Inheritance

Author Dani Shapiro reveals what it was like to, by chance, discover a shocking secret about herself, and what this secret taught her about identity, family, and new beginnings.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. It
could have happened like this one winter night, just three
years ago, when my husband mentioned to me that he
was ordering one of those popular DNA testing kids, and

(00:23):
he asked me whether I wanted to have my DNA
tested too. I might have said no, no, thanks, not interested.
Instead I sort of shrugged, at least this is how
I remember it, and said sure, why not. I wasn't
particularly curious. I had never considered doing something like this before.

(00:44):
I mean, I knew my relatives, I knew my ancestors,
I knew their stories. I knew exactly who I was
and where I came from. It could have happened like that.
I might have lived my entire your life without ever
knowing the truth of who I was. My name is

(01:12):
Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets. Secrets that are
kept from us, secrets that we keep from others, and
secrets that we keep from ourselves. You're going to be
hearing a lot of different kinds of family secrets on
my new podcast, Secrets involving crime, race, sexuality, abuse, addiction, loss,

(01:37):
and identity. While these family secrets are as individual as snowflakes,
what each one of them, What every family secret has
in common, is the silence rooted in shame, trauma, and
the desire to protect what he doesn't know won't hurt him.

(02:01):
Why should we tell her when she'll never find out?
It's none of her business. I've been a student of
family secrets for my entire life. I've written novels that
center around secrets corrosive power. I've written memoirs in which
I dug deep into my own family's buried past. One

(02:22):
of the first big pieces of journalism I ever wrote
as a young writer was a story for The New
Yorker called The Secret Wife. My dad had been dead
for a few years, and I was trying to understand
him better. From a chance throwaway comment, I had learned
that before my dad met my mother, he had been

(02:43):
briefly married to a young woman named Dorothy. She died
shortly after they wed. As I researched and reported the story,
I felt I was uncovering the truth of my own
father's sorrow and oppression. I interviewed people who told me
that Dorothy had been the love of his life. I
began to understand, or so I thought, the reasons he

(03:06):
was so distant the source, ultimately of the pain killers
he swallowed by the dozen each day. When I finished
the Secret Wife, I thought I was done. Like a detective.
I had gotten to the bottom of things. I had
solved the case of my beloved, sad dead dad. It

(03:29):
could have happened like this. I could have skipped the
whole DNA testing thing because I had no curiosity about it. Really,
I didn't need to spit into the plastic vials sent
by ancestry dot Com. I wasn't going to discover new
branches on my family tree, So why didn't I? Why
didn't I skip it? I've learned something new about family

(03:55):
secrets in the three years that have elapsed between that
moment in my kitchen in Connecticut, that cold winter evening,
Like so many other cold winter evenings, I've learned that
when we discover a family secret is as important as
the how and the why of what we discover. It

(04:16):
could have happened like this, that most subtle whisper, that
place in the deepest interior that we feel when we
know something isn't right. There's something we're missing, some piece
of elusive information that has been withheld from us, that
subtle whisper can become so subtle that we almost don't
hear it at all. We brushed by it as we

(04:39):
go about our lives. We're so busy. Our to do
lists are endless. There are jobs, bosses, spouses, kids, always
something louder clamoring for our attention. On the day that
my DNA results were returned to me by ancestry dot Com,
I was fifty four years old. I had been married

(05:00):
for nearly twenty years. I was the mother of a
teenage son. I lived with my family in a house
in the Connecticut countryside. I was a writer who had
just finished my ninth book, Woman, wife, mother, cousin, niece, granddaughter,
great granddaughter, daughter. I stared at the results of my

(05:26):
DNA test on my computer screen. The numbers, letters, words,
names were a nonsensical blur. They arranged and rearranged themselves
as I tried to make any kind of sense of them.
But I couldn't make sense of them. They made no
sense the results of the DNA test. I almost didn't

(05:46):
take Those results, spilled out in crystal clear, scientific black
and white, meant only one possible thing. My father was
not my father. What forms us? What shapes are identities.
When we're children, teenagers, young adults, there's nature, and there's nurture,

(06:10):
of course, and then there are the stories were told
and the stories we tell ourselves. The story I was
told and the story I told myself all my life
until I was fifty four, was that I was the
only child of my two older parents. My father was
from an Orthodox Jewish family, a family well known within

(06:31):
the confines of the Orthodox Jewish world. I spent my
childhood in suburban New Jersey, going to synagogue with my
dad on Saturday mornings. Our home was strictly kosher, dairy
and meat kept separate. I never tasted bacon or shell
fish until I rebelled as a teenager. And when I

(06:53):
first tried at cheeseburger, I was afraid that God would
strike me dead. Oh and one more sing I didn't
look at Jewish. I know this sounds like the punch
line of a joke, but it was a real thing,
A huge part of what formed my identity. This not
looking like who and what I was. I was very fair,

(07:15):
with blonde hair, blue eyes, pale skin. I blushed easily.
People made comments every single day of my life about
how non Jewish. I looked your mother had an affair
with a Swedish milkman. Come on, I've never seen a
Jewish girl who looks like you. Sometimes people would even
get mad at me, as if I was trying to

(07:37):
pull one over on them, pretending to be something I wasn't.
The ethnic breakdown on my ancestry dot com d n
A was as follows, that was pretty much half Jewish,
to be precise. The other half was English, French, German, Swedish, Irish.

(08:00):
It turns out that all those people were right. They
saw something that I couldn't allow myself to see, and
so at the age of fifty four, I was left
holding a massive mystery. My dad was dead, my mom
was dead. Who was my father? Where had I come from?

(08:21):
I mean literally who and what had made me? Here's
another thing I've learned during my recent crash course and
family secrets. If the secret keepers believe, really, truly believe
that their secret will never come to light, they can
pretend that it doesn't exist. And if they pretend long

(08:43):
enough and hard enough that the secret doesn't exist, it's
possible for them to come to believe this with their
whole selves. In a sea of confusion. I did have
a few clues to go on, and I clung to
them like life raft. If a secret has been kept

(09:08):
from you for your whole life, there's a part of
you that knows it, not consciously, but in a deep
place of knowing what the psychoanalyst Christopher Bolas calls the
unthought known, something you know but can never allow yourself
to think. Here's what I knew. My parents had been older,

(09:30):
they'd have trouble conceiving me. My mother had had a
number of miscarriages. She was nearly forty when I was born.
Many years earlier, my mother had once let it slip
that they had visited an institute in Philadelphia where they
had undergone the process of artificial insemination. But there was

(09:51):
no question that my dad was my dad. That was
a given, that was a fact, his sperm, her egg,
my parents. Do you know that expression the rug was
pulled out from under me? We use that expression so
often that it's pretty much a cliche. But stop for
a second and think about what it really means. On

(10:14):
the day that I found out that my dad hadn't
been biologically speaking, my dad beneath me, all was suddenly empty,
all was air, all was nothingness. The rug of my
entire foundation had been, in fact pulled out from under me.
The ancestors whose photographs and portraits hung on the walls

(10:36):
of my home, the men and women I believed I
came from, were transformed in a single instant into people
with whom I had no connection. I had never known them,
so now who were they to me? It felt almost
as if they were all floating away, perfect strangers, waving
at me solemnly. As the distance between us grew and grew.

(11:08):
I had never felt so alone. Somewhere out there was
my biological father, a huge question mark. I quickly understood
that he must have been a sperm downer. I walked
through the world for days, looking at every man of
a certain age, wondering, are you my father? But the

(11:28):
deeper mystery was this, What had my parents known when
they went to that institute in Philadelphia? What was their mission?
This was in the early days of reproductive science. What
did my parents understand about what they were doing? One
thing became quickly clear. They would have been told that

(11:49):
they must never speak of this again. They would have
been told that the child would never know. They would
have been given express permission, no more than permission, a mandate,
to keep a secret forever, to take that secret to
the grave with them, to die with it. I was

(12:10):
that secret. Their secret was me. Somewhere out there in
a vast world was an elderly man with white hair
and blue eyes who blushes easily, A man whose background
is French, English, German, Swedish, Irish, a man who lived

(12:33):
in Philadelphia during the year I was conceived. Somewhere out
there was an elderly man who had been told long ago,
when he was a young medical student, that no one
would ever know, that records would be destroyed, that he
would help a couple have a baby, make a family.
Somewhere that man existed, and I would find him. I

(13:00):
did find him, and also learned a great deal about
the journey my parents took on their path to making
a family to making me. We're living in an extraordinary
moment in time, one in which the potent combination of
easy and popular DNA testing and the power of the

(13:23):
Internet have made many kinds of family secrets no longer possible.
Every day, people are making discoveries. They're finding out that
they were adopted, or donor conceived or have siblings they
hadn't known about. They're discovering that their ethnicity is other
than what they've always known, and often the keepers of

(13:45):
those secrets are still alive, the ones who thought their
secrets were safe. These kinds of secrets have been around
since the dawn of humanity, but now that era is over.
In the not too distant future, the very idea that
family has kept these kinds of secrets out of self
protectiveness or shame or in the name of love will

(14:07):
be considered ludicrous and just playing wrong. But here we are,
with secrets tumbling out at a staggering rate. Join me
and my guests on Family Secrets as we shine a
bright light into the dark hidden corners of the unspoken
and discovered together the power and beauty that comes with

(14:29):
finally knowing the truth. Family Secrets is an I Heart
Media production. Dylan Fagin is the supervising producer, Andrew Howard

(14:51):
and Tristan McNeil are the audio engineers, and Julie Douglas
is the executive producer. A special shout out thank you
to my husband Michael Marin and my son Jacob Marin
who have been on this journey with me If you
have a family secret you'd like to share, you can
get in touch with us at listener mail at Family
Secrets Podcast dot com, and you can also find us

(15:14):
on Instagram at Danny Ryder, and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod,
and Twitter at fam secrets Pot. That's fam secrets Pot.
For more about my book, Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot
com