Almost 15 years ago, in the midst of his mother’s health crisis, Washington Post editor Steve Luxenberg learned something surprising. His mom had had a sister who'd been institutionalized and lost track of as a child. How could he not have known this? Well, for one reason, because his mother had kept the secret for decades. For another, it wasn't entirely true. Subsequently, the journalist Luxenberg would begin pulling the threads on a family secret, whereupon his notion of family history began to unravel. The story is told in Luxenberg’s new book, Annie’s Ghost. Luxenberg recalls the first moment when journalistic curiosity required factchecking his own loved ones.

STEVE LUXENBERG: In 1995, my mom was being interviewed by a psychiatrist, and she was asked her routine family history and said she had a disabled sister who had gone away to an institution when she was 4 and her sister was 2, and she had no idea what happened to this sister. We didn't ask her about it in our family because she was quite ill and we thought that there wouldn't be any point. Five years later, after her death, we got a letter from the cemetery asking us if we'd like to plant flowers on our grandparents’ graves, but instead of listing two graves it listed three. And now the secret had a name, Annie.

BOB GARFIELD: So now you know that this reference your mother made in the midst of psychiatric extremis was a living, breathing aunt of yours. What did you do?

STEVE LUXENBERG: I believe what my mom had said, that she didn't know what had happened to her sister, so I didn't pursue it then. And then after I heard that she had buried her sister, that is, I called the cemetery and learned that my mom had arranged the burial, well, the first myth kind of exploded. If she buried her sister, then she obviously knew what happened to her. So now the journalist kicked in, overwhelming the son, I suppose, and I made a call to Lansing, Michigan to talk to somebody in the Department of Community Health. I reached a woman and I asked her, I've just learned about my aunt, I'd like to know something about her. I think she was in the mental hospital. And she said, you and 5,000 other people.

BOB GARFIELD: Hmm.

STEVE LUXENBERG: But one of the more important things that I had learned, I'd gotten some records that weren't easy to ferret out, and when I looked at them, instead of seeing that my mom had been 4 years old and her sister was 2, my mom had been 23 and her sister 21. So they had grown up together, and this changed, again, my perception of my mom.

BOB GARFIELD: This book is a number of things. One is a journey into your family’s secrets and another is a journey into the history of treatment of Americans with physical disorders, mental disorders and psychiatric ones. And I guess even though on the face of it your aunt’s experience at Eloise must have been horrifying, it was way better than what someone like her might have been getting elsewhere in America at exactly that time.

STEVE LUXENBERG: Well, you know, her time in the mental institution, from a writer’s point of view, is ideal because she straddles two very different eras, the peak of one which was the time when states kind of considered that they owed treatment and care to its mentally ill, and the period of the emptying out of these huge institutions. One of the more fascinating things that I learned was that, you know, every generation thinks that it is doing better than the last in terms of taking care of the mentally ill or the physically disabled, and that generation was no different. In 1949, a Portuguese scientist was awarded the Nobel Prize for the development of the lobotomy. That’s what that generation thought of that procedure. And, of course, now we consider it to be barbaric.

BOB GARFIELD: The history of American - what they used to call asylums – also has a kind of a dual function in your book. It enables us as readers to see in context the treatment given your aunt, but it also puts in context your own family’s conduct with respect to her and the decision when she was a young woman to institutionalize her, because I guess there was a kind of a last-straw moment when they were very impoverished and your aunt’s psychiatric condition was worsening and she was literally keeping the entire household awake every night. I guess they simply could not stand the pressure any more. Is that a fair summation?

STEVE LUXENBERG: The term that was in the report was, “We're all going crazy.” Annie was exhibiting extreme paranoia, refusing to eat, bathe, wouldn't leave the house for a week at a time. If she did leave the house, occasionally, she would stand on the curb and refuse to cross the street. And they didn't have many choices. Their poverty meant that they couldn't get private treatment for Annie, and there weren't very many treatments anyway. Today she would have been treated at a much earlier age. She had a host of problems when she was born with a deformed leg. Finally her leg was amputated. And then the paranoia began to exhibit itself around 18 or 19.

BOB GARFIELD: I want to ask you about conflict. The moment that made me gasp in reading this book was when it occurred to you, and you essentially said aloud, the possibility that your parents were married not necessarily because they were so in love, but you leave open the possibility that your father was just looking for a family in order to get a deferment from World War II. Do you have to bite your lip to, to go there?

STEVE LUXENBERG: I felt that I had to disclose that there was a reason why my mother would have met my father in June of 1942 and that they would be married so quickly; by November they were married. Was it really love at first sight? My mother was desperately in love with him. I think that they, they truly were in love, in fact. But being in love and getting married so quickly wasn't [LAUGHS] the same thing. And it wasn't biting my lip so much as being candid, as I felt I needed to be, to earn the reader’s respect so that when I finished the book they could say, well, I can give the guy an opportunity to say what he thinks really happened here, because I have to lead to some conclusion about what I think my mother’s reasons were for keeping this secret. And I didn't really want to pull any punches.

BOB GARFIELD: So there were the circumstances of your parents’ marriage, there was the secret of your aunt, and then there was your description of your father’s military career, which was, shall we say, undistinguished. Did you get any grief from your siblings? How much support did you have from them as you were digging deeper and deeper into the family’s private saga?

STEVE LUXENBERG: I got quite a lot of support, but it was episodic and uneven. I mean, my sister, who is actually my dad’s daughter by a first marriage and not my mom’s daughter, she was gung-ho, my younger brother, gung-ho a little bit less but still pretty interested. My older brother was unwilling to think that I could really get to where I wanted to go. But you have to remember, my family was one that didn't believe that the past mattered. As I write in the book, the past wasn't just past, it was irrelevant. We were a modern American family. We were going to overcome all those injustices that our European ancestors, Jewish ancestors had suffered. We were going to make something of ourselves. And so, I think that he was just, why are you going back into the past, why – why are you doing this? But, in the end, he’s been very supportive. There’s no tension in the family over the book. But I, I just think that we don't see the world in quite the same way, and that’s why I'm a journalist and he was a contracts negotiator.

BOB GARFIELD: Steve, thank you. STEVE LUXENBERG: Thanks, Bob.

BOB GARFIELD: Steve Luxenberg is an associate editor of The Washington Post and author of Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret.

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