DANI SHAPIRO

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
You know what I think. I think every family has secrets, secrets.
Some are big, really big secrets, and some are a
little and some, once the revealed, are huge life changing.
Today's guest, I love someone with Delilah discovered quite by

(00:28):
accident that her family had been keeping one of those
huge life changing type of secrets. In Danny Shapiro and
her husband sent some DNA testing kits in for analysis.
It was supposed to be just a little thing, a
whimsical little thing. Her husband was doing it. Danny, who

(00:50):
is a very successful author, thought I'll do it too,
But the surprising results evoked some serious emotions that could
be labeled anything but whimsical. What Danny, a self proclaimed
daddy's girl, learned was it the man who raised her,

(01:13):
the man she adored, could not possibly have been her
biological father. Imagine that some of you have found that
out in the same way. As a matter of fact,
at this time when Danny discovered it, both her parents
had passed away, so when covering the mystery was up

(01:33):
to her, there was simply no one left to ask.
As an author of several nonfiction books, and now with
curiosity and all these jumbles of emotions, Danny, alongside her
journalistic husband, set to work. It took her just three
short days to unlock the truth of her conception and

(01:57):
her identifying her biological father. Danny shared her story and
found that there are many people who have uncovered similar
findings from these beginnings. Her podcast series Family Secrets was conceived.
Season three debuts on Thursday, February six. Family Secrets features

(02:18):
real life stories of individuals sharing facts that maybe DNA
and genealogy research has revealed, presented in the kindest and
most compassionate of ways. Danny also has a new book out, Inheritance,
about her own discovery and the journey of self it

(02:38):
took her on. She's joining us today to talk about
this journey. Right after I shared this important information with
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(03:21):
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when you need it most. With me on the phone
is Danny Shapiro, author of a number of books. Her
latest is called Inheritance, a memoir of genealogy, paternity, and love.

(03:44):
I love the cover of it. Is that one of
your dresses as a child, Thank you? It was that
was address that I wore as a flower girl and
a cousin's wedding. So it's really meaningful to me that
it's on the cover. Very ethereal. Yeah, Like it's got
like a blithe spirit feel to it. When I picked
up the book and saw the cover, I thought, I

(04:05):
bet this was one of her dresses, without ever delving
into the inside, just judging a book by its cover.
I like the cover. I'm glad. I'm glad. I really
it was so important to me. I mean, the book
to me is so much about love and there's a
tremendous amount of warmth in it, and I wanted I mean,
we do judge books by their covers. So I wanted
there to be that sense of just being about family

(04:30):
and history. And you know, there's a reason why the
word love is in the subtitles. To me, all about
love ultimately, In fact, I would say I'm not that
far into it. I'm only up to a hundred and fifteen.
But so far everything I've read is dripping with love.
I would have started it with a memoir of love
and just left it there, I think, thank you. So

(04:50):
let's kind of start at the beginning. Born and raised
Orthodox jew Yeah, I was raised in New Jersey, just
outside of New York City, and my father's family in
particular were a observant, you know, very religious, devout family,
and my mother's family was less so. But you know,

(05:12):
both of my parents were were Jewish, and my mother,
when she married my father, agreed to raise any children
that they would have in that religious observant way. So
that is how I was raised as an only child
in Hillside, New Jersey. And the whole time, just by
the stories I've read, you were a daddy's girl. I

(05:34):
was a total daddy's girl. I just adored my dad. Um,
he was really you know, the much warmer of my
two parents, the much more like sort of physically affectionate
with a huge hugger. And you know, my mom just
kind of didn't have those particular kinds of instincts. So yeah,

(05:58):
you know, I've heard it said if you have one
adult or you know, preferably a parent, but any really
anyone in your childhood who really gives you that kind
of love, you know, that's what saves us. I've heard
that said, and I've shared that truth over and over
and over again on the air off the air because
I work a lot with kids in foster care, and

(06:18):
I say, you know, if a kid has just one
parent or one person who's consistent with love, with unconditional love,
that changes the trajectory of a life. It's so true.
I mean, it could be a grandparent, or a teacher,
or a mentor or a neighbor. It doesn't have to

(06:39):
be someone in the immediate family. But it's just I
was always I mean, that was my dad for me.
But I was also always on the search. I was always.
I think one saving grace for me was that I
recognized my angels when they appeared. I recognized my teachers
and all through my life. Um, but certainly. I mean

(07:01):
I lost my dad when I was twenty three, but
certainly for those first twenty three years he was that
for me, and afterwards too. He's always been there for
me all through my life, you know, to this day.
So growing up Orthodox community, blonde hair, fair skin, pink cheeks.
You start your novels saying you were always staring at

(07:23):
the in the mirror as a little girl, looking for something,
but you didn't even know what you were looking for,
just looking deep into your eyes to to unlock this mystery.
Did you ever feel like that story of the ugly
duckling where the the swan doesn't quite fit in with
the ducks. Yeah, I absolutely did, because I was told
every single day of my life, really literally every day.

(07:46):
This is not an exaggeration. I was told, you don't
look Jewish. It doesn't you know, your mother must have
had an affair with the Swedish milk command or you know,
you're sure you're Jewish, or when I was older, it
became because Shapiro is I'm fond of saying Piro was
like the Smith of Jews. Yes, yes it is. You know,
it's a dead giveaway, and people would say, so is
your husband, the Shapiro. You know, once I was married,

(08:09):
you know, once I was a grown up. So every
day of my life I was, in one way or
another told that I didn't look like who I knew
myself to be. UM. So when when that happens when
you're a child, it really contributes to making you feel
like you don't belong. I felt, I felt like something
didn't add up. I think it probably is what turned

(08:33):
me into a writer. You know, from the time that
I was a teenager, I was always just scribbling and
scribbling in notebooks and you know, you know, under the
cover's late at night writing trying to like dig for
something that I didn't even know was there. But I
just knew that something didn't add up. There was a
mystery that I couldn't solve, and and I think I

(08:55):
felt writing, in some way or another was helping me
to solve it. Well, I think you were born and
a writer. Just reading the little bit that I've read,
you were born a writer, But solving that mystery probably
propelled you into being a really good writer. M hmm,
I wondered, because you know, when I started writing, I
started writing novels, and then I turned to memoirs. You know,

(09:15):
I turned to telling stories that were out of my
own life and shaping stories out of my own experience.
And you know, knowing what I know today, you know
from where I sit now, that makes a lot of sense.
I know why that was the case. Um, it was
the case because I was after some sort of elusive
truth that I couldn't get at. So fifty plus years,

(09:39):
five decades, you live as Danny Shapiro, Jewish daughter, living
your life, married, had a child, and then your husband says, hey,
why don't we take this DNA test just for the
fun of it, And you didn't even really think of
it there was a big thing. I totally didn't think
of it as a big thing. In fact, I almost

(09:59):
didn't do it. I mean, he wanted to do it
just for sort of recreational reasons, and he just asked
me if I wanted to do it too. And I
think about that now because taking that DNA has changed
my entire life and my understanding of myself and of
my history. And if I hadn't done it, I just

(10:19):
never would have known. And it's so interesting because you know,
I have been a student of identity in some way
or another, all my life. And I've also been someone
who's always tried to tried and tried to make meaning
out of things I didn't understand. And you know, if
it's true what they say, some people believe that when
we pass away, we get a moment where we can

(10:42):
survey the whole thing and we can see everything that
we didn't know. And I think about that sometimes now
because if that, if that's the case, and if that
were me, and if I had never made the discovery
that I did, I would have just like knocked myself
upside the head at that moment and think I missed it.
I missed the whole thing, Delilah, Like I just missed um,

(11:03):
something so fundamental and essential about myself. And how many
other people have taken those same DNA tests and learned
truths that they had no clue of. Yeah, so I
can tell you. Actually, I mean, twenty six million people
in the last two years to have ordered these over
the counter DNA tests. It's become the most popular holiday

(11:27):
gift in America. Families are all giving these kids to
each other and then approximately two of people who take
these tests find out what's called it's actually has um
initials it's called an m p E, which is what
happened to me. It stands for not parent expected, and

(11:49):
in PE is kind of like an e MP, a
big bomb that goes off and doesn't damage the buildings,
but damages like everything inside your heart. We're going to
talk about the impact that truth bomb had on you,
that e MP right after this important message. So you
got your results back, that's right, I mean, I so,

(12:13):
so I I get my results back and I and
I discover in really pretty short order that my beloved
dad had not been my biological father, and that changed
both everything and nothing right, Like I remember saying to
my best friend a few weeks later, do you still

(12:34):
see me as the same person? I was in such
I was reeling, I was in such shock, and she
looked at me with such compassion, and she said, you
are the same person. You just didn't You just didn't
have all the information. But you, Danny, are the same person.
But now you have all of the pieces of the puzzle.

(12:56):
But you know I should say too that, I mean,
I now see my story and you know what I
discovered and the journey that I've been on, and that
I write about an inheritance. I see it as miraculous
because I had just enough clues to be able to
piece together the story of my identity. I mean, there

(13:19):
are so many people out there who never are able
to know. And it only took thirty six hours from
the moment that I realized that my dad had not
been my biological father until I found the man who
was thirty six hours with nothing more. I don't have
like great detective skills. It was just nothing more than

(13:42):
a couple of hunches and a little face block and
little googling and a couple of long ago conversations that
came back to me. Because I also think one of
the things about just all of us as human beings
is that when something's really important, like if we have
a conversation and we don't even know it's really important
at the time, if it's really important, something inside of

(14:06):
us kind of sits up and takes note and remembers it.
It's like an invisible tape recorder kind of goes off
and we are able to retain it whole. And that's
what happened to me. Um conversation I've had with my
mother literally thirty years earlier came back to me, and
it was full of clues. If I hadn't had that

(14:28):
conversation with my mother, I'd still be walking around going
I know my father wasn't my biological father, but I
don't know who was. And I'm never going to know
more about this story. Both of my parents have passed.
But your mom gave you that clue when she said
an institute in Philadelphia, that's right. And it was just
such a quote unquote, such an accident, right, such a

(14:49):
um unlikely thing that my mother would have let that slip.
But she used the word institute and she said Philadelphia.
And based just on that, I was able to put
together a big part of the story. And if I
hadn't had that, I would have looked at those results
and I would have made up You know, we all
we we make up stories all the time. We all

(15:11):
go through life that way, not just writers. We we
create narratives to make sense of the world around us
and to make sense of ourselves and to make sense
of our families. And if I had discovered that my
dad hadn't been my biological father, and I hadn't known
anything more about it, I would have had to assume

(15:31):
that my mother had an affair that would have been
the only thing that would have made any sense, and
it wouldn't have made any sense, but that's what I
would have assumed. And instead my mother let's slip that
my parents had trouble with fertility, trouble conceiving me, and
they had gone to an institute in Philadelphia. And because

(15:54):
of that, really, within minutes of making the discovery about
my dad, I knew what had happened, and I knew
that my biological father must have been a spun downer.
And that was the beginning of unraveling the mystery of
you know, couples. In those days, we're told never to

(16:17):
tell anyone, to keep it the biggest secret if they
made a baby in that way, to not tell their
own parents, to not tell their siblings. That was the
case with everything. I mean, that was the case with everything.
When when I was a teenager, I got in a
fight with my dad. My father and I were fighting

(16:38):
every day, every week, and I was sent to live
with my grandparents. And I was sobbing and crying and
I said to my grandma, my mother's mother, my maternal grandma,
I don't know why my dad hates me so much.
And she said sissy. He doesn't hate you. He's afraid
you're going to turn out just like he did. And
I said, I don't get that. He's a wonderful man.

(17:01):
He's successful, he's an engineer, he's smart, you know. And
I'm going on and on listing all my dad's great qualities.
And she said, your dad got a girl pregnant in
high school and he's afraid you're going to end up
in the same boat. Mm hmm. Wow. And just like
you described in your book when you looked at the

(17:21):
DNA results and realized, wait a minute, I just sat
there like and I was, what fourteen fifteen maybe sixteen,
Oh my goodness. And then she dropped the big bomb.
You can't tell anyone. I told you this. You can't
tell your mother, you can't tell your father, you can't

(17:42):
tell anyone. I told you this. Yeah, you know. I
have this podcast called Family Secrets in which I talked
to my guests about family secrets. And one of the
most heartbreaking things for me and so many of the
story is that the person who the secret was kept

(18:03):
from often ends up being thrust into the role of
being the secret keeper. And you know, it's like this
double whammy. It's like you find out something that you
were never supposed to know and it was hidden from you,
and then you have to hold it yourself. I don't
believe in keeping secrets like that. I don't either. I
have so many kids that are adopted, and you know,

(18:25):
in our generation when when you were adopted, you weren't
told that, you were never told that. You know, it
was all these big secrets and you weren't told who
your birth family was. Or I have a girlfriend who
got pregnant when she was a teenager and she never
got to know her baby, never got to bond with
her baby. They took her baby, they placed her baby

(18:45):
for adoption, and you don't talk about it. Well, that's
the amazing thing about now. The time that we're living
in now is because of the combination of this DNA
testing and the unintended consequences of the d n A testing,
which is that everybody's signing out. Everybody's signing like I.
I've been on the road since Inheritance came out in hardcover,

(19:09):
and everywhere I've gone there have been wall to wall
people and they are people with stories. And when it
started happening, it stunned me. I mean, I'm a writer.
I've been on book tour a bunch of times. I
had never experienced anything like this. And they were late
discovery adoptees who never knew they were adopted. They were many,

(19:32):
many people who had biological fathers who had been sperm donors,
or even now biological mothers who were egg donors. There
were lots of people from the adoptive community or adoptees.
There were, like the story you just told me, grown
women who as teenagers had put up a child for
adoption and then that child grows up and find them eventually,

(19:55):
or they find the child. There are men have always
had children they didn't know about like that, they literally
just never knew about you know, got to go pregnant
and then you know, just never knew about it. And
so there's like a reckoning going on because of all this,
and it's huge. From where I sit, it's it's epidemic,
and and I think that even though sometimes it's hard

(20:18):
and sometimes it's painful and it's kind of rocking a
lot of families, I also think it's great because it's
the end of the era of secrecy. It's the it's
the end of it. There can't be these kinds of
secrets anymore because everybody's finding out everything. Well, my sister
is the genealogist in our family. She loves genealogy. She

(20:41):
she could have a business just doing genealogy for people
because she's so good at it. I mean, she's just
really really good. I am not that detail oriented person.
I'm just not. And she pours over charts and graphs,
and she reads the census. She loves censuses, and she
reads the census takers comments from you know, decades gone by,

(21:03):
and holy molly, she dug up a lot of secrets
in our family. And I'm like, whoa, wow, because not that,
you know, not that our family was perfect by any
stretch of the imagination, and we weren't religious, we weren't
Orthodox or anything like that. But you grow up with
these concepts of these notions that you are who you are,

(21:25):
and then when you find out you you aren't who
you thought you were, it's it's bizarre, exactly. I mean.
I I felt, you know, like, you know, so interesting
for me as a writer, because I've always been digging
and suddenly it all made sense. But it was also

(21:47):
all this brand new, like it forced me to think
about what makes us us, Like what makes a family
of families doesn't matter? You know, the genes matter? Does
biology matter? You know, nature versus nurture. You know, there
was so much that I felt like, Wow, I am
getting the most extraordinary front row seat to all this.

(22:12):
Like I remember, you know, like you mentioned, I've like
stared at my face in the mirror as a child.
In the days after my discovery, and especially when I
identified my biological father, who I happened to look a
great deal like, I looked at my face in the mirror,
and for the first time I actually understood my face,

(22:33):
Like I understood why those people had all been saying
that all my life. I understood where I came from
in terms of the nature piece of it. And so
much of the journey for me was one that had
to do with you know, at the very beginning after
my discovery, well meaning people would say things to me like, well,

(22:53):
no matter what, your your father is still your father.
And at the beginning I had a really hard time
I'm taking that in or even knowing what it meant,
because I had just discovered that in biological terms, he
wasn't and in all likelihood. My parents knew that and
had of course kept it a secret, and so I

(23:17):
had been raised with that secret at the center of
my life. And the journey was really one of and
this is one of the greatest gifts of this for me.
I had to really think about my parents, and I
had to think of them not as my parents, but
as people, as human beings who existed before me, and

(23:40):
who made choices and decisions based on their own desires
and their own histories, and the same. Of infertility in
those days, oh my goodness, like the shame of male
infertility was so tremendous that you couldn't even get a
doctor to say it existed. And there was so much

(24:03):
heartache that went into childlessness, not being able to have
a child. And what I came to feel was that
my dad was a hero. My books dedicated to him,
and that he was more, if anything more my dad
than he had been before, that he had done something

(24:23):
that was hard and heroic and sacrificial, absolutely sacrificial. I think,
you know. One of the very painful things for me
is I did come to say because my father was
a very sad guy, and I always felt his heart.
I always felt that he there was something at his
core that was was lonely and sad, and I had

(24:48):
a lot of thoughts about why that might be. But
then when I discovered what I did, I realized that
this contributed to that as well. That he knew he
wasn't my biological father and he could not have loved
any more. But I also think that he had a
sadness about that. Um. But in the end, you know,

(25:09):
I came to feel, you know, and I write this
towards the end of the book, that I come from
three people. That's pretty unusual. I I come from my mom,
who I was not close to and never never felt
connected to. But she's my mom. I checked, I did.
I lasted like a ninety year old cousin of hers

(25:32):
into like I got her kids to go, you know,
get her to spit into a plastic violence sends it away.
Because when something like this happens in your life, you
really need a tent pole somewhere. I just wanted to
I wanted to just be sure of something, so I know,
she's my mom. Um, my dad who raised me is
my dad and who loved me into being. And then

(25:55):
the man who was the anonymous no longer anonymous sperm
donor who was a medical student, you know, just making
his way to medical school and you know, picking up
a few dollars and doing something that might help a
family have a child. He's I come from him, you know,
I've come from him biologically. So I feel like I

(26:16):
really lucked out, Like I end up with even more
of a sense of solidity than I did before. I
think also because when we know the truth, which I
spent fifty four years not knowing, it really is true,
that the truth will set us free. It is profoundly

(26:36):
liberating to know the truth about something that was hidden
for so long. I love that. I love it is true.
I mean, it was written for five thousand years ago.
The truth will set you free, and it's true. In
my circumstance, I couldn't. I couldn't process what my grandma
had told me. And I found out that my father

(26:58):
actually had two children. He married the woman, the girl
that got pregnant and had a daughter, and then she
got pregnant again and they separated and divorced. She had
a son, But my dad was never a part of
his life. He was a part of his little girl's
life for the first couple of years, and they made
an agreement to go their separate ways because she was

(27:19):
involved with somebody else, and that somebody else was raising
the children as his own, and so she and my
dad made an agreement that they would go their separate ways,
and that they would bury the truth, and that the
children would always believe they were their stepfather's biological children,
and that my father would go on with his life.

(27:39):
And like your dad, he had such an immense sadness
I believe a sadness that led to his early death
because he mourned that he grieved that, but he couldn't
couldn't talk about it, couldn't acknowledge it. And they lived
half an hour away mhm. So I was the one
that that actually called my my brother, my half brother

(28:02):
m hm. And he drove to my house the next weekend,
and when he got out of the car, I almost fainted.
Just like you described your sensation of seeing your biological
dad in in the video, with the same expressions and
the same hand movements, in the same pattern of conversation

(28:22):
out of the car stands a younger version of my father.
It was very weird. Oh, I have chilled. What made
you do it finally, you know, at well, Grandma had
seen an article again, this was my mother's mother had
seen an article in the local newspaper I'm from a

(28:42):
small town in Oregon, that he had graduated from a
trade school and had gotten a job, a good job
in Everett, Washington, which was only forty five minutes north
of me. And she cut out the article and she
mailed it to me, and she said, I think that
is your brother, because she had told me, you know,

(29:03):
years ago about my sister, and and seeing his picture,
I knew he was my brother. Um, and back then
you could just call, you know, the operator and get
a phone number, and they called him and that was that.
So I just wanted to put the pieces together. I

(29:24):
wanted to know the story. And I think mostly I
wanted to understand my dad because he was always so mysterious,
and I was trying to unlock that peace. Yeah, to
find a reason, to get at the reason beneath all
the behavior and the and the feelings and the energy.

(29:45):
Right then, I think, you know, I've been a student
of secrets probably all my life, and it sort of
threaded through all of my work, you know, Interestingly, given
what I didn't know. But one of the things that
I had real in the last two years because I'm thinking,
what does secrets haven't like holding a secret, keeping a secret,

(30:06):
burying a secret, Like what what what do secrets have
in common? And I think whenever there is a secret
that is held so closely, there's shame thrumming just beneath it.
We keep secrets because we're ashamed. We think no one
will understand or ashamed of our behavior, where we think
will be shunned off people new. And that's like it's

(30:29):
like the sea of shame. You know that these secrets
just bob along. And but the thing is what we
know now, and we know it. I mean, I think
there are still many many people who try to keep secrets,
but we know now that you can't just bury something
and really think like that it disappeared. Nothing disappears. It's there,

(30:52):
but it's I look back at both of my parents
now and I can see that so much of what
made them them and what formed them over the years
that we you know, walked the earth together, was formed
around the um. It must have been so lonely for

(31:13):
each of them. I don't I don't think they ever
spoke about it. To each other ever again, I mean,
I'll never know, but I believe that they basically went
ahead and did this thing and then pretty much decided
that it had never happened and they were just gonna
get on with things. Um. And yet they have this blonde,
blue eyed, pink cheeked daughter who nobody can seem to

(31:33):
fail to comment on how she doesn't look Jewish, And
you know, it's it's it was always always there. There
were probably things prodding and poking constantly, but that feeling
that you just what you describe your your your dad as.
I think when we keep secrets like that, it diminishes
us ultimately, when we hold that darkness in and we

(31:57):
feel like we can't talk about it and we're blanketed
in shame, we wrap ourselves with that shame, and then
we have these fake personas, you know, especially now with
social media, where we you know, we crop and alter
and boost and change the shape of everything to look
like what we think it should look like when inside

(32:17):
we're just we feel unworthy, right right, absolutely, and then
we compare ourselves with other people's furnished you know images.
You know, it's like a vicious it's a vicious cycle. Well,
I'm glad that you've written the book. I'm glad that
you got to the bottom of your secret, as painful

(32:38):
as that was, but as healing as it is. Banned.
But I'm really, really glad Danny, that you're giving a
forum of voice to those you know, two percent of
people who find out guess what Dad wasn't dad or
mom wasn't mom, and are able to talk about it,
because the more we talk about it, the more you know.

(32:59):
I went on vacation a couple of years ago. So
one of my closest friends has an adopted daughter, and
it was in an open adoption, and the birth mom,
beautiful woman, was at a point in her life where
she could not parent to child, and so she made
the very loving, healthy decision to choose her child's mother,

(33:20):
who is my best friend. And I went on vacation
a couple of years ago, and I took my god daughter,
the adopted child, all of my adopted children, and we
met her birth mom and spent a week on vacation together.
And she went for a walk on the beach and
I said, can I join you? Because I could tell

(33:41):
she needed some alone time. She said, yeah, please, and
we walked and she cried, she said. She said, being
able to talk about my experience openly and honestly and
without judgment is something I have not been able to
do in any setting, not with my husband, not with
my family, she said. But you and your kids talk

(34:04):
about it like you're talking about what's for dinner. Yeah.
That's a beautiful story, and you know it's it's making
me think that one thing I really want to get
across is that one of the things about my story
and what happened is that everybody tried to do the
right thing. What I mean by that is when I

(34:27):
reached out to my biological father. You know, seventy eight
year old man, retired physician living in the Pacific Northwest.
You know, he he must have opened his email one
day and expected to see an announcement from like, you know,
his golf club and um, you know, what's for lunch
or whatever, and instead he receives an email from a

(34:48):
complete stranger saying, I hope this won't come as too
much of a shock, but I think that you may
be my biological father. Right. I hear so many stories
of families where this kind of thing is happening because
it's happening in hundreds of thousands of the families right now,
in one way or another. Where the first response, and
admittedly it was my biological father's first response too, but

(35:11):
he got past it. The first response is to feel threatened.
What do you want from me? What do you want?
You know, it's like it's the ultimate like in the
other the stranger, you know, the interloper, what do you want?
And when people can get beyond that very sort of
primitive human impulse and actually make room for each other

(35:36):
and for each other's experiences. I mean my biological father,
and he will never feel like he's not my dad,
but I do come from him and his kids, particularly
his daughter who is just only a few years younger
than I am, the daughter that he and his he
has three kids that he and his wife raised. They've
become we have a special relationship now, um, And it's

(35:59):
because there was this openness and this sense of who
are we to each other? Who do we want to
be to each other? And the you know what you're
describing with your goddaughter and her birth mother, or what
I see you know when I'm out on the road.
You know, just stories where half siblings find each other
and then start getting together and having you know, sort

(36:21):
of meetups and families who have used donors or surrogates
all being able to gather together. It's like the opposite
of shame. It's celebrating all different forms and shapes of
what makes the family a family and how we you know,
how we move through this life together. You know that

(36:42):
that we're all, you know, more the same than we're
different inside. And how do we do that, you know,
with each other and with open and loving hearts. Well,
thank you for writing your book, Thank you for having
your podcast and giving people a place to bring their
stories and share their stories. Is we need to talk
about it? Absolutely true. You know. On my podcast we

(37:05):
have these highly produced episodes every season, but we also
have a pull free number eight number that people people
can call in and just record their stories. And one
of the things that has just been amazing is to
see how many stories pour in from people who some

(37:26):
of them are still very much keeping secrets, you know,
they're they're they're just sharing them on this line and
sometimes we you know, we include them in bonus episodes
and so they're being heard by you know, millions of people. Um,
but that desire to share is so powerful that it's
even something to pick up the phone and say, this

(37:49):
happened to me. I want to I want to share
what happened to me, or I want to share what
happened in my family. Okay. The book is Inheritance by
Danny Shapiro, a memoir of genealogy, paternity, and mostly love.
Uh and and I would encourage anyone to read it
that has ever questioned their inheritance, but but also anybody

(38:10):
to read it because it's so well written. You're a
wonderful writer. And I'm halfway through it and I'm loving it,
so I'm going to finish it before the day is over.
Thanks to love. I'm gonna love thinking of you reading it.
All right, thank you for being here, Danny, God blessio.
Thanks for having me. Take care. The book is called Inheritance,
a Memoir of genealogy, paternity, and mostly love, and Danny's

(38:34):
podcast is called Family Secrets. New episodes will be released
each week through the winter and into spring. You can
find it on I Heart Radio and all of your
favorite podcast platforms. I'm a little more than halfway through
the book. Can't wait to finish it. Listen You will
love this book. Even if you don't have a big

(38:55):
family secret like Danny did, you will still love this book.
Pick up your copy today, and you and me next
time I love someone with Delilah or I will do
my best to inspire you to change the world, one
heart at a time.