June 27, 2019 • 44 mins
In this special episode Dani sits down with Nora McInerny from the podcast Terrible, Thanks for Asking.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. I'm
Danny Shapiro and this is a special bonus episode of
Family Secrets. This summer, I was so excited to have
Nora McNerney, the host of the wonderful podcast Terrible, thanks
(00:23):
for asking join me for a live taping of Family
Secrets at Rizzoli Bookstore in New York City. This is
part one of our conversation. Well, hey, everybody, very exciting
(00:50):
for me because you know you you make podcasts kind
of a loaner with one other person in a tiny,
little dark space. UM. And this is the first live
event that I've done for Family Secrets. UM. So that's thrilling.
And what's particularly thrilling is to have Norah with me,
(01:10):
because I have to say that when I was starting
to think about doing a podcast, I knew nothing about
how to do a podcast. I listened pretty regularly to
some podcasts that I liked a lot. I live in
rural Connecticut, I drive a lot, and I would listen
to podcasts in my car. UM. And I knew what
I liked and I knew what I didn't like, But
I didn't necessarily really think or discern why. UM, when
(01:33):
I read. I've spent my life as a writer, so
when I read, I know what I like or what
I don't like and why, or what's good or what
I don't think is as good and why. But I
didn't know with podcasts. And then I was in conversation
with the podcast producers who I ended up partnering with,
and someone in one of those phone calls said, have
(01:55):
you listened to Terrible? Thanks for asking? Do you know
Nora mcinner me? And since I was sort of a
podcast virgin um and late to the party, I had
not yet listened to Terrible Thanks for Asking? And then
I basically binge listened to Nora for weeks and weeks
because I thought, Oh, I think I do know how
(02:17):
to do this. I think I want to do this
the way that she does this, in the sense of
holding a story, like holding being someone who has actually
is not just a just but you know, is not
a journalist or am an observer or doesn't have any
(02:37):
skin in the game, but someone who is actually um,
like on the path that is the same path that
um she's asking her guests to walk. And so there's
something very different about that and very intimate about that,
and then in addition to that, the artfulness and the
(02:58):
way that there is the story of the guest, but
then there is the host and the host holding the story,
which is the way I always think of it. So Nora,
thanks for doing this with me. Oh and I should
also add that this conversation took place. Oh yeah, also
thank you for having me. But more importantly, this conversation
took place with each of us in our cars, and
(03:22):
within five minutes, I was like, I mean, listen to
your voice. You should absolutely have a podcast. Like I
was like, I feel like I don't even know what
you said for the past five minutes, but like I'm
I mean, I will download that podcast. I would listen
to you say anything. And um, I stand by that statement. Well,
thank you and thank you for being my brabbi. I
(03:43):
uh what what What Nora's leaving out is that when
I listened to her podcast binge listened to it, I
was like, I need to talk to her. I need
I need to find out like what am I in for?
Like what is this thing? And and and Nora gone
on the phone with me and us we were in
our cars, like she has at a car wash and
at the car dealer. I was sitting outside this UM
(04:05):
cafe where I go work in the country. UM, just
like sitting in my car in like you know, dead
of winter with the engine running, kind of just looking
out over a waterfall and just having like these a
couple of long conversations, UM that were these deep dives
into And I guess this is a lot of what
I would love to talk with you about today. UM.
(04:26):
What it is two experience something you know on a
human scale, very very difficult UM. In your case, UM,
having been widowed at a shockingly young age, the loss
of your husband Aaron, and a lot of loss compounded
all at once, and then a moment where or tell
(04:49):
me if it's a moment but a feeling where in
which you need to do something with it other than
sit with it. It was kind of a series of
moments for me. But for those of you who don't
know my very um uplifting story, my husband Aaron died
when he was thirty five. He had brain cancer for
(05:10):
three years and I was thirty one and we had
almost two year old child together, and he died right
after my dad died of cancer. But my dad had
cancer very briefly, which was like rude, like Aaron already
has cancer, Like you can't also get cancer, you can't
die first. Um. And then my dad had died right
after I had miscarried my second child with Darin. So UM,
(05:32):
just set in the tone for a fun evening out
for you, for you all welcome. And I I had
always been a person, even when I was very little,
and I know you were too, who was always like
very observant, very attuned to the other the emotions of
the other people. Um, in my life and in my orbit.
And I I had never had anything that I thought
(05:58):
was important to write about, which if if you ever
feel that way, like literally you can write about anything
like and truly you don't have to have you don't
have to have, like a disaster happened to you. Um.
But I always thought, like, what would I write about?
You're supposed to write what you know. I don't know anything.
Nothing's ever happened to me. And Aaron had a seizure
(06:19):
at work a year after we started dating, and I
met him at the hospital and we were both like, man,
we gotta get you out of here. It's Halloween. We
gotta hand out candy. It just did not register to
us that this this was the thing, This was a
serious thing, both of us. Instagram had just come out.
This was a simpler time. This was like you know,
(06:40):
we were He was like, take a picture, take a
picture of me, like laying in the e R. And
I was like, yeah, that's that's funny, that's cool. Um,
He's like take a picture. They have to put me
in a wheelchair. It's like that's great, it's great. It's
got two likes. So it's me and it's you. What
did you? I liked my own photo just to get
the get that content rolling. Um. But I always had
(07:04):
notebook with me. It was always filled with very important
work things. I worked in advertising, so like truly life
or death kind of stuff happening every day. And I
remember Aaron being pushed into the mri I room and
him giving me the thumbs up and the door closing,
and that hitting me like, oh, this is this is
(07:25):
a moment. This is an important moment, and there will
be before this moment and there will be after it,
whatever happens, Like this is this is a big thing.
And I sat in that hallway and I wrote everything
that had happened, and I didn't think that it was
for anybody else, but a part of me knew, and
I wrote this in that same notebook that I had
(07:46):
to keep my eyes open for this, even though I
didn't want to. I didn't want to remember seeing him
going going like this. Um from that room, I didn't.
I just wanted to go home and hand out Halloween candy.
And at first, when I started writing about it again,
this was a simpler time. I used tumbler dot com
and uh, I password protected it. I don't want anyone
(08:09):
knowing all my secret feelings. Nobody cared. And then, um,
I just got tired of writing group emails to people,
which I'm sure you've written quite a quite a lot
of group emails lately. You have to keep so many
people updated when when your life turns upside down. And
I took the password off it, and I was like,
I'm only going to be writing here. And it was
(08:32):
immediately not updates about Aaron's cancer. It was observations about
what it was like to be alive with him, because
I didn't want him to be a sad story, and
I could feel that from people. I could feel people
just like pitying us and feeling bad for us, and
I hated it, and I truly thought the only people
(08:52):
who would read something like that would be the people
who knew us and already and cared about us. But uh,
it started to be parent that more people were reading
it than I knew personally. I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota,
and so I know, I mean, I know most of
the city. There's a good chance I'm related to like
most people I encounter there. UM, But not everybody knew us,
(09:17):
But people could understand that feeling, that feeling of being
so out of control of your life and having your
life go so off the path that it's supposed to
when you meet someone and you fall in love, like
it's just supposed to be good. You know, that's supposed
to like immediately turned into UM an episode of Gray's Anatomy.
(09:40):
So when people would begin to respond and and they
went beyond the people that you knew in Minneapolis, UM,
was that a feeling of UM supporting community UM? Or
did you feel in any way like WHOA you know?
Was there any sense of privacy being invaded? Or you
(10:02):
know a lot of people know stuff about me and
I don't. I don't know them, but they feel they
know me? Or or did it feel like a good thing.
I think that if the same thing were to unfold now,
it would look so drastically different, Like the difference between
twenty nineteen internet and Internet is crazy. It's not even
it's not even the same world. And so the people
(10:26):
who were reaching out, we're literally just leaving comments. They
were um like it was such a it was such
a smaller system. Does that make sense now? It would
be there would just be so many ways to access
that information, and it would be so much more direct.
And I think that thirty six year old me in
(10:47):
Internet probably wouldn't do it that same way. But I
was seven, and it was the year, and I did
it the way that I knew how, and that felt
natural all for how I was, And it did feel
so amazing to have people care, because it's so lonely
to be sick or to have someone you love be sick,
(11:09):
and to automatically inhabit this different version of the world
where you are, where your calendar has all the normal
stuff on it, like you have a nine am conference
call and then at one pm you have to go
pick up your husband and take him to get chemo infusion,
and your friends care, but they also just don't know
what that's like. They just don't know. So having people
(11:31):
from really all over be able to say, I know
how that feels, I know how you feel like I
care about this thing that feels too big for you
to even like talk to anybody face to face about.
The Internet gave me away to to say the things
that I could not say to the people who cared
(11:52):
about me face to face, because it's just so much.
It's so much for a casual conversation ship. When you
run into a friend of a friend at the co op,
that's a lot you knows as you're talking. I was
thinking about the difference between writing a book and UM
(12:14):
and beginning to post online and and ultimately then what
leads to making a podcast, right, So writing a book,
which is something you do alone in a room in
this way, I mean when I when I was writing Inheritance, UM,
I rented an office that was out of my home. UM.
(12:35):
And just briefly for anyone who doesn't know what my
book is about, I UM made the discoveries three years ago,
almost exactly three three years ago, that my dad who
raised me had not been my biological father. I had
never known this. UM it was a secret that was
very much kept from me by my parents. And so
it was just like identity shifting, um massive shock that
(12:57):
that happened in my life. Very very different on your story.
But as I was beginning to work on inheritance, I
rented an office because I couldn't be in my home
with all this research that had to do with early
reproductive medicine in this country, and just some kind of
crazy details about what people were told and not told,
(13:19):
and it was very disturbing. It's very disturbing to be
told that you would be considered an abomination in your
face because because in Judaism they didn't, you know, rabbis
didn't believe in artificial insemination, donor insemination and so forth.
So I would be in this office and I would
go in every morning, and it was in an empty house.
A friend who was a lawyer had recently moved his
(13:40):
law offices and the house was just sitting there for sale.
But the real estate broker said to me, no one's
ever going to buy it. You'll be fine, you can
have every years. And I would go into this completely
empty house and I would go up the stairs and
I would unlock the door to my office, and in
the office there was a beatle, a bug a beatle,
and it was the only living thing in this house.
(14:01):
And I would like look forward to seeing the beetle,
and I would wait for the beetle to make itself
known each day. And they're like, oh, there's the beetle. Wow,
the beatles finding something to eat here. It's like, still,
there's my beetle. That's how solitary it was, right, So
it's like in a way, And then the experience of
writing a book and publishing a book even is that
(14:23):
you're not seeing people read it. They're not responding in
real time. Every once in a while, someone on Instagram
posts a picture of like, look, there was somebody on
the subway reading your book. And it's the most amazing
thing when that happens. But it's not that sense of
immediate response that that you're describing the feeling of putting something,
(14:44):
putting a raw and complicated thought out there, and then
immediately having this world of some version of me too. Yeah,
And I think that's part of like the addictive nature
of the Internet. And I will usually say, oh God,
I hate the Internet. Somebody should find it and unplug
it and we should all just write each other letters
(15:06):
and make phone calls on landlines and um. And I
usually stand by that. And also some of the most
amazing things that have come out of this experience would
not have existed without the Internet and without social media.
(15:26):
I I was never posting things trying to accumulate followers. Um.
Internet celebrity hadn't wasn't a thing I would say in
at least not a thing in in my life and
my world. But what I remember about Aaron being diagnosed
is immediately googling it, regretting googling it, and committing to
(15:52):
never looking it up again. Never, never, never, Because the
only thing that I found out he had stage four
glioblastoma was that he was going to die. And that
um when I when I looked, even just just I
was like, maybe there's something on the second page of
Google like that would be like, no, we won't UM.
So I went looking for the like he's not going
to die page, and all I found was forums of
(16:13):
of women. This is a cancer that mostly affects men,
young men. Pages and pages of forums of women who
were just chronicling their husband's cancer, just their just their sickness,
the treatment that he was getting the pill, that he
was taking, the doctor that he had seen, the specialists
that they had they had gone to for a second opinion,
(16:33):
and I thought, I don't want that. I don't want that.
I don't want that life. I don't want Aaron to
have that life. I want to be people. I want
everybody who reads anything about us to know that we
are people and that this is our life. And when
I look back at those early posts, I was truly
creating a manual for the people who knew us and
(16:54):
those who didn't, to say, this is who we are,
and this is how you should in age with us.
Do not feel bad for us, you can feel with us.
And the people who found me were the same women
who did the same Google search I did, but my
blog went to the top of those search results, and
(17:17):
they would just see two people and then eventually a baby,
also living, just living. I never wrote about what Aaron
was taking. When people asked me what Aaron was taking, like, frankly,
I don't know. For a long time, I thought one
of his infusions was I don't know where I got
this information, Danny. I was certain. I was like, oh, yeah,
Aaron goes on Wednesdays, he gets like a vitamin. This
(17:38):
doctor was like, what that's chemo. I was like, well,
someone once explained to me that it was vitamin drip.
And he's like, no one ever said that to you.
I'm like, well, that's how I heard it. And guess
what he felt great after it to be adaptive, right,
I was like, well, looks, I mean, it's kind of
the color of a vitamin. I maybe I assumed. I
don't know, um, very medically minded. Um. I can't remember
(18:04):
where that story was going. My train of thought is
literally just a jet ski and so we're going to
go a lot of places, and so let me guide
you a little yea. So wait, yeah, should be a
jet ski, I think they have. I think a train.
I also don't know. I've never been on one, but
I've seen people use them, and they seem they see
(18:27):
even a fully dangerous and out of control. So here
I am so the way that, you know, when people
have been asking me about family secrets and how it
came to be, I keep on describing it as some
combination of um, this very organic thing. I never thought,
oh podcast, I listened to them, I should make one
(18:50):
also kind of a happy accident, like some combination of
like an organic happy accident. And so I guess I'm
wondering what the moment was for you when you moved
from I'm posting these, um these bullets like bulletins, this
(19:10):
kind of in a way educating people in how to
how to be with me and how to be with Aaron,
um and maybe even really how to be with anyone
who's ill into something that you make that's artful and
that um, and then that becomes terrible. Thanks for asking. Yeah,
I I also didn't set out to be like, oh
(19:33):
my weight, so my husband has a brain tumor, looks
like I finally have a book. Um. It wasn't like
great and he's gonna die awesome, Um great, Um. That
was not that I really wanted to write a book
when I was younger. That was about a girl who
moves to New York and wants to be a writer
but instead finds herself like in a different kind of
(19:54):
job and her boss is crazy, and um, that book
is the devil worst product. Tragically, tragically, it was made
into a classic film featuring Anne Hathaway, And so I
was like, well, I guess I'll never be able to
write a book. Someone beat me to the one story
I have, And um, I didn't write my blog like
(20:15):
necessarily hoping that it would be a book. I still
had a job, you know, I was working every day
writing tweets for discount hair care companies. Uh seven nine haircuts.
That's a full tweet, by the way, seven en haircut,
seven nine haircut this weekend link. Um got paid the
big books for that. Um. So it's not as if
I was sitting there, you know, calculating how this could
(20:40):
be a thing. So this is how it happened. This
is like my origin story. Is that everything that I
ever posted Aaron read. Aaron saw every picture, he read
every caption, he read every post. Because it wasn't my story.
It was the story of our family. And my dad died,
which I already told you, But guess what my dad's
(21:02):
dad must say? As many times I can. My dad
died and I had to write his obituary. And we
have I have three siblings, and you know, I write
a draft, they all edit it. It's very it's it's
the worst collaborative effort that you can imagine. And because
we're like, I don't know what is important to dad
like my brother's like, I don't think that's that part's important, Like, well,
you know, to me, it felt like that was a
(21:22):
really you always write somebody's obituary customarily after they die,
which does make sense because it's kind of a bummer
to right. But I didn't want to go through that again.
And I didn't want to be the person who wrote
the final word on what Aaron's life meant, because he
was so unique, he was so funny. And the night
(21:43):
that he entered hospice and we had no idea what
that meant other than you can't have any more chemo vitamins. Um.
We went home and we put our baby to bed,
and I opened up my laptop and I said, uh,
I think we have to write your obituary right now,
and he was like, okay, Um, I really wanted to
(22:07):
watch Game of Thrones and like, we'll get to that.
We will, we will do that. And we paused Game
of Thrones and we sat down and we wrote his
obituary together, and the first line of it is per
mort Aaron Joseph Age died on November fourteen due to
complications from a radioactive spider bite, and UH revealed his
(22:32):
identity as Spider Man and gave you know, shout out
to his first wife, Gwen Stefani, and it mentioned, you know,
the the band that he was in in high school,
a local a local band called the Asparagus Children. Anyone
heard of it? Weird? Okay? Where that didn't get past
(22:54):
Anoka County, Minnesota. Oh strange. And I didn't think that
they would a blish it, but we wrote it, and
turns out they will publish it because in obituary is
an advertisement for your death, so they will you pay
for it, They'll they'll publish whatever you want. So take
that knowledge home tonight. And they published it after Aaron
died and it went viral like crazy everywhere on the internet.
(23:19):
That I that I looked for distraction from planning his funeral,
which actually he planned so I really didn't have much
to do but implementing those plans. Um, he was there,
his face was there, and it's because it was so
true to who he was, and that is so rare.
That's not something that you see all the time. It
(23:39):
was people. People loved that. And a woman named Jessica
Regal emailed me and said, I'm so sorry about your husband.
Um and you know, I'm a I'm an agent. Maybe
in like five years, you'd want to write a book.
And I replied and I was like, I probably would
write it now, honestly, And she was like, that sounds insane.
We'll talking in five years, and I was, no, I
(24:00):
really do I want to write it now, because I
there are so many books written from distance of time,
and those are wonderful. A lot of them helped me
when I was when Aaron was diagnosed, after Aaron had died,
and I wanted to write something while I was in it,
while I was in all of that chaos, because being
in something is also a perspective. And so I two
(24:25):
months after Aaron died, I was here in New York City, Uh,
wearing so many I was wearing like an outfit from
Jay Crew, like on the on the I can't think
of the word mannequin. That's the word where you know
they dressed Jay Crew models or mannequins, and many layers.
It's it's too many layers. Was it winter? It was winter,
but not that winter, not like a sweater shirt and
(24:47):
a jacket winter. It was too much. I thought I
was going to die, but instead I sold a book
we're going to pause for a moment. Let's let's go
to the idea of immediacy for a minute, because I
think that that's actually really UM, I think it's key
to both of our stories and both of our experiences.
(25:09):
I mean, Inheritance is my tenth book I owe and
fifth memoir, and I always believed that it was impossible
to write anything good out of immediate experience, out of
sort of the raw immediacy, and UM, and I think
it's it's definitely like you know the commercials say, like,
(25:31):
you know, don't try this at home, or because I,
for me, UM, the story of Inheritance, I didn't want
to tell from my rocking chair someday. I wanted to
capture it as it was unfolding, or maybe was a
half a step away from it enough to have a
little bit of a way of pivoting toward it and
away from it. But it felt essential that it be
(25:52):
told that way. UM, And I wonder whether to take
it a step further than in podcasting. There's such intimacy
in in podcasting. It's intimate in the way that it's made,
in the conversations that you know that you have with
your guests, or that I have was my guests is
intimate in the way that it's listened to. Uh, at
(26:15):
least his intimate is reading because you know, you've got
these you know, air pods in or whatever they're called,
and you know, or you're in your car alone. People
don't have like podcast listening parties, at least not yet.
I mean maybe a little become a thing, um, but
it's something that people do by themselves. And so there's
this there's this voice in literally become the voice in
(26:37):
someone's head. So so then how does how does it
go from you know, you're in these j crue layers
and you sell the book and it's two months after
Aaron died to um it becoming the birth of a podcast.
Did you intend for that to happen? Because another thing
that I think that happens with people a lot um
(26:57):
when they see see something that works a book, a
short story, an essay, a podcast, there's always like retrospective intentionality, like, oh,
this must have been the plan all along and that's
why it's a thing. And as about me, it's so flattering.
Everyone thinks, right, it was on it was on a
(27:19):
list of this is how you're going to be about it.
It's almost never the case that that's what it is now.
I uh. I was unemployed, so an unemployed widowed mom
with a toddler and a mortgage. I sold a book.
I started trying to do freelance copyrighting on the side.
(27:40):
But I had this other full time job, which was
managing the emotions of anyone who had read that obituary,
and anybody whose husband was sick, and anybody's husband who
had died, and they would email me. It would email
me because I was a person who had said something
about it, and their friends and family didn't know how
to talk about it, and so they weren't talking about it.
And so I spent every night going through my emails
(28:03):
and replying to every single person so that they would
feel like someone out in the world heard them and
felt with them, and that they weren't so alone, because
you have to be pretty alone in this world to
spill your guts to an absolute stranger over email. UM
in the middle of the night. And I know because
(28:23):
I've done that. I have done that, Cheryl Strait, you
got gotten several messages for me like UM. I did not.
I did not think, oh, like this would make a
this would make a great podcast everything that I've done,
because I also feel I am a lucky person. Aaron died,
he did not have life insurance. I quit my job
(28:47):
by not going, which was I don't advise that, UM,
but I was like, oh my god, I've forgotten, and
also I don't want to do it. UM. But so
many people, if you are lucky enough to be employed
full time time and in benefits, go ahead tonight and
read them because you probably have three to five business
days of bereavement leaf if your husband dies, if your
(29:08):
wife dies, you have no time. You have to get
back to real life. And many many women who I
was talking to her fielding their their emails, they didn't
have that. They had nothing, They had even less than nothing.
Aaron did not have life insurance. But I had a
mom who was still alive, who had a house that
it could and did end up living in as a
(29:31):
thirty one year old mom. That felt great. We were
not the best of roommates, but I still do love
her UM and mostly it's mutual. I do feel but terrible.
Thanks for asking was like the next the thing that
I could do that seemed like it would it would
help it would it would help all of these people
(29:53):
feel less lonely. So the first season is every single
story is from my inbox. My first season, all ten
episodes are all people who had emailed me before I
had a podcast, before I had anything, people who had
just sent me a message about something. I replied to
them and said, so, if I had a podcast, which
(30:15):
I don't, um, would you want to be on it?
And they were like that sounds great. The title is
a rejected title for my first book, right, um, So
I had a title, I had an inbox full of
sad stories, and I had um nothing more to lose,
And so I sent out a tweet and I said,
(30:37):
who in Minnesota makes podcasts? Great? Didn't even google it? Okay,
I was like, right to right to Twitter, And if
I saw that tweet, I would be like google it,
dou fas. But someone who's nicer than me was like,
there is there is someone who makes podcasts in Minnesota.
His name is Hans Buto, and that man became my
producer and we created this show together and and that's
(31:01):
that's how it all happened. And I do, I do.
I would love to be able to say like this
was all the plan. But really I do know one thing,
which is that the plan was to at least make
a thing. Every episode is a thing that somebody can
point to and say like, it felt like this, or
it parts of it, it feels like at five minutes
and thirty eight seconds, that's how I feel. That's how
(31:23):
I feel. So you and I talked on the phone
the other day about whether this kind of work is
therapeutic or cathartic. People will often say about writing memoir
and they will also say about um, this kind of
podcast either family secrets or terrible things for asking a
feeling of um. Is this somehow like a form of
(31:47):
therapy or um? I remember years ago, as a memoirist,
somebody for the first time asking me a question about
my first memoir, the it must feel so cast a question,
and at the time I actually found it like I've
bristled at it. It was like, it's not catharsis, it's
art um. And of course these are not mutually exclusive,
(32:11):
but I wonder and I actually don't find writing memoirkus arctic,
but I do and have found the conversations that I
have um either when I'm I mean the various places
where I record family secrets, my basement in Connecticut and
my son's old playroom, like hunched over my recording equipment
(32:31):
with like the big stuffed you know, hippopotamus from when
he was to sitting in the corner and like you know,
baseball paraphernalia and stuff like that very glamorous, or in
the studio with my guest on the phone, or with
my guest in the room. Um, and it almost doesn't
matter where or even whether the guest is in the room.
(32:52):
And actually I remember you saying to me early on,
it can feel even more intimate when the guest is
not in the room. You're just in this kind of
cocoon of just voices and silence and pauses and um.
And this this interaction that can feel almost like a
confessional booth in some way. And to me that has
(33:14):
felt I don't like words like cathartic or or therapeutic,
but there's something that happens that really feels transformative, both
hopefully for the guest but for me. So I'm wondering.
You know, you were talking about starting it thinking I
want to give something to all these people who are
flooding my inbox. But what has it done for you also,
(33:38):
people who listen to your podcast find it therapeutic, and
that's a very good I know a lot of sobbing.
Sobbing by the side of the road over everyone's looking
for a way to cry in their car or on
the subway, whatever is available to you. A big fan
of like a good public cry. The first season sounds
so different than the current season, and that is because
(34:01):
it was my form of therapy. I was. I mean,
so much was happening in my life that had not
been included in the book, because it happens. You write
a book and then life has happened after you turned in,
after you turned in the final draft, and after it
comes out, and all of these things had happened. I
had um met a man and I had fallen in
(34:23):
love with him, and we had I had gotten pregnant,
not in that order, and uh and we blended this
family and it was so wonderful. And also for the
first time I had stopped moving since Aaron died, and
I was present with love and with like this newness
(34:44):
and it was my grief just catching up with me.
And you can hear that in the first season for sure.
Is that all of the things that I thought that, um,
that I had processed by writing a book or by
starting you know this nonprofit, uh still kicking that that
honors my husband and anybody going through something hard by
(35:07):
just staying busy. I felt like maybe maybe I wouldn't have. Yeah,
I felt like I would avoid the grief like it
would expire and I'd have like I would have just
avoided it like a genius. Like I don't know why
everybody doesn't do that, Like you just stay really busy.
Time passes and like you've ducked down and the grief
has shot overhead. It totally missed you, and instead it
(35:28):
had completely just decimated me. And so much of that
first season is me digging through that, along with my
guests and their stories that are about not that at all.
You know. What's so interesting nor though, is it's possible
for something to be as beautifully produced as your show
(35:50):
is and to be stark ly honest. They're not, They're
not mutually exclusive. Um. I think we sing to go
back to Instagram and social media like that. The more
produced something is, the more it means that it's kind
of burnished and therefore somehow not real, not true. Um.
(36:11):
And yet I think that. When I first heard your show,
I thought, oh that I want. I want to do
something that's going to be beautifully produced, that can be
heard and listened to and shaped and there there's there's
music in there, and they're sound in there, and there's
real artfulness in there. And at the same time it's
it's true, and there's rawness, and there's honesty, and there's
(36:35):
vulnerability that often overused word, but it's really there within
the container of this um beautifully produced thing. Yeah, Danny
is like really smart. Sometimes I'm like, yeah, I completely agree.
It is art. We're going to open it up to
(36:58):
questions in a minute. The tempt someone posted a picture
of us at a different event and was like the
Queen the Joker, and I was like, it was accurate.
It was not me. I reposted it because I was like,
that's actually, it's actually very accurate. And in the picture,
I'm like, Danny's like, we're talking about a book. I'm like,
are we um? So episode zero of my podcast is
(37:23):
was not planned. We were not making an episode zero.
We're supposed start with number one. But I had a
baby right before the podcast was supposed to come out.
I had not told anybody that I was pregnant, including
the people who worked on my podcast, because I do
believe the world to be like an inherently sexist place,
and I just was like, I don't know, if anyone
knows I'm pregnant, they're really going to try to promote
a show made by a woman who just had a baby.
(37:44):
I don't know. Maybe I'm not being generous enough, but
that's what I did. And you can hear in that episode, um,
I'm holding a baby. I'm holding a two day old
baby and recording a podcast. And because it just felt
like I wanted to put something out there that was
that was real and that was produced, I did it
(38:06):
in a studio. I took my baby with no immune
system out into the world. I was like, honey, the
world needs this content. Um. But because I've been so
deeply depressed during my pregnancy and I was automatically just
had postpartum anxiety and postpartum depression, and I wanted to
(38:27):
tell that story that sometimes it is more complicated than
it looks, because from the outside, at the time my
life did look and was it was really good. Like
it's hard to write a better happy ending than a
widowed mom meeting a divorce dad and all the kids
falling in love and then you moved to the suburbs
(38:47):
and you get a minivan and a rescue dog. That's
a pretty good story. And also I was so sad,
it was just so sad. So um, so yes, I'll
and plus i'll smart things to Danny. So yeah, so
I think, you know, i'd love to you know, when
(39:07):
it comes to I mean, everything that we're talking about,
we're talking about life, um, and I think both of
our shows are really about that, really about life. And
we talked a lot um earlier about again the kind
of burnishment of social media and all that stuff. And
I feel like there are these places out there that
(39:28):
are like respites from that, you know, that are you know,
like it's really not um. I mean, I know for
myself that I am constantly working against. I don't want
people to mistake my life for being um perfect, fabulous,
(39:49):
photoshopped in some way. And I mean these days there's
probably not much of a chance of people doing that,
but it's happened a lot over time. And my only
is to kind of move into that place of let's
talk about the and here, you know, not the either
or but the like this and this, you know that
(40:11):
the you you have talked a lot about um and
early early in the first season you you you talk
about loving two men, you know, having two husbands, having
a child with each of them, and it's this great
you know, comic of course because it's you, but also
(40:31):
a very very real sort of introduction to this is
this messy, complicated, beautiful, painful, tragic, which is to say,
human life. And I think that that's what you know,
that's what resonates about these kinds of stories. And I
think it's like that for most people, but we just
(40:53):
don't know it typically, especially in marketing UM marketing books
like this book is it's on. It's an escape from
every day. But the reason that podcasts like this work
and are popular is because what you need an escape
from is this oppressively optimistic American um social media in
(41:16):
uh uh faned But just like this, this oppressively optimistic
point of view, which is that if something happens, then
the next thing that happens is like you get over it.
If somebody hits you in the face with the lemon
it turned to lemonade on your face, or like a
nice vitamin c Serum while it was on there, um
like you're you're definitely supposed to find the silver lining
(41:38):
as soon as possible so that people can feel inspired
by you. And we need stories that are not just bummers.
Nobody's interested in in a story that is just a
sad story. And also nobody's story is just a sad story,
even if your story makes people really sad, even if
people are like, Danny, your dad wasn't your dad? Like
(42:00):
your story is also a story about love and and
and life in all of its complications. And I do
want my kids to know more than anything that this
is not the exception to the rule, like at all,
Like this is just the rule. Actually, like really really
bad things are going to happen in your life and
also really good things, and then most of it is
(42:22):
going to be so dull you won't remember it. Like
today on the airport, on the airport, on the airplane,
I looked over there's a woman sitting next to me
and I was like, I'm sorry, did I stand up
to let you in or did you have to climb
over me? And she was like you stood up? And
I was like, I have no memory, no memory of
standing up for you just want to make sure I'm
not the worst person on this plane. That is how
(42:45):
dull most of our lives are. Like I was like,
I don't even remember standing up for you, lady. That's
a little of an impression. Like, so anytime like and
it's all temporary, and most of it is going to
be just like a five, and that's a pretty good day.
And so when you're having a one, like, you'll be
at a five soon enough. When you're at a ten, like,
savor the flavor because you're gonna be leveling out all
(43:09):
over again. Virginia Wolf describes that as the cotton woolf.
It's like the cotton woolf of daily existence. That's what
we're in most of the time. And there's one thing
that I want to like, just and this part of
the conversation with which is terrible, thanks for asking. There's
(43:29):
also there's I have this dear friend Buddhist teacher or
some of you may uh no or have encountered named
Sylvia Borstein um and um. Sylvia's version of that when
somebody says how are you is couldn't be better? Always true,
not couldn't be better, but just couldn't be better. Can't
be better than I am right now, so maybe that's
(43:51):
the sequel. This equal pretty okay, pretty all right? Thank
you for inquiring. Ah. I'd like to thank Rizzoli Bookstore
for hosting the live taping of Family Secrets and Derrek
(44:14):
Clemens for recording it. And i'd like to thank Nora mcinnerney.
If you haven't already, be sure to check out and
subscribe to her podcast, Terrible Thanks for asking. Family Secrets
is an i Heeart Media production. For more podcasts for
(44:40):
my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. I'm
Danny Shapiro and this is a special bonus episode of
Family Secrets. This summer, I was so excited to have
Nora McNerney, the host of the wonderful podcast Terrible, thanks
(00:23):
for asking join me for a live taping of Family
Secrets at Rizzoli Bookstore in New York City. This is
part one of our conversation. Well, hey, everybody, very exciting
(00:50):
for me because you know you you make podcasts kind
of a loaner with one other person in a tiny,
little dark space. UM. And this is the first live
event that I've done for Family Secrets. UM. So that's thrilling.
And what's particularly thrilling is to have Norah with me,
(01:10):
because I have to say that when I was starting
to think about doing a podcast, I knew nothing about
how to do a podcast. I listened pretty regularly to
some podcasts that I liked a lot. I live in
rural Connecticut, I drive a lot, and I would listen
to podcasts in my car. UM. And I knew what
I liked and I knew what I didn't like, But
I didn't necessarily really think or discern why. UM, when
(01:33):
I read. I've spent my life as a writer, so
when I read, I know what I like or what
I don't like and why, or what's good or what
I don't think is as good and why. But I
didn't know with podcasts. And then I was in conversation
with the podcast producers who I ended up partnering with,
and someone in one of those phone calls said, have
(01:55):
you listened to Terrible? Thanks for asking? Do you know
Nora mcinner me? And since I was sort of a
podcast virgin um and late to the party, I had
not yet listened to Terrible Thanks for Asking? And then
I basically binge listened to Nora for weeks and weeks
because I thought, Oh, I think I do know how
(02:17):
to do this. I think I want to do this
the way that she does this, in the sense of
holding a story, like holding being someone who has actually
is not just a just but you know, is not
a journalist or am an observer or doesn't have any
(02:37):
skin in the game, but someone who is actually um,
like on the path that is the same path that
um she's asking her guests to walk. And so there's
something very different about that and very intimate about that,
and then in addition to that, the artfulness and the
(02:58):
way that there is the story of the guest, but
then there is the host and the host holding the story,
which is the way I always think of it. So Nora,
thanks for doing this with me. Oh and I should
also add that this conversation took place. Oh yeah, also
thank you for having me. But more importantly, this conversation
took place with each of us in our cars, and
(03:22):
within five minutes, I was like, I mean, listen to
your voice. You should absolutely have a podcast. Like I
was like, I feel like I don't even know what
you said for the past five minutes, but like I'm
I mean, I will download that podcast. I would listen
to you say anything. And um, I stand by that statement. Well,
thank you and thank you for being my brabbi. I
(03:43):
uh what what What Nora's leaving out is that when
I listened to her podcast binge listened to it, I
was like, I need to talk to her. I need
I need to find out like what am I in for?
Like what is this thing? And and and Nora gone
on the phone with me and us we were in
our cars, like she has at a car wash and
at the car dealer. I was sitting outside this UM
(04:05):
cafe where I go work in the country. UM, just
like sitting in my car in like you know, dead
of winter with the engine running, kind of just looking
out over a waterfall and just having like these a
couple of long conversations, UM that were these deep dives
into And I guess this is a lot of what
I would love to talk with you about today. UM.
(04:26):
What it is two experience something you know on a
human scale, very very difficult UM. In your case, UM,
having been widowed at a shockingly young age, the loss
of your husband Aaron, and a lot of loss compounded
all at once, and then a moment where or tell
(04:49):
me if it's a moment but a feeling where in
which you need to do something with it other than
sit with it. It was kind of a series of
moments for me. But for those of you who don't
know my very um uplifting story, my husband Aaron died
when he was thirty five. He had brain cancer for
(05:10):
three years and I was thirty one and we had
almost two year old child together, and he died right
after my dad died of cancer. But my dad had
cancer very briefly, which was like rude, like Aaron already
has cancer, Like you can't also get cancer, you can't
die first. Um. And then my dad had died right
after I had miscarried my second child with Darin. So UM,
(05:32):
just set in the tone for a fun evening out
for you, for you all welcome. And I I had
always been a person, even when I was very little,
and I know you were too, who was always like
very observant, very attuned to the other the emotions of
the other people. Um, in my life and in my orbit.
And I I had never had anything that I thought
(05:58):
was important to write about, which if if you ever
feel that way, like literally you can write about anything
like and truly you don't have to have you don't
have to have, like a disaster happened to you. Um.
But I always thought, like, what would I write about?
You're supposed to write what you know. I don't know anything.
Nothing's ever happened to me. And Aaron had a seizure
(06:19):
at work a year after we started dating, and I
met him at the hospital and we were both like, man,
we gotta get you out of here. It's Halloween. We
gotta hand out candy. It just did not register to
us that this this was the thing, This was a
serious thing, both of us. Instagram had just come out.
This was a simpler time. This was like you know,
(06:40):
we were He was like, take a picture, take a
picture of me, like laying in the e R. And
I was like, yeah, that's that's funny, that's cool. Um,
He's like take a picture. They have to put me
in a wheelchair. It's like that's great, it's great. It's
got two likes. So it's me and it's you. What
did you? I liked my own photo just to get
the get that content rolling. Um. But I always had
(07:04):
notebook with me. It was always filled with very important
work things. I worked in advertising, so like truly life
or death kind of stuff happening every day. And I
remember Aaron being pushed into the mri I room and
him giving me the thumbs up and the door closing,
and that hitting me like, oh, this is this is
(07:25):
a moment. This is an important moment, and there will
be before this moment and there will be after it,
whatever happens, Like this is this is a big thing.
And I sat in that hallway and I wrote everything
that had happened, and I didn't think that it was
for anybody else, but a part of me knew, and
I wrote this in that same notebook that I had
(07:46):
to keep my eyes open for this, even though I
didn't want to. I didn't want to remember seeing him
going going like this. Um from that room, I didn't.
I just wanted to go home and hand out Halloween candy.
And at first, when I started writing about it again,
this was a simpler time. I used tumbler dot com
and uh, I password protected it. I don't want anyone
(08:09):
knowing all my secret feelings. Nobody cared. And then, um,
I just got tired of writing group emails to people,
which I'm sure you've written quite a quite a lot
of group emails lately. You have to keep so many
people updated when when your life turns upside down. And
I took the password off it, and I was like,
I'm only going to be writing here. And it was
(08:32):
immediately not updates about Aaron's cancer. It was observations about
what it was like to be alive with him, because
I didn't want him to be a sad story, and
I could feel that from people. I could feel people
just like pitying us and feeling bad for us, and
I hated it, and I truly thought the only people
(08:52):
who would read something like that would be the people
who knew us and already and cared about us. But uh,
it started to be parent that more people were reading
it than I knew personally. I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota,
and so I know, I mean, I know most of
the city. There's a good chance I'm related to like
most people I encounter there. UM, But not everybody knew us,
(09:17):
But people could understand that feeling, that feeling of being
so out of control of your life and having your
life go so off the path that it's supposed to
when you meet someone and you fall in love, like
it's just supposed to be good. You know, that's supposed
to like immediately turned into UM an episode of Gray's Anatomy.
(09:40):
So when people would begin to respond and and they
went beyond the people that you knew in Minneapolis, UM,
was that a feeling of UM supporting community UM? Or
did you feel in any way like WHOA you know?
Was there any sense of privacy being invaded? Or you
(10:02):
know a lot of people know stuff about me and
I don't. I don't know them, but they feel they
know me? Or or did it feel like a good thing.
I think that if the same thing were to unfold now,
it would look so drastically different, Like the difference between
twenty nineteen internet and Internet is crazy. It's not even
it's not even the same world. And so the people
(10:26):
who were reaching out, we're literally just leaving comments. They
were um like it was such a it was such
a smaller system. Does that make sense now? It would
be there would just be so many ways to access
that information, and it would be so much more direct.
And I think that thirty six year old me in
(10:47):
Internet probably wouldn't do it that same way. But I
was seven, and it was the year, and I did
it the way that I knew how, and that felt
natural all for how I was, And it did feel
so amazing to have people care, because it's so lonely
to be sick or to have someone you love be sick,
(11:09):
and to automatically inhabit this different version of the world
where you are, where your calendar has all the normal
stuff on it, like you have a nine am conference
call and then at one pm you have to go
pick up your husband and take him to get chemo infusion,
and your friends care, but they also just don't know
what that's like. They just don't know. So having people
(11:31):
from really all over be able to say, I know
how that feels, I know how you feel like I
care about this thing that feels too big for you
to even like talk to anybody face to face about.
The Internet gave me away to to say the things
that I could not say to the people who cared
(11:52):
about me face to face, because it's just so much.
It's so much for a casual conversation ship. When you
run into a friend of a friend at the co op,
that's a lot you knows as you're talking. I was
thinking about the difference between writing a book and UM
(12:14):
and beginning to post online and and ultimately then what
leads to making a podcast, right, So writing a book,
which is something you do alone in a room in
this way, I mean when I when I was writing Inheritance, UM,
I rented an office that was out of my home. UM.
(12:35):
And just briefly for anyone who doesn't know what my
book is about, I UM made the discoveries three years ago,
almost exactly three three years ago, that my dad who
raised me had not been my biological father. I had
never known this. UM it was a secret that was
very much kept from me by my parents. And so
it was just like identity shifting, um massive shock that
(12:57):
that happened in my life. Very very different on your story.
But as I was beginning to work on inheritance, I
rented an office because I couldn't be in my home
with all this research that had to do with early
reproductive medicine in this country, and just some kind of
crazy details about what people were told and not told,
(13:19):
and it was very disturbing. It's very disturbing to be
told that you would be considered an abomination in your
face because because in Judaism they didn't, you know, rabbis
didn't believe in artificial insemination, donor insemination and so forth.
So I would be in this office and I would
go in every morning, and it was in an empty house.
A friend who was a lawyer had recently moved his
(13:40):
law offices and the house was just sitting there for sale.
But the real estate broker said to me, no one's
ever going to buy it. You'll be fine, you can
have every years. And I would go into this completely
empty house and I would go up the stairs and
I would unlock the door to my office, and in
the office there was a beatle, a bug a beatle,
and it was the only living thing in this house.
(14:01):
And I would like look forward to seeing the beetle,
and I would wait for the beetle to make itself
known each day. And they're like, oh, there's the beetle. Wow,
the beatles finding something to eat here. It's like, still,
there's my beetle. That's how solitary it was, right, So
it's like in a way, And then the experience of
writing a book and publishing a book even is that
(14:23):
you're not seeing people read it. They're not responding in
real time. Every once in a while, someone on Instagram
posts a picture of like, look, there was somebody on
the subway reading your book. And it's the most amazing
thing when that happens. But it's not that sense of
immediate response that that you're describing the feeling of putting something,
(14:44):
putting a raw and complicated thought out there, and then
immediately having this world of some version of me too. Yeah,
And I think that's part of like the addictive nature
of the Internet. And I will usually say, oh God,
I hate the Internet. Somebody should find it and unplug
it and we should all just write each other letters
(15:06):
and make phone calls on landlines and um. And I
usually stand by that. And also some of the most
amazing things that have come out of this experience would
not have existed without the Internet and without social media.
(15:26):
I I was never posting things trying to accumulate followers. Um.
Internet celebrity hadn't wasn't a thing I would say in
at least not a thing in in my life and
my world. But what I remember about Aaron being diagnosed
is immediately googling it, regretting googling it, and committing to
(15:52):
never looking it up again. Never, never, never, Because the
only thing that I found out he had stage four
glioblastoma was that he was going to die. And that
um when I when I looked, even just just I
was like, maybe there's something on the second page of
Google like that would be like, no, we won't UM.
So I went looking for the like he's not going
to die page, and all I found was forums of
(16:13):
of women. This is a cancer that mostly affects men,
young men. Pages and pages of forums of women who
were just chronicling their husband's cancer, just their just their sickness,
the treatment that he was getting the pill, that he
was taking, the doctor that he had seen, the specialists
that they had they had gone to for a second opinion,
(16:33):
and I thought, I don't want that. I don't want that.
I don't want that life. I don't want Aaron to
have that life. I want to be people. I want
everybody who reads anything about us to know that we
are people and that this is our life. And when
I look back at those early posts, I was truly
creating a manual for the people who knew us and
(16:54):
those who didn't, to say, this is who we are,
and this is how you should in age with us.
Do not feel bad for us, you can feel with us.
And the people who found me were the same women
who did the same Google search I did, but my
blog went to the top of those search results, and
(17:17):
they would just see two people and then eventually a baby,
also living, just living. I never wrote about what Aaron
was taking. When people asked me what Aaron was taking, like, frankly,
I don't know. For a long time, I thought one
of his infusions was I don't know where I got
this information, Danny. I was certain. I was like, oh, yeah,
Aaron goes on Wednesdays, he gets like a vitamin. This
(17:38):
doctor was like, what that's chemo. I was like, well,
someone once explained to me that it was vitamin drip.
And he's like, no one ever said that to you.
I'm like, well, that's how I heard it. And guess
what he felt great after it to be adaptive, right,
I was like, well, looks, I mean, it's kind of
the color of a vitamin. I maybe I assumed. I
don't know, um, very medically minded. Um. I can't remember
(18:04):
where that story was going. My train of thought is
literally just a jet ski and so we're going to
go a lot of places, and so let me guide
you a little yea. So wait, yeah, should be a
jet ski, I think they have. I think a train.
I also don't know. I've never been on one, but
I've seen people use them, and they seem they see
(18:27):
even a fully dangerous and out of control. So here
I am so the way that, you know, when people
have been asking me about family secrets and how it
came to be, I keep on describing it as some
combination of um, this very organic thing. I never thought,
oh podcast, I listened to them, I should make one
(18:50):
also kind of a happy accident, like some combination of
like an organic happy accident. And so I guess I'm
wondering what the moment was for you when you moved
from I'm posting these, um these bullets like bulletins, this
(19:10):
kind of in a way educating people in how to
how to be with me and how to be with Aaron,
um and maybe even really how to be with anyone
who's ill into something that you make that's artful and
that um, and then that becomes terrible. Thanks for asking. Yeah,
I I also didn't set out to be like, oh
(19:33):
my weight, so my husband has a brain tumor, looks
like I finally have a book. Um. It wasn't like
great and he's gonna die awesome, Um great, Um. That
was not that I really wanted to write a book
when I was younger. That was about a girl who
moves to New York and wants to be a writer
but instead finds herself like in a different kind of
(19:54):
job and her boss is crazy, and um, that book
is the devil worst product. Tragically, tragically, it was made
into a classic film featuring Anne Hathaway, And so I
was like, well, I guess I'll never be able to
write a book. Someone beat me to the one story
I have, And um, I didn't write my blog like
(20:15):
necessarily hoping that it would be a book. I still
had a job, you know, I was working every day
writing tweets for discount hair care companies. Uh seven nine haircuts.
That's a full tweet, by the way, seven en haircut,
seven nine haircut this weekend link. Um got paid the
big books for that. Um. So it's not as if
I was sitting there, you know, calculating how this could
(20:40):
be a thing. So this is how it happened. This
is like my origin story. Is that everything that I
ever posted Aaron read. Aaron saw every picture, he read
every caption, he read every post. Because it wasn't my story.
It was the story of our family. And my dad died,
which I already told you, But guess what my dad's
(21:02):
dad must say? As many times I can. My dad
died and I had to write his obituary. And we
have I have three siblings, and you know, I write
a draft, they all edit it. It's very it's it's
the worst collaborative effort that you can imagine. And because
we're like, I don't know what is important to dad
like my brother's like, I don't think that's that part's important, Like, well,
you know, to me, it felt like that was a
(21:22):
really you always write somebody's obituary customarily after they die,
which does make sense because it's kind of a bummer
to right. But I didn't want to go through that again.
And I didn't want to be the person who wrote
the final word on what Aaron's life meant, because he
was so unique, he was so funny. And the night
(21:43):
that he entered hospice and we had no idea what
that meant other than you can't have any more chemo vitamins. Um.
We went home and we put our baby to bed,
and I opened up my laptop and I said, uh,
I think we have to write your obituary right now,
and he was like, okay, Um, I really wanted to
(22:07):
watch Game of Thrones and like, we'll get to that.
We will, we will do that. And we paused Game
of Thrones and we sat down and we wrote his
obituary together, and the first line of it is per
mort Aaron Joseph Age died on November fourteen due to
complications from a radioactive spider bite, and UH revealed his
(22:32):
identity as Spider Man and gave you know, shout out
to his first wife, Gwen Stefani, and it mentioned, you know,
the the band that he was in in high school,
a local a local band called the Asparagus Children. Anyone
heard of it? Weird? Okay? Where that didn't get past
(22:54):
Anoka County, Minnesota. Oh strange. And I didn't think that
they would a blish it, but we wrote it, and
turns out they will publish it because in obituary is
an advertisement for your death, so they will you pay
for it, They'll they'll publish whatever you want. So take
that knowledge home tonight. And they published it after Aaron
died and it went viral like crazy everywhere on the internet.
(23:19):
That I that I looked for distraction from planning his funeral,
which actually he planned so I really didn't have much
to do but implementing those plans. Um, he was there,
his face was there, and it's because it was so
true to who he was, and that is so rare.
That's not something that you see all the time. It
(23:39):
was people. People loved that. And a woman named Jessica
Regal emailed me and said, I'm so sorry about your husband.
Um and you know, I'm a I'm an agent. Maybe
in like five years, you'd want to write a book.
And I replied and I was like, I probably would
write it now, honestly, And she was like, that sounds insane.
We'll talking in five years, and I was, no, I
(24:00):
really do I want to write it now, because I
there are so many books written from distance of time,
and those are wonderful. A lot of them helped me
when I was when Aaron was diagnosed, after Aaron had died,
and I wanted to write something while I was in it,
while I was in all of that chaos, because being
in something is also a perspective. And so I two
(24:25):
months after Aaron died, I was here in New York City, Uh,
wearing so many I was wearing like an outfit from
Jay Crew, like on the on the I can't think
of the word mannequin. That's the word where you know
they dressed Jay Crew models or mannequins, and many layers.
It's it's too many layers. Was it winter? It was winter,
but not that winter, not like a sweater shirt and
(24:47):
a jacket winter. It was too much. I thought I
was going to die, but instead I sold a book
we're going to pause for a moment. Let's let's go
to the idea of immediacy for a minute, because I
think that that's actually really UM, I think it's key
to both of our stories and both of our experiences.
(25:09):
I mean, Inheritance is my tenth book I owe and
fifth memoir, and I always believed that it was impossible
to write anything good out of immediate experience, out of
sort of the raw immediacy, and UM, and I think
it's it's definitely like you know the commercials say, like,
(25:31):
you know, don't try this at home, or because I,
for me, UM, the story of Inheritance, I didn't want
to tell from my rocking chair someday. I wanted to
capture it as it was unfolding, or maybe was a
half a step away from it enough to have a
little bit of a way of pivoting toward it and
away from it. But it felt essential that it be
(25:52):
told that way. UM, And I wonder whether to take
it a step further than in podcasting. There's such intimacy
in in podcasting. It's intimate in the way that it's made,
in the conversations that you know that you have with
your guests, or that I have was my guests is
intimate in the way that it's listened to. Uh, at
(26:15):
least his intimate is reading because you know, you've got
these you know, air pods in or whatever they're called,
and you know, or you're in your car alone. People
don't have like podcast listening parties, at least not yet.
I mean maybe a little become a thing, um, but
it's something that people do by themselves. And so there's
this there's this voice in literally become the voice in
(26:37):
someone's head. So so then how does how does it
go from you know, you're in these j crue layers
and you sell the book and it's two months after
Aaron died to um it becoming the birth of a podcast.
Did you intend for that to happen? Because another thing
that I think that happens with people a lot um
(26:57):
when they see see something that works a book, a
short story, an essay, a podcast, there's always like retrospective intentionality, like, oh,
this must have been the plan all along and that's
why it's a thing. And as about me, it's so flattering.
Everyone thinks, right, it was on it was on a
(27:19):
list of this is how you're going to be about it.
It's almost never the case that that's what it is now.
I uh. I was unemployed, so an unemployed widowed mom
with a toddler and a mortgage. I sold a book.
I started trying to do freelance copyrighting on the side.
(27:40):
But I had this other full time job, which was
managing the emotions of anyone who had read that obituary,
and anybody whose husband was sick, and anybody's husband who
had died, and they would email me. It would email
me because I was a person who had said something
about it, and their friends and family didn't know how
to talk about it, and so they weren't talking about it.
And so I spent every night going through my emails
(28:03):
and replying to every single person so that they would
feel like someone out in the world heard them and
felt with them, and that they weren't so alone, because
you have to be pretty alone in this world to
spill your guts to an absolute stranger over email. UM
in the middle of the night. And I know because
(28:23):
I've done that. I have done that, Cheryl Strait, you
got gotten several messages for me like UM. I did not.
I did not think, oh, like this would make a
this would make a great podcast everything that I've done,
because I also feel I am a lucky person. Aaron died,
he did not have life insurance. I quit my job
(28:47):
by not going, which was I don't advise that, UM,
but I was like, oh my god, I've forgotten, and
also I don't want to do it. UM. But so
many people, if you are lucky enough to be employed
full time time and in benefits, go ahead tonight and
read them because you probably have three to five business
days of bereavement leaf if your husband dies, if your
(29:08):
wife dies, you have no time. You have to get
back to real life. And many many women who I
was talking to her fielding their their emails, they didn't
have that. They had nothing, They had even less than nothing.
Aaron did not have life insurance. But I had a
mom who was still alive, who had a house that
it could and did end up living in as a
(29:31):
thirty one year old mom. That felt great. We were
not the best of roommates, but I still do love
her UM and mostly it's mutual. I do feel but terrible.
Thanks for asking was like the next the thing that
I could do that seemed like it would it would
help it would it would help all of these people
(29:53):
feel less lonely. So the first season is every single
story is from my inbox. My first season, all ten
episodes are all people who had emailed me before I
had a podcast, before I had anything, people who had
just sent me a message about something. I replied to
them and said, so, if I had a podcast, which
(30:15):
I don't, um, would you want to be on it?
And they were like that sounds great. The title is
a rejected title for my first book, right, um, So
I had a title, I had an inbox full of
sad stories, and I had um nothing more to lose,
And so I sent out a tweet and I said,
(30:37):
who in Minnesota makes podcasts? Great? Didn't even google it? Okay,
I was like, right to right to Twitter, And if
I saw that tweet, I would be like google it,
dou fas. But someone who's nicer than me was like,
there is there is someone who makes podcasts in Minnesota.
His name is Hans Buto, and that man became my
producer and we created this show together and and that's
(31:01):
that's how it all happened. And I do, I do.
I would love to be able to say like this
was all the plan. But really I do know one thing,
which is that the plan was to at least make
a thing. Every episode is a thing that somebody can
point to and say like, it felt like this, or
it parts of it, it feels like at five minutes
and thirty eight seconds, that's how I feel. That's how
(31:23):
I feel. So you and I talked on the phone
the other day about whether this kind of work is
therapeutic or cathartic. People will often say about writing memoir
and they will also say about um, this kind of
podcast either family secrets or terrible things for asking a
feeling of um. Is this somehow like a form of
(31:47):
therapy or um? I remember years ago, as a memoirist,
somebody for the first time asking me a question about
my first memoir, the it must feel so cast a question,
and at the time I actually found it like I've
bristled at it. It was like, it's not catharsis, it's
art um. And of course these are not mutually exclusive,
(32:11):
but I wonder and I actually don't find writing memoirkus arctic,
but I do and have found the conversations that I
have um either when I'm I mean the various places
where I record family secrets, my basement in Connecticut and
my son's old playroom, like hunched over my recording equipment
(32:31):
with like the big stuffed you know, hippopotamus from when
he was to sitting in the corner and like you know,
baseball paraphernalia and stuff like that very glamorous, or in
the studio with my guest on the phone, or with
my guest in the room. Um, and it almost doesn't
matter where or even whether the guest is in the room.
(32:52):
And actually I remember you saying to me early on,
it can feel even more intimate when the guest is
not in the room. You're just in this kind of
cocoon of just voices and silence and pauses and um.
And this this interaction that can feel almost like a
confessional booth in some way. And to me that has
(33:14):
felt I don't like words like cathartic or or therapeutic,
but there's something that happens that really feels transformative, both
hopefully for the guest but for me. So I'm wondering.
You know, you were talking about starting it thinking I
want to give something to all these people who are
flooding my inbox. But what has it done for you also,
(33:38):
people who listen to your podcast find it therapeutic, and
that's a very good I know a lot of sobbing.
Sobbing by the side of the road over everyone's looking
for a way to cry in their car or on
the subway, whatever is available to you. A big fan
of like a good public cry. The first season sounds
so different than the current season, and that is because
(34:01):
it was my form of therapy. I was. I mean,
so much was happening in my life that had not
been included in the book, because it happens. You write
a book and then life has happened after you turned in,
after you turned in the final draft, and after it
comes out, and all of these things had happened. I
had um met a man and I had fallen in
(34:23):
love with him, and we had I had gotten pregnant,
not in that order, and uh and we blended this
family and it was so wonderful. And also for the
first time I had stopped moving since Aaron died, and
I was present with love and with like this newness
(34:44):
and it was my grief just catching up with me.
And you can hear that in the first season for sure.
Is that all of the things that I thought that, um,
that I had processed by writing a book or by
starting you know this nonprofit, uh still kicking that that
honors my husband and anybody going through something hard by
(35:07):
just staying busy. I felt like maybe maybe I wouldn't have. Yeah,
I felt like I would avoid the grief like it
would expire and I'd have like I would have just
avoided it like a genius. Like I don't know why
everybody doesn't do that, Like you just stay really busy.
Time passes and like you've ducked down and the grief
has shot overhead. It totally missed you, and instead it
(35:28):
had completely just decimated me. And so much of that
first season is me digging through that, along with my
guests and their stories that are about not that at all.
You know. What's so interesting nor though, is it's possible
for something to be as beautifully produced as your show
(35:50):
is and to be stark ly honest. They're not, They're
not mutually exclusive. Um. I think we sing to go
back to Instagram and social media like that. The more
produced something is, the more it means that it's kind
of burnished and therefore somehow not real, not true. Um.
(36:11):
And yet I think that. When I first heard your show,
I thought, oh that I want. I want to do
something that's going to be beautifully produced, that can be
heard and listened to and shaped and there there's there's
music in there, and they're sound in there, and there's
real artfulness in there. And at the same time it's
it's true, and there's rawness, and there's honesty, and there's
(36:35):
vulnerability that often overused word, but it's really there within
the container of this um beautifully produced thing. Yeah, Danny
is like really smart. Sometimes I'm like, yeah, I completely agree.
It is art. We're going to open it up to
(36:58):
questions in a minute. The tempt someone posted a picture
of us at a different event and was like the
Queen the Joker, and I was like, it was accurate.
It was not me. I reposted it because I was like,
that's actually, it's actually very accurate. And in the picture,
I'm like, Danny's like, we're talking about a book. I'm like,
are we um? So episode zero of my podcast is
(37:23):
was not planned. We were not making an episode zero.
We're supposed start with number one. But I had a
baby right before the podcast was supposed to come out.
I had not told anybody that I was pregnant, including
the people who worked on my podcast, because I do
believe the world to be like an inherently sexist place,
and I just was like, I don't know, if anyone
knows I'm pregnant, they're really going to try to promote
a show made by a woman who just had a baby.
(37:44):
I don't know. Maybe I'm not being generous enough, but
that's what I did. And you can hear in that episode, um,
I'm holding a baby. I'm holding a two day old
baby and recording a podcast. And because it just felt
like I wanted to put something out there that was
that was real and that was produced, I did it
(38:06):
in a studio. I took my baby with no immune
system out into the world. I was like, honey, the
world needs this content. Um. But because I've been so
deeply depressed during my pregnancy and I was automatically just
had postpartum anxiety and postpartum depression, and I wanted to
(38:27):
tell that story that sometimes it is more complicated than
it looks, because from the outside, at the time my
life did look and was it was really good. Like
it's hard to write a better happy ending than a
widowed mom meeting a divorce dad and all the kids
falling in love and then you moved to the suburbs
(38:47):
and you get a minivan and a rescue dog. That's
a pretty good story. And also I was so sad,
it was just so sad. So um, so yes, I'll
and plus i'll smart things to Danny. So yeah, so
I think, you know, i'd love to you know, when
(39:07):
it comes to I mean, everything that we're talking about,
we're talking about life, um, and I think both of
our shows are really about that, really about life. And
we talked a lot um earlier about again the kind
of burnishment of social media and all that stuff. And
I feel like there are these places out there that
(39:28):
are like respites from that, you know, that are you know,
like it's really not um. I mean, I know for
myself that I am constantly working against. I don't want
people to mistake my life for being um perfect, fabulous,
(39:49):
photoshopped in some way. And I mean these days there's
probably not much of a chance of people doing that,
but it's happened a lot over time. And my only
is to kind of move into that place of let's
talk about the and here, you know, not the either
or but the like this and this, you know that
(40:11):
the you you have talked a lot about um and
early early in the first season you you you talk
about loving two men, you know, having two husbands, having
a child with each of them, and it's this great
you know, comic of course because it's you, but also
(40:31):
a very very real sort of introduction to this is
this messy, complicated, beautiful, painful, tragic, which is to say,
human life. And I think that that's what you know,
that's what resonates about these kinds of stories. And I
think it's like that for most people, but we just
(40:53):
don't know it typically, especially in marketing UM marketing books
like this book is it's on. It's an escape from
every day. But the reason that podcasts like this work
and are popular is because what you need an escape
from is this oppressively optimistic American um social media in
(41:16):
uh uh faned But just like this, this oppressively optimistic
point of view, which is that if something happens, then
the next thing that happens is like you get over it.
If somebody hits you in the face with the lemon
it turned to lemonade on your face, or like a
nice vitamin c Serum while it was on there, um
like you're you're definitely supposed to find the silver lining
(41:38):
as soon as possible so that people can feel inspired
by you. And we need stories that are not just bummers.
Nobody's interested in in a story that is just a
sad story. And also nobody's story is just a sad story,
even if your story makes people really sad, even if
people are like, Danny, your dad wasn't your dad? Like
(42:00):
your story is also a story about love and and
and life in all of its complications. And I do
want my kids to know more than anything that this
is not the exception to the rule, like at all,
Like this is just the rule. Actually, like really really
bad things are going to happen in your life and
also really good things, and then most of it is
(42:22):
going to be so dull you won't remember it. Like
today on the airport, on the airport, on the airplane,
I looked over there's a woman sitting next to me
and I was like, I'm sorry, did I stand up
to let you in or did you have to climb
over me? And she was like you stood up? And
I was like, I have no memory, no memory of
standing up for you just want to make sure I'm
not the worst person on this plane. That is how
(42:45):
dull most of our lives are. Like I was like,
I don't even remember standing up for you, lady. That's
a little of an impression. Like, so anytime like and
it's all temporary, and most of it is going to
be just like a five, and that's a pretty good day.
And so when you're having a one, like, you'll be
at a five soon enough. When you're at a ten, like,
savor the flavor because you're gonna be leveling out all
(43:09):
over again. Virginia Wolf describes that as the cotton woolf.
It's like the cotton woolf of daily existence. That's what
we're in most of the time. And there's one thing
that I want to like, just and this part of
the conversation with which is terrible, thanks for asking. There's
(43:29):
also there's I have this dear friend Buddhist teacher or
some of you may uh no or have encountered named
Sylvia Borstein um and um. Sylvia's version of that when
somebody says how are you is couldn't be better? Always true,
not couldn't be better, but just couldn't be better. Can't
be better than I am right now, so maybe that's
(43:51):
the sequel. This equal pretty okay, pretty all right? Thank
you for inquiring. Ah. I'd like to thank Rizzoli Bookstore
for hosting the live taping of Family Secrets and Derrek
(44:14):
Clemens for recording it. And i'd like to thank Nora mcinnerney.
If you haven't already, be sure to check out and
subscribe to her podcast, Terrible Thanks for asking. Family Secrets
is an i Heeart Media production. For more podcasts for
(44:40):
my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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