April 15, 2021 • 43 mins
As a law student, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich was vehemently opposed to the death penalty, even in the most heinous of crimes. Yet their deeply-held beliefs were put to the test after watching the confession tape of a man convicted of the brutal killing and sexual assault of a six-year-old boy—the details of which felt all too familiar to Alex, an abuse survivor.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. This
episode contains descriptions of sexual assault. Listener discretion as advised.
The morning after I confronted my grandfather, I was home
alone at my parents house, standing in the kitchen. Early
(00:20):
summer light streamed in through the window over the sink.
I could see the old tire swing, its rope now free,
and then starting to rap. The phone rang. There were
no words when I picked up, only his labor breathing.
He'd done this before, calling the house and just breathing
when he heard me pick up. Hello, I said hello.
(00:44):
I was ready to hang up, but this time he spoke.
I'm an old man, he said, I'm going to be
dead soon. I need your forgiveness to go to heaven.
Do you forgive me? I remember the phone ringing. I
remember the light through the window and the black plastic
(01:05):
receiver smooth in my palm. I remember the sound of
his voice wavery and grap and old, and the way
my skin pricked and my heart started to hear it.
I remember his question, I have no memory of how
I answered him. That's Alex Marzano Lesnovitch. They are a memorist,
(01:27):
author of the lambeda award winning the Fact of a
Body and assistant professor at Bowdon College. Alex's story is
a braided one, each strand weaving around the other to
make something stronger than its parts, a strength that comes
from looking closely, even when looking is scary, especially when
(01:48):
looking is scary. I'd call this a story that is
the triumph of spirit and intellect over silence and secrets.
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets
(02:11):
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. I grew up
in New Jersey. It was a bedroom community for New York.
All around us there were these these markers of people
trying to make a new story over the one that
they had grown up in, over the one they had
left behind. So I remember when my parents brought home
(02:36):
matching cadillacs. We had this house that was kind of
falling down around us that they forever rebuilding. They had
bought it really cheaply when the family who had lived
in it prior had moved out, and they had moved
out because the rumor had it of an accompted murder.
We moved in and they sat about trying to remake it,
and interestingly, I think trying to remake it in ways
(02:59):
that sometimes looked older. So my father, for example, had
these Victorian flourishes added to the house, to the woodwork,
even though they weren't part of it originally. And so
it was this landscape of remaking, a reinvention of the
idea that it was possible to reinvent oneself and get
away from the past. And that was a really heavy
(03:21):
and beautiful idea as a kid, right like you're living
in some ways in a grand story. There were always
living in a mythology of like the big house and
the big family and the big parties, and there was
real beauty to that, and there was real complexity. Mm hmm.
I love the idea of these Victorian flourishes and the
(03:42):
idea of remaking a house but remaking it to look
older rather than classically remaking a house to modernize it.
It's almost like somehow that feels very metaphorical in terms
of your story itself, because it's like, I don't know,
somehow attaching pieces of history or I'm just sort of
picturing it like a Wes Anderson movie. I mean, I
(04:03):
gotta say it felt very left Anderson. And when I
look at it now and then remember when they were
redoing the hallway, for example, they had all us kids
pick out things that were important to us and place
them in the framework of the house, and then we
would work with boarded back up. So it was all
with this idea of we will live, and we will
(04:24):
live through history. We will be a story in the future.
There will be some family down the line that uncovers
us and wonders about who we are. If there is,
they may be a bit sad to discover my goofy
ring that was my prized possession of. Could there possibly
be a more apt and beautiful metaphor than a child's
(04:46):
goofy ring? A prized possession buried into the framework of
the house. Alex's family's home contains many secrets that are
quite the opposite of childhood innocence. Many years later, Alex
and their mother have a conversation when there's a good
chance the house is going to be raised torn down
(05:07):
to make way for a new development. Alex says they'd
like to drive the bulldozer, and their mother says, no,
I get to do that. Tell me about your mother,
the mother that you grew up with, not your mother today.
I mean, I have so much respect for everything she
pulls off. Her parents didn't want her to go to college.
(05:29):
They didn't feel a woman had to go to college,
so she would sneak out to go to college, even
though she was living with them. She went to college secretly.
They didn't even know until unmost she graduated. She'd almost
graduated when they found out. And she continued this kind
of determination. I think my my love of words and
my love of stories comes from her. She taught me
(05:50):
to read well before I went to kindergarten, you know,
well before we were learning to read a bit of
a I think we're both quite stubborn and so um.
I apparently didn't speak to her the first day of
kindergarten because I came home very upset that she had
never told me that there were capital letters. She only
taught me the lower case letters, and I was so upset.
(06:10):
Aar and I said, you never told me there were
big ones. But I think that way she made it fun,
you know, she made learning a real adventure for us,
and UM, I suspect she was quite bored at home
with us a bit. She loved it. But also when
I look back now, I sort of sense a mind
straining for like wanting to be out in the world
(06:31):
tackling things, because she did teach us so much and
also had some fun with her power as someone who
could teach us. So, for example, she taught us the
word candy meant as a matter of definition, bananas dipped
and playing yogurt, and so I vividly remember the first
(06:52):
time I went to like a classmates house and the
classmates mothers that, would you like some candy? And I
was like, no, not really, I don't really like candy,
and the expression on my classmates spaces, you know, and
then realizing, oh, but that was that was quite a
powerful moment because I realized, all right, like words or
what we say they are, this is all a system
(07:13):
of meaning that we are constantly making um. And then
when I was I think about twelve, maybe younger, she
went to law school and by that point there were
four of us kids at home, and she went full
time to law school during the day and brought us
with her sometimes, and so I kind of grew up,
(07:35):
you know, as a kid, the things that make impressions
on you are not what would seem right size to
an adult, but rather you know the things that that
stand out is like themb text in your world or
in your landscape, or shift your understanding of the world.
And for me, it was a couple of things. Being
at law school with her was the first time I
ever saw a woman in a suit and understood that
(07:56):
a woman could be a professor, that a woman could
teach her, the woman could have this session of authority.
It was also the first time I encountered macaroni and
cheese the way the rest of the world, as the
rest of the country makes it, and not the way
my family makes it, which is a very distinctive way.
And how's that after the banana dipped in yogurt? I
need to know? You know, the way we grew up
(08:17):
with mac and cheese was just like you make it
so that the pasta is like fresh off the stove,
and you dump it into a metal bowl, and my
mom would yell, stir, and all as kids would like
be positioned around the bowl, and one of us would
dump in a load of shredded cheese, and another world
would dump in some milk, and another would would would
(08:37):
dump in a little bit of I can't believe it's
not butter, and all you would do was just stir madly.
And then mostly it was cheese. It was like almost
equal parts macaroni and cheese. So it's just like a
melted cheese extravagant that it was like goodlier than pizza.
But it definitely wasn't that like creamy mac and cheese
sauce the people make. So we got to the cafeteria
and I just remember being stunned, just utterly done by
(09:02):
whatever the substance was. So those two and then sitting
in one of her law school classes and having a
professor talk about a hypothetical and call it that a hypothetical,
which is how law is taught, which is how you
know I was taught, well, eventually when I went to
law school, where you spin out a second alternate facts
(09:24):
and you talk about the way president in case law
could apply to those tacts. But I remember sitting in
that classroom and feeling like, you know, they just said
this fancy word, but I know what that is. That's
a story hypothetical as a story, And so it was
really the space of storytelling. And she would read to us,
She read to us every every night, so many stories,
(09:46):
and you know, gave me adult books the minute I
expressed interest in something with chapters. You know, I think she, uh,
she worked really hard to we make the word all
that she wanted to be in a world of ideas
and a world of words that she had been very
(10:08):
forcefully told was not to be hers when she was
a child and when she was a young adult. And
so I think she really made the world she wanted
to be in and made a world for herself to enter.
And what about your father. My dad was a man
of dreams. He wears his dreams on his sleeve. My
mother wears her dreams more privately. I didn't talk about them,
(10:30):
but my dad wears his dreams and his stories on
his sleeve. He is a very enthusiastic man. He's always
the life of the party, and um wants to be
the center of attention. And he's very much a story teller.
And um, he too was a lawyer, and he would
often tell us stories about his childhood, whereas my mother
(10:51):
never did. But he would always tell stories about his childhood,
and he was always falling in love with something new,
and very enthusiastic. I'm a very enthusiastic person. I would
probably trace that back to him. So when I was
a kid, you know, when he fell in love with opera,
it wasn't just that he fell in love with opera,
(11:12):
it was at suddenly he was periodically wearing a tux
and there was opera always playing through the house, and
there were posters about opera and whatnot. Then when he
fell in love with country music, there was Garth Brooks
all the time through the house, and he bought the
tractor for the backyard, and all of a sudden he
had big belt buckles and um, cowboy boots, even though
(11:32):
we lived in New Jersey. Then Cole Porter and so
literally a white dinner jacket, Cole Porter playing through the
house at all times. And of course the cuisine would shift,
the cuisine of the house would shift. Um. So I
think it's like ideay invention and of chasing maybe multiple
lives within a lifetime. We'll be right back within this
(12:05):
family life filled with books and words and music and magic.
Alex and their three siblings, the four of them form
a neat and tidy family. Everything fits together snugly, exactly right.
They sit around the dining room table, the six of them,
a table built for a family exactly this size, no more,
(12:26):
no fewer. But something shimmers in the air, something not
quite right. Alex can't put their finger on it. It's
just a feeling. But then one day, while they and
their twin brother Andy are outside playing, Alex is witnessed
to one of those indelible moments that shifts their understanding
(12:47):
of their family. I think in child could be often
remember those moments that shift our understanding of the world,
that opened up a new layer. And for me, one
of these moments was the house was built in such
a way that there was a window in my parents
bedroom that you could look out in their bedrooms in
(13:08):
the second floor, and you could look at that window
and you would see the whole landscape of the backyard.
And there was a tire swing back in the yard
hanging from this the old tree, and we would plan
on it all the time. But there was this day
when my brother flung himself through that tire swing and
his body went limp because he was playing. I mean
(13:31):
I was standing not far from him. I knew he
was playing. That's what we were doing. He was just
going to limp and play. But my mother came running
from the house barefoot, her bathroom trailing behind, you know,
the ties of her bathroom trailing behind her, just wailing,
and my dad caught her. He caught her and then
(13:55):
steadied her, and she kind of flung herself into his arms.
And it made such an impression for so many reasons. One,
I had really never seen my mother cry. My mother
was always very composed, very controlled, very polished. And my
father was the emotional one. I think now we would
(14:17):
say that he was suffering from a pretty profound depression
at the time, but he was the one who I
was used to seeing pride. I had never seen her
break apart that way. And of course there were things
that I barely remembered but must have retained sort of
an imprint on my memory of the fact that my
brother had been very sick when we were growing up.
(14:38):
He and I were born three months premature, and we
were triplets, and my sister had died when we were
several months old. And it was one of those things
that exists in the shadow of your mind as a child,
where sort of you know, but you don't know, but
you know, but you don't know. But certainly no one
ever ever ever spoke of it, nor did they speak
(15:01):
of how sick my brother had been as a kid.
He was in three commas before we were seven, And
I do because I look back and think about it.
There are all these moments where we would be sent
off to relatives or someone would appear at the house
to take care of us, and he would be off
in the hospital. Again. They kept a bad pack for
the hospital at all times, and there were just many
(15:24):
moments when he was near death. But in that way
that my family sort of approached anything difficult with always
we would just never again speak avail. We would pretend
that it never happened, so it would sort of all
those incidents would kind of get It's not that they disappeared,
but they sort of disappeared in the landscape of my memory,
(15:46):
like they retained like this shadowy presence. And that moment
when she came running, I think it's certainly looking back,
the first time that I can recall realizing that they
were grappling with grief. But on it was something that
we never spoke about again. We never acknowledged, you know,
what had just happened was weird, but you certainly couldn't
(16:07):
say anything about it. But I think when I look
back and I try to look for the traces of
what made us right the way that I think often
with memory are often telling a story about what made
us what promis here. That's one of the places I
see that trace of grief showing up. I see the
residue of grief channel. Yeah, I'm so. I'm so interested
(16:29):
in that liminal, shadowy place where the things that we
know but can't allow ourselves to think live. And it's
shortly after the moment where your mother comes running out
of the house wailing that she actually tells you this
(16:53):
one time about the third triplet, Jacqueline. It seems like
it's the first time that you're given a name. And
one of the things that really struck me is that
you're right. I already knew you know that there was
this strange chore feeling that someone was missing. And that
(17:14):
speaks so much too, the ways that your family and
so many families, in an attempt to just move on
or have things be fine or better, will just push
something into a corner or under the rug where it
inevitably does not remain. I mean, eventually it does not remain,
(17:37):
but that that moment really struck me that way, thank you. Yeah,
I think absolutely, it inevitably does not remain And I
I think about that so often in teaching. I constantly
tell my students to pay attention to what's emerging, to
what's showing up, to what's poking through, to what's trying
to materialize, trying to make it self known and bring
(17:58):
itself into language. And I think we live in a
society where that's also such a major aspect. You know,
what is showing up that we don't talk about, what
is showing up that we're trying to pretend isn't there,
what wants to make itself known, And so much of
life is negotiating what we're willing to acknowledge versus what
lies beneath the surface. Yeah, I mean the tagline for
(18:21):
this show is the secrets that are kept from us,
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves. Yes, well said, but there's another very
different kind of massive secret also buried within the walls
of the house. Alex's grandfather, their mother's father sexually molested
(18:41):
both of them and their sister from the time they
were three years old. You know, like so many families.
Mine had a lot of hidden abuse in it. My
earliest memory of my grandfather of using me, I think
explace at age three. That's about what we can figure
out from where I remember the objects in his house being.
(19:05):
And it continued on until I was age eight, when
my parents found out about it because my sister had something.
She had money that they asked her work came from,
and she said, oh, my grandpa gave it to me
for sitting on his lap. And they started asking questions
and realized that we were all being abused by him,
(19:26):
All the assigned female births people in my family were
being abused by him, public kids, but at every stage
it was hidden, you know, the kids who were being abused.
We didn't talk about it with each other. My sister
and I we shared a room, and we certainly we're
in the room when the other one was being abused,
(19:46):
and so we certainly knew about it, but we never
spoke about it, at least not that I recall. I
have pretty strong memories from that whole time period, and
I don't recall us ever speaking of it. And when
they found out about it, what they said was, you
can never talk about this, And I think they believed
(20:07):
that they were protecting us. I think they believed, you
know what they what they tell me now is that
they were told by a psychologist they consulted that maybe
if they pretended that it had happened, it would go
away for us. There's so much of that kind of
well meaning but unbelievably poor, psychologically damaging advice that parents
(20:33):
got from medical professionals at a certain time, and you know,
in history that's not really that long ago. Yeah, I
hear constantly how common that was. Um. I will say,
the first five months of my book without in the world,
I got at least three emails a day from people
who have been abused. And I have never done a
(20:53):
reading without having someone tell me their story afterwards. It's
so common. It's just so incredibly common for queer people
who had sometimes thought are targeted more, perhaps because they
maybe perceived a difference of children or what have you.
So it's just very very very common and very very
(21:16):
common to have it be covered up. And I think
that was one of the things that broke my heart
most working on the book, but then also in the
aftermath of its publication, was just how alone everyone feels
with their secret, and yet how incredibly not alone everyone is,
and that it's something that I deeply believe if we
(21:37):
spoke about it more, the prevalence might decrease, right. I
thinkfully believe that the only way to stop this inciety
is to actually start talking about it. And so the
secrecy hurts the people who've been through it, but also
sort of keeps it going. That's been one of the
big things I hold heavily in my heart. Alex is
(21:58):
an adult attending a big family party when they overhear
their father saying regarding their grandfather's abuse. Oh, Alex is
the only one who remembers that. It's essentially a kind
of gas lighting. Like if they're the only one who
remembers it, then did it really happen? When there is
no doubt that it happened. In fact, Alex has a
(22:21):
memory of their grandfather saying to them on Halloween, I'm
a witch and someday I'm gonna get you. There's so
much in your story about the negation of the abuse
and what it does to the memory. Part of why
(22:44):
that scene with my father at the party was so
striking was that no one had previously denied that the
abuse happened, and it was a shock to hear him
denying him. What was the timeline on that? How old
were you when when I was in my twenties when
that happened. So it went from silence and we're not
going to talk about this, and grandfather is still going
(23:05):
to be in our lives and we're going to kind
of pave it over two then a kind of hunting. Yes, yeah,
I mean, my family didn't deny that it happened. They
just denied that it should hurt that it happened. They
just denied that it should have any effect. Or it
was very much if this bothers you, that is your problem,
(23:25):
your fault. And so my father saying that the party
was such an escalation of the denial where it was like, wait,
now yours and either to even happened, how because he
had abused my sisters as well as myself and also
another cousin or I didn't know that at the time,
there was enough of a chorus of voices that none
(23:48):
of us had to doubt ourselves that it happened. And
when I finally did confront him, my grandfather, when I
was eighteen, he immediately acknowledged that he had abused me,
he just denied that it was a problem. Well, any
any quite a matter of factly says it happened to
me too. Yes, he did say that, yeah, And I
(24:10):
think that was my family style was more to say, yes,
it happened, but we don't need to talk about it,
because it shouldn't affect you. If it affects you, It's
essentially like this idea that to be affected by the
past is a kind of weakness, that one should just
be able to turn away from it and not be affected.
(24:33):
I think the belief that if we don't think about
the past, it will research itself, it will, it will
resurf it um is one that is important to me.
It's one that I grew up in trans and not
transplan binary and a message constantly given to me by
society is, oh my god, that's so new. How could
you how could you demand to be recognized that way?
(24:55):
How could you ask to be seen that way? That's
so incredibly new? And I am so and who finds
great solace in looking at history and being able to
say super not new? Isn't actually way more true and
way more real to have people have lived throughout time
than any pretense of a very strict binary and similarly,
(25:17):
the idea that if we turn away from whatever happened
in the past just shows up again. I think all
of my work is like this argument for complexity and
acknowledging complexity and living in complexity, and also sort of
continuity across time, that there really isn't a way to
just put a firm break on the past and never
(25:38):
talk about it. That our lives are continual stories. We'll
be back in a moment with more family secrets. When
(25:58):
Alex is a law student studying at Harvard, during a
summer internship at a law firm, they first come across
the case of a man named Ricky Langley, a murderer
and pedophile who is facing the death penalty for killing
a six year old boy named Jeremy Gilroy m So
Alex never works on Ricky's case, They've become consumed by
(26:21):
it because when they watched the video and read the reports,
they are shocked to realize that they, who are firmly
opposed to capital punishment, want Ricky dead. What this about?
Alex's journey to understand Rickie's history is part of the
braid I mentioned earlier. Buried in Ricky's history are questions
(26:44):
and answers to Alex's own. So was your decision to
go to law school born at your mother's feet when
you were twelve years old, sitting and watching her in
law school? I wrote my application essay for herr Boss
thing I didn't want to be a lawyer, and kudos
(27:04):
to them for letting me in despite that fact, because
what I wanted to do was understand. I wrote it
about wanting to understand why the definitalty was constitutional because
it felt to me, you know, I'd read everything that
I could at that age, and without more training, I
had read what I could find, and to me, it
seemed patently unconstitutional. And I was also didn't quite understand
(27:28):
why sex offender registration was constitutional. It seems like essentially
a second punishment, given that shaming as one of the
oldest punishments, and that might appear to be sort of
an odd thing for me to care about, given that
I was abused, and one would think perhaps that I
would just of course be in favor of sex offender
(27:49):
registration and whatnot. But I think I was pretty acutely
aware that so much of sexual abuse happens within families,
and that offender red stories tend to leave out family
driven abece, so it's more like an illusion of safety
than an actual public mechanism for safety. And I was
(28:09):
really curious why that was okay, why that was as okay?
And so I went to law school for those reasons,
but promptly also started taking writing classes at night, so
I would go to law school during the day, and
I was I was still closeted then as gay. So
I've go to law school during the day, and one
(28:29):
evening a week I would go to fiction classes, and
one evening a week I would go to a queer
meet up that was happening in Boston at the time.
And both of those other lives were totally secret, no
when I knew at law school knew about them. What
was that like during that time? I mean, what did
that feel like? That you were essentially dividing your life
(28:51):
into pieces on a pie chart and and keeping secrets.
That was the only way I knew, all right, I
had grown up in secrets. I'd kept secrets. I've known
I was trans since I was eight. You have a
very cute memory of when I realized that, and I
kept that secret hard back in law school. It actually
(29:13):
felt very natural because it was what I was used
to ill ta get a step. Further, I was really
politically liberal, wasn't I am really politically liberal? And yet
my first year I joined all the conservative organizations because
I was like, I don't understand any of this, and
so let me try to learn. So I was so closeted.
I was just very, very very closet. I had this
(29:35):
daytime life that was had nothing to do with who
I really was, and then I would have this evening
life that was where my heart laved and where I
was trying on the idea of living with myself. So
at what point when you're in law school do you
come across the case of Ricky Langley. My first summer
(29:57):
of law school, I took a internship helping to defend
men accused of murder, mostly meant all the clients from them,
and I came across the case on the third day
of that internship when I was shown his confession with
you tap in the interview for the job for the internship,
(30:18):
they had asked me, well could you help defendive head
of five? And I remember I was sitting in my
law school dorm room, and you know that quality of
where the air changes when it's one of those moments
in your life where things collide and the quality of
the air shifted. And I remember saying, yes, I can,
(30:43):
and I truly believed, you know, And I was pretty
intense person in my twenties, and I would say I
truly believed that if I really opposed the death penalty,
I had to be able to do this, that this
was the ultimate test because of my past. It would
it would sort of prove that I was so over
my past that I could remain committed to my ideals.
(31:07):
And so that was the first inkling. But then I
got to the internship and they showed us his confession
video tape, and I watched the video and he described
doing something to children that my grandfather had done to me,
like a very specific thing, and my body just totally
(31:30):
launched me back into the past. That was kind of
the moment where I realized that what I had believed
about how we could just turn away from the past,
how we could just deny it, was in fact not
going to be true, and that I was going to
have to find a different way through this story. My
(31:50):
body just totally launched me back into the past. Anyone
who has experienced trauma knows this feeling, expressed so beautifully
by a previous guest on this podcast, Dr Bessel vander Kolk,
author of the seminal book The Body Keeps the Score.
Trauma lives in the body, and we now use the
(32:11):
word trigger when we're triggered by something that stirs up
that trauma. It's like a game of shoots and ladders
were taken right back there. So you become deeply involved
in Ricky's story and in the story of Jeremy Gilroy,
the six year old boy that he that he killed.
(32:33):
Was that clear to you that the story has become
so intricately braided together psychologically, your story and Ricky's story
and Jeremy's story and the other people who are connected
to them. You know, there are some really breathtaking moments
(32:53):
where it all feels like it's kind of in a
concert somehow, that it's the way that you are coming
to understand everything that you need to know. I really
appreciate your word to us there, because he said in concert,
and I know you mean like together, but at the
same time that's sort of a musical metaphor, No, I
(33:13):
actually meant. I meant it as a musical metaphor. Okay, fantastic.
In terms of when I sort of got involved in
his case, I think it's really important to note that
I did not work on his case at all and
was not part of it at all while I was
doing the internship. Had I been involved in it, I
never could have written the book. So what happened was
(33:35):
that I was showing that video, not because I was
going to be working on his case. The second trial
had concluded by that point, and so I didn't have
any interaction with his case for the rest of that
summer until meeting him at the end of the summer,
which is a moment that's at the end of the book.
And this very curious thing happened in those years where
(33:57):
I actually couldn't remember the King needs met. For many years,
I could not remember it. In those years. It was
so intense that if I looked up the case online,
I could read all about it and I would walk away,
or I would put a print out or a paper down,
and I would not be able just a moment later
(34:17):
to tell you what the murderer's name was. I knew
everything else about the case. All the details are in
my mind, but I couldn't remember his name. A big
part of why Alex can't remember Rickie's name is like
that staticky reaction to trauma. As they read through eight
thousand pages of court records, they're haunted by the gruesome
(34:38):
details as a case, a six year old boy murdered
and stuck in a closet, wrapped in a blue blanket,
where he remained for days, a seaman stain on his shirt,
a single pubic hair on his lip, a sock stuffed
into his mouth, a videotaped confession. Over the course of
(35:01):
the years, Alex studies Ricky's history, moving back and forth
in time in order to understand, if not pinpoint where
the story begins, both Zair's and Ricky Langley's. It's understanding
thereafter not forgiveness. There is no place for the simple
platitude of forgiveness. As they write from the transcripts and
(35:26):
by visiting the places in Louisiana where events in the
man's life took place, I have imagined his mother, his sisters,
the little boy's mother, all the characters from the past,
and I have driven the long, lonely road from New
Orleans to the Louisiana State Penitentiary called Angola. I have
sat across from this man, the murderer, in a visiting booth,
(35:49):
and have looked into the same eyes that are on
this tape. This tape brought me to re examine everything
I believed, not only about the law, but my family
and my past. In both your family story and your
story and then Ricky Langley's story, there is this question
(36:13):
of how far do we have to trace back? Where
do we begin telling a story if we're really going
to be telling it from its beginnings, if that's even possible.
One of the things I'm really interested in is how
much where you start a story shapes what it's meaning is.
And that comes up in my family right like I
(36:36):
think you you interpret my family's actions and they're turning
away from the abuse differently. If I begin the story
shortly before the abuse, then sometimes it might be possible
to judge my parents quite harshly for that. But if
you tell a larger story about why they would feel
so compelled to turn away from the past, and you
(36:57):
start understanding that for them it was and st ordinary
and out of grief and fear, among my brother's illnesses
and the unknown nature of the future and the loss
of my sister. I think it's possible to have more
empathy for why it would be so important to them
to rewrite the story of the past and pretend the
(37:17):
past hadn't the harms of the past and the hearts
that past hadn't happened. And similarly in the Langley case,
I think we understand mack you Langley differently depending on
where we start his story, and that that power of
the storyteller to shape the story and what goes in
and what gets left out is also of course a
(37:37):
big thing in the the law. There's so much that ultimately
is threaded through um your story that has to do
with the question of forgiveness, the question of forgiveness in
your family, with your parents, you with your grandfather, the
(37:59):
question of this sort of extraordinary forgiveness that happens in
in Ricky Langley's case, where Jeremy's mother, the mother of
the boy that he murdered, is the one who appeals
to the court to spare him the death penalty. Talk
to me a little bit about what you learned about
(38:19):
that there can be actions that may seem like on
the surface that they would connote forgiveness, but that in
fact don't require forgiveness. Yeah, I think forgiveness it's such
a Oh, it's such a tricky idea. I really justlike
the way to use it culturally. I think we use
it to simplify. I think we use it to flatten.
(38:40):
I think we often use it to a race. We
often use it to shift the burden to the person
who has been harmed and to say, oh, well, that
person should just forgive. And I think it's really important
that we know that Laurel I did not forgive, that
that that her action she feels is not a matter
or a forgiveness, that her action really is about not
(39:03):
wanting him to die, but that that is not the
same thing. And that is a more complicated position than
we have cultural language for. And yet I personally believe
probably a more honest position than we have cultural language for,
and one that allows for recognition of the humanity of
the person who did the harm without erasing the harm
(39:27):
done to the person who was hurting. And we are
not very good at duality in this society, at holding dualities,
and that is one that I think is really important.
I hope someday we as a society learn a better relationship.
Two the harms of the past, one that makes more
(39:50):
space for reckoning and more space for accountability and more
space for complexity, and stops rushing to a simplified idea.
Forgiveness that could have quite a lot of power, and
could be quite beautiful, and could make space for everyone's
humanity and reconciliation and whatnot, is instead now used as
(40:13):
a weapon or a band aid. And that is kind
of why I am so resistant to engaging with it.
Let's close with a few more words from Alex. Here
they stand at the cemetery where their grandparents are buried.
(40:35):
My grandmother is buried next to a secret. My grandfather died,
but the fact of who he was. I can't say
that I forgive them, only that forgiveness is too simple
a word. They helped make me. They did such harm.
I have to go now. My voice sounds strange, tremulous
(40:58):
in the quiet. I have always found the dead in
the stories they leave behind, not in the stone cold
fact of the grave. But I never got to say
goodbye all my grandparents were alive, because every goodbye I
ever said it was really just words that stood in
place of all I couldn't say. I'm going to go
finished telling the story there Now they know I am
(41:26):
telling this story. I mean those words to be my
last to them. But where there was silence, there will
be speech that where there were secrets, I will make
way for the complicated truth. Family Secret is a production
(41:55):
of My Heart Media. Dylan Fagin and Bethman Macaluso are
the executive producers. Andrew Howard is our audio editor. If
you have a secret you'd like to share, leave us
a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming
bonus episode. Our number is one Secret zero. That's secret
(42:17):
and then the number zero. You can also find us
on Instagram at Danny Writer, Facebook at facebook dot com
slash Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at Fami Secret Spot.
And if you want to know about my family Secret
that inspired this podcast, check out my New York Times
best selling memoir Inheritance. For more podcast asked for my
(43:00):
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. This
episode contains descriptions of sexual assault. Listener discretion as advised.
The morning after I confronted my grandfather, I was home
alone at my parents house, standing in the kitchen. Early
(00:20):
summer light streamed in through the window over the sink.
I could see the old tire swing, its rope now free,
and then starting to rap. The phone rang. There were
no words when I picked up, only his labor breathing.
He'd done this before, calling the house and just breathing
when he heard me pick up. Hello, I said hello.
(00:44):
I was ready to hang up, but this time he spoke.
I'm an old man, he said, I'm going to be
dead soon. I need your forgiveness to go to heaven.
Do you forgive me? I remember the phone ringing. I
remember the light through the window and the black plastic
(01:05):
receiver smooth in my palm. I remember the sound of
his voice wavery and grap and old, and the way
my skin pricked and my heart started to hear it.
I remember his question, I have no memory of how
I answered him. That's Alex Marzano Lesnovitch. They are a memorist,
(01:27):
author of the lambeda award winning the Fact of a
Body and assistant professor at Bowdon College. Alex's story is
a braided one, each strand weaving around the other to
make something stronger than its parts, a strength that comes
from looking closely, even when looking is scary, especially when
(01:48):
looking is scary. I'd call this a story that is
the triumph of spirit and intellect over silence and secrets.
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets
(02:11):
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. I grew up
in New Jersey. It was a bedroom community for New York.
All around us there were these these markers of people
trying to make a new story over the one that
they had grown up in, over the one they had
left behind. So I remember when my parents brought home
(02:36):
matching cadillacs. We had this house that was kind of
falling down around us that they forever rebuilding. They had
bought it really cheaply when the family who had lived
in it prior had moved out, and they had moved
out because the rumor had it of an accompted murder.
We moved in and they sat about trying to remake it,
and interestingly, I think trying to remake it in ways
(02:59):
that sometimes looked older. So my father, for example, had
these Victorian flourishes added to the house, to the woodwork,
even though they weren't part of it originally. And so
it was this landscape of remaking, a reinvention of the
idea that it was possible to reinvent oneself and get
away from the past. And that was a really heavy
(03:21):
and beautiful idea as a kid, right like you're living
in some ways in a grand story. There were always
living in a mythology of like the big house and
the big family and the big parties, and there was
real beauty to that, and there was real complexity. Mm hmm.
I love the idea of these Victorian flourishes and the
(03:42):
idea of remaking a house but remaking it to look
older rather than classically remaking a house to modernize it.
It's almost like somehow that feels very metaphorical in terms
of your story itself, because it's like, I don't know,
somehow attaching pieces of history or I'm just sort of
picturing it like a Wes Anderson movie. I mean, I
(04:03):
gotta say it felt very left Anderson. And when I
look at it now and then remember when they were
redoing the hallway, for example, they had all us kids
pick out things that were important to us and place
them in the framework of the house, and then we
would work with boarded back up. So it was all
with this idea of we will live, and we will
(04:24):
live through history. We will be a story in the future.
There will be some family down the line that uncovers
us and wonders about who we are. If there is,
they may be a bit sad to discover my goofy
ring that was my prized possession of. Could there possibly
be a more apt and beautiful metaphor than a child's
(04:46):
goofy ring? A prized possession buried into the framework of
the house. Alex's family's home contains many secrets that are
quite the opposite of childhood innocence. Many years later, Alex
and their mother have a conversation when there's a good
chance the house is going to be raised torn down
(05:07):
to make way for a new development. Alex says they'd
like to drive the bulldozer, and their mother says, no,
I get to do that. Tell me about your mother,
the mother that you grew up with, not your mother today.
I mean, I have so much respect for everything she
pulls off. Her parents didn't want her to go to college.
(05:29):
They didn't feel a woman had to go to college,
so she would sneak out to go to college, even
though she was living with them. She went to college secretly.
They didn't even know until unmost she graduated. She'd almost
graduated when they found out. And she continued this kind
of determination. I think my my love of words and
my love of stories comes from her. She taught me
(05:50):
to read well before I went to kindergarten, you know,
well before we were learning to read a bit of
a I think we're both quite stubborn and so um.
I apparently didn't speak to her the first day of
kindergarten because I came home very upset that she had
never told me that there were capital letters. She only
taught me the lower case letters, and I was so upset.
(06:10):
Aar and I said, you never told me there were
big ones. But I think that way she made it fun,
you know, she made learning a real adventure for us,
and UM, I suspect she was quite bored at home
with us a bit. She loved it. But also when
I look back now, I sort of sense a mind
straining for like wanting to be out in the world
(06:31):
tackling things, because she did teach us so much and
also had some fun with her power as someone who
could teach us. So, for example, she taught us the
word candy meant as a matter of definition, bananas dipped
and playing yogurt, and so I vividly remember the first
(06:52):
time I went to like a classmates house and the
classmates mothers that, would you like some candy? And I
was like, no, not really, I don't really like candy,
and the expression on my classmates spaces, you know, and
then realizing, oh, but that was that was quite a
powerful moment because I realized, all right, like words or
what we say they are, this is all a system
(07:13):
of meaning that we are constantly making um. And then
when I was I think about twelve, maybe younger, she
went to law school and by that point there were
four of us kids at home, and she went full
time to law school during the day and brought us
with her sometimes, and so I kind of grew up,
(07:35):
you know, as a kid, the things that make impressions
on you are not what would seem right size to
an adult, but rather you know the things that that
stand out is like themb text in your world or
in your landscape, or shift your understanding of the world.
And for me, it was a couple of things. Being
at law school with her was the first time I
ever saw a woman in a suit and understood that
(07:56):
a woman could be a professor, that a woman could
teach her, the woman could have this session of authority.
It was also the first time I encountered macaroni and
cheese the way the rest of the world, as the
rest of the country makes it, and not the way
my family makes it, which is a very distinctive way.
And how's that after the banana dipped in yogurt? I
need to know? You know, the way we grew up
(08:17):
with mac and cheese was just like you make it
so that the pasta is like fresh off the stove,
and you dump it into a metal bowl, and my
mom would yell, stir, and all as kids would like
be positioned around the bowl, and one of us would
dump in a load of shredded cheese, and another world
would dump in some milk, and another would would would
(08:37):
dump in a little bit of I can't believe it's
not butter, and all you would do was just stir madly.
And then mostly it was cheese. It was like almost
equal parts macaroni and cheese. So it's just like a
melted cheese extravagant that it was like goodlier than pizza.
But it definitely wasn't that like creamy mac and cheese
sauce the people make. So we got to the cafeteria
and I just remember being stunned, just utterly done by
(09:02):
whatever the substance was. So those two and then sitting
in one of her law school classes and having a
professor talk about a hypothetical and call it that a hypothetical,
which is how law is taught, which is how you
know I was taught, well, eventually when I went to
law school, where you spin out a second alternate facts
(09:24):
and you talk about the way president in case law
could apply to those tacts. But I remember sitting in
that classroom and feeling like, you know, they just said
this fancy word, but I know what that is. That's
a story hypothetical as a story, And so it was
really the space of storytelling. And she would read to us,
She read to us every every night, so many stories,
(09:46):
and you know, gave me adult books the minute I
expressed interest in something with chapters. You know, I think she, uh,
she worked really hard to we make the word all
that she wanted to be in a world of ideas
and a world of words that she had been very
(10:08):
forcefully told was not to be hers when she was
a child and when she was a young adult. And
so I think she really made the world she wanted
to be in and made a world for herself to enter.
And what about your father. My dad was a man
of dreams. He wears his dreams on his sleeve. My
mother wears her dreams more privately. I didn't talk about them,
(10:30):
but my dad wears his dreams and his stories on
his sleeve. He is a very enthusiastic man. He's always
the life of the party, and um wants to be
the center of attention. And he's very much a story teller.
And um, he too was a lawyer, and he would
often tell us stories about his childhood, whereas my mother
(10:51):
never did. But he would always tell stories about his childhood,
and he was always falling in love with something new,
and very enthusiastic. I'm a very enthusiastic person. I would
probably trace that back to him. So when I was
a kid, you know, when he fell in love with opera,
it wasn't just that he fell in love with opera,
(11:12):
it was at suddenly he was periodically wearing a tux
and there was opera always playing through the house, and
there were posters about opera and whatnot. Then when he
fell in love with country music, there was Garth Brooks
all the time through the house, and he bought the
tractor for the backyard, and all of a sudden he
had big belt buckles and um, cowboy boots, even though
(11:32):
we lived in New Jersey. Then Cole Porter and so
literally a white dinner jacket, Cole Porter playing through the
house at all times. And of course the cuisine would shift,
the cuisine of the house would shift. Um. So I
think it's like ideay invention and of chasing maybe multiple
lives within a lifetime. We'll be right back within this
(12:05):
family life filled with books and words and music and magic.
Alex and their three siblings, the four of them form
a neat and tidy family. Everything fits together snugly, exactly right.
They sit around the dining room table, the six of them,
a table built for a family exactly this size, no more,
(12:26):
no fewer. But something shimmers in the air, something not
quite right. Alex can't put their finger on it. It's
just a feeling. But then one day, while they and
their twin brother Andy are outside playing, Alex is witnessed
to one of those indelible moments that shifts their understanding
(12:47):
of their family. I think in child could be often
remember those moments that shift our understanding of the world,
that opened up a new layer. And for me, one
of these moments was the house was built in such
a way that there was a window in my parents
bedroom that you could look out in their bedrooms in
(13:08):
the second floor, and you could look at that window
and you would see the whole landscape of the backyard.
And there was a tire swing back in the yard
hanging from this the old tree, and we would plan
on it all the time. But there was this day
when my brother flung himself through that tire swing and
his body went limp because he was playing. I mean
(13:31):
I was standing not far from him. I knew he
was playing. That's what we were doing. He was just
going to limp and play. But my mother came running
from the house barefoot, her bathroom trailing behind, you know,
the ties of her bathroom trailing behind her, just wailing,
and my dad caught her. He caught her and then
(13:55):
steadied her, and she kind of flung herself into his arms.
And it made such an impression for so many reasons. One,
I had really never seen my mother cry. My mother
was always very composed, very controlled, very polished. And my
father was the emotional one. I think now we would
(14:17):
say that he was suffering from a pretty profound depression
at the time, but he was the one who I
was used to seeing pride. I had never seen her
break apart that way. And of course there were things
that I barely remembered but must have retained sort of
an imprint on my memory of the fact that my
brother had been very sick when we were growing up.
(14:38):
He and I were born three months premature, and we
were triplets, and my sister had died when we were
several months old. And it was one of those things
that exists in the shadow of your mind as a child,
where sort of you know, but you don't know, but
you know, but you don't know. But certainly no one
ever ever ever spoke of it, nor did they speak
(15:01):
of how sick my brother had been as a kid.
He was in three commas before we were seven, And
I do because I look back and think about it.
There are all these moments where we would be sent
off to relatives or someone would appear at the house
to take care of us, and he would be off
in the hospital. Again. They kept a bad pack for
the hospital at all times, and there were just many
(15:24):
moments when he was near death. But in that way
that my family sort of approached anything difficult with always
we would just never again speak avail. We would pretend
that it never happened, so it would sort of all
those incidents would kind of get It's not that they disappeared,
but they sort of disappeared in the landscape of my memory,
(15:46):
like they retained like this shadowy presence. And that moment
when she came running, I think it's certainly looking back,
the first time that I can recall realizing that they
were grappling with grief. But on it was something that
we never spoke about again. We never acknowledged, you know,
what had just happened was weird, but you certainly couldn't
(16:07):
say anything about it. But I think when I look
back and I try to look for the traces of
what made us right the way that I think often
with memory are often telling a story about what made
us what promis here. That's one of the places I
see that trace of grief showing up. I see the
residue of grief channel. Yeah, I'm so. I'm so interested
(16:29):
in that liminal, shadowy place where the things that we
know but can't allow ourselves to think live. And it's
shortly after the moment where your mother comes running out
of the house wailing that she actually tells you this
(16:53):
one time about the third triplet, Jacqueline. It seems like
it's the first time that you're given a name. And
one of the things that really struck me is that
you're right. I already knew you know that there was
this strange chore feeling that someone was missing. And that
(17:14):
speaks so much too, the ways that your family and
so many families, in an attempt to just move on
or have things be fine or better, will just push
something into a corner or under the rug where it
inevitably does not remain. I mean, eventually it does not remain,
(17:37):
but that that moment really struck me that way, thank you. Yeah,
I think absolutely, it inevitably does not remain And I
I think about that so often in teaching. I constantly
tell my students to pay attention to what's emerging, to
what's showing up, to what's poking through, to what's trying
to materialize, trying to make it self known and bring
(17:58):
itself into language. And I think we live in a
society where that's also such a major aspect. You know,
what is showing up that we don't talk about, what
is showing up that we're trying to pretend isn't there,
what wants to make itself known, And so much of
life is negotiating what we're willing to acknowledge versus what
lies beneath the surface. Yeah, I mean the tagline for
(18:21):
this show is the secrets that are kept from us,
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves. Yes, well said, but there's another very
different kind of massive secret also buried within the walls
of the house. Alex's grandfather, their mother's father sexually molested
(18:41):
both of them and their sister from the time they
were three years old. You know, like so many families.
Mine had a lot of hidden abuse in it. My
earliest memory of my grandfather of using me, I think
explace at age three. That's about what we can figure
out from where I remember the objects in his house being.
(19:05):
And it continued on until I was age eight, when
my parents found out about it because my sister had something.
She had money that they asked her work came from,
and she said, oh, my grandpa gave it to me
for sitting on his lap. And they started asking questions
and realized that we were all being abused by him,
(19:26):
All the assigned female births people in my family were
being abused by him, public kids, but at every stage
it was hidden, you know, the kids who were being abused.
We didn't talk about it with each other. My sister
and I we shared a room, and we certainly we're
in the room when the other one was being abused,
(19:46):
and so we certainly knew about it, but we never
spoke about it, at least not that I recall. I
have pretty strong memories from that whole time period, and
I don't recall us ever speaking of it. And when
they found out about it, what they said was, you
can never talk about this, And I think they believed
(20:07):
that they were protecting us. I think they believed, you
know what they what they tell me now is that
they were told by a psychologist they consulted that maybe
if they pretended that it had happened, it would go
away for us. There's so much of that kind of
well meaning but unbelievably poor, psychologically damaging advice that parents
(20:33):
got from medical professionals at a certain time, and you know,
in history that's not really that long ago. Yeah, I
hear constantly how common that was. Um. I will say,
the first five months of my book without in the world,
I got at least three emails a day from people
who have been abused. And I have never done a
(20:53):
reading without having someone tell me their story afterwards. It's
so common. It's just so incredibly common for queer people
who had sometimes thought are targeted more, perhaps because they
maybe perceived a difference of children or what have you.
So it's just very very very common and very very
(21:16):
common to have it be covered up. And I think
that was one of the things that broke my heart
most working on the book, but then also in the
aftermath of its publication, was just how alone everyone feels
with their secret, and yet how incredibly not alone everyone is,
and that it's something that I deeply believe if we
(21:37):
spoke about it more, the prevalence might decrease, right. I
thinkfully believe that the only way to stop this inciety
is to actually start talking about it. And so the
secrecy hurts the people who've been through it, but also
sort of keeps it going. That's been one of the
big things I hold heavily in my heart. Alex is
(21:58):
an adult attending a big family party when they overhear
their father saying regarding their grandfather's abuse. Oh, Alex is
the only one who remembers that. It's essentially a kind
of gas lighting. Like if they're the only one who
remembers it, then did it really happen? When there is
no doubt that it happened. In fact, Alex has a
(22:21):
memory of their grandfather saying to them on Halloween, I'm
a witch and someday I'm gonna get you. There's so
much in your story about the negation of the abuse
and what it does to the memory. Part of why
(22:44):
that scene with my father at the party was so
striking was that no one had previously denied that the
abuse happened, and it was a shock to hear him
denying him. What was the timeline on that? How old
were you when when I was in my twenties when
that happened. So it went from silence and we're not
going to talk about this, and grandfather is still going
(23:05):
to be in our lives and we're going to kind
of pave it over two then a kind of hunting. Yes, yeah,
I mean, my family didn't deny that it happened. They
just denied that it should hurt that it happened. They
just denied that it should have any effect. Or it
was very much if this bothers you, that is your problem,
(23:25):
your fault. And so my father saying that the party
was such an escalation of the denial where it was like, wait,
now yours and either to even happened, how because he
had abused my sisters as well as myself and also
another cousin or I didn't know that at the time,
there was enough of a chorus of voices that none
(23:48):
of us had to doubt ourselves that it happened. And
when I finally did confront him, my grandfather, when I
was eighteen, he immediately acknowledged that he had abused me,
he just denied that it was a problem. Well, any
any quite a matter of factly says it happened to
me too. Yes, he did say that, yeah, And I
(24:10):
think that was my family style was more to say, yes,
it happened, but we don't need to talk about it,
because it shouldn't affect you. If it affects you, It's
essentially like this idea that to be affected by the
past is a kind of weakness, that one should just
be able to turn away from it and not be affected.
(24:33):
I think the belief that if we don't think about
the past, it will research itself, it will, it will
resurf it um is one that is important to me.
It's one that I grew up in trans and not
transplan binary and a message constantly given to me by
society is, oh my god, that's so new. How could
you how could you demand to be recognized that way?
(24:55):
How could you ask to be seen that way? That's
so incredibly new? And I am so and who finds
great solace in looking at history and being able to
say super not new? Isn't actually way more true and
way more real to have people have lived throughout time
than any pretense of a very strict binary and similarly,
(25:17):
the idea that if we turn away from whatever happened
in the past just shows up again. I think all
of my work is like this argument for complexity and
acknowledging complexity and living in complexity, and also sort of
continuity across time, that there really isn't a way to
just put a firm break on the past and never
(25:38):
talk about it. That our lives are continual stories. We'll
be back in a moment with more family secrets. When
(25:58):
Alex is a law student studying at Harvard, during a
summer internship at a law firm, they first come across
the case of a man named Ricky Langley, a murderer
and pedophile who is facing the death penalty for killing
a six year old boy named Jeremy Gilroy m So
Alex never works on Ricky's case, They've become consumed by
(26:21):
it because when they watched the video and read the reports,
they are shocked to realize that they, who are firmly
opposed to capital punishment, want Ricky dead. What this about?
Alex's journey to understand Rickie's history is part of the
braid I mentioned earlier. Buried in Ricky's history are questions
(26:44):
and answers to Alex's own. So was your decision to
go to law school born at your mother's feet when
you were twelve years old, sitting and watching her in
law school? I wrote my application essay for herr Boss
thing I didn't want to be a lawyer, and kudos
(27:04):
to them for letting me in despite that fact, because
what I wanted to do was understand. I wrote it
about wanting to understand why the definitalty was constitutional because
it felt to me, you know, I'd read everything that
I could at that age, and without more training, I
had read what I could find, and to me, it
seemed patently unconstitutional. And I was also didn't quite understand
(27:28):
why sex offender registration was constitutional. It seems like essentially
a second punishment, given that shaming as one of the
oldest punishments, and that might appear to be sort of
an odd thing for me to care about, given that
I was abused, and one would think perhaps that I
would just of course be in favor of sex offender
(27:49):
registration and whatnot. But I think I was pretty acutely
aware that so much of sexual abuse happens within families,
and that offender red stories tend to leave out family
driven abece, so it's more like an illusion of safety
than an actual public mechanism for safety. And I was
(28:09):
really curious why that was okay, why that was as okay?
And so I went to law school for those reasons,
but promptly also started taking writing classes at night, so
I would go to law school during the day, and
I was I was still closeted then as gay. So
I've go to law school during the day, and one
(28:29):
evening a week I would go to fiction classes, and
one evening a week I would go to a queer
meet up that was happening in Boston at the time.
And both of those other lives were totally secret, no
when I knew at law school knew about them. What
was that like during that time? I mean, what did
that feel like? That you were essentially dividing your life
(28:51):
into pieces on a pie chart and and keeping secrets.
That was the only way I knew, all right, I
had grown up in secrets. I'd kept secrets. I've known
I was trans since I was eight. You have a
very cute memory of when I realized that, and I
kept that secret hard back in law school. It actually
(29:13):
felt very natural because it was what I was used
to ill ta get a step. Further, I was really
politically liberal, wasn't I am really politically liberal? And yet
my first year I joined all the conservative organizations because
I was like, I don't understand any of this, and
so let me try to learn. So I was so closeted.
I was just very, very very closet. I had this
(29:35):
daytime life that was had nothing to do with who
I really was, and then I would have this evening
life that was where my heart laved and where I
was trying on the idea of living with myself. So
at what point when you're in law school do you
come across the case of Ricky Langley. My first summer
(29:57):
of law school, I took a internship helping to defend
men accused of murder, mostly meant all the clients from them,
and I came across the case on the third day
of that internship when I was shown his confession with
you tap in the interview for the job for the internship,
(30:18):
they had asked me, well could you help defendive head
of five? And I remember I was sitting in my
law school dorm room, and you know that quality of
where the air changes when it's one of those moments
in your life where things collide and the quality of
the air shifted. And I remember saying, yes, I can,
(30:43):
and I truly believed, you know, And I was pretty
intense person in my twenties, and I would say I
truly believed that if I really opposed the death penalty,
I had to be able to do this, that this
was the ultimate test because of my past. It would
it would sort of prove that I was so over
my past that I could remain committed to my ideals.
(31:07):
And so that was the first inkling. But then I
got to the internship and they showed us his confession
video tape, and I watched the video and he described
doing something to children that my grandfather had done to me,
like a very specific thing, and my body just totally
(31:30):
launched me back into the past. That was kind of
the moment where I realized that what I had believed
about how we could just turn away from the past,
how we could just deny it, was in fact not
going to be true, and that I was going to
have to find a different way through this story. My
(31:50):
body just totally launched me back into the past. Anyone
who has experienced trauma knows this feeling, expressed so beautifully
by a previous guest on this podcast, Dr Bessel vander Kolk,
author of the seminal book The Body Keeps the Score.
Trauma lives in the body, and we now use the
(32:11):
word trigger when we're triggered by something that stirs up
that trauma. It's like a game of shoots and ladders
were taken right back there. So you become deeply involved
in Ricky's story and in the story of Jeremy Gilroy,
the six year old boy that he that he killed.
(32:33):
Was that clear to you that the story has become
so intricately braided together psychologically, your story and Ricky's story
and Jeremy's story and the other people who are connected
to them. You know, there are some really breathtaking moments
(32:53):
where it all feels like it's kind of in a
concert somehow, that it's the way that you are coming
to understand everything that you need to know. I really
appreciate your word to us there, because he said in concert,
and I know you mean like together, but at the
same time that's sort of a musical metaphor, No, I
(33:13):
actually meant. I meant it as a musical metaphor. Okay, fantastic.
In terms of when I sort of got involved in
his case, I think it's really important to note that
I did not work on his case at all and
was not part of it at all while I was
doing the internship. Had I been involved in it, I
never could have written the book. So what happened was
(33:35):
that I was showing that video, not because I was
going to be working on his case. The second trial
had concluded by that point, and so I didn't have
any interaction with his case for the rest of that
summer until meeting him at the end of the summer,
which is a moment that's at the end of the book.
And this very curious thing happened in those years where
(33:57):
I actually couldn't remember the King needs met. For many years,
I could not remember it. In those years. It was
so intense that if I looked up the case online,
I could read all about it and I would walk away,
or I would put a print out or a paper down,
and I would not be able just a moment later
(34:17):
to tell you what the murderer's name was. I knew
everything else about the case. All the details are in
my mind, but I couldn't remember his name. A big
part of why Alex can't remember Rickie's name is like
that staticky reaction to trauma. As they read through eight
thousand pages of court records, they're haunted by the gruesome
(34:38):
details as a case, a six year old boy murdered
and stuck in a closet, wrapped in a blue blanket,
where he remained for days, a seaman stain on his shirt,
a single pubic hair on his lip, a sock stuffed
into his mouth, a videotaped confession. Over the course of
(35:01):
the years, Alex studies Ricky's history, moving back and forth
in time in order to understand, if not pinpoint where
the story begins, both Zair's and Ricky Langley's. It's understanding
thereafter not forgiveness. There is no place for the simple
platitude of forgiveness. As they write from the transcripts and
(35:26):
by visiting the places in Louisiana where events in the
man's life took place, I have imagined his mother, his sisters,
the little boy's mother, all the characters from the past,
and I have driven the long, lonely road from New
Orleans to the Louisiana State Penitentiary called Angola. I have
sat across from this man, the murderer, in a visiting booth,
(35:49):
and have looked into the same eyes that are on
this tape. This tape brought me to re examine everything
I believed, not only about the law, but my family
and my past. In both your family story and your
story and then Ricky Langley's story, there is this question
(36:13):
of how far do we have to trace back? Where
do we begin telling a story if we're really going
to be telling it from its beginnings, if that's even possible.
One of the things I'm really interested in is how
much where you start a story shapes what it's meaning is.
And that comes up in my family right like I
(36:36):
think you you interpret my family's actions and they're turning
away from the abuse differently. If I begin the story
shortly before the abuse, then sometimes it might be possible
to judge my parents quite harshly for that. But if
you tell a larger story about why they would feel
so compelled to turn away from the past, and you
(36:57):
start understanding that for them it was and st ordinary
and out of grief and fear, among my brother's illnesses
and the unknown nature of the future and the loss
of my sister. I think it's possible to have more
empathy for why it would be so important to them
to rewrite the story of the past and pretend the
(37:17):
past hadn't the harms of the past and the hearts
that past hadn't happened. And similarly in the Langley case,
I think we understand mack you Langley differently depending on
where we start his story, and that that power of
the storyteller to shape the story and what goes in
and what gets left out is also of course a
(37:37):
big thing in the the law. There's so much that ultimately
is threaded through um your story that has to do
with the question of forgiveness, the question of forgiveness in
your family, with your parents, you with your grandfather, the
(37:59):
question of this sort of extraordinary forgiveness that happens in
in Ricky Langley's case, where Jeremy's mother, the mother of
the boy that he murdered, is the one who appeals
to the court to spare him the death penalty. Talk
to me a little bit about what you learned about
(38:19):
that there can be actions that may seem like on
the surface that they would connote forgiveness, but that in
fact don't require forgiveness. Yeah, I think forgiveness it's such
a Oh, it's such a tricky idea. I really justlike
the way to use it culturally. I think we use
it to simplify. I think we use it to flatten.
(38:40):
I think we often use it to a race. We
often use it to shift the burden to the person
who has been harmed and to say, oh, well, that
person should just forgive. And I think it's really important
that we know that Laurel I did not forgive, that
that that her action she feels is not a matter
or a forgiveness, that her action really is about not
(39:03):
wanting him to die, but that that is not the
same thing. And that is a more complicated position than
we have cultural language for. And yet I personally believe
probably a more honest position than we have cultural language for,
and one that allows for recognition of the humanity of
the person who did the harm without erasing the harm
(39:27):
done to the person who was hurting. And we are
not very good at duality in this society, at holding dualities,
and that is one that I think is really important.
I hope someday we as a society learn a better relationship.
Two the harms of the past, one that makes more
(39:50):
space for reckoning and more space for accountability and more
space for complexity, and stops rushing to a simplified idea.
Forgiveness that could have quite a lot of power, and
could be quite beautiful, and could make space for everyone's
humanity and reconciliation and whatnot, is instead now used as
(40:13):
a weapon or a band aid. And that is kind
of why I am so resistant to engaging with it.
Let's close with a few more words from Alex. Here
they stand at the cemetery where their grandparents are buried.
(40:35):
My grandmother is buried next to a secret. My grandfather died,
but the fact of who he was. I can't say
that I forgive them, only that forgiveness is too simple
a word. They helped make me. They did such harm.
I have to go now. My voice sounds strange, tremulous
(40:58):
in the quiet. I have always found the dead in
the stories they leave behind, not in the stone cold
fact of the grave. But I never got to say
goodbye all my grandparents were alive, because every goodbye I
ever said it was really just words that stood in
place of all I couldn't say. I'm going to go
finished telling the story there Now they know I am
(41:26):
telling this story. I mean those words to be my
last to them. But where there was silence, there will
be speech that where there were secrets, I will make
way for the complicated truth. Family Secret is a production
(41:55):
of My Heart Media. Dylan Fagin and Bethman Macaluso are
the executive producers. Andrew Howard is our audio editor. If
you have a secret you'd like to share, leave us
a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming
bonus episode. Our number is one Secret zero. That's secret
(42:17):
and then the number zero. You can also find us
on Instagram at Danny Writer, Facebook at facebook dot com
slash Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at Fami Secret Spot.
And if you want to know about my family Secret
that inspired this podcast, check out my New York Times
best selling memoir Inheritance. For more podcast asked for my
(43:00):
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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