October 27, 2022 • 41 mins
As Tad reckons with the choices he’s made in his relationships—most prominently, in his marriage—he must confront the choices made by his father, too. And his grandmother. In uncovering staggering truths, he finds his own struggles with intimacy are part of a long string of inherited secrecy.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. It's
funny how so often those secrets get passed down, and
some smuggled down secretly. It's like he'd clapped me out
in the back and then slipt it into my pocket
and I didn't notice. He's like the artful dodger. And
(00:21):
maybe his mom did the same thing to him. You
don't know where you're getting it, you know. I would
have said if I'd had to guess that he had
been unfaithable, But I didn't know that, and we've never
talked about it, and I never, certainly would never have thought,
like I want to model myself. I'm that guy who
I can't get it you enough love from That would
be a mistake. Why would I want to do that.
I was trying to be the opposite. That's Tad Friend,
(00:46):
staff writer for The New Yorker, an author of the
memoir Cheerful Money, as well as the recent In the
Early Times, A Life Reframed. Tad's is a story about stoicism, silence,
and shame. It's also a story about a complex emotional
legacy passed from generation to generation. A father, a son,
(01:08):
a shared history of marital infidelity, that leaves a great
deal of damage in its wake until the cycle is
finally broken. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,
(01:32):
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
The first house I grew up and was in Buffalo,
New York, it felt very dark. Um. I don't think
it actually objectively was. I mean, there's probably just as
(01:53):
much son in Buffalo um and in most other parts
of the world. But it felt like the house felt dark.
And that's because I spent most of my time when
I was young on the sun porch, which is all
entirely mullioned. Last windows looking out on those days were
still this sort of avenue of elm trees before Dutch
elm disease took them all down. The reason I think
(02:14):
the house felt dark is because I was alone. I
was the first child and for four years, the only child.
And also because the living room felt to me and
maybe actually was dark, and my mom was beyond it
in the kitchen, usually doing something, and it felt like
that sort of almost like a moat between me and
the sunlight and the rest of the house and her
(02:35):
and my dad wasn't around much. He was a Southeast
Asian history professor at the University of Buffalo. And those
first four years of darkness and isolation are pretty tough
to shape. That's a fairly important time in anyone's life.
And I blamed my mom bar without having any understanding
of her own difficulties or what she was going through,
or her postpartum depression or her filling left alone a
(02:58):
bout my dad to with this baby that she hadn't
really wanted, which, on the one hand to make you
feel worse, like who wants to be the unwanted child?
But on the other hand, you know, like, hey, here
I am. And she started to do her best, and
she became a lot better mom later, and I felt
like so many of the things that I like about
myself actually come from her. I like my sense of whimsy,
(03:22):
I like missions of humor, I like my playfulness, and
that's all straight from her. Soon, though, the darkness begins
to lift. When Tad's brother and sister come along. The
house becomes livelier, more jolly. His parents are warming to parenthood,
becoming better at the job, and raising their proverbial game.
When Tad is almost eleven, the family relocates from Buffalo
(03:46):
to Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. My dad became the president of wealthmart
College in nineteen seventy three, and we were lived in
a gigantic, colossal field stone house called Overstone, what wasn't
really called Overtold by anyone, but technically was his name.
And that sort of tokei nish name UM felt right
(04:07):
because it had a sort of goblin ish feel somehow,
Um and my parents were both always super busy. I
felt like that was sort of the end of my
childhood with my dad in some ways. You know, we
all had our own bedroom, you know, in this new
big president's house, and there were three floors and just
(04:28):
endless rooms, and it was gigantic and a nice place
to run around and play, but a lot of it
was sort of also felt off limits because there were
constant cocktail parties and dinner parties for the college of
events which we were not invited to and basically shoot
away from. And also because you know, we just didn't
see much of my parents. And you know, with the
(04:49):
benefit of Hindstein and being help myself now, I realized
that they're both just insanely busy. And overworked and doing
their best, but it felt like that we were we
can sort of weaving but drowning a bit in terms
of trying to get their attention. Describe your father, who
you called Day, described Day both Buffalo Day and then
(05:13):
slothmore Day. How did he change and what was that like?
Buffalo Day coached my soccer team, the Panthers UM and
was excitable and enthusiastic about kicking soccer ball with me
and coaching our team and taking me out for a
(05:33):
Hamburg actor practice. And he felt like his dad. You know,
you could look from the dad on TV, you know,
in a family show, and then turn my dad and
I kind of nod that yet that dad he felt engaged.
And then swathmore Day felt disengaged and preoccupied with faculty
(05:55):
treachery and board uprisings and students camping out in his
office and protesting to Vietnam War, which he himself was against.
UM and he gave a lot of weight, and he
felt harried and harassed and like he wasn't doing a
very good job, which he probably wasn't in the first
couple of years, but I think he got better at it,
(06:16):
and it just felt like we were another claim on
his time, so I had never felt I felt that
he would hit baseballs to me in the yard sometimes
for like twenty minutes after he got home, but not
And it always felt like he had a sense of
like you know, a surgeon who was about to go
into surgery, and he was kind of like mentally cutting
(06:37):
the minutes until you know, he's got to go and
do it. It had a feeling of like forbearance to
him rather than a joy in it. My mom she'd
had like nine billion conversations with him about over the years,
beginning probably on like the second day against wat More.
That was a big source of their strife during that period.
It was just that he was never home and never available,
(06:58):
so I think she didn't say too much. It was
mostly the kids who were now growing up saying it,
and which we hadn't like that before because we weren't
asked to and we're sort of psychically discouraged from delivering
a word. It done the unhappiness, and I was probably
the most unhappy. I'm thinking about my sister maybe giving
(07:18):
me a good race for it. Our brother in the
middle has always seemed very equable and able to get
along anywhere and thinking the best of everyone. And he
has sort of somehow, you know, grew up under a
cabbage sleeve in some different, slightly different universe than we did.
So but I think, yeah, my sister helps neglected, and
I certainly did. I think their marriage appeared to friends
(07:40):
and people on the outside to be magical, and they
seem to in public always be attentive to each other,
taking cues from each other. They were married for more
than forty years. They had a really rough patch in
swathamore where they were in therapy together, and I think,
I'm they just felt neglected. And she wrote him a
(08:02):
letter one point saying like, you know, I'm not having
any fun? Are you having any fun? And neither one
of them was having a whole lot of fun. And
I think she felt like he becomes sort of a
pompous ass, and he felt that she was always nagging him,
and I didn't understand all the challenges you faced. You know,
they were reasonably good about not blowing up at each
(08:23):
other in front of us, because their wasps and they
would go blow up each other, you know, you know,
just a region of the house or take a walk
or do something. But we still got the general drift
of a kind of current of mutual unhappiness, and I
think think things sort of get get her sort of
by and large. Once my dad left that job, I
(08:43):
think my mom made her peace with sort of being.
We carved out her own life a bit. She started
to become a painter. Um she didn't feel like an appendage,
which she was clearly as the wife of the president Blosmore.
I mean there's a lot of just social duties of
smiling to people and saying on what a nice frock.
And when she started to paint, and she became a
board member in high school and took on more project
(09:06):
where people, he was using more of her years and
not just sitting around whenning to phone to ring. So
that helped in the course of becoming a parent myself
and growing older. And I think kind of understanding my parents,
I hope better than I did. I feel much closer
to them and much more forgiving is probably the word,
(09:30):
or grateful too. Time has a way of allowing us
a different understanding of the complicated people who raise us.
As we evolve, our sense of our parents often evolves too.
In midlife, Ted learns to think of his parents not
just as parents, but as people too, complex and multifaceted people.
(09:54):
But before he reaches this point, when he's in college,
something else strikes him about evolution. It was something I
was reading about a primatology class, and it was about
this experiment that he's insane. But scientists had done with
baby monkeys by taking them away from their mothers and
(10:14):
then giving them the surrogate mothers, who were these sort
of as I imagine it anyway, like and I think
they describe it as sort of a metal armorature covered
with some cloth, but in a very rudimentary way. She
was like the bare minimum of monkey nous. And then
they had these these sort of mother contraption monkeys, and
(10:35):
of course the baby monkeys would kind of try swarm
all over this, you know, sort of numbly inert mom
looking for comfort. And then they had all these things
where they would they would blast like air out of
the monkey mothers nipples at the baby to see how
strong the instinct to go back to the mom was.
And they had spikes to chat out of the abdomen,
(10:58):
and it was like all these sort of insane, horrifying
torture things that I almost couldn't read about them, but
it actually reading about it plunged me back into that
state of being on the sun porch. And obviously my
mom was not a metallic monster with hair shooting at
nipples as part, and I know, but the experience, the
sense of like desperately trying to swarm towards my mother
(11:21):
for comfort and being rebuffed was very strong beneath that,
and that it invoked in such a way that I
kind of was intrusive. I kept sort of thinking about
the bathing monkeys when I was going to class or
eating lunch and we're talking to friends in college and
I and it. I had to kind of almost like
just push it all away with a great effort of
(11:42):
will to not think about it, because it kind of
took me over. I never talked about it with my
mom for obvious reasons, but um, but it definitely stayed
with me as a weird and unpleasant reminder of the
weird and unpleasant four years that I had spent kind
of trying to get more affection and maternal cuddling from
(12:03):
her than um she was capable. Also, while Tad is
in college, he tries, as many college students do, to
decide on what he'd liked to do with his future.
He considers pursuing law that he keeps returning to the
idea of becoming a writer. He had seen both his
parents right professionally and otherwise, and it's a world that
(12:25):
seems both familiar and appealing to him. I had been
working in a magazine called The American Lawyer my first
year after college, because I thought that I would be
a great way to both right and also get exposure
to what lawyers actually did all day. And that turned
out to be true. Um, and the result was that
(12:45):
I realized I did not want to be a lawyer.
My dad had was a historian, and he'd written his
first big history book at One's Big Prize, and he'd
written a novel that came out eight scurity seven and
got pretty good reviews, and he thought it would started
thinking himself as like someone who could write more novels,
and he did, but of course he couldn't get any
of them published. But I didn't necessarily think of him
(13:07):
as a writer when I was kind of in high
school and college, because he had written one book and
then his second book had been kind of put on
a hold. Well, he was running Swathmore College. So he
wasn't really writing, and so I didn't feel I think
he still I think he he thought of himself a writer.
He had turned out he'd years later I discovered that
he'd been writing like lots of poetry and in the
(13:31):
sixties and um, and they'd been keeping these very extensive journals,
um And I think he communicated with himself most effectively
by writing down what he was feeling, and then he
could sort of know what he was feeling. But if
he didn't write it down, and almost was like he
didn't feel it or he didn't understand it. So he
was almost writing to an audience of one a lot
(13:53):
of the time, which later became an audience of two
because I read all the stuff that he wrote. That's
what I was just thinking, is that he he was
writing as a way of knowing himself. You know, he
was elusive to himself. He was also ellusive to you. Yeah.
But the thing I didn't know was that he was
listening to himself. I thought he was keeping it from
(14:14):
us on purpose. But I had sort of intuitive that
he somehow was reserving his inmost self for reasons unknown,
and that we were not getting it. My sister and I.
My sister Timmy and I both for sometime sort of
thought there's sort of a bit of a child's fable
(14:34):
quality to it. Where would we just say the right phraise,
the rock will spring open and the you know, like
and the steps will go down and to the basement
with the sects of gold. There was something he was
sort of like, maybe we can this time, and you know, like, oh,
what if we do this or what if we asked
him about that? And I gave up at a certain point,
probably about twenty five years ago, and my sister really
(14:56):
didn't you know, and I can we I would talk
with her about it, and and I would say a because
she would often end a conversation, a bad phone conversation
with him and be really kind of stricken by it.
And I would At that point, I was like, if
you go to the potato store and they say they're
out of potatoes, they don't have any podatos, Like I
was like they you know, just thinking like it's not
going to happen. But there were some podatos there. We
(15:18):
just didn't know. And I remember, you know, there was
a point late in my dad's life when I was
somehow the one who was as Signs who asked him
about his plans for his memorial service, which was sort
of a tricky conversation. Um he seemed to welcome it.
He was like, he loved the idea of people celebrating
his life, and he had all these ideas, none of
which seemed to involve any of his children speaking about him.
(15:40):
But there were some eminent Southeast Asian historians we had
in mind would be old to really eat sum them up.
And then that's once you sort of talked about all
the some of the details of this and that who
could talk. And I started asked him to some other
questions about this this phase of his life and what
was difficult and what was the best part, and he
said something like, you know, the best part is getting
(16:01):
the time an opportunity to really to reconsider something and
make up my mind in a different way about things.
And I was thinking, like, wow, this could be the
moment where he says, you know I always really loved you,
or you know, I'm sorry that I didn't always express
the deep feelings I have or some version of that.
I was kind of like poised and like just like
I'm blame, thinking this is going to be it, and
I said, you know, well, you know, do you have
(16:23):
any examples? And he said, well, I might be just
about ready to change my mind about Franklin Roosevelt. And
I was started like, yeah, all right, I still no
petitause we'll be right back. In the mid nineties, Tad
(16:51):
is in his thirties when his mom is diagnosed with
breast cancer. It metastasizes and she becomes very, very sick.
At this point, Tad's father is no longer president of
Swarthmore College. He's running the Eisenhower Foundation. But when his
wife gets sick, he steps down from his position and
steps up as her caretaker. He's attentive, staunch, and loving.
(17:15):
It's in this phase of their relationship that Tad's parents
can reconnect and find joy with one another, even in
the face of grave illness. And then my mom unfortunately
died to them and three so that cut short what
would have been I think a great late My mother
lives you know the West fifteen or twenty years, and
(17:35):
you know, it turned out later on my dad had
made me his literary executor, and when I was reading
there's papers that he had been faithful to her. Once
in the sixties in Indonesia we told her about, which
precipitated her big storm honestly in their marriage, and then
later on a couple of other times which he didn't
(17:56):
tell her about. As far as I can tell, I
think he felt like she once he told her about
the first time that he was unfaibled or kind of
cut off that part of their relationships, the intimate part
in some way, that intimate physical part, and none of
this was you know, they weren't talking about this with us,
believe me. But this was again just something I didn't
(18:18):
really know about it until after he died. If someone
had asked you before he died, do you think that
your father was unfaithful to your mother? What would you
have said? Yeah, I would have guessed that he was
with no evidence, no actual evidence. I could sort of
feel some kind of in some sub sonic frequency kind
of weighed his sense of dissatisfaction and the way he
(18:42):
would sometimes laid up around other women. So I would
have guessed that. You know, if you said she had
been unfaithful, I would have been really shocked. She could
be flirty, but it was it wasn't clearly that was
like just in a kind of like didner party hostess
kind of way in the role of his father's literary executor.
As Tad pours over Day's writings, he discovers the specificity
(19:05):
with which Day recounted his extramarital affairs three women, five nights,
forty one years. Day had done the math. There was
writing two of Day's mother's many affairs which had impacted Day.
But even before Tad discovers the scope of this generational infidelity,
he spends his early adulthood with a nagging and persistent
(19:28):
fear of intimacy and a fear of being vulnerable. He
has a desire to be known, but also to be hidden.
These fears cause him to stress test his relationships, to
test the loyalty of the women he dates. During the
same period of his life, he's also searching for father figures,
though at the time he doesn't realize that's what he's doing.
(19:52):
I think I was doing both things without knowing them,
without understanding. It wasn't like I said, I shall stress
test this relationship. Observed there is also right a you
know new hypothesis. Because I was dimly aware of how
fragile and insufficient I felt in a relationship how I
felt like when you know, if someone really needed me
(20:12):
to be there for them, or you know, like if
I had to be get married or and be around
with someone all the time and they could see me,
and you know, like I was extremely closed off. I
could kind of I can't remember what that term is
on the Myers Briggs thing, but whatever it is, where
you can be an extrovert for like two minutes at
(20:35):
a party and then exhaust you and then you have
to like go lie down with a compress over your eyes.
That was that I wasn't quite lying now the compress,
but I was like, I can engage with people, but
then I really needed or wanted space because I think
I felt like they're getting too close. You know. The
the hounds are the hounds of people who actually want
to know who I am are being, and therefore, you know,
(20:58):
time to run away. I would like to retroactively apologize
to all all of my friends and particularly any girlfriends
from my teens through my early thirties, and um, I
was terrible, and I apologize because I only later on
began to realize how terrible it was. I did you know,
(21:18):
it was like the stress testing was just sort of
like more of almost like pushing up pressure relief style
of like you know, well, you know I won't be
endangered into a see if I I'm also presenting this
other person. And the way that I think I think
that was linked to my equally unknowing search for other figures,
is that I was looking for some kind of model
(21:40):
for what I should be doing with my life and
how I should be a man. He felt like my
dad wanted to be some kind of version of him
where everything was processed through your brain and nothing was
processed in your heart too, And I felt like, even
though I wasn't very good at processing these things in
my heart, that's what I wanted to do. Um So
I was looking for people who it seemed better at it,
(22:03):
and it seemed to have access to their feelings and
you know, who either took joy and daily life or
who seemed savvy about you know, other people's feelings. And
I sort of thought, well, it could be savvy about
other people's feelings, and maybe there's a way of locating
my own triangulating you know, where I am by seeing
(22:25):
where everyone around me is. It was a kind of
me blindly groping my way towards as it turned out,
towards decades of misery. I didn't as I did. I
was hoping it would work out better. I think objectively,
my dad seemed like, you know, he was a decent husband.
But I think it's rare that people say I really
(22:46):
want to have exactly my parents marriage. I mean, there
are aspects that you know that you end up having
whether you want to or not. And usually and you're like, okay,
and there are maybe one or two things you would
like to have, but most part you're like, you kind
of know the way that goes, and you want something.
It would be great if your parents came with a
handbook and you could just like look through it or
(23:09):
like a set of instructions, even in bad English. You
know that from me somewhere far away, and you get
this sort of printed out a little mimio sheet that
says your dad was raised by two wasps in Pittsburgh.
His father was an a total alcoholic who was a
nice but extremely ineffectual man who was fired from his
last job at forty three and never worked a day
(23:31):
in his life after that. Your father could never really
respect him, even though he loved him, and your father's
mother Um lost respect for her husband and had numerous
affairs that were widely known, and your father was embarrassed
about that and never quite worked through his feelings about
women as a result. That would be really handy. I mean,
(23:52):
you wouldn't be ready for it at age three or four,
but it would be nice if you. It's sort of
like became, you know, It's like in a Harry Potter's way,
someone would send an owl for you with these little
updates every now and again. It would be helpful because
I didn't get that information. I didn't really have any
picture at all of my grandparents, but we didn't see
much of them his parents anyway, until I was an adult.
(24:12):
And by then, of course, as you were saying, like,
it's all the streams have already moved around the rock,
and you're already set alone in your way. Pretty well,
what Tad calls blindly groping, i'd call actively thoughtfully searching,
searching for a partner, searching for answers about his family,
(24:33):
and searching for answers about himself. But of course, in
order to find answers, he must first ask questions. He
must put himself under the microscope to uncover why he's
been so closed off. He seeks and engages in therapy
with a Freudian analyst, and also embarks on group therapy,
a particularly scary endeavor for someone with a limited threshold
(24:55):
when it comes to vulnerability and social interaction. Well, there
was an aspect of like a version therapy, whereas like
my worst fear, like exploding yourself to it, like if
you don't like flying, you look at video plane crashes
or something. And it was really hard. The first might
have been an hour and a half, but spending that
at the end of it, I was I was wrong
(25:16):
out And even if I hadn't said it a damn thing,
which I pretty much didn't. For the first we had
accepted kind of enigmatic remarks about other people, but I
didn't say anything about myself. But I still was exhausted
by just the sheer, vibrating emotionality of it all. Exhausting
and emotional are good words to describe this time in
Tad's life. It's around the year two thousand, now the millennium,
(25:40):
and it appears the hard work he's done on himself
is paying off. He's opening up in therapy. He's met
a woman, a writer named Amanda Hesser, who he marries
just a couple of years later in two thousand two. Then,
of course, the asteroid of his mother's death comes in
two thousand three. It's an intense time, to say the least.
And just a few years later, in two thousand six,
(26:03):
Tad and Amanda have twins. They're building a life together
in Brooklyn, two talented writers with robust careers and wonderful
little kids. But that generational scope of infidelity presents itself
to Tad, and he succumbs to it, just like his dad,
just like his grandmother. I'm struck by there's this moment
(26:27):
in your book where you quote something that day Rights,
which is, I seem to be the prisoner of my history,
regrettable as that may be. And it's right after this
line of days, I seem to be the prisoner of
my history, regrettable if that may be. That then you
write I cheated on Amanda in two thousand and eight,
And that juxtaposition just felt to me like it was
(26:53):
you acknowledging that you too were a prisoner of your
own his tree. And you go on and you write,
having long feared being known, I had cheated and lined
in ways that gave credence to the fear. Right, we'll
be back in a moment with more family secrets. Dad's
(27:26):
book and the process of writing it thus become multifold.
It's a way to unpack and confront this fear, a
way to understand his dad, to understand himself, and to
reckon with the secrets that shaped them. The genesis of
writing the book. Wizard emotionally had sort of given up
on my dad and achieved a kind of like friendly, dutiful,
(27:50):
loving civility. You know. I felt like I tried to
get more out of him and that never really took.
So I sort of had just decided, Okay, here are
the limits, and then I sort of rubbed along in
that way, you know, thinking about him, until suddenly I realized, like,
he's he's getting old, he's falling down, he is he
(28:10):
needs help. And when he had his first big thing,
he went down to the hospital and talked to the
doctors and realized, like, there is a date here that's
coming where he's not going to be here. And I
think that had an effect. I think the book almost
grew out of that trip down to the hospital where
the resident was basically saying, you know, like it's a
slow or maybe even medium speed or maybe even quick,
(28:32):
you know, slide from here, it's not going to get better,
and realizing that I think I was started to feel like, well,
there's only so much time to keep deferring, you know,
one last hail Mary, that maybe he can make this
all work and answer so many questions and make me
feel better about myself, because I'll say I felt if
my dads were reserving his best qualities from me, there
(28:54):
must be a judgment that I'm not worthy of them.
So I started to write, and I started keeping notes
and kind of drawing stuff into a file about my
dad and my memories of him, and also then also
about our our own family, like Amanda and me and
our two kids, like you know, here I am becoming
a dad myself? Am I doing in comparison to my
(29:15):
own stat And I did turn that book in and
then mahbe I got sicker and died, and that I
felt like I knew I needed to revise the book,
and I knew I wanted to like so I'm back
at it afresh. And then he made me his literal executor.
So I was reading through you know, we were cleaning
(29:37):
out of his house to sell it, and twenty big
steel file cabinets crammed with files, and there was a
whole other storage shed full of files, and there were
fouls on top of his desk and files on top
of his bureau and fills all over the floor, and
it was kind of a big mess. He's been very,
very meticulous and organized and like dow we decimal slash
(29:57):
alphabetical until a certain point and he kind of just
said at a bucket and sorry everybody can said everywhere
in the last like ten years of his life, and
so it really wasn't organized. And I arned maybe he
had there was a system, but I couldn't decipher it.
So I was just kind of going through it all
and never sure what, you know, what's going to turn
out to be, like tax returns from nineteen and was
(30:19):
going to turn out to be his poems and his
journals from nineteen sixties seven and the course of that,
and realized he was a much different man then I thought.
He was much more emotional, much more sensitive, much more
awake two and alive to life in every way. He was,
you know, he really felt things deeply, but he the
problems he couldn't convey them to us very well or
(30:43):
something some kind of like I almost think of him
as like, you know, those trumpeters, and he can trumpet,
and then he like, as soon as he saw us
that the mute would come over it. I don't know why.
I think he just felt like the dad should be
the sort of regal, regal figure who um it sits
in a chair like a k throne and pronounces and
(31:03):
it's like, no, that's that's I don't know where you
got that. That is totally wrong. So, realizing all that,
I rewrote the book, not completely, but I you know,
I recast a lot of it, and I added all
this material, and so I had written the second version
and I wanted a manage to read it. She read it.
She was shocked about my dad's and fidelities, as I
(31:26):
had originally been just reading about them, because he'd written
he had tholes of his premarital affairs, lots of stuff
about erotic dreams he had, including about one of them
he had at the time and the nineties about a
girlfriend of mine, which is kind of weird to read.
You're like, what, no, then you can't see that, you know,
you're like, I wish I had, I wish I had
somehow skipped over that particular one. There's a bunch of
(31:46):
stuff that you know, like was candid because he did
think he was going to be writing for himself, and
without getting into all the glory details. In the second
version of the book, he had tried to convey a
much fuller, rounder, more passionate, more flawed person who you know,
(32:06):
more human person that he was. And Amanda, she loved
my dad and admired him, and I think she felt
disabused in reading it and felt like he treated my
mom badly. And then we're talking about it, and I
said something like I had more time with it all
and I but I said something like, you know, well,
I know what you're saying, and I hear you, but
(32:27):
I also think, you know, she could be tough to
which I still think it's true. Um, And I said,
I also think it was a pretty good marriage all
and all, which I also think it's true, with reservations
and that if I wouldn't want to have it be
our marriage. But Amanda, it was very emotionally sensitive somehow
picked up on what I was saying and thought I
was referring or in some coded or unconscious way, to
(32:50):
our our marriagers in mind and so um. When I
was out the next day, she started reading to my journals,
and she even though I thought I had you know,
when I was writing my journals, I didn't want to them,
but I didn't expect anyone to realms. So I had
written about with various degrees of candor or various degrees
of openness about I had said always. So that began
(33:11):
the worst period of our lives, the ways in which
I felt like I was a prisoner of my history.
There's a natural assumption that sometimes people can make that
if you know someone's having an affair in the marriage,
that they maybe they're not satisfied with their partner, or
they're not getting what they need from their partners, they're
seeking it outside the marriage. I think that is not
apply here. I had cheated on pretty much everyone before Amanda.
(33:35):
It was just I was built. Say I was built
makes it sound like someone else did it. I was.
You know, I'm totally responsible. I'm an adult. I did
these things, cheated, I was unfaithful, I behave terribly allied.
You know that crappy, crappy horrible stuff that makes me
still feeling incredibly ashamed and mad at myself and demanded.
(33:56):
And I had issues in our marriage that I talked
about in the book. Even if we had had zero
issues in our marriage, even if I had been like
just overjoyed every single day, which is hard to have
any any marriage, and there was a lot of times
I really was overdover the Amanda. But even if I've
been overod all the time, I still probably would have
diated because I felt so badly about myself, and I
(34:17):
felt so needy, and I felt so insecure, and I
you know, I think I was just building a compartment
that one more bulkhead against intimacy, full true intimacy, and
unconsciously replicating my dad, who does the same thing. But
I didn't know that, you know, Like it's funny how
(34:38):
so often those secrets get passed down and some smuggled
down secretly. It's like he'd clapped me out in the
back and then slipped it into my pocket and I
didn't notice. He's like the artful dodger, and maybe his
mom didn't the same thing to him, you know, like
you don't know where you're getting it, because I didn't.
I didn't. I would have, you know, I would have
said if I had had to guess that he had
(34:59):
been impatable. But I didn't know that, and we've never
talked about it, and I never certainly would never have thought,
like I want to model myself. I'm that guy who
I can't get enough love from. That would be a mistake.
Why would I want to do that. I was trying
to be the opposite. I was trying to be like Mr.
Supersensitive guy. You know, I'm going to do all his therapy.
And then it turned out while he'd been doing therapy too,
(35:19):
last lats of therapy. So on the one hand, Tad
is in therapy. He's working on himself in all sorts
of ways, as did his dad. But sometimes even in therapy,
we don't go to the scariest places. It's ironic, I suppose,
But in the inner sanctum of a therapist's office, where
(35:41):
it's safe to expose our demons, sometimes we just don't.
The shame is too large, too looming, too terrifying. Tad
never addresses his fears about his infidelity with his therapist.
He never addresses his truths. He realizes later it this
doesn't make sense paying a professional only to present a
(36:04):
fabricated version of yourself. I was never aware of how
much shame I was carrying around until and I discovered
how terribly I behaved for years in our marriage, and
then I was plunged right into this big battle of it,
and it felt really awful. And having access to the shame,
(36:29):
being aware of it now, like and having it pretty easily,
you know, even talking with you now At times when
we're talking about my behavior, you know, I feel that
clammy disbelieving but totally having to accept sense of shame
that this is what I did and this is how
I betrayed Amanda um and also the accompanying sense of like,
(36:52):
what kind of person does that? But I also feel
like there's some there at some point which I maybe
not yet but I could see in the future where
you know, you might it's not it's like incorporating it
so it doesn't feel like an alien part of you.
It feels like, Okay, there's the shame, and it's just
you know, it's just like, Okay, there's the dog, Okay,
(37:13):
there's the kitchen sink. Um. It feels like a useful
thing at some point because it's like, well, I did
do that, and it's not like something that's swept over
me and possessed me. It's like part of who I was.
I will never do it again, but I know that
I had that capacity and I should be mindful of that. Well.
(37:33):
And you're also owning it because I mean, I don't
just mean with Amanda and with yourself, but making the
decision to to go there in this book means that
you're not sweeping anything under any rock. You're just like
no sweeping, and that, you know, strikes me as very brave,
(37:54):
um and necessary. If you were if you were going
to write this book, the book wouldn't be true if
you know you wrote about about days infidelities and then
pretending that it wasn't another generational layer to that. Yeah,
it felt, even when I was writing the second version
of the book like it felt that I was aware
of that I was sweeping my own behavior under the rug,
(38:17):
and it felt that help falls to me and wrong,
I'd like it, but I didn't. Also at that point,
I feel like, oh, well, it's a great opportunity for
me to write about this um because um, you know,
you know that would be revealing my shame to everyone,
and now I am. And you know, I would never
have done it if Amanda hadn't agreed with me that
we should, that I should do it, and hadn't wanted
(38:39):
me to do it, and hadn't read it and made sure,
you know, like the last thing I would ever want
to do it. Having hurt her so badly has hurt
her more with the book. And so if she hadn't
wanted me to, I would have just helped it and
that would have been that that she did. And I
feel like Amanda has been the one who has been
brave to like take me on again, knowing that I
(39:00):
was not the person that she thought it wasn't I
was living with for all those years, and that I
had unexplored rooms that she didn't know about. And I
think that's that's the big act of bravery, because she
would have been would have been perfectly reasonable and emotionally
plausible for her to say, no way, I'm out. So
(39:21):
I'm grateful every day that she didn't. You know, you
right towards the end of your book being exposed was
a harrowing but necessary precursor to being seen and having
those unexposed rooms be exposed, it seems like a great gift. Yeah.
It was the thing I probably most feared and before
(39:44):
it happened, and the thing I am most grateful for
now that it has happened. It was the great psychoanalyst
and writer Donald Winnicott, who once wrote, it is a
joy to be hidden, but disaster not to be found.
(40:05):
Here's Tad who has been found and found himself at last,
reading one last passage from his stirring book. But I
identified his wrongly. With those baby monkeys, I couldn't stop
thinking about them at the legettive air in my eyes
and black vertigoes. I felt the way. The feeling was
so intrusive that I stepped it into the memory hole,
(40:26):
or it wouldn't trouble me anymore. Now, I wonder if
given time, the monkeys would have eventually retreated to the
corners of their cages, because that's what I did. I
retreated with many a backward look. But I took the
compressed air hose with me. I'm afraid I left you
alone a good deal when you were young, mom said
to me once, dreadfully brightening, she added, but the result
(40:46):
is that you learned to read very early and now
you're a writer. Family Secrets is a production of I
Heart Radio. Molly Zachor is the story editor and Dylan
Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family
(41:07):
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 Secret zero. That's the number zero.
You can also find me on Instagram at Danny writer.
And if you'd like to know more about the story
that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance. For
(41:52):
more podcasts from 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. It's
funny how so often those secrets get passed down, and
some smuggled down secretly. It's like he'd clapped me out
in the back and then slipt it into my pocket
and I didn't notice. He's like the artful dodger. And
(00:21):
maybe his mom did the same thing to him. You
don't know where you're getting it, you know. I would
have said if I'd had to guess that he had
been unfaithable, But I didn't know that, and we've never
talked about it, and I never, certainly would never have thought,
like I want to model myself. I'm that guy who
I can't get it you enough love from That would
be a mistake. Why would I want to do that.
I was trying to be the opposite. That's Tad Friend,
(00:46):
staff writer for The New Yorker, an author of the
memoir Cheerful Money, as well as the recent In the
Early Times, A Life Reframed. Tad's is a story about stoicism, silence,
and shame. It's also a story about a complex emotional
legacy passed from generation to generation. A father, a son,
(01:08):
a shared history of marital infidelity, that leaves a great
deal of damage in its wake until the cycle is
finally broken. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,
(01:32):
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
The first house I grew up and was in Buffalo,
New York, it felt very dark. Um. I don't think
it actually objectively was. I mean, there's probably just as
(01:53):
much son in Buffalo um and in most other parts
of the world. But it felt like the house felt dark.
And that's because I spent most of my time when
I was young on the sun porch, which is all
entirely mullioned. Last windows looking out on those days were
still this sort of avenue of elm trees before Dutch
elm disease took them all down. The reason I think
(02:14):
the house felt dark is because I was alone. I
was the first child and for four years, the only child.
And also because the living room felt to me and
maybe actually was dark, and my mom was beyond it
in the kitchen, usually doing something, and it felt like
that sort of almost like a moat between me and
the sunlight and the rest of the house and her
(02:35):
and my dad wasn't around much. He was a Southeast
Asian history professor at the University of Buffalo. And those
first four years of darkness and isolation are pretty tough
to shape. That's a fairly important time in anyone's life.
And I blamed my mom bar without having any understanding
of her own difficulties or what she was going through,
or her postpartum depression or her filling left alone a
(02:58):
bout my dad to with this baby that she hadn't
really wanted, which, on the one hand to make you
feel worse, like who wants to be the unwanted child?
But on the other hand, you know, like, hey, here
I am. And she started to do her best, and
she became a lot better mom later, and I felt
like so many of the things that I like about
myself actually come from her. I like my sense of whimsy,
(03:22):
I like missions of humor, I like my playfulness, and
that's all straight from her. Soon, though, the darkness begins
to lift. When Tad's brother and sister come along. The
house becomes livelier, more jolly. His parents are warming to parenthood,
becoming better at the job, and raising their proverbial game.
When Tad is almost eleven, the family relocates from Buffalo
(03:46):
to Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. My dad became the president of wealthmart
College in nineteen seventy three, and we were lived in
a gigantic, colossal field stone house called Overstone, what wasn't
really called Overtold by anyone, but technically was his name.
And that sort of tokei nish name UM felt right
(04:07):
because it had a sort of goblin ish feel somehow,
Um and my parents were both always super busy. I
felt like that was sort of the end of my
childhood with my dad in some ways. You know, we
all had our own bedroom, you know, in this new
big president's house, and there were three floors and just
(04:28):
endless rooms, and it was gigantic and a nice place
to run around and play, but a lot of it
was sort of also felt off limits because there were
constant cocktail parties and dinner parties for the college of
events which we were not invited to and basically shoot
away from. And also because you know, we just didn't
see much of my parents. And you know, with the
(04:49):
benefit of Hindstein and being help myself now, I realized
that they're both just insanely busy. And overworked and doing
their best, but it felt like that we were we
can sort of weaving but drowning a bit in terms
of trying to get their attention. Describe your father, who
you called Day, described Day both Buffalo Day and then
(05:13):
slothmore Day. How did he change and what was that like?
Buffalo Day coached my soccer team, the Panthers UM and
was excitable and enthusiastic about kicking soccer ball with me
and coaching our team and taking me out for a
(05:33):
Hamburg actor practice. And he felt like his dad. You know,
you could look from the dad on TV, you know,
in a family show, and then turn my dad and
I kind of nod that yet that dad he felt engaged.
And then swathmore Day felt disengaged and preoccupied with faculty
(05:55):
treachery and board uprisings and students camping out in his
office and protesting to Vietnam War, which he himself was against.
UM and he gave a lot of weight, and he
felt harried and harassed and like he wasn't doing a
very good job, which he probably wasn't in the first
couple of years, but I think he got better at it,
(06:16):
and it just felt like we were another claim on
his time, so I had never felt I felt that
he would hit baseballs to me in the yard sometimes
for like twenty minutes after he got home, but not
And it always felt like he had a sense of
like you know, a surgeon who was about to go
into surgery, and he was kind of like mentally cutting
(06:37):
the minutes until you know, he's got to go and
do it. It had a feeling of like forbearance to
him rather than a joy in it. My mom she'd
had like nine billion conversations with him about over the years,
beginning probably on like the second day against wat More.
That was a big source of their strife during that period.
It was just that he was never home and never available,
(06:58):
so I think she didn't say too much. It was
mostly the kids who were now growing up saying it,
and which we hadn't like that before because we weren't
asked to and we're sort of psychically discouraged from delivering
a word. It done the unhappiness, and I was probably
the most unhappy. I'm thinking about my sister maybe giving
(07:18):
me a good race for it. Our brother in the
middle has always seemed very equable and able to get
along anywhere and thinking the best of everyone. And he
has sort of somehow, you know, grew up under a
cabbage sleeve in some different, slightly different universe than we did.
So but I think, yeah, my sister helps neglected, and
I certainly did. I think their marriage appeared to friends
(07:40):
and people on the outside to be magical, and they
seem to in public always be attentive to each other,
taking cues from each other. They were married for more
than forty years. They had a really rough patch in
swathamore where they were in therapy together, and I think,
I'm they just felt neglected. And she wrote him a
(08:02):
letter one point saying like, you know, I'm not having
any fun? Are you having any fun? And neither one
of them was having a whole lot of fun. And
I think she felt like he becomes sort of a
pompous ass, and he felt that she was always nagging him,
and I didn't understand all the challenges you faced. You know,
they were reasonably good about not blowing up at each
(08:23):
other in front of us, because their wasps and they
would go blow up each other, you know, you know,
just a region of the house or take a walk
or do something. But we still got the general drift
of a kind of current of mutual unhappiness, and I
think think things sort of get get her sort of
by and large. Once my dad left that job, I
(08:43):
think my mom made her peace with sort of being.
We carved out her own life a bit. She started
to become a painter. Um she didn't feel like an appendage,
which she was clearly as the wife of the president Blosmore.
I mean there's a lot of just social duties of
smiling to people and saying on what a nice frock.
And when she started to paint, and she became a
board member in high school and took on more project
(09:06):
where people, he was using more of her years and
not just sitting around whenning to phone to ring. So
that helped in the course of becoming a parent myself
and growing older. And I think kind of understanding my parents,
I hope better than I did. I feel much closer
to them and much more forgiving is probably the word,
(09:30):
or grateful too. Time has a way of allowing us
a different understanding of the complicated people who raise us.
As we evolve, our sense of our parents often evolves too.
In midlife, Ted learns to think of his parents not
just as parents, but as people too, complex and multifaceted people.
(09:54):
But before he reaches this point, when he's in college,
something else strikes him about evolution. It was something I
was reading about a primatology class, and it was about
this experiment that he's insane. But scientists had done with
baby monkeys by taking them away from their mothers and
(10:14):
then giving them the surrogate mothers, who were these sort
of as I imagine it anyway, like and I think
they describe it as sort of a metal armorature covered
with some cloth, but in a very rudimentary way. She
was like the bare minimum of monkey nous. And then
they had these these sort of mother contraption monkeys, and
(10:35):
of course the baby monkeys would kind of try swarm
all over this, you know, sort of numbly inert mom
looking for comfort. And then they had all these things
where they would they would blast like air out of
the monkey mothers nipples at the baby to see how
strong the instinct to go back to the mom was.
And they had spikes to chat out of the abdomen,
(10:58):
and it was like all these sort of insane, horrifying
torture things that I almost couldn't read about them, but
it actually reading about it plunged me back into that
state of being on the sun porch. And obviously my
mom was not a metallic monster with hair shooting at
nipples as part, and I know, but the experience, the
sense of like desperately trying to swarm towards my mother
(11:21):
for comfort and being rebuffed was very strong beneath that,
and that it invoked in such a way that I
kind of was intrusive. I kept sort of thinking about
the bathing monkeys when I was going to class or
eating lunch and we're talking to friends in college and
I and it. I had to kind of almost like
just push it all away with a great effort of
(11:42):
will to not think about it, because it kind of
took me over. I never talked about it with my
mom for obvious reasons, but um, but it definitely stayed
with me as a weird and unpleasant reminder of the
weird and unpleasant four years that I had spent kind
of trying to get more affection and maternal cuddling from
(12:03):
her than um she was capable. Also, while Tad is
in college, he tries, as many college students do, to
decide on what he'd liked to do with his future.
He considers pursuing law that he keeps returning to the
idea of becoming a writer. He had seen both his
parents right professionally and otherwise, and it's a world that
(12:25):
seems both familiar and appealing to him. I had been
working in a magazine called The American Lawyer my first
year after college, because I thought that I would be
a great way to both right and also get exposure
to what lawyers actually did all day. And that turned
out to be true. Um, and the result was that
(12:45):
I realized I did not want to be a lawyer.
My dad had was a historian, and he'd written his
first big history book at One's Big Prize, and he'd
written a novel that came out eight scurity seven and
got pretty good reviews, and he thought it would started
thinking himself as like someone who could write more novels,
and he did, but of course he couldn't get any
of them published. But I didn't necessarily think of him
(13:07):
as a writer when I was kind of in high
school and college, because he had written one book and
then his second book had been kind of put on
a hold. Well, he was running Swathmore College. So he
wasn't really writing, and so I didn't feel I think
he still I think he he thought of himself a writer.
He had turned out he'd years later I discovered that
he'd been writing like lots of poetry and in the
(13:31):
sixties and um, and they'd been keeping these very extensive journals,
um And I think he communicated with himself most effectively
by writing down what he was feeling, and then he
could sort of know what he was feeling. But if
he didn't write it down, and almost was like he
didn't feel it or he didn't understand it. So he
was almost writing to an audience of one a lot
(13:53):
of the time, which later became an audience of two
because I read all the stuff that he wrote. That's
what I was just thinking, is that he he was
writing as a way of knowing himself. You know, he
was elusive to himself. He was also ellusive to you. Yeah.
But the thing I didn't know was that he was
listening to himself. I thought he was keeping it from
(14:14):
us on purpose. But I had sort of intuitive that
he somehow was reserving his inmost self for reasons unknown,
and that we were not getting it. My sister and I.
My sister Timmy and I both for sometime sort of
thought there's sort of a bit of a child's fable
(14:34):
quality to it. Where would we just say the right phraise,
the rock will spring open and the you know, like
and the steps will go down and to the basement
with the sects of gold. There was something he was
sort of like, maybe we can this time, and you know, like, oh,
what if we do this or what if we asked
him about that? And I gave up at a certain point,
probably about twenty five years ago, and my sister really
(14:56):
didn't you know, and I can we I would talk
with her about it, and and I would say a because
she would often end a conversation, a bad phone conversation
with him and be really kind of stricken by it.
And I would At that point, I was like, if
you go to the potato store and they say they're
out of potatoes, they don't have any podatos, Like I
was like they you know, just thinking like it's not
going to happen. But there were some podatos there. We
(15:18):
just didn't know. And I remember, you know, there was
a point late in my dad's life when I was
somehow the one who was as Signs who asked him
about his plans for his memorial service, which was sort
of a tricky conversation. Um he seemed to welcome it.
He was like, he loved the idea of people celebrating
his life, and he had all these ideas, none of
which seemed to involve any of his children speaking about him.
(15:40):
But there were some eminent Southeast Asian historians we had
in mind would be old to really eat sum them up.
And then that's once you sort of talked about all
the some of the details of this and that who
could talk. And I started asked him to some other
questions about this this phase of his life and what
was difficult and what was the best part, and he
said something like, you know, the best part is getting
(16:01):
the time an opportunity to really to reconsider something and
make up my mind in a different way about things.
And I was thinking, like, wow, this could be the
moment where he says, you know I always really loved you,
or you know, I'm sorry that I didn't always express
the deep feelings I have or some version of that.
I was kind of like poised and like just like
I'm blame, thinking this is going to be it, and
I said, you know, well, you know, do you have
(16:23):
any examples? And he said, well, I might be just
about ready to change my mind about Franklin Roosevelt. And
I was started like, yeah, all right, I still no
petitause we'll be right back. In the mid nineties, Tad
(16:51):
is in his thirties when his mom is diagnosed with
breast cancer. It metastasizes and she becomes very, very sick.
At this point, Tad's father is no longer president of
Swarthmore College. He's running the Eisenhower Foundation. But when his
wife gets sick, he steps down from his position and
steps up as her caretaker. He's attentive, staunch, and loving.
(17:15):
It's in this phase of their relationship that Tad's parents
can reconnect and find joy with one another, even in
the face of grave illness. And then my mom unfortunately
died to them and three so that cut short what
would have been I think a great late My mother
lives you know the West fifteen or twenty years, and
(17:35):
you know, it turned out later on my dad had
made me his literary executor, and when I was reading
there's papers that he had been faithful to her. Once
in the sixties in Indonesia we told her about, which
precipitated her big storm honestly in their marriage, and then
later on a couple of other times which he didn't
(17:56):
tell her about. As far as I can tell, I
think he felt like she once he told her about
the first time that he was unfaibled or kind of
cut off that part of their relationships, the intimate part
in some way, that intimate physical part, and none of
this was you know, they weren't talking about this with us,
believe me. But this was again just something I didn't
(18:18):
really know about it until after he died. If someone
had asked you before he died, do you think that
your father was unfaithful to your mother? What would you
have said? Yeah, I would have guessed that he was
with no evidence, no actual evidence. I could sort of
feel some kind of in some sub sonic frequency kind
of weighed his sense of dissatisfaction and the way he
(18:42):
would sometimes laid up around other women. So I would
have guessed that. You know, if you said she had
been unfaithful, I would have been really shocked. She could
be flirty, but it was it wasn't clearly that was
like just in a kind of like didner party hostess
kind of way in the role of his father's literary executor.
As Tad pours over Day's writings, he discovers the specificity
(19:05):
with which Day recounted his extramarital affairs three women, five nights,
forty one years. Day had done the math. There was
writing two of Day's mother's many affairs which had impacted Day.
But even before Tad discovers the scope of this generational infidelity,
he spends his early adulthood with a nagging and persistent
(19:28):
fear of intimacy and a fear of being vulnerable. He
has a desire to be known, but also to be hidden.
These fears cause him to stress test his relationships, to
test the loyalty of the women he dates. During the
same period of his life, he's also searching for father figures,
though at the time he doesn't realize that's what he's doing.
(19:52):
I think I was doing both things without knowing them,
without understanding. It wasn't like I said, I shall stress
test this relationship. Observed there is also right a you
know new hypothesis. Because I was dimly aware of how
fragile and insufficient I felt in a relationship how I
felt like when you know, if someone really needed me
(20:12):
to be there for them, or you know, like if
I had to be get married or and be around
with someone all the time and they could see me,
and you know, like I was extremely closed off. I
could kind of I can't remember what that term is
on the Myers Briggs thing, but whatever it is, where
you can be an extrovert for like two minutes at
(20:35):
a party and then exhaust you and then you have
to like go lie down with a compress over your eyes.
That was that I wasn't quite lying now the compress,
but I was like, I can engage with people, but
then I really needed or wanted space because I think
I felt like they're getting too close. You know. The
the hounds are the hounds of people who actually want
to know who I am are being, and therefore, you know,
(20:58):
time to run away. I would like to retroactively apologize
to all all of my friends and particularly any girlfriends
from my teens through my early thirties, and um, I
was terrible, and I apologize because I only later on
began to realize how terrible it was. I did you know,
(21:18):
it was like the stress testing was just sort of
like more of almost like pushing up pressure relief style
of like you know, well, you know I won't be
endangered into a see if I I'm also presenting this
other person. And the way that I think I think
that was linked to my equally unknowing search for other figures,
is that I was looking for some kind of model
(21:40):
for what I should be doing with my life and
how I should be a man. He felt like my
dad wanted to be some kind of version of him
where everything was processed through your brain and nothing was
processed in your heart too, And I felt like, even
though I wasn't very good at processing these things in
my heart, that's what I wanted to do. Um So
I was looking for people who it seemed better at it,
(22:03):
and it seemed to have access to their feelings and
you know, who either took joy and daily life or
who seemed savvy about you know, other people's feelings. And
I sort of thought, well, it could be savvy about
other people's feelings, and maybe there's a way of locating
my own triangulating you know, where I am by seeing
(22:25):
where everyone around me is. It was a kind of
me blindly groping my way towards as it turned out,
towards decades of misery. I didn't as I did. I
was hoping it would work out better. I think objectively,
my dad seemed like, you know, he was a decent husband.
But I think it's rare that people say I really
(22:46):
want to have exactly my parents marriage. I mean, there
are aspects that you know that you end up having
whether you want to or not. And usually and you're like, okay,
and there are maybe one or two things you would
like to have, but most part you're like, you kind
of know the way that goes, and you want something.
It would be great if your parents came with a
handbook and you could just like look through it or
(23:09):
like a set of instructions, even in bad English. You
know that from me somewhere far away, and you get
this sort of printed out a little mimio sheet that
says your dad was raised by two wasps in Pittsburgh.
His father was an a total alcoholic who was a
nice but extremely ineffectual man who was fired from his
last job at forty three and never worked a day
(23:31):
in his life after that. Your father could never really
respect him, even though he loved him, and your father's
mother Um lost respect for her husband and had numerous
affairs that were widely known, and your father was embarrassed
about that and never quite worked through his feelings about
women as a result. That would be really handy. I mean,
(23:52):
you wouldn't be ready for it at age three or four,
but it would be nice if you. It's sort of
like became, you know, It's like in a Harry Potter's way,
someone would send an owl for you with these little
updates every now and again. It would be helpful because
I didn't get that information. I didn't really have any
picture at all of my grandparents, but we didn't see
much of them his parents anyway, until I was an adult.
(24:12):
And by then, of course, as you were saying, like,
it's all the streams have already moved around the rock,
and you're already set alone in your way. Pretty well,
what Tad calls blindly groping, i'd call actively thoughtfully searching,
searching for a partner, searching for answers about his family,
(24:33):
and searching for answers about himself. But of course, in
order to find answers, he must first ask questions. He
must put himself under the microscope to uncover why he's
been so closed off. He seeks and engages in therapy
with a Freudian analyst, and also embarks on group therapy,
a particularly scary endeavor for someone with a limited threshold
(24:55):
when it comes to vulnerability and social interaction. Well, there
was an aspect of like a version therapy, whereas like
my worst fear, like exploding yourself to it, like if
you don't like flying, you look at video plane crashes
or something. And it was really hard. The first might
have been an hour and a half, but spending that
at the end of it, I was I was wrong
(25:16):
out And even if I hadn't said it a damn thing,
which I pretty much didn't. For the first we had
accepted kind of enigmatic remarks about other people, but I
didn't say anything about myself. But I still was exhausted
by just the sheer, vibrating emotionality of it all. Exhausting
and emotional are good words to describe this time in
Tad's life. It's around the year two thousand, now the millennium,
(25:40):
and it appears the hard work he's done on himself
is paying off. He's opening up in therapy. He's met
a woman, a writer named Amanda Hesser, who he marries
just a couple of years later in two thousand two. Then,
of course, the asteroid of his mother's death comes in
two thousand three. It's an intense time, to say the least.
And just a few years later, in two thousand six,
(26:03):
Tad and Amanda have twins. They're building a life together
in Brooklyn, two talented writers with robust careers and wonderful
little kids. But that generational scope of infidelity presents itself
to Tad, and he succumbs to it, just like his dad,
just like his grandmother. I'm struck by there's this moment
(26:27):
in your book where you quote something that day Rights,
which is, I seem to be the prisoner of my history,
regrettable as that may be. And it's right after this
line of days, I seem to be the prisoner of
my history, regrettable if that may be. That then you
write I cheated on Amanda in two thousand and eight,
And that juxtaposition just felt to me like it was
(26:53):
you acknowledging that you too were a prisoner of your
own his tree. And you go on and you write,
having long feared being known, I had cheated and lined
in ways that gave credence to the fear. Right, we'll
be back in a moment with more family secrets. Dad's
(27:26):
book and the process of writing it thus become multifold.
It's a way to unpack and confront this fear, a
way to understand his dad, to understand himself, and to
reckon with the secrets that shaped them. The genesis of
writing the book. Wizard emotionally had sort of given up
on my dad and achieved a kind of like friendly, dutiful,
(27:50):
loving civility. You know. I felt like I tried to
get more out of him and that never really took.
So I sort of had just decided, Okay, here are
the limits, and then I sort of rubbed along in
that way, you know, thinking about him, until suddenly I realized, like,
he's he's getting old, he's falling down, he is he
(28:10):
needs help. And when he had his first big thing,
he went down to the hospital and talked to the
doctors and realized, like, there is a date here that's
coming where he's not going to be here. And I
think that had an effect. I think the book almost
grew out of that trip down to the hospital where
the resident was basically saying, you know, like it's a
slow or maybe even medium speed or maybe even quick,
(28:32):
you know, slide from here, it's not going to get better,
and realizing that I think I was started to feel like, well,
there's only so much time to keep deferring, you know,
one last hail Mary, that maybe he can make this
all work and answer so many questions and make me
feel better about myself, because I'll say I felt if
my dads were reserving his best qualities from me, there
(28:54):
must be a judgment that I'm not worthy of them.
So I started to write, and I started keeping notes
and kind of drawing stuff into a file about my
dad and my memories of him, and also then also
about our our own family, like Amanda and me and
our two kids, like you know, here I am becoming
a dad myself? Am I doing in comparison to my
(29:15):
own stat And I did turn that book in and
then mahbe I got sicker and died, and that I
felt like I knew I needed to revise the book,
and I knew I wanted to like so I'm back
at it afresh. And then he made me his literal executor.
So I was reading through you know, we were cleaning
(29:37):
out of his house to sell it, and twenty big
steel file cabinets crammed with files, and there was a
whole other storage shed full of files, and there were
fouls on top of his desk and files on top
of his bureau and fills all over the floor, and
it was kind of a big mess. He's been very,
very meticulous and organized and like dow we decimal slash
(29:57):
alphabetical until a certain point and he kind of just
said at a bucket and sorry everybody can said everywhere
in the last like ten years of his life, and
so it really wasn't organized. And I arned maybe he
had there was a system, but I couldn't decipher it.
So I was just kind of going through it all
and never sure what, you know, what's going to turn
out to be, like tax returns from nineteen and was
(30:19):
going to turn out to be his poems and his
journals from nineteen sixties seven and the course of that,
and realized he was a much different man then I thought.
He was much more emotional, much more sensitive, much more
awake two and alive to life in every way. He was,
you know, he really felt things deeply, but he the
problems he couldn't convey them to us very well or
(30:43):
something some kind of like I almost think of him
as like, you know, those trumpeters, and he can trumpet,
and then he like, as soon as he saw us
that the mute would come over it. I don't know why.
I think he just felt like the dad should be
the sort of regal, regal figure who um it sits
in a chair like a k throne and pronounces and
(31:03):
it's like, no, that's that's I don't know where you
got that. That is totally wrong. So, realizing all that,
I rewrote the book, not completely, but I you know,
I recast a lot of it, and I added all
this material, and so I had written the second version
and I wanted a manage to read it. She read it.
She was shocked about my dad's and fidelities, as I
(31:26):
had originally been just reading about them, because he'd written
he had tholes of his premarital affairs, lots of stuff
about erotic dreams he had, including about one of them
he had at the time and the nineties about a
girlfriend of mine, which is kind of weird to read.
You're like, what, no, then you can't see that, you know,
you're like, I wish I had, I wish I had
somehow skipped over that particular one. There's a bunch of
(31:46):
stuff that you know, like was candid because he did
think he was going to be writing for himself, and
without getting into all the glory details. In the second
version of the book, he had tried to convey a
much fuller, rounder, more passionate, more flawed person who you know,
(32:06):
more human person that he was. And Amanda, she loved
my dad and admired him, and I think she felt
disabused in reading it and felt like he treated my
mom badly. And then we're talking about it, and I
said something like I had more time with it all
and I but I said something like, you know, well,
I know what you're saying, and I hear you, but
(32:27):
I also think, you know, she could be tough to
which I still think it's true. Um, And I said,
I also think it was a pretty good marriage all
and all, which I also think it's true, with reservations
and that if I wouldn't want to have it be
our marriage. But Amanda, it was very emotionally sensitive somehow
picked up on what I was saying and thought I
was referring or in some coded or unconscious way, to
(32:50):
our our marriagers in mind and so um. When I
was out the next day, she started reading to my journals,
and she even though I thought I had you know,
when I was writing my journals, I didn't want to them,
but I didn't expect anyone to realms. So I had
written about with various degrees of candor or various degrees
of openness about I had said always. So that began
(33:11):
the worst period of our lives, the ways in which
I felt like I was a prisoner of my history.
There's a natural assumption that sometimes people can make that
if you know someone's having an affair in the marriage,
that they maybe they're not satisfied with their partner, or
they're not getting what they need from their partners, they're
seeking it outside the marriage. I think that is not
apply here. I had cheated on pretty much everyone before Amanda.
(33:35):
It was just I was built. Say I was built
makes it sound like someone else did it. I was.
You know, I'm totally responsible. I'm an adult. I did
these things, cheated, I was unfaithful, I behave terribly allied.
You know that crappy, crappy horrible stuff that makes me
still feeling incredibly ashamed and mad at myself and demanded.
(33:56):
And I had issues in our marriage that I talked
about in the book. Even if we had had zero
issues in our marriage, even if I had been like
just overjoyed every single day, which is hard to have
any any marriage, and there was a lot of times
I really was overdover the Amanda. But even if I've
been overod all the time, I still probably would have
diated because I felt so badly about myself, and I
(34:17):
felt so needy, and I felt so insecure, and I
you know, I think I was just building a compartment
that one more bulkhead against intimacy, full true intimacy, and
unconsciously replicating my dad, who does the same thing. But
I didn't know that, you know, Like it's funny how
(34:38):
so often those secrets get passed down and some smuggled
down secretly. It's like he'd clapped me out in the
back and then slipped it into my pocket and I
didn't notice. He's like the artful dodger, and maybe his
mom didn't the same thing to him, you know, like
you don't know where you're getting it, because I didn't.
I didn't. I would have, you know, I would have
said if I had had to guess that he had
(34:59):
been impatable. But I didn't know that, and we've never
talked about it, and I never certainly would never have thought,
like I want to model myself. I'm that guy who
I can't get enough love from. That would be a mistake.
Why would I want to do that. I was trying
to be the opposite. I was trying to be like Mr.
Supersensitive guy. You know, I'm going to do all his therapy.
And then it turned out while he'd been doing therapy too,
(35:19):
last lats of therapy. So on the one hand, Tad
is in therapy. He's working on himself in all sorts
of ways, as did his dad. But sometimes even in therapy,
we don't go to the scariest places. It's ironic, I suppose,
But in the inner sanctum of a therapist's office, where
(35:41):
it's safe to expose our demons, sometimes we just don't.
The shame is too large, too looming, too terrifying. Tad
never addresses his fears about his infidelity with his therapist.
He never addresses his truths. He realizes later it this
doesn't make sense paying a professional only to present a
(36:04):
fabricated version of yourself. I was never aware of how
much shame I was carrying around until and I discovered
how terribly I behaved for years in our marriage, and
then I was plunged right into this big battle of it,
and it felt really awful. And having access to the shame,
(36:29):
being aware of it now, like and having it pretty easily,
you know, even talking with you now At times when
we're talking about my behavior, you know, I feel that
clammy disbelieving but totally having to accept sense of shame
that this is what I did and this is how
I betrayed Amanda um and also the accompanying sense of like,
(36:52):
what kind of person does that? But I also feel
like there's some there at some point which I maybe
not yet but I could see in the future where
you know, you might it's not it's like incorporating it
so it doesn't feel like an alien part of you.
It feels like, Okay, there's the shame, and it's just
you know, it's just like, Okay, there's the dog, Okay,
(37:13):
there's the kitchen sink. Um. It feels like a useful
thing at some point because it's like, well, I did
do that, and it's not like something that's swept over
me and possessed me. It's like part of who I was.
I will never do it again, but I know that
I had that capacity and I should be mindful of that. Well.
(37:33):
And you're also owning it because I mean, I don't
just mean with Amanda and with yourself, but making the
decision to to go there in this book means that
you're not sweeping anything under any rock. You're just like
no sweeping, and that, you know, strikes me as very brave,
(37:54):
um and necessary. If you were if you were going
to write this book, the book wouldn't be true if
you know you wrote about about days infidelities and then
pretending that it wasn't another generational layer to that. Yeah,
it felt, even when I was writing the second version
of the book like it felt that I was aware
of that I was sweeping my own behavior under the rug,
(38:17):
and it felt that help falls to me and wrong,
I'd like it, but I didn't. Also at that point,
I feel like, oh, well, it's a great opportunity for
me to write about this um because um, you know,
you know that would be revealing my shame to everyone,
and now I am. And you know, I would never
have done it if Amanda hadn't agreed with me that
we should, that I should do it, and hadn't wanted
(38:39):
me to do it, and hadn't read it and made sure,
you know, like the last thing I would ever want
to do it. Having hurt her so badly has hurt
her more with the book. And so if she hadn't
wanted me to, I would have just helped it and
that would have been that that she did. And I
feel like Amanda has been the one who has been
brave to like take me on again, knowing that I
(39:00):
was not the person that she thought it wasn't I
was living with for all those years, and that I
had unexplored rooms that she didn't know about. And I
think that's that's the big act of bravery, because she
would have been would have been perfectly reasonable and emotionally
plausible for her to say, no way, I'm out. So
(39:21):
I'm grateful every day that she didn't. You know, you
right towards the end of your book being exposed was
a harrowing but necessary precursor to being seen and having
those unexposed rooms be exposed, it seems like a great gift. Yeah.
It was the thing I probably most feared and before
(39:44):
it happened, and the thing I am most grateful for
now that it has happened. It was the great psychoanalyst
and writer Donald Winnicott, who once wrote, it is a
joy to be hidden, but disaster not to be found.
(40:05):
Here's Tad who has been found and found himself at last,
reading one last passage from his stirring book. But I
identified his wrongly. With those baby monkeys, I couldn't stop
thinking about them at the legettive air in my eyes
and black vertigoes. I felt the way. The feeling was
so intrusive that I stepped it into the memory hole,
(40:26):
or it wouldn't trouble me anymore. Now, I wonder if
given time, the monkeys would have eventually retreated to the
corners of their cages, because that's what I did. I
retreated with many a backward look. But I took the
compressed air hose with me. I'm afraid I left you
alone a good deal when you were young, mom said
to me once, dreadfully brightening, she added, but the result
(40:46):
is that you learned to read very early and now
you're a writer. Family Secrets is a production of I
Heart Radio. Molly Zachor is the story editor and Dylan
Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family
(41:07):
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 Secret zero. That's the number zero.
You can also find me on Instagram at Danny writer.
And if you'd like to know more about the story
that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance. For
(41:52):
more podcasts from 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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