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Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. In the play, Appropriate, a family is confronted by disturbing revelations about their dead father and his views on race. In a New Yorker article about playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, there's an anecdote where a theatergoer reveals to the playwright, the quote is, "This could be my family." Many families have secrets, they keep or bury for years.

For example, writer Dani Shapiro's parents kept the secret that her dad was not her biological father. That she was instead the product of a sperm donor. She wrote about her journey coming to terms with this revelation in her 2019 memoir Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love. You may remember, she was a guest on the show when the book came out.

For nine seasons now, she has been hosting a podcast called Family Secrets where she discusses the secrets that families keep, with guests like musician Mikel Jollett, author of the memoir Hollywood Park, who only realized later in life that he was born into a cult to cultural critic Rich Benjamin about why no one ever spoke about his grandparents in Haiti. Dani joins us today to be our ride-along to discuss families and why they keep secrets. Welcome back to the show.

Dani Shapiro: Thanks, Alison. Great to be with you.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we want to get you in on this conversation. What family secret have you learned about your own family? Any surprises come to light? Any stories passed down you found out were not true? Or did you find some mystery about your family that you're trying to solve or have solved? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can join us on air or you can text us at that number. If you'd like to remain anonymous, you can always send us a DM through our social media @allofitwnyc.

You interview writers and thinkers who tell their stories, Dani. You also solicit stories from your website. What does a story need to have to make a good story for the podcast, to be one that you can really investigate?

Dani Shapiro: I think, more than anything, what I look for in my guests are people who have some sense of perspective on this secret. The tagline of the show is, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Those are all three different baskets of secrets in a way, but I look for people who, and I think it's why so many of my guests are writers, or filmmakers, or documentary filmmakers, people who have made stories, made art out of their discoveries because they have some sense of how this secret has acted upon them, how it's shaped them, how it's formed them.

Alison Stewart: Over the course of nearly five years of doing this podcast, what have you noticed about why people keep secrets, especially family secrets?

Dani Shapiro: Well, one of the reasons why family secrets are so fascinating and bittersweet in a way is because so often they're kept in the name of love. They're kept in the name of wanting to protect someone. Sometimes that someone is the person who's keeping the secret, but often it's other people in a family. Sometimes there even are these double secrets where someone discovers something that was a family secret, and then they feel that they need to keep that secret from other members of a family, so they're really having it in every direction.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. Sharon is calling in from Queens. Hi, Sharon. Thank you so much for calling in.

Sharon: Hi. I found out that my grandmother had an illegitimate child, which was my uncle. He thought that he had the same father as his siblings, but he didn't. As a result, down in South Carolina, my grandmother having him with another man, she was [unintelligible 00:04:19] out of the town because she was a religious woman, and her husband left her. I didn't find all of this out, but it explained a lot about my uncle who was the youngest child, that he was abusive, and he was an alcoholic, but I don't think he understood why he felt so different from everybody. I didn't find this out until my mother was almost 85 years old.

My grandmother was always so holier than thou, meanwhile, she had this big secret. We couldn't even sit on the couch in her house, she was very rigid with a whole lot of rules, and now I understand why her behavior was so crazy.

Alison Stewart: Sharon, thank you for calling in. In your study of this and your research of this, Dani, did you find that it was interesting what Sharon said that her uncle then had difficulties in his own life? Have you found that that's the keeping of secrets, whether someone knows the secret or not, it does make itself known.

Dani Shapiro: Absolutely. One of my guests on Family Secrets, recently said, "If you bury a secret, you bury it alive." I thought that was one of the most chilling and resonant things that I've ever heard about secrecy. Carl Jung described secrets as toxic poison like there's a toxicity to secrets, but the idea that they don't go away. The people keeping them very much want them to go away, but as Sharon just described, we're talking about a generational secret that impacted really three generations, at least in terms of what you're talking about, Sharon.

What I hear again and again in terms of the language that people use when they have been the secret, like your uncle, is there's some way in which we feel, and I'm including myself in this because I was a secret, we feel like something doesn't add up, something doesn't make sense, and we've always felt that way. When a child grows up feeling like they don't make sense, they tend to place the blame for that on themselves. Not look outward, but it boomerangs inward and becomes this thing that shapes us without our even knowing why we're being shaped by it.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to George from Kinnelon, New Jersey. George, thank you so much for calling in.

George: You're talking about things that came back and surprised you. I was always told that we descended from Polish royalty. Very, very royal, but things didn't add up. The name of my paternal grandfather was actually Lithuanian, not Polish. The name was Jakob Junis, which has Jakob in the front end, which sounds Jewish and more than one Polish person pointed that out to me. It turns out they came from an area around Vilnius, which was called the Jerusalem of Eastern Europe. It was a very large Jewish community that settled there since medieval times. This is interesting.

Then I found out after doing a little bit of internet research that there was a deal that had been offered by the Catholic Church, where if you renounce the faith and become Catholic, you could get a royal title in Poland. This was really interesting. By the way, the scholars said that not too many Jews took this up, they were mostly bad people, the ones who did, so I guess I descended from bad people because I did a genetic test, and it turns out I am 0.8% Ashkenazi Jew, which would have meant that the last Jewish Jakob Junis probably lived in the late 18th century, early 19th century.

Alison Stewart: George, thank you for calling in. It's interesting. Dani, before we take a quick break, from people that you've spoken to, what is it like when someone finds out they're not who they thought they were? They're not necessarily descended from Polish royalty, or their parents have told them that they were Irish, and they discovered that they're Jewish. What tends to be the reaction? Or what reactions have you seen? Not everybody's the same. What reactions have you seen?

Dani Shapiro: Well, one thing I would say is similar pretty much across the board is that our identities are formed by the stories that were told from the time that we were very small. If those stories aren't true, either because they're being withheld from us or because people really just didn't know or there's something in the history that just doesn't really add up, doesn't make sense, the discovery is a feeling of the very roots being shaken, you have to, in a way, rethink and reunderstand and recalibrate the story that you've understood your whole life, the story that's been told to you, and therefore, the story that you've told yourself and you walk around the world inhabiting.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about Family Secrets, literally family secrets, as well as the podcast with its host, Dani Shapiro. We'll also take more of your calls and read more of your texts after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Dani Shapiro. She is the host of the podcast Family Secrets. We're discussing family secrets this hour. If you'd like to share a family secret, we'd love to hear from you. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Or any stories passed down about your family you found out weren't true. How did you feel about it when you found out what the facts were? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can join us on air or you can text us at that number.

I want to read a text to you, Dani, that says, "I found out at my aunt's funeral a few years ago that my grandmother had secretly baptized me and gone to the grave without telling my mother. I guess she wasn't totally down with my mom marrying a Jew and wanted to save my soul. My sister asked my aunts and uncles as a joke, and they all knew about it. The whole extended family kept a secret for 30 years from my parents." That's an action that is a secret. What kind of actions have you found that people keep secret within family?

Dani Shapiro: One of the really interesting things about that is the idea that everybody knew. I had a guest on my podcast in the first season who was raised by his

grandparents who he was told were his adoptive parents, but it turned out that they were actually his grandparents because his oldest sister was his mother, and the whole town knew. It was a tiny town in Kansas and everybody knew. I think that there's something about that that feels particularly like an even deeper betrayal when it just feels like, "What, everybody knew but me?"

Another thing though, and I just want to make sure I say this about Family Secrets is for everybody who's listening is that in almost a hundred of these interviews now, there is not one single person who's made a discovery about a family secret who wished they hadn't discovered it. There's something of a relief and there's something of a liberation in making the discovery of something that was there, that was buried alive, that was under the rug because we always feel it. We have a spidey sense, we have a gut feeling that something isn't right and to know it is very freeing.

Alison Stewart: When I was researching my book about a segregated high school, there was a story that all of the elders told about someone from their class who passed for white. His children didn't know until they found his segregated yearbook when he passed away. They had no clue that their father had gone north and passed.

Dani Shapiro: Oh, yes, I've had two guests on with similar stories, and one was the writer, Bliss Broyard, whose father was Anatole Broyard, and he passed. He raised his children in Fairfield County, Connecticut, going to the country club and going to all their fancy private schools not knowing that their father was Black, and not knowing until he was on his deathbed and their mom who was white begged him to tell them. These stories are just astounding when you think of what it's like to then carry that burden to just be carrying-- The secret keeper is very burdened as well.

Alison Stewart: We got a text via the census. We discovered that my family's father was negro in 1910, white in 1920, negro in 1930, then forever white from 1940 on. We found it very humorous. Guess they were discovering how to fit into the USA. It was never discussed at all. Since then, our generation has met many family members of all shades. That's a lovely part of the story they found out family they didn't know about. Let's talk to Eileen from Hillsdale, New Jersey. Hi, Eileen. Thanks for calling in.

Eileen: Hi.

Alison Stewart: You're on the--

Eileen: Yes, so you want the story?

Alison Stewart: Please.

Eileen: Can you hear me?

Alison Stewart: Yes, you're on the air.

Eileen: Oh, okay. My grandparents were from Romania and came to the United States in the early 1900s. Actually, what happened was they lived in Romania. My father and my grandmother were married. They had two children, and at some point, we don't really know why, he departed Romania with my grandmother's younger sister and came to the United States, leaving the two children that she had with him in Romania. They got here and they set up housekeeping and had two more children.

Then the younger sister began to have a nervous breakdown and ended up in a mental hospital for the next 75 years. Just died a few years ago. My grandmother then came to the United States, and they reconnected with my grandfather after much negative interactions. She brought her two children with her, and then they started living together here, and they had another child. They were five children, and she took the two children from the younger sister and in fact took them in as her children in a very, very negative way.

Then all of them eventually grew up, got married, and then they had children. I am one of those children. We never knew anything about this ever until we were well into our 20s. Then it came out through one of my cousins who was from the other sister getting married and asking her mother about a note that she found that was addressed to her mother from her loving mother, but it was not the name of my grandmother. She asked her mother who that person was.

Alison Stewart: Oh, Eileen, I'm going to dive in. That sounds wow. It's so interesting. It's happening around weddings and funerals. That's another thing I've noticed. Thank you, Eileen, for calling in. I just want to make sure we could get to one or two more calls. Juliana is calling in from Brooklyn. Hi, Juliana. Thanks for holding. You're on the air.

Juliana: Hi. Yes, thanks for having me. About two and a half years ago now, my sister and I found out that we were sperm donated, and I was 29 and she was 27 at the time. When it happened in the '90s, I'm under the impression that a lot of people didn't talk about it. My parents are both Italian. My dad's an immigrant from Italy, and they went to this doctor. They had been trying for 13 years to get pregnant. They went to this doctor and they asked for an Italian American sperm donor, but the doctor didn't obey their wishes.

Part of the reason we found this out is because when we took a DNA test, it came back that we were half Ashkenazi Jewish. This kind of set a spiral through my sister and my mind, trying to figure out how that could be possible, and over time, we eventually found out that our donor actually lived only a few miles away from us and had raised his children like parallel to our lives, one of which actually went to the same college as us and studied in the same art conservatory and even had the same therapist as me. It's just a wild story. I don't even have time. You don't have time to share the whole thing.

Alison Stewart: Wow. Juliana, thank you for calling in. How often does that happen where there are these "coincidences" when people find out someone's, oh, you're my half-sister, you're related to me?

Dani Shapiro: I am just sitting here nodding so hard that my head's going to fall off my neck. Juliana, I hear that story so often. It's eerie where two, unbeknownst to them, half-siblings go to the same college. Sometimes they have the same name. They have these trajectories where they cross paths with each other, which is one of the reasons why when it comes to that kind of secret, it's just simply not a secret that is acceptable to keep because people meet each other. That whole feeling of you're so familiar to me, they don't know why.

Parents even in the '90s but throughout time, and this actually relates to the other story too as well, that story of the woman who just was on before you. They're kept because people feel shame. Male infertility being "shameful" or these stories of rocky romantic pasts and different families breaking apart and coming back together. They're ashamed, which goes back to the feeling of they keep the secret in the name of love and in the name of self-protection and you never need to know that. Then of course, now we're living in a time where because of the internet, because of the unintended consequences of these DNA tests is not possible for these things to be secrets anymore at all.

Alison Stewart: Dani, we were just saying we're typing away that our phone lines are full and we have so many texts, but we're coming up against the hardout with the news. We'd love to have you back to continue talking about this and play some clips from your podcast if you're game.

Dani Shapiro: Would love to do that. Absolutely.

Alison Stewart: All right. We'll reschedule with you or we'll schedule a new conversation with you. My guest has been Dani Shapiro. The name of the podcast is Family Secrets. Thanks to everybody who called in, who got on the air, and texted. Those who didn't if you didn't, we're going to do this again real soon. We'll let you know what's happening on the show right after the news. We're going to be talking about Angel Island. It's an oratorio making its New York premiere at BAM and explores the immigration station's history through music. That's happening right after the news.

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