Long before DNA surprises became ubiquitous or NPE became part of the lexicon, "This American Life" shed light on family secrets and misattributed parentage.
Most podcasts in existence today owe a debt to “This American Life,” a public radio program and podcast aired weekly, each week’s episode a selection of stories on particular theme. On the air for more than two decades, it’s a stellar model of narrative journalism, created, produced, and hosted by Ira Glass and about everything and anything, from national politics to the smallest of stories about people you’ve never heard of.
The theme of a 2005 show was “Go Ask Your Father,” stories about children who find out something they’ve always wanted to know about their fathers — although not necessarily something they ultimately want to know. In each case, the subjects confront (or wish they could confront) a parent about a nagging concern. In a heartbreaking prologue, we hear from a child named Aric Knuth, whose father, a Merchant Marine, was gone from his life for six months at a time in Aric’s youth. Over the years, the boy records audiotapes, sends them to his absent father, and pleads for tapes to be returned in kind. He’s shattered when all he gets in return is radio silence.
It’s Glass’s way of jumpstarting the conversations with a provocative dilemma — one that’s likely to resonate with anyone who’s been hurt or lied to by their parents. “I know this is the saddest tape in the world that we’re starting the show with this week, and I’m just doing it so I can talk about this choice,” he says. “As adults, we have this funny choice. Are we going to sit down with our parents and talk about the stuff that hurt us and didn’t make sense to us when we were kids? And it’s hard to know if it’s worth it sometimes, if it’s just going to make your parents feel bad. And what are they going to say, anyway?” No spoilers here about Knuth’s conclusion, but he raises an intriguing question that might cause listeners to think differently about dissatisfying heart-to-hearts with parents about events that happened long in the past.
In the next story, Glass turns his attention to a man whose question for his father is one many of us have asked: are you really my father? In the episode, “Make Him Say Uncle,” Glass talks to Lennard Davis, a professor in the English Department in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois in Chicago, about his quest to determine whether his father really was his father. It’s a story Davis later explored in his 2009 memoir, “Go Ask Your Father.”
In his signature style, Glass lets you in on the story from the beginning, with the tale told as if it’s unfolding as you listen. It’s set in motion in 1981 by a bizarre phone conversation between Davis and his Uncle Abie, a man his father warned him all his life not to emulate. Whatever Abie did — deeds as simple as reading in bed — Davis was instructed not to do. Whoever Abie was, Davis was urged not to be. The message was clear: Uncle Abie was the black sheep of the family and everything he did was bad or wrong. Davis’ father encouraged his son to be like him and more like his brother in all the ways Davis felt different from both of them.
When Davis was 31, his mother had already died and his father was hospitalized with cancer. Uncle Abie showed up and said he had a secret to tell him, but he couldn’t reveal it until his father died. After his father’s death, when Abie called to discuss furniture that belonged to his brother, Davis reminded him about the secret, and his uncle tried to evade the question. But Davis pressed him. “I kind of nudged him and finally he said, OK, I’ll tell you the secret. And I said, what is it? And he said, I’m your father. And there was just this — this was just completely out of the blue. There was no clues in my upbringing. There was nothing. And my father had just died, and I’m in the process of mourning him and thinking about my connection to him.”
Abie then told a story Davis found preposterous: Abie’s brother — Davis’ father — came to him with a jar and told him he needed semen. Abie went in the bathroom and returned with the semen. Then Abie added a wrinkle: the semen was mixed with semen from Davis’ father. “I was in a complete, total state of shock,” said Davis. “And I just thought, wow, whose movie am I in? The whole thing was completely bizarre.” Surely, he thought, artificial insemination hadn’t been performed as early as 1949, and if it had been, they couldn’t possibly have mixed the semen. But his research told him it had been, and they did. Glass describes the mixing of sperm as being like a firing squad in reverse, where “each person would choose to believe they weren’t the one who hit the prisoner. And in this, everybody would choose to believe they were the one.”
After his father’s funeral, Davis confronted his cousin, Abie’s son, and told him the strange story. His cousin both startled and relieved Davis when he revealed that Abie had been delusional at the time, had even been committed to an institution because he’d been hearing voices. Given this new information, and influenced by his wife’s encouragement, Davis set aside the whole matter and got on with his life, until 15 years later, when it began to preoccupy him. He talked again to his cousin, who admitted that he’d lied all those years earlier — that his father told him the same story when he was very young.
Glass and Davis explore the feelings this strange story evokes — Davis’ recollections of never feeling as if he belonged in his family, his thoughts about the possibility his father isn’t his father and the dreaded Abie might be, and about who he hopes his father will turn out to be. The conversation is raw and moving, with painful pauses and tense moments of suspense — as when, for example, Davis opens an envelope from a DNA lab that contains the answer to his questions — that leave you guessing, along with Davis and Glass, about what will be discovered.
It’s a fascinating conversation about what it means to be family, about how we respond to family secrets and reckon with shifting identities. It reveals how individuals can respond to these questions and revelations in ways that seem universal and in others that are unique and surprising.
The show’s entire archive is available on iOS and Android and at the show’s website. Tune in to find out what was in the letter from the DNA lab.