July 10, 2025 • 57 mins
As E.A. takes to the road on a route once taken with her mother, she must confront the stories we inherit, the ones we choose to tell, and the one’s we don’t.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio Things. I want
to know? Where did you grow up? How did you
grow up? Did your father hurt you? Did your mother
hurt you? Where did you go to high school? What
did you like to wear as a little girl? What
(00:22):
did you like to wear as a teenager? Did you
like being a sister? What was your favorite book as
a kid? Did you pick at your skin? Are you
glad you had kids? Why didn't we stop the New
Orleans in nineteen ninety six? Were you afraid to die?
Where was your ropa vieja recipe from Do You Miss Me?
(00:47):
Are you still Mad at Me?
Speaker 2 (00:52):
That's e A Hanks journalist and author of the recent
memoir The Ten, a memoir of family and the Open Road.
Eas is a story of contrasts. As a child, she
was exposed to the depths of mental illness and the
heights of Hollywood celebrity. As she learned to navigate her
(01:12):
place in the world. As an adult, she goes on
a journey to understand those contrasts, buried secrets, and to
make peace with the generations who came before her. I'm
(01:35):
Danny 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 this question, but in your case it feels
(01:55):
even more like the place to begin. So much of
your story is about place and how it informs us.
So tell me about the earliest place that you remember, the.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Earliest place that I remember. My childhood memories of location
are as bifurcated and bipolar, as my adult sort of
identity conundrums were because I was born in Burbank, California,
which is a suburb of Los Angeles, part of the
pulsing megalopolis that is LA. You can't tell when you've
(02:29):
left LA and entered Burbank for people who don't live here.
I was born in southern California, and I ended up
in Sacramento around the age of five. So I had
a typical childhood of divorce, which is that I went
between cities. The arrangement was that I lived with my
mom and I visited my dad, so my winters and
(02:51):
the bulk of my life was in Sacramento. Sacramento is
as maybe it's the most famous citizen. Johan Didean describes
it the ubiquitous valley town. It's extremely flat. The air
kind of sits on it in between the Pacific and
the Sierra Nevadas, so the heat really lays on the city.
The summers or kind of one hundred winters, are very rainy.
(03:15):
I grew up a horse girl, and so the bulk
of my time was spent out in this area that
unfortunately doesn't really exist anymore. It's all been built over
by track homes and fulfillment centers and god knows what else.
But when I close my eyes and I say, what
is the landscape of your childhood? I toggle back and
forth between the rice patties outside of Sacramento, because there's
(03:39):
a huge Japanese American community in Sacramento that used to
grow the bulk of rice for the world outside of Sacramento,
and it was just as far as the eye could see,
these kind of like emerald fields that are water logged
because rice is grown in water, and so the sun
would hit the water and the green rice shoots, and
(04:00):
I just remember the sense that this green could go
on forever, and between the ocean and the mountains. It
was not a hidden valley, but a place that was
separate from the rest of the world. And then the
opposite side of that is my childhood memories of southern
California during the weekends and the summers i'd be with
my dad when he wasn't on location shooting. Those are
(04:22):
all of Malibu, which at the time certainly had money
and stature, but was not quite as built up and
fancy as it is now, kind of run down, a
lot of old hippies, and the sort of beach esthetic
of early nineties Malibu was baywatch and breakfast burritos and
(04:45):
the smell of a warm wetsuit and it's called sex wax,
what you rub onto your surfboard. So I had these
very classic Californian landscapes of the valley farming town and
the southern California beach, and I'm of both of them equally.
I can't prioritize one over the other because my childhood
(05:09):
is so rooted in both of those places.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
That makes so much sense and such a beautiful answer.
It seems the way that you're describing this sort of
split screen of these two very different landscapes is also
mirrored in these two very different experiences of being a
kid with a parent. Tell me a bit about your
(05:35):
mom from those Sacramento years when you were little, and
then a little bit about your dad as well.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
My mom, even when I was an adolescent, was this
sort of romantically tragic figure to me. And it's strange
that when I think back about her in my childhood
to realize how young she was at the time. Your
parents are just perpetually middle aged to you, but I
it's very strange to look back at these memories and
realize I'm describing someone who's twenty nine years old, thirty
(06:06):
three years old, thirty six years old. At that age
when I was a child, my mom had this failure
to launch in a way that there was something about
her life that had never You know, when you're learning
how to ride a bike and you're trying to get
your sense of balance and then you wobble a little bit,
but then you find that center and you find your
(06:27):
balance and you can take off, or you know, like
the surfboard, when you pop up you funny hit your
stride and you can glide. My mom just never hit that.
Everything was always difficult with her. Friendships were difficult, Parenting
was difficult, making sure the kitchen sink was empty and
the fridge was full, was difficult. Everything was a struggle,
(06:52):
and this sense that she had already been benched by
my father's fame, by her lack of a career as
a stage artist, which is how she thought of herself.
And in the background of this varying degrees of dysfunction
(07:13):
was the art that she so valued and cherished. I
grew up in a house with many books and newspapers
and being told this weekend, we're going to watch Churrosawa
films because they're important to watch. And there was classical
music because my mom's mom listened to quite a lot
(07:33):
of classical music, and so did my mom, and so
do I. Now my mom was romantic to me in
the way that romance is tragic, and this sense that
her relationship with reality was never obviously a defense mechanism.
It was something she was not in control of. I'm
(07:54):
trying to describe the depths of my mom's evangelical fervor.
Because my mother was, as she would say, washed in
the blood of the Lamb, and she had accepted Jesus
Christ as her personal Lord and savior. Her dependence on
her faith was such and it loomed so large for
her that you know, as a child, I once said,
why is the date ten sixty six important? And maybe
(08:17):
another parent would start explaining the Anglo Saxons and the
Battle of Hastings, But my mom's answer started, when you
don't have the love and light of Jesus Christ in
your heart, which is an interesting approach to teaching medieval history.
So she was baffling to me in a way that
all parents are baffling to their children. But even as
(08:38):
a child, I had a sense that something was not
adding up about her life, that her interpretations of events
that happened days previously never matched mine. But that also
the barometers of adulthood that I was aware of even
as a child, that a house should be clean, that
you should have help with your homework, that there should
be regular meals, that your life should be populated with
(09:01):
friends and loved ones who pop in. That was all absent,
and I was able to sort of clock that at
a very early age.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
No, that's so interesting because our childhoods are so often
these kinds of echo chambers, where the reality that we
are contending with is the only reality we know. And
you did not have that because of your parents' divorce,
you had two different realities that you were to some
(09:29):
degree in those early years toggling back and forth between.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
This word has kind of fallen out of use in
this capacity, But I had a very Catholic childhood in
the small sea of like very high highs, very low lows.
My existence with my mom verged on the gray gardens.
There weren't quite raccoons, but it was two crazy biddies
knocking around this house with stacks of newspaper and petae everywhere.
(09:53):
And then my life with my dad came equipped with
not just my dad, the whole cast of characters that
was my Greek step family. Because my dad married I
call her my other mother, Rita Wilson. They married when
I was around five or six, and she came with
cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents, and so I
(10:16):
had the view of what family could be like, and
I was aware that my mom was not up for
any of that. I just knew that my mom was
not like other parents, but I didn't understand how deeply
strange and off putting she was to other people. That
stuff I thought was normal when she would speak to herself,
(10:37):
because from her perspective, she was in a conversation with
the voice of God, the way that she could not
take care of her hygiene and clothing, all of those
things I mistook for normal because that was all I knew,
and the blueprint had already been laid before I would
start going back and forth between my two different families.
(11:00):
Really strange blend of being aware that something isn't quite
adding up. And then also you only know the aquarium
you're swimming around in, you think the castle is supposed
to be that size. It's an odd sort of chamber
of mirrors of what is normal. And for every friend
(11:20):
I had that was not allowed to come to my
house and certainly was never allowed to spend the night.
I had other friends, non school friends, for whom my
mom was the cool mom who said, Oh, dinner will
be cookie dough, and you can dye your hair whatever
color you want, and I will drive you all over
the state to compete in horse Things can be hard
to pin down with that childhood experiences because it was
(11:42):
in its nature different every day. So my dad, for listeners,
is a man you might have heard of. His name
is Tom Hanks, and my dad has his own sort
of family struggles in that my dad's parents divorced, and
then his mom and his dad each had a succession
of failed marriages, which meant step parents would show up
(12:06):
and step siblings, and then a couple years later they'd
be gone again. I think his dad married two more times,
and my grandmother remarried four times. So they worked that courthouse.
There's a lot of people coming and going. So my
dad had a very lonely childhood of being an artist
(12:27):
in his bedroom, working out jokes to make the kids
at school laugh. And by the time he bumps into
my mom, their college students at sax State in Sacramento,
and their theater kids, and they're not really friends. They
don't really know each other, and they're not particularly close.
(12:49):
But my mom had just had her heart broken by
a guy I think she thought she was gonna marry,
and he was certainly on paper, more of what she
was looking for. And my dad was funny and charming,
but he was awkward and very sensitive, and she let
him take a crack because she was on the rebound.
(13:10):
My dad was twenty two when my brother Colin was born,
and my mom was only twenty four or twenty five,
and so these are kids, they're young adults who have
no concept of how to be parents, to have a home,
how to raise people, and so they're both working with
(13:31):
what they've got. The difference between them is my dad
lives in reality and my mom is already starting to
show signs of significant mental health struggles. She's already lying
and stealing from people that she loves and who love her,
and has different versions of events.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
She has rage, she has all of these sort of
issues that are disquieting to my dad, but coming from
a broken hon himself.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
He has a young son now, and he has a
burgeoning career, so he's gonna make it work for as
long as he can, and as long as he can
goes till around nineteen eighty five, nineteen eighty six. Colin's
born in seventy seven. I'm born in eighty two, and
the best part about having famous parents is being able
to google their birthdays and anniversaries. So I can't remember
(14:28):
when Dad and Rita got married. I think they got
married in eighty eight. So that's where all of the
cast of characters are coming from, which are funny, talented,
ambitious young people who have no concept of stability of
parents who will be there every Day of How to
(14:51):
Be a Family on the regular, and they find themselves
with two young kids. When Colin is born, my parents
are living in a hellhole apartment in Hell's Kitchen in
New York in nineteen seventy seven. They don't get married
until Colin's already two years old, so around seventy nine,
(15:13):
and that is around when the second season of Bosom Buddies,
everyone's favorite television show. So Bosom Buddies had happened, and
my parents are still married. When my dad shoots Splash,
which is his big breakout moment, but it's not until
Big which I think is eighty nine or ninety. I
(15:36):
know there's going to be a Tom Hanks fan who
is listening who is so deeply disappointed in me that
I do not have this IMDb in front of me.
In the grand tradition of show business, we'll fix it
in the post. I think it's accurate to say that
in terms of my dad's fame, I was not born
on third base, but we certainly moved there in the
mid nineties. Colin and I have a sort of verbal
(16:00):
marker for when things get crazy, and we call it
beg and ag, which is my dad's fame is one
thing before Forrest Gump, and it's a completely different thing
after Forrest Gump. He was famous, and he had made
movies and was out of the significant and crushing financial
stress that he had been in his young adulthood. Basically,
(16:23):
my mom kidnapped us, Colin and I and took us
to Sacramento without telling my dad, and they were in
the middle of divorce proceedings by the time we end
up in Sacramento. My Dad's kind of on his way.
He is not Tom Hanks's global movie star, but he
is Tom hanks promising actor who's going to do big things.
(16:44):
I'm like twelve years old when the full sort of
experience kicks in.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
In February nineteen ninety six, at the age of thirteen,
(17:13):
Ea makes the pivotal move from Sacramento to Los Angeles,
a shift set in motion by escalating tensions and abuse
in her mother's home. The realization that she needs to
escape is validated by lawyers, police, teachers, and neighbors, all
finally storming the bestiale of the custody arrangement, which now
(17:34):
needs to be changed. She leaves mid school year and
lands in a very different world, her father directing his
first film, a newly blended family, and the beginning of
a new chapter. That summer, in the emotional wake of
her departure, Ba's mother comes back into focus. She wants
(17:55):
to take her on a sprawling, enigmatic road trip, one
that seems to aim at connecting the dots of a
fractured family history. EA barely knows.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
So it's in the thick of all of this that
my mom announces that we're going to buy Owennebago and
drive to Florida, where my grandmother lives. And that's really
the only thing I know about my mom's family. I
know that my grandmother at some point lived in Sacramento
with us, and then she moved back to her hometown,
(18:28):
which is Palatka, Florida, which is a central Florida town
not too far from the Okaala National Forest, which is
sizable and impressive. And I know that my mom's father
is a military man who is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
And all I know about him is that when I
told my mom that I had peeled off from an
(18:50):
eighth grade school trip to Arlington to see his grave.
She looked at me. I finished my sentence. She went
up to her bedroom. She closed the door and did
not come out for I think about a week. She
would not speak to me and did not acknowledge my questions.
So I did not know where my mom was born.
I did not know where she went to high school.
(19:10):
I had no idea where she grew up, or who
her friends were, or what her relationship was like with
her parents. I had not met two of my uncles.
And so she buys this Winnebago and we hit the
road because we're going to Florida and then we will
eventually continue on to the nineteen ninety six Olympics in Atlanta.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Was Colin on that road trip as well, or was
it you and your mom?
Speaker 1 (19:32):
No, it was just me and my mom. Colin had
a coterie of incredibly close friends. We grew up in
a neighborhood of East Sacramento. It's very idyllic, it's really beautiful,
and there was just a pack of boys all around
the same age, and they all hung out at the
same place. It's misleading to call it a country club.
(19:54):
It is a country club, but it's small and very
ramshackle and old, very waspy. It's like the nice it
is falling apart around the edges. And it was a
place for all of these boys to eat chips and
watch Brend and Stimpy reruns and occasionally play water polo
or tennis on the one tennis court that they have.
These boys became family to the extent that at some
(20:17):
point before I had left my mother's house, he had
already moved out and was living with a family that
had seen what was going on and just very casually said,
you can spend the night on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and
then it was you can spend the night on Tuesdays
and Wednesdays. So it got to the point where essentially
(20:37):
Colin had already moved out, and that is in part
what precipitated things really starting to fall apart with my
mom because there was no one watching the store. Colin,
as older siblings very often are, was the great protector
and had kept an eye on my mother's increasingly fragile
(20:58):
mental state. And so when once he wasn't around is
kind of when everything started to go pear shaped. And
that summer he was not on the road because he
had really started to individuate and to begin his own life,
and he was headed off to college.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
It's so interesting the way that two siblings or multiple
siblings can have such different experiences depending on luck of
this posse of boys in the neighborhood. And you just
didn't have your version of that. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
I remember I had my friends who were my horseback
riding sort of friends, but they knew my mom was
the cool mom. They didn't see the other stuff that
was going on. They were not an avenue out. They
were about staying in one place. So when we hit
the road, I had just moved to Los Angeles and
my mother was barely speaking to me. And because it
(21:54):
was just the two of us, we move into this
Winnebago barely saying a thing to each other, and I
don't think we had really had a conversation until we
got on the far side of Texas. And if anybody's
driven the tent through Texas, hits a long road with
very little on the horizon. It got very faulkner. It
(22:16):
got very as I lay dying very quickly until we
got to Florida. By that time things had warmed up
a little bit.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
You're stuck You're in this Winnebago with your mom, who
you're very much not getting along with and who has
a loose grip on reality, and you're making this journey.
How would you characterize your inner state during that time?
Speaker 1 (22:37):
It was surreal. Basically, I leave my mother's house because
her sort of usually vague threats of violence had become concrete.
My mom had been physically intimidating for as long as
I could remember. She spanked, but she also pulled hair
and dragged and shooked and shoved, but she had never
(22:59):
just hul doubt and started hitting me across the face.
But that's what had happened, and that's why I was
finally able to leave. And now suddenly I've had to
give depositions, and I've talked to lawyers and court appointed psychotherapists,
and we've had screaming fights where she does not remember
(23:20):
hitting me, or if she does, she remembers that I
deserved it. And now we're in a van, stuck in
a very small space together, barely speaking and trying to
cross Texas the hours of silence or having my headphones
(23:40):
on while my mom just chain spokes because she really
wanted to get to Florida as quickly as possible. So
it was just this unrelenting pace of just driving for
hours and hours and hours until she would finally pass out.
Because I was too young to drive at this point.
We would drive as far as we could, and then
we'd try the inn too, some campground of America, and
(24:02):
she would just go to the back bed and completely
pass out. There was no Okay, what are we going
to do for dinner or where are we It was
I paid for a spot, I'm going to park it
and fall asleep, and then me, fourteen year old, I'd
have to set up the gray water tank and the
poop shoot and the electricity and get the generator going.
So it was just this very bizarre month and a
(24:25):
half of this surreal experience of being on the open
road with a woman who we love each other more
than anything, but also I'm terrified of her. She's furious
and broken hearted with me. And the worst thing that
can happen is the batteries on my discman get worn
(24:48):
out because I've just listened to my four CDs too
many times as a way of filling the silence of
these miles on the highway and the vast expanse the
American South. There was a bunch of trips that kind
of I only found out after much much later, were
(25:09):
actually sort of court appointed mother daughter things. I remember
we went to Disneyland in the middle of all of
the court proceedings. It was absolutely hilatious. It was a
horrible trip, and I didn't know until years and years
later that we went because some judge or some lawyer said,
you guys should have some quality time together, go to Disneyland.
(25:30):
I was like, Okay, I guess we're going to Disneyland.
I think there had been maybe some sort of conversation
about there needs to be a trip this summer, and
maybe that was what was the thinking behind the Atlanta Olympics,
because my mother certainly did not have it together to
be like, I'm going to research Olympic tickets and airplane
costs and book the hotel and all of that. That
(25:51):
was just all of that was way beyond her. She's
not agoraphobic, but she's not leaving the house because she
doesn't have anywhere to go or anyone to see. And
suddenly we're at the Olympics and stuff like that. So
I think there might have been something around that and
the Olympics, and thinking that was a good idea, But
there was no sort of stated narrative around I want
(26:13):
you to see where we're from, and I want you
to know your grandmother better, and I want you to
see the South. That's how she would conceive of it
after the fact, But I think it was just that's
actually a very good question that I have never thought of.
Why did my mother want to go on the trip?
I was just kind of part and parcel. But I
wonder if after the trauma of the year and now
(26:35):
both of her children being out of the house, and
the stress of the court case and everything around the
custody agreement, if there was some level of she wanted
to see her mom. I would not be surprised if
that was a deep desire for her at the time.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Did you return from that trip feeling like you knew
anything more about your family history or your mother's than
you did before you set out.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
No, I didn't learn anything on that trip because my grandmother,
much like my mother, refused to talk about anything. That
trip was the first time I'd even seen a picture
of my grandfather. So it's very shocking to walk by
and be like who's this man who looks like me?
And realizing that it's my mother's father. My grandmother lived
(27:24):
in reality, my grandmother was not mentally ill, but she
was maybe as I would go on to discover the
true Southerner in the family, and that came out in
a lot of different ways. And one of the ways
it came out was we don't talk about that. So
when I asked her, I think that was the first
time I had anyone to ask explicitly who was my grandfather?
(27:46):
What was your marriage like, and why did it end?
And what did he do? That was my first experience
being told to my face, we don't talk about that,
and furthermore, you shouldn't ask what I do remember thinking
that I had finally seen and understood was the South
and being called, oh, you're Harriet's Yankee granddaughter. I've heard
(28:08):
about you. Being called a Yankee to your face for
the first time is a bracing experience. And that was also,
you know, my first time at Waffle Hut and Cracker
Barrel and Pigley Wiggly and seeing drive through dackery shops
in Louisiana and seeing the emptiness of West Texas and
seeing the desert and seeing the swamps of like, Oh,
(28:30):
I think my family is southern, and now I know
what that is. I know enough to be curious, but
I don't know enough to understand anything.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
It's now the spring of EA's senior year in high school,
and her mother is dying.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
My mom did not trust doctors because she thought they
were all She thought my dad was sending people to
kill her or to hasten her death. Sometimes it was
that remarkable, and sometimes she just didn't trust doctors, and
she thought that they were crooks who would say something
and take your money, or that they would be so
(29:11):
blindsided by the name of her ex husband that they
would somehow not have their priorities in line. So she
put off going to the doctors for many, many years,
and finally she was in such crippling pain because her
arm hurt, and so she finally went to the doctor
and discovered that, in fact, she had stage three, stage
(29:31):
four lung cancer that had completely taken over one of
her lungs and had spread to her bones. And actually
the reason why her arm hurt is because she had
bone cancer and it had spread to her rib cage
and headed into her endercin system and her brain stem.
So she was diagnosed right around Christmas of my senior
year of high school, which is right before two thousand,
(29:53):
nineteen ninety nine, two thousand and she dies my spring
break of my freshman year of college, which is two
thousand and two, so it was brief. She lasted about
a little over a year.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
After EA's mother's death, EA and Colin returned to Sacramento
and put all her mother's stuff into storage. And she
has a lot, a lot of stuff. It's nineteen ninety
nine and some people are experiencing panic about Y two K.
EA's mom is one of them. EA calls her a
(30:29):
Y two K aficionado. She has enough canned goods to
survive the apocalypse. It's all too much to deal with,
so the siblings put everything into storage, figuring they'll deal
with it sometime soon.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
I think it was Haley Ephron, one of Nora Ephron's
talented sisters, and I remember on NPR she was asked,
why write about your childhood when you're much more famous
sibling already did just a toozy of a question and
lot more empathy for that question now, And the answer
was genius, which was that no sibling grows up in
(31:06):
the same house. Exactly Colin's experience of that is he
was already a working actor. He was already in the
grand tradition of Hanks's. He had not finished college because
he got cast in something, and so he was already
on his way. And so he had really wrangled the
bureaucracy of my mom's death, putting the house on the market,
(31:27):
dealing with the last will and testament, paying for all
the little things that a crewe and by the time
all of that was handled, he had nothing in the tank,
and I had nothing to offer. So it became let's
just get all of this stuff into storage and we
can deal with it quote unquote in a couple months,
(31:48):
and that becomes a full decade. My mom gets put
on the back shelf as it pertains to her stuff
and also the woman herself. It's like, well, we'll deal
with that when we have the bandwidth, and we didn't
have the bandwidth. Arguably I still don't, but we cracked
open the locks about ten years on.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
And during those years, you're working as a journalist for
Vanity Fair. You were trying to get on with your life,
but there was also this detritus of a life that's
like sitting there. It's like it's got a heartbeat, it's ticking.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Yeah, it's waiting. Yeah. I had graduated college, which was
absolutely devastating, and hit the ground running because I wanted
to be a writer and I wanted to work at
magazines and that meant living on as I call it,
work Booze Island. So I had a series of really
high stress and demanding jobs that kept me in the
(32:46):
Manhattan run around. And I was also very clearly not
just trying to get my career started, but I was
also trying to see how long I could go without
dealing with it all on any level.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
No makes so much sense. So then it's ten years
later and was there a reason or a moment?
Speaker 1 (33:05):
So by the time Colin and I go back to
Sacramento to finally deal with everything, Colin is in the
middle of working on his first documentary, the most excellent
All Things Must Pass, The Rise and Fall of Tower Records,
which is a Sacramento story, and so Colin and his
producing partner, one of the boys from East Sacramento, that
(33:27):
posse we were all going to be back, and it
was the sense of, Okay, we're all going to be
in Sacramento, so maybe this is the time to do this.
At that point, I had left New York, I was
living in Los Angeles and was pretty lost in that
late twenties to mid thirties. Oh God, I have a
(33:48):
diminishing runway to get my act together and figure out
if I'm going to have a good life post college.
You have a horrific realization of it might not be
just a bad summer. It could be like a bad life.
I don't want to be my mom. I don't want
to have this failure to launch. I want to succeed
in being a whole person. So what did that mean?
(34:09):
That meant starting some pretty serious therapy and saying, whatever
is sitting there in storage, I think I'm ready to
start going through it. And up goes that clanging metal door,
and what we see is essentially a life frozen in time,
because when we threw everything in there, it was really
(34:30):
like we didn't edit anything or go through anything. One
of the things I found was this bag of maggots
because we had thrown all of these boxes not knowing
what they were. And part of it was my mom's
y two K like food hoard that next to six
boxes of horseshow ribbons and romance novels. Who's a real
(34:52):
grab bag of a confusing life.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
And in that storage also there's a white binder of
poetry that your mother had written, and a dozen reporters notebooks.
But that's like a bridge too far. You don't look
at those for a few years.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
Yeah. So I find essentially these huge sort of storage
tupperware boxes of all of her papers, and there were
a handful of things that I'd been looking for, and
then there were a couple of things that I just
grabbed with that sort of journalistic idea, that hunch of
maybe there's something in there. My journalistic predilection is I
(35:36):
will go through your trash and piece together shredded facts
if it's going to help me put the story together.
So when I saw that there was some version of
a paper trail, I was like, I don't even know
what would be in there. And there were these notebooks
of cars that she thought were following her, or numbers
(35:57):
that she was convinced were the CIAH tracking her phone
calls as opposed to like people trying to sell you
a set of encyclopedias or something. And this binder of
her poetry, which I knew that she wrote, but I
had never read. And at this point I had become
an aunt, so I had an eye on trying to
(36:17):
find something of my mother to share with my three nieces.
That was an instinct as well. And what I end
up with ultimately is this white binder of my mom's
poetry and this red journal of hers, which is the
thing that kicks it all off.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
So tell me a little bit about what you started
to read. You're like piecing together a puzzle, but it's
not just a puzzle. It's like aasmagorical puzzle, Like it's
putting together a puzzle when you don't actually know whether
the pieces you hold in your hands are actually pieces.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
Yeah, or even from the same puzzle. Yeah. So I'm
reading this sort of red journal and it was like
the sort of stream of consciousness images very often written
as prayers. Dear Jesus, thank you for showing us where
to find the dead Sea scrolls, Oh, my beautiful Lord
(37:17):
and Savior, thank you for getting all of the drug
dealers out of Sacramento. And then, just in the middle
of it, almost as an aside, I read, thank you
for protecting me and keeping me from going insane when
I remembered my father raping, murdering, and cannibalizing a little girl.
(37:45):
And when I read it, it is the best example
I have personally in my life and also in my
body of being deeply shocked and not at all surprised.
This is the first thing I've heard about my grandfather
(38:05):
from my mother. I barely know his real name, which
is John Raymond Dillingham. I don't know where he was born.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Well.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
I know when he died, in part because my father
told me that. I had asked my dad, was I
save the marriage, baby, and he said no, but you
were a someone died, and I feel the urge to
create life baby. And that's because my grandfather died in
nineteen eighty one, and it's his death that made my
mom want to have another child in a marriage that
(38:36):
was already failed. So all I know about this man
is that my mom won't speak about that. No one
will speak about him. I've met three of my uncles
in passing. I've asked my grandmother about him, and she's
explicitly said, we don't talk about that. And now here's
my mom just offhandedly describing what I can only say
(38:57):
is like a podcast worthy cry of rape, murder, dismemberment,
and cannibalization.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
Just for clarity's sake, was this This is the grandfather
who is buried at Arlington Arlington. Yeah, and when you
peeled off from the class trip to visit his grave
and you told your mother about that, and so that
must have also been this kind of callback to that moment.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Yeah, I remember reading it. Suddenly, of the very few
pieces of information, I have this memory of saying, hey,
I went to go see Grandpa John's gravestone. And the
response is, oh, that's so incredible, or isn't it remarkable
that he's buried at Arlington, or let me show you
some pictures of him. It's to look at me blankly
(39:47):
and then shut herself in a room in silence and
refuse to come out for a week. And it's my
grandmother refusing to even say his name. So suddenly it's okay,
I have person experience of how bad my mom is
at keeping reality straight of this is what we did yesterday,
(40:08):
This is what this person said to me. This is
how my marriage ended. This is why my ex husband
is famous. This is why my son lives with another family.
Those are all things that my mom could not hold
the truth of And yet here's this accusation or this
(40:30):
bit of information that suddenly makes all these very disparate
and strange memories of mine kind of make sense. And
it becomes what I know about mom is there's always
a grain of truth in her version of events. It
just ends up deformed and hard to follow. How much
(40:53):
of any of this is true? Is it possible that
the whole thing is true? And what does that mean
for the way my mother was raised and the lessons
that she taught me about God, everything, men and women, marriage,
parents and children, what a family is, what should be
(41:17):
discussed and what shouldn't be discussed? How do we feel
about the concept of justice or sex? The chasm of
how in the dark I was about who my mother
was and what card she was playing with, and what
is the hand that she in turn dealt me? It
all opened up in front of me in a very
(41:39):
obvious way. It was as the sort of adventure and
question and deep emotional process appeared to me with as
much nuance as the yellow brick road in front of Dorothy.
It became very clear to me that I had an
opportunity to do all of that work around my mother
(42:00):
and our relationship and her death and my concept of
who she is and who I am. That was all
suddenly the work presented itself.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
We'll be right back. Two decades after her mother's death,
(42:33):
Ea feels not only an opportunity but also a profound
urgency to understand the woman who shaped her and in turn,
the roots of her own identity. She has an idea
a road trip. Driving a trusty old Mini van named Minnie,
her father's indestructible, well worn vehicle, Ea sets out to
(42:55):
retrace the journey her mother once took her on. What
starts as a drive down to ten quickly becomes something
far more layered, a search for meaning, memory, and the
elusive pieces of her past. This is the story she's
meant to investigate, to write.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
So by the time I discover the journals, I'm in
a creative and professional rut, which is when I leave
New York. I have a book deal, I've worked for
Vanity Fair, I've worked for the Huffington Post. I am
officially on my way, and then, as so often happens,
getting everything that you want makes everything completely blow up
(43:38):
in your face, and the anxiety and the stress around
this book deal and how I have actually no idea
how to write a book, because at that point I've
been living on a four hour news cycle for three
years and had the beginnings of an ulcer before the
age of twenty five. I had no idea how to
write a novel. And yet here I am with an
opportunity to not just write one, but to write two
(43:59):
with an option for a third, and I don't have
any time to do it, and I choke so hard
and so completely that it quickly becomes a writer's block
that is a decade in the making. And because I
can't write, I'm teaching at preschools, I'm teaching at bookstores.
(44:20):
I'm trying to claw my way out of this block
that I'm so deeply ashamed of that everyone ten years
on is saying things like, so, how's the book, And
I'm like, almost done, and of course is not anywhere.
I can't even write a paragraph, let alone finish to
possibly three books in six months. And that sort of
(44:42):
struggle is what happens during that ten years where everything
is sitting in storage. When Colin and I start going
through everything, is when I have basically I've had six
months of creative recovery. At this point, I'm living in
La so I'm back around show business, and I start
(45:02):
writing jokes for other people's scripts, which doesn't make me
anxious because it's not my script and I won't have
to tell the joke. So I start writing for other
stand ups, and I start ghostwriting speeches for people who
I used to edit at the Huffington Post, and I'm
kind of clogging my way back into being able to
write and being how I pay the bills, and I
(45:24):
start being able to live this Los Angeles existence, which
is for show business civilians. There are many very creative
and successful writers in Los Angeles, and you've never seen
anything they've made, because you can write television shows and
movies and sell them for a lot of money and
(45:45):
they will never get made. And I found myself in
that writer experience where I'm successful but nothing's actually getting made,
and I start thirsting for something. And so I had
started wildly unsuccessfully pitching this story that was the ten.
(46:06):
But it had nothing to do with myself. It was
just a political story because I wanted a big swing
about America and who we are and these issues that
were coming to the forefront and I knew that I
knew the Ten and I could report on it because
I had been there. If I needed to hit the road,
I would know where to go. I tried for five
(46:27):
years to sell that magazine story, and everyone was just
sort of like, no one knows you as a political reporter,
No one trusts your take on what any of this means,
and why should they. What we're interested in is you.
So if you have a story you want to pitch
us that's about you and your story, then come back.
(46:48):
So when I read the journal, I had already had
this idea about doing a trip on the Ten. I
had already had the idea about America and the South
and the Southwest that I want to talk about. I
had already been told the only way anyone's going to
want to hear from you is if it's something about
you and extension your family. And in that cutthroat, deeply
(47:13):
ambitious journalist part of my brain looked at their a
journal and immediately knew that's the ticket. This is the
personal aspect of the story that's been missing. And I
think it was also a very helpful psychological relief, like
a tool to inject emotional distance. I'm not dealing with this.
(47:34):
I'm reporting on this, which is very different and certainly
gave me a permission structure for getting into that work.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
It's so interesting because my sort of hot take on
that is that when you were out there pitching the
story of the ten, the journalistic story, this was already
somewhere hovering, and then like a thunderclap when you read
the Red Notebook, it came together, but you had already
(48:02):
been paving the way for it, without knowing that you
were paving the way for it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
I don't have kids, so I have no experience of
there's a soul waiting to enter the family, or there's
an apple and there's a gleam in my eye that
will one day be my progeny. I don't have any
personal experience of that. What I do have experience with
is that sort of the bizarre mysticism of creativity and
(48:28):
how the work comes to us when we need it.
Maybe the deepest cynics become the most fervent mystics. And
I can say that my experience of creative block and
creative recovery from block made me a deep believer in
when the work presents itself, say yes, and the work
entered the chat with tap dance shoes on and a
(48:49):
cone brawl on fire. It was just like this is happening.
Speaker 2 (48:52):
Buckle up, and so Ea tries to follow the map
of notes as burning questions and no way of knowing
whether or where she might find answers. She and Minnie
make stops in Phoenix, Tucson, White Sands National Park in
New Mexico. They go to Marfa, Texas, New Orleans, until
(49:17):
they finally arrive in her mother's hometown of Palatka, Florida,
And though she doesn't find exactly what she was looking for,
she finds something infinitely more meaningful, a way of understanding
her mother and her history and therefore herself.
Speaker 1 (49:36):
So my mother's family is one girl, three boys. My
family is one girl, three boys. My father's family one girl,
three boys. The biggest significant difference between my life when
I wrote the book and my life now is I
have a partner and their family one girl, three boys.
(49:57):
Have no idea the significance or meaning of that, And
I think meaning is usually what we decide to place
on things. I have no idea what the meaning of
one girl, three boys is for me, but it's a
pattern of significant presence in my life.
Speaker 2 (50:12):
Yeah, it calls to mind this quote from Alice Miller
that you highlight fairly deep in the narrative near the
end of your story. Experience has taught us that we
have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness,
the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in
the individual and unique history of our childhood. And so
(50:32):
you by making this trip and by coming to understand
holding the cognitive dissonance of all these things, being unable
to prove that your mother was assaulted by her father,
but knowing that violence was definitely a part of her childhood,
quite possibly sexual violence, and knowing that your grandfather was
(50:53):
a successful army man and also was a drunkard, a charmer,
and a dark presence who was expelled from his own family. Like,
both of these truths can be held in the same palm.
And this journey, to me feels like your journey to
be able to do that in a way that you
(51:14):
can make peace with.
Speaker 1 (51:16):
Yeah, I mean, I think the book. I really love
that Alice Miller quote because I find it fascinating that
people think that the therapeutic process is an inherently egotistical process,
the concept of like, oh, you're just going to sit
there and talk about yourself. Don't you ever get tired
of talking about yourself? And I actually find that therapy
(51:38):
is ego destructive because your problems are so common, so basic,
that they are in a book called the DSM, and
that in fact, the process of sitting and sharing with
someone who you trust and who is capable of meeting
you in that space, you tell them a series of
(51:59):
stores reason they help you connect the dots so that
the dot of what happened last week at brunch with
your girlfriends is connected to the dot of what happened
between you and your mother when you were six years old,
and how you're just recreating the moment over and over
in an unconscious attempt to resolve the dynamic. I find
(52:20):
that this idea that the therapeutics process and the creative
process about being ego driven comes from a place where
it's like, you must acknowledge the unconscious and the subconscious
and the fact that we do things for reasons that
we are not aware of ourselves. I think the therapeutic
(52:41):
process is a permission structure for acknowledging that we are
not always aware of why we do things and the
repercussions not only on ourselves but of the people that
we love. And my mother made many references to being
very wary of psychiatry and psychologists, and the language that
(53:03):
she uses is always like entrapment. But the idea that
there is grace to be found in the realization that
we are not always in control of why we do things,
which meant that holds space or creates even more space
for the understanding that my mother loved me to the
best of her abilities, and that everything that she did
(53:25):
to me in that power dynamic of mother and child,
she was not aware of why she was doing them.
She was not making the connections, she had no one
to share the data points with, She could not see
the patterns, and that allows me to understand her and
to hold primarily the memories of the good days and
(53:47):
not so much the bad days. And that is as
I think anybody who is buried someone with whom they
have a complicated relationship with, it's easier on the other
side of loss to prioritize the good day, I would say.
Joan Didion says that basically her entire life is determined
by the fact that she's from Sacramento, in the Sacramento Valley.
It determined everything about her and everything she ever was
(54:11):
that she'll ever do. And Georgia O'Keefe basically says, it
could not matter less who I am or where I'm from.
It's what I do that determines the course of my life.
And I think these are really about meaning that Didion,
in her drive for narrative is a form of control.
(54:31):
What she's really trying to figure out is not what happened,
but what does it mean? And Georgia O'Keefe is someone
who says, you can tell me that for you, my
paintings of flowers mean vaginas, but I do not co
sign that you get to tell me what my paintings mean.
And I think that when you're talking about family secrets journalistically, emotionally, poetically,
(55:00):
the follow up is not what is the secret? But
what does the secret mean? What does it mean for
your family? What does it mean for your relationships, what
does it mean for your self? Concept And what I
realized is that not having a clean ending did not
signify a lack of meaning. What it meant was that
(55:22):
I had much more flexibility to determine the meaning of
what I discovered about my mother. That it was not
going to be something external. I wasn't going to find
the meaning outside. The meaning was always going to come
from inside, inside the house, inside the journal, inside the dynamic,
inside the process.
Speaker 2 (55:48):
Here's Ea reading one last passage from her memoir, The ten.
Speaker 1 (55:58):
I think there must be something between truth and narrative.
As much as narrative can give us meaning, it can
just as easily deceive. I took to the road in
an attempt to find out what really happened, to try
to divide truth and narrative. Back home in my own
big bed with music on my own radio, I look
over the white binder one last time before setting it
(56:21):
on the shelf next to Yates and Whitman and Plath.
Reading my mother's words was a conversation with her on
her own terms, and she told me that she lived
honestly in accordance with the story she needed to survive.
Speaker 2 (56:47):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Acur is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story appear on
an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight eight
Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find
(57:08):
me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd like
to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1 (57:32):
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 Things. I want
to know? Where did you grow up? How did you
grow up? Did your father hurt you? Did your mother
hurt you? Where did you go to high school? What
did you like to wear as a little girl? What
(00:22):
did you like to wear as a teenager? Did you
like being a sister? What was your favorite book as
a kid? Did you pick at your skin? Are you
glad you had kids? Why didn't we stop the New
Orleans in nineteen ninety six? Were you afraid to die?
Where was your ropa vieja recipe from Do You Miss Me?
(00:47):
Are you still Mad at Me?
Speaker 2 (00:52):
That's e A Hanks journalist and author of the recent
memoir The Ten, a memoir of family and the Open Road.
Eas is a story of contrasts. As a child, she
was exposed to the depths of mental illness and the
heights of Hollywood celebrity. As she learned to navigate her
(01:12):
place in the world. As an adult, she goes on
a journey to understand those contrasts, buried secrets, and to
make peace with the generations who came before her. I'm
(01:35):
Danny 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 this question, but in your case it feels
(01:55):
even more like the place to begin. So much of
your story is about place and how it informs us.
So tell me about the earliest place that you remember, the.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Earliest place that I remember. My childhood memories of location
are as bifurcated and bipolar, as my adult sort of
identity conundrums were because I was born in Burbank, California,
which is a suburb of Los Angeles, part of the
pulsing megalopolis that is LA. You can't tell when you've
(02:29):
left LA and entered Burbank for people who don't live here.
I was born in southern California, and I ended up
in Sacramento around the age of five. So I had
a typical childhood of divorce, which is that I went
between cities. The arrangement was that I lived with my
mom and I visited my dad, so my winters and
(02:51):
the bulk of my life was in Sacramento. Sacramento is
as maybe it's the most famous citizen. Johan Didean describes
it the ubiquitous valley town. It's extremely flat. The air
kind of sits on it in between the Pacific and
the Sierra Nevadas, so the heat really lays on the city.
The summers or kind of one hundred winters, are very rainy.
(03:15):
I grew up a horse girl, and so the bulk
of my time was spent out in this area that
unfortunately doesn't really exist anymore. It's all been built over
by track homes and fulfillment centers and god knows what else.
But when I close my eyes and I say, what
is the landscape of your childhood? I toggle back and
forth between the rice patties outside of Sacramento, because there's
(03:39):
a huge Japanese American community in Sacramento that used to
grow the bulk of rice for the world outside of Sacramento,
and it was just as far as the eye could see,
these kind of like emerald fields that are water logged
because rice is grown in water, and so the sun
would hit the water and the green rice shoots, and
(04:00):
I just remember the sense that this green could go
on forever, and between the ocean and the mountains. It
was not a hidden valley, but a place that was
separate from the rest of the world. And then the
opposite side of that is my childhood memories of southern
California during the weekends and the summers i'd be with
my dad when he wasn't on location shooting. Those are
(04:22):
all of Malibu, which at the time certainly had money
and stature, but was not quite as built up and
fancy as it is now, kind of run down, a
lot of old hippies, and the sort of beach esthetic
of early nineties Malibu was baywatch and breakfast burritos and
(04:45):
the smell of a warm wetsuit and it's called sex wax,
what you rub onto your surfboard. So I had these
very classic Californian landscapes of the valley farming town and
the southern California beach, and I'm of both of them equally.
I can't prioritize one over the other because my childhood
(05:09):
is so rooted in both of those places.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
That makes so much sense and such a beautiful answer.
It seems the way that you're describing this sort of
split screen of these two very different landscapes is also
mirrored in these two very different experiences of being a
kid with a parent. Tell me a bit about your
(05:35):
mom from those Sacramento years when you were little, and
then a little bit about your dad as well.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
My mom, even when I was an adolescent, was this
sort of romantically tragic figure to me. And it's strange
that when I think back about her in my childhood
to realize how young she was at the time. Your
parents are just perpetually middle aged to you, but I
it's very strange to look back at these memories and
realize I'm describing someone who's twenty nine years old, thirty
(06:06):
three years old, thirty six years old. At that age
when I was a child, my mom had this failure
to launch in a way that there was something about
her life that had never You know, when you're learning
how to ride a bike and you're trying to get
your sense of balance and then you wobble a little bit,
but then you find that center and you find your
(06:27):
balance and you can take off, or you know, like
the surfboard, when you pop up you funny hit your
stride and you can glide. My mom just never hit that.
Everything was always difficult with her. Friendships were difficult, Parenting
was difficult, making sure the kitchen sink was empty and
the fridge was full, was difficult. Everything was a struggle,
(06:52):
and this sense that she had already been benched by
my father's fame, by her lack of a career as
a stage artist, which is how she thought of herself.
And in the background of this varying degrees of dysfunction
(07:13):
was the art that she so valued and cherished. I
grew up in a house with many books and newspapers
and being told this weekend, we're going to watch Churrosawa
films because they're important to watch. And there was classical
music because my mom's mom listened to quite a lot
(07:33):
of classical music, and so did my mom, and so
do I. Now my mom was romantic to me in
the way that romance is tragic, and this sense that
her relationship with reality was never obviously a defense mechanism.
It was something she was not in control of. I'm
(07:54):
trying to describe the depths of my mom's evangelical fervor.
Because my mother was, as she would say, washed in
the blood of the Lamb, and she had accepted Jesus
Christ as her personal Lord and savior. Her dependence on
her faith was such and it loomed so large for
her that you know, as a child, I once said,
why is the date ten sixty six important? And maybe
(08:17):
another parent would start explaining the Anglo Saxons and the
Battle of Hastings, But my mom's answer started, when you
don't have the love and light of Jesus Christ in
your heart, which is an interesting approach to teaching medieval history.
So she was baffling to me in a way that
all parents are baffling to their children. But even as
(08:38):
a child, I had a sense that something was not
adding up about her life, that her interpretations of events
that happened days previously never matched mine. But that also
the barometers of adulthood that I was aware of even
as a child, that a house should be clean, that
you should have help with your homework, that there should
be regular meals, that your life should be populated with
(09:01):
friends and loved ones who pop in. That was all absent,
and I was able to sort of clock that at
a very early age.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
No, that's so interesting because our childhoods are so often
these kinds of echo chambers, where the reality that we
are contending with is the only reality we know. And
you did not have that because of your parents' divorce,
you had two different realities that you were to some
(09:29):
degree in those early years toggling back and forth between.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
This word has kind of fallen out of use in
this capacity, But I had a very Catholic childhood in
the small sea of like very high highs, very low lows.
My existence with my mom verged on the gray gardens.
There weren't quite raccoons, but it was two crazy biddies
knocking around this house with stacks of newspaper and petae everywhere.
(09:53):
And then my life with my dad came equipped with
not just my dad, the whole cast of characters that
was my Greek step family. Because my dad married I
call her my other mother, Rita Wilson. They married when
I was around five or six, and she came with
cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents, and so I
(10:16):
had the view of what family could be like, and
I was aware that my mom was not up for
any of that. I just knew that my mom was
not like other parents, but I didn't understand how deeply
strange and off putting she was to other people. That
stuff I thought was normal when she would speak to herself,
(10:37):
because from her perspective, she was in a conversation with
the voice of God, the way that she could not
take care of her hygiene and clothing, all of those
things I mistook for normal because that was all I knew,
and the blueprint had already been laid before I would
start going back and forth between my two different families.
(11:00):
Really strange blend of being aware that something isn't quite
adding up. And then also you only know the aquarium
you're swimming around in, you think the castle is supposed
to be that size. It's an odd sort of chamber
of mirrors of what is normal. And for every friend
(11:20):
I had that was not allowed to come to my
house and certainly was never allowed to spend the night.
I had other friends, non school friends, for whom my
mom was the cool mom who said, Oh, dinner will
be cookie dough, and you can dye your hair whatever
color you want, and I will drive you all over
the state to compete in horse Things can be hard
to pin down with that childhood experiences because it was
(11:42):
in its nature different every day. So my dad, for listeners,
is a man you might have heard of. His name
is Tom Hanks, and my dad has his own sort
of family struggles in that my dad's parents divorced, and
then his mom and his dad each had a succession
of failed marriages, which meant step parents would show up
(12:06):
and step siblings, and then a couple years later they'd
be gone again. I think his dad married two more times,
and my grandmother remarried four times. So they worked that courthouse.
There's a lot of people coming and going. So my
dad had a very lonely childhood of being an artist
(12:27):
in his bedroom, working out jokes to make the kids
at school laugh. And by the time he bumps into
my mom, their college students at sax State in Sacramento,
and their theater kids, and they're not really friends. They
don't really know each other, and they're not particularly close.
(12:49):
But my mom had just had her heart broken by
a guy I think she thought she was gonna marry,
and he was certainly on paper, more of what she
was looking for. And my dad was funny and charming,
but he was awkward and very sensitive, and she let
him take a crack because she was on the rebound.
(13:10):
My dad was twenty two when my brother Colin was born,
and my mom was only twenty four or twenty five,
and so these are kids, they're young adults who have
no concept of how to be parents, to have a home,
how to raise people, and so they're both working with
(13:31):
what they've got. The difference between them is my dad
lives in reality and my mom is already starting to
show signs of significant mental health struggles. She's already lying
and stealing from people that she loves and who love her,
and has different versions of events.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
She has rage, she has all of these sort of
issues that are disquieting to my dad, but coming from
a broken hon himself.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
He has a young son now, and he has a
burgeoning career, so he's gonna make it work for as
long as he can, and as long as he can
goes till around nineteen eighty five, nineteen eighty six. Colin's
born in seventy seven. I'm born in eighty two, and
the best part about having famous parents is being able
to google their birthdays and anniversaries. So I can't remember
(14:28):
when Dad and Rita got married. I think they got
married in eighty eight. So that's where all of the
cast of characters are coming from, which are funny, talented,
ambitious young people who have no concept of stability of
parents who will be there every Day of How to
(14:51):
Be a Family on the regular, and they find themselves
with two young kids. When Colin is born, my parents
are living in a hellhole apartment in Hell's Kitchen in
New York in nineteen seventy seven. They don't get married
until Colin's already two years old, so around seventy nine,
(15:13):
and that is around when the second season of Bosom Buddies,
everyone's favorite television show. So Bosom Buddies had happened, and
my parents are still married. When my dad shoots Splash,
which is his big breakout moment, but it's not until
Big which I think is eighty nine or ninety. I
(15:36):
know there's going to be a Tom Hanks fan who
is listening who is so deeply disappointed in me that
I do not have this IMDb in front of me.
In the grand tradition of show business, we'll fix it
in the post. I think it's accurate to say that
in terms of my dad's fame, I was not born
on third base, but we certainly moved there in the
mid nineties. Colin and I have a sort of verbal
(16:00):
marker for when things get crazy, and we call it
beg and ag, which is my dad's fame is one
thing before Forrest Gump, and it's a completely different thing
after Forrest Gump. He was famous, and he had made
movies and was out of the significant and crushing financial
stress that he had been in his young adulthood. Basically,
(16:23):
my mom kidnapped us, Colin and I and took us
to Sacramento without telling my dad, and they were in
the middle of divorce proceedings by the time we end
up in Sacramento. My Dad's kind of on his way.
He is not Tom Hanks's global movie star, but he
is Tom hanks promising actor who's going to do big things.
(16:44):
I'm like twelve years old when the full sort of
experience kicks in.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
In February nineteen ninety six, at the age of thirteen,
(17:13):
Ea makes the pivotal move from Sacramento to Los Angeles,
a shift set in motion by escalating tensions and abuse
in her mother's home. The realization that she needs to
escape is validated by lawyers, police, teachers, and neighbors, all
finally storming the bestiale of the custody arrangement, which now
(17:34):
needs to be changed. She leaves mid school year and
lands in a very different world, her father directing his
first film, a newly blended family, and the beginning of
a new chapter. That summer, in the emotional wake of
her departure, Ba's mother comes back into focus. She wants
(17:55):
to take her on a sprawling, enigmatic road trip, one
that seems to aim at connecting the dots of a
fractured family history. EA barely knows.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
So it's in the thick of all of this that
my mom announces that we're going to buy Owennebago and
drive to Florida, where my grandmother lives. And that's really
the only thing I know about my mom's family. I
know that my grandmother at some point lived in Sacramento
with us, and then she moved back to her hometown,
(18:28):
which is Palatka, Florida, which is a central Florida town
not too far from the Okaala National Forest, which is
sizable and impressive. And I know that my mom's father
is a military man who is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
And all I know about him is that when I
told my mom that I had peeled off from an
(18:50):
eighth grade school trip to Arlington to see his grave.
She looked at me. I finished my sentence. She went
up to her bedroom. She closed the door and did
not come out for I think about a week. She
would not speak to me and did not acknowledge my questions.
So I did not know where my mom was born.
I did not know where she went to high school.
(19:10):
I had no idea where she grew up, or who
her friends were, or what her relationship was like with
her parents. I had not met two of my uncles.
And so she buys this Winnebago and we hit the
road because we're going to Florida and then we will
eventually continue on to the nineteen ninety six Olympics in Atlanta.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Was Colin on that road trip as well, or was
it you and your mom?
Speaker 1 (19:32):
No, it was just me and my mom. Colin had
a coterie of incredibly close friends. We grew up in
a neighborhood of East Sacramento. It's very idyllic, it's really beautiful,
and there was just a pack of boys all around
the same age, and they all hung out at the
same place. It's misleading to call it a country club.
(19:54):
It is a country club, but it's small and very
ramshackle and old, very waspy. It's like the nice it
is falling apart around the edges. And it was a
place for all of these boys to eat chips and
watch Brend and Stimpy reruns and occasionally play water polo
or tennis on the one tennis court that they have.
These boys became family to the extent that at some
(20:17):
point before I had left my mother's house, he had
already moved out and was living with a family that
had seen what was going on and just very casually said,
you can spend the night on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and
then it was you can spend the night on Tuesdays
and Wednesdays. So it got to the point where essentially
(20:37):
Colin had already moved out, and that is in part
what precipitated things really starting to fall apart with my
mom because there was no one watching the store. Colin,
as older siblings very often are, was the great protector
and had kept an eye on my mother's increasingly fragile
(20:58):
mental state. And so when once he wasn't around is
kind of when everything started to go pear shaped. And
that summer he was not on the road because he
had really started to individuate and to begin his own life,
and he was headed off to college.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
It's so interesting the way that two siblings or multiple
siblings can have such different experiences depending on luck of
this posse of boys in the neighborhood. And you just
didn't have your version of that. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
I remember I had my friends who were my horseback
riding sort of friends, but they knew my mom was
the cool mom. They didn't see the other stuff that
was going on. They were not an avenue out. They
were about staying in one place. So when we hit
the road, I had just moved to Los Angeles and
my mother was barely speaking to me. And because it
(21:54):
was just the two of us, we move into this
Winnebago barely saying a thing to each other, and I
don't think we had really had a conversation until we
got on the far side of Texas. And if anybody's
driven the tent through Texas, hits a long road with
very little on the horizon. It got very faulkner. It
(22:16):
got very as I lay dying very quickly until we
got to Florida. By that time things had warmed up
a little bit.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
You're stuck You're in this Winnebago with your mom, who
you're very much not getting along with and who has
a loose grip on reality, and you're making this journey.
How would you characterize your inner state during that time?
Speaker 1 (22:37):
It was surreal. Basically, I leave my mother's house because
her sort of usually vague threats of violence had become concrete.
My mom had been physically intimidating for as long as
I could remember. She spanked, but she also pulled hair
and dragged and shooked and shoved, but she had never
(22:59):
just hul doubt and started hitting me across the face.
But that's what had happened, and that's why I was
finally able to leave. And now suddenly I've had to
give depositions, and I've talked to lawyers and court appointed psychotherapists,
and we've had screaming fights where she does not remember
(23:20):
hitting me, or if she does, she remembers that I
deserved it. And now we're in a van, stuck in
a very small space together, barely speaking and trying to
cross Texas the hours of silence or having my headphones
(23:40):
on while my mom just chain spokes because she really
wanted to get to Florida as quickly as possible. So
it was just this unrelenting pace of just driving for
hours and hours and hours until she would finally pass out.
Because I was too young to drive at this point.
We would drive as far as we could, and then
we'd try the inn too, some campground of America, and
(24:02):
she would just go to the back bed and completely
pass out. There was no Okay, what are we going
to do for dinner or where are we It was
I paid for a spot, I'm going to park it
and fall asleep, and then me, fourteen year old, I'd
have to set up the gray water tank and the
poop shoot and the electricity and get the generator going.
So it was just this very bizarre month and a
(24:25):
half of this surreal experience of being on the open
road with a woman who we love each other more
than anything, but also I'm terrified of her. She's furious
and broken hearted with me. And the worst thing that
can happen is the batteries on my discman get worn
(24:48):
out because I've just listened to my four CDs too
many times as a way of filling the silence of
these miles on the highway and the vast expanse the
American South. There was a bunch of trips that kind
of I only found out after much much later, were
(25:09):
actually sort of court appointed mother daughter things. I remember
we went to Disneyland in the middle of all of
the court proceedings. It was absolutely hilatious. It was a
horrible trip, and I didn't know until years and years
later that we went because some judge or some lawyer said,
you guys should have some quality time together, go to Disneyland.
(25:30):
I was like, Okay, I guess we're going to Disneyland.
I think there had been maybe some sort of conversation
about there needs to be a trip this summer, and
maybe that was what was the thinking behind the Atlanta Olympics,
because my mother certainly did not have it together to
be like, I'm going to research Olympic tickets and airplane
costs and book the hotel and all of that. That
(25:51):
was just all of that was way beyond her. She's
not agoraphobic, but she's not leaving the house because she
doesn't have anywhere to go or anyone to see. And
suddenly we're at the Olympics and stuff like that. So
I think there might have been something around that and
the Olympics, and thinking that was a good idea, But
there was no sort of stated narrative around I want
(26:13):
you to see where we're from, and I want you
to know your grandmother better, and I want you to
see the South. That's how she would conceive of it
after the fact, But I think it was just that's
actually a very good question that I have never thought of.
Why did my mother want to go on the trip?
I was just kind of part and parcel. But I
wonder if after the trauma of the year and now
(26:35):
both of her children being out of the house, and
the stress of the court case and everything around the
custody agreement, if there was some level of she wanted
to see her mom. I would not be surprised if
that was a deep desire for her at the time.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Did you return from that trip feeling like you knew
anything more about your family history or your mother's than
you did before you set out.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
No, I didn't learn anything on that trip because my grandmother,
much like my mother, refused to talk about anything. That
trip was the first time I'd even seen a picture
of my grandfather. So it's very shocking to walk by
and be like who's this man who looks like me?
And realizing that it's my mother's father. My grandmother lived
(27:24):
in reality, my grandmother was not mentally ill, but she
was maybe as I would go on to discover the
true Southerner in the family, and that came out in
a lot of different ways. And one of the ways
it came out was we don't talk about that. So
when I asked her, I think that was the first
time I had anyone to ask explicitly who was my grandfather?
(27:46):
What was your marriage like, and why did it end?
And what did he do? That was my first experience
being told to my face, we don't talk about that,
and furthermore, you shouldn't ask what I do remember thinking
that I had finally seen and understood was the South
and being called, oh, you're Harriet's Yankee granddaughter. I've heard
(28:08):
about you. Being called a Yankee to your face for
the first time is a bracing experience. And that was also,
you know, my first time at Waffle Hut and Cracker
Barrel and Pigley Wiggly and seeing drive through dackery shops
in Louisiana and seeing the emptiness of West Texas and
seeing the desert and seeing the swamps of like, Oh,
(28:30):
I think my family is southern, and now I know
what that is. I know enough to be curious, but
I don't know enough to understand anything.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
It's now the spring of EA's senior year in high school,
and her mother is dying.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
My mom did not trust doctors because she thought they
were all She thought my dad was sending people to
kill her or to hasten her death. Sometimes it was
that remarkable, and sometimes she just didn't trust doctors, and
she thought that they were crooks who would say something
and take your money, or that they would be so
(29:11):
blindsided by the name of her ex husband that they
would somehow not have their priorities in line. So she
put off going to the doctors for many, many years,
and finally she was in such crippling pain because her
arm hurt, and so she finally went to the doctor
and discovered that, in fact, she had stage three, stage
(29:31):
four lung cancer that had completely taken over one of
her lungs and had spread to her bones. And actually
the reason why her arm hurt is because she had
bone cancer and it had spread to her rib cage
and headed into her endercin system and her brain stem.
So she was diagnosed right around Christmas of my senior
year of high school, which is right before two thousand,
(29:53):
nineteen ninety nine, two thousand and she dies my spring
break of my freshman year of college, which is two
thousand and two, so it was brief. She lasted about
a little over a year.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
After EA's mother's death, EA and Colin returned to Sacramento
and put all her mother's stuff into storage. And she
has a lot, a lot of stuff. It's nineteen ninety
nine and some people are experiencing panic about Y two K.
EA's mom is one of them. EA calls her a
(30:29):
Y two K aficionado. She has enough canned goods to
survive the apocalypse. It's all too much to deal with,
so the siblings put everything into storage, figuring they'll deal
with it sometime soon.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
I think it was Haley Ephron, one of Nora Ephron's
talented sisters, and I remember on NPR she was asked,
why write about your childhood when you're much more famous
sibling already did just a toozy of a question and
lot more empathy for that question now, And the answer
was genius, which was that no sibling grows up in
(31:06):
the same house. Exactly Colin's experience of that is he
was already a working actor. He was already in the
grand tradition of Hanks's. He had not finished college because
he got cast in something, and so he was already
on his way. And so he had really wrangled the
bureaucracy of my mom's death, putting the house on the market,
(31:27):
dealing with the last will and testament, paying for all
the little things that a crewe and by the time
all of that was handled, he had nothing in the tank,
and I had nothing to offer. So it became let's
just get all of this stuff into storage and we
can deal with it quote unquote in a couple months,
(31:48):
and that becomes a full decade. My mom gets put
on the back shelf as it pertains to her stuff
and also the woman herself. It's like, well, we'll deal
with that when we have the bandwidth, and we didn't
have the bandwidth. Arguably I still don't, but we cracked
open the locks about ten years on.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
And during those years, you're working as a journalist for
Vanity Fair. You were trying to get on with your life,
but there was also this detritus of a life that's
like sitting there. It's like it's got a heartbeat, it's ticking.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Yeah, it's waiting. Yeah. I had graduated college, which was
absolutely devastating, and hit the ground running because I wanted
to be a writer and I wanted to work at
magazines and that meant living on as I call it,
work Booze Island. So I had a series of really
high stress and demanding jobs that kept me in the
(32:46):
Manhattan run around. And I was also very clearly not
just trying to get my career started, but I was
also trying to see how long I could go without
dealing with it all on any level.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
No makes so much sense. So then it's ten years
later and was there a reason or a moment?
Speaker 1 (33:05):
So by the time Colin and I go back to
Sacramento to finally deal with everything, Colin is in the
middle of working on his first documentary, the most excellent
All Things Must Pass, The Rise and Fall of Tower Records,
which is a Sacramento story, and so Colin and his
producing partner, one of the boys from East Sacramento, that
(33:27):
posse we were all going to be back, and it
was the sense of, Okay, we're all going to be
in Sacramento, so maybe this is the time to do this.
At that point, I had left New York, I was
living in Los Angeles and was pretty lost in that
late twenties to mid thirties. Oh God, I have a
(33:48):
diminishing runway to get my act together and figure out
if I'm going to have a good life post college.
You have a horrific realization of it might not be
just a bad summer. It could be like a bad life.
I don't want to be my mom. I don't want
to have this failure to launch. I want to succeed
in being a whole person. So what did that mean?
(34:09):
That meant starting some pretty serious therapy and saying, whatever
is sitting there in storage, I think I'm ready to
start going through it. And up goes that clanging metal door,
and what we see is essentially a life frozen in time,
because when we threw everything in there, it was really
(34:30):
like we didn't edit anything or go through anything. One
of the things I found was this bag of maggots
because we had thrown all of these boxes not knowing
what they were. And part of it was my mom's
y two K like food hoard that next to six
boxes of horseshow ribbons and romance novels. Who's a real
(34:52):
grab bag of a confusing life.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
And in that storage also there's a white binder of
poetry that your mother had written, and a dozen reporters notebooks.
But that's like a bridge too far. You don't look
at those for a few years.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
Yeah. So I find essentially these huge sort of storage
tupperware boxes of all of her papers, and there were
a handful of things that I'd been looking for, and
then there were a couple of things that I just
grabbed with that sort of journalistic idea, that hunch of
maybe there's something in there. My journalistic predilection is I
(35:36):
will go through your trash and piece together shredded facts
if it's going to help me put the story together.
So when I saw that there was some version of
a paper trail, I was like, I don't even know
what would be in there. And there were these notebooks
of cars that she thought were following her, or numbers
(35:57):
that she was convinced were the CIAH tracking her phone
calls as opposed to like people trying to sell you
a set of encyclopedias or something. And this binder of
her poetry, which I knew that she wrote, but I
had never read. And at this point I had become
an aunt, so I had an eye on trying to
(36:17):
find something of my mother to share with my three nieces.
That was an instinct as well. And what I end
up with ultimately is this white binder of my mom's
poetry and this red journal of hers, which is the
thing that kicks it all off.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
So tell me a little bit about what you started
to read. You're like piecing together a puzzle, but it's
not just a puzzle. It's like aasmagorical puzzle, Like it's
putting together a puzzle when you don't actually know whether
the pieces you hold in your hands are actually pieces.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
Yeah, or even from the same puzzle. Yeah. So I'm
reading this sort of red journal and it was like
the sort of stream of consciousness images very often written
as prayers. Dear Jesus, thank you for showing us where
to find the dead Sea scrolls, Oh, my beautiful Lord
(37:17):
and Savior, thank you for getting all of the drug
dealers out of Sacramento. And then, just in the middle
of it, almost as an aside, I read, thank you
for protecting me and keeping me from going insane when
I remembered my father raping, murdering, and cannibalizing a little girl.
(37:45):
And when I read it, it is the best example
I have personally in my life and also in my
body of being deeply shocked and not at all surprised.
This is the first thing I've heard about my grandfather
(38:05):
from my mother. I barely know his real name, which
is John Raymond Dillingham. I don't know where he was born.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Well.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
I know when he died, in part because my father
told me that. I had asked my dad, was I
save the marriage, baby, and he said no, but you
were a someone died, and I feel the urge to
create life baby. And that's because my grandfather died in
nineteen eighty one, and it's his death that made my
mom want to have another child in a marriage that
(38:36):
was already failed. So all I know about this man
is that my mom won't speak about that. No one
will speak about him. I've met three of my uncles
in passing. I've asked my grandmother about him, and she's
explicitly said, we don't talk about that. And now here's
my mom just offhandedly describing what I can only say
(38:57):
is like a podcast worthy cry of rape, murder, dismemberment,
and cannibalization.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
Just for clarity's sake, was this This is the grandfather
who is buried at Arlington Arlington. Yeah, and when you
peeled off from the class trip to visit his grave
and you told your mother about that, and so that
must have also been this kind of callback to that moment.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Yeah, I remember reading it. Suddenly, of the very few
pieces of information, I have this memory of saying, hey,
I went to go see Grandpa John's gravestone. And the
response is, oh, that's so incredible, or isn't it remarkable
that he's buried at Arlington, or let me show you
some pictures of him. It's to look at me blankly
(39:47):
and then shut herself in a room in silence and
refuse to come out for a week. And it's my
grandmother refusing to even say his name. So suddenly it's okay,
I have person experience of how bad my mom is
at keeping reality straight of this is what we did yesterday,
(40:08):
This is what this person said to me. This is
how my marriage ended. This is why my ex husband
is famous. This is why my son lives with another family.
Those are all things that my mom could not hold
the truth of And yet here's this accusation or this
(40:30):
bit of information that suddenly makes all these very disparate
and strange memories of mine kind of make sense. And
it becomes what I know about mom is there's always
a grain of truth in her version of events. It
just ends up deformed and hard to follow. How much
(40:53):
of any of this is true? Is it possible that
the whole thing is true? And what does that mean
for the way my mother was raised and the lessons
that she taught me about God, everything, men and women, marriage,
parents and children, what a family is, what should be
(41:17):
discussed and what shouldn't be discussed? How do we feel
about the concept of justice or sex? The chasm of
how in the dark I was about who my mother
was and what card she was playing with, and what
is the hand that she in turn dealt me? It
all opened up in front of me in a very
(41:39):
obvious way. It was as the sort of adventure and
question and deep emotional process appeared to me with as
much nuance as the yellow brick road in front of Dorothy.
It became very clear to me that I had an
opportunity to do all of that work around my mother
(42:00):
and our relationship and her death and my concept of
who she is and who I am. That was all
suddenly the work presented itself.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
We'll be right back. Two decades after her mother's death,
(42:33):
Ea feels not only an opportunity but also a profound
urgency to understand the woman who shaped her and in turn,
the roots of her own identity. She has an idea
a road trip. Driving a trusty old Mini van named Minnie,
her father's indestructible, well worn vehicle, Ea sets out to
(42:55):
retrace the journey her mother once took her on. What
starts as a drive down to ten quickly becomes something
far more layered, a search for meaning, memory, and the
elusive pieces of her past. This is the story she's
meant to investigate, to write.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
So by the time I discover the journals, I'm in
a creative and professional rut, which is when I leave
New York. I have a book deal, I've worked for
Vanity Fair, I've worked for the Huffington Post. I am
officially on my way, and then, as so often happens,
getting everything that you want makes everything completely blow up
(43:38):
in your face, and the anxiety and the stress around
this book deal and how I have actually no idea
how to write a book, because at that point I've
been living on a four hour news cycle for three
years and had the beginnings of an ulcer before the
age of twenty five. I had no idea how to
write a novel. And yet here I am with an
opportunity to not just write one, but to write two
(43:59):
with an option for a third, and I don't have
any time to do it, and I choke so hard
and so completely that it quickly becomes a writer's block
that is a decade in the making. And because I
can't write, I'm teaching at preschools, I'm teaching at bookstores.
(44:20):
I'm trying to claw my way out of this block
that I'm so deeply ashamed of that everyone ten years
on is saying things like, so, how's the book, And
I'm like, almost done, and of course is not anywhere.
I can't even write a paragraph, let alone finish to
possibly three books in six months. And that sort of
(44:42):
struggle is what happens during that ten years where everything
is sitting in storage. When Colin and I start going
through everything, is when I have basically I've had six
months of creative recovery. At this point, I'm living in
La so I'm back around show business, and I start
(45:02):
writing jokes for other people's scripts, which doesn't make me
anxious because it's not my script and I won't have
to tell the joke. So I start writing for other
stand ups, and I start ghostwriting speeches for people who
I used to edit at the Huffington Post, and I'm
kind of clogging my way back into being able to
write and being how I pay the bills, and I
(45:24):
start being able to live this Los Angeles existence, which
is for show business civilians. There are many very creative
and successful writers in Los Angeles, and you've never seen
anything they've made, because you can write television shows and
movies and sell them for a lot of money and
(45:45):
they will never get made. And I found myself in
that writer experience where I'm successful but nothing's actually getting made,
and I start thirsting for something. And so I had
started wildly unsuccessfully pitching this story that was the ten.
(46:06):
But it had nothing to do with myself. It was
just a political story because I wanted a big swing
about America and who we are and these issues that
were coming to the forefront and I knew that I
knew the Ten and I could report on it because
I had been there. If I needed to hit the road,
I would know where to go. I tried for five
(46:27):
years to sell that magazine story, and everyone was just
sort of like, no one knows you as a political reporter,
No one trusts your take on what any of this means,
and why should they. What we're interested in is you.
So if you have a story you want to pitch
us that's about you and your story, then come back.
(46:48):
So when I read the journal, I had already had
this idea about doing a trip on the Ten. I
had already had the idea about America and the South
and the Southwest that I want to talk about. I
had already been told the only way anyone's going to
want to hear from you is if it's something about
you and extension your family. And in that cutthroat, deeply
(47:13):
ambitious journalist part of my brain looked at their a
journal and immediately knew that's the ticket. This is the
personal aspect of the story that's been missing. And I
think it was also a very helpful psychological relief, like
a tool to inject emotional distance. I'm not dealing with this.
(47:34):
I'm reporting on this, which is very different and certainly
gave me a permission structure for getting into that work.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
It's so interesting because my sort of hot take on
that is that when you were out there pitching the
story of the ten, the journalistic story, this was already
somewhere hovering, and then like a thunderclap when you read
the Red Notebook, it came together, but you had already
(48:02):
been paving the way for it, without knowing that you
were paving the way for it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
I don't have kids, so I have no experience of
there's a soul waiting to enter the family, or there's
an apple and there's a gleam in my eye that
will one day be my progeny. I don't have any
personal experience of that. What I do have experience with
is that sort of the bizarre mysticism of creativity and
(48:28):
how the work comes to us when we need it.
Maybe the deepest cynics become the most fervent mystics. And
I can say that my experience of creative block and
creative recovery from block made me a deep believer in
when the work presents itself, say yes, and the work
entered the chat with tap dance shoes on and a
(48:49):
cone brawl on fire. It was just like this is happening.
Speaker 2 (48:52):
Buckle up, and so Ea tries to follow the map
of notes as burning questions and no way of knowing
whether or where she might find answers. She and Minnie
make stops in Phoenix, Tucson, White Sands National Park in
New Mexico. They go to Marfa, Texas, New Orleans, until
(49:17):
they finally arrive in her mother's hometown of Palatka, Florida,
And though she doesn't find exactly what she was looking for,
she finds something infinitely more meaningful, a way of understanding
her mother and her history and therefore herself.
Speaker 1 (49:36):
So my mother's family is one girl, three boys. My
family is one girl, three boys. My father's family one girl,
three boys. The biggest significant difference between my life when
I wrote the book and my life now is I
have a partner and their family one girl, three boys.
(49:57):
Have no idea the significance or meaning of that, And
I think meaning is usually what we decide to place
on things. I have no idea what the meaning of
one girl, three boys is for me, but it's a
pattern of significant presence in my life.
Speaker 2 (50:12):
Yeah, it calls to mind this quote from Alice Miller
that you highlight fairly deep in the narrative near the
end of your story. Experience has taught us that we
have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness,
the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in
the individual and unique history of our childhood. And so
(50:32):
you by making this trip and by coming to understand
holding the cognitive dissonance of all these things, being unable
to prove that your mother was assaulted by her father,
but knowing that violence was definitely a part of her childhood,
quite possibly sexual violence, and knowing that your grandfather was
(50:53):
a successful army man and also was a drunkard, a charmer,
and a dark presence who was expelled from his own family. Like,
both of these truths can be held in the same palm.
And this journey, to me feels like your journey to
be able to do that in a way that you
(51:14):
can make peace with.
Speaker 1 (51:16):
Yeah, I mean, I think the book. I really love
that Alice Miller quote because I find it fascinating that
people think that the therapeutic process is an inherently egotistical process,
the concept of like, oh, you're just going to sit
there and talk about yourself. Don't you ever get tired
of talking about yourself? And I actually find that therapy
(51:38):
is ego destructive because your problems are so common, so basic,
that they are in a book called the DSM, and
that in fact, the process of sitting and sharing with
someone who you trust and who is capable of meeting
you in that space, you tell them a series of
(51:59):
stores reason they help you connect the dots so that
the dot of what happened last week at brunch with
your girlfriends is connected to the dot of what happened
between you and your mother when you were six years old,
and how you're just recreating the moment over and over
in an unconscious attempt to resolve the dynamic. I find
(52:20):
that this idea that the therapeutics process and the creative
process about being ego driven comes from a place where
it's like, you must acknowledge the unconscious and the subconscious
and the fact that we do things for reasons that
we are not aware of ourselves. I think the therapeutic
(52:41):
process is a permission structure for acknowledging that we are
not always aware of why we do things and the
repercussions not only on ourselves but of the people that
we love. And my mother made many references to being
very wary of psychiatry and psychologists, and the language that
(53:03):
she uses is always like entrapment. But the idea that
there is grace to be found in the realization that
we are not always in control of why we do things,
which meant that holds space or creates even more space
for the understanding that my mother loved me to the
best of her abilities, and that everything that she did
(53:25):
to me in that power dynamic of mother and child,
she was not aware of why she was doing them.
She was not making the connections, she had no one
to share the data points with, She could not see
the patterns, and that allows me to understand her and
to hold primarily the memories of the good days and
(53:47):
not so much the bad days. And that is as
I think anybody who is buried someone with whom they
have a complicated relationship with, it's easier on the other
side of loss to prioritize the good day, I would say.
Joan Didion says that basically her entire life is determined
by the fact that she's from Sacramento, in the Sacramento Valley.
It determined everything about her and everything she ever was
(54:11):
that she'll ever do. And Georgia O'Keefe basically says, it
could not matter less who I am or where I'm from.
It's what I do that determines the course of my life.
And I think these are really about meaning that Didion,
in her drive for narrative is a form of control.
(54:31):
What she's really trying to figure out is not what happened,
but what does it mean? And Georgia O'Keefe is someone
who says, you can tell me that for you, my
paintings of flowers mean vaginas, but I do not co
sign that you get to tell me what my paintings mean.
And I think that when you're talking about family secrets journalistically, emotionally, poetically,
(55:00):
the follow up is not what is the secret? But
what does the secret mean? What does it mean for
your family? What does it mean for your relationships, what
does it mean for your self? Concept And what I
realized is that not having a clean ending did not
signify a lack of meaning. What it meant was that
(55:22):
I had much more flexibility to determine the meaning of
what I discovered about my mother. That it was not
going to be something external. I wasn't going to find
the meaning outside. The meaning was always going to come
from inside, inside the house, inside the journal, inside the dynamic,
inside the process.
Speaker 2 (55:48):
Here's Ea reading one last passage from her memoir, The ten.
Speaker 1 (55:58):
I think there must be something between truth and narrative.
As much as narrative can give us meaning, it can
just as easily deceive. I took to the road in
an attempt to find out what really happened, to try
to divide truth and narrative. Back home in my own
big bed with music on my own radio, I look
over the white binder one last time before setting it
(56:21):
on the shelf next to Yates and Whitman and Plath.
Reading my mother's words was a conversation with her on
her own terms, and she told me that she lived
honestly in accordance with the story she needed to survive.
Speaker 2 (56:47):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Acur is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story appear on
an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight eight
Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find
(57:08):
me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd like
to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1 (57:32):
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
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.