Escape Velocity

Just as Adam approaches an exciting apex in his career, he receives life-shattering news which stems from a deep and painful family secret.

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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. For

(00:23):
the next year, I was always on the road, or
on the phone, or lying on my couch a Washington
television gathering the strength to leave again. I answered every
question like no one had ever asked before. We do
not turn into what we pretend to be, but what
we pretend. You can still unmake us, worship the false
idol and tell yourself you are only playing the game

(00:46):
of survival. How long before that graven image comes to
mean something or everything? How long before we confuse happiness
with distance from disaster, closure with being unable to remember?
That's Adam Man's back. Award winning novelist, screenwriter, cultural critic,

(01:08):
and number one New York Times bestselling author of the
hilarious instant classic Go the Funk to Sleep. Yes, there
are going to be cuss words in this episode. It's
in the book's title. After all. You know that expression,
God doesn't give us anything we can't handle. I hate
that expression sometimes God or the universe or whatever gives

(01:30):
us a lot, and sometimes something absolutely terrible coincides precisely
with something absolutely wonderful, And how are we supposed to manage.
Adam's story is about exactly that, when it all explodes
all at once. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,

(01:59):
the secrets they are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
I grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, which is a close
suburb to Boston. My parents moved to Newton, like a

(02:20):
lot of people, because it was known to have good
public schools. Both of them are from the Boston area.
My father grew up in Boston and Brookline. My mother
is from Cambridge, so I had also four grandparents living
in the area for most of my childhood. Now that
I'm a parent, and I look at the relatively constrained

(02:41):
level of freedom that my kids have because of the
way we are placed geographically, I look back at my
childhood and think about how much freedom we had to
just kind of run the neighborhood, you know, walking to school,
taking the train into Boston, playing pickup basketball or football
at different arcs and playgrounds, walking to friends houses. Like

(03:03):
there was a game we played there was kind of
a modified, more violent version of like Hide and Seek,
where it was hide and Seek plus throwing tennis balls
and people and uh, it raged over you know, like
probably a couple of square miles, which was ridiculous because
you never found the other team. They were hiding for
like three days. So when I think about the geography,

(03:24):
that's the first thing that comes to mind, is just
sort of having the run of a large, pretty safe
suburban space and then also having the freedom to take
the train and explore. I could get on the train
and go to my grandparents house in Cambridge, you know,
take the green line, switched to the red line, be
there in less than an hour. I could take the

(03:48):
train two different record stores. You know. I was a DJ,
so I was always looking for vinyl. So I could,
like even before I could drive or anybody I knew
could drive, I could get around the greater Boston area
with a certain amount of ease. Tell me about your mother,
your father, and your younger brother, David So. My parents

(04:09):
met at the Worcester Telegram and Gazette. Um, my dad
was an editor and my mom was a reporter fresh
at a grad school. My mother is very funny and
a serbic and has a quick wit and curses like
a sailor. So like when go to fund to Sleep
came out, you know, I placed a lot of blame
on her for teaching me to talk like that. My

(04:31):
mom comes from a family of writers and words smith's
my grandmother. Her mother was a poet and a playwright.
Her father was a law professor and a judge who
was known for the eloquence of his legal writing. Both
of them were very present in my life growing up.

(04:52):
I think in a lot of ways, my mom sort
of rebelled against the culture of their house. They were
both very social. They threw a lot of parties. They
went to a lot of parties. Their friends and their
careers in some ways came first. I mean, this was
also a different time, but like you know, they weren't
probably as present as parents as she would have liked

(05:14):
them to be. And as time went on, I think
she found the elevated, sort of intellectual, artistic social life
of her parents house to be a little bit oppressive
um and kind of rebelled against it. She didn't like
to go to their parties. I like to go to
their party. She brought me to their parties and then
like hung out in the kitchen and ignoring everybody. But

(05:37):
she was pretty close to her parents, I think in
her own way, and her parents were very much a
presence and an influence on me growing up. You know,
these were the first My grandmother was the first writer
I ever met, And as I grew up and got
into hip hop, I found this very close parallel in
my grandmother's work because she was writing rhyming political poetry

(05:59):
that you word politicians and social morays, and it was
like published in our local newspaper ship poetry column called
the Muse of the week in Review that was in
the Boston Globe, and um syndicated in a bunch of
other newspapers, which seems insane in retrospect, but like in
the eighties you could have a syndicated political poetry column. Yeah,

(06:21):
I'm sitting here shaking my head. Oh those right, right. Also,
there are these things called newspapers in those days. Yeah.
Imagine that. My father was very much a working class
kid from Brookline. My dad came from a family without
much money. His dad was various kinds of salesmen over

(06:45):
the years. I always think of him as kind of
a Willie Loman kind of guy. His mother was a painter,
but not really a successful one, and also was manic depressive,
although I don't think they had that diagnosis then, and
was in and out of the hospital. So my dad
lived at home through college, went to Boston University, and
then went straight into the workforce as um a reporter

(07:09):
at the Worcester Telegram and Gazette the tn G as
they called it, and uh, you know, is a brilliant guy,
and spent forty years subsequently in the Boston Globe newsroom
and became kind of the institutional memory of the Boston
Globe newsroom. My dad has an incredible memory and spent
forty years like laying out the front page of the

(07:29):
paper deciding how it looked and what went there. One
of the things about my dad that I really always
loved and noticed was how much he loved his work.
He worked weird hours. He went to the newspaper at
like three four in the afternoon, he packed a dinner,
he didn't come back until one in the morning. But
he loved it. It was somewhere he was excited to

(07:51):
go every day, and because of that and his job
and his sensibilities, we lived in a house where everybody
read the newspaper and discussed what was in it. We
were very much creatures of politics. We followed elections the
same way we followed the Red sox. Um. You know,
it's kind of the culture that that I grew up in.

(08:13):
And so how old are you when you moved to Newton? Uh?
I was two years old when my family moved from
Worcester to Newton and my dad moved from the Telegram
to the Boston Globe. I think in nineteen. And your
brother David is born when you're he old. I was

(08:35):
born in seventy six and he was born in seventy nine.
We're two years nine months apart. My brother was I think,
you know, some of my earliest memories of him were
of a certain kind of unspoken worry and anxiety around
him for reasons that I think didn't actually make any sense,

(08:56):
but that as a parent now I understand very well.
Because kids developed differently, and I was really gregarious and
learned to speak really really early, as firstborn kids often do.
My brother didn't learn to speak quickly, and when he
did he had kind of a minor speech impediment, and

(09:18):
I think these things made my parents think that he
might not be smart. And in my family, particularly my
mother's family, there's really nothing more important than being smart,
and I think that was their big fear that he
like wasn't so bright. This is a kid who went
on to get a six hundred on his s A
T S go you get a PhD in atmospheric science.

(09:38):
But I remember there being a certain kind of like
worry and coddling of him, um particularly around the talking.
And I remember being the only person in the house
who could sometimes understand what he was saying, and I
would translate what he was saying for my parents. And then,
you know, I remember just a goofy, giggly kid. I remember,

(10:00):
even at the time seeing how some of my friends
and their younger brothers or sisters interacted. And I don't
know that David and I were like as easy and
free with each other. You know, we fought a lot,
all kids do, I guess, but I loved him and
we hung out to some extent, and we sort of

(10:21):
did our own thing to a large extent as well.
We had very different kind of interests David didn't have
as many friends as I did. He went on to
not be a creature of like words and jokes and
arguing the way that I was, in the way that
kind of the rest of my family also was. He
became a scientist, and I mean, even at a young age,

(10:44):
he sort of had the proclivities and the inclinations of
a scientist. A lot of my childhood memories do revolve
around like how we were each treated by our parents
and the compensatory things they seemed to do um maybe
to give him more agency or more of a sense
of himself. Like I remember them buying him like a

(11:04):
Nintendo and basically telling him that it was his and
that I could only use it with his permission. So
you know, like in retrospect, that's kind of a it's
kind of a weird move, right, Like, Okay, you bought
your like eight year old a Nintendo and he's the
gatekeeper of it. There's no equity here. There's no like
you're gonna play for half an hour and your brother

(11:25):
is gonna play, or like we're gonna set a timer,
or like you gotta share. I think that they felt
like giving him sort of ownership was was gonna be
i don't know, good for him somehow, empowering to him somehow,
or that I would overwhelm him if they didn't. I
remember feeling a lot like there was the fear that
I would overwhelm him, or my superior ability to speak

(11:49):
would somehow sort of subsume him, which in some cases
was true. I also remember being a real dick to
him because I could talk circles around him, and knowing
that a eventually, if I did it long enough, he
would just resort to hitting me, and and and that's
and that was sort of like when I knew I
had won, you know, if he just gave up and

(12:10):
started flailing his fists at me, that was a victory
for me. It's so interesting because now I'm sure as
a parent yourself, once you become a parent, so many
of these moments from your own childhood are understood differently, right,
or the or the worry of your parents when they
were being your parents as as as little kids. From

(12:32):
the way you're describing that story to me, probably a
lot of thought went into David's Nintendo, you know, and
like leveling the playing field somehow, or like the idea
that they needed to level the playing field so that
you know that it could be his. Yeah, I think
I think a lot of thought probably did go into it.
I wonder in retrospect if any of that thought was

(12:53):
directed towards consulting people who knew anything about child psychology. Um,
my guests, maybe not. Yeah, it sort of wasn't the time.
You know, in art in our times, that would be
stop number one. But in those times, no matter how
educated and sophisticated people were, it wasn't the first thing
they thought about. Adam and David are two very different kids,

(13:18):
with different interests and different paths. David is on track
to become a scientist and Adam is on track to
become a writer. Though of course, when it comes to
a career as a writer there is no well lit path.
It helps that Adam comes from a family of writers,
which gives him a kind of permission, the sense that
such a life is possible. His father is an editor,

(13:41):
his uncle is a sportswriter, his grandmother is a poet.
It is, as you might say, the family business, and
yet it can take a long time for writers just
starting out to find their footing. There are no guarantees
you write in your extraordinary poem slash memoir, sort of

(14:01):
genre defying book. I had a brother once. It's a
sentence that begins with not even just the word and
but actually an ampersand and you you're right, And now
it was eleven. What was going on in your life
at that point? So you know, for a number of years,
I've been basically just a novelist, a literary novelist who

(14:24):
at any given time was like knee deep or waist
deep or shoulder deep in a book and coming up
to maybe do a little journalism on the side. I
had a two year old daughter. I was teaching in
the m f A program at Rutgers Camden, which was
kind of the first full time academic job I had had.
I was lucky enough to get it, and then lucky

(14:46):
enough to get offered a second year in my visiting
writer position. And you know, I was just kind of
trying to figure out how to make a career as
a writer. Like I had a career as a writer,
but I was trying to figure out how to not
lose that career, not have to fall back on teaching
full time, which I enjoyed but didn't want to do forever.

(15:09):
And I suddenly had a kid and a greater degree
of sort of financial responsibility than I'd ever had before,
and my teaching appointment was going to end in a
couple of months, and I was going to go back
to California, and the mortgage on my house and all
kinds of things. So I was just trying to figure
out what my next move was going to be. While

(15:33):
he's figuring out his next move, Adam writes an unusual
and unquantifiable twenty eight page book. He really writes it
for himself. He's not sure there's any market for it
at all, and neither is his literary agent. He ends
up selling it to a small press owned by a
friend with very low expectations. The book in question, though
The Funk to Sleep, is not quite out yet, but

(15:56):
it will be soon. It's about to go viral, but
Adam does know this yet. He's a new dad in Philly.
He's teaching dj ing, hoping for the best. I wrote
that book really with no expectation that it was even publishable.
Certainly was not part of my like strategy to secure

(16:17):
future for myself, for my family. Um, you know, the
book was really just kind of something I did for fun.
It was my attempt two kind of cross stitch all
of the board books B O, A, R D. But
it kind of works both ways because they're incredibly boring,

(16:38):
like the little cute see books that you read to
your kids at bedtime that have all of these A, B, C,
B rhyme schemes and these like cute animals who are
all toddling off to bed. To try to kind of
remix that by inserting a real parental monologue into it,
something that expresses the frustration of a parent who cannot

(16:58):
get his kid to go to sleep, which was the
position I found myself in every night with my daughter Vivian,
who was probably two two and a half when I
wrote the book in two thousand ten, and you know,
a year later when the book started to inexplicably make
all this noise. The book was supposed to come out
in October, but the day after my daughter Vivian's third

(17:21):
birthday April, I did a gig in Philly where basically
I read the book out loud on stage. I had
just gotten a PDF of the entire book with illustrations,
and I was able to project it on the screen
and I, you know, I read it to maybe a
hundred and fifty people, and I got a good reaction.
They thought it was funny. People asked me where they

(17:41):
could buy it. I told them they couldn't because it
wasn't coming out for six months. So from that initial reading,
people began to order the book, and the buzz began
to spread. By the end of the week, the book
was number one on Amazon. This book that that that
did not yet exist, hadn't even been printed yet, was
not even on a boat headed for the United States yet.

(18:03):
And from their things sort of accelerated and got even
crazier because the fact that an obscenely titled book from
an obscure publisher was number one sort of engendered around
of media attention, which I think then led to a
PDF of the entire book beginning to ricochet around the Internet.
And meanwhile, we're rushing to get the book out as

(18:24):
soon as possible, so instead of October, we publish it
on Father's Day, which I believe was June four, So
we're sort of rushing towards that, and I'm fielding phone calls,
and we're trying to make decisions about whether I'm even
going to talk to the media. Because now there's an
element of strategy in place, like someone, if I remain quiet,

(18:47):
can get an exclusive with me. And I'm like, you know,
an exclusive, like I'm I'm used to talking to anybody
who's willing to talk to me. Like, you know, as
a literary novelists, you're not giving exclusives. You're hoping that
your phone rings, you know, But we have at this point,
like a publicist in place, and she's talking to the
Today Show and Good Morning America and pitting one against
the other, and you know, people are trying to get

(19:07):
the exclusive, and things are just out of control. We're
auctioning off foreign rights and audio rights and movie rights
and all kinds of stuff again for a book that
does not technically exist yet. So it's kind of a whirlwind.
And I'm doing this as I'm wrapping up my final
weeks of my tenure at Rutgers and Adam, how did

(19:29):
it feel to go from being a literary novelist spending
years at a time with your head down working on
one book at a time. You know, the sound of
a literary novel being published is a little like a
tree falling in a forest. Um, except on the rare
times when when it's not and this entirely left field

(19:54):
thing happens completely unexpected, no impossible to have imagined. Along
with trying to do everything right, what did it feel like?
There was definitely a lot of joy and exhilaration and
shock and surprise. Um. I mean I was feeding off

(20:16):
of the people around me, and my friends were watching
this happen, and they were tickled by it because it
was something that was just done with so little calculation,
And I was excited, but I was also nervous or
kind of jitteryan on edge, I guess, because what was
happening was clearly very good, but it was impossible to

(20:37):
see even three days into the future, so, you know,
it was impossible to know whether this was such a
flash in the pan that the book would actually be
forgotten already by the time it was published, or whether
it was conceivable that we could ride this and stay
at number one until it was published. I was refreshing

(20:59):
my Amazon page every fifteen minutes, you know, I was like, Okay,
still number one, still number one. Click, okay, still number one.
You know, go make a coffee, come back, click still
number one. Okay, so far, so good. It was a
wild moment. I mean, it was more exciting than anything
that had happened in a long time. But I also

(21:20):
felt like I had to be very strategic and careful
and do anything I could to help this thing continue
to succeed. And I also felt powerless over it. I
didn't really know what the hell I was doing or
whether any action of mine could affect this in any way.
At the very least, this was an industry I knew

(21:43):
and had been making a living in for the better
part of the last decade. So you know, it's not
like I was just some schmuck who'd never written a
book before and this was happening to me. I was
some schmuck who'd written several books and this was happening
to me. So at least I had that going for me.

(22:03):
We'll be right back with Father's Day just around the corner.
Adam is cautiously riding the high of his forthcoming publication

(22:23):
in June. On May eleven, he's playing records in a
lounge bar in Philly. He's just taught his last class
at Rutgers, and many of his grad students are in attendance.
It's a joyful night, a victory lap of sorts, and
a goodbye to his students, and a goodbye to Philly too,
as he's planning to move soon. A lot of good

(22:46):
friends are there, and Adam is basking in the great
energy of the evening. Then his phone rings and he
sees that it's his father. He doesn't answer. It's unusual
that his dad is calling so late at night, but
doesn't clock it a stranger, unsettling in a state of
cognitive dissonance, he ignores the call with no inkling that

(23:07):
anything could be wrong. But then his phone rings again.
It was about twelve thirty nine times out of a hundred,
I would have been home and asleep and in bed
at that time. My father was always up at that
time because he would be coming home, probably from the newspaper.
So I saw his name on my phone, and I

(23:29):
didn't pick it up because I was in the middle
of playing this set um and you can't DJ and
talk on the phone at the same time. And inasmuch
as I thought anything, the quick calculation that I made
about my father calling me unprecedentedly at this time he
never called me that late, was that it had something
to do with the book, that some new bit of

(23:51):
news around go to funk to sleep had emerged that
I didn't know about it. He did because he'd spent
the last eight hours in the news room and he
was haul in to tell me something funny, or you know,
tell me that one of his colleagues had had the
PDF land in their in boxing, you know, some something
trivial and cool like that. So I didn't answer, and

(24:12):
then he called back again, and so I answered. And
the first thing my father asked me was whether I
was sitting down, which I don't think anybody had ever
asked me that in real life before. You know, I guess,
I guess that question is only asked when you think
that the news you're about to deliver might literally knock

(24:33):
somebody on their ass, that that the person's legs might
stop working. So I walked outside through the back room
of the club and then also through the front room,
and sometime I think before I got outside, my father
said to me, David has taken his own life. That
was the phrase he used, and and I was unable

(24:57):
to even really process he was saying, it seems so
outlandish that the first thing I said was what I mean,
it's I couldn't even wrap my mind around it. UM.
So I made him say it again, and by that
time I was outside, and he proceeded to explain to

(25:18):
me that my brother had been missing all day, that
he and my mother had been at my brother's apartment
with my brother's wife um with the sinking growing feeling
that something had happened, um, but that they had just
received the news from I guess it would have been

(25:39):
the police officer or the emergency worker or something who
found his body in his car where he chose to
kill himself. So this is what my father told me
A twelve thirty On that night, I had some further
conversation with my father that I can't really remember very well.

(26:00):
I remember the it was extremely hot, even at night.
We're in the middle of a heat wave, and I
was sort of, you know, I sort of stepped outside
into this hot air and it felt like somebody was
breathing right in your face, and I remember crying. I
remember asking further questions. I remember my father sort of
inquiring into my safety and well being, like he really

(26:23):
wanted to know, like where are you and what are
you gonna do now? And like can you get yourself home?
You know, like what are you gonna do, like I
he I think he made me promise not to drive
or something like that. I got off the phone with
my father and I stood there crying hysterically. And I
don't think that I spoke out loud to my brother,

(26:44):
but I think I spoke in my head to my brother,
and you know, I said something along the lines of
like what have you done. I don't think I was
out there very long. I think before I was even
done crying, I went back in the club. I walked
straight to Emery, who was a good friend of mine,
be my closest friend in Philly, and I told him

(27:04):
then that my brother had killed himself. And you know,
the look on his face was sort of the first
it was the first kind of mirror that I had.
It was the first reading back of what had happened
on someone else's face, which because he's like, what do
you need? Do you want me to drive you home?
I basically just was like, I'm leaving, grab my records

(27:26):
when you go, or something like that, and I, you know,
I just I just kind of got out of there.
I think I called my father back from the car,
having already promised not to drive, and you know, currently
driving to try to get more information, to try to,
I don't know, understand this thing better in some kind
of way. I remember just driving down the freeway, blinking

(27:47):
back tears and just kind of like feeling a lot.
I mean, there was there was the shock, there was
the attempt to understand what was happening. I should say
that I can't imagine that then NWS that someone killed
himself would ever not be surprising and shocking. But in
the case of my brother, he had gone to Great

(28:09):
Pines to hide his depression and make sure that no
one knew about it. So this was entirely surprising to me.
I had not known that my brother suffered from depression
in any way. I thought he was a weird but
happy guy. So, you know, I was learning this entire

(28:31):
history and this entire secret that his wife had kept
from everybody, that he had insisted she keep from everybody
on pain of him never speaking to them again if
she told them. Tremendous shame on his part about what
he was going through. I learned that my parents had

(28:52):
known for a little while that my brother's wife had
eventually kind of buckled under this tremendous pressure and told
them but that my brother had downplayed it, but that
they had all been extremely worried for the past few months,
and that I had not been brought into this confidence,
which even at the time, like I felt very frustrating,
and I think immediately took me down the track of like,

(29:16):
what if I would have been able to do something?
What if not telling me was the worst thing you
could have done? What if I'm the person in this
family best equipped to do something at least and convince
him to seek help. But there was another part of
me that, as I was sort of navigating my own grief,
navigating the roads of Philly, was filled with enormous trepidation

(29:42):
because I knew that when I got home, I would
have to wake up my then partner, Vivian's mother and
tell her what had happened. And that seemed, you know,
incredibly hard even I mean, saying it out loud felt
in it will be hard, but having to break that
news felt almost too much. Um. But that's that's what

(30:07):
I went home and did. There's something that, you know,
in the midst of just profound shock, having to say it,
being the bearer of it, suddenly you know which you
know you were when you when you told Emory, but
then you know you're going home and you're telling your
your then partner. It makes it more real, I think, Yeah, definitely,

(30:30):
it makes it more real with every time that you
say it, with every repetition you you bring it more
fully into reality. Somehow you feel like you're lying, like
these words can't be true. I'm saying these words that
I know are true, but they can't be true. And
then each time you say them, it becomes more true
or more real. Yeah, and then even realer than that

(30:53):
is watching it becomes true for someone else, destroying someone
else's world with that information, you know. I mean, for
months and months after his death, I really strove to
never be the one to break the news to anyone.
I wanted people to know. I wanted the roads sort

(31:14):
of paved ahead of me, Like I wanted all my
friends to know, but I didn't want to be the
one to tell them. And you know, I found ways
to navigate conversations with strangers. I've developed kind of a
sixth sense for when a conversation might turn in the
direction of families, so that I could steer it another way.
Before I was asked to kind of account for my
own family, you know. And this was a time when

(31:36):
I was like around a lot of strangers because the
funk to sleep continue to happen, and I continue to
like have to deal with what that meant and tour
and travel and chat and schmooz. But yeah, the actual
simple act of stating that my brother had killed himself
was probably the single most painful, Like it was the thing.

(31:59):
I there's the thing I guess that I felt like
I had enough agency to be able to avoid, so
I tried very hard to avoid it. Adam returns to
Newton to his parents home, where they observe the Jewish
ritual of sitting Shiva, a prescribed week of mourning. Though
they are descended from ancestors who are famous rabbis, the

(32:21):
family are secular Jews, not religious at all, and these
religious practices in the case of David's death do not
feel exactly healing or helpful to Adam. Because my family
is deeply culturally Jewish. I think my sensibilities are very Jewish.

(32:41):
My sense of humor, my sense of art coming from
the margins, all of these things to me are quintessentially Jewish.
But we do not go to synagogue there's an, if anything,
a hostility and a skepticism towards organized religion. I was
not born mids, but my parents don't belong to a synagogue,
nor did their parents, and you know, we go pretty

(33:02):
far back as secular, agnostic Jews in this country. So
when we were sitting shiva, we had no idea what
the funk we were doing. It was an approximation of
a shiva. We didn't have any guidance. We didn't really
have a connection to these rituals. You know, suicide in
some ways is a is a dramatization of that, because

(33:23):
you're at a loss. I think almost no matter what
your tradition is, like most religions, and most traditions kind
of fail us when it comes to suicide, or they
have a few terse words to say and you're not
allowed to be buried in the cemetery or whatever. But
my family was particularly poorly equipped to deal with any
of it because we you know, we don't have that

(33:45):
as at our fingertips at all. We don't have those traditions.
So yeah, I found myself trying to grapple with what
it meant, whether you could invent a ritual, whether that
counted as a ritual, what a ritual was intended to do,
and who it was for, and how it was meant
to be carried out. Like, all of these things were
adding to my state of distress, particularly the feeling that,

(34:07):
in the absence of a regimented path, I was going
to do it wrong. This idea that if you sort
of mourned incompletely, like pushed it away, didn't deal with
it fully whatever, that meant that the grief would somehow
gree group and come back stronger. And if you didn't

(34:29):
sort of face it now, it would become more and
more unbeatable later. And and I remember, like I kind
of internalized that and let it scare me even even more.
And I don't think that was a useful thing to
to have put in my in my mind. Like I
think the opposite is true. I think that people grieve
in all kinds of different ways. Certainly there are ways

(34:50):
to not fully grieve. But the idea that that there
is one way, I think for me it was a
very damaging idea. And remember, this terrible grief is now
coinciding with the crazy roller coaster ride of Adam's book publication.
The high point of his career is now underscored and

(35:12):
forever tied to his agony over his brother's suicide. In
the midst of all this, Adam struggles to understand his
brother's life and his brother's death. One of the ways
I think in which for me anyway, suicide is so
difficult to deal with and difficult to mourn, is that

(35:35):
it effectively rewrites everything you thought you knew about a person,
at least in the case of my brother. I am
someone who, if I'm trained in anything, I'm trained to
kind of create and craft narrative and pulled together threads
and weave together something that makes sense and tells a story.

(35:56):
And in trying to understand my brother's life and my
brother's death, I was sort of torn between these warring impulses,
one of which was to create narrative, create a narrative,
and one of which was to resist the creation of narrative,
even my own narrative, because fundamentally I knew that I

(36:17):
did not understand and probably could not understand what had
happened and at certain things about his actions. We're going
to just be resistant to the project of creating a
coherent story. Um. So, I mean, there's a lot of
there's a lot of parts to that, Right, there's the
part where a person can both be planning to live

(36:40):
and planning to die, and these are simultaneous impulses, and
you kind of just have to understand that his mind
was running on both those tracks at once. Like I
went to his apartment with my cousin, and among other
things that we found there, we found in his email
the receipts for the chemicals that he had ordered that

(37:03):
he would mix together and use and breathe to kill himself.
He had ordered those, and after he had ordered those,
he had ordered an expensive skateboard that still hadn't arrived. Um,
he had printed out directions to a memorial service for
our grandfather, which wasn't for a couple of months. So

(37:23):
like he was planning to live and he was planning
to die. And you know, there's a part of you
that might see all that evidence laid out and turn
it into a detective story and say, something is amiss,
something is a rise, something doesn't add up. Why would
he do this if he was going to do that,
I suspect foul play. You know, you could, you could,
you could spin up any kind of narrative but the

(37:46):
struggle for me was to understand that all of these
things were kind of true at once, that this was
a paradox that I was not going to resolve, but
that instead I merely had to kind of hold and
look at and not try to on ravel, not try
to turn the two things into one thing. There was
also the way in which everything I thought I knew

(38:08):
about my brother was now rewritten by his act of
killing himself, and by the revelation that he had been
depressed for years and years. So, you know, things he
had done and said that I had described one meaning
to suddenly took on a different meaning. Even something as
simple as looking at a photograph. You know, it's like

(38:30):
a photograph in which he up until now seemed to
be looking at the camera. Now he no longer seemed
to be looking at the camera. He seemed to be
staring into sort of the abyss, you know. I mean.
It sounds dramatic and melodramatic and maybe dumb, but there's
a way in which even looking at a simple artifact
which has not changed in any way, it feels different

(38:51):
now that this life has concluded. In this way, Adam
also suspected looking back that perhaps has brought or had
Asperger syndrome. As David's character bore some of the hallmarks
of being on the spectrum. He was extremely intelligent, high achieving,
and academically gifted, but it was hard for him to

(39:12):
connect to have an emotional conversation. The type of questions
one might expect to elicit an emotional response from him
often did not. I remember one time, you know, at
the time he and I were both involved with partners
who were from other countries. His wife was Brazilian, my
partner at the time was Swedish, and I remember sort

(39:32):
of trying to talk to him about being somebody who
sort of has a foot in two different cultures, and
you know, do you think you'd ever moved to Brazil?
How does she feel about living in America? Blah blah blah,
And his response was sort of just a recitation of
crime statistics in Rio, and I was like, huh, that's
that's a that's a weird response. But like, you know,

(39:52):
with the revelation of this crippling depression and the suicide,
it's like I found myself looking back on things and saying, well,
maybe it's not that that was the response that like
made the most sense to him. Maybe that was the
response that prevented him from opening up the Pandora's box
of his own emotions and quickly getting lost. We'll be

(40:19):
back in a moment with more family secrets. Adam's book
is hurtling towards existence, picking up speed in the midst

(40:41):
of all his grief and family turmoil. He's thrust into
the public eye in a way that's highly unusual for
a writer. He's the subject of many interviews and it's
booked a coveted spot on morning television. He's worried that
some interviewer is going to learn about David's suicide and
ambush him, forcing him to talk publicly about his loss.

(41:02):
He's caught between two selves, needing simultaneously to perform and
to retreat. It's almost like there's another there's another Atom
who is suffering and his grief stricken, and that Atom
needs to kind of sit out right and not be
the one who's talking to Matt Lower on the Today Show. Right. Yeah,

(41:25):
I knew even at the time that it was not
a rational fear that like Matt Lower is going to
blindside me in the middle of this fluffy interview and
asked me about my brother's Nason death. Nobody actually is
invested in doing anything of the kind, right, It's completely
outside the narrative that all of us are agreed upon

(41:46):
in the in that setting and in every every setting.
At the same time, weird ship was happening on a
daily basis, like bizarre, somewhat unthinkable, certainly implausible stuff was
continuing to fold day by day. One day, a bunch
of topless photos of me quote unquote leak and are

(42:06):
like on the internet. I mean, what this was was me.
What this was was like me playing basketball with a
bunch of friends and students at a summer program in
Anne Arbor that I taught at every summer. They did
not leak. Somebody took him and they existed. But I
was just famous enough for somebody to think that anybody
might give a ship and to like put them out

(42:27):
there and be like, go to funk to sleep. Author,
you know whatever it was, You're like, that didn't make
any sense either. It didn't make any sense of like
there was a censorship fight over the book New Zealand,
it didn't make any sense that Sam Jackson was reading
the book on the Dave Letterman show like nothing made
any sense. So it seemed just barely plausible enough that

(42:48):
in a moment where everybody was rushing to find some
angle in some way to write about go to Funk
to sleep and use it as fodder for their think
pieces and their takedowns and their handwringing about the sorry
state apparent and whatever it was, that somebody might find
this more sol of information and think to use it.
But I mean, more than anything, I think, what I

(43:08):
felt and what I was aware of was that just
as David had sort of chosen to wear a mask
and chosen to obscure his real feelings and hide them,
and then in some real sense, this, as much as anything,
was the thing that had killed him, that he chose
hiding and chose that shame and that secrecy over telling

(43:32):
anybody what was really going on and living in that
and allowing us to help him. It was very real
to me that I was making a not entirely dissimilar
choice in putting on this different mask, but still a mask,
and sort of cleaving my public persona from my real

(43:53):
persona and going on this kind of like victory tour
of American media and then international media and repeatedly telling
a story about my life and my current circumstances that
we're not in any way reflective of what I was
really going through. That felt on one hand, it felt

(44:14):
disrespectful to my brother to be out here pretending that
I was indeed like the happiest, luckiest shmuck in the world.
And it also, in an uglier and darker way, felt
to me like there was a way to spend it
as an affirmation of everything that he had thought and
the choices that had led him to kill himself, because

(44:36):
you don't I think a thing if the literature is
to be believed, a thing that suicidal people convinced themselves
of is that everybody will be better off without them,
that everybody will be okay, will survive, will recover the loss,
and it will be okay. And in presenting this public
face to the world, it's like I was turning myself

(44:58):
into a walking dramatization of that fact, Like I was
walking around being like I'm okay um. And at the
same time, I knew that my family very much needed
to see me be okay and do all of these things,
like they very much were of the opinion that I
should go out and promote the book. And then there
was the part of me that was struggling because I

(45:19):
wanted to at least feel more conflicted about whether I
should go out and promote the book. But on a
very basic level, I wanted to. And I was ambitious
and desirous of all of the success and the fame
and the money that would come with this book being
successful and sort of achieving escape velocity. Right, this was

(45:41):
the moment where with enough booster fuel, the thing could
get into orbit and potentially just kind of circle the
planet forever. And I knew this this was that time,
and I knew that I could play a role in
that because all of these opportunities were available and we
could see the results from them, like you know, when

(46:02):
you're tracking a project that closely, you actually see the
sales bump after you do the Today Show or the
sales bump after you do this thing or that thing.
So like it was all right there at my fingertips,
and I was sort of struggling with all of those
things and taggling between all of those things. Yeah, And

(46:23):
I think also there's a kind of self protection involved
there too. I mean, you're right, something that struck me
as really a very universal feeling there, which was, if
tragedy was ever allowed to step into the winner's circle,
triumph would be incinerated. You know that somehow the magical

(46:46):
thinking feeling of there are two worlds and they can't coexist,
which of course they can and they do, but that
that feeling. Yeah, Adams an event for his book in Georgetown.
He knows the woman who's organized it. She had gone
to the same school as him and David, so he

(47:07):
knows it's going to come up. She's going to ask
how David's doing, what he's up to. Adam can feel
it coming, and then there it is. She finally asks,
and he flat outlies. He tells her David is married
and living in Brookline. I knew I wasn't going to
get out of this without accounting for him in some way,

(47:28):
like it was, you know, no matter how how I
deflected or flipped the conversation. I sort of knew the
entire evening that this woman was going to ask him
about my brother, and I truly did not know what
I was going to do when she did. Like, you know,
We're at some dinner with a whole bunch of people.
I didn't know anybody. This is her event. So I

(47:51):
just lied to her. I just told her he was
he was fine, And you know, it felt like it
felt like it cost me something. It felt deeply unco
comfortable to me. But also I think I think better
than better for all of us than me telling her
that actually, three weeks earlier, he had killed himself. Suicide

(48:12):
is also so different than every other kind of of
death and every other kind of grief. That was something
that also struck me again and again. You know, I
would be sitting down to remember getting back to California
months and months later and sitting down for dinner with
two very good friends of mine, both of whom in
the in the previous six months had lost a grandparent
and listening, you know, and they both knew about David,

(48:33):
and we had talked about it already, so I wasn't
in the same situation. But I just remember sitting and
listening to them each talk about the funeral and all
of the surrounding activity and emotion and how it feels
when an elder dies in the way that everybody gets
a bumper here, just all of this stuff that that
was very like recognizably in line with the natural flow

(48:59):
of life. Sad but not unnatural in the way that
suicide continued and continues to feel to me, and just
feeling like the three of us are at this table
talking about death, and yet I can't talk, you know,
I can't contribute. My story does not intersect with these stories,

(49:22):
and so life continues. Adam's riding the wave of his
public success while privately contending with his grief. Many opportunities
are coming his way. It's now and he's at a
storytelling event at the Moss in Boston. The evening is
a turning point for Adam. He feels in this moment
that he wants and needs to tell the story of

(49:44):
his brother. The other writers participating in the event are
being vulnerable, and he feels like a fraud. But first
he needs to shed his mask, the protected shield that
has kept him well shielded for so long, and he
also needs to find the length which to write about David.
He's written in all sorts of forms and genres, supernatural thrillers, screenplays,

(50:07):
literary novels, but now he feels the pull to return
to where he began, with a form he'd inherited from
his grandmother, poetry. Perhaps in poetry he can begin to
unpack the story that needs unpacking to tell the story
that needs telling the story of his brother David. I

(50:27):
certainly think that that moment in Boston was a touch point. Well,
it was the closest that I probably came to even
thinking or attempting to, certainly to attempting to talk about
or write about David. I think that from very soon
after his death, I always knew that I would have

(50:49):
to write something about him. This is It's just it's
just too central and too critical to the way that
I processed the world to not um And yet I
continued to not do it, and to not really even
attempt to do it. I thought about doing it. I
never stopped thinking about doing it. I never stopped thinking
about it, and I never stopped being stymied by things

(51:13):
like what the form would be, what the architecture would be,
what the kind of scaffolding of it would look like.
I never considered doing it as a poem until I
did it as a poem. I thought about a novel,
a screenplay, an essay. I wrote one half of one
scene of a screenplay, which was basically me djaying in

(51:33):
a club and my phone ringing, and I don't even
think I answered the phone, and seeing that I wrote,
that's as far as I got um. But you know,
I never stopped thinking about writing about him, and I
never stopped feeling like something was out of whack, like
my my life and my my creative life was out
of balance for not having written about him. That, like

(51:55):
everything else I was writing, was relatively easy, was light work,
was trivial because there was this thing that I had
to write about it and was not even really spending
any time thinking about writing about you know that that
moment that the Moth in what got me to that
producers door at you know, ten o'clock the night before

(52:18):
the performance was the fact that earlier that night we'd
rehearsed and I've heard all these other stories, and everybody's
story was so honest and raw and vulnerable, and there
was so much bravery in them getting up and talking
about whatever the thing was. Because you know, the Moth
doesn't typically do too many light breezy stories, like often

(52:42):
they take a dark turn. The classic Moth story is
four or five minutes of fun and games and laughter
and light, and then somebody is diagnosed with something or
somebody goes through something horrible and the rest of the
story is really dealing head on with whatever that turn
that tragedy is. The story I was telling was none
of that. The story I was telling was basically a

(53:05):
stand up comedy routine. Now they needed that to end
the night with so that everybody walked out of there.
You know, able to operate heavy machinery. But yeah, I
felt newly dishonest in the face of all this other
courage and bravery from my other co storytellers. And it
also felt very different to me. Three years later, I

(53:26):
felt like it was one thing to do my go
to Focus League tour and bullshit with Matt Lower and
whoever else and promote the book and the way it
needed to be promoted, and keep my grief and my
pain to myself. But it felt like a new level
of dishonesty, and maybe an unhealthy one. Two three years later,

(53:47):
be crafting my own story in my own words, under
my own sort of motor, and still be telling the
story that didn't include my brothers, still be telling the
fun and Games version. I went out and told that
story exactly as I was supposed to, and got big
laughs and had a ball, and they kept bringing me back,

(54:08):
and I ended up telling that story and probably you know,
ten different cities and sort of subsuming the part of
me that felt like, I, you know, shouldn't be telling
that story, but should instead be working on telling the
real story. In many ways, Adam's book about his brother
reads like a ritual itself, even though Adam is not religious.

(54:29):
It has an incantatory quality like the Jewish mourner's prayer
the Kaddish. Another staggering moment begins with an amber's hand,
Adam writes, and so all I can do is grapple
my way back? Is right this or maybe I mean mine,
make ritual of being known as he would not build

(54:50):
a bridge, I do rapple a lot in this book
with the idea of telling his story, this notion of
being resistant to narrative versus deeply deeply dependent on narrative,
the idea that the fundamental thing David refused to do
was tell his story like live in the honesty of

(55:11):
what he was going through and who he was. And
so I think I say those lines in the context
of my own children and thinking about what tools I
want them to have that David didn't in the event
that they ever deal with any of the things he did.
You know, I've been lucky enough to sidestep the genetic

(55:33):
inheritance of depression, but it runs on both sides of
my family, my mother's and my father's, through the generations.
So I look at my own three children, and what
I really want more than anything is for them to
not feel the kind of shame that would lead them

(55:56):
to keep something like depression or mental illness a secret.
So the building of a bridge, I think, is the
idea of helping them construct a language of framework, a
life in which they never feel the need to hide

(56:17):
that really characterized David's life. Suicide is so particular there
are no natural bridges to it, like nothing connects to it.
It's sort of an island, and to get there you
have to swim. Here's Adam reading one last passage from

(56:40):
his beautiful, powerful book. I had a brother once. Soon
after his death, my mother tried to make me promise
I would never write about David. I said nothing, and
continue to say nothing until now, and still do not
know what she asked, because it is nobody's business, or

(57:00):
would be too painful to see rendered on the page,
or simply because when my mother was a girl, Felicia
promised never to write about her, and this, she feels,
is what a writer owes his family. But I will
make a different plea to my children. I will implore
them to write it, speak it all, shed light, and
who knows what else you might shed. Family Secrets is

(57:48):
a production of I Heart Radio. Molly's A Core 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 Secret zero.
That's the number zero. You can also find me on

(58:09):
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 heart Radio,

(58:45):
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.