Circle Yes or No

In 1988, Margaret Kimball is four years old and her mother attempts suicide; this is just one of several family secrets. As Margaret searches for answers nearly thirty years later, she mines through old diary entries, hospital records, home videos, and other archives to piece together a narrative map of her childhood in an attempt to understand the unspoken familial fractures.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. This
episode contains discussions of suicide. Listener discussion is advised. If
you are a loved one is struggling with suicidal thoughts,
please call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline. At three at

(00:21):
my desk, I sped my beer and straightened my back,
suddenly aware that I am watching us as a family,
that I'm about to see what we were like together
before time had scattered us off into our separate lives.
Playing on the screen in front of me is evidence
that we've been together, proof that we existed, with clues
to our disintegration, the possibility that my memories are to

(00:43):
whatever degree, real and verifiable. So I watch, hoping to
find answers to questions I hardly have language for about
who we were during those years that shaped us. That's
Margaret Kimball, illustrator, lettering artist, and writer, sir of the
recent graphic memoir and now I spill The Family Secrets.

(01:06):
Margaret's story is about silence and memory and the powerful
need to peel back the layers of secrecy and shame
in order to move forward with grace, strength, and dignity.

(01:29):
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. We grew up
in Connecticut and Glastonbury, which is a really cute suburb
of Hartford, and we lived on this little street called

(01:51):
Marthew Drive, and there are all these colonial houses and
it was a safe street, so we could just kind
of roam freely around. And there was a little side
street called Little Acres and we could roam down there
into the creek and there were some woods and there
was a field beyond that. It felt infinite to me,
like when I go back there now, it's like such

(02:12):
a tiny little street, but as a kid, you can just,
you know, walking up the entire street felt like this
giant journey. There was one time where my brother and
I tried to run away and we went literally, I
mean probably thirty ft down the road, but we felt
like we were, you know, miles from home, and my
dad just stepped on the porch and screamed for us
to come back home, and we immediately did. It felt

(02:35):
like we had gone like really far. And it felt
that way when we went to Little aakres we build
forts there. There were all these twigs and branches, and
I remember sitting in our woods actually kind of near
the shed, and just dreaming of tree forts I could build.
And I loved being in the really tiny woods. In
the town, there was like a little downtown area so
near our church, we could ride bikes and go get

(02:57):
donuts at the little pharmacy. There was a cute restaurant
called Lotties, which is still there, which I go do
sometimes when I'm in Connecticut. You know, in many ways,
it was a sort of visually idyllic childhood. And my
mom was and is. She's like a very kind woman,
but you know, I remember her as very tired and distracted,

(03:18):
and I think she was just having three kids. And
I remember, maybe a little when I was a little older,
like maybe ten, her just constantly talking about this career
she wanted to have. I think she wanted to be
an English teacher, and that it made me feel guilty,
like sorry that I exist, you know, I'm sorry for

(03:39):
your career. So that's what I think of her. I
just think of her as like really tired and nice,
although sometimes very angry, but just like a tired person.
Who kind of has limited resources to manage that exhaustion
and her feeling of not having had the exact life

(03:59):
she wanted. Was how I look at it now? And
how about your dad? He is a workaholic. He was
gone all week working, but he would play with us
so much. So I remember on the weekends. There's two
games that I remember really well. One was I think
we called it monster, where he'd just like to sit

(04:21):
on the living room carpet and we'd go near him
and he'd grab one of us and then we'd have
to try and escape. It would just go on for hours.
The other game we called Jail, and we'd go to
one of the local elementary schools. I think button Ball
was the one that had the best playground, so he
would chase us around playing tag around the elementary school

(04:43):
or the playground, and then when we got caught, would
have to go into jail, and all the kids, any
kid that was on the playground would start playing, so
he'd be, you know, chasing like ten kids. So I
remember him playing a lot, which I also feel like
it's probably not a super fair memory, Like my mom's
exhausted and tired, and God's just so playful and great,
but I think he was having his own struggles. But

(05:04):
when we were with him, that's what I remember. Yeah,
there's so much in your story that really illustrates the
way that memory plays tricks on us, or sometimes lays
down tracks like invisible tracks within us that we can't
really access or don't really know what images or snippets

(05:26):
of conversation or any of it means until way, way later,
when the pieces of the puzzle sort of fall together.
Within the idyllic, sweet landscape of Margaret's childhood, there were
indeed hidden struggles, but as a small child, of course,
she doesn't see them, even though perhaps she intuits them.

(05:50):
She adores her older brother and wants to do everything
he does. Not only do they get lost in the
woods together and build forts, but when he starts to
ride a bike, she wants to ride one too. When
she's four, she misjudges a corner, falls down, and has
a pretty bad accident. But this is just one of
the seminal and destabilizing events that occurred that year. The

(06:13):
other happens on Mother's Day. That morning, my mom asked
my dad to take us to church as a Sunday,
so he did I think I was four, and my
youngest brother was ten months, and my older brother must
have been six. So he took us to church, and

(06:35):
she stayed home and I think kind of spun out
of control and was looking in the mirror and having
all these really negative thoughts about herself and finally decided
that we would be better off if she was dead.
And so she had been prescribed something like xanex. I
don't know if it was actually zanex or something like that,
some anti anxiety medication. She went up to the shed

(06:56):
in our backyard and she grabbed a belt to just
planning to hang herself. But she went to the shed
and took all the pills. I mean, I think there
were eleven or thirteen something like that, and then down
goes in vodka and then immediately became unconscious. And so
that's where my dad found her after church. You were

(07:20):
four years old, So what, if anything, do you remember
about that day. Our shed was kind of up a
little hill and there were these um stone steps that
just were on a little path back into the woods.
I remember this picture in my mind of my dad
carrying my mom across his arms and bringing her into

(07:42):
the house and kind of brushing past me. It was
like an image in my mind that I just thought
was maybe fake, or I had dreamed it or something.
Margaret has a hazy memory of that image from mother's day,
but never fully knows the context of what happened. The
details about the pills and vodka and belt those were

(08:05):
unknown to her childhood self. It isn't until fifteen years later,
when she's nineteen years old, that she received a call
from her brother who tells her he's just learned from
their father that their mother had attempted suicide that day.
And what does she do with that information, what so
many of us do with what we can't yet handle,

(08:25):
She files it away. You know, one of the things
I often think about about secrets is that only part
of the challenge when one finds out something that was
a secret is the secret itself. It's also when we
find out what we find out, and whether we have
the the muscles or the ability psychologically, emotionally, spiritually to

(08:50):
absorb what we're learning. And I mean, to me, so
much of your story is about this very powerful need
that comes over you over time to learn and excavate
as much of the truth as you possibly can. But
that doesn't happen right away, right. That doesn't happen when

(09:11):
you're nineteen and you get that information, right. I mean,
I love the way you're describing that, like the excavation,
because as you were speaking and I'm thinking that, my
brother's phone call was like the stone on a pile.
I was so angry about my mom. When I'm sixteen,
she attempts suicide again, and I was so angry about

(09:34):
that because it just seemed like she didn't care about us.
I don't feel that way anymore, for the record, but
when he called and told me that, I just kind
of put it on that pile of anger and just
I didn't have any way to think about it other
than to say, like, of course, of course that's what happened.
And then it took me years. I mean, yeah, I

(09:56):
think fifteen or seventeen years or something to really unpack
was your sense as you grew up that if someone
had asked you, do you think is your mother depressed?
Or are you worried about your mother? What would you
have said? As a kid, I would have said, what
is depressed? Did you have a sense that something was amiss?

(10:17):
You know, not until I was ten the first time
that I was aware, she went to the hospital and
my dad talked to me about it. That's when I
first became aware of it. Before that, I knew she
got mad, especially at me. By this time, Margaret's parents
had been divorced for a couple of years. When Margaret's
with her mom, she's also on the receiving end of

(10:39):
her mother's anger. She sent to her room all the time.
When she's with her dad, she struggles to communicate with him.
She's pretty sure her dad has a girlfriend, and the
way she eventually confirms this is by showing him a
piece of paper on which she's written, Dad, do you
have a girlfriend? Circle? Yes or no? So enough said,

(11:02):
But in fact, the family's lack of communication stretches much
further back, all the way back to her mom and
dad's own secretive histories. You describe your father as someone
who doesn't know how to put language to feeling, which
really comes from his own history, and you know various

(11:24):
difficult and even tragic things in his own history, his
sister Peggy drowning at the age of thirteen in a
lake while he was there, and the way that these
things never got talked about. Now that there was this
kind of silence on both sides of your family, and
your mother came from a mentally ill mother, but that

(11:49):
was never talked about. And there's a line in your
book where you say your forebears want the secrets disappeared,
Like if you don't, if you don't talk about it,
then maybe it never happened. I think that's exactly right.
I think you know secrets sometimes. I think secret is
another word for shame. And I just think my parents,

(12:09):
in their own ways, feel so much shame over things
that have happened, and so much disappointment about the way
their lives have unfolded in some ways, and I think
it's too much for them to talk about. Not long
after Margaret's father circles yes on that slip of paper,

(12:33):
he marries his then girlfriend Janice. At around the same time,
Margaret's mother is hospitalized for a second time and diagnosed
with manic depression. Just before her mother's hospitalization, Margaret notices
that her mom is buying a ton of jewelry, but
she can't remotely afford acting completely out of character. As

(12:53):
time passes and her mom's behavior becomes more erratic, Margaret
learns to read for signs like this, signs of her
mother's instability. Her watchfulness becomes part of the texture of
family life. I think it's it's an education you get
really quickly. My mom was such a foundational figure for

(13:15):
me at that point. She was still my best friend,
and I suddenly realized, or thought I realized that she
could disappear at any moment, and so I needed to know,
like what would the signs be so I could help her.
So I learned pretty quickly, and you know, they stuck

(13:36):
with me, like later on when she would have an episode.
I mean, I can recognize it immediately. I think it's
just something that once you can see those signs, it's
just it doesn't leave you, or at least it hasn't
left me. We'll be back in a moment with more

(13:58):
family secrets. When Margaret enters the sixth grade, she goes
to a new school, and at first she clocks this
as an ideal time for a fresh start, an opportunity

(14:18):
to peel away from her complicated home life. But the
complications persist, and now her mom is not the only
one grappling with illness. Margaret herself develops a number of
inexplicable physical ailments. In the meantime, perhaps not coincidentally, her
parents are in a custody battle, which her father ultimately wins.

(14:40):
I remember throwing up a bunch of times in Phitnancy's grade,
and I remember those moments, but I didn't realize that
they had had to end so close together and so
consistently during that time period, during the gusty battle. So
they seemed so strange. It wasn't like a headstrip throat like.
I didn't have anything diagnosable. So I just wondered if

(15:02):
they were related to the stress from, you know, going
to psychologists and answering questions about my parents which were
clearly going to put me into loyalty buyings, and going
to therapists and talking to them about which house they
felt safest at, or my issues with Janice. Now I
just look at it and I'm like, oh, of course
it was were related, like my getting sick and all

(15:24):
the stress of trying to navigate my loyalty to both
my parents. Your mother and Janice are about as different
as two women could be in terms of the way
that they live, the way that they run their households,
um just their energy who they are. First, Janice seems

(15:45):
really worldly. She read the New York or the New
York Times. She lived in New York City for a while,
and she loves art and she loves music, and so
she seems very cultured and she's fun like she you know,
immediately subscribed me teen Bop and all the like tween
magazines that I thought were like amazing, and would buy

(16:05):
me posters of celebrities like Jonathan Taylor Thomas to put
on my wall. So she's like cultured, but also loves
pop culture and so it's great. And she loves shopping.
And she seemed to me like a breath of fresh
air at the time, but soon that breath of fresh
air feels more like a cold wind. Janice's attitude towards

(16:27):
Margaret changes. Unlike Margaret's mother, who has a sort of
anything goes approach to house rules, Janice runs a tight ship.
Spills are not tolerated, some couches are off limits, and
Margaret and her brothers are banned from the kitchen. I
mean entirely. They are not allowed to enter the kitchen

(16:48):
of their own home unless Janice is there. As the
tensions build, Janice and Margaret's father have a child of
their own, a daughter named Katie, and the divide widens further.
When Margaret calls Katie her sister, Janice corrects her and
says she's her half sister. Janice does everything she can

(17:09):
to keep them apart. That was shocking, um, And you know,
I wonder if that divide was sort of always there.
Janice married my dad and they had never lived together
until they got married, and we all had never lived together,

(17:29):
and so I think she was kind of signing up
for something and she just didn't have any clue what
it might be like. And I think my dad didn't
have any clue of what kind of person she was
to live with. But you know, before Katie was born,
when they lived there was a year. I think that

(17:50):
they lived together before she was born for maybe two years,
and the house was immediately filled with Janice's belongings. And
my dad would say, oh, it's because know, I lost
everything in the divorce or something like that. And I
remember when she got pregnant, she just started snapping at us,
and my dad kept saying, Oh, she's just pregnant, you know,
she's just not feeling well. I wondered is it because

(18:12):
she's pregnant or is it something else? And then when
we all moved in together, became clear that she just
you know, had her way of doing things and was
not really interested in compromising. We weren't allowed to do
our own laundry, which you know should sound like a dream,
like I would love to not do my own laundry now.

(18:33):
But it was weird because at my mom's house, you know,
from the age of ten, she was like, you're going
to do your own laundry. You're old enough, you know
how to do it. And then we get to Janice's
house and all the laundry runs through her. I can't
use the book. I couldn't. I never once used the machines,
and I don't even know what they looked like. And
again the silence and the way that things don't get

(18:53):
really talked about or get um sort of underplayed by
your fathers like that's just how that's how she is,
or making excuses until it reaches a point where you're
a senior in high school and that's the year that

(19:14):
your mom makes another suicide attempt, and it's also the
year that your dad and Janice split up. Yeah, Janis
and I thought almost the entire time. But the fights
were never productive, and they, I don't think ever really
addressed the underlying issues, which probably required a lot of therapy.

(19:40):
For her to deal with her childhood is use whatever
they might be, and then for me to try and
understand why she was the way she was. So yeah,
of course, eventually in that environment it reaches a fever
pitch and then everybody disperses, and then my mom, I
don't know, you know, I had become kind of distant

(20:01):
from her. She moved a bunch of times in that
time period. She moved two or three times, and I
probably saw her or maybe every other weekend, and so
I wasn't totally connected to what was happening in her life.
And when I talked to her at one point and
realized she was manic, I just said, you know, I
think you're manic, and she just yelled at me, and

(20:24):
I didn't agree. Now, Margaret is in her senior year
of high school, a time usually filled with feelings of freedom, excitement, elation.
But Margaret's senior year is instead weighed down by the
heft of Janice leaving her father and her mother's ongoing
struggles with mental illness. But here is where her resilience

(20:47):
begins to really take form and shape. She finds comfort
and therapy where she can safely examine the troubles of
her family. In addition, she sets off on a number
of healing expeditions too far away places through landscapes, which
allow her to physically, psychologically, and spiritually distance herself from
her family in order to turn inward to heal and

(21:10):
to grow. I was angry, and I was just trying
to be okay. So I did a bunch of backpacking trips.
I took a backpacking trip in high school out to
around moab Utah for three weeks with Howard Bound, and
that helped me kind of center myself and feel capable.

(21:31):
You know, when you're hiking and they say like, well,
if you break your leg, you're still gonna have to
hike yourself out of here, you know, You're like, okay,
Like I'm gonna really focus. And then the other thing
during that first backpacking trip was that I realized this
sounds really morbid, but it was really helpful to me,
which I was, you know, hiking in the mountains and
the canyons and feeling like it doesn't matter if I

(21:53):
die if I fall off the side, because at first
it was really hard to kind of walk because there
was like loose rock and it was hurting my ankles
and I was carrying like a six pound backpack and
I was really scared. And then I was like, if
I fall up this mountain and die, the earth doesn't care.

(22:14):
It just like absorbs my body. And that made me
feel somehow calmer, Like my life is small and so
I can figure out what my priorities are and what
I want to focus on and try and aim for
that I'm just like a blip and the history of
the earth, and that smallness made me feel safe and

(22:39):
like centered. So I took another backpacking trip to Alaska
in college in a summer between years, I think after
my freshman year. So that helped me a ton, just
to kind of feel calm um. And then you know,
I ignored it until I took a class with Lynn Bloom.
She's retired now, but she was professor at the University

(22:59):
of connectict It and she taught the autobiography class there.
I read all these memoirs and I suddenly was like,
oh my god, these books are teaching me how to
live or like giving me guidance that I don't have otherwise.
And so from there I started writing kind of lightly
about my mom and what had happened, and it just

(23:19):
built up over time, and I took more independent studies
with her and read more memoirs and just kind of
slowly chipped away at that until I got to grad school,
and then I really tried to unpack the story as
much as I could. We'll be right back. So Margaret

(23:55):
begins to unpack. She's moved by the art of memoir,
and we realize is that this will be the way
to ask and hopefully answer the questions that so defined
her childhood, namely the nature of her mom's illness and
the reason behind her multiple attempts to take her own life.
But as is the case when we grapple with family secrets,

(24:16):
it's a slow and rocky journey. Remember that call Margaret
receives when she's nineteen and her brother tells her he's
learned about their mom's first suicide attempt on Mother's Day. Well,
it takes five years, and it isn't until Margaret's twenty four,
when she's actively writing the story of her family, that
she decides to directly ask the questions she needs to ask.

(24:41):
I didn't have the wherewithal too articulate a question, and
I didn't feel like I had one. I was angry,
and I was just kind of like, oh, of course
she did that. I wasn't empathetic. I wasn't really thinking
about what it must have been like for her. I

(25:01):
was just sort of shoving it away and not thinking
it was anything I had to address or that there
was any way to address it because it was so
far in the past. And I'm like, while we survived,
we're fine. She survived, it's fine, it doesn't matter. While
also I think always in the back of your mind
is like, for me is probably fear and maybe shame

(25:22):
of like why did that happen? Did she not love us?
Was she okay? Like? What happened? What happened? Indeed, as
it turns out, it isn't just Margaret's mom's mental state
in question. At around this time, Margaret invites her siblings
to a family reunion of sorts in Kentucky, where she's

(25:43):
living with her boyfriend, Christian. It's supposed to be a
fun weekend of bourbon tastings and card games, though Margaret
and her brothers have always been sort of rough and
tumble with each other. This time, her brother Ted seems off.
He punches a table violence, catching everyone off guard, and

(26:03):
the darkness doesn't subside. The next day, Ted is still
deeply and inexplicably distraught, and the weekend is ruined. So
we all go to bed angry. And then the day
after that he just refuses to come with us. We
had like some stuff planned, I think a bourbon tour,
and he skipped it. He just stayed home and I

(26:23):
didn't speak to anybody. So finally in the evening, Christian
just looked at him and said, are you okay? And
he just burst into tears. And I went out and
talked to him, and he just was like, no one
listens to me, no one understands me. And I was
kind of like, what are you talking about? Like it

(26:44):
just seemed like such a big reaction for such a
small thing. How many times have we yelled at each other?
How many times have we just been like piss off?
We're like a little rough with each other all the time,
and so none of us think anything of it. And
then he said, I don't know what's happening to me.
And I was trying of taken aback. I just like
sort of noted it. I didn't say anything at the time,
but I was like, what does that mean? And it

(27:06):
just sounded a lot bigger. Remember, Margaret has had some
early life training in this reading the signs. She's developed
her hyper vigilance skills with regard to her mother. Now
it appears that the same level of watchfulness she practiced
as a child is needed for her brother. He's been
acting paranoid, calling himself a targeted individual and ascribing to

(27:32):
out their ideas and conspiracy theories. Did alarm bells go
off for you at all in terms of his behavior,
which had, you know, kind of a paranoid aspect to it.
You eventually look up the phrase targeted individual, and you
know it takes you to this is something that people

(27:53):
who are schizophrenic often say. Yeah. So I didn't realize
that until I think sixteen, a couple of years later.
I didn't put any of the pieces together any Like,
nothing was flagged for me except for his comment like,
I don't know what's happening to me, And I just
thought that sounds really big and scary, and I'm not

(28:15):
sure what he means. But he's always been unconventional. I
remember in high school, like he would do weird stuff,
you know, like, for example, he wanted a parking spot
in the senior lot and there weren't any. He got
one in a side lot, and so he went in
the middle of the night and painted an additional parking

(28:36):
spot and started parking there, you know, which is funny.
But he did a million things like that, and then
would just be a jerk to the principle when you'd
get called in and get in trouble, you'd just be
like what and he'd be really belligerent, and I just
remember thinking, like, why are you so weird? Like somebody
wanted to fight him once and he bought boxing gloves

(28:57):
and it's like what a box in a ring? Like
what are you doing? So he just always seems so
unconventional to me, and it was funny until it wasn't.
One of the things that's still moving in your story
is the way in which you put all these pieces
together in your mom gives you videos that were transferred

(29:23):
from film to c D family footage, family videos, which is,
you know, a treasure trove for anyone who is ever
trying to understand anything about their family, the role of
of film, of photographs, of being able to just see
with your own eyes certain things that happened or didn't happen.

(29:46):
So it's when you when you head home, which is
when you get you know, all of this like download
of information. You get the films and you get the
you know, you you go searching through the attic, you
find all this stuff. Yeah, when I sat down to
watch those videos, it just unlocked a whole world for me.
Like I just was shocked to see us as a family,

(30:10):
which it sounds so mundane, but I just hadn't I mean,
we have photographs, but I hadn't seen any footage at
least not in the decade or two. I just don't
even remember like footage of us interacting. And so I
was just struck. And then realizing the time frame of
the video because I saw attention between my parents in

(30:33):
the video, and I'm like, so when was this taken?
What's going on in her lives? I called my mom.
I just started talking to her more and asking her
more questions and coming up with questions that I could
think about, you know, like, because you don't know what
you don't know and I just had no idea what
to even ask, and so my mom would always say,
you can ask me anything, but it's like, what do

(30:55):
you ask when the question is not even clear in
your mind and the problems that I'm clearing your mind.
So that video really helped give me a starting point
anyway for asking her questions about that year in particular.
And then from there, you know, more questions than raveled
as we as we spoke. That's such a great and

(31:15):
interesting point, the idea of not knowing the questions. It's
often you know someone will get to a point of saying,
ask me anything, but if you don't know, you can't.
And you write, you write in the book while you're
watching the films, you write a familiar feeling bloomed in
my chest, that wide eyed desperation of wanting to hold

(31:36):
us all together. And I thought that was really moving
because it was like you were accessing your child's self.
You know that that even the language bloomed in my chest.
But the wide eyed desperation of wanting to hold us
all together is probably something that you felt as a child,
without even knowing what that meant. And then one of

(31:57):
the really beautiful things about being able to go back
as as an adult who's done a lot of work
and sort of reach a hand out in a way
to that child is to kind of intervene in that
after the fact. Yeah, I you know, that's a that's
a lovely way to put it. Um, My therapist would
really like that. It was kind of a surprising feeling

(32:20):
because I think I told myself a story after their
divorce about like, yeah, they weren't good for each other,
they needed to be a part best for everybody. I
still don't remember wanting them to stay together, but I
remember being sad when they told us they were separating.
And when I watched that and I felt that feeling.
It was such a child feeling, like a childhood feeling

(32:43):
of like thinking, that's something in my behavior, just like
I'm watching it in my thirties. In my mind, I'm like,
if I do something different, I can help them, like
I can keep them together. But I think I must
have just wondered that a lot to myself. How do
I help them or would I do differently? You know,
when I think about getting sent to my room all

(33:04):
the time, I think, sometimes, oh, well, if I didn't
make my mom so mad, maybe things would have been
different or something. When there is a record of some
sort um like those films were for you, you look
for evidence. You know, this sort of unlocks, you know,
the sluice in you. And you go to the attic

(33:25):
and and go through photos and diaries and videos and
notes and just anything that you can get your hands on,
and you even you make a pilgrimage back to the
old house and the shed where your mother had gone
that day. In the current owners are oblivious about history,
which of course is always the case. They've strung up lights,

(33:47):
and there are these lime green chairs, and it's all
kind of festive and and pretty and and of course
they don't know the history. But you're there to try to,
you know, dig in and find out as much as
as much as you can. Ye. It's during this pivotal
trip home when Ted's worrying behaviors begin to crystallize from

(34:07):
Margaret that she's also immersing herself and the family artifacts
and memorabilia. She's at a point of readiness to know more,
to take in more, to know what questions to ask,
what to look for in terms of signs and patterns.
She and Ted are in the car together and he's
acting really fearful and on edge, and so she digs

(34:28):
into that too and begins to research what might be
going on with Ted. I mean he helped me with
that by seeing things like targeted individual and gain stocking.
Those aren't words or terms I ever would have known
to look up or think about. And he was so
distraught in that car ride, like he he was wearing

(34:49):
this hoodie and covering his face. It was just like
so odd. He just looked really distressed. And so when
he started using those terms, I just like walcked them
in my mind and was like, I need to figure
out what's going on. And that's yeah. When I started
looking that scared me. And I didn't want to frighten him,

(35:11):
and I didn't want to like judge him, and I
didn't quite know how to approach him with empathy. And
it took me a while to figure that out. Margaret
continues her immersion into the family history to work on
her book, and eventually she meets up with Ted for
a somewhat official interview at a coffee shop. He knows

(35:32):
she's writing this book, and she makes the generous move
as the memoirist to give him the opportunity to tell
his own story, to convey his experiences in his own words.
How could I possibly describe his experiences as thoroughly as
he could. I wanted to give him space to do
that and to feel safe about the book since he

(35:54):
was going to be in it. After a few years
has and Margaret has asked all the questions she can ask,
mind all the footage and data she possibly can. It's
and the book is coming out. She shares it with
her mother, her father, her siblings. In a way, the

(36:15):
very act of writing the graphic memoir is what gives
both Margaret and her family the chance to excavate and
dissect their memories. In the end, Margaret's family has a
very loving response to the book and the awareness that
for each of them the story is different and uniquely
their own. I feel like the book ultimately put language

(36:40):
to all these experiences and all these things that had happened.
And I had just hours and hours and hours of
conversations with my mom about her experiences, and the book
gave us this space to do that. And I don't
think we would have had an opportunity otherwise, because it's
hard to just go to somebody's house and be like,

(37:00):
tell me about the darkest periods of your life for
no reason at all. Um. So I think everything was
said that could be said, and it kind of allowed
us to move on. I think from all of our
anger and sadness about and maybe shame, I hope about
what had happened for my dad. He you know, I

(37:23):
asked him a few questions throughout the process, like about
my grandparents, and I wasn't sure if my grandfather's thinking
ted had really happened or if I had imagined that,
and my dad was like, no, that absolutely happened. I
would say, like, this is specifically for the book. I'm
specifically asking this question for this reason, and he needed
that information upfront. But he said, I want you to

(37:46):
write whatever you want to write, but I'm not going
to read it because I lived it and I don't
need to go back there and I don't want and
he didn't want to influence me. He's like, I don't
want to read it and then change what you've said
about it through my own memory, and so he just didn't,
but has been really supportive. I don't feel upset about it.

(38:08):
I feel sad that he's so sad about the past.
I wish you could, you know, I'll be okay talking
about it, but that might not just not happen for him.
How does it feel now you're a brand new mother yourself,
You just had a baby, and you've birthed this book

(38:29):
into the world. How does it feel to have finally
been able to assemble the shards of this story so
that it makes something that's whole and that's coherent. And
is this something you feel that you can now move
on from. Is they're moving on? I think so. I mean,

(38:52):
I feel incredibly calm, Like I feel like the book
gave me solace about everything that happened, the suicide attempts
and my mom's mental illness and just mental illness in
our family. Like there was a long period where I
didn't talk about it, and then I would kind of
dole it out as like a little party trick, like, oh, well,

(39:14):
my mom is bi polars, you know, like just to
get attention or something. And now it feels complicated, and
I feel like I have empathy for everyone in my family.
And you know, I was thinking the other day looking
at my baby, and I was thinking, like, I wonder
if he'll want to write about whatever torments we do

(39:35):
to him as he grows up, and I hope he
feels free too, And the same with my stepdaughter, Like
I just want them to feel like they can say
anything they want to say about their Childhood's not perfect,
you know, like no childhood is perfect, I don't think.
I think it's really hard for everyone, And I hope
they feel free to, like, ask us questions and talk

(39:57):
to us about their experiences and hell in whatever ways
they need to when they're older. M M Family Secrets

(40:28):
is a production of I Heart Radio. Molly z Achor
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
Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find

(40:48):
me on Instagram at Danny writer. And if you'd like
to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts for my

(41:25):
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.