The Family Secrets Podcast

The second season of novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro’s riveting “Family Secrets” podcast recently launched in iTunes’ Top 10, a testament to the fact that humans have a deep desire to see what’s behind the curtain, to get at the truth of what we hide or what’s been hidden from us. The author deftly satisfies this urge, indulging our voyeuristic impulses as she unburdens guests of their long-held deepest secrets and bears witness to the lasting impact, both of the secrets themselves and of their ultimate revelations.

But there’s nothing sensationalized or salacious about these secrets or their disclosures. Even as guests detail stories we might never have been able to imagine, sometimes mournful and often harrowing, they reveal a slice of common humanity. Shapiro in each episode homes in on the core emotions from which virtually all secrets arise and which all secrets arouse—shame, guilt, fear—feelings that resonate for everyone and, thus, stir empathy and compassion.

Listening to each episode is like looking into a lighted room on a dark street—something that seems both furtive and intimate. There are moments so revealing you want to look away, yet you can’t help but linger to see just a bit more. These are, to a one, painful conversations; we listen as each storyteller presses an ancient bruise, but the pain is only prelude to the relief that comes from unleashing the story that’s been kept locked inside them or had been kept hidden from them.

Shapiro is no stranger to family secrets. She’s written about them tenderly through nine books, both fiction and nonfiction. Her tenth, the bestselling “Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love,” details her discovery that she was a family secret, that she’d been donor conceived, her father’s sperm having been mixed with donor sperm at a fertility clinic. It explores not only her anguish at learning that her dear father wasn’t in fact her father, but also the sense of betrayal and the rudderlessness she felt after learning of this genetic disconnection. There, as here, she discusses the ways in which we are formed as much by what we don’t know, what we merely suspect, and what we might intuit as by what we do know.

The podcast arose out of the author’s understanding that her story isn’t unusual. In the age of the Internet and with the rising popularity of direct-to-consumer DNA tests, it’s become increasingly difficult to hold back the truth. Secrets, she observes, have existed throughout the ages, but “are tumbling out at a staggering rate.” The goal of her conversations with her guests, Shapiro says, is to “shine a bright light into the dark hidden corners of the unspoken and discover together the power and beauty that comes with finally knowing the truth.”

She succeeds admirably. The stories move listeners to tears at the same time that they promote a deeper understanding of the traumas that all too often remain below the surface. They raise the unsettling truth that we are—all of us—both unknowable and fundamentally similar.

The first episode of the second season focuses on a secret that’s both heartbreaking and—rare among these stories—truly beneficial to those who were kept in the dark about it. Jon Mehlman details what he and his wife, Marla, judged to be a “loving choice”—to withhold from their young daughters the fact that Marla, suffering from metastatic breast cancer, had been told by her doctors she had roughly 1,000 days to live. And in the second episode, Sascha Rothchild, a Los Angeles television writer, tells the astonishing story of how her father, in the grip of dementia, inadvertently revealed his secret sexual past—how the man she and her mother thought they knew had been someone quite different.

Among the first season episodes are two involving secrets and shame circling brutal instances of violence and sexual abuse. Another involves the soul-shaking solution to a family mystery; in “Don’t Duck,” Sylvia Boorstein, famed author, psychotherapist, and mindfulness meditation teacher, tells a chilling tale of learning that she’d had an aunt who had died in childhood and whose existence no one acknowledged. At age 82, she remains profoundly shaken by the discovery. Her story, which she’d previously shared with her friend Shapiro, became the inspiration for the creation of the podcast.

The majority of the guests in the first season discuss secrets related to some aspect of misattributed parentage, genetic disconnection, and genealogical bewilderment. An early episode of that inaugural season, “The Very Image,” begins, appropriately enough, with the sound of whispers, a signifier of a truth running through many of these stories—that everyone knows the secret except the person most affected by it. Shapiro talked with Jim Graham about his discovery that his father wasn’t the gruff and distant man who raised him, but instead had been a Catholic priest. In conversation they reveal the lengths to which the church went to keep Graham from ever knowing the truth, an effort he ultimately thwarted. In a letter Graham shares with Shapiro, a particularly sensitive and perceptive nun who knew his father encapsulates the predicament of so many of Shapiro’s guests when she refers to “the pain of unknowing.”

In “Open Secret,” Steve Lickteig similarly relates coming to learn that everyone knew something about him he didn’t know—that is sister is actually his mother. In “One Drop,” Bliss Broyard recalls the moment in adulthood when she and her brother learned what everyone around them knew—that their father, literary critic Anatole Broyard, was an African-American who passed as white. “Little White Lie” is the story of Lacey Schwartz, who was raised in predominantly white Woodstock, New York in a Jewish Family in which her dark skin was essentially ignored. She knew, deep down, she wasn’t the child of both of her parents, yet that knowledge wasn’t confirmed until high school, when she was bussed to a school where the black students implicitly accepted her, and further, when, after including a photo with a college application, she was admitted as a black student. At its core, says Shapiro, this is “a story about the extraordinary capacity that we human beings have to believe what we want to believe, to bury our own secrets even from ourselves, and at the same time the capacity we also have to shed those secrets, to move past them and become wholly ourselves.”

Of these episodes about genetic identity, the one I found most resonant and shattering is “Zygote Baby”—in which Jane Mintz, a clinical interventionist, searches for and connects with her biological mother. This narrative touches on feelings that will be all too familiar to many readers—the great emptiness inside us that comes from lacking knowledge about our past and the unshakable feeling of being “other.” Mintz, by all accounts, had a good life and was highly successful. Yet, she says, “My whole life I felt like there was a black hole in my soul so deep and wide and I felt like I didn’t deserve to feel that way.” There was a sense, she says, of not feeling entitled to the pain of not knowing one’s origins. “You always feel on the outside of life, and there’s no evidence for why you should feel that way, so there’s incongruence.” Her description of finally meeting her mother is extraordinarily moving and illustrative of the highs and lows and the promises and pitfalls so often associated with reunions.

While not all listeners may agree with Shapiro’s choice at times to bring her own experience, as detailed in “Inheritance,” into the conversation, I find it to be one of the key strengths of the podcast, elevating the episodes from mere recitations of events to conversations that give and take and uncover the deeper threads that run through all the stories. Her literary skills let Shapiro set the stage for the revelation of the secrets. She adds just enough descriptive detail and context at various points, keeping the pace and moving the narrative forward. She knows instinctively when to step back and let the guest have the floor and when to interject to summarize, amplify, or invite a deeper discussion. Her commentary, rather than distracting, highlights what’s universal about these experiences. As the podcast moves from story to story, Shapiro points to the thru lines and acknowledges the echoes from guest to guest about knowing, keeping, or revealing secrets. It’s a way of saying “I see, I understand, I’ve been there.”

What every secret has in common, Shapiro says “is the silence rooted in shame, trauma, and the desire to protect.” In almost all cases, though, the secrets are toxic. “Family Secrets” is evidence that releasing these painful experiences can be both detoxifying and transformative. The telling of stories and the sharing of secrets lets others know they’re not alone.

New episodes drop every Thursday, and all of season one and the bonus episodes, including listener stories, are available now at iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow on Twitter at @famsecretspod and @danijshapiro.