know, that was one
moment where finally my body other than insomnia, but physically,
I could look at myself and see that these hands
were doing something I had control of and I couldn't
stop them from shaking.

Speaker 2 (47:52):
We'll be right back during those years of the dog days,
Emily's family upholds its tradition of their annual Christmas holiday,
even once going to another Caribbean island. Her sister keeps

(48:13):
doing the spreadsheet of which movies to watch. The subtext
seems to be this is behind us, We're getting back
to normal, except we know this isn't the way it works.

Speaker 1 (48:26):
I don't know that it was the greatest idea to
keep going on holiday Christmas, but we had sort of
backed ourselves into this corner of that being our tradition.
You know, we didn't talk about it as a family,
and I don't think that anyone would have objected if
somebody brought it up and said, look, I'm really upset
about this. I'm really struggling. But that is also not

(48:46):
something that we really do in my family. And again,
I don't think it's because anyone's unkind or doesn't care.
There's just a toughness to kind of get on with it.
We just didn't really talk about it, and I think
there was this sense, too, oh, if we just keep
going on this holiday together, it will be like it
never happened. We weren't defeated. Our way of doing things

(49:09):
was not taken from us. We can just carry on.
But of course on those holidays I became very paranoid
and couldn't really sleep and had a lot of sort
of intrusive cycling thoughts because things were getting worse and
worse for me because I obviously had, you know, retrospectively,
like a kind of post traumatic stress disorder. But I

(49:30):
think I thought, well, you know, I can still get
up in function, so it's probably just like a difficult
time and I'm a depressive or something. Also, my sister
got married, so she stopped coming on the holidays. That's
how we ended up in Spain that one year because
I was living in the UK, so it was sort
of easier for my parents to come this way. And
I think we thought it would be warm, but it

(49:50):
wasn't really, and we had these sort of terrible storms,
and we're watching DVDs that we actually didn't bring with us.
They were in the house, which accounts for the site
bizarre selection.

Speaker 2 (50:02):
Well, it was interesting because you describe watching on that trip,
you know, when you're really at a low point and
you're watching It's a Wonderful Life and a Matter of
Life and Death, which we're both films made the same year,
and you watch them over and over. And the phrase

(50:23):
that you wrote about this that I found so striking
was you were trying to glean something from these films
about how to reintegrate into normal society after a brush
with fate, and that reintegrate into normal society is something
that we're just supposed to do, and you weren't doing it.

(50:44):
You couldn't do it. You were like functioning, but internally
it was like you were like one of those characters
in one of those films.

Speaker 1 (50:53):
Yeah, I think, you know, looking back, I think this
struggle for me was really the sense of not understanding
why something happened, feeling like I was no longer myself,
and feeling like I lived in a different world than
anybody else, and that in itself became this kind of
enduring trauma of being alienated, misunderstood, and feeling deceased, you know,

(51:18):
feeling that I was living in some kind of afterlife.
And so the idea of somehow reintegrating it just felt impossible.
And you know, that's a word that's used a lot
in certain kinds of analysis or psychology practices, that the
idea for trauma is that you find a way to
reintegrate or you integrate the traumatic event into the narrative

(51:40):
of the rest of your life. And of course it's
more complex than that in the way that different therapists work.
But I fundamentally felt that that was a lie. That
was sort of why I couldn't do it, you know,
I just sort of thought, there is no way to
do that. So now I live here in this other place,
you know, by myself, and I think, you know, in
those films, there at these kind of famous moments of

(52:02):
time being frozen. So in It's a Wonderful Life, there's
this moment where George Bailey is in Bedford Falls and
he never existed, and it's a completely different place, and
he's walking around and no one knows who he is,
and he'd saying, I'm George Bailey, I'm George Bailey, but
no one knows who he is. And I sort of
felt in that pause that there was this sense that

(52:24):
I recognized of my life having been paused, that this
could happen in a life, And I was so stunned
by it visually, and I was so moved by the
ending of the film where he finds a way to
return to his life having basically died and ejected himself
from it, and it was strange to identify with the

(52:46):
protagonist of this film, who's sort of a middle aged
family man. But of course it was post war, so
in the US and elsewhere there's this reckoning with a
return to life after something monumental changing. So he was
sort of living through this return to life after having
been elsewhere. And in a matter of life and death,

(53:06):
we have a character who should have died, but there
has been a mistake in the afterworld, and so he
was allowed to live on Earth for another twenty four
hours erroneously, and in that time he fell in love
with someone. So an angel or the Conductor comes from
heaven or the afterlife and says, I'm sorry, but you
have to come with me, and the character is put

(53:30):
on trial and he has to argue for why he
is still allowed to live and that his life in
fact does belong to him, and that this time wasn't borowed.
And there's a moment in that film where time pauses
as well, because every time the Conductor comes down to Earth,
life on Earth stops, but the protagonist keeps living. It
was kind of extraordinary to me to look back at

(53:52):
these films to see these men who had been through
these wartime scenarios, who were having these experiences that I
really related to, And I suppose that artistically and culturally
and formally I found that really interesting.

Speaker 2 (54:06):
So do you think that in some way in the
watching those films again and again there was a little
dent in the isolation that you had been feeling in
terms of the feeling of deadness.

Speaker 1 (54:20):
I think because I've always been like a reader and
a watcher and also a consumer of images and objects
in art settings, I think there's always been a sense
to me that we look at things made by other
people not just to understand our own lives, but to
understand how other people face the human project of living

(54:40):
and also surviving on earth and with people, which I
think is not always easy and involves facing various difficult
realities sort of structural, political, cultural, individual And so there
was a sense to me that I knew that you
should look outside of yourself for way to better understand

(55:01):
your own experience through the experiences of others, or that
artwork tells us something in a different way that we
can't necessarily just formulate in straight sentences, you know. And
I think film is a really amazing version of that
because it involves the stuff of life, but it does
a lot of fantastical things with them. And I think
probably the kind of cinematic experience of that was more

(55:25):
striking to me perhaps than obviously I had been reading.
There are a lot of short stories and female writers
and essays who I turned to a lot, but those
movies somehow did something different. It was like, maybe I
could make a whole that scrambled time and showed what
it was like to move back and forward and live

(55:46):
through it. And maybe my understanding of these films through
my own perspective of rupture or time travel in a
sense or stasis, maybe my understanding of those films could
be part of that. They could be like this proxy
conversation for being stuck. That I could enter the films,
that I could have a relationship with the films and

(56:07):
describe that, and it would explain something that I couldn't
simply do in a straightforward narrative. And so I think
that big moving image aspect of it probably was really
striking in a way that other art forms maybe hadn't
made occur to me yet.

Speaker 2 (56:26):
In her posthumously published memoir Moments of Being Virginia. Wolf
famously writes, I make it real by putting it into words.
It is only by putting it into words that I
make it whole. This wholeness means that it has lost
its power to hurt me. It gives me, perhaps because
by doing so, I take away the pain, a great

(56:48):
delight to put the severed parts together. Emily knows this
has lived this the way that writing towards something terrible
can in turn begin to soften its edges. And yet
there's something in Wolf's formulation that resists tidiness. The severed
parts are put together, yes, but they remain fundamentally severed.

(57:13):
The wholeness is never without its traces of fracture.

Speaker 1 (57:18):
Maybe you can see the sutures, right, if we're talking
about it as a kind of body, maybe you can
see the cracks. They don't have to fit exactly. They
can never be the same body again. But the making
something out of them is what changes the severed parts.
And that ability to make choices about what you don't

(57:39):
have to fill in either because you can't remember, because
you feel it's not interesting, because perhaps conventional narrative demands it,
but you don't want to say it to people, or
to fill the spaces with the words of other writers
or other makers. I think was really important to me
because I also feel that trauma is collective in a

(57:59):
lot of ways. Not that it's shared, not that everyone
has the same experience, but we live in this immensely
traumatic world and we don't have ways to talk about that.
So people are living these really individual experiences. But actually
having my experience and my writing sit alongside other art
forms in the book, and you know, researchers who are

(58:22):
foundational to trauma study, like Judith Herman or Bessel vander
Kolk was really important to me too, those part of
the severed parts, because they were things that I looked
at to understand what had happened to me because I
didn't understand. And so I think that idea of collage
or a commonplace book, working through other people's writing with

(58:42):
my own writing was really important to me in terms
of a I suppose like a political view of how
we talk about trauma as not simply a single story,
and that was very freeing.

Speaker 2 (58:58):
Trauma narratives never quite and Emily eventually learns that one
of the hostage takers lives in London. In fact, somewhat
near a flat she wants lived in. This understandably spooks her.
It stays with her, and so when she happens to
meet a private investigator at a party, she takes the
coincidence and runs with it. She wants to know more,

(59:21):
and as fantasies about confronting this man who had been
a teenager during the event, she wants to know, what
were you after? What did you want? As she writes,
I want my information back. She doesn't even know what
this means, but she knows it's true. The lost passport,
the long wait for identification so she could regain her identification,

(59:45):
these were not only metaphors. Emily wants her information back.

Speaker 1 (59:53):
I think when I said that there were many things
that I couldn't remember, and I felt quite shocked and
angry about that. And you know, it's possible that in
normal memory you don't remember everything anyway, but I had
this sense that I would never be able to know
why I didn't remember it, And something about that felt

(01:00:13):
like some of my existence or some of my experience
had been disappeared, like it had been taken from me.
And I think in that moment I actually felt it,
in this really rudimentary way. I want to know what
happened and why and all of these kind of practical details.
But of course, looking back, I think it was like,

(01:00:35):
because of this sense of rupture of a before and after,
I felt like if I could answer some practical questions,
I would no longer be this person who was potentially
missing things that they could have been but which had
somehow been erased. In this moment, I think I had
a feeling, and this is again something that people who've

(01:00:57):
experienced traumas talk about, of a life foreshortened or stalled,
that your future is fated because something happened and it
has eradicated the possibility of being who you were in
the first place, or having the life you might have had,
or being free the way other people are to make decisions,

(01:01:18):
and to know why you are the way you are,
whether you chose it or whether it was something imposed
on you externally. And I think those kinds of information
are linked. But I guess that now it doesn't matter,
you know, And I don't know if it's just that
it's been so much time. I don't know if it's

(01:01:40):
that I wrote this book, which is very much about
grappling with the aftermath and answering these questions through looking
outward and that being a way of integrating yourself into
the world versus integrating things into yourself or that. Now
there is this book, and I made something. Whether I

(01:02:02):
understand what happened or not, this is what I have now. Yeah,
so I don't think I got my information back, but
I think I made new information and I think I
probably realized that that's what you have. That's the option
with life, whether you experienced a trauma or not. You know,

(01:02:22):
no one's responsible for what happened to them, but we
are all responsible for what we do with that. And
it's easier for some than it is for others, you know,
practically speaking. But this is what I've done, and this
is who I am now.

Speaker 2 (01:02:52):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's A Core
is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder and if you'd

(01:03:17):
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.