November 7, 2024 • 45 mins
Two fires. Two Anitas. Countless questions. In order to understand her mother—and herself—Nina must reckon with a difficult and diffuse past.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. This episode contains
discussion of suicide and self harm.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Listener discretion is advice. For twenty years, I told no
one her story. I tucked it into me like a
grotesque treasure, a cold gem that I guarded with ferocious pride.
Uncertain who else knew. Mom and I never talked about
(00:29):
it again, and no one, not my father or his parents,
or any of my mother's friends, ever asked me about
the fire or what sense I, as a young girl,
had made of it. People ask about my relationship with fire.
You must be afraid of it, they say, I'm so sorry.
My college roommate says, after she burns toast to a
(00:50):
smoky crisp in the kitchen, releasing plumes of smoke. Who
smell lingers for days? Does this trigger you? It's okay,
I shrug, It's just toast. I have no relationship with fire. Really,
relationships are cultivated, nurtured. This I inherited.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
That's Nina Saint Pierre, culture writer, essayist, editor, and author
of the recent memoir Love Is a Burning Thing. Nina's
is a story about surviving the people who precede us
those we love but cannot emulate those we wish to protect,
but not at the expense of destroying ourselves. It's a
(01:36):
story of tenacity, resilience, and hope. I'm Danny Shapiro and
this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
(01:58):
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape of your childhood.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
It was sort of a roving landscape. I'd say, it's
kind of always in motion. And you know, I was
born in a small Transcendental meditation community in Fairfield, Iowa.
My parents sort of split but remained geographically close to
each other and co parented for the first few years
(02:30):
of my life. But my mom was, as my father
puts it, constantly taking off. So we were pinging between
Iowa and Washington, d c. In Detroit, where her family
was from. She was deeply involved in the Transcendental Meditation movement.
So there were these TM centers sort of all over
(02:51):
the country, and so we would kind of go to
those for little stints because she was working on projects
with them. Then at four years old, four going on five,
I'd moved to California with her, and from that point on.
Our travel was sort of restricted to California, but we
moved around a lot up and down the state, to
little towns and cities, and we were just always on
(03:12):
the move.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
At one point, you describe, I love this sentence you're write.
My real memory begins in motion.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
I was living with my mom in the Tenderloine in
San Francisco, was nineteen eighty six by then, which if
you know anything about the Tenderloin in nineteen eighty six,
it was a rough and colorful place. It was really
a triangle of social services. Most people were living on welfare.
We lived in what they go on SRO, so it's
(03:43):
a single room occupancy. Most of them don't have kitchens.
They were converted hotels, so people were really scraping by,
and we had a very colorful life, you know, living
in this sort of European style of hotel was sheer
back through the hallways. Our neighbors were drag queens. They
(04:03):
were queer day black Asian, straight white like my mother.
There were many other single parents, mothers in particular, and
their kids kind of became my friends. So it was
sort of a bright, vivid, grimy world filled with colorful characters.
We were really living a pretty broke life at that time,
(04:25):
and she had gotten me into this private school called
White Pony, which was in Walnut Creek, sort of a wealthy,
primarily white suburb of San Francisco, and we would take
like two buses and a bart. It was about an
hour long trip each way to this kindergarten that was
(04:46):
run by a branch of what they call Sufia's and
Reoriented and it was just this very pristine, calm environment
where everything felt sort of white and washed and everyone
spoke in low tone. And so every day my mom
and I would travel between the chaos and clatter of
the Tenderloin and take this hour long trip to my
(05:08):
school in the suburbs, and it was it was very calm,
and I kind of settled in there, and then every
day we would go back to the clatter of the Tenderloin.
So I think that was the time that I really
started to like hold this duality.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
And that was just the one year, right because after that,
your mom, when you're in first grade, you know, said
something to the effects of we're out of here, We're
heading north.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
That was just the one year. And so it's interesting
that is so outsized in my memory. But I think
it was that age, you know, around five years old
or they say you really start to have concrete memory,
and because it was so full of contrast in life,
it really stood out. But then yeah, at the end
of that year, she was pregnant with my little brother
and a friend had told her there was a cosmic
(05:53):
mountain up north, and she said, now doesn't that sound cool?
And five six years old, what did I know? So
we were off again.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Nina and her mom moved to the remote area of
Siskiyou County, which is halfway between San Francisco and Portland.
Siskiu is at the foot of Mount Shasta, an active volcano.
Could there be a more perfect metaphor? Nina's mom has
moved them here to be closer to the mystical mountain
(06:26):
she's heard so much about. This is not new to Nina,
her mom putting her spirituality at the forefront of their lives.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
There is something very cloistered about childhood. You just understand
your life to be the way it is, so I'm
sure there was some of that, but I think being
born into a transcendental meditation community and it wasn't Camm
you like in the way that some people might imagine.
But it was a small town in which people were
all practicing TM toye a day, and my parents were
(06:57):
both very united in what they felt was their contribution
to creating world peace and before so I think, before
I even remember, that's kind of what I was born into,
and I'm sure I was surrounded by this sort of language.
My mother got into tarot and astrology and things like
(07:17):
channeling very early on. That's part of why she left TM.
So I think even if I don't remember this language
consciously much before we got to Mount Shasta, it was
sort of in me through osmosis, if nothing else. So,
and she kind of had this great adventurous spirit. And
(07:38):
much like my life in San Francisco, which felt like
in a juxtaposition between this gritty, grimy, bright city life
and the sort of calm, meditative tones of White Pony,
my mom contained that duality as well. So you know,
she could kind of like run with the people in
the street and talk a little shit, but she is
(08:00):
always reading about the saints and sort of spoke about
the cosmos and enlightenment and angels in the same sentences.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
In the meantime, Nina's dad remarries a woman named Beth.
While Nina and her mom live at the base of
this magical mountain, her dad and Beth end up in
the hill country in Texas. Living a spiritual life is
important to her dad too, and he and Beth are
part of a meditation community. But back at the volcanic rock,
(08:34):
life goes on for Nina and her mom. Nina's mom
has another child some years later, Nina's younger brother, Christopher.
Finances are tight for the family, and Nina's mom, for
better or worse, is not exactly shy about sharing this
financial precarity with her daughter.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
It was sort of like, you know, the ticker on
a news show was just the running tally. She she
was always working out her finances on little pieces of
paper at a cafe. And I knew, you know, very
early on, what each little treat cost us. So I
really learned not to ask for those things, and I
knew that if I if I didn't I received them.
There could sometimes be blowback because she, like most mothers,
(09:15):
you know, I'm sure she wanted to treat me, so
sometimes she might buy a pizzaen set of paying the
electric Bill, but there was always a fallout for that.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Yeah, there's a really arresting moment where she's having trouble
with a tooth and she just says, well, it's time
to go to Tijuana because that's that's where you go
for dentistry.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Ninety nine dollars root canal.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
And so you were privy to all that, absorbed that
as a child, and then you had your dad and
Bess in Texas in this TM community. But it seems
also in a more day to day stable life than
your mom's life.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Mm hmm. I think you know my dad from what
I understand, it is own natural procurity at times, and
they all did because they were very dedicated to this
movement that they had made the center of their life,
which was ultimately a movement toward, you know, achieving world peace.
So no one was rolling in the dough. But the
life that they eventually built, and as I came into,
you know, being in second, third, fourth, fifth grade, was
(10:18):
one that was very sort of quiet and stable. They
lived in a rural sort of subdivision that they had
all built as a community, and that was the place
I would say I had the closest to an Americana childhood.
I mean I had a little bike with the banana
seat and the streamers. I would write it to my
(10:39):
friend's house. And it was not a wealthy life by
any means, but it was very comfortable. I mean, it
felt kind of protected in middle class. After my mom
and I moved to California. Most every summer from I'd
say age five or six through toward the end of
high school, I would fly out from California and go
(11:01):
stay with my dad and Beth in Texas for the summer,
maybe a month or so, and then after that I
would fly to his parents' home in Miami for a
couple of weeks and my grandfather, his father was a
renowned surgeon, and they lived a very different life. Again,
it wasn't ostentatious, but it was definitely the wealthiest environment
(11:23):
that I was ever in as a child.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
(11:53):
When Nina is in the fifth grade, about ten or eleven,
her mother says to her, I am a walk him.
Her mother, whose name is Anita, also says something about
the Anitas Anita one and Anita two. Nina isn't sure
what to make of any of this, what is her
mom talking about?
Speaker 2 (12:15):
That must have been, you know, the early nineties and
on OPRAH there was a lot of talk shows doing
segments on like past life progression, sort of memories of
abuse emerging. Do you remember this? Yeah? Yeah, So I
feel like this idea sort of was born of that time.
So a walk in too, and you can find you know,
(12:36):
sort of communities online that feel that they are Walking's
Ruth Montgomery, I think sort of wrote a seminal book
about that, describing what it is a person that feels
like they are walking. It is a pre agreed upon
contract that your soul makes with another soul before you're born.
(12:57):
And that agreement is that at some point in your life,
when your soul has completed its its tasks or its
lessons or whatever it came here to do, so to speak,
then your soul will exit the body and this new
soul will enter it. So you will essentially be outwardly
(13:20):
the same, but this new soul is in the body
and it has its own sort of karmic lessons that
it needs to learn and things that it needs to
follow out.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
So your mom explains this to you, and what did
that feel like for you? I mean, your mom was
essentially saying to you, I look the same, but I'm
a different person.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Yeah, I mean terrifying, Like that is just I felt
like I was in a horror film. You know. It
just was so spooky. I remember that very viscerally, and
but just remember having chills and being both scared and
confused because the way that she presented it to me
was sort of in this calming, assured way, like oh no,
(14:02):
it's better now, you know. And because she said, you know,
I was Anita one and now I'm Anita two, and
looking back, I feel like she was trying to distill
it into child terms. But that was terrifying, because you
know what, Anita too is not my mom, who the
hell is she? But the way she was explaining it
(14:24):
was a very matter of fact and straightforward and like,
you know, it's better now. Anita one wasn't doing well
and Nita two is here, and she's like, you know,
she has her stuff more together, she's healthier, she's grounded,
she's going to take better care of you guys. And
it felt, I don't know, like just a total schism.
I just didn't know how to make sense of it.
It was both like really frightening. But then what was
(14:48):
I to do but just trust this new old person.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
By the time Nina is in the sixth grade, her
mom has managed to scrape together a little money bought
a house in a town called Weed, So in one sense,
life is a bit more settled, But there's an undercurrent,
something lurking. Up until that point in Nina's life, she's
been aware of her mother's burns. She knows her mom
(15:16):
wears turtlenecks no matter what the season, to cover the
burns on her neck, but Nina's never known exactly what
happened or why. Now her mom decides would be a
good time to tell Nina the story of how her
burns came to be.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
So that conversation, and I remember sitting on the couch
with my mom, you know, we had these like kind
of like dusty, old second hand tweed couches, and I
remember sitting there with her, and she just said, it's
time for me to tell you the story. And I said,
the story of what? And she said my burn and
(15:56):
I kind of brushed her off, like you were in
a fire.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
You know.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
I knew that I didn't know anything else about it,
and I had honestly never thought about it, which people
think seems strange. But as a child, you're like that
frog in boiling water. You just accept what is. Often
we don't question these things until much later in life,
unless something really catalyzes that inquiry. So she just sat
me down, and she just kind of launched into this story,
(16:22):
which in retrospect was like, oh my god. I didn't
ask for this story. But she told me how how
she grew up in Detroit, and she had been a
student at University of Michigan and after her freshman year,
I think it was the summer before her sophomore year,
her and some girlfriends decided to dig a road trip
to Colorado. You know, it was nineteen seventy one, and
(16:45):
you know, there was a lot going on politically. The
Vietnam protests were happening. All these Buddhist monks had been
self immolating. There was a lot of angst and sort
of rage in the youth culture, and so they went
out to Colorado to see what was happening. And it
was a couple of her college roommates and then an
older woman who at that time I think was like
(17:07):
twenty five or twenty six, and this older woman named Rayelle.
I don't know how they were friends. I don't know
how they were connected, but you know, it was a
university town, so who knows. So they all take this
road trip to Colorado, and toward the end of the summer,
they're coming back and Rail starts telling my mom these
stories about these men that are after them. And my
(17:28):
mom is telling me this as I'm sitting on the
couch with her, you know, knees to chess, just listening,
thinking like, where is this going? You know, what does
this have to do? Is my mom's burns but kind
of wrapped. So she tells me that Rail's has this
story that these men are after them. I'm like, oh
my god, you know, and that most of the other
(17:48):
girls go home. They're kind of getting freaked out by
Rail's stories. But my mom and ray all go back
to ann Arbor and by that time it's the fall,
but my mom never rear enrolls in school. They're just
kind of wandering around town and Rayel is getting increasingly
paranoid and saying, not only are these men after them,
but if they find them, that they're going to torture
(18:10):
them and eventually kill them, and my mom is getting
really freaked out by this, and she just can't imagine this,
and somehow she starts to believe this too, and then
Rayelle says, you know, we should kill ourselves. It would
be better to do that than to be tortured. And so,
you know, my mom goes along with it, and they're
(18:31):
staying in some kitchen and ann arbor, and you know,
as my mom is telling me this, I'm thinking like,
oh my god, who's this woman? Like what do you mean?
How could you believe this? But I'm also really freaked out.
And then she says, they found a roll butcher paper
and just wrap themselves in it and let themselves on fire.
You know, I've come to find out a lot later,
(18:53):
a lot more about it as an adult, but in
that moment, that's what she told me, and I just
was like, you know, shell shocked, could not believe what
she was telling me. And then by that point, you know,
she'd been telling me the story and her the language
was getting more frenetic, and I was just kind of
getting caught up in it, sort of like full body
chills and kind of like a not in the chest
(19:14):
kind of sad and scared for my mom and confused
and wondering who this wild lady was. And by that
point she has kind of a far away look in
her eyes, and then she says, you know, then the
firemen came and they wrapped us in wool blankets. There
were fire blankets. They wrapped us in fire blankets. It
took us to the ambulance and rushed them to the
(19:35):
University of Michigan Burn Center. And I think the last
thing she said was something like, you know, he saved
my life. That fireman saved my life. It was an
eerie moment. I mean, I just didn't know what to
do with that.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
I mean, how would you characterize what you felt at
that time? And I know it's so hard because there
are layers and layers, but I mean it was mostly
concern for your mother? Or was it fear for yourself?
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Was it?
Speaker 1 (20:05):
I mean, in a way, I'm kind of connecting it
back to Anita one and Anita two in the sense
of like who are you Innita one?
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Anita too, that was felt like the first sort of
like split. You know, my mother and I had been
very tight. I think a lot of kids who are
raised by single parents, I mean, maybe mothers in particular.
I can't speak to it. It might be the same
for any parent, but especially when you're raised by a
single parent and you don't have much money, you kind
(20:32):
of become their little partner in crime. You grow up
with them in a way you know much more than
maybe is healthy or appropriate at times, because they're just
getting by and you're doing it all with them. They
don't have the privilege of protecting you from information that
maybe a broader or more stable or moneyed household might.
(20:54):
So I don't begrudge her taking me along for for
those things. I think some stories she told me were
too psychologically advanced for the age at which she shared them.
But the walking thing, yet, that was the first sort
of glitch, like, oh my mother and I are not
there's a divide between us. And then with this story,
(21:17):
it really felt like, oh my god, my mom has
this whole which we all experience at some point, right
when you first start to understand your parents as a person.
You know that moment comes for us all in different ways.
But this was something more than that. Not only was
my mother a person on her own who had lived
this whole other life, but she'd been involved in something
(21:40):
that just who could even wrap their mind around that.
So I think that it created this sort of dissonance
for me which became a part of my life as
a person, as a thinker, as an artist, in which
nothing was ever as it seemed. Not only was there
always something below the surface, there was many, many lays
(22:00):
and that was both sort of intellectually interesting, but as
a person and as a child, it was totally destabilizing.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Right, And it's happening as you're entering your teenage years, great,
like right on the cusp there, and your mom came
extremely close to dying, which she tells you at that time.
And this woman, Rayel does die.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
Right, she dies, not that night, but they end up
in the University of Michigan burn unit in two months
in November, and two months later around the holidays, Rael dies.
I'm not exactly sure from what I think it was
complications in infection or something. And then my mom is
in the burn unit for six months total before she
(22:44):
gets out.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
It's a lot, in fact, it's too much. By the
time she's in high school, Nina distances herself from her
mother as much as possible. She doesn't exactly run away,
she just doesn't come home, and this escape from home
extends to other things, a kind of escape from herself.
(23:09):
She drinks, does drugs, all the typical high school stuff,
except Nina is rebelling with more than the usual teenage gusto.
She's hell bent on self destruction. She's in this phase
of CouchSurfing at friends homes, relying on the kindness of
other people's families. When her mother decides that enough is enough,
(23:30):
she insists that Nina come home, and in a way,
Nina wants to come home, but once she does, she's
overtaken by a rage she hasn't allowed herself to feel
up until now, and she writes her mother a letter
that begins with the salutation mommy dearest. Now, Mommy Dearest
(23:51):
was a film, a biopic about Joan Crawford who had
been a nightmarish mother, and Nina and her mom had
watched this film together, so the phrase is a terrible blow.
Nina leaves the letter for her mother and goes off
to school.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
So when I came home from school and I felt,
you know, this great flood of relief leaving that letter
for her and thinking like, screwed it, you know, and
finally saying all the things I didn't say, all the
feelings that I ate, all the ways that I listened
to you tell me these things I didn't want to hear,
et cetera. Like it all came out and I felt
very justified. And then I came home from school and
(24:29):
she didn't say a thing to me, Like half of
the things on my bedroom walls were gone, and there
was a pile of boxes on the floor and she
was packing up my room and she just turned around
and said, you know, if that's how you feel, you
can get the fuck out of my house. And I
immediately felt like that sort of you know, righteous feeling
I had just disappeared, and I just felt like kind
(24:52):
of a hot flush of shame, and I just thought,
oh my god, what have I done. You know, my
mother is a lot of things, and was a lot
of things, but she was not that woman. And I
did it to hurt her, and because I was hurt,
and I did deserve a voice in that conversation, but
it had gone so far that that's how it came out,
and so she said, you can get out, and I
(25:13):
just felt totally ashamed. And I remember picking up the
boxes and just not saying a word. We didn't say
anything else to each other. I crammed some boxes in
the trunk of my car and I went back in
to get the rest, and as I was sort of
closing the trunk, I saw one of the boxes flapped open,
and on the top of you know, a pile of clothes,
(25:34):
there was a copy of the book Mommy Dearest, like
an old, you know, ratty copy from the thrift store
or something. I don't know if she had it in
her collection or if she went and bought it that day,
which I would not put past my mother, like if
you want to activate your petty, she will always win.
The cover was missing, though, So I picked up this
book and she had ripped the front cover off and
on the first page, in her big sort of like
(25:57):
flowering cursive, she had written love Mommy dearest. So she
had signed the book to me.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Do you still have that?
Speaker 2 (26:04):
Oh? No, God, I wish that could go on the archive.
You know. So if you ever wanted to fight my
mother with fire, you were not going to win.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
So this becomes the beginning of a rift. It sort
of gets band aids on it, but it never really
heals after that.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
That's right. Yeah, it feels strained. I kind of leave
and I'm living out of a trailer, and then I
have a temporary situation where I'm living with a friend,
and eventually I moved back home with my mom, but
you know, for a year or so, and we're kind
of polite, like things have settled, but it were never
close like we were again.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Yeah, it's so interesting because she was obviously so ill
and at the same time, the best part of her
identity was very wrapped up in being a mother, even
though you know, in like mothering one oh one, she
failed in all sorts of ways. We were all such
complicated human beings. She was an incredibly complicated human being. Yeah,
(27:04):
of course, we'll be right back. Nina goes off to
(27:37):
college and to Italy for a semester. Abroad, she's only
a little bit in touch with her mom, whose reality
is continuing to deteriorate. Nina gets worrying messages from her,
but as she's finally experiencing some freedom in her adult life,
she tries not to let her worry get in the way.
She's in Italy. After all, how much can she really
(27:59):
do to help her man? Now, When she gets back
from studying abroad, she sees a blinking green light on
her message machine. The message is from her mother's friend, March.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
March tells me that probably as my flight was returning
from a semester abroad Italy, my mom has let her house,
the house we were living in Weed, you know where.
She had told me about the first fire, that she
let her house on fire and been charged with fillanny
arson and is now in county jail. And so I
(28:34):
obviously freak out and call March back. And I don't
get much more information than that, but just that, you know,
my mom had some sort of psychotic break and let
her house on fire. Came to sort of as it
was happening, that's all, a little murky realized she didn't
(28:55):
want to do this and kind of ran outside and
called the fire department, and with fire department King, and
I'm sure what they encountered was must have been a
woman in great distress, but instead of getting her help,
she was booked and put in the back of a
squad car and charged.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
And she had also told your brother Chris to leave
the house.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
She had, Yeah, I think because I you know, my
brother was only fifteen at that time, and we weren't
that close, because you know, I was away in college
and at that point I was so deeply devoted to
my family and would have done anything for them, but
there was a part of me that was sort of,
as you said, emotionally disconnected, sort of like fingers in
the ears, la la la la la. So I could go,
(29:42):
and I had to do that so I could build
a life of my own. And I think while I
was in Italy there was some of that denial coming
into place, with the fact that she was writing these
emails which were pretty unhinged, and I was still just
you know, going for weekend trips to Waldough beaut in
a and drinking per secon go and eating cheese, and
I just didn't want to deal with it, to be
(30:03):
honest by that point, which sounds harsh, but if you've
lived a life anything like this, you can probably relate.
So Marge said, Oh, don't worry. You know, your brother's
with his friends, and I thought, oh, my god, my brother.
And I found out later that my mom had him
go to a friend's house. She just said, I'm not
feeling good, you need to go to a friend's house.
So I think in a few days leading up to
(30:24):
the fire. She was really breaking down, and she was
aware enough to know, like, you've got to get out
of your I don't know what I'm going to do.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
So you go to pick Chris up at high school
so that you can go see your mother. And there's
a line in your book which I noted, which is
someone older or wiser should have been driving that day.
And I actually wrote in the margin I'm in like,
I mean please, yeah, I mean, I'm end to that.
(30:54):
You know that there's this fifteen year old and this
twenty two year old going to see their mother who's
been put in jail for suspected arson. And where were
your father and Beth during that period of time, like
(31:15):
during that crisis as the parents who much more were
mentally together.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
Yeah, I mean they were, you know, still like physically,
you know, they were in Texas. I think after I
got that call, I left. I was in school in
San Diego. I was at you see, San Diego, and
I flew home. My final quarter of school I was
about to graduate, was starting like two days later, So
I email my professors, took a week off, and I
flew home, borrowed a car from you know, an old
(31:46):
friend's dad and drove and got my brother and was like,
we're going to see mom and figure out, you know,
what the hell's going on. It was like visiting hours.
You know, you had to get there between you know,
four thirty and five thirty years. So we got there.
We talked to my mom through you know, the sort
of soup caned phones that they have in jail, and
(32:06):
she was in a jumpsuit and it was just so surreal.
I mean, my brother hardly said anything, but she said,
you know, I want you to get me a lawyer.
And this was my mom. You know, She's like, I'm
not going to get stuck with a public defender.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
The other thing that was very intense about seeing her
in that orange jumpsuit was that it was maybe the
first time that you had ever seen your mother, certainly
in public, with her scars just out in the open. Right.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
She would wear turtlenecks every day, and she bore them
under dresses, she bore them under a T shirt or
you know, a button down. She was always covering, you know,
because her scars went up her neck and they ended
right at her jaw line, and she actually had the
outer part of her ears had been burned off. Well,
(33:01):
but if she wore you know, she had sort of
like a chin lenk bob most of my life. So
she wore it like that, and then she wore eternal
neck to cover the neck, and her face was intact,
and she was quite beautiful and you just would never
know that. And so in that jumpsuit, her neck was
totally exposed. And yeah, that was just such a poignant
(33:21):
moment because it was almost as shocking to see my
mother's neck exposed as it was to see her in jail.
There were just so many levels of secrecy, I guess,
but there were so many levels of covering, is what
I would call it. Because my mom never said, you know,
my body's a secret, or even this fire is a secret.
She never my mother never asked me to keep a
(33:41):
secret my whole life. But there were so many things
that I just knew were secrets that I internalized. And
maybe that was because of the environments around me didn't
seem amenable to hearing those things. I'm not sure. I
just kind of knew. So as we left the jail,
I thought, okay, I needed to hire a lawyer, and
her friend Marge had given me a number for a lawyer.
(34:03):
So I called him and he said, you know, to
retain me, it'll be three thousand dollars. So I went
to a payphone. My brother was waiting the car. I
went to a payphone and called the only person that
I knew that I could ask for three thousand dollars,
which was my father. I told him briefly what had happened.
He was obviously in shock and just asked, if you know,
we were okay, But I was very to business at
(34:26):
that point, and I just said, I need this money.
I have to get it by XYZ day. And he
looked at the closest Western Union and said, you know,
can you be there by seven o'clock? And I went
and I did it, and he didn't ask any other questions.
So to his credit, he really came through when we
needed it. But then the fallout of that experience, which
(34:50):
went on for several months afterward, I was kind of
on my own in it. To be honest, I hope
that's a fair memory, because that's how it is in
my mind. My mom ended up spending three months in jail,
even with the private attorney that we hired, and my
brother was with his best friend's family who were close
(35:13):
to my mom and knew her well, and she trusted
them and they really took him in. And I went
back to college to finish school, and the.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
Arson investigation found your mom temporarily insane was the phrase.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
That was a phrase. And I didn't meet I was.
I think I was up in California, you know, because
that was at the very top of the state, and
I was at school in San Diego, very bottom of
the state. So I think I was up there for
a week or so, helping with details and getting my
brother settled, and I met him. I remember meeting the
insurance inspector at the house, and I don't even remember
what kind of questions he asked, but they're basically trying
(35:49):
to assess whether you were doing this for money, you know,
whether she had burned the house down for insurance money.
So we asked some questions, and then the verdict came back,
and he went been met with her in the jail
and you know, interviewed her, and the verdict came back
temporarily insane. So they awarded a full money to rebuild
the house, which was a sort of twisted blessing, you know.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
But yeah, and I imagine it must have been so surreal,
like the way you describe it to You know that
this house which was the sight of so much, and
which you know had burned to cinders, then being rebuilt
in this kind of everything new, you know, like your
mother now had like her own meditation room. Right a
(36:38):
week before Nina's twenty fourth birthday, her mother dies suddenly
of a pulmonary embolism. Her death, even though foreshadowed in
all sorts of ways by her life, is shocking, and
Nina is at such a tender age on the cusp
of adulthood. As she goes through her mother's things, Nina
(36:58):
stumbles upon her grandfather's journal, which contains writing about their
shared family history, particularly the time her mother set herself
on fire. This time, instead of turning away, Nina leans in.
She's ready in a sense to know the secrets she
has kept from herself, and the way that tragedy when
(37:19):
it comes, can spread like a virus or a fire,
one terrible thing leading to the next and to the next.
So what did you find when you did begin to
look up everything that you could about your mother's story.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
With that journal? I was or reading that and somehow
feeling connected to my grandfather and even imagining my uncle
being there across time. I kind of I wanted to
go back to that time, and I wanted to see
the story for myself because everything I had ever known
about this was just funneled directly from my mother to me,
and I had never talked to my dad about it.
(38:00):
I had never talked to anyone else about this, including
my little brother. So I was just hungry for something grounding,
like some real information about this. So I went home
to Portland and I googled my mom, which I mean
Google didn't exist when when you know, I was first
hearing these stories, and it was something that back to
the frog and boiling water thing, I had just never
(38:22):
thought of. But with my mother gone, there was sort
of like this this hole in the time space continuum
for me, and it just felt like all these new
ideas and possibilities sorted pouring out and I just thought, oh,
I have to research and explore this on my own.
So I remember being my apartment and googling my mom's name,
and it was just all these articles came up from
(38:47):
all over the country. I mean some of them were
smaller or bigger, but there was a piece in the
New York Times about the fire. There was something in
you know, the Frisno newspapers. There was coverage of the
fire from all over the country, and you know, they
were calling them human torches and quoting one of the
girls who said to another in the ambulance as they
(39:08):
were holding their hands on the way to the burning unit, like,
isn't it lovely to die together? I mean, it was
just really arresting seeing all that on the screen. For
some reason, it really concretized. The whole thing for me
was that when.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
You began to find your way into writing about it.
Speaker 2 (39:27):
I was twenty four. Then I really didn't start writing
about this until I was almost thirty, and I had
gone through a big breakup someone that I was with
for years, and I was living on my own for
the first time, and I had done all this research
on it when I first found that journal and was
reading the articles in the newspaper, and I had a
bunch of my mom's journals too, and I was reading
(39:49):
them and really getting into her psyche and maybe how
ill she had been at the end, and it was
it kind of consumed my life for a while. But
then I tucked it ou and I went back to
trying to just live and make my life. And it
wasn't until I went through a big breakup and moved
out into an apartment on my own. I think I
(40:09):
was like twenty nine by then that I really started
to try to reckon with all these things that had happened.
So it wasn't just oh, this is the information, this
is a story that happened to my mother. It was like, well,
what happened to me? And it wasn't until I was
living in my first little apartment of my own, and
you know, I was like doing the artist's way and
starting to read self help books, which I had always
(40:30):
avoided like the plague before, you know, growing up with
like a very new age mother. I was just like, oh, god, whatever.
But I sat down one morning. I had this old
typewriter that a friend had left me, and I started
just writing anything I could think of, like stories, scenarios, scenes,
character just all these moments from my life that I
had never really processed. I had just sort of lived
(40:52):
through and survived and kept it moving. So I really
didn't start to ask that what happened to me until
I put it down on paper and for one year,
every morning I just wrote and wrote, wrote, And then
at the end of the year, I had like a
stack of three hundred pages. I mean it was crude
and wild and all over the place. But I sat
(41:14):
down on my couch and I read the stack of
pages from front to back. And that was an out
of body experience. When I tell you that reading those
pages was like reading the story of someone else's life,
I mean I just thought, where was I How could
I have been? You know, my mother was descending into madness,
and that I was over here worried about like do
(41:36):
I look cute in these genes? And does this guy
like me? It just it was really stark to see
it on paper. Eventually, I think then the real work
of the book and where I came out the other
end was forgiving myself for that, forgiving myself and my
mother and understanding that we were all doing what we
could to live.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Yeah. You know, it strikes me when you said that
about the writer's way and avoiding self help books and
all the rest, is that there's another sentence from your
book that struck me, which is, in a way, my
mother's beliefs stole faith from me and it seems to
use the word faith really loosely, like you needed to
(42:14):
reclaim that for yourself, and writing is an act of faith.
Writing every day, writing forward, not knowing where it's taking you,
is making something out of nothing, and that requires something
like faith. And in a way, it seems like that
knitted back together for you, like something that had been
(42:37):
taken from you or just simply not available to you
because there was no room for it to be.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
No. I love that. I really feel like I reconstituted
myself in the process of writing that story, and not
just looking at what had happened and how it had
affected me, but also who my mother was and what
was and what was not allowed her or a woman
like her in the culture in which we live, and
so that really helped me understand her in context as well.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
Here's Nina reading one last passage from Love is a
burning thing.
Speaker 2 (43:21):
Maybe those of us compelled to tell fractured family stories
are the ones who feel unfinished. Maybe we take the
ancestors into us and live out all possible lives, wandering
down alleyways not ours, just to tie up storylines in
the gap left by my mother's family, the Detroit people,
the Canadians, the Catholic and the quebec Qua, the Hockey
(43:44):
Lovers and Crown Royals, the La Bat Blues. I emerge
as mother, father, brother's sister. I am the metallurgist, transforming
alloy into cars, the alchemists, rendering mercury to gold. I
am perfection and its destruction. I am flash over the
whole damn room combusting. I am splitting this town. I
(44:04):
am blowing this joint. I am a woman on the run,
a neon flash. If you blink, we carry all of
the story. See we are the whole scene.
Speaker 1 (44:30):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly z Acur
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
(44:51):
find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(45:27):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows,
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. This episode contains
discussion of suicide and self harm.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Listener discretion is advice. For twenty years, I told no
one her story. I tucked it into me like a
grotesque treasure, a cold gem that I guarded with ferocious pride.
Uncertain who else knew. Mom and I never talked about
(00:29):
it again, and no one, not my father or his parents,
or any of my mother's friends, ever asked me about
the fire or what sense I, as a young girl,
had made of it. People ask about my relationship with fire.
You must be afraid of it, they say, I'm so sorry.
My college roommate says, after she burns toast to a
(00:50):
smoky crisp in the kitchen, releasing plumes of smoke. Who
smell lingers for days? Does this trigger you? It's okay,
I shrug, It's just toast. I have no relationship with fire. Really,
relationships are cultivated, nurtured. This I inherited.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
That's Nina Saint Pierre, culture writer, essayist, editor, and author
of the recent memoir Love Is a Burning Thing. Nina's
is a story about surviving the people who precede us
those we love but cannot emulate those we wish to protect,
but not at the expense of destroying ourselves. It's a
(01:36):
story of tenacity, resilience, and hope. I'm Danny Shapiro and
this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
(01:58):
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape of your childhood.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
It was sort of a roving landscape. I'd say, it's
kind of always in motion. And you know, I was
born in a small Transcendental meditation community in Fairfield, Iowa.
My parents sort of split but remained geographically close to
each other and co parented for the first few years
(02:30):
of my life. But my mom was, as my father
puts it, constantly taking off. So we were pinging between
Iowa and Washington, d c. In Detroit, where her family
was from. She was deeply involved in the Transcendental Meditation movement.
So there were these TM centers sort of all over
(02:51):
the country, and so we would kind of go to
those for little stints because she was working on projects
with them. Then at four years old, four going on five,
I'd moved to California with her, and from that point on.
Our travel was sort of restricted to California, but we
moved around a lot up and down the state, to
little towns and cities, and we were just always on
(03:12):
the move.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
At one point, you describe, I love this sentence you're write.
My real memory begins in motion.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
I was living with my mom in the Tenderloine in
San Francisco, was nineteen eighty six by then, which if
you know anything about the Tenderloin in nineteen eighty six,
it was a rough and colorful place. It was really
a triangle of social services. Most people were living on welfare.
We lived in what they go on SRO, so it's
(03:43):
a single room occupancy. Most of them don't have kitchens.
They were converted hotels, so people were really scraping by,
and we had a very colorful life, you know, living
in this sort of European style of hotel was sheer
back through the hallways. Our neighbors were drag queens. They
(04:03):
were queer day black Asian, straight white like my mother.
There were many other single parents, mothers in particular, and
their kids kind of became my friends. So it was
sort of a bright, vivid, grimy world filled with colorful characters.
We were really living a pretty broke life at that time,
(04:25):
and she had gotten me into this private school called
White Pony, which was in Walnut Creek, sort of a wealthy,
primarily white suburb of San Francisco, and we would take
like two buses and a bart. It was about an
hour long trip each way to this kindergarten that was
(04:46):
run by a branch of what they call Sufia's and
Reoriented and it was just this very pristine, calm environment
where everything felt sort of white and washed and everyone
spoke in low tone. And so every day my mom
and I would travel between the chaos and clatter of
the Tenderloin and take this hour long trip to my
(05:08):
school in the suburbs, and it was it was very calm,
and I kind of settled in there, and then every
day we would go back to the clatter of the Tenderloin.
So I think that was the time that I really
started to like hold this duality.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
And that was just the one year, right because after that,
your mom, when you're in first grade, you know, said
something to the effects of we're out of here, We're
heading north.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
That was just the one year. And so it's interesting
that is so outsized in my memory. But I think
it was that age, you know, around five years old
or they say you really start to have concrete memory,
and because it was so full of contrast in life,
it really stood out. But then yeah, at the end
of that year, she was pregnant with my little brother
and a friend had told her there was a cosmic
(05:53):
mountain up north, and she said, now doesn't that sound cool?
And five six years old, what did I know? So
we were off again.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Nina and her mom moved to the remote area of
Siskiyou County, which is halfway between San Francisco and Portland.
Siskiu is at the foot of Mount Shasta, an active volcano.
Could there be a more perfect metaphor? Nina's mom has
moved them here to be closer to the mystical mountain
(06:26):
she's heard so much about. This is not new to Nina,
her mom putting her spirituality at the forefront of their lives.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
There is something very cloistered about childhood. You just understand
your life to be the way it is, so I'm
sure there was some of that, but I think being
born into a transcendental meditation community and it wasn't Camm
you like in the way that some people might imagine.
But it was a small town in which people were
all practicing TM toye a day, and my parents were
(06:57):
both very united in what they felt was their contribution
to creating world peace and before so I think, before
I even remember, that's kind of what I was born into,
and I'm sure I was surrounded by this sort of language.
My mother got into tarot and astrology and things like
(07:17):
channeling very early on. That's part of why she left TM.
So I think even if I don't remember this language
consciously much before we got to Mount Shasta, it was
sort of in me through osmosis, if nothing else. So,
and she kind of had this great adventurous spirit. And
(07:38):
much like my life in San Francisco, which felt like
in a juxtaposition between this gritty, grimy, bright city life
and the sort of calm, meditative tones of White Pony,
my mom contained that duality as well. So you know,
she could kind of like run with the people in
the street and talk a little shit, but she is
(08:00):
always reading about the saints and sort of spoke about
the cosmos and enlightenment and angels in the same sentences.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
In the meantime, Nina's dad remarries a woman named Beth.
While Nina and her mom live at the base of
this magical mountain, her dad and Beth end up in
the hill country in Texas. Living a spiritual life is
important to her dad too, and he and Beth are
part of a meditation community. But back at the volcanic rock,
(08:34):
life goes on for Nina and her mom. Nina's mom
has another child some years later, Nina's younger brother, Christopher.
Finances are tight for the family, and Nina's mom, for
better or worse, is not exactly shy about sharing this
financial precarity with her daughter.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
It was sort of like, you know, the ticker on
a news show was just the running tally. She she
was always working out her finances on little pieces of
paper at a cafe. And I knew, you know, very
early on, what each little treat cost us. So I
really learned not to ask for those things, and I
knew that if I if I didn't I received them.
There could sometimes be blowback because she, like most mothers,
(09:15):
you know, I'm sure she wanted to treat me, so
sometimes she might buy a pizzaen set of paying the
electric Bill, but there was always a fallout for that.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Yeah, there's a really arresting moment where she's having trouble
with a tooth and she just says, well, it's time
to go to Tijuana because that's that's where you go
for dentistry.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Ninety nine dollars root canal.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
And so you were privy to all that, absorbed that
as a child, and then you had your dad and
Bess in Texas in this TM community. But it seems
also in a more day to day stable life than
your mom's life.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Mm hmm. I think you know my dad from what
I understand, it is own natural procurity at times, and
they all did because they were very dedicated to this
movement that they had made the center of their life,
which was ultimately a movement toward, you know, achieving world peace.
So no one was rolling in the dough. But the
life that they eventually built, and as I came into,
you know, being in second, third, fourth, fifth grade, was
(10:18):
one that was very sort of quiet and stable. They
lived in a rural sort of subdivision that they had
all built as a community, and that was the place
I would say I had the closest to an Americana childhood.
I mean I had a little bike with the banana
seat and the streamers. I would write it to my
(10:39):
friend's house. And it was not a wealthy life by
any means, but it was very comfortable. I mean, it
felt kind of protected in middle class. After my mom
and I moved to California. Most every summer from I'd
say age five or six through toward the end of
high school, I would fly out from California and go
(11:01):
stay with my dad and Beth in Texas for the summer,
maybe a month or so, and then after that I
would fly to his parents' home in Miami for a
couple of weeks and my grandfather, his father was a
renowned surgeon, and they lived a very different life. Again,
it wasn't ostentatious, but it was definitely the wealthiest environment
(11:23):
that I was ever in as a child.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
(11:53):
When Nina is in the fifth grade, about ten or eleven,
her mother says to her, I am a walk him.
Her mother, whose name is Anita, also says something about
the Anitas Anita one and Anita two. Nina isn't sure
what to make of any of this, what is her
mom talking about?
Speaker 2 (12:15):
That must have been, you know, the early nineties and
on OPRAH there was a lot of talk shows doing
segments on like past life progression, sort of memories of
abuse emerging. Do you remember this? Yeah? Yeah, So I
feel like this idea sort of was born of that time.
So a walk in too, and you can find you know,
(12:36):
sort of communities online that feel that they are Walking's
Ruth Montgomery, I think sort of wrote a seminal book
about that, describing what it is a person that feels
like they are walking. It is a pre agreed upon
contract that your soul makes with another soul before you're born.
(12:57):
And that agreement is that at some point in your life,
when your soul has completed its its tasks or its
lessons or whatever it came here to do, so to speak,
then your soul will exit the body and this new
soul will enter it. So you will essentially be outwardly
(13:20):
the same, but this new soul is in the body
and it has its own sort of karmic lessons that
it needs to learn and things that it needs to
follow out.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
So your mom explains this to you, and what did
that feel like for you? I mean, your mom was
essentially saying to you, I look the same, but I'm
a different person.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Yeah, I mean terrifying, Like that is just I felt
like I was in a horror film. You know. It
just was so spooky. I remember that very viscerally, and
but just remember having chills and being both scared and
confused because the way that she presented it to me
was sort of in this calming, assured way, like oh no,
(14:02):
it's better now, you know. And because she said, you know,
I was Anita one and now I'm Anita two, and
looking back, I feel like she was trying to distill
it into child terms. But that was terrifying, because you
know what, Anita too is not my mom, who the
hell is she? But the way she was explaining it
(14:24):
was a very matter of fact and straightforward and like,
you know, it's better now. Anita one wasn't doing well
and Nita two is here, and she's like, you know,
she has her stuff more together, she's healthier, she's grounded,
she's going to take better care of you guys. And
it felt, I don't know, like just a total schism.
I just didn't know how to make sense of it.
It was both like really frightening. But then what was
(14:48):
I to do but just trust this new old person.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
By the time Nina is in the sixth grade, her
mom has managed to scrape together a little money bought
a house in a town called Weed, So in one sense,
life is a bit more settled, But there's an undercurrent,
something lurking. Up until that point in Nina's life, she's
been aware of her mother's burns. She knows her mom
(15:16):
wears turtlenecks no matter what the season, to cover the
burns on her neck, but Nina's never known exactly what
happened or why. Now her mom decides would be a
good time to tell Nina the story of how her
burns came to be.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
So that conversation, and I remember sitting on the couch
with my mom, you know, we had these like kind
of like dusty, old second hand tweed couches, and I
remember sitting there with her, and she just said, it's
time for me to tell you the story. And I said,
the story of what? And she said my burn and
(15:56):
I kind of brushed her off, like you were in
a fire.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
You know.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
I knew that I didn't know anything else about it,
and I had honestly never thought about it, which people
think seems strange. But as a child, you're like that
frog in boiling water. You just accept what is. Often
we don't question these things until much later in life,
unless something really catalyzes that inquiry. So she just sat
me down, and she just kind of launched into this story,
(16:22):
which in retrospect was like, oh my god. I didn't
ask for this story. But she told me how how
she grew up in Detroit, and she had been a
student at University of Michigan and after her freshman year,
I think it was the summer before her sophomore year,
her and some girlfriends decided to dig a road trip
to Colorado. You know, it was nineteen seventy one, and
(16:45):
you know, there was a lot going on politically. The
Vietnam protests were happening. All these Buddhist monks had been
self immolating. There was a lot of angst and sort
of rage in the youth culture, and so they went
out to Colorado to see what was happening. And it
was a couple of her college roommates and then an
older woman who at that time I think was like
(17:07):
twenty five or twenty six, and this older woman named Rayelle.
I don't know how they were friends. I don't know
how they were connected, but you know, it was a
university town, so who knows. So they all take this
road trip to Colorado, and toward the end of the summer,
they're coming back and Rail starts telling my mom these
stories about these men that are after them. And my
(17:28):
mom is telling me this as I'm sitting on the
couch with her, you know, knees to chess, just listening,
thinking like, where is this going? You know, what does
this have to do? Is my mom's burns but kind
of wrapped. So she tells me that Rail's has this
story that these men are after them. I'm like, oh
my god, you know, and that most of the other
(17:48):
girls go home. They're kind of getting freaked out by
Rail's stories. But my mom and ray all go back
to ann Arbor and by that time it's the fall,
but my mom never rear enrolls in school. They're just
kind of wandering around town and Rayel is getting increasingly
paranoid and saying, not only are these men after them,
but if they find them, that they're going to torture
(18:10):
them and eventually kill them, and my mom is getting
really freaked out by this, and she just can't imagine this,
and somehow she starts to believe this too, and then
Rayelle says, you know, we should kill ourselves. It would
be better to do that than to be tortured. And so,
you know, my mom goes along with it, and they're
(18:31):
staying in some kitchen and ann arbor, and you know,
as my mom is telling me this, I'm thinking like,
oh my god, who's this woman? Like what do you mean?
How could you believe this? But I'm also really freaked out.
And then she says, they found a roll butcher paper
and just wrap themselves in it and let themselves on fire.
You know, I've come to find out a lot later,
(18:53):
a lot more about it as an adult, but in
that moment, that's what she told me, and I just
was like, you know, shell shocked, could not believe what
she was telling me. And then by that point, you know,
she'd been telling me the story and her the language
was getting more frenetic, and I was just kind of
getting caught up in it, sort of like full body
chills and kind of like a not in the chest
(19:14):
kind of sad and scared for my mom and confused
and wondering who this wild lady was. And by that
point she has kind of a far away look in
her eyes, and then she says, you know, then the
firemen came and they wrapped us in wool blankets. There
were fire blankets. They wrapped us in fire blankets. It
took us to the ambulance and rushed them to the
(19:35):
University of Michigan Burn Center. And I think the last
thing she said was something like, you know, he saved
my life. That fireman saved my life. It was an
eerie moment. I mean, I just didn't know what to
do with that.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
I mean, how would you characterize what you felt at
that time? And I know it's so hard because there
are layers and layers, but I mean it was mostly
concern for your mother? Or was it fear for yourself?
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Was it?
Speaker 1 (20:05):
I mean, in a way, I'm kind of connecting it
back to Anita one and Anita two in the sense
of like who are you Innita one?
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Anita too, that was felt like the first sort of
like split. You know, my mother and I had been
very tight. I think a lot of kids who are
raised by single parents, I mean, maybe mothers in particular.
I can't speak to it. It might be the same
for any parent, but especially when you're raised by a
single parent and you don't have much money, you kind
(20:32):
of become their little partner in crime. You grow up
with them in a way you know much more than
maybe is healthy or appropriate at times, because they're just
getting by and you're doing it all with them. They
don't have the privilege of protecting you from information that
maybe a broader or more stable or moneyed household might.
(20:54):
So I don't begrudge her taking me along for for
those things. I think some stories she told me were
too psychologically advanced for the age at which she shared them.
But the walking thing, yet, that was the first sort
of glitch, like, oh my mother and I are not
there's a divide between us. And then with this story,
(21:17):
it really felt like, oh my god, my mom has
this whole which we all experience at some point, right
when you first start to understand your parents as a person.
You know that moment comes for us all in different ways.
But this was something more than that. Not only was
my mother a person on her own who had lived
this whole other life, but she'd been involved in something
(21:40):
that just who could even wrap their mind around that.
So I think that it created this sort of dissonance
for me which became a part of my life as
a person, as a thinker, as an artist, in which
nothing was ever as it seemed. Not only was there
always something below the surface, there was many, many lays
(22:00):
and that was both sort of intellectually interesting, but as
a person and as a child, it was totally destabilizing.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Right, And it's happening as you're entering your teenage years, great,
like right on the cusp there, and your mom came
extremely close to dying, which she tells you at that time.
And this woman, Rayel does die.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
Right, she dies, not that night, but they end up
in the University of Michigan burn unit in two months
in November, and two months later around the holidays, Rael dies.
I'm not exactly sure from what I think it was
complications in infection or something. And then my mom is
in the burn unit for six months total before she
(22:44):
gets out.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
It's a lot, in fact, it's too much. By the
time she's in high school, Nina distances herself from her
mother as much as possible. She doesn't exactly run away,
she just doesn't come home, and this escape from home
extends to other things, a kind of escape from herself.
(23:09):
She drinks, does drugs, all the typical high school stuff,
except Nina is rebelling with more than the usual teenage gusto.
She's hell bent on self destruction. She's in this phase
of CouchSurfing at friends homes, relying on the kindness of
other people's families. When her mother decides that enough is enough,
(23:30):
she insists that Nina come home, and in a way,
Nina wants to come home, but once she does, she's
overtaken by a rage she hasn't allowed herself to feel
up until now, and she writes her mother a letter
that begins with the salutation mommy dearest. Now, Mommy Dearest
(23:51):
was a film, a biopic about Joan Crawford who had
been a nightmarish mother, and Nina and her mom had
watched this film together, so the phrase is a terrible blow.
Nina leaves the letter for her mother and goes off
to school.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
So when I came home from school and I felt,
you know, this great flood of relief leaving that letter
for her and thinking like, screwed it, you know, and
finally saying all the things I didn't say, all the
feelings that I ate, all the ways that I listened
to you tell me these things I didn't want to hear,
et cetera. Like it all came out and I felt
very justified. And then I came home from school and
(24:29):
she didn't say a thing to me, Like half of
the things on my bedroom walls were gone, and there
was a pile of boxes on the floor and she
was packing up my room and she just turned around
and said, you know, if that's how you feel, you
can get the fuck out of my house. And I
immediately felt like that sort of you know, righteous feeling
I had just disappeared, and I just felt like kind
(24:52):
of a hot flush of shame, and I just thought,
oh my god, what have I done. You know, my
mother is a lot of things, and was a lot
of things, but she was not that woman. And I
did it to hurt her, and because I was hurt,
and I did deserve a voice in that conversation, but
it had gone so far that that's how it came out,
and so she said, you can get out, and I
(25:13):
just felt totally ashamed. And I remember picking up the
boxes and just not saying a word. We didn't say
anything else to each other. I crammed some boxes in
the trunk of my car and I went back in
to get the rest, and as I was sort of
closing the trunk, I saw one of the boxes flapped open,
and on the top of you know, a pile of clothes,
(25:34):
there was a copy of the book Mommy Dearest, like
an old, you know, ratty copy from the thrift store
or something. I don't know if she had it in
her collection or if she went and bought it that day,
which I would not put past my mother, like if
you want to activate your petty, she will always win.
The cover was missing, though, So I picked up this
book and she had ripped the front cover off and
on the first page, in her big sort of like
(25:57):
flowering cursive, she had written love Mommy dearest. So she
had signed the book to me.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Do you still have that?
Speaker 2 (26:04):
Oh? No, God, I wish that could go on the archive.
You know. So if you ever wanted to fight my
mother with fire, you were not going to win.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
So this becomes the beginning of a rift. It sort
of gets band aids on it, but it never really
heals after that.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
That's right. Yeah, it feels strained. I kind of leave
and I'm living out of a trailer, and then I
have a temporary situation where I'm living with a friend,
and eventually I moved back home with my mom, but
you know, for a year or so, and we're kind
of polite, like things have settled, but it were never
close like we were again.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Yeah, it's so interesting because she was obviously so ill
and at the same time, the best part of her
identity was very wrapped up in being a mother, even
though you know, in like mothering one oh one, she
failed in all sorts of ways. We were all such
complicated human beings. She was an incredibly complicated human being. Yeah,
(27:04):
of course, we'll be right back. Nina goes off to
(27:37):
college and to Italy for a semester. Abroad, she's only
a little bit in touch with her mom, whose reality
is continuing to deteriorate. Nina gets worrying messages from her,
but as she's finally experiencing some freedom in her adult life,
she tries not to let her worry get in the way.
She's in Italy. After all, how much can she really
(27:59):
do to help her man? Now, When she gets back
from studying abroad, she sees a blinking green light on
her message machine. The message is from her mother's friend, March.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
March tells me that probably as my flight was returning
from a semester abroad Italy, my mom has let her house,
the house we were living in Weed, you know where.
She had told me about the first fire, that she
let her house on fire and been charged with fillanny
arson and is now in county jail. And so I
(28:34):
obviously freak out and call March back. And I don't
get much more information than that, but just that, you know,
my mom had some sort of psychotic break and let
her house on fire. Came to sort of as it
was happening, that's all, a little murky realized she didn't
(28:55):
want to do this and kind of ran outside and
called the fire department, and with fire department King, and
I'm sure what they encountered was must have been a
woman in great distress, but instead of getting her help,
she was booked and put in the back of a
squad car and charged.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
And she had also told your brother Chris to leave
the house.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
She had, Yeah, I think because I you know, my
brother was only fifteen at that time, and we weren't
that close, because you know, I was away in college
and at that point I was so deeply devoted to
my family and would have done anything for them, but
there was a part of me that was sort of,
as you said, emotionally disconnected, sort of like fingers in
the ears, la la la la la. So I could go,
(29:42):
and I had to do that so I could build
a life of my own. And I think while I
was in Italy there was some of that denial coming
into place, with the fact that she was writing these
emails which were pretty unhinged, and I was still just
you know, going for weekend trips to Waldough beaut in
a and drinking per secon go and eating cheese, and
I just didn't want to deal with it, to be
(30:03):
honest by that point, which sounds harsh, but if you've
lived a life anything like this, you can probably relate.
So Marge said, Oh, don't worry. You know, your brother's
with his friends, and I thought, oh, my god, my brother.
And I found out later that my mom had him
go to a friend's house. She just said, I'm not
feeling good, you need to go to a friend's house.
So I think in a few days leading up to
(30:24):
the fire. She was really breaking down, and she was
aware enough to know, like, you've got to get out
of your I don't know what I'm going to do.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
So you go to pick Chris up at high school
so that you can go see your mother. And there's
a line in your book which I noted, which is
someone older or wiser should have been driving that day.
And I actually wrote in the margin I'm in like,
I mean please, yeah, I mean, I'm end to that.
(30:54):
You know that there's this fifteen year old and this
twenty two year old going to see their mother who's
been put in jail for suspected arson. And where were
your father and Beth during that period of time, like
(31:15):
during that crisis as the parents who much more were
mentally together.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
Yeah, I mean they were, you know, still like physically,
you know, they were in Texas. I think after I
got that call, I left. I was in school in
San Diego. I was at you see, San Diego, and
I flew home. My final quarter of school I was
about to graduate, was starting like two days later, So
I email my professors, took a week off, and I
flew home, borrowed a car from you know, an old
(31:46):
friend's dad and drove and got my brother and was like,
we're going to see mom and figure out, you know,
what the hell's going on. It was like visiting hours.
You know, you had to get there between you know,
four thirty and five thirty years. So we got there.
We talked to my mom through you know, the sort
of soup caned phones that they have in jail, and
(32:06):
she was in a jumpsuit and it was just so surreal.
I mean, my brother hardly said anything, but she said,
you know, I want you to get me a lawyer.
And this was my mom. You know, She's like, I'm
not going to get stuck with a public defender.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
The other thing that was very intense about seeing her
in that orange jumpsuit was that it was maybe the
first time that you had ever seen your mother, certainly
in public, with her scars just out in the open. Right.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
She would wear turtlenecks every day, and she bore them
under dresses, she bore them under a T shirt or
you know, a button down. She was always covering, you know,
because her scars went up her neck and they ended
right at her jaw line, and she actually had the
outer part of her ears had been burned off. Well,
(33:01):
but if she wore you know, she had sort of
like a chin lenk bob most of my life. So
she wore it like that, and then she wore eternal
neck to cover the neck, and her face was intact,
and she was quite beautiful and you just would never
know that. And so in that jumpsuit, her neck was
totally exposed. And yeah, that was just such a poignant
(33:21):
moment because it was almost as shocking to see my
mother's neck exposed as it was to see her in jail.
There were just so many levels of secrecy, I guess,
but there were so many levels of covering, is what
I would call it. Because my mom never said, you know,
my body's a secret, or even this fire is a secret.
She never my mother never asked me to keep a
(33:41):
secret my whole life. But there were so many things
that I just knew were secrets that I internalized. And
maybe that was because of the environments around me didn't
seem amenable to hearing those things. I'm not sure. I
just kind of knew. So as we left the jail,
I thought, okay, I needed to hire a lawyer, and
her friend Marge had given me a number for a lawyer.
(34:03):
So I called him and he said, you know, to
retain me, it'll be three thousand dollars. So I went
to a payphone. My brother was waiting the car. I
went to a payphone and called the only person that
I knew that I could ask for three thousand dollars,
which was my father. I told him briefly what had happened.
He was obviously in shock and just asked, if you know,
we were okay, But I was very to business at
(34:26):
that point, and I just said, I need this money.
I have to get it by XYZ day. And he
looked at the closest Western Union and said, you know,
can you be there by seven o'clock? And I went
and I did it, and he didn't ask any other questions.
So to his credit, he really came through when we
needed it. But then the fallout of that experience, which
(34:50):
went on for several months afterward, I was kind of
on my own in it. To be honest, I hope
that's a fair memory, because that's how it is in
my mind. My mom ended up spending three months in jail,
even with the private attorney that we hired, and my
brother was with his best friend's family who were close
(35:13):
to my mom and knew her well, and she trusted
them and they really took him in. And I went
back to college to finish school, and the.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
Arson investigation found your mom temporarily insane was the phrase.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
That was a phrase. And I didn't meet I was.
I think I was up in California, you know, because
that was at the very top of the state, and
I was at school in San Diego, very bottom of
the state. So I think I was up there for
a week or so, helping with details and getting my
brother settled, and I met him. I remember meeting the
insurance inspector at the house, and I don't even remember
what kind of questions he asked, but they're basically trying
(35:49):
to assess whether you were doing this for money, you know,
whether she had burned the house down for insurance money.
So we asked some questions, and then the verdict came back,
and he went been met with her in the jail
and you know, interviewed her, and the verdict came back
temporarily insane. So they awarded a full money to rebuild
the house, which was a sort of twisted blessing, you know.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
But yeah, and I imagine it must have been so surreal,
like the way you describe it to You know that
this house which was the sight of so much, and
which you know had burned to cinders, then being rebuilt
in this kind of everything new, you know, like your
mother now had like her own meditation room. Right a
(36:38):
week before Nina's twenty fourth birthday, her mother dies suddenly
of a pulmonary embolism. Her death, even though foreshadowed in
all sorts of ways by her life, is shocking, and
Nina is at such a tender age on the cusp
of adulthood. As she goes through her mother's things, Nina
(36:58):
stumbles upon her grandfather's journal, which contains writing about their
shared family history, particularly the time her mother set herself
on fire. This time, instead of turning away, Nina leans in.
She's ready in a sense to know the secrets she
has kept from herself, and the way that tragedy when
(37:19):
it comes, can spread like a virus or a fire,
one terrible thing leading to the next and to the next.
So what did you find when you did begin to
look up everything that you could about your mother's story.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
With that journal? I was or reading that and somehow
feeling connected to my grandfather and even imagining my uncle
being there across time. I kind of I wanted to
go back to that time, and I wanted to see
the story for myself because everything I had ever known
about this was just funneled directly from my mother to me,
and I had never talked to my dad about it.
(38:00):
I had never talked to anyone else about this, including
my little brother. So I was just hungry for something grounding,
like some real information about this. So I went home
to Portland and I googled my mom, which I mean
Google didn't exist when when you know, I was first
hearing these stories, and it was something that back to
the frog and boiling water thing, I had just never
(38:22):
thought of. But with my mother gone, there was sort
of like this this hole in the time space continuum
for me, and it just felt like all these new
ideas and possibilities sorted pouring out and I just thought, oh,
I have to research and explore this on my own.
So I remember being my apartment and googling my mom's name,
and it was just all these articles came up from
(38:47):
all over the country. I mean some of them were
smaller or bigger, but there was a piece in the
New York Times about the fire. There was something in
you know, the Frisno newspapers. There was coverage of the
fire from all over the country, and you know, they
were calling them human torches and quoting one of the
girls who said to another in the ambulance as they
(39:08):
were holding their hands on the way to the burning unit, like,
isn't it lovely to die together? I mean, it was
just really arresting seeing all that on the screen. For
some reason, it really concretized. The whole thing for me
was that when.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
You began to find your way into writing about it.
Speaker 2 (39:27):
I was twenty four. Then I really didn't start writing
about this until I was almost thirty, and I had
gone through a big breakup someone that I was with
for years, and I was living on my own for
the first time, and I had done all this research
on it when I first found that journal and was
reading the articles in the newspaper, and I had a
bunch of my mom's journals too, and I was reading
(39:49):
them and really getting into her psyche and maybe how
ill she had been at the end, and it was
it kind of consumed my life for a while. But
then I tucked it ou and I went back to
trying to just live and make my life. And it
wasn't until I went through a big breakup and moved
out into an apartment on my own. I think I
(40:09):
was like twenty nine by then that I really started
to try to reckon with all these things that had happened.
So it wasn't just oh, this is the information, this
is a story that happened to my mother. It was like, well,
what happened to me? And it wasn't until I was
living in my first little apartment of my own, and
you know, I was like doing the artist's way and
starting to read self help books, which I had always
(40:30):
avoided like the plague before, you know, growing up with
like a very new age mother. I was just like, oh, god, whatever.
But I sat down one morning. I had this old
typewriter that a friend had left me, and I started
just writing anything I could think of, like stories, scenarios, scenes,
character just all these moments from my life that I
had never really processed. I had just sort of lived
(40:52):
through and survived and kept it moving. So I really
didn't start to ask that what happened to me until
I put it down on paper and for one year,
every morning I just wrote and wrote, wrote, And then
at the end of the year, I had like a
stack of three hundred pages. I mean it was crude
and wild and all over the place. But I sat
(41:14):
down on my couch and I read the stack of
pages from front to back. And that was an out
of body experience. When I tell you that reading those
pages was like reading the story of someone else's life,
I mean I just thought, where was I How could
I have been? You know, my mother was descending into madness,
and that I was over here worried about like do
(41:36):
I look cute in these genes? And does this guy
like me? It just it was really stark to see
it on paper. Eventually, I think then the real work
of the book and where I came out the other
end was forgiving myself for that, forgiving myself and my
mother and understanding that we were all doing what we
could to live.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Yeah. You know, it strikes me when you said that
about the writer's way and avoiding self help books and
all the rest, is that there's another sentence from your
book that struck me, which is, in a way, my
mother's beliefs stole faith from me and it seems to
use the word faith really loosely, like you needed to
(42:14):
reclaim that for yourself, and writing is an act of faith.
Writing every day, writing forward, not knowing where it's taking you,
is making something out of nothing, and that requires something
like faith. And in a way, it seems like that
knitted back together for you, like something that had been
(42:37):
taken from you or just simply not available to you
because there was no room for it to be.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
No. I love that. I really feel like I reconstituted
myself in the process of writing that story, and not
just looking at what had happened and how it had
affected me, but also who my mother was and what
was and what was not allowed her or a woman
like her in the culture in which we live, and
so that really helped me understand her in context as well.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
Here's Nina reading one last passage from Love is a
burning thing.
Speaker 2 (43:21):
Maybe those of us compelled to tell fractured family stories
are the ones who feel unfinished. Maybe we take the
ancestors into us and live out all possible lives, wandering
down alleyways not ours, just to tie up storylines in
the gap left by my mother's family, the Detroit people,
the Canadians, the Catholic and the quebec Qua, the Hockey
(43:44):
Lovers and Crown Royals, the La Bat Blues. I emerge
as mother, father, brother's sister. I am the metallurgist, transforming
alloy into cars, the alchemists, rendering mercury to gold. I
am perfection and its destruction. I am flash over the
whole damn room combusting. I am splitting this town. I
(44:04):
am blowing this joint. I am a woman on the run,
a neon flash. If you blink, we carry all of
the story. See we are the whole scene.
Speaker 1 (44:30):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly z Acur
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
(44:51):
find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(45:27):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows,
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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