November 27, 2025 • 56 mins
When Amanda’s parents’ eccentricities take a dark turn toward hoarding, scheming, and secret-keeping, the walls begin to literally close in on her. As the chaos and deceit grows in volume around her, she must figure out how to escape.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. All my life,
I've been knocking on doors, digging through boxes, grasping for answers.
Who were these people? What drove them? How did all
of this happen? In our strange lives? Why am I here?
And why? And our males? And our love and our
(00:21):
stories and savagery and tenderness of all those years together?
Did we never remember that? Long is a verb to
feel a strong desire or craving, especially for something not
likely to be attained, to pine to yearn.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
That's Amanda Julie, writer and executive editor and publisher of McSweeney's.
Her memoir Destroyed This House was recently published. Amanda's is
a story of extremes, what things look like on the
outside and what they're really like on the inside. It's
about being a child of parents who have trouble parenting
(00:57):
themselves as well as their children. And it's a story
about a child who learns to navigate in a world
not of her making, until she grows up to become
a woman with a successful, beautiful life while still loving
and caring for the people she comes from. I'm Danny
(01:25):
Shapiro and this is Family secrets, the secrets that are
kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and
the secrets we keep from ourselves. So I always begin
with the question tell me about the landscape of your childhood,
but in your case, Amanda, I feel like I have
to phrase it as tell me about the landscape of
(01:48):
your childhood.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
There were many, yes, many homes, many places. I was
born in nineteen seventy eight in Philadelphia, and my parents
soon moved to the New York City area Island where
we lived. It is probably the place I lived the
longest in my childhood. My dad began getting into every
kind of business scheme and everything else, and that led
(02:12):
us to a small town in Indiana where my mother
grew up, and that didn't last long. Things were difficult there,
and then we moved to another place in Indiana where
we lived. We lived in Fort Wayne, actually three different places.
We had the kind of childhood where we were getting
into money trouble pretty much all the time. My dad
(02:36):
found a way to not pay the bills or figure
something out for us, and so all of these places
were really short lived.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Tell me a little bit about your parents and who
they were, you know, when they met what were their histories,
what was they each bringing to the table with them.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Well, my mother had been this enterprising, pioneering woman, really
a feminist hero, and some ways she started out as
someone in this small town who was interested in fashion
design and did I think the extremely bold thing of
applying to and going to Pratt Institute in New York
(03:14):
from this small town in nineteen sixty nine. So she
did that for a while, didn't like it. She wasn't
a real rigorous student. In nineteen seventies, she worked in
the World Trade Center the first year was open. She
was at an insurance firm and she was a secretary
and she told me later she learned there that she
never wanted to be anybody's secretary. But she also learned
how to fix typewriters in that job. So when she
(03:37):
landed herself back near her hometown in Indianapolis, she was
eventually hired by IBM as their very first ever female engineer.
She fixed typewriters for IBM, running around, you know, early
seventies Indianapolis, fixing office equipment. So that was my mom,
you know, kind of spirited person, unconventional, did what she
(04:00):
wanted always, And then my dad had grown up in Miami,
he had been married and had three children, and then
was it's a very murky story, but really exiled from
that family and everything that was going on with him
in Miami. The story that he told is that he
(04:20):
was deposited in Indianapolis by his father in law with
no winter coat in March in Indianapolis and half a
suitcase of whatever he had, and he worked for a while.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
He did so.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Many different jobs. This is a theme in my dad's life.
He just he worked always. He was always selling things.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Did you ever get to the bottom of, or even
part way to the bottom of, why the exile from
that first family, because that's such a radical, kind of
unusual thing. I mean, he never saw those three kids again.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
He never saw those three kids again. And my understanding,
and I couldn't prove this in lots of research I
did on my family, I couldn't prove it. But I
believe that those children were told that he was dead
in nineteen seventy so there was no contact at all
with Florida. He never went back and by the time
(05:14):
in nineteen seventy three or so when my parents met,
my dad was actually homeless. Everything he owned at that
point was in Tom McCann's shoe box, and he was
working at the Indianapolis Press Club running the bar, and
he would sleep behind the bar there most nights unless
he found a better place to sleep somewhere in Indianapolis.
(05:36):
So the night he met my mother, he slept there,
and that's how it started. It's so apt for my
parents that from the beginning that's how it was.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
Yeah, it seems like they had a very kind of
intense connection and bond and love for each other that
also enabled each other over the years.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Yes, I think enabling is a good word. It's not
a word I use all the time. I prefer to
refer to them as the Midwestern Bonnie and Clyde. They
loved each other so fiercely. They were each other's allies
in just remarkable ways. No matter what either of them did,
the misbehaviors, the lies, everything, they stood up for each other,
(06:21):
which itself is you know, it has its beauty. I
think I think my dad specialized in self defeating choices. Really,
it was his thing. So he'd gotten this job in
New Jersey. He was selling janitorial supplies for Johnson Wax,
and I think that the houses around there around New
Jersey weren't big enough or weren't quite what they wanted,
(06:43):
so they kept, you know, going further and further out.
They didn't want to live in New York City, so
they found My Island. But it did mean this, you know,
a commute in the morning through Manhattan, a commute in
the afternoon through Manhattan. It was hours he spent on
the road. So back in Miami and he worked at
hotel and he booked live music and he loved do
up music and sort of you know that fifties sound,
(07:07):
and he was okay at music himself. Later in his
life music became a bigger part of things. But he
had a plug into the cigarette lighter piano keyboard, and
so he would plug that in and he would just
noodle and he'd just sang and play his you know, piano,
and you know, he was happy. I think he liked
the commute. He was maybe one of the only people
who did.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
And what were some of his other ventures during that time.
I mean I recall that he was out telling your
mother bought an oil Derek.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
He did, Yeah in Texas. Yeah, so because he had
this commute through the city, but both ways he got
into the habit of stopping off in the village and
having a drink, which is, you know, very early eighties
maybe habit which I don't think we would think now
is the best driving, you know, hygiene. But he would
stop off and have a drink or two, and he
(08:01):
met someone in a bar. He came up and told
us he met someone at a bar in the village and
they had this deal and he could get in on
the oil business and be an oil man, and he
wanted to. He always wanted to save us from our
financial difficulties. He wanted us to be comfortable. He wanted
that status and that comfort. So whatever he paid, I'm
(08:22):
not even sure exactly, but he bought an oil derek
in Texas, and he thought, he told us we were
going to be rich from that day forward, which it
turns out we were not. He lost money on that deal.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
He was a dreamer or maybe a fantasist, but also
he seemed like he was ahead of his time in
various ways. I mean, he also was visionary. Some of
his ideas, it struck me, were ideas that were simply
a fantastic idea at the wrong time.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Or he had a few like that.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
So tell me about the soap valve.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Yeah, so in this janitorial world with Johnson Wack, he
had been part of creating this valve for soap. He
saw and the people that worked there saw that. You know,
back in the seventies early eighties, a lot of times
you went to a public restroom and there was like
a sliver of gross soap, or there were those things
where you had to push it upward. It was like
a little stick, you know, and you had to put
(09:18):
and touch it. And so he thought, well, what if
there was a little valve and the soap would just
squirt into your hand. And so he was part of
creating this valve. He eventually split off from his day job.
He never, i think ever wanted to have a day job,
and he became this international marketing consultant entrepreneur. And so
(09:39):
we took that valve to other clients overseas. He was
traveling Hong Kong, Sweden, and they eventually took that valve
and decided it could be a great asset in ice cream.
And so it was kind of like the progenitor to
what we now know as the flurry, which McDonald says,
but these ice cream drinks that have a little scol
(10:00):
of cherry syrup or something in it. So he was
part of that. But then some of his other ideas
were really, I think so similar to things that actually
happened later in you know, consumerism and pop culture. We
had this idea to have an air freshenair with a
little bit of something that smelled good, and then a
little fan that went over it that blew the scented
(10:21):
air across your room, and I think Glade did something
like that maybe ten years after. My dad was trying.
He was always trying things. He always had this vision
that he could figure it out.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
In nineteen eighty two, Amanda's little brother, Adam, is born,
and in nineteen eighty six, when Adam is four and
Amanda is eight, the family moved to Martinsville, Indiana, their
mom's hometown, population eleven thousand. There the family buys a house,
well not just a house, a mansion.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
The biggest house you can really imagine. I've been sort
of describing this house to people in recent months, and
when I say it's large, people are like, okay, how big.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
But it was.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Sixty eight hundred square feet. It was the front yard
was a golf course. The backyard was a lake, and
it was a sixties house. I don't know exactly what year,
but whomever built the house first in that era had
been I think a diamond broker. The basement rooms had
this walk in safe where apparently diamonds were kept. There
(11:26):
was a sauna inside. I mean, it's really kind of
like the most ostentatious house you can imagine anyone having.
And so we went from a pretty normal, suburban Long
Island home to that in a very different place, rural Indiana.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
The mansion is part of a gated community overseen by
a homeowners association. It's a grand, manicured place with a
country club at its center. Amanda's father buys a fancy car.
He's feeling bullish. He's had a great year financially and
has no doubt the great years are just beginning.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
About everything, I did so much research to figure out
some of the truths behind all the things I went
through as a kid, and I did find the amount
of money that my dad made in nineteen eighty six,
and it's pretty staggering. That year he made two hundred
and sixty five thousand dollars, which is so much for
that time so much for our family. We'd been struggling
(12:24):
various ways forever. But I think the problem was that
my dad made every financial decision for the rest of
his life based on one really good year, so we
couldn't afford to live there or live the way we
were living for more than I don't know, four months
or six months. Very quickly it was clear that we
(12:45):
weren't selling these valves that were going to make ice
cream machines or soap dispensers. That wasn't working out. My
mother hadn't worked since before I was born, which was
eight years earlier, eight years before that house.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
That was the idea, right was that your mom was
going to stay at home and she wanted to be
home with her kids. And that was also very much
the culture that they were aspiring to was women who
worked outside the house were somehow to be pitied or worse.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
They saw it as an obligation on their part, an
obligation on my dad's part to make enough money for
this to be possible, and on my mom's to stay
home and raise the kids. Like that was just what
was going to happen in our family. We sort of
had to perform as rich people, which we certainly weren't
or didn't feel like in nineteen eighty six. But you know,
my mom. The interesting thing about that move is that
(13:38):
my mom had grown up there this very small town.
Everyone knew everyone's business, and you know, everyone in that
town knew that my mother had bought this plane ticket
to New York City in nineteen sixty ninety year she
graduated high school and had gone off to be important,
to be a fashion designer. And when she came back,
she was not a fashion designer. But you know, she
(14:00):
was married to how the way they described themselves, a wealthy,
successful businessman, and she had this sort of perfect family
of a daughter and a son, and you know, I
think she was showing that a little bit to her hometown.
And part of that part of what developed for my mom,
which took many years to develop, she developed a hoarding problem.
(14:21):
And it started with things that I think are so
relatable and so just easy to understand any of us
easing into you know, it was it was two things,
clothes and food. So in the clothing front, it was about,
you know, her desire to look cute, have a nice outfit,
(14:43):
make an outfit. She would buy fabric, zippers, patterns, buttons,
all the things she would need for a project. And
it was this aspiration she had to make and to
wear all these beautiful designs of hers. She bought so
much more though than she could ever make. It was
(15:03):
an unrealistic match between, you know, what she was acquiring
and what she could do. And she did the same
thing with food and that it really got bad in
those years, in the mid eighties. And when I say
it's relatable, you know, speaking for myself, I have in
my basement, I have a shelf, and I have a
few extra cans of beans, and I have an extra
(15:25):
jar of pasta sauce or this or that. A lot
of people do that, a lot of people who can
afford to have an extra this or that at home,
you know, you do. It's normal my mother though, you know,
that's how it started. But then it was like fifty
two jars of marin Aa sauce sitting around, and the
grocery store runs would be she would just feel anxious
(15:50):
about bringing home one thing. If she needed one box
of Bisquick at the store, she would buy three because
she would think, well, maybe I'll use this one up,
and maybe we need to have an extra. But then
that thinking just like went diabolical, started relatably with non
perishable food, and then it went into perishable food. So
(16:13):
by the time I was in high school, we had
spoiled food all around us, I mean in unbelievable quantities
and levels all over.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
How aware were you? The homes of our childhood and
the you know, the nature of our families are all
we know, and so they seem pretty much no matter what,
like you know, quote unquote normal.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Absolutely, I thought it was very normal. I was probably
eight or nine when I started to understand that. For
one thing, we never had people in the house. You know,
my parents had an instinctive sense of shame about the
house and the way it was kept. You know, these
bags of my mom's fabric, her extra clothes, they were everywhere.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
They filled up that led that six thousand plus square feet, Yes.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
It was filled up. It was astounding. In those years.
My father also had I would say, scheme after scheme,
although really with my dad, I don't think you can
rightly or fairly call them schemes because they were so
open hearted, you know, all of his ideas he was
I think almost never few exceptions was he trying to
be devious or hurt people, or you know, be shady,
(17:30):
but he just tried things. So he tried to do
something with Madonna, the performing artist, and he told us
we were going to have Madonna come over to our house.
This is in nineteen eighty seven. I was a ten
year old. I thought it was incredible. But that never happened.
So all these all these things didn't happen. Eventually, my
dad he got kind of wrapped up in selling motivational
(17:52):
cassette tapes. We would now call it a multi level
marketing scheme, but it was like for Christian businessmen to
be successful. He was very into it.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
You all did a lot of driving around with with
your dad, and your dad was loquacious and he did
most of the talking. But you know in your book
there's this you know, this self help multi level marketing program.
And the most famous quote your dad often said while
driving around, whatever you vividly imagine, ardently desire, sincerely believe,
(18:24):
and enthusiastically act upon must inevitably come to pass.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
I mean, he lived that way. I'm so glad that
you read that. I think it's Paul J. Meyer said that,
and he was a Texas sort of Christian entrepreneur person
and started this business that my dad just really locked into.
It was this vision for you know, an American dream.
My dad loved it.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
And one more venture of his. I mean, I was
just so fascinated by what good ideas so many of
them were, was shared office space, like like we work.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
But oh yeah, back.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
In you know, in the eighties.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Yeah, I can't believe that he came up with that,
because it really it is something that especially now is
a pretty standard, pretty I think it's been profitable model
for people to share office space and share services that way. Yeah,
my dad was trying it in nineteen eighty eight. He
rented a sort of strip mall office building. I helped him.
We decorated it in full nineteen eighty eight style. Everything
(19:22):
was like moth. It was sort of shades of pink,
dusty pink and you know, magenta hell pink. But we
set this up and my father hired a secretary who
sat at the front desk and filed her nails and
answered the phone, and then he tried to rent out
these little rooms within this building to business people. I'll
call it a failure in my dad's business record. Although
(19:46):
it's funny when I talk about my dad this way
and I think about the word failure, I don't ever
remember my dad getting down about these things not working out.
He really just went on to the next thing with
a you know, he just was like, well, let's try
something else.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
And your mom you describe at one point as recklessly tolerant,
which which just felt so right. I mean more than tolerant,
I would say recklessly enthusiastic about, you know, whatever was next.
In this way, that comes across as really you know,
as really lovely in a lot of ways. But at
(20:24):
the same time, the house is falling apart. Your parents
both get real estate licenses so they can be the
ones to sell it and not have to pay commission
to other realtors. And the letters from the homeowners association
are just piling up, and the hoarding has become more
and more intense.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Yes, the grass in that home was at my waist
in the front yard. In the backyard, they just stopped
mowing the grass. Something happened to our front door, and
a chunk of the bottom was covered in plywood. We
had fallen into great disrepair because my parents just were
never they weren't into consequences, right, They just sort of lived.
They just did what they wanted to do. So, yeah,
(21:07):
we were in a bad place and my father really
didn't have any work at that point. It was a low,
low moment.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
And that seems like it's sort of dovetails was during
this whole period of time when your family is living
in luxury land, your dad is kind of on this
shift right ward both politically and religiously. He was raised Lutheran.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
He was raised Lutheran. He tells a story or used
to tell a story about going to a Lutheran camp
outside Miami and getting really interested in what the Lutheran
pastor that ran it did for a job, and you
know what that was like. But then, you know, we
spent all these years where we were a very casual
(21:55):
church family. We went to church. I'd say we went
to church most weeks, but we didn't stress if we
missed a week. Sometimes we would not go on Christmas
because we wanted to open presents. You know. It wasn't
like a core part of just how our family operated
until nineteen eighty nine, which is when my dad decided
(22:16):
to leave the house that was in shambles and moved
to Fort Wayne and entered this seminary and become a
Lutheran pastor himself. So he was forty six when he did.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
That, and you were going into sixth grade. How did
that feel for you? You went from this kid trying
to kind of find your way in Indiana after having
grown up prior to that in Long Island, like these
really different cultures, and turned out that you were a
(22:47):
really good swimmer and really excelled at the backstroke when
you were in Indiana. And so you had that, you know,
you had that life. But even the way that you
describe different cuisines were the way that you had never
really had soda, but then suddenly when.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
You were in Indiana, all you drank was soda.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
I Mean, one really really stark example of I would
call it benign neglect of you know, not necessarily taking
care of things in a particularly responsible way, would be
that you ended up like kneeding dentures for your baby
(23:29):
teeth because your mother gave you apple juice in a bottle, right, she.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Just gave me apple juice in a bottle. In my
mom's way of thinking, she would just say, well, you
wanted apple juice, and of course I had apple juice.
I was a baby, and it was sugar, and so
it just tasted good. It, you know, stopped me from crying,
and she just put me to sleep with a bottle
of apple juice. But that caused my front teeth to
be completely rotten on the back, and so they were
(23:55):
rotten for years. The fronts of my teeth looked white
and I guess normal, but it was painful, and I
didn't know that that was wrong, you know, I just
thought that's how teeth felt like you were saying before,
this sense of normalcy, whatever is going on in your house.
However the adults around you behave when you're young, you
just think that that's the way it is. So yeah,
(24:19):
So it was discovered that I had these rotten forefront
teeth and I had to have them pulled when I
was four, and then I got dentures when I was
four as well. You know, in some ways you can
see it as my mom fitting into the parenting of
nineteen eighty one nineteen eighty two that was maybe a
little bit more standard, But so many of their choices
were that they leaned toward this sense that consequences didn't
(24:43):
exist and that they just wanted to do what they
wanted to do.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
When Amanda is eleven, her father is in seminary and
the family is now living in a small house. She's
a p K, a pastor's kid, and she's becoming more
aware of the family's precarious finances. Everyone needs to pull
(25:14):
their weight. Amanda needs a job.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
So this was an advertisement in you know, the seminary
where he was attending. They had a lunch room and
a little photocrappied daily newsletter and it's very much of
the era. So someone had posted in that I need
a teenage babysitter to take my kids to the pool.
And of course I had been swimming and I was
a good backstroker. I was eleven, so I wasn't a teenager.
(25:40):
And my dad takes me on this job interview and
he tells the person, now, I got to tell you,
she's not a teenager. She's twelve. And I was standing there,
eleven years old, you know, watching him stretch the truth.
And then I watched him say that I knew CPR
and I was a lifeguard, and it's like my dad
took the the kernel of the fact that I was, like,
(26:02):
you know, an adolescent and good at swimming, and he
made that into the story that this family wanted to
hear all for I think it was two dollars an
hour that I earned that summer, and in the end,
my dad ended up keeping that money. I didn't have
a checking account, and this person wanted to write checks,
and so she wrote them to my dad, and my
(26:23):
dad was going to give me the money at the
end of the summer or at the end of the month.
So in some ways you can say, God, what a
horrible thing it was that he took your babysitting money
from the whole summer. You were eleven and you did
that job. But yeah, I sometimes I feel that way,
and sometimes I feel like, well, the fact that I
was making two dollars an hour, however many hours a week,
(26:46):
and he hung on to and he must have needed
it a lot more than I did.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
There's also, I mean, two really interesting things around that
time that really struck me. And one is the really
big difference in the way they treated you and saw
you and what they expected of you and the way
that they treated your brother. You were like on two
different tracks.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Absolutely the gendered thing of what daughters do and are
expected to do versus sons is well documented beyond my family,
I think. But also he's the youngest, and I mean
my theory is that my mom she so just loved
that role of having kids to take care of instead
of having a job. I think that that was like
(27:31):
such a central part of identity for her that she
kind of didn't want my brother to grow up. And
whereas in my case, any sort of responsibility that I
might take on that might alleviate my mom and dad
from responsibility, they embraced, like, please, Amanda, do you want
to cook dinner or do you want to you know,
(27:51):
whatever thing I whatever role I stepped into, they were
very happy to see that and just watch me take
it on, take on their kind of obligations and things.
It was fully the opposite for my brother. They really
wanted him to remain little, you know, My mom especially
wanted him to be the baby of the family. And so, yeah,
(28:13):
we definitely had different childhoods. Different childhoods.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Yeah, your mom also have had a very interesting way
of kind of dealing with sexuality, and you're you know,
like she started talking to you about it very young
and even when you needed braces, was like, well, it's
good to you get over this with this now before
(28:38):
you're a teenager, because that way you'll be able to
kiss boys.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
And they never got my brother braces, and I think
objectively my brother's teeth were worse than mine. But it
was about marriage ability for them. They were very concerned,
my mom, especially that I wouldn't be appealing to boys.
I think they saw in me I was like a
little strident and a little they called it bossy, but
(29:02):
they were worried that I wouldn't be like docile enough
or pretty, and that was a concern because I think
that for both of my parents they saw success and
maturing and coming into adulthood that was all part of
finding a person, finding a mate, and for women it's
having children and all those things that they really treasured.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
Do you think that that was true of your mother
back when she was repairing typewriters and wanting to be
a designer, and this very unusual for her to have
gone to New York City from Indiana at that time.
Do you think that was always the case for her
or do you think it sort of developed.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
I think something must have changed, because I really see
in my mom. I see two people. I see this
young person, and there's these beautiful clips. I have a
lot of newspaper clips of my family, things that happened
to make the news. And there's one of my mother
when she was working at IBM nineteen seventy four. She
(30:05):
has this long, glossy red hair. She's got plaid bell
bottoms on. She's a stunning woman with this tool belt on.
You can't imagine a more inspirational young woman. I feel
like that really was her. But then I have to
compare that with the mother that I knew all through
(30:27):
the eighties and nineties. She really got so far away
from that pioneering spirit that I loved so much in her.
I will say what she hung on to. My mother
did whatever she wanted, like she just did. She really
wouldn't be stopped, and she didn't care if it was
the norm, and she didn't care if it made other
(30:49):
people mad. She just did it. And so this is
a bit gross, and there are in the story of
my family there are some things that are kind of gross.
A lot of them are about expired food. But my mother,
I think she didn't really like brushing her teeth and
when she was about fifty maybe fifty two, she just stopped.
(31:11):
She was just like, make your own choices. I don't
like doing it. It's like a deranged thing to say.
Speaker 3 (31:17):
Of course, people.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
Should brush their teeth, even if they don't like doing it.
It's a short task that we all figure out how
to do. It's how she operated, and I think that
that was a constant in her life that she she
wanted to learn to be a fashion designer, so she
just went to New York. So she just did it.
And I think that that's how she was a parent too,
And it was just how she was.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
First the tooth brushing stops. Then Amanda's mom and dad
stopped paying taxes forever.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
Yeah, they stopped paying taxes in nineteen ninety four, pretty much, so,
and that was the year we moved from Fort Wayne.
He finished the seminary program and took a position as
a Lutheran pastor in the Detroit right suburbs. So I'd
started high school in Fort Wayne, was to finish the
last two years in Detroit. But yeah, they just I
think they got to a point where they were out
(32:08):
overspending like they always did. They were spending more than
we had or would get, and they kind of were like, well,
we're going to leave the state of Indiana soon, and
so they just they just thought maybe these things wouldn't
follow them. And in a way that's true. I think
that in that time things were so much less digital, right,
so they just they just didn't pay for things. Bill
(32:30):
would come in, they just didn't pay it. And it
was in a different county in a different state, and
so I found records that they were being sued for
you know, dental work and other expenses that they had
incurred in those years. They just stopped paying for thanks
in ninety two and ninety three, and then we moved.
So how they did it?
Speaker 2 (32:50):
It also seems like, well, would you say, you started
to try to mitigate some of especially the whole which
of course your family never called hoarding, but when you
started to kind of order the marinerisauces from oldest to
newest by date of expiration or like just become like
(33:13):
try to contend with the mess, and which earns you
as a nickname Martha a lah Martha Stewart, which they
mean in a totally derogatory way.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
Not nice. Yes, it was before Martha had her problems
and everything, but Martha was so popular nineteen ninety four
ish when we moved to Detroit. I really, as anyone
who's lived with a hoarder does, you have a period
of time and for some at last forever where you
think the problem here is the stuff. It's not that
(33:48):
my loved one has an emotional or a mental health problem.
The problem is the stuff. So I'm going to fix
the stuff. And it's a very tangible way to I think,
think about these issues. So, as a sixteen year old,
I had been plucked yet another move. I didn't have
any friends. I was sixteen, school hadn't started. It was
(34:09):
that summer. So I just thought, I'm I'm going to
make order out of this madness of all all this food.
We'd been moving food from Long Island to Indiana to
the other place in Indiana, all this stuff. I tried
organizing it and got in some trouble. My mother was
very annoyed that I'd kind of magnified the issue of
how much of this food we had and what a
(34:31):
problem it was. And I was kind of a punky
teenager and I worked these bright blue Doc Martins all
the time. My hair was a little bit purple. I
had this maroon some nineties hair thing going on, and
at the same time I did become really fascinated with
Martha Stewart, who had a TV show at that same year.
(34:53):
It was becoming very big, and man, I just saw
in Martha this classic sense of keeping home, putting a
nice meal on the table. It was just everything I
didn't have at home, everything I didn't see, but gosh,
I just thought, what a person Martha. And my mom
picked up on my interest in Martha Stewart and my
(35:18):
annoying to her, deeply annoying, and to her just judgmental
and really bad behavior on my part of doing things
like tidying up the food in the basement or trying
to clean out the refrigerator sometimes, and if she would
clean something up that was a massive mess that needed
(35:38):
immediate attention, she would say, oh, is that good enough
for you, Martha. So when we got to Detroit, it
was sort of like this yet again reinvention. Suddenly my
father is a Lutheran pastor and a place we've never been,
so there's no history of his business failings or anything,
and there's no history of my mom is this fashion
design person or horror or anything. She's a nurse, so
(36:01):
she got a job at a hospital, and he had
his job at the Lutheran church. It's very different, and
we did that all the time. We really reinvented ourselves.
I think my parents liked that ability to just start again.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
So are you just like dying to get out of
there and go to college?
Speaker 1 (36:20):
That's too light a phrase to describe my desire to
just leave. I just really thought I just had to
get out. I had been having this dream about my house.
I had this dream night after night after night. I
just would obliterate my house.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
Was it whatever house you were in at the time,
or was it always the mansion.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Whatever house we lived in at that time. I had
it a lot in high school, which my last years
of high school was this Detroit area house. And yeah,
the dream, it's like a very simple dream. It doesn't
require much psychological analysis to say I was uncomfortable with
all the stuff in our house. But I just would dream.
I just go to sleep. It was like a comforting
thing to think about. I'm going to take all this
(37:05):
fabric that's on our dining table and I'm going to
throw it out the window. I'm going to open our
refrigerator and pour out the ketchup and throw the meat
on the floor, and whatever I could do to just
destroy the house. And it was a very satisfying kind
of ritual in my sleep and in my mind. And
I can tell you honestly, I truly thought every person
(37:27):
had that dream when I was young. I really thought
that was like a very normal thing to do. And
a way to think about where you live is that
you want to ruin it.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
That house was owned by the church, so as far
as they were concerned, anything that ever went wrong in
the house was not their responsibility because they didn't have
equity in the house and the church owned it, so
they didn't have to do anything about it.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
There was a bathroom upstairs and they didn't clean it.
They did wipe down the shower or clean the toilet
for six or seven years. They started out doing it
in the nineties and then they just stopped. They just
didn't want to. We had when I was in high school.
I don't even exactly know how it happened, but there
was crack and then a hole in our kitchen window.
(38:18):
This is in the Midwest, so we're not in Florida
or a place where there's good weather all year. This
is in Detroit area, and there was a large hole
the size of a standard slice of pizza, pretty big hole,
triangular hole, looking out in the backyard. And they refused
(38:40):
to address it in any way. They would just say, well,
the church owns the house. What good does it do
us if we go out and spend money on a
piece of glass or a repair. And I lived with that.
I mean I lived there maybe eight or ten months
of when that hole was there, because I was in
high school and I was leaving. But every time I
(39:01):
came home, the slice of pizza hole was still there.
They just let it be. At certain points they had
a garbage bag and duct tape over, but they couldn't
they couldn't conceive of investing a dollar or a moment
in that house. Things became very run down and almost scary.
(39:24):
The garage caved in eventually. The garage was not something
they put cars in. It was just full of boxes
of stuff, you know, my dad's cassette tapes from the
multi level marketing scheme, and books and old winter coats
and food. Of course, there was food. There was everything
(39:44):
in there in that space, and it was deteriorating before
our eyes over all that time, and they just refused
to do anything about it. And one day, I think
it was in college at this time, I had watched
the sort of undulation of the room of this garage.
I could see it was not doing well. And I
(40:04):
arrived one day and it just all the way caved in.
And I came into the house just I was alarmed.
It's like a structure caved in and just all this
stuff in there. And I said to my dad, like,
oh no, the garage fell in. What are we going
to do? And he was kind of like, yeah, it
happened Tuesday. Do you want pancakes or waffles? Like he
(40:26):
was making breakfast? He didn't. He just they just moved on.
And their attitude was so often like Amanda, why are
you getting so worried about everything? Okay, there's a hole
in the window. Okay, the garage fell in.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
We'll be back in a moment. With more family secrets.
Amanda goes to college in Chicago in nineteen ninety six.
She falls asleep that first night in her new dorm
and wake up in the morning to a vivid, remarkable absence.
(41:04):
She has not had the dream in Chicago, she sleeps
through the night. In fact, the dream goes away for
years as she moves into young adulthood. When she's in
her mid twenties, she falls in love with a man
named Frank and they marry. While she stays in close
touch with her parents, their lives have continued to slide
(41:24):
into further chaos. Her father is renting himself out as
a pastor for hire working funerals, and her mother is
working as an RN at a hospice. Amanda is living
her own very different life, but then in two thousand
and six, she gets a call from her mother. Amanda's
(41:44):
father has had a nervous breakdown.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
So the story that I heard from my mother that
day is that he stood up Sunday morning to do
the first service. He went into the pulpit at early
service and started speaking. He prepared these sermons. My dad
was a great sermonizer in all parts of his life,
not just in church. But he looked forward to it.
(42:09):
He got there and said a few words. I don't
know exactly where he was going with it, and then
he said, I can't do this anymore. And he turned
around and he took his vestments off in the Socristy
area and got in a car and picked up my
mom who was at home. They got in the car
and they just drove around and my dad said he
(42:32):
wasn't able to continue. He just had In retrospect, I
think it was called sort of a nervous breakdown by
people that were caring for my dad. It was a
breaking point of some kind where he just couldn't do
it anymore. So at that point, they're living in a
house that is owned by this church that he's just
(42:53):
said I'm done with, I can't do it anymore. And
they had lived there eleven years, so so much had
to be dealt with emotionally and then tangibly with all
the stuff. And then my parents were moving out of
the house and I was helping them. That dream came
back when I went back into grappling with all the stuff,
(43:16):
all the mess in their house.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
One of the things that really struck me is that
in that next stretch of years, which is not a
small number of years, you're building your life, you're making
your home, you're married, you're working. You become pregnant and
(43:39):
discover that you're having a girl, and you say to Frank,
I don't know how to be a mother to a daughter,
which was so moving to me because so much about
do you break a cycle or do you not break
a cycle? For all of us at at any given moment,
Can I do it differently?
Speaker 1 (43:58):
Right? What's possible?
Speaker 3 (44:00):
Right?
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Right?
Speaker 1 (44:00):
Yes? Yes, That's how I felt for sure, and she does.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
She does do it differently. In the background, though her
parents continue to not do things differently, and now, on
top of all else, they are ailing, both facing a
number of illnesses. There was her dad's nervous breakdown in
two thousand and five, and then in two thousand and
seven he has a debilitating stroke and then cancer. Having
(44:30):
grown up under the Miami sun, He's been diagnosed with
melanoma before, but now it's returning with consequences.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
He could have and did once have part of it removed.
They could have treated it, but he didn't want to
because they they did what they wanted to do and
it was not interesting for him to spend time. It
was difficult for him to get around because of this stroke,
but he wouldn't do You wouldn't face it, and that
(45:03):
was very characteristic and very just classic of my dad.
But it really was this reckoning of all of their choices,
and similar things happened to My mom developed kidney disease.
She said she had lupus. Turns out she never did,
but she had diabetes. She had other problems. So what
(45:24):
was hard. I think what was frustrating for me is
that I could see from the era that they were
calling me Martha. When I was sixteen in nineteen ninety four,
and even before then, I could see these problems, and
I could see the financial choices they were making, the
health choices, the social choices. They were really kind of
(45:48):
terrible friends to people. I could see that they would
have an endgame like that it would. I could see.
I could see it falling apart. Maybe when I was
like eleven, I thought, well, how is this going to end?
And I had periods in my life where I thought,
I'm so glad that their adults and I'm a separate adult.
(46:09):
I have my marriage and I have my life, and
I'm just not I don't need to fix their problems.
But then I had other periods where I thought, I
probably do need to fix their problems because they can't
fix them themselves. But the end of their lives, it
really was this beckoning of all those things coming true.
They had terrible financial troubles. They were living in sort
(46:29):
of a low income assisted living place for a while.
Their house in Pontiac, Michigan was repossessed by the bank.
You know, they were not able to run their own lives,
and just like they did for decades before, they really
hoped I would run them. You know, they turned to
(46:50):
me for physically cleaning things up. They wanted me to
pay for things. My mom wanted my you know, name
on her banking so that she could have better credit,
which would have been catastrophic. I think for me, I've
always worked in nonprofits. I don't have like the wealth
that could be helpful in that way. We really struggled
(47:12):
through those last years. It was about ten years and
the metaphor of my father having this cancer that sort
of ate away at his face. It's really so much
like just what happened in our family. It just was
this series of almost impossibly hard years together and they
passed away within about a year and a half of
one another.
Speaker 2 (47:33):
And this was the endgame. You know, this was what
you saw, not in its details, but in a moment.
You know, after your mother dies, and before she dies,
she's kicked out of hospice because you're supposed to ask
for absolutely any kind of medication there. Everything's very strictly monitored.
And she has her duffel bag that she has. Instead
(47:56):
of it being full of clothes, it's full of morphine.
And this gets discussed, so she's kicked out of there,
I mean. But then after she dies and you go
to the funeral home and you're there with the funeral
director who also it was the funeral home where your
father was, and he's going over the funeral classes with you,
(48:16):
and then he stops in.
Speaker 1 (48:19):
What happens, Well, this is this very kind man who
had arranged my mother and I had gone in a
year and a half ago and dealt with my father's passing.
And this man named Ken was so understanding, so thoughtful
about every detail. You know, in a funeral home, you're
in this very quiet, somber setting, thick carpet, you know,
(48:44):
sort of absorbing everything. So I was sitting across from him,
as I had sat across from him eighteen months before
we settle everything, and I stand up to go and
to shake his hands. I put my hand out and
he kept sitting and he's said, I'm so sorry but
I have to tell you your mother never paid the
(49:05):
bill for your dad. And that was we had arranged
this that my mom was due some life insurance money
when my dad passed in twenty thirteen. The funeral was
about seven thousand dollars I think, and she was to
get around twenty four or twenty five thousand dollars from
this policy. So she had shown this man the paper
she said, as soon as this money comes in seven
(49:27):
thousand of the whole bill will come to you. And
just as you would expect, you know, she never did that.
And so then when it came time from my mother's
funeral arrangements had to pay for two. My mom had said, oh,
they haven't put the headstone on your dad, saying that
because the ground is stiff in the winter. Like she
(49:48):
had a whole story about it, and I realized in
that moment she was gone. I thought, Okay, well she
just left me with this too. She left me with
a lot. That's how could I have expected anything else?
You know, this is like my dad took my babysitting money.
I mean, there were so many times where my parents
just they just couldn't seem to do better, and they
(50:12):
left me with it.
Speaker 2 (50:14):
So in terms of leaving you with it, you literally
are left with it. You're left with receipts, both literally
and metaphorically. You are left with so many questions, some
of which you can answer and some of which you'll
never be able to answer. But what I'm wondering is
(50:36):
you went down this road of really deeply researching, reporting,
you know, coming to learn anything that you could. It's
almost like there was a split screen. There was your
childhood and what you were experiencing during your childhood, and
then there's adult Amanda looking back with the skill set
(50:58):
that you have, going like what was really going on
that year? What was really going on that year? And
you were able to fill in a lot of those gaps,
And I'm wondering what that was like for you and
how it felt.
Speaker 1 (51:13):
I forever will say my parents betrayed me in a
lot of ways, disappointed me. That said, we all loved
each other, our home that I lived, and even though
it had this darkness and these secrets, it did have
joy and humor in it.
Speaker 3 (51:31):
And telling their story accurately was it was sort of
like a lifelong mystery that I had that I wanted
to solve and I was so fortunate it So few
these exist anymore, but the paper in Martinsville where we lived,
reported on everything.
Speaker 1 (51:50):
Just everything, and it's on newspapers dot com. So I
was able to dig up lots of things about how
we lived in the eighties that made the paper that
clip of my mother in the Indianapolis Star with her
IBM prepare kit, and I found a lot of things
that helped me understand in an objective way who my
(52:12):
parents were, and that was I think that was the
most important thing to me, just to know who they
really were, because if you had just listened to their stories,
you would only have part of the answers, and that's
all that I had growing up. So I felt amazing
getting the whole story. And I think I got most
(52:34):
of it. I mean, it's only a few things that
were murky enough I just couldn't quite pin down.
Speaker 2 (52:40):
It's like you were able to color them in for yourself.
And I think being able to see our parents as
full human beings is something that many of us never
get to do.
Speaker 1 (52:53):
I agree, And I think another aspect of this that
felt so good to me is that I was prepared
haird to be wrong. For instance, the story about my
father buying the oil Derek. I looked back on that
and I thought he he just loved to tell a
tall tale. So maybe that didn't happen. Maybe that was
(53:13):
just I remembered it. I was four. I did remember
that he from this western bar. He brought home a hat,
and I thought, maybe he bought a hat and told
a story. Maybe he didn't buy an oil Derek. And
you know, looked into it, and as an adult, I
was able to find not the paperwork, but I did
find photos of him in Texas with an oil Derek
(53:36):
behind him, wearing the same hat, and I, you know,
I'm pretty convinced that he did it. So I was
able to flesh out things and I was able to
prove myself right. So my memory of all these years
with my parents, who were just extraordinary people, even in
(53:56):
their betrayals, even in all the ways they disappointed, I mean,
they were just ordinary people. I was able to tell
the whole story and feel correct in it. So I
wasn't wrong. I missed a few things, or there are
some things I didn't know, but I wasn't wrong. I
didn't find anything where it was a total mis Remember.
Speaker 2 (54:20):
Here's Amanda reading one last passage from Destroy This House.
Speaker 1 (54:31):
Trying our best is the one indisputable thing I have
in common with my parents. Their best fell frustratingly short
of what I needed and wanted. Their best was bizarre, craven, outlandish, deranged,
hilarious when it wasn't dangerous, confounding. If there was another
key to unlock the mystery of Long's Island, I don't
(54:53):
have it. To thoroughly report on the madness of their
forty year reign. I've had to piece together not just
their document actions, but also their inferred and imagined motivations.
Why did they act so strangely? Why defeat their own
best interests constantly? I won't know that boldly, as is
my birthright, I will guess this is what their best
(55:15):
look like.
Speaker 2 (55:25):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly z Accur
is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder and if you'd
(55:50):
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. All my life,
I've been knocking on doors, digging through boxes, grasping for answers.
Who were these people? What drove them? How did all
of this happen? In our strange lives? Why am I here?
And why? And our males? And our love and our
(00:21):
stories and savagery and tenderness of all those years together?
Did we never remember that? Long is a verb to
feel a strong desire or craving, especially for something not
likely to be attained, to pine to yearn.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
That's Amanda Julie, writer and executive editor and publisher of McSweeney's.
Her memoir Destroyed This House was recently published. Amanda's is
a story of extremes, what things look like on the
outside and what they're really like on the inside. It's
about being a child of parents who have trouble parenting
(00:57):
themselves as well as their children. And it's a story
about a child who learns to navigate in a world
not of her making, until she grows up to become
a woman with a successful, beautiful life while still loving
and caring for the people she comes from. I'm Danny
(01:25):
Shapiro and this is Family secrets, the secrets that are
kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and
the secrets we keep from ourselves. So I always begin
with the question tell me about the landscape of your childhood,
but in your case, Amanda, I feel like I have
to phrase it as tell me about the landscape of
(01:48):
your childhood.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
There were many, yes, many homes, many places. I was
born in nineteen seventy eight in Philadelphia, and my parents
soon moved to the New York City area Island where
we lived. It is probably the place I lived the
longest in my childhood. My dad began getting into every
kind of business scheme and everything else, and that led
(02:12):
us to a small town in Indiana where my mother
grew up, and that didn't last long. Things were difficult there,
and then we moved to another place in Indiana where
we lived. We lived in Fort Wayne, actually three different places.
We had the kind of childhood where we were getting
into money trouble pretty much all the time. My dad
(02:36):
found a way to not pay the bills or figure
something out for us, and so all of these places
were really short lived.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Tell me a little bit about your parents and who
they were, you know, when they met what were their histories,
what was they each bringing to the table with them.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Well, my mother had been this enterprising, pioneering woman, really
a feminist hero, and some ways she started out as
someone in this small town who was interested in fashion
design and did I think the extremely bold thing of
applying to and going to Pratt Institute in New York
(03:14):
from this small town in nineteen sixty nine. So she
did that for a while, didn't like it. She wasn't
a real rigorous student. In nineteen seventies, she worked in
the World Trade Center the first year was open. She
was at an insurance firm and she was a secretary
and she told me later she learned there that she
never wanted to be anybody's secretary. But she also learned
how to fix typewriters in that job. So when she
(03:37):
landed herself back near her hometown in Indianapolis, she was
eventually hired by IBM as their very first ever female engineer.
She fixed typewriters for IBM, running around, you know, early
seventies Indianapolis, fixing office equipment. So that was my mom,
you know, kind of spirited person, unconventional, did what she
(04:00):
wanted always, And then my dad had grown up in Miami,
he had been married and had three children, and then
was it's a very murky story, but really exiled from
that family and everything that was going on with him
in Miami. The story that he told is that he
(04:20):
was deposited in Indianapolis by his father in law with
no winter coat in March in Indianapolis and half a
suitcase of whatever he had, and he worked for a while.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
He did so.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Many different jobs. This is a theme in my dad's life.
He just he worked always. He was always selling things.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Did you ever get to the bottom of, or even
part way to the bottom of, why the exile from
that first family, because that's such a radical, kind of
unusual thing. I mean, he never saw those three kids again.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
He never saw those three kids again. And my understanding,
and I couldn't prove this in lots of research I
did on my family, I couldn't prove it. But I
believe that those children were told that he was dead
in nineteen seventy so there was no contact at all
with Florida. He never went back and by the time
(05:14):
in nineteen seventy three or so when my parents met,
my dad was actually homeless. Everything he owned at that
point was in Tom McCann's shoe box, and he was
working at the Indianapolis Press Club running the bar, and
he would sleep behind the bar there most nights unless
he found a better place to sleep somewhere in Indianapolis.
(05:36):
So the night he met my mother, he slept there,
and that's how it started. It's so apt for my
parents that from the beginning that's how it was.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
Yeah, it seems like they had a very kind of
intense connection and bond and love for each other that
also enabled each other over the years.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Yes, I think enabling is a good word. It's not
a word I use all the time. I prefer to
refer to them as the Midwestern Bonnie and Clyde. They
loved each other so fiercely. They were each other's allies
in just remarkable ways. No matter what either of them did,
the misbehaviors, the lies, everything, they stood up for each other,
(06:21):
which itself is you know, it has its beauty. I
think I think my dad specialized in self defeating choices. Really,
it was his thing. So he'd gotten this job in
New Jersey. He was selling janitorial supplies for Johnson Wax,
and I think that the houses around there around New
Jersey weren't big enough or weren't quite what they wanted,
(06:43):
so they kept, you know, going further and further out.
They didn't want to live in New York City, so
they found My Island. But it did mean this, you know,
a commute in the morning through Manhattan, a commute in
the afternoon through Manhattan. It was hours he spent on
the road. So back in Miami and he worked at
hotel and he booked live music and he loved do
up music and sort of you know that fifties sound,
(07:07):
and he was okay at music himself. Later in his
life music became a bigger part of things. But he
had a plug into the cigarette lighter piano keyboard, and
so he would plug that in and he would just
noodle and he'd just sang and play his you know, piano,
and you know, he was happy. I think he liked
the commute. He was maybe one of the only people
who did.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
And what were some of his other ventures during that time.
I mean I recall that he was out telling your
mother bought an oil Derek.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
He did, Yeah in Texas. Yeah, so because he had
this commute through the city, but both ways he got
into the habit of stopping off in the village and
having a drink, which is, you know, very early eighties
maybe habit which I don't think we would think now
is the best driving, you know, hygiene. But he would
stop off and have a drink or two, and he
(08:01):
met someone in a bar. He came up and told
us he met someone at a bar in the village and
they had this deal and he could get in on
the oil business and be an oil man, and he
wanted to. He always wanted to save us from our
financial difficulties. He wanted us to be comfortable. He wanted
that status and that comfort. So whatever he paid, I'm
(08:22):
not even sure exactly, but he bought an oil derek
in Texas, and he thought, he told us we were
going to be rich from that day forward, which it
turns out we were not. He lost money on that deal.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
He was a dreamer or maybe a fantasist, but also
he seemed like he was ahead of his time in
various ways. I mean, he also was visionary. Some of
his ideas, it struck me, were ideas that were simply
a fantastic idea at the wrong time.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Or he had a few like that.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
So tell me about the soap valve.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Yeah, so in this janitorial world with Johnson Wack, he
had been part of creating this valve for soap. He
saw and the people that worked there saw that. You know,
back in the seventies early eighties, a lot of times
you went to a public restroom and there was like
a sliver of gross soap, or there were those things
where you had to push it upward. It was like
a little stick, you know, and you had to put
(09:18):
and touch it. And so he thought, well, what if
there was a little valve and the soap would just
squirt into your hand. And so he was part of
creating this valve. He eventually split off from his day job.
He never, i think ever wanted to have a day job,
and he became this international marketing consultant entrepreneur. And so
(09:39):
we took that valve to other clients overseas. He was
traveling Hong Kong, Sweden, and they eventually took that valve
and decided it could be a great asset in ice cream.
And so it was kind of like the progenitor to
what we now know as the flurry, which McDonald says,
but these ice cream drinks that have a little scol
(10:00):
of cherry syrup or something in it. So he was
part of that. But then some of his other ideas
were really, I think so similar to things that actually
happened later in you know, consumerism and pop culture. We
had this idea to have an air freshenair with a
little bit of something that smelled good, and then a
little fan that went over it that blew the scented
(10:21):
air across your room, and I think Glade did something
like that maybe ten years after. My dad was trying.
He was always trying things. He always had this vision
that he could figure it out.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
In nineteen eighty two, Amanda's little brother, Adam, is born,
and in nineteen eighty six, when Adam is four and
Amanda is eight, the family moved to Martinsville, Indiana, their
mom's hometown, population eleven thousand. There the family buys a house,
well not just a house, a mansion.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
The biggest house you can really imagine. I've been sort
of describing this house to people in recent months, and
when I say it's large, people are like, okay, how big.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
But it was.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Sixty eight hundred square feet. It was the front yard
was a golf course. The backyard was a lake, and
it was a sixties house. I don't know exactly what year,
but whomever built the house first in that era had
been I think a diamond broker. The basement rooms had
this walk in safe where apparently diamonds were kept. There
(11:26):
was a sauna inside. I mean, it's really kind of
like the most ostentatious house you can imagine anyone having.
And so we went from a pretty normal, suburban Long
Island home to that in a very different place, rural Indiana.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
The mansion is part of a gated community overseen by
a homeowners association. It's a grand, manicured place with a
country club at its center. Amanda's father buys a fancy car.
He's feeling bullish. He's had a great year financially and
has no doubt the great years are just beginning.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
About everything, I did so much research to figure out
some of the truths behind all the things I went
through as a kid, and I did find the amount
of money that my dad made in nineteen eighty six,
and it's pretty staggering. That year he made two hundred
and sixty five thousand dollars, which is so much for
that time so much for our family. We'd been struggling
(12:24):
various ways forever. But I think the problem was that
my dad made every financial decision for the rest of
his life based on one really good year, so we
couldn't afford to live there or live the way we
were living for more than I don't know, four months
or six months. Very quickly it was clear that we
(12:45):
weren't selling these valves that were going to make ice
cream machines or soap dispensers. That wasn't working out. My
mother hadn't worked since before I was born, which was
eight years earlier, eight years before that house.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
That was the idea, right was that your mom was
going to stay at home and she wanted to be
home with her kids. And that was also very much
the culture that they were aspiring to was women who
worked outside the house were somehow to be pitied or worse.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
They saw it as an obligation on their part, an
obligation on my dad's part to make enough money for
this to be possible, and on my mom's to stay
home and raise the kids. Like that was just what
was going to happen in our family. We sort of
had to perform as rich people, which we certainly weren't
or didn't feel like in nineteen eighty six. But you know,
my mom. The interesting thing about that move is that
(13:38):
my mom had grown up there this very small town.
Everyone knew everyone's business, and you know, everyone in that
town knew that my mother had bought this plane ticket
to New York City in nineteen sixty ninety year she
graduated high school and had gone off to be important,
to be a fashion designer. And when she came back,
she was not a fashion designer. But you know, she
(14:00):
was married to how the way they described themselves, a wealthy,
successful businessman, and she had this sort of perfect family
of a daughter and a son, and you know, I
think she was showing that a little bit to her hometown.
And part of that part of what developed for my mom,
which took many years to develop, she developed a hoarding problem.
(14:21):
And it started with things that I think are so
relatable and so just easy to understand any of us
easing into you know, it was it was two things,
clothes and food. So in the clothing front, it was about,
you know, her desire to look cute, have a nice outfit,
(14:43):
make an outfit. She would buy fabric, zippers, patterns, buttons,
all the things she would need for a project. And
it was this aspiration she had to make and to
wear all these beautiful designs of hers. She bought so
much more though than she could ever make. It was
(15:03):
an unrealistic match between, you know, what she was acquiring
and what she could do. And she did the same
thing with food and that it really got bad in
those years, in the mid eighties. And when I say
it's relatable, you know, speaking for myself, I have in
my basement, I have a shelf, and I have a
few extra cans of beans, and I have an extra
(15:25):
jar of pasta sauce or this or that. A lot
of people do that, a lot of people who can
afford to have an extra this or that at home,
you know, you do. It's normal my mother though, you know,
that's how it started. But then it was like fifty
two jars of marin Aa sauce sitting around, and the
grocery store runs would be she would just feel anxious
(15:50):
about bringing home one thing. If she needed one box
of Bisquick at the store, she would buy three because
she would think, well, maybe I'll use this one up,
and maybe we need to have an extra. But then
that thinking just like went diabolical, started relatably with non
perishable food, and then it went into perishable food. So
(16:13):
by the time I was in high school, we had
spoiled food all around us, I mean in unbelievable quantities
and levels all over.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
How aware were you? The homes of our childhood and
the you know, the nature of our families are all
we know, and so they seem pretty much no matter what,
like you know, quote unquote normal.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Absolutely, I thought it was very normal. I was probably
eight or nine when I started to understand that. For
one thing, we never had people in the house. You know,
my parents had an instinctive sense of shame about the
house and the way it was kept. You know, these
bags of my mom's fabric, her extra clothes, they were everywhere.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
They filled up that led that six thousand plus square feet, Yes.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
It was filled up. It was astounding. In those years.
My father also had I would say, scheme after scheme,
although really with my dad, I don't think you can
rightly or fairly call them schemes because they were so
open hearted, you know, all of his ideas he was
I think almost never few exceptions was he trying to
be devious or hurt people, or you know, be shady,
(17:30):
but he just tried things. So he tried to do
something with Madonna, the performing artist, and he told us
we were going to have Madonna come over to our house.
This is in nineteen eighty seven. I was a ten
year old. I thought it was incredible. But that never happened.
So all these all these things didn't happen. Eventually, my
dad he got kind of wrapped up in selling motivational
(17:52):
cassette tapes. We would now call it a multi level
marketing scheme, but it was like for Christian businessmen to
be successful. He was very into it.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
You all did a lot of driving around with with
your dad, and your dad was loquacious and he did
most of the talking. But you know in your book
there's this you know, this self help multi level marketing program.
And the most famous quote your dad often said while
driving around, whatever you vividly imagine, ardently desire, sincerely believe,
(18:24):
and enthusiastically act upon must inevitably come to pass.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
I mean, he lived that way. I'm so glad that
you read that. I think it's Paul J. Meyer said that,
and he was a Texas sort of Christian entrepreneur person
and started this business that my dad just really locked into.
It was this vision for you know, an American dream.
My dad loved it.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
And one more venture of his. I mean, I was
just so fascinated by what good ideas so many of
them were, was shared office space, like like we work.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
But oh yeah, back.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
In you know, in the eighties.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Yeah, I can't believe that he came up with that,
because it really it is something that especially now is
a pretty standard, pretty I think it's been profitable model
for people to share office space and share services that way. Yeah,
my dad was trying it in nineteen eighty eight. He
rented a sort of strip mall office building. I helped him.
We decorated it in full nineteen eighty eight style. Everything
(19:22):
was like moth. It was sort of shades of pink,
dusty pink and you know, magenta hell pink. But we
set this up and my father hired a secretary who
sat at the front desk and filed her nails and
answered the phone, and then he tried to rent out
these little rooms within this building to business people. I'll
call it a failure in my dad's business record. Although
(19:46):
it's funny when I talk about my dad this way
and I think about the word failure, I don't ever
remember my dad getting down about these things not working out.
He really just went on to the next thing with
a you know, he just was like, well, let's try
something else.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
And your mom you describe at one point as recklessly tolerant,
which which just felt so right. I mean more than tolerant,
I would say recklessly enthusiastic about, you know, whatever was next.
In this way, that comes across as really you know,
as really lovely in a lot of ways. But at
(20:24):
the same time, the house is falling apart. Your parents
both get real estate licenses so they can be the
ones to sell it and not have to pay commission
to other realtors. And the letters from the homeowners association
are just piling up, and the hoarding has become more
and more intense.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Yes, the grass in that home was at my waist
in the front yard. In the backyard, they just stopped
mowing the grass. Something happened to our front door, and
a chunk of the bottom was covered in plywood. We
had fallen into great disrepair because my parents just were
never they weren't into consequences, right, They just sort of lived.
They just did what they wanted to do. So, yeah,
(21:07):
we were in a bad place and my father really
didn't have any work at that point. It was a low,
low moment.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
And that seems like it's sort of dovetails was during
this whole period of time when your family is living
in luxury land, your dad is kind of on this
shift right ward both politically and religiously. He was raised Lutheran.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
He was raised Lutheran. He tells a story or used
to tell a story about going to a Lutheran camp
outside Miami and getting really interested in what the Lutheran
pastor that ran it did for a job, and you
know what that was like. But then, you know, we
spent all these years where we were a very casual
(21:55):
church family. We went to church. I'd say we went
to church most weeks, but we didn't stress if we
missed a week. Sometimes we would not go on Christmas
because we wanted to open presents. You know. It wasn't
like a core part of just how our family operated
until nineteen eighty nine, which is when my dad decided
(22:16):
to leave the house that was in shambles and moved
to Fort Wayne and entered this seminary and become a
Lutheran pastor himself. So he was forty six when he did.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
That, and you were going into sixth grade. How did
that feel for you? You went from this kid trying
to kind of find your way in Indiana after having
grown up prior to that in Long Island, like these
really different cultures, and turned out that you were a
(22:47):
really good swimmer and really excelled at the backstroke when
you were in Indiana. And so you had that, you know,
you had that life. But even the way that you
describe different cuisines were the way that you had never
really had soda, but then suddenly when.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
You were in Indiana, all you drank was soda.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
I Mean, one really really stark example of I would
call it benign neglect of you know, not necessarily taking
care of things in a particularly responsible way, would be
that you ended up like kneeding dentures for your baby
(23:29):
teeth because your mother gave you apple juice in a bottle, right, she.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Just gave me apple juice in a bottle. In my
mom's way of thinking, she would just say, well, you
wanted apple juice, and of course I had apple juice.
I was a baby, and it was sugar, and so
it just tasted good. It, you know, stopped me from crying,
and she just put me to sleep with a bottle
of apple juice. But that caused my front teeth to
be completely rotten on the back, and so they were
(23:55):
rotten for years. The fronts of my teeth looked white
and I guess normal, but it was painful, and I
didn't know that that was wrong, you know, I just
thought that's how teeth felt like you were saying before,
this sense of normalcy, whatever is going on in your house.
However the adults around you behave when you're young, you
just think that that's the way it is. So yeah,
(24:19):
So it was discovered that I had these rotten forefront
teeth and I had to have them pulled when I
was four, and then I got dentures when I was
four as well. You know, in some ways you can
see it as my mom fitting into the parenting of
nineteen eighty one nineteen eighty two that was maybe a
little bit more standard, But so many of their choices
were that they leaned toward this sense that consequences didn't
(24:43):
exist and that they just wanted to do what they
wanted to do.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
When Amanda is eleven, her father is in seminary and
the family is now living in a small house. She's
a p K, a pastor's kid, and she's becoming more
aware of the family's precarious finances. Everyone needs to pull
(25:14):
their weight. Amanda needs a job.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
So this was an advertisement in you know, the seminary
where he was attending. They had a lunch room and
a little photocrappied daily newsletter and it's very much of
the era. So someone had posted in that I need
a teenage babysitter to take my kids to the pool.
And of course I had been swimming and I was
a good backstroker. I was eleven, so I wasn't a teenager.
(25:40):
And my dad takes me on this job interview and
he tells the person, now, I got to tell you,
she's not a teenager. She's twelve. And I was standing there,
eleven years old, you know, watching him stretch the truth.
And then I watched him say that I knew CPR
and I was a lifeguard, and it's like my dad
took the the kernel of the fact that I was, like,
(26:02):
you know, an adolescent and good at swimming, and he
made that into the story that this family wanted to
hear all for I think it was two dollars an
hour that I earned that summer, and in the end,
my dad ended up keeping that money. I didn't have
a checking account, and this person wanted to write checks,
and so she wrote them to my dad, and my
(26:23):
dad was going to give me the money at the
end of the summer or at the end of the month.
So in some ways you can say, God, what a
horrible thing it was that he took your babysitting money
from the whole summer. You were eleven and you did
that job. But yeah, I sometimes I feel that way,
and sometimes I feel like, well, the fact that I
was making two dollars an hour, however many hours a week,
(26:46):
and he hung on to and he must have needed
it a lot more than I did.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
There's also, I mean, two really interesting things around that
time that really struck me. And one is the really
big difference in the way they treated you and saw
you and what they expected of you and the way
that they treated your brother. You were like on two
different tracks.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Absolutely the gendered thing of what daughters do and are
expected to do versus sons is well documented beyond my family,
I think. But also he's the youngest, and I mean
my theory is that my mom she so just loved
that role of having kids to take care of instead
of having a job. I think that that was like
(27:31):
such a central part of identity for her that she
kind of didn't want my brother to grow up. And
whereas in my case, any sort of responsibility that I
might take on that might alleviate my mom and dad
from responsibility, they embraced, like, please, Amanda, do you want
to cook dinner or do you want to you know,
(27:51):
whatever thing I whatever role I stepped into, they were
very happy to see that and just watch me take
it on, take on their kind of obligations and things.
It was fully the opposite for my brother. They really
wanted him to remain little, you know, My mom especially
wanted him to be the baby of the family. And so, yeah,
(28:13):
we definitely had different childhoods. Different childhoods.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Yeah, your mom also have had a very interesting way
of kind of dealing with sexuality, and you're you know,
like she started talking to you about it very young
and even when you needed braces, was like, well, it's
good to you get over this with this now before
(28:38):
you're a teenager, because that way you'll be able to
kiss boys.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
And they never got my brother braces, and I think
objectively my brother's teeth were worse than mine. But it
was about marriage ability for them. They were very concerned,
my mom, especially that I wouldn't be appealing to boys.
I think they saw in me I was like a
little strident and a little they called it bossy, but
(29:02):
they were worried that I wouldn't be like docile enough
or pretty, and that was a concern because I think
that for both of my parents they saw success and
maturing and coming into adulthood that was all part of
finding a person, finding a mate, and for women it's
having children and all those things that they really treasured.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
Do you think that that was true of your mother
back when she was repairing typewriters and wanting to be
a designer, and this very unusual for her to have
gone to New York City from Indiana at that time.
Do you think that was always the case for her
or do you think it sort of developed.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
I think something must have changed, because I really see
in my mom. I see two people. I see this
young person, and there's these beautiful clips. I have a
lot of newspaper clips of my family, things that happened
to make the news. And there's one of my mother
when she was working at IBM nineteen seventy four. She
(30:05):
has this long, glossy red hair. She's got plaid bell
bottoms on. She's a stunning woman with this tool belt on.
You can't imagine a more inspirational young woman. I feel
like that really was her. But then I have to
compare that with the mother that I knew all through
(30:27):
the eighties and nineties. She really got so far away
from that pioneering spirit that I loved so much in her.
I will say what she hung on to. My mother
did whatever she wanted, like she just did. She really
wouldn't be stopped, and she didn't care if it was
the norm, and she didn't care if it made other
(30:49):
people mad. She just did it. And so this is
a bit gross, and there are in the story of
my family there are some things that are kind of gross.
A lot of them are about expired food. But my mother,
I think she didn't really like brushing her teeth and
when she was about fifty maybe fifty two, she just stopped.
(31:11):
She was just like, make your own choices. I don't
like doing it. It's like a deranged thing to say.
Speaker 3 (31:17):
Of course, people.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
Should brush their teeth, even if they don't like doing it.
It's a short task that we all figure out how
to do. It's how she operated, and I think that
that was a constant in her life that she she
wanted to learn to be a fashion designer, so she
just went to New York. So she just did it.
And I think that that's how she was a parent too,
And it was just how she was.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
First the tooth brushing stops. Then Amanda's mom and dad
stopped paying taxes forever.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
Yeah, they stopped paying taxes in nineteen ninety four, pretty much, so,
and that was the year we moved from Fort Wayne.
He finished the seminary program and took a position as
a Lutheran pastor in the Detroit right suburbs. So I'd
started high school in Fort Wayne, was to finish the
last two years in Detroit. But yeah, they just I
think they got to a point where they were out
(32:08):
overspending like they always did. They were spending more than
we had or would get, and they kind of were like, well,
we're going to leave the state of Indiana soon, and
so they just they just thought maybe these things wouldn't
follow them. And in a way that's true. I think
that in that time things were so much less digital, right,
so they just they just didn't pay for things. Bill
(32:30):
would come in, they just didn't pay it. And it
was in a different county in a different state, and
so I found records that they were being sued for
you know, dental work and other expenses that they had
incurred in those years. They just stopped paying for thanks
in ninety two and ninety three, and then we moved.
So how they did it?
Speaker 2 (32:50):
It also seems like, well, would you say, you started
to try to mitigate some of especially the whole which
of course your family never called hoarding, but when you
started to kind of order the marinerisauces from oldest to
newest by date of expiration or like just become like
(33:13):
try to contend with the mess, and which earns you
as a nickname Martha a lah Martha Stewart, which they
mean in a totally derogatory way.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
Not nice. Yes, it was before Martha had her problems
and everything, but Martha was so popular nineteen ninety four
ish when we moved to Detroit. I really, as anyone
who's lived with a hoarder does, you have a period
of time and for some at last forever where you
think the problem here is the stuff. It's not that
(33:48):
my loved one has an emotional or a mental health problem.
The problem is the stuff. So I'm going to fix
the stuff. And it's a very tangible way to I think,
think about these issues. So, as a sixteen year old,
I had been plucked yet another move. I didn't have
any friends. I was sixteen, school hadn't started. It was
(34:09):
that summer. So I just thought, I'm I'm going to
make order out of this madness of all all this food.
We'd been moving food from Long Island to Indiana to
the other place in Indiana, all this stuff. I tried
organizing it and got in some trouble. My mother was
very annoyed that I'd kind of magnified the issue of
how much of this food we had and what a
(34:31):
problem it was. And I was kind of a punky
teenager and I worked these bright blue Doc Martins all
the time. My hair was a little bit purple. I
had this maroon some nineties hair thing going on, and
at the same time I did become really fascinated with
Martha Stewart, who had a TV show at that same year.
(34:53):
It was becoming very big, and man, I just saw
in Martha this classic sense of keeping home, putting a
nice meal on the table. It was just everything I
didn't have at home, everything I didn't see, but gosh,
I just thought, what a person Martha. And my mom
picked up on my interest in Martha Stewart and my
(35:18):
annoying to her, deeply annoying, and to her just judgmental
and really bad behavior on my part of doing things
like tidying up the food in the basement or trying
to clean out the refrigerator sometimes, and if she would
clean something up that was a massive mess that needed
(35:38):
immediate attention, she would say, oh, is that good enough
for you, Martha. So when we got to Detroit, it
was sort of like this yet again reinvention. Suddenly my
father is a Lutheran pastor and a place we've never been,
so there's no history of his business failings or anything,
and there's no history of my mom is this fashion
design person or horror or anything. She's a nurse, so
(36:01):
she got a job at a hospital, and he had
his job at the Lutheran church. It's very different, and
we did that all the time. We really reinvented ourselves.
I think my parents liked that ability to just start again.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
So are you just like dying to get out of
there and go to college?
Speaker 1 (36:20):
That's too light a phrase to describe my desire to
just leave. I just really thought I just had to
get out. I had been having this dream about my house.
I had this dream night after night after night. I
just would obliterate my house.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
Was it whatever house you were in at the time,
or was it always the mansion.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Whatever house we lived in at that time. I had
it a lot in high school, which my last years
of high school was this Detroit area house. And yeah,
the dream, it's like a very simple dream. It doesn't
require much psychological analysis to say I was uncomfortable with
all the stuff in our house. But I just would dream.
I just go to sleep. It was like a comforting
thing to think about. I'm going to take all this
(37:05):
fabric that's on our dining table and I'm going to
throw it out the window. I'm going to open our
refrigerator and pour out the ketchup and throw the meat
on the floor, and whatever I could do to just
destroy the house. And it was a very satisfying kind
of ritual in my sleep and in my mind. And
I can tell you honestly, I truly thought every person
(37:27):
had that dream when I was young. I really thought
that was like a very normal thing to do. And
a way to think about where you live is that
you want to ruin it.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
That house was owned by the church, so as far
as they were concerned, anything that ever went wrong in
the house was not their responsibility because they didn't have
equity in the house and the church owned it, so
they didn't have to do anything about it.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
There was a bathroom upstairs and they didn't clean it.
They did wipe down the shower or clean the toilet
for six or seven years. They started out doing it
in the nineties and then they just stopped. They just
didn't want to. We had when I was in high school.
I don't even exactly know how it happened, but there
was crack and then a hole in our kitchen window.
(38:18):
This is in the Midwest, so we're not in Florida
or a place where there's good weather all year. This
is in Detroit area, and there was a large hole
the size of a standard slice of pizza, pretty big hole,
triangular hole, looking out in the backyard. And they refused
(38:40):
to address it in any way. They would just say, well,
the church owns the house. What good does it do
us if we go out and spend money on a
piece of glass or a repair. And I lived with that.
I mean I lived there maybe eight or ten months
of when that hole was there, because I was in
high school and I was leaving. But every time I
(39:01):
came home, the slice of pizza hole was still there.
They just let it be. At certain points they had
a garbage bag and duct tape over, but they couldn't
they couldn't conceive of investing a dollar or a moment
in that house. Things became very run down and almost scary.
(39:24):
The garage caved in eventually. The garage was not something
they put cars in. It was just full of boxes
of stuff, you know, my dad's cassette tapes from the
multi level marketing scheme, and books and old winter coats
and food. Of course, there was food. There was everything
(39:44):
in there in that space, and it was deteriorating before
our eyes over all that time, and they just refused
to do anything about it. And one day, I think
it was in college at this time, I had watched
the sort of undulation of the room of this garage.
I could see it was not doing well. And I
(40:04):
arrived one day and it just all the way caved in.
And I came into the house just I was alarmed.
It's like a structure caved in and just all this
stuff in there. And I said to my dad, like,
oh no, the garage fell in. What are we going
to do? And he was kind of like, yeah, it
happened Tuesday. Do you want pancakes or waffles? Like he
(40:26):
was making breakfast? He didn't. He just they just moved on.
And their attitude was so often like Amanda, why are
you getting so worried about everything? Okay, there's a hole
in the window. Okay, the garage fell in.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
We'll be back in a moment. With more family secrets.
Amanda goes to college in Chicago in nineteen ninety six.
She falls asleep that first night in her new dorm
and wake up in the morning to a vivid, remarkable absence.
(41:04):
She has not had the dream in Chicago, she sleeps
through the night. In fact, the dream goes away for
years as she moves into young adulthood. When she's in
her mid twenties, she falls in love with a man
named Frank and they marry. While she stays in close
touch with her parents, their lives have continued to slide
(41:24):
into further chaos. Her father is renting himself out as
a pastor for hire working funerals, and her mother is
working as an RN at a hospice. Amanda is living
her own very different life, but then in two thousand
and six, she gets a call from her mother. Amanda's
(41:44):
father has had a nervous breakdown.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
So the story that I heard from my mother that
day is that he stood up Sunday morning to do
the first service. He went into the pulpit at early
service and started speaking. He prepared these sermons. My dad
was a great sermonizer in all parts of his life,
not just in church. But he looked forward to it.
(42:09):
He got there and said a few words. I don't
know exactly where he was going with it, and then
he said, I can't do this anymore. And he turned
around and he took his vestments off in the Socristy
area and got in a car and picked up my
mom who was at home. They got in the car
and they just drove around and my dad said he
(42:32):
wasn't able to continue. He just had In retrospect, I
think it was called sort of a nervous breakdown by
people that were caring for my dad. It was a
breaking point of some kind where he just couldn't do
it anymore. So at that point, they're living in a
house that is owned by this church that he's just
(42:53):
said I'm done with, I can't do it anymore. And
they had lived there eleven years, so so much had
to be dealt with emotionally and then tangibly with all
the stuff. And then my parents were moving out of
the house and I was helping them. That dream came
back when I went back into grappling with all the stuff,
(43:16):
all the mess in their house.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
One of the things that really struck me is that
in that next stretch of years, which is not a
small number of years, you're building your life, you're making
your home, you're married, you're working. You become pregnant and
(43:39):
discover that you're having a girl, and you say to Frank,
I don't know how to be a mother to a daughter,
which was so moving to me because so much about
do you break a cycle or do you not break
a cycle? For all of us at at any given moment,
Can I do it differently?
Speaker 1 (43:58):
Right? What's possible?
Speaker 3 (44:00):
Right?
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Right?
Speaker 1 (44:00):
Yes? Yes, That's how I felt for sure, and she does.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
She does do it differently. In the background, though her
parents continue to not do things differently, and now, on
top of all else, they are ailing, both facing a
number of illnesses. There was her dad's nervous breakdown in
two thousand and five, and then in two thousand and
seven he has a debilitating stroke and then cancer. Having
(44:30):
grown up under the Miami sun, He's been diagnosed with
melanoma before, but now it's returning with consequences.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
He could have and did once have part of it removed.
They could have treated it, but he didn't want to
because they they did what they wanted to do and
it was not interesting for him to spend time. It
was difficult for him to get around because of this stroke,
but he wouldn't do You wouldn't face it, and that
(45:03):
was very characteristic and very just classic of my dad.
But it really was this reckoning of all of their choices,
and similar things happened to My mom developed kidney disease.
She said she had lupus. Turns out she never did,
but she had diabetes. She had other problems. So what
(45:24):
was hard. I think what was frustrating for me is
that I could see from the era that they were
calling me Martha. When I was sixteen in nineteen ninety four,
and even before then, I could see these problems, and
I could see the financial choices they were making, the
health choices, the social choices. They were really kind of
(45:48):
terrible friends to people. I could see that they would
have an endgame like that it would. I could see.
I could see it falling apart. Maybe when I was
like eleven, I thought, well, how is this going to end?
And I had periods in my life where I thought,
I'm so glad that their adults and I'm a separate adult.
(46:09):
I have my marriage and I have my life, and
I'm just not I don't need to fix their problems.
But then I had other periods where I thought, I
probably do need to fix their problems because they can't
fix them themselves. But the end of their lives, it
really was this beckoning of all those things coming true.
They had terrible financial troubles. They were living in sort
(46:29):
of a low income assisted living place for a while.
Their house in Pontiac, Michigan was repossessed by the bank.
You know, they were not able to run their own lives,
and just like they did for decades before, they really
hoped I would run them. You know, they turned to
(46:50):
me for physically cleaning things up. They wanted me to
pay for things. My mom wanted my you know, name
on her banking so that she could have better credit,
which would have been catastrophic. I think for me, I've
always worked in nonprofits. I don't have like the wealth
that could be helpful in that way. We really struggled
(47:12):
through those last years. It was about ten years and
the metaphor of my father having this cancer that sort
of ate away at his face. It's really so much
like just what happened in our family. It just was
this series of almost impossibly hard years together and they
passed away within about a year and a half of
one another.
Speaker 2 (47:33):
And this was the endgame. You know, this was what
you saw, not in its details, but in a moment.
You know, after your mother dies, and before she dies,
she's kicked out of hospice because you're supposed to ask
for absolutely any kind of medication there. Everything's very strictly monitored.
And she has her duffel bag that she has. Instead
(47:56):
of it being full of clothes, it's full of morphine.
And this gets discussed, so she's kicked out of there,
I mean. But then after she dies and you go
to the funeral home and you're there with the funeral
director who also it was the funeral home where your
father was, and he's going over the funeral classes with you,
(48:16):
and then he stops in.
Speaker 1 (48:19):
What happens, Well, this is this very kind man who
had arranged my mother and I had gone in a
year and a half ago and dealt with my father's passing.
And this man named Ken was so understanding, so thoughtful
about every detail. You know, in a funeral home, you're
in this very quiet, somber setting, thick carpet, you know,
(48:44):
sort of absorbing everything. So I was sitting across from him,
as I had sat across from him eighteen months before
we settle everything, and I stand up to go and
to shake his hands. I put my hand out and
he kept sitting and he's said, I'm so sorry but
I have to tell you your mother never paid the
(49:05):
bill for your dad. And that was we had arranged
this that my mom was due some life insurance money
when my dad passed in twenty thirteen. The funeral was
about seven thousand dollars I think, and she was to
get around twenty four or twenty five thousand dollars from
this policy. So she had shown this man the paper
she said, as soon as this money comes in seven
(49:27):
thousand of the whole bill will come to you. And
just as you would expect, you know, she never did that.
And so then when it came time from my mother's
funeral arrangements had to pay for two. My mom had said, oh,
they haven't put the headstone on your dad, saying that
because the ground is stiff in the winter. Like she
(49:48):
had a whole story about it, and I realized in
that moment she was gone. I thought, Okay, well she
just left me with this too. She left me with
a lot. That's how could I have expected anything else?
You know, this is like my dad took my babysitting money.
I mean, there were so many times where my parents
just they just couldn't seem to do better, and they
(50:12):
left me with it.
Speaker 2 (50:14):
So in terms of leaving you with it, you literally
are left with it. You're left with receipts, both literally
and metaphorically. You are left with so many questions, some
of which you can answer and some of which you'll
never be able to answer. But what I'm wondering is
(50:36):
you went down this road of really deeply researching, reporting,
you know, coming to learn anything that you could. It's
almost like there was a split screen. There was your
childhood and what you were experiencing during your childhood, and
then there's adult Amanda looking back with the skill set
(50:58):
that you have, going like what was really going on
that year? What was really going on that year? And
you were able to fill in a lot of those gaps,
And I'm wondering what that was like for you and
how it felt.
Speaker 1 (51:13):
I forever will say my parents betrayed me in a
lot of ways, disappointed me. That said, we all loved
each other, our home that I lived, and even though
it had this darkness and these secrets, it did have
joy and humor in it.
Speaker 3 (51:31):
And telling their story accurately was it was sort of
like a lifelong mystery that I had that I wanted
to solve and I was so fortunate it So few
these exist anymore, but the paper in Martinsville where we lived,
reported on everything.
Speaker 1 (51:50):
Just everything, and it's on newspapers dot com. So I
was able to dig up lots of things about how
we lived in the eighties that made the paper that
clip of my mother in the Indianapolis Star with her
IBM prepare kit, and I found a lot of things
that helped me understand in an objective way who my
(52:12):
parents were, and that was I think that was the
most important thing to me, just to know who they
really were, because if you had just listened to their stories,
you would only have part of the answers, and that's
all that I had growing up. So I felt amazing
getting the whole story. And I think I got most
(52:34):
of it. I mean, it's only a few things that
were murky enough I just couldn't quite pin down.
Speaker 2 (52:40):
It's like you were able to color them in for yourself.
And I think being able to see our parents as
full human beings is something that many of us never
get to do.
Speaker 1 (52:53):
I agree, And I think another aspect of this that
felt so good to me is that I was prepared
haird to be wrong. For instance, the story about my
father buying the oil Derek. I looked back on that
and I thought he he just loved to tell a
tall tale. So maybe that didn't happen. Maybe that was
(53:13):
just I remembered it. I was four. I did remember
that he from this western bar. He brought home a hat,
and I thought, maybe he bought a hat and told
a story. Maybe he didn't buy an oil Derek. And
you know, looked into it, and as an adult, I
was able to find not the paperwork, but I did
find photos of him in Texas with an oil Derek
(53:36):
behind him, wearing the same hat, and I, you know,
I'm pretty convinced that he did it. So I was
able to flesh out things and I was able to
prove myself right. So my memory of all these years
with my parents, who were just extraordinary people, even in
(53:56):
their betrayals, even in all the ways they disappointed, I mean,
they were just ordinary people. I was able to tell
the whole story and feel correct in it. So I
wasn't wrong. I missed a few things, or there are
some things I didn't know, but I wasn't wrong. I
didn't find anything where it was a total mis Remember.
Speaker 2 (54:20):
Here's Amanda reading one last passage from Destroy This House.
Speaker 1 (54:31):
Trying our best is the one indisputable thing I have
in common with my parents. Their best fell frustratingly short
of what I needed and wanted. Their best was bizarre, craven, outlandish, deranged,
hilarious when it wasn't dangerous, confounding. If there was another
key to unlock the mystery of Long's Island, I don't
(54:53):
have it. To thoroughly report on the madness of their
forty year reign. I've had to piece together not just
their document actions, but also their inferred and imagined motivations.
Why did they act so strangely? Why defeat their own
best interests constantly? I won't know that boldly, as is
my birthright, I will guess this is what their best
(55:15):
look like.
Speaker 2 (55:25):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly z Accur
is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder and if you'd
(55:50):
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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