July 24, 2025 • 57 mins
Not every member of a family is told the same story. Elissa wrestles with the necessity of claiming her voice, even as telling her own singular truth may exact a painful price.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Every family has a core legend, a cone, a defining, foundational,
sometimes cryptic, narrative around which its generations are coiled. Left unresolved,
it will pomp relentlessly back to the surface like a
rubber bath toy. It is the story that appears when
we least expect it in primary relationships, both successful and failed,
(00:30):
in parenthood, at work, in recovery meetings, and the patterns
that our therapists tell us they see. It is an
endless loop, a thin mobius strip that vibrates like a
guitar string.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
That's Alyssa Autman Award winning author, most recently of a
memoir of the writing life titled Permission. Permission figures centrally
in Alyssa's story, which is at its core about the
necessity of telling our own stories, the ones that hurt,
the ones that haunt, in order to fully discover and
(01:09):
understand who we are, and sometimes often that telling has
a cost. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets.
(01:31):
The secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
I grew up in Queens and Forest Hills, a little
bit outside of the city in the late sixties and
into the seventies, and had no siblings, and lived in
an apartment with two very much New Yorker parents, both
(02:02):
very creative and my dad was a creative director at
a large advertising agency in the city. And my mom
had been a model and a singer and gave that
up when she married my dad. And they were both
really beautiful people and also tortured. My dad and I
(02:23):
were very, very close. We were I think, probably more
friends than not. And my mother and I were none
of those things. And as I always like to say,
I frame it in that she did not know that
she was pregnant with me for six months. How that happens,
I don't know what it did. She was on television
(02:45):
and that loomed large in our home.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
What year did they get married?
Speaker 2 (02:49):
They got married in sixty two and I arrived nine
months later, almost to the day.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
And you were their only child? Was that the intention?
I think as an only child myself born in the
same era, it was a pretty unusual thing to be
an only child.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
I definitely think that it was an unusual thing in
most of the people I knew, and most of my
friends had siblings and at least one sibbling. I know
that my dad very much wanted more children and my
mother very much did not. My father was very clear
about that with me. And whether that was appropriate or
(03:30):
not for him to be clear on that, I don't know.
But that kind of openness and transparency was really very
much a part of the way I was raised.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
Tell me a bit about your mother in your childhood
and your youth.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
She was this until very recently, this sort of very tall,
spelt in love with fashion. That was very much a
part of my growing up. And there are not a
whole lot of pictures of the two of us. I
have boxes and boxes of photos, and I've gone through
them pretty much with a fine toothcomb over the years,
(04:12):
and I can count maybe five photos of the two
of us from the time that I was born really
until the present day. I always say that our relationship
changed when I was eleven because I learned how to
say no when I was eleven, and she didn't like that.
We were like oil and water. I mean, my mother
(04:36):
was the sort of quintessential fashion yeasta. I describe her
often as a hyper heterosexual glam queen, and I knew
pretty much pretty early on that I was different from
my other friends and the other kids I was growing
up with, But I didn't have any words for what
(04:58):
I was feeling, which was appropriate, of course, I think.
And it was also the seventies and being gay was
just nobody really talked about it. It was still really
what we would call a shonda. It was just not
something that we would ever talk about. And the idea
that my mother, who was this glamorouss would have this short,
(05:22):
chubby lesbian for a daughter, I think that she had
no words for it, and so that really set the
stage for a lot of acrimony.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
What was your parents' relationship like and when did you
start to have a sense of them as being these
radically different people with very different histories.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
They were both very funny people, and they were either
fighting loudly or laughing. There was no discussion, no past
the salt, no mondanity at the dinner table. They went
from one ex dream to the other. They were always
fighting or intermittently fighting and laughing at something. There was
(06:08):
a lot of hyper sexualization of jokes at the time,
and I attribute that to it being the seventies and
growing up in a fairly wild community. Although I grew
up in an apartment building, it was attached to another
apartment building, and there were tons of newly married, young
couples with kids, and there were parties every Saturday night,
(06:31):
and I wound up knowing probably a lot more than
I should have about what went on at those parties.
And my dad was really proud to walk around with
my mother on his arm, and she was proud to
be married to this creative director who was going into
the city every day and doing great things in advertising.
(06:53):
But then when they were at home in their own apartment,
and I, of course was present, a lot of very
rage would come bubbling to the surface. My dad was
not quick to fight, but when he did, it was
like tossing a match into gasoline, and so the two
of them it could be really audibly terrifying, terrifying certainly
(07:18):
for a kid to witness and to hear. And I
grew up in a lot of ways. I grew up
thinking that that was normal. That behavior became normalized in
my home. And when I went out to visit friends
or I stayed over at France houses and their parents
were like straight out of the Waltons. You know, everybody
was pleasant and calm and happy and kind, and of
(07:38):
course that's not always the truth, but I was very
happy to make myself scarce at a certain point.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
How did the stories of your family history come to you?
I think as an only child, the extended family was
really important to you. The idea that there were cousins,
and that you were part of this kind of gang,
of a larger family than this trio of you and
(08:09):
your mother and your father. What did that look like.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
We had a family on my mom's side who we
never saw, so we spent all of our holidays with
my father's sister and brother in law, and they had
two daughters who were significantly older than I, So the
younger one who was twelve years older than I, and
the older one was sixteen years older than I. So
(08:36):
when I was very little, they were off in college
in the sixties and living through that drama that was
college in the sixties in this country. So I didn't
really see them except on Thanksgiving and Passover and other
family birthdays, big celebrations, and they were mostly very doting.
I mean my younger cousin, and by younger I mean
(08:58):
twelve years older than I, younger of the two, and
I were very very close, and she became sort of
a big sister figure to me and was very kind
and loving and warm and affectionate. And she eventually brought
home a guy she met at Cornell, and we all
(09:18):
kind of knew that he was going to be part
of the group, and they eventually got married in the
early seventies, and he was very much the same, just
very sweet and gentle and kind. And conversely, her sister
was definitely a little bit standoff, as I got the
sense that she really didn't like kids so much. I mean,
(09:41):
children know when people don't like them. And I had
a vivid memory of driving home to Forest Hills with
my parents after a big function at their house and
I leaned forward, I must have been maybe five or six,
and I leaned forward in my father's car, and I said,
why does she hate me so much? And my father said,
(10:03):
don't worry, she hates everybody. And that was the beginning
of my sense that she and her sister were very
very different people, with definitely very different ways of maneuvering
through the world and what their world views were. Her
older sister and I were not terribly close until I
(10:25):
was a little bit older, and that all changed after
my parents' divorce in nineteen seventy eight. I was sort
of sucked into this whirlwind of cousins and parties and
traveling and dinners, and it was great. It was something
that I'd never had before, and I loved it made
me feel very safe. Why do you.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
Think that you're getting pulled into their orbit in that
way coincided with your parents' divorce or was it just
that you were reaching an age of you know, teenage ornests,
you know, where you weren't this little kid anymore.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
I think that when my parents divorced in nineteen seventy eight,
I knew in my heart of hearts that my mother
was I don't want to stay playing the field, but
maybe playing playing the field.
Speaker 4 (11:10):
I mean.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
She was coming home from work later and later every day,
and it was no shock to me that she was
not happy with my dad and they were fighting all
the time about money and about expectations and family. That
we were spending so much time with my father's family
and not really any time with her family, which was
really her doing. She didn't really like her family that
(11:32):
much either, But I think that because of the divorce,
I felt very much alone. I felt very isolated, and
I lived with my mother after the divorce. She was
not coming home until about two o'clock in the morning.
Every day. My grandmother was staying with me. My grandmother
would pick me up from the school bus, my grandmother
(11:54):
would make me dinner, and so I didn't really see
a whole lot of my mother. So when my father
showed up on the weekends, because he had part time
custody of me, we always went to his sister's house
and my cousins were home from the various places they'd
wound up in the country, And eventually everybody moved closer
(12:17):
to each other and it was just great. And as
I got older, I was an avid tennis player and
they were avid tennis players, so that, you know, I
always had somebody to play with. They became golfers. I
was a golfer, and there was definitely sort of like
a tribal feeling about it. It was really wonderful. I
felt safe. I felt secure. When I had to go
(12:40):
home back to Queens at the end of every weekend,
I just looked forward to the following weekend when I
knew I could see everybody again.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
(13:15):
All this flux and instability leaves Alyssa to become an
anxious child, fearful of being abandoned. Movies like Chitty Chitty
Bang Bang and Oliver stories of abandoned children definitely don't help.
And then there's the story of how her father and
his sisters had been abandoned. Not a movie, not fiction.
(13:36):
This happened to them in real life.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
I think the way to describe it really is like wallpaper.
It was just always there. I know that I said
that my father was a very funny man, and he
really was. He was also easily moved to tears, to
like body racking, sobbing tears that would just often come
out of the clear They seemed to me as a child,
(14:02):
to come out of the clear blue sky, and that's
terrorizing for a child to see that in their parents.
I knew early on I had the strong sense that
there was some sort of deeply rooted sadness and I
certainly didn't know the word trauma back then, but a
deeply rooted sadness and trauma that he was carrying around
(14:26):
with him, and he could go from laughing to weeping
very quickly. He didn't sit me down, but he would
talk about the time that my grandmother walked out, and
when Grandma left is the way he put it. And
(14:46):
I didn't know his mother very well. I mean, she
was a little bit distant. She and my grandfather lived
out near Coney Island. They were devoutly religious. My grandfather
was an Orthodox cancer, so so they felt, I think,
very old country to my mother, who didn't like that,
and so I didn't have a whole lot of exposure
(15:08):
to them. But he would talk about when Grandma left,
and it was almost as though he was ruminating. He
would sort of metabolize it, metabolized this pain by talking
about being a border with my grandfather and my aunt
becoming a surrogate mother to him. My aunt was five
(15:31):
years older than my dad.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
What were their ages when your grandmother walked out?
Speaker 2 (15:37):
My dad was three and my aunt was eight, and
this was in nineteen twenty six. She apparently was gone
for anywhere from three to four years. But he would
talk about this matter of factly, and he would talk
(15:57):
about it while we were walking the dog. He would
talk about out it over dinner. When my parents fought,
my mother's like down shift, it was sort of like
the switch blade was your mother didn't love you, your
mother left, So my mother could really go for the
you know, the jugular, and my father often you know,
flew out of the house in a rage when she
(16:20):
did that, and I of course was standing there and
hearing all of this, and so the story about grandma leaving,
about Grandma abandoning the family loomed very large in my life.
And when I was left, from a very young age
and from when I was left with a babysitter, on
(16:40):
any average Saturday night, I was sure that my parents
were not coming home, because that was a possibility. What
would have been normal separation anxiety became this almost paralyzing
fear that I was going to lose them in some way.
They were just going to go out and not come back.
And all of the movies of the time had abandonment
(17:04):
themes built into them, and so they kind of reinforced
this idea that you know, oh my god, Mom could
go out to have her hair done and not come back,
or you know, Dad could go on a business trip
to Chicago and not come back, and where are we
going to go or what are we going to do?
And I used to think if they were going out
(17:25):
on our weekend night and leaving me behind with a
babysitter or with my grandmother, where was I going to live?
And who was going to take care of me? How
was I going to feed myself?
Speaker 3 (17:35):
Do you think that when your parents got divorced, which
also was when you were a teenager, did that diminish
it all that kind of anxiety or did that continue
or did it shift?
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Actually it shifted. I've actually never really considered that, And
it's really interesting. My parents had such a discombobulated marriage
and so acrimonious that they was just anger and fury
and rage hanging in the air all the time. And
so when my mother in nineteen seventy eight, I was fifteen,
(18:10):
my mother announced that my father was leaving that day
in front of him. I mean, she had already asked him,
and that was what the agreement was. I usually hear
stories like this, and you hear stories about kids being
very upset, and I was. I mean I was upset,
but I was not inconsolable. I knew that they were
miserable together. I knew that I was being exposed to
(18:33):
a lot of anger that I didn't need to be
exposed to. I wanted my father to be happy, and
I knew that he was not going to be happy
as long as he stayed in that house. My mother
took up with her boss, who was a furrier, really
lovely guy who I came to know really well and
really loved very much, and who was very kind to me.
(18:55):
But I spent my weekends with my dad and his family,
and so I was sort of sucked into this whirlwind
of dinners and family dinners and going to the movies
with five, six, seven people, and it was really wonderful,
and I didn't have that level of that abandonment anxiety
(19:16):
that i'd had when we were all living together.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
Well, that makes so much sense, because suddenly now you
have a safety net of people of family that you know,
even if something terrible were to happen, there's this support
system of this group of people that you're suddenly having
this different kind of life experience with.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
That's exactly right, That's exactly what it felt like. I
had gone to Sleepway Camp for many, many years over
the summer for eight weeks at a time, and spent
I want to say, the first two summers crying desperately
because again I thought my parents were dumping me in Honesdale,
Pennsylvania and never coming back for me. And then I
realized that there were things that I was really good.
(20:00):
I was a really good athlete. I was a really
good musician, really good guitarist. And although I was also
very shy and often withdrawn and worried, I could turn
to one of those two things, or both of those things,
and they were sort of like pressure valves. They were
like an escape route for me. What I didn't really
(20:23):
realize until much later was that I knew that I
felt different. I knew that, you know, everybody was cooing
over the boys on boys campus and like, you know,
running over to boys campus in the middle of the night,
and I was expected to do the same thing. And
I remember doing that and then being like, Okay, now
what am I supposed to do? I knew that. But interestingly,
(20:43):
I had a lot of counselors who, in hindsight I
recognized now that they were lesbians, and it was kept
very quiet. They would have been fired. It was the seventies,
it was still really a shonda and I was like,
I think I recognized myself in these women. So by
the time I went away to college, I had a
(21:04):
sense of it, and I absolutely buried it. I didn't
want to be the disappointment to the family. No one
in my family brought home someone of the same sex.
Whatever was there, I sort of quelled it and didn't
think about it. And I graduated in nineteen eighty five
(21:26):
and moved home to New York to live with my
mother and my stepfather on the Upper West Side, and
immediately went to work for a random house two weeks later.
There was a lot of partying. There were a lot
of drugs. I did some of them and not others,
and those of us who worked together were close enough
(21:48):
that we would also then go out after work. And
I still was sort of just burying any sense of
attraction that I had to women and just didn't really
think about it. I had a lot of gay male
friends and was certainly, you know, not an issue at all,
but I noticed that whenever I came home to my
(22:10):
father's sister's house for holidays, they always tried to fix
me up with you know, some poor guy was like
the son of the bridge partner from the country club.
You know, and he would show up at Thanksgiving and
I was like, now this is not it's not working
for me. And my father's sister tried and tried and
(22:31):
tried to fix me up with any number of one
hundred men, and it just was not going to happen,
and they kind of started looking at me like, what's
the deal with you? You know, what's up with you.
I moved out of my mother's apartment into a walk
up on the Upper East Side in the East nineties
and just fell stupidly head over heels matt for my roommate.
(22:57):
She was straight, I was quote straight on quote, and
we were together for I would say three and a
half years. Her family didn't know, My family didn't know.
I brought her to every family function when she wasn't
going home, and everyone was like, oh, how nice. She
seems very nice, but nobody put two and two together,
(23:18):
or at least they didn't tell me they did. Eventually
came home from work one day and she said, I
can't do this. So our relationship came to a bitter
end and I moved out and I had nowhere to go.
I was certainly not going to move back in with
my mother and my stepfather, and I was not going
to move in with my father, who lived on Long
(23:39):
Island at that point with his second wife, who was
a therapist, thank god, because we all needed one. And
my father said, you know, why don't you move into
grandma and Grandpa's apartment. And my grandmother had died in
nineteen ninety, and my grandfather had died much earlier, in
(23:59):
nineteen seven six, and my father and my aunt made
the decision to keep paying the one hundred and forty
two dollars a month rent on this two bedroom apartment
near Coney Island. It was my father's childhood apartment. He
had lived there from the time that I want to
say he was nine or ten, and I grew up
on Sundays going out to grandma and Grandpa's for lunch,
(24:22):
so I knew the apartment really well.
Speaker 3 (24:25):
What do you think was the reason that your father
and his sister decided to hold onto that apartment after
your grandmother died. Was it just financial, just keep this
apartment because it's so inexpensive and we'll keep it in
the family, or was there also this is after all,
this is the grandmother who had abandoned them both as children.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Yeah. Ostensibly it was financial. It was one hundred and
forty two dollars a month. It was on the F
train line, so you could get in and out of
the city really easily. And my father used to say
that the had kept it in the event that any
family member needed it, and so that was this sort
of party line, and that's what I believed. Even though
(25:10):
my cousin and her husband, the younger one lived in
the DC area and the other one lived in Great Neck,
so they weren't going to be moving many time soon
out to Coney Island. And I really didn't want to
move into this apartment. It just gave me the willies.
It just made my hair stand on end. It felt
very ghostly and complicated. But I had nowhere else to go,
(25:36):
so I moved in. The day that I moved in,
my father brought me into the apartment with my stuff,
and the moving van came with the rest of my stuff.
Everything was exactly in the same place that it had
been when my grandmother died. It was in the same
place that it had been when I was a child
(25:57):
going there on Sundays. Everything looked the same, everything smelled
the same. This was a community of very religious Jews,
so you know, you would walk into the apartment and
it just smelled like chicken fat, you no, from like
a thousand Sabbaths. I tried to unpack, and I couldn't
(26:18):
because my father and my aunt never took my grandmother's
stuff out of the apartment. So everything that she owned,
her clothes, there was food in the refrigerator, there was
her stuff in the medicine cabinet. It was like she'd
gone out to run an errand when I was coming
back any minute, but didn't. That was a really shocking experience.
Speaker 3 (26:42):
The echo of she was going out for a quick
errand and then just simply never came back exactly is
pretty profound.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Yes, yes, when I called my father and I said, Dad,
you've got to come back over here and get grandma's stuff,
and I don't know what you want to do with it,
but he was actually annoyed. And I didn't talk about
it with my aunt, but I can imagine that she
would have been annoyed also. It was like the first
real rift that my father and I had in our relationship,
(27:14):
and it was a big one. It was like I
was demanding that he'd make a break from his past,
and he had a very hard time doing that.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
Alyssa spends her mid twenties and early thirties in this
crazy relic of an apartment, nursing her broken heart. During
this time, she's writing, becoming involved in the world of
food and cooking too. All the while, the story of
her father's abandonment and the fear it instilled in her
looms large. She lives with a sense that danger and
(27:47):
loss are always lurking. But what can she do with
this sense? She does the best thing she can for now.
She tucks it away.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
I definitely tucked away. As I said, my father's second
wife was a ironically trauma therapist and just wonderful, an
amazing woman, really incredible. I know that over time she
got him to talk a lot about what had happened,
and carrying the weight of this three year old little
(28:20):
boy whose mother had abandoned him and his sister, the
story was re emerging in my life. I had buried it.
I thought, well, you know, this is a terrible thing,
but I need to move on and I need to
make my own life. I can't carry the same burden
of sadness and trauma that he did, and I just
(28:42):
need to live in a different mindset in a different way.
She dragged him to therapy. I wouldn't say he brought
it up a lot, but he did bring it up
more than he had when I was in college and
high school, and so I knew it was in the air.
The story of abandonment was in the air for whatever reason.
My father used to say that I learned how to
(29:03):
cook out of self defense because my mother was such
a horrendous cook. I started to become really really interested
in food stories. And you know, I can write a
recipe and I have many times, but I was really
interested in I guess you could call it food anthropology,
culinary anthropology. Why people ate the way they ate, Why
(29:25):
people do certain things at the table that other people
don't do at the table. What does funeral food look like?
What does celebratory food look like? And when I was
working as the book buyer at the original Diana Dluca
on Prince Street, and I was managing the book department
and falling in love with the writing of people like
(29:46):
Fisher and Patients Gray and you know, a lot of
Elizabeth David, a lot of British food writers, and I
took to it immensely and started going to cooking school
at night and loved that. I also realized that I
never wanted to be a chef because chef hours were insane.
I was offered a job at a restaurant in Chelsea,
(30:08):
and I was thinking about taking it, and I was
told that the hours were two in the afternoon until
two in the morning, and I was like, Yeah, that's
not happening. I'll sit at my computer and write about
food instead, and so I did. I found myself writing
stories about my family and celebrations that we had and
(30:30):
trips that we'd taken, and Thanksgiving dinners that we'd had.
And I wrote about my mother's mother, who was also
a lesbian closeted, you know, in the same relationship with
someone for sixty years, but closeted. And she was a
wonderful cook, and if I got any cooking talent at all,
it was through her. And these stories really began to
(30:54):
inhabit my work, my day to day. I mean, I
was still doing a lot of editing, very connected to
the publishing community. There was and remains a sizeable sort
of food publishing world in New York, and I was
very much a part of that, but I didn't want
to write recipes. I was not interested in that. I
was interested in telling family stories through what went on
(31:18):
at the table.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
We'll be right back in the year two thousand, Alyssa
meets Susan, the love of her life. When they're first together,
Alissa lives in New York and Susan is in Connecticut.
It becomes clear that one of them is going to
(31:43):
have to move, and Susan's the one with a house.
So Alyssa goes from a diehard urbanite to a life
in a Connecticut countryside. Her father is completely supportive of
this move and of this new relationship.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Had met Susan, and my stepmother had met Susan, and
they fell in love with her instantly, and they could
see and I remember my father saying this to me,
that he could see that I felt safe, that I
had sort of dropped my anchor and I was sort
of carrying a certain amount of safety. I was wearing
(32:21):
safety where I had never worn it before. That anxiety
were either gone or napping. And so I moved up
full time in two thousand and one, and I had
a job waiting for me up here as the editorial
director of a small publisher, and we just had a
(32:41):
wonderful first year, first couple of years, and I learned
how to garden, and we were cooking all the time,
and my father and Shirley would come up from Long
Island and they'd stay over and we'd go walking, we'd
go hiking with the dog. It was just really wonderful.
And in August of two thousand and two, I talked
(33:05):
to my dad probably three or four times a week.
I mean, that's a lot, but we were that close
and if we didn't get each other, we just left messages.
That was fine. And one night, Susan was working in
the Hartford area and I was home alone with the dog,
and we had this terrible storm that knocked out power,
(33:25):
knocked out cable, but I was still able to call
on the landline because we all still had landlines back then.
And I called him and I left a message and
I said, you know, we've lost power. The thunder is
booming and the house is shaking, dog is crying, and
you know, call me when you get a chance. And
he didn't, and Sue came home. The storm was over,
(33:48):
and the next morning we went out into the garden.
We were working up to our ankles and composts, and
it was very messy and gross. We decided to go
into the house for a glass of water. We went
into the house, the phone rang and it was my
stepbrother and he said the words that no one wants
to hear. Lizzy. There was an accident and we dropped
(34:12):
everything and jumped into the car raced down to Long Island.
My father lingered for a week. They were in a
really terrible car accident in Roslyn, Long Island. They had
taken him to one hospital and his second wife to
another hospital, so they never saw each other again. Completely
heartbreaking and tragic. And after a week I had to
(34:36):
take him off of life support, which was the most
devastating thing that I've ever had to do. The day
of the accident, I expected this tribe to come together
around me. That was what I expected to happen, because
I essentially had been told my whole life that was
what would happen if there was ever any kind of
(34:58):
a tragedy. And and instead they didn't. They sort of
walked away from me, and I was sort of made
into an outsider. My cousin, the older one, was so
cruel that I mean it's almost comical, how cool. I mean,
it was like something out of Larry David. It was
so ridiculous, everything from asking me for the keys to
(35:22):
her house the day of the accident to refusing to
give me his obituary the day of his funeral because
Susan and I were staying with her and didn't have
a paper of our own, And that was like the
first indication to me that, Okay, there's definitely a very
(35:44):
large dent in this relationship.
Speaker 3 (35:48):
Did you have any idea why?
Speaker 2 (35:49):
At that point, not a clue, And I remember saying
to her, you know, saying to all of them, why
are you treating me this way? Why are you doing this?
It was no response, There was no answer, and it
made me take a giant step back and wonder if
(36:11):
everything that I had thought was true about our group,
about our clan, in fact wasn't. And maybe it had
been my imagination, or maybe it was just out of
obligation to my dad, And it took me a long
time to be able to get to that place. It
(36:31):
probably seems fairly obvious, but it wasn't to me. And
you know, either it wasn't or I just wouldn't let
myself go down that road, the realization that perhaps my
relationship with these people was not as strong as I
thought it had been for you know, at that point,
(36:51):
thirty nine years, I was almost forty at that point.
Speaker 3 (36:58):
In the years following her father's death and in her
wonderfully stable and supportive relationship, Alyssa begins to blossom as
a writer. It's the early aughts and blogging is popular.
Alyssa starts a culinary narrative blog called poor Man's Feast,
which at first, she says, was about cheap food recipes.
(37:19):
But the more she wrote, the more she found herself
drawn to narratives about family and less about how to
boil an egg. These family stories heavily featured her father
and his family. Eventually they became her first book of
the same name, and in that book, Alyssa writes about
what she describes as a secret not secret, a story
(37:41):
her father had shared with her all her life.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
I was writing about the table and my family's need
for sustenance and need for nurturing through the generations. Then
I started to write the book, and that repeats itself
in the book and in you know, my meeting Susan.
We came together as food people. She was a really
(38:10):
wonderful home cook, and I was working in food and
thinking about food all the time. And the question that
was always there was why, how did this happen? You know,
my mother is a terrible cook. My mother is afraid
of food. My mother was always afraid of food. But
my father loved it. And my father was a great cook.
He enjoyed restaurants, he enjoyed feeding people, He enjoyed having
(38:35):
people around his table, and so did I. We were
like directly linked by that. And you know, I tried
to understand and unravel. You know what we say is,
you know, I tried to peel the onion and get
to an understanding of where that need for nurturing and
sustenance came from. And that was when I told the
story in eight lines in the book eight lines. Yes,
(39:00):
here's Alyssa reading those eight lines.
Speaker 5 (39:03):
When he was three, his mother had famously mythically walked
out on the family, leaving my grandfather to care for
him and his eight year old sister, who took it
upon herself to never let him out of her sight.
His mother did return eventually, but for my father, things
were never the same those easy, youthful days of feeling
(39:26):
nothing can harm you, that the world was perfect and
delicious for him.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
Those days were.
Speaker 4 (39:31):
Gone forever as my grandmother came back. My father and
my aunt spent much of the rest of their lives
trying to somehow ensure that she would never leave them again,
draping a thin DeMar of imaginary perfection over her. She
was a good, no a great mother, they would say,
(39:52):
and trying to fix whatever they had done wrong that
might have compelled her to walk out in the first place.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
And what happened in the aftermath of poor Man's Feast
combing out.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
I was completely cut out of my family.
Speaker 3 (40:13):
Where were things prior to the publication, because the way
you've described it, there was already, you know, some really
inexplicable behavior. And how had you been feeling in those years, say,
post your father's death and before the publication of your
first memoir?
Speaker 2 (40:33):
I wanted our relationship, my relationship with my older cousin
to be what it had always in my mind been,
which was doting and kind and funny and warm and
all of those things. And when my father died and
her behavior really changed, and my aunt's behavior towards me
(40:57):
really changed as well, and I thought, initially this my imagination.
Is it grief? Is it a weird manifestation of grief?
And I remember Susan saying, no, it's definitely there. I'm
feeling it as well. But we were still able to
overcome that, whatever that was. Susan and I were still
(41:17):
being invited to family functions. We were going to weddings
and bar mitzvah's and Thanksgiving and Passover. We had Thanksgiving
here at one point for all of my cousins and
my aunt, and so we were still seeing each other.
Susan and I were going down to Florida to visit
the cousins, and so that kept going. That kept happening.
(41:40):
In hindsight, it's sort of mystifying to me. I guess
that when we have a relationship that is sort of
going down the tubes, you know, with a family member.
I won't say that it's easy to kid oneself or
to you know, to confuse the issue, but I did,
(42:03):
and I think that they did too. And when the
book came out, though, it was as though a wire
had been snipped and any connection to them or most
of them, was gone, and Susan and I were never
included in a family function ever. Again. We had been
(42:25):
god parents to my older cousin's grandchild and that ended.
We never saw anybody again. And it has been how
many years twelve years now?
Speaker 3 (42:40):
Was it explained to you why this was happening.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
You know, my hal to cousin loves a good battle.
She's fairly skilled at it. But we emailed back and
forth over the course of probably six months or so,
and those emails were started by me, and they began with,
please tell me what's happening. Please tell me what I've
(43:07):
done to upset you. Please let me know, you know,
I want to have a conversation about this. That beca
was like going through the five stages of grief, which
I think are probably more than five stages, but it
started with that, and then I would get angry, like,
why the hell aren't you responding to me? You know,
we've been so close all these years, maybe on and
(43:27):
on and on, And when she responded to me, she
was sending me shrieking emails that were so witheringly painful
that in many cases I just couldn't read them. I
saw them come in and I would just send them
to Susan just so that we had them. I don't
even know why I saved them, but I think it
(43:49):
was when Susan finally said to her, can you please
tell us what this is about? And she said that
I knew, and that of course I knew, and it
had to do with telling the secret, telling the story.
It was not my story to tell. And she pretty
(44:15):
much ended our relationship by saying to Susan that they
had decided that their lives were better off without me
in it.
Speaker 3 (44:26):
Were you able to come to understand where that story
resided in your aunt's family. So here you have your
father at age three and your aunt at age eight,
going through this trauma of their mother abandoning them and
(44:47):
everything that happened to them in those years where their
mother was gone. Your father chose to share that story
and in many ways be emotionally defined by it, and
your aunt went in a different direction.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
Yes, and you didn't know this, which I.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
Think is really key when it comes to telling stories
on this podcast. You know about family secrets, what is
secret to one member of the family and not to another,
and how that all gets played out over time I
think is so central. I mean, let me ask you this.
Had you known that this was a secret in your
(45:29):
aunt's family and that she had never spoken of it
to her kids, that was it was just something that
didn't exist for them, which of course we know that
does not how secrets work. But for all intents and purposes,
on the surface of things did not exist for them.
Would you have written those eight lines?
Speaker 2 (45:47):
I probably would have written those eight lines, but I
likely would have had a sit down with my cousins
and said, Okay, so here's the situation. We need to
talk about this. This has informed my life, I think that,
(46:07):
and it had completely informed my father's life, and I'm
led to think that it probably informed your lives as
well to some degree. And in the writing of this book,
this is what I've come to, and I need to
be able to write this, and I'd like to think
that that is what I would have done.
Speaker 3 (46:27):
I wonder, too, do you think that would have made
any difference. Do you think that if there had been
that sit down that the outcome would have been any different,
or do you think that the estrangement would have been
the same.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
I think that with one of my cousins, the outcome
would have been different, and that's the younger cousin, and
we have I don't even want to say rebuilt most
of our relationship. I think it took her a while
to realize that I was not the demon that her
older sister made me out to be, that I was
(47:04):
still you know, Lissie, and still loved her and was
the same person I was before the book came out,
and so I talked to her. I don't really see
her very much anymore, But knowing what I know now,
I am not sure that it would have made a
difference with my older cousin. I think that my older cousin,
(47:29):
when my father died all those years before the book
came out, was pulling me out of the central circle
of the family, little by little. And you know, Susan
likens my family to rings inside of each other, and
you know, it's like Dante, right, So which circle are
(47:50):
you in? Are you in the inner circle? Are you
in the outer circle? And before my father's accident, I
was in the inner circle, and then after my father's accident,
I was moved to the outer circle, and that became
very clear to me. But to your question, I don't
know that it would have made any difference with the
(48:13):
older cousin. And the reason why is I think that
every family has a keeper of the narrative, keys keeper
of the stories, and the person who controls the stories,
who controls the narrative and politics and pr they call
(48:34):
it spin. And I don't know that she understood or
was able to understand, and certainly is not still not
able to understand that every person in every family has
their own truth. And I often tell the story about
(48:54):
You can ask five siblings, five adult siblings sitting around
the table, what happened in eighteen seventy five when Dad
got drunk on the jim beam at Christmas, And you'll
get five different versions of that story, and they will
fight to the death to prove that their version is
the right version. And I think that that is human nature.
But then they'll get up and get on with their day.
(49:16):
The fact is that every one of those truths is valid.
There can only be one empirical fact, but every one
of those truths is valid because we all see the
world through our own lenses, through our own screens. Every
writer who writes memoir is confronted with the question of
(49:39):
what right they have to publicly tell a story that
involves other people after all, there are multiple truths within
every relationship, especially family relationships. The poet and memoirst Honor Moore,
a guest on this podcast a couple of seasons back,
once remarked that we do not choose our stories. They
(50:00):
choose us, and if we walk away from them or
ignore them, we are somehow diminished. I think the word
diminished is the right word. At one point when I
was writing this new book, I was reliving this, I
was reliving this experience of loss. And I talk about abandonment,
(50:23):
begat abandonment. And that's the theme, that's the chord that
ties our generations together. That's the family story, that's the
family fear. And it plays out in all sorts of ways.
And it played out in my life as a young person,
day in and day out. And it played out in
(50:43):
my father's life, both in real time when he was
three and again as an adult until the day he died.
I'm sure of that. To not tell this story would have,
I think, felt to me like trying to rewrite my DNA.
(51:03):
It would have felt like trying to change my height,
or trying to change the texture of my hair or
the way my voice sounds. This story made me who
I am without question, and I considered while I was
writing this book, you know what would have happened if
I didn't tell, if I just glossed over it and
(51:24):
went through life happily. And the fact is that I
would have felt, I think, without sounding you know, hyperbolic
or dramatic. I think that I would have felt in
some way inauthentic and like I was wearing a costume
that benefited someone else. I believe that memoirists that we
(51:48):
tell our stories because they are who we are. It's
like a ben diagram. They are who we are. We
are our stories, and not telling the story would have
been asking me to not be who I am. And
I couldn't do that anymore than I could be a straight,
(52:10):
tall person who is not at all myself. I would
have had to have been another person.
Speaker 3 (52:17):
What your cousin said to you in the wake of
your having written those eight lines was I don't love
you anymore. Do you think that it is possible to
actually genuinely love someone and then be hurt by them
(52:39):
or feel betrayed by them, and then sort of decide
that you don't love them anymore? As if love could
be sort of switched on or off.
Speaker 2 (52:49):
I don't think love is a binary thing. I don't
think that you know it's a switch that you flip.
I think that you certainly true For myself, my feelings
may have changed about this person, but she is still
in my heart, and she's always going to be in
(53:11):
my heart and is always going to be a part
of my life. Whether I see her again or I
don't likely won't. In terms of how she feels, I
think that for some people who have been raised with
(53:33):
the threat of abandonment themselves, I mean, I do believe
somewhere inside, I believe that she is the cousin who
knew a little bit about what had happened. And I
also believe that it was her mother, my aunt who
told her never to tell anyone because the family had
(53:56):
to be perceived as perfect. And I came along and
I blew the lid off that perfection, and that was
a very hard thing I think for her to swallow.
I think she felt betrayed, and for her, betrayal could
be equated to the loss of love, to the loss
(54:17):
of connection, to the loss of familial connection. That's who
she in part is personally. For me, as I said,
I mean, I don't know that love is binary. It's
not like you love somebody who you've known your whole
life and then one day you don't. I don't think
love works that way. But I think that she, in
(54:41):
her own mind, had to effectively remove me from the tribe,
and that was the only way for her to do it.
Speaker 3 (54:54):
Here's Alyssa reading one last passage from her powerful memoir Permission.
Speaker 2 (55:04):
I did not know that it was a secret, and
this not knowing changed my world, tilted it on its axis,
spun it like a top. It broke my life and
broke my health, and it broke my spirit. It threatened
my marriage. I began to stutter the way I had
as a child. It altered my creative course, took my humor,
(55:28):
rendered me silent for almost a decade. It left me
sleepless and afraid. It inflated my ego, the narcissism of
self preservation, and then burnt it to ash. It unraveled
my understanding of love and tribe and the meaning of grace.
Toward the end, when I could no longer do the
(55:51):
things that breathe air and light into my days, I
couldn't write or work. I couldn't play guitar. I couldn't
feed or support myself or the woman I love. I
couldn't care for my health or my spirit. These things
are gravy, Raymond Carver might have said, and I came
close enough to the edge to peer over it. The
(56:12):
Non Secret Secret Save Me.
Speaker 3 (56:27):
Family Secret is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Acre is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
(56:48):
find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1 (57:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Every family has a core legend, a cone, a defining, foundational,
sometimes cryptic, narrative around which its generations are coiled. Left unresolved,
it will pomp relentlessly back to the surface like a
rubber bath toy. It is the story that appears when
we least expect it in primary relationships, both successful and failed,
(00:30):
in parenthood, at work, in recovery meetings, and the patterns
that our therapists tell us they see. It is an
endless loop, a thin mobius strip that vibrates like a
guitar string.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
That's Alyssa Autman Award winning author, most recently of a
memoir of the writing life titled Permission. Permission figures centrally
in Alyssa's story, which is at its core about the
necessity of telling our own stories, the ones that hurt,
the ones that haunt, in order to fully discover and
(01:09):
understand who we are, and sometimes often that telling has
a cost. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets.
(01:31):
The secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
I grew up in Queens and Forest Hills, a little
bit outside of the city in the late sixties and
into the seventies, and had no siblings, and lived in
an apartment with two very much New Yorker parents, both
(02:02):
very creative and my dad was a creative director at
a large advertising agency in the city. And my mom
had been a model and a singer and gave that
up when she married my dad. And they were both
really beautiful people and also tortured. My dad and I
(02:23):
were very, very close. We were I think, probably more
friends than not. And my mother and I were none
of those things. And as I always like to say,
I frame it in that she did not know that
she was pregnant with me for six months. How that happens,
I don't know what it did. She was on television
(02:45):
and that loomed large in our home.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
What year did they get married?
Speaker 2 (02:49):
They got married in sixty two and I arrived nine
months later, almost to the day.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
And you were their only child? Was that the intention?
I think as an only child myself born in the
same era, it was a pretty unusual thing to be
an only child.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
I definitely think that it was an unusual thing in
most of the people I knew, and most of my
friends had siblings and at least one sibbling. I know
that my dad very much wanted more children and my
mother very much did not. My father was very clear
about that with me. And whether that was appropriate or
(03:30):
not for him to be clear on that, I don't know.
But that kind of openness and transparency was really very
much a part of the way I was raised.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
Tell me a bit about your mother in your childhood
and your youth.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
She was this until very recently, this sort of very tall,
spelt in love with fashion. That was very much a
part of my growing up. And there are not a
whole lot of pictures of the two of us. I
have boxes and boxes of photos, and I've gone through
them pretty much with a fine toothcomb over the years,
(04:12):
and I can count maybe five photos of the two
of us from the time that I was born really
until the present day. I always say that our relationship
changed when I was eleven because I learned how to
say no when I was eleven, and she didn't like that.
We were like oil and water. I mean, my mother
(04:36):
was the sort of quintessential fashion yeasta. I describe her
often as a hyper heterosexual glam queen, and I knew
pretty much pretty early on that I was different from
my other friends and the other kids I was growing
up with, But I didn't have any words for what
(04:58):
I was feeling, which was appropriate, of course, I think.
And it was also the seventies and being gay was
just nobody really talked about it. It was still really
what we would call a shonda. It was just not
something that we would ever talk about. And the idea
that my mother, who was this glamorouss would have this short,
(05:22):
chubby lesbian for a daughter, I think that she had
no words for it, and so that really set the
stage for a lot of acrimony.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
What was your parents' relationship like and when did you
start to have a sense of them as being these
radically different people with very different histories.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
They were both very funny people, and they were either
fighting loudly or laughing. There was no discussion, no past
the salt, no mondanity at the dinner table. They went
from one ex dream to the other. They were always
fighting or intermittently fighting and laughing at something. There was
(06:08):
a lot of hyper sexualization of jokes at the time,
and I attribute that to it being the seventies and
growing up in a fairly wild community. Although I grew
up in an apartment building, it was attached to another
apartment building, and there were tons of newly married, young
couples with kids, and there were parties every Saturday night,
(06:31):
and I wound up knowing probably a lot more than
I should have about what went on at those parties.
And my dad was really proud to walk around with
my mother on his arm, and she was proud to
be married to this creative director who was going into
the city every day and doing great things in advertising.
(06:53):
But then when they were at home in their own apartment,
and I, of course was present, a lot of very
rage would come bubbling to the surface. My dad was
not quick to fight, but when he did, it was
like tossing a match into gasoline, and so the two
of them it could be really audibly terrifying, terrifying certainly
(07:18):
for a kid to witness and to hear. And I
grew up in a lot of ways. I grew up
thinking that that was normal. That behavior became normalized in
my home. And when I went out to visit friends
or I stayed over at France houses and their parents
were like straight out of the Waltons. You know, everybody
was pleasant and calm and happy and kind, and of
(07:38):
course that's not always the truth, but I was very
happy to make myself scarce at a certain point.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
How did the stories of your family history come to you?
I think as an only child, the extended family was
really important to you. The idea that there were cousins,
and that you were part of this kind of gang,
of a larger family than this trio of you and
(08:09):
your mother and your father. What did that look like.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
We had a family on my mom's side who we
never saw, so we spent all of our holidays with
my father's sister and brother in law, and they had
two daughters who were significantly older than I, So the
younger one who was twelve years older than I, and
the older one was sixteen years older than I. So
(08:36):
when I was very little, they were off in college
in the sixties and living through that drama that was
college in the sixties in this country. So I didn't
really see them except on Thanksgiving and Passover and other
family birthdays, big celebrations, and they were mostly very doting.
I mean my younger cousin, and by younger I mean
(08:58):
twelve years older than I, younger of the two, and
I were very very close, and she became sort of
a big sister figure to me and was very kind
and loving and warm and affectionate. And she eventually brought
home a guy she met at Cornell, and we all
(09:18):
kind of knew that he was going to be part
of the group, and they eventually got married in the
early seventies, and he was very much the same, just
very sweet and gentle and kind. And conversely, her sister
was definitely a little bit standoff, as I got the
sense that she really didn't like kids so much. I mean,
(09:41):
children know when people don't like them. And I had
a vivid memory of driving home to Forest Hills with
my parents after a big function at their house and
I leaned forward, I must have been maybe five or six,
and I leaned forward in my father's car, and I said,
why does she hate me so much? And my father said,
(10:03):
don't worry, she hates everybody. And that was the beginning
of my sense that she and her sister were very
very different people, with definitely very different ways of maneuvering
through the world and what their world views were. Her
older sister and I were not terribly close until I
(10:25):
was a little bit older, and that all changed after
my parents' divorce in nineteen seventy eight. I was sort
of sucked into this whirlwind of cousins and parties and
traveling and dinners, and it was great. It was something
that I'd never had before, and I loved it made
me feel very safe. Why do you.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
Think that you're getting pulled into their orbit in that
way coincided with your parents' divorce or was it just
that you were reaching an age of you know, teenage ornests,
you know, where you weren't this little kid anymore.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
I think that when my parents divorced in nineteen seventy eight,
I knew in my heart of hearts that my mother
was I don't want to stay playing the field, but
maybe playing playing the field.
Speaker 4 (11:10):
I mean.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
She was coming home from work later and later every day,
and it was no shock to me that she was
not happy with my dad and they were fighting all
the time about money and about expectations and family. That
we were spending so much time with my father's family
and not really any time with her family, which was
really her doing. She didn't really like her family that
(11:32):
much either, But I think that because of the divorce,
I felt very much alone. I felt very isolated, and
I lived with my mother after the divorce. She was
not coming home until about two o'clock in the morning.
Every day. My grandmother was staying with me. My grandmother
would pick me up from the school bus, my grandmother
(11:54):
would make me dinner, and so I didn't really see
a whole lot of my mother. So when my father
showed up on the weekends, because he had part time
custody of me, we always went to his sister's house
and my cousins were home from the various places they'd
wound up in the country, And eventually everybody moved closer
(12:17):
to each other and it was just great. And as
I got older, I was an avid tennis player and
they were avid tennis players, so that, you know, I
always had somebody to play with. They became golfers. I
was a golfer, and there was definitely sort of like
a tribal feeling about it. It was really wonderful. I
felt safe. I felt secure. When I had to go
(12:40):
home back to Queens at the end of every weekend,
I just looked forward to the following weekend when I
knew I could see everybody again.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
(13:15):
All this flux and instability leaves Alyssa to become an
anxious child, fearful of being abandoned. Movies like Chitty Chitty
Bang Bang and Oliver stories of abandoned children definitely don't help.
And then there's the story of how her father and
his sisters had been abandoned. Not a movie, not fiction.
(13:36):
This happened to them in real life.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
I think the way to describe it really is like wallpaper.
It was just always there. I know that I said
that my father was a very funny man, and he
really was. He was also easily moved to tears, to
like body racking, sobbing tears that would just often come
out of the clear They seemed to me as a child,
(14:02):
to come out of the clear blue sky, and that's
terrorizing for a child to see that in their parents.
I knew early on I had the strong sense that
there was some sort of deeply rooted sadness and I
certainly didn't know the word trauma back then, but a
deeply rooted sadness and trauma that he was carrying around
(14:26):
with him, and he could go from laughing to weeping
very quickly. He didn't sit me down, but he would
talk about the time that my grandmother walked out, and
when Grandma left is the way he put it. And
(14:46):
I didn't know his mother very well. I mean, she
was a little bit distant. She and my grandfather lived
out near Coney Island. They were devoutly religious. My grandfather
was an Orthodox cancer, so so they felt, I think,
very old country to my mother, who didn't like that,
and so I didn't have a whole lot of exposure
(15:08):
to them. But he would talk about when Grandma left,
and it was almost as though he was ruminating. He
would sort of metabolize it, metabolized this pain by talking
about being a border with my grandfather and my aunt
becoming a surrogate mother to him. My aunt was five
(15:31):
years older than my dad.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
What were their ages when your grandmother walked out?
Speaker 2 (15:37):
My dad was three and my aunt was eight, and
this was in nineteen twenty six. She apparently was gone
for anywhere from three to four years. But he would
talk about this matter of factly, and he would talk
(15:57):
about it while we were walking the dog. He would
talk about out it over dinner. When my parents fought,
my mother's like down shift, it was sort of like
the switch blade was your mother didn't love you, your
mother left, So my mother could really go for the
you know, the jugular, and my father often you know,
flew out of the house in a rage when she
(16:20):
did that, and I of course was standing there and
hearing all of this, and so the story about grandma leaving,
about Grandma abandoning the family loomed very large in my life.
And when I was left, from a very young age
and from when I was left with a babysitter, on
(16:40):
any average Saturday night, I was sure that my parents
were not coming home, because that was a possibility. What
would have been normal separation anxiety became this almost paralyzing
fear that I was going to lose them in some way.
They were just going to go out and not come back.
And all of the movies of the time had abandonment
(17:04):
themes built into them, and so they kind of reinforced
this idea that you know, oh my god, Mom could
go out to have her hair done and not come back,
or you know, Dad could go on a business trip
to Chicago and not come back, and where are we
going to go or what are we going to do?
And I used to think if they were going out
(17:25):
on our weekend night and leaving me behind with a
babysitter or with my grandmother, where was I going to live?
And who was going to take care of me? How
was I going to feed myself?
Speaker 3 (17:35):
Do you think that when your parents got divorced, which
also was when you were a teenager, did that diminish
it all that kind of anxiety or did that continue
or did it shift?
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Actually it shifted. I've actually never really considered that, And
it's really interesting. My parents had such a discombobulated marriage
and so acrimonious that they was just anger and fury
and rage hanging in the air all the time. And
so when my mother in nineteen seventy eight, I was fifteen,
(18:10):
my mother announced that my father was leaving that day
in front of him. I mean, she had already asked him,
and that was what the agreement was. I usually hear
stories like this, and you hear stories about kids being
very upset, and I was. I mean I was upset,
but I was not inconsolable. I knew that they were
miserable together. I knew that I was being exposed to
(18:33):
a lot of anger that I didn't need to be
exposed to. I wanted my father to be happy, and
I knew that he was not going to be happy
as long as he stayed in that house. My mother
took up with her boss, who was a furrier, really
lovely guy who I came to know really well and
really loved very much, and who was very kind to me.
(18:55):
But I spent my weekends with my dad and his family,
and so I was sort of sucked into this whirlwind
of dinners and family dinners and going to the movies
with five, six, seven people, and it was really wonderful,
and I didn't have that level of that abandonment anxiety
(19:16):
that i'd had when we were all living together.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
Well, that makes so much sense, because suddenly now you
have a safety net of people of family that you know,
even if something terrible were to happen, there's this support
system of this group of people that you're suddenly having
this different kind of life experience with.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
That's exactly right, That's exactly what it felt like. I
had gone to Sleepway Camp for many, many years over
the summer for eight weeks at a time, and spent
I want to say, the first two summers crying desperately
because again I thought my parents were dumping me in Honesdale,
Pennsylvania and never coming back for me. And then I
realized that there were things that I was really good.
(20:00):
I was a really good athlete. I was a really
good musician, really good guitarist. And although I was also
very shy and often withdrawn and worried, I could turn
to one of those two things, or both of those things,
and they were sort of like pressure valves. They were
like an escape route for me. What I didn't really
(20:23):
realize until much later was that I knew that I
felt different. I knew that, you know, everybody was cooing
over the boys on boys campus and like, you know,
running over to boys campus in the middle of the night,
and I was expected to do the same thing. And
I remember doing that and then being like, Okay, now
what am I supposed to do? I knew that. But interestingly,
(20:43):
I had a lot of counselors who, in hindsight I
recognized now that they were lesbians, and it was kept
very quiet. They would have been fired. It was the seventies,
it was still really a shonda and I was like,
I think I recognized myself in these women. So by
the time I went away to college, I had a
(21:04):
sense of it, and I absolutely buried it. I didn't
want to be the disappointment to the family. No one
in my family brought home someone of the same sex.
Whatever was there, I sort of quelled it and didn't
think about it. And I graduated in nineteen eighty five
(21:26):
and moved home to New York to live with my
mother and my stepfather on the Upper West Side, and
immediately went to work for a random house two weeks later.
There was a lot of partying. There were a lot
of drugs. I did some of them and not others,
and those of us who worked together were close enough
(21:48):
that we would also then go out after work. And
I still was sort of just burying any sense of
attraction that I had to women and just didn't really
think about it. I had a lot of gay male
friends and was certainly, you know, not an issue at all,
but I noticed that whenever I came home to my
(22:10):
father's sister's house for holidays, they always tried to fix
me up with you know, some poor guy was like
the son of the bridge partner from the country club.
You know, and he would show up at Thanksgiving and
I was like, now this is not it's not working
for me. And my father's sister tried and tried and
(22:31):
tried to fix me up with any number of one
hundred men, and it just was not going to happen,
and they kind of started looking at me like, what's
the deal with you? You know, what's up with you.
I moved out of my mother's apartment into a walk
up on the Upper East Side in the East nineties
and just fell stupidly head over heels matt for my roommate.
(22:57):
She was straight, I was quote straight on quote, and
we were together for I would say three and a
half years. Her family didn't know, My family didn't know.
I brought her to every family function when she wasn't
going home, and everyone was like, oh, how nice. She
seems very nice, but nobody put two and two together,
(23:18):
or at least they didn't tell me they did. Eventually
came home from work one day and she said, I
can't do this. So our relationship came to a bitter
end and I moved out and I had nowhere to go.
I was certainly not going to move back in with
my mother and my stepfather, and I was not going
to move in with my father, who lived on Long
(23:39):
Island at that point with his second wife, who was
a therapist, thank god, because we all needed one. And
my father said, you know, why don't you move into
grandma and Grandpa's apartment. And my grandmother had died in
nineteen ninety, and my grandfather had died much earlier, in
(23:59):
nineteen seven six, and my father and my aunt made
the decision to keep paying the one hundred and forty
two dollars a month rent on this two bedroom apartment
near Coney Island. It was my father's childhood apartment. He
had lived there from the time that I want to
say he was nine or ten, and I grew up
on Sundays going out to grandma and Grandpa's for lunch,
(24:22):
so I knew the apartment really well.
Speaker 3 (24:25):
What do you think was the reason that your father
and his sister decided to hold onto that apartment after
your grandmother died. Was it just financial, just keep this
apartment because it's so inexpensive and we'll keep it in
the family, or was there also this is after all,
this is the grandmother who had abandoned them both as children.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Yeah. Ostensibly it was financial. It was one hundred and
forty two dollars a month. It was on the F
train line, so you could get in and out of
the city really easily. And my father used to say
that the had kept it in the event that any
family member needed it, and so that was this sort
of party line, and that's what I believed. Even though
(25:10):
my cousin and her husband, the younger one lived in
the DC area and the other one lived in Great Neck,
so they weren't going to be moving many time soon
out to Coney Island. And I really didn't want to
move into this apartment. It just gave me the willies.
It just made my hair stand on end. It felt
very ghostly and complicated. But I had nowhere else to go,
(25:36):
so I moved in. The day that I moved in,
my father brought me into the apartment with my stuff,
and the moving van came with the rest of my stuff.
Everything was exactly in the same place that it had
been when my grandmother died. It was in the same
place that it had been when I was a child
(25:57):
going there on Sundays. Everything looked the same, everything smelled
the same. This was a community of very religious Jews,
so you know, you would walk into the apartment and
it just smelled like chicken fat, you no, from like
a thousand Sabbaths. I tried to unpack, and I couldn't
(26:18):
because my father and my aunt never took my grandmother's
stuff out of the apartment. So everything that she owned,
her clothes, there was food in the refrigerator, there was
her stuff in the medicine cabinet. It was like she'd
gone out to run an errand when I was coming
back any minute, but didn't. That was a really shocking experience.
Speaker 3 (26:42):
The echo of she was going out for a quick
errand and then just simply never came back exactly is
pretty profound.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Yes, yes, when I called my father and I said, Dad,
you've got to come back over here and get grandma's stuff,
and I don't know what you want to do with it,
but he was actually annoyed. And I didn't talk about
it with my aunt, but I can imagine that she
would have been annoyed also. It was like the first
real rift that my father and I had in our relationship,
(27:14):
and it was a big one. It was like I
was demanding that he'd make a break from his past,
and he had a very hard time doing that.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
Alyssa spends her mid twenties and early thirties in this
crazy relic of an apartment, nursing her broken heart. During
this time, she's writing, becoming involved in the world of
food and cooking too. All the while, the story of
her father's abandonment and the fear it instilled in her
looms large. She lives with a sense that danger and
(27:47):
loss are always lurking. But what can she do with
this sense? She does the best thing she can for now.
She tucks it away.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
I definitely tucked away. As I said, my father's second
wife was a ironically trauma therapist and just wonderful, an
amazing woman, really incredible. I know that over time she
got him to talk a lot about what had happened,
and carrying the weight of this three year old little
(28:20):
boy whose mother had abandoned him and his sister, the
story was re emerging in my life. I had buried it.
I thought, well, you know, this is a terrible thing,
but I need to move on and I need to
make my own life. I can't carry the same burden
of sadness and trauma that he did, and I just
(28:42):
need to live in a different mindset in a different way.
She dragged him to therapy. I wouldn't say he brought
it up a lot, but he did bring it up
more than he had when I was in college and
high school, and so I knew it was in the air.
The story of abandonment was in the air for whatever reason.
My father used to say that I learned how to
(29:03):
cook out of self defense because my mother was such
a horrendous cook. I started to become really really interested
in food stories. And you know, I can write a
recipe and I have many times, but I was really
interested in I guess you could call it food anthropology,
culinary anthropology. Why people ate the way they ate, Why
(29:25):
people do certain things at the table that other people
don't do at the table. What does funeral food look like?
What does celebratory food look like? And when I was
working as the book buyer at the original Diana Dluca
on Prince Street, and I was managing the book department
and falling in love with the writing of people like
(29:46):
Fisher and Patients Gray and you know, a lot of
Elizabeth David, a lot of British food writers, and I
took to it immensely and started going to cooking school
at night and loved that. I also realized that I
never wanted to be a chef because chef hours were insane.
I was offered a job at a restaurant in Chelsea,
(30:08):
and I was thinking about taking it, and I was
told that the hours were two in the afternoon until
two in the morning, and I was like, Yeah, that's
not happening. I'll sit at my computer and write about
food instead, and so I did. I found myself writing
stories about my family and celebrations that we had and
(30:30):
trips that we'd taken, and Thanksgiving dinners that we'd had.
And I wrote about my mother's mother, who was also
a lesbian closeted, you know, in the same relationship with
someone for sixty years, but closeted. And she was a
wonderful cook, and if I got any cooking talent at all,
it was through her. And these stories really began to
(30:54):
inhabit my work, my day to day. I mean, I
was still doing a lot of editing, very connected to
the publishing community. There was and remains a sizeable sort
of food publishing world in New York, and I was
very much a part of that, but I didn't want
to write recipes. I was not interested in that. I
was interested in telling family stories through what went on
(31:18):
at the table.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
We'll be right back in the year two thousand, Alyssa
meets Susan, the love of her life. When they're first together,
Alissa lives in New York and Susan is in Connecticut.
It becomes clear that one of them is going to
(31:43):
have to move, and Susan's the one with a house.
So Alyssa goes from a diehard urbanite to a life
in a Connecticut countryside. Her father is completely supportive of
this move and of this new relationship.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Had met Susan, and my stepmother had met Susan, and
they fell in love with her instantly, and they could
see and I remember my father saying this to me,
that he could see that I felt safe, that I
had sort of dropped my anchor and I was sort
of carrying a certain amount of safety. I was wearing
(32:21):
safety where I had never worn it before. That anxiety
were either gone or napping. And so I moved up
full time in two thousand and one, and I had
a job waiting for me up here as the editorial
director of a small publisher, and we just had a
(32:41):
wonderful first year, first couple of years, and I learned
how to garden, and we were cooking all the time,
and my father and Shirley would come up from Long
Island and they'd stay over and we'd go walking, we'd
go hiking with the dog. It was just really wonderful.
And in August of two thousand and two, I talked
(33:05):
to my dad probably three or four times a week.
I mean, that's a lot, but we were that close
and if we didn't get each other, we just left messages.
That was fine. And one night, Susan was working in
the Hartford area and I was home alone with the dog,
and we had this terrible storm that knocked out power,
(33:25):
knocked out cable, but I was still able to call
on the landline because we all still had landlines back then.
And I called him and I left a message and
I said, you know, we've lost power. The thunder is
booming and the house is shaking, dog is crying, and
you know, call me when you get a chance. And
he didn't, and Sue came home. The storm was over,
(33:48):
and the next morning we went out into the garden.
We were working up to our ankles and composts, and
it was very messy and gross. We decided to go
into the house for a glass of water. We went
into the house, the phone rang and it was my
stepbrother and he said the words that no one wants
to hear. Lizzy. There was an accident and we dropped
(34:12):
everything and jumped into the car raced down to Long Island.
My father lingered for a week. They were in a
really terrible car accident in Roslyn, Long Island. They had
taken him to one hospital and his second wife to
another hospital, so they never saw each other again. Completely
heartbreaking and tragic. And after a week I had to
(34:36):
take him off of life support, which was the most
devastating thing that I've ever had to do. The day
of the accident, I expected this tribe to come together
around me. That was what I expected to happen, because
I essentially had been told my whole life that was
what would happen if there was ever any kind of
(34:58):
a tragedy. And and instead they didn't. They sort of
walked away from me, and I was sort of made
into an outsider. My cousin, the older one, was so
cruel that I mean it's almost comical, how cool. I mean,
it was like something out of Larry David. It was
so ridiculous, everything from asking me for the keys to
(35:22):
her house the day of the accident to refusing to
give me his obituary the day of his funeral because
Susan and I were staying with her and didn't have
a paper of our own, And that was like the
first indication to me that, Okay, there's definitely a very
(35:44):
large dent in this relationship.
Speaker 3 (35:48):
Did you have any idea why?
Speaker 2 (35:49):
At that point, not a clue, And I remember saying
to her, you know, saying to all of them, why
are you treating me this way? Why are you doing this?
It was no response, There was no answer, and it
made me take a giant step back and wonder if
(36:11):
everything that I had thought was true about our group,
about our clan, in fact wasn't. And maybe it had
been my imagination, or maybe it was just out of
obligation to my dad, And it took me a long
time to be able to get to that place. It
(36:31):
probably seems fairly obvious, but it wasn't to me. And
you know, either it wasn't or I just wouldn't let
myself go down that road, the realization that perhaps my
relationship with these people was not as strong as I
thought it had been for you know, at that point,
(36:51):
thirty nine years, I was almost forty at that point.
Speaker 3 (36:58):
In the years following her father's death and in her
wonderfully stable and supportive relationship, Alyssa begins to blossom as
a writer. It's the early aughts and blogging is popular.
Alyssa starts a culinary narrative blog called poor Man's Feast,
which at first, she says, was about cheap food recipes.
(37:19):
But the more she wrote, the more she found herself
drawn to narratives about family and less about how to
boil an egg. These family stories heavily featured her father
and his family. Eventually they became her first book of
the same name, and in that book, Alyssa writes about
what she describes as a secret not secret, a story
(37:41):
her father had shared with her all her life.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
I was writing about the table and my family's need
for sustenance and need for nurturing through the generations. Then
I started to write the book, and that repeats itself
in the book and in you know, my meeting Susan.
We came together as food people. She was a really
(38:10):
wonderful home cook, and I was working in food and
thinking about food all the time. And the question that
was always there was why, how did this happen? You know,
my mother is a terrible cook. My mother is afraid
of food. My mother was always afraid of food. But
my father loved it. And my father was a great cook.
He enjoyed restaurants, he enjoyed feeding people, He enjoyed having
(38:35):
people around his table, and so did I. We were
like directly linked by that. And you know, I tried
to understand and unravel. You know what we say is,
you know, I tried to peel the onion and get
to an understanding of where that need for nurturing and
sustenance came from. And that was when I told the
story in eight lines in the book eight lines. Yes,
(39:00):
here's Alyssa reading those eight lines.
Speaker 5 (39:03):
When he was three, his mother had famously mythically walked
out on the family, leaving my grandfather to care for
him and his eight year old sister, who took it
upon herself to never let him out of her sight.
His mother did return eventually, but for my father, things
were never the same those easy, youthful days of feeling
(39:26):
nothing can harm you, that the world was perfect and
delicious for him.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
Those days were.
Speaker 4 (39:31):
Gone forever as my grandmother came back. My father and
my aunt spent much of the rest of their lives
trying to somehow ensure that she would never leave them again,
draping a thin DeMar of imaginary perfection over her. She
was a good, no a great mother, they would say,
(39:52):
and trying to fix whatever they had done wrong that
might have compelled her to walk out in the first place.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
And what happened in the aftermath of poor Man's Feast
combing out.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
I was completely cut out of my family.
Speaker 3 (40:13):
Where were things prior to the publication, because the way
you've described it, there was already, you know, some really
inexplicable behavior. And how had you been feeling in those years, say,
post your father's death and before the publication of your
first memoir?
Speaker 2 (40:33):
I wanted our relationship, my relationship with my older cousin
to be what it had always in my mind been,
which was doting and kind and funny and warm and
all of those things. And when my father died and
her behavior really changed, and my aunt's behavior towards me
(40:57):
really changed as well, and I thought, initially this my imagination.
Is it grief? Is it a weird manifestation of grief?
And I remember Susan saying, no, it's definitely there. I'm
feeling it as well. But we were still able to
overcome that, whatever that was. Susan and I were still
(41:17):
being invited to family functions. We were going to weddings
and bar mitzvah's and Thanksgiving and Passover. We had Thanksgiving
here at one point for all of my cousins and
my aunt, and so we were still seeing each other.
Susan and I were going down to Florida to visit
the cousins, and so that kept going. That kept happening.
(41:40):
In hindsight, it's sort of mystifying to me. I guess
that when we have a relationship that is sort of
going down the tubes, you know, with a family member.
I won't say that it's easy to kid oneself or
to you know, to confuse the issue, but I did,
(42:03):
and I think that they did too. And when the
book came out, though, it was as though a wire
had been snipped and any connection to them or most
of them, was gone, and Susan and I were never
included in a family function ever. Again. We had been
(42:25):
god parents to my older cousin's grandchild and that ended.
We never saw anybody again. And it has been how
many years twelve years now?
Speaker 3 (42:40):
Was it explained to you why this was happening.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
You know, my hal to cousin loves a good battle.
She's fairly skilled at it. But we emailed back and
forth over the course of probably six months or so,
and those emails were started by me, and they began with,
please tell me what's happening. Please tell me what I've
(43:07):
done to upset you. Please let me know, you know,
I want to have a conversation about this. That beca
was like going through the five stages of grief, which
I think are probably more than five stages, but it
started with that, and then I would get angry, like,
why the hell aren't you responding to me? You know,
we've been so close all these years, maybe on and
(43:27):
on and on, And when she responded to me, she
was sending me shrieking emails that were so witheringly painful
that in many cases I just couldn't read them. I
saw them come in and I would just send them
to Susan just so that we had them. I don't
even know why I saved them, but I think it
(43:49):
was when Susan finally said to her, can you please
tell us what this is about? And she said that
I knew, and that of course I knew, and it
had to do with telling the secret, telling the story.
It was not my story to tell. And she pretty
(44:15):
much ended our relationship by saying to Susan that they
had decided that their lives were better off without me
in it.
Speaker 3 (44:26):
Were you able to come to understand where that story
resided in your aunt's family. So here you have your
father at age three and your aunt at age eight,
going through this trauma of their mother abandoning them and
(44:47):
everything that happened to them in those years where their
mother was gone. Your father chose to share that story
and in many ways be emotionally defined by it, and
your aunt went in a different direction.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
Yes, and you didn't know this, which I.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
Think is really key when it comes to telling stories
on this podcast. You know about family secrets, what is
secret to one member of the family and not to another,
and how that all gets played out over time I
think is so central. I mean, let me ask you this.
Had you known that this was a secret in your
(45:29):
aunt's family and that she had never spoken of it
to her kids, that was it was just something that
didn't exist for them, which of course we know that
does not how secrets work. But for all intents and purposes,
on the surface of things did not exist for them.
Would you have written those eight lines?
Speaker 2 (45:47):
I probably would have written those eight lines, but I
likely would have had a sit down with my cousins
and said, Okay, so here's the situation. We need to
talk about this. This has informed my life, I think that,
(46:07):
and it had completely informed my father's life, and I'm
led to think that it probably informed your lives as
well to some degree. And in the writing of this book,
this is what I've come to, and I need to
be able to write this, and I'd like to think
that that is what I would have done.
Speaker 3 (46:27):
I wonder, too, do you think that would have made
any difference. Do you think that if there had been
that sit down that the outcome would have been any different,
or do you think that the estrangement would have been
the same.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
I think that with one of my cousins, the outcome
would have been different, and that's the younger cousin, and
we have I don't even want to say rebuilt most
of our relationship. I think it took her a while
to realize that I was not the demon that her
older sister made me out to be, that I was
(47:04):
still you know, Lissie, and still loved her and was
the same person I was before the book came out,
and so I talked to her. I don't really see
her very much anymore, But knowing what I know now,
I am not sure that it would have made a
difference with my older cousin. I think that my older cousin,
(47:29):
when my father died all those years before the book
came out, was pulling me out of the central circle
of the family, little by little. And you know, Susan
likens my family to rings inside of each other, and
you know, it's like Dante, right, So which circle are
(47:50):
you in? Are you in the inner circle? Are you
in the outer circle? And before my father's accident, I
was in the inner circle, and then after my father's accident,
I was moved to the outer circle, and that became
very clear to me. But to your question, I don't
know that it would have made any difference with the
(48:13):
older cousin. And the reason why is I think that
every family has a keeper of the narrative, keys keeper
of the stories, and the person who controls the stories,
who controls the narrative and politics and pr they call
(48:34):
it spin. And I don't know that she understood or
was able to understand, and certainly is not still not
able to understand that every person in every family has
their own truth. And I often tell the story about
(48:54):
You can ask five siblings, five adult siblings sitting around
the table, what happened in eighteen seventy five when Dad
got drunk on the jim beam at Christmas, And you'll
get five different versions of that story, and they will
fight to the death to prove that their version is
the right version. And I think that that is human nature.
But then they'll get up and get on with their day.
(49:16):
The fact is that every one of those truths is valid.
There can only be one empirical fact, but every one
of those truths is valid because we all see the
world through our own lenses, through our own screens. Every
writer who writes memoir is confronted with the question of
(49:39):
what right they have to publicly tell a story that
involves other people after all, there are multiple truths within
every relationship, especially family relationships. The poet and memoirst Honor Moore,
a guest on this podcast a couple of seasons back,
once remarked that we do not choose our stories. They
(50:00):
choose us, and if we walk away from them or
ignore them, we are somehow diminished. I think the word
diminished is the right word. At one point when I
was writing this new book, I was reliving this, I
was reliving this experience of loss. And I talk about abandonment,
(50:23):
begat abandonment. And that's the theme, that's the chord that
ties our generations together. That's the family story, that's the
family fear. And it plays out in all sorts of ways.
And it played out in my life as a young person,
day in and day out. And it played out in
(50:43):
my father's life, both in real time when he was
three and again as an adult until the day he died.
I'm sure of that. To not tell this story would have,
I think, felt to me like trying to rewrite my DNA.
(51:03):
It would have felt like trying to change my height,
or trying to change the texture of my hair or
the way my voice sounds. This story made me who
I am without question, and I considered while I was
writing this book, you know what would have happened if
I didn't tell, if I just glossed over it and
(51:24):
went through life happily. And the fact is that I
would have felt, I think, without sounding you know, hyperbolic
or dramatic. I think that I would have felt in
some way inauthentic and like I was wearing a costume
that benefited someone else. I believe that memoirists that we
(51:48):
tell our stories because they are who we are. It's
like a ben diagram. They are who we are. We
are our stories, and not telling the story would have
been asking me to not be who I am. And
I couldn't do that anymore than I could be a straight,
(52:10):
tall person who is not at all myself. I would
have had to have been another person.
Speaker 3 (52:17):
What your cousin said to you in the wake of
your having written those eight lines was I don't love
you anymore. Do you think that it is possible to
actually genuinely love someone and then be hurt by them
(52:39):
or feel betrayed by them, and then sort of decide
that you don't love them anymore? As if love could
be sort of switched on or off.
Speaker 2 (52:49):
I don't think love is a binary thing. I don't
think that you know it's a switch that you flip.
I think that you certainly true For myself, my feelings
may have changed about this person, but she is still
in my heart, and she's always going to be in
(53:11):
my heart and is always going to be a part
of my life. Whether I see her again or I
don't likely won't. In terms of how she feels, I
think that for some people who have been raised with
(53:33):
the threat of abandonment themselves, I mean, I do believe
somewhere inside, I believe that she is the cousin who
knew a little bit about what had happened. And I
also believe that it was her mother, my aunt who
told her never to tell anyone because the family had
(53:56):
to be perceived as perfect. And I came along and
I blew the lid off that perfection, and that was
a very hard thing I think for her to swallow.
I think she felt betrayed, and for her, betrayal could
be equated to the loss of love, to the loss
(54:17):
of connection, to the loss of familial connection. That's who
she in part is personally. For me, as I said,
I mean, I don't know that love is binary. It's
not like you love somebody who you've known your whole
life and then one day you don't. I don't think
love works that way. But I think that she, in
(54:41):
her own mind, had to effectively remove me from the tribe,
and that was the only way for her to do it.
Speaker 3 (54:54):
Here's Alyssa reading one last passage from her powerful memoir Permission.
Speaker 2 (55:04):
I did not know that it was a secret, and
this not knowing changed my world, tilted it on its axis,
spun it like a top. It broke my life and
broke my health, and it broke my spirit. It threatened
my marriage. I began to stutter the way I had
as a child. It altered my creative course, took my humor,
(55:28):
rendered me silent for almost a decade. It left me
sleepless and afraid. It inflated my ego, the narcissism of
self preservation, and then burnt it to ash. It unraveled
my understanding of love and tribe and the meaning of grace.
Toward the end, when I could no longer do the
(55:51):
things that breathe air and light into my days, I
couldn't write or work. I couldn't play guitar. I couldn't
feed or support myself or the woman I love. I
couldn't care for my health or my spirit. These things
are gravy, Raymond Carver might have said, and I came
close enough to the edge to peer over it. The
(56:12):
Non Secret Secret Save Me.
Speaker 3 (56:27):
Family Secret is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Acre is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
(56:48):
find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1 (57:19):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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