Bonus: Dani and Nora

is brilliant. She tells stories like no one else in a way. Nora is like the godmother of my show. When I was first starting out and had no idea how to create a podcast, I reached out to her and she walked me through the process with so much kindness and generosity. We've become friends. I adore her and felt completely safe in this far reaching conversation was her. So here's Terrible Thanks for Asking. Lacuna manuscripts a missing piece of text, Lacuna music an extended silence in a

piece of music. Lacuna linguistics a lexical gap in a language. Lacuna law the lack of law or of a legal source addressing a situation Lacuna histology, a small space containing an osteo syte. In bone, there's an uneasy sense a person gets when something is missing, that gap in the text, in music, in language, in law, in bone. We like when the pieces fit together, and we like when we

have them all laid out neatly before us. And I know that puzzle is a lazy metaphor to use, but I'm going to use it many times in this episode because I love puzzles and I am not great at them, but I know we like when pieces fit together in music, in podcasts, in puzzles, in life. And today's episode is about that gap, that chasm, that open and unfilled space, and what happens when it finally all comes together. I'm Nora McNerney, and this is terrible. Thanks for asking. And

this is Danny Shapiro. I remember so little about my childhood. I think in part because I didn't have any witnesses to it, and the two witnesses I did have to it were my parents, and I was like a lost to myself. UM didn't have a real sense of my two feet on the ground like my I can't summon what it felt like to be me as a child,

and that's been always true for me. I can remember certain things or have certain flashes of images, but not inhabit what it was to be me, you know, growing up in this house in New Jersey with my two parents and a lot of quiet, and you know, a sense that there were secrets kind of hanging in the air, and that there was just so much that I knew, I knew, I didn't know, and I but you know that feeling Nora, like that feeling of being lost to oneself,

feeling like other kids had a sense of their families, in a sense of belonging in a sense of their lives and of fitting in and of just having a right to be there. I guess I would say I didn't. I didn't have that. I did have a feeling somehow of a kind of special nous because I was, in one way or another, always being told that I was somehow special. But you know, specialness in isolation is a very strange and painful place to be. What does it even mean? Mhm. That's such a good way to put it,

because what does it mean to be special? You're only special in comparison to something. But if you don't know what you're being compared to. What good does it do you? Yeah, I mean I felt like a hothouse flower, like I would die under the wrong conditions. I was very shivered over by both of my parents and by really all of the adults around me who were related to me,

you know, really on my mother's side. But the feeling that there was something very fragile about me and that I might just kind of vanish, and that contributed to that sense of special illness, you know, like like a very delicate but perhaps not prepared for the elements in some way, kind of little human being. Danny was the only child of an Orthodox Jewish couple. She went to a yeshiva, a Jewish day school, from kindergarten to seventh grade. All around her were kids who dressed and prayed and

looked alike, and there was Danny. I was very fair, sort of pink cheeked and blue eyed and very delicate looking, and a lot was made of that all the time, both by my family and by other adults around me,

and by teachers and by other children. It really was commented on all the time that I didn't look like I was Jewish, and that I didn't look like I belonged, and that somehow the the message underneath all that was you're not one of us, and you're from someplace else entirely, you know, there was just this feeling of like complete and utter being kind of alien, like an alien hothouse flower creature. I think what made it even more complicated is that I knew that it was meant as a compliment,

but it somehow felt like an insult. Because I adored my father, I felt very much like being part of his world and being part of his family was a tethering kind of rooted thing. UM. I very much wanted to feel that way, and I didn't feel that way about my mother. I was not connected to her. UM such a strange thing for a daughter to feel about a mother. But we really were kind of like a total mismatch, and I tried. I loved her, she was my mother, but I didn't relate to her, and I

didn't feel that I was like her at all. I felt like I was like my dad, and I wanted to be part of his family. And so when somebody would say to me, you don't look Jewish, or you don't you don't look like your cousins, or you don't look like you belong in this group of people. It would feel insulting to me or hurtful. But I did understand that what they were saying is, oh, you're so pretty,

Oh you're so fair. Um, oh you you know you look like you know, I mean in Judaism, and it's a really it's tricky territory because there's kind of a self hating aspect of that. You know, there's the the realm of the the chicksa is the word that is always used, and you know, Jewish boy ways are raised to kind of stay away from but revere. You know, the chicksa goddess. You see all of Woody Allen, you

see Philip Roth. And that's what I looked like. And that was something that I was supposed to be flattered by, but instead felt kind of that it was I didn't understand it, and and it was hurtful to me in some way. It is natural to want to fit in, especially when fitting in means fitting into your family and into your culture. And people who are lonely who want to fit in do not need to be told the

ways that they don't fit. And when it is pointed out, whether it is that your shoes are the wrong brand or your hair is the wrong color. It wouldn't be surprising if you wanted to throw your shoes in the trash or grab a box of hair dye. But when the thing that doesn't fit is just you in general, and there's no way to chameleon yourself into the right form, that feeling can just boomerang back into you. Just what, and it's your problem now? And not fitting in is

Danny's problem. I absolutely internalized it and felt that there must be something very wrong with me. And that is something that I carried with me through my childhood. And you know, I don't know that I wore it on the surface. When I've encountered people who I went to grade school with or I went to high school with, they didn't see me that way, which I find completely fascinating. They saw me as somehow confident or somehow you know, are surprised by the degree to which I felt like

I didn't belong. I think I also had a pretty good, a pretty solid mask or you know, a veneer um. You know, I didn't wear any of this on my sleeve. There weren't the external things that sometimes happened with kids. You know, I didn't show my anxiety. I didn't have uh, you know, ticks. It was all much more subtle than that. And I didn't talk to anybody about it. I wasn't somebody who spoke a lot about my feelings. I kind of buried them, and they just became more and more

toxic to me. I found this whole box of many, many things that my mother saved, and it was like the most radioactive box. And there was this one list that my mother had clearly had me make and I sign it and it's like a confession. It has a title, and the title is six reasons of why I should be happy. And I can't quote you the whole thing, but the first, you know, on the list were things like I have a dog, I have a mother who

drives me everywhere, I have everything I need. And this was clearly an assignment that I was given of, you know, coming up with reasons why I should be happy. And the thing that was so striking about them, and it's like in a child's handwriting. It couldn't have been more than you know, six years old, seven years old. You know, I have piano lessons, and it just felt like I was almost being coached, like, here are reasons why you should be happy, as opposed to let's understand what's really

going on. Yeah, let's explore why you could be sad, right right, But it was never okay to be sad, to be upset, to be angry. And so I think I really learned like that, Veneer. I learned that there was a kind of composure that I could And this wasn't conscious. I mean, let me just be you know, really clear. This was not something I sat down and thought,

how do I appear composed? It was more like composure was survival um that if I could find a way to sort of moved through the world and moved through my family in a kind of composed way and not reveal my my sorrow, my guilt, my fear, my anxiety, that that was going to be you know, the way through for me. It is a way through, but not the healthiest way through, because that sorrow, that guilt, that fear,

that anxiety, they royal beneath her composed surface. Danny does all of the right things in the right order, right up until she's sent to college, and anyone who knew me at Xavier University from two thousand to two thousand and five can tell you that this is a period in life where many of us, many of us try on different versions of ourselves like paper dolls, trying to

see what fits and what will stick. But that feeling that she's different, that she doesn't belong it stays unsaid, and it leaks outsideways as Danny flails through her teens and twenties. But Danny isn't simply doing keg stands in the basement of a former morgue and falling out of a stolen grocery card on the way home like some people on today's podcast. She's unraveling in a very New York City in the eighties kind of way. She has an affair with her college roommates married father, she gets

into acting. Both of her parents die when she's still in her early twenties, and then she's not alone like she was as a little girl in that big house in New Jersey. She's alone, Lauren Gough wrote in the novel Fates and Furies, green is for the strong who

use it as fuel for burning. The death of Danny's parents become the fuel that propels her out of that affair, out of acting and back into college and then grad school and into a career as a novelist, building worlds and stories and characters and finding the right place for

every piece. Danny falls in love and gets married, and builds a career and has a son, and together their family of three are their own universe, far from that world where she grew up, feeling simultaneously pressed between the slides of a microscope and gazing through the lens at her community. Here in this farmhouse in Connecticut, many decades removed from the little girl who was forced to write a gratitude list with a list of published books and

essays and articles a mile long, she is home. I'm fifty four years old. I'm a writer of many books, a professor of writing. I'm married for twenty plus years. I have a seventeen year old son, and have really built a life I love. And I am genuinely content to the degree that contentment is possible. There's always a sense that I have that somehow, not everything clicks into place, not everything makes sense. There's some kind of subtle disconnect that I've learned how to live with. It's just the

way it is. But I am the happiest and the most fulfilled that I've ever been in my life. I live in rural Connecticut in house I love, you know, with my husband and my son and a dog, and my husband who's also a writer and a journalist and a filmmaker. And he's a former foreign correspondent, so he really has the journalistic instinct, and and he's also an early adopter of technology, always kind of early to the

party on all things technological. Danny's husband, Michael, is about to be an early adopter of at home DNA tests. They're ubiquitous now. I'm pretty sure you can get them at target. But at this point these tests are just gaining steam and all across America. We were thrilled to be able to prove that actually you should kiss me because I am Irish, or definally know our heritage after a private adoption as a child, or to you just you know, hand over our personal DNA to a giant

data company. Whatever. Michael and Danny already know everything there is to know about their own heritage, but it could be an interesting experiment. So Michael tells Danny, Hey, I ordered some of those DNA tests. You want to do one? And I could so easily have said no. To this day, I'm marvel that I said yes. It was just in the spirit of, like, oh, what the hell. You know, the testing companies bring their prices down every year, right around the holidays, and it was not a big ticket item,

and I thought, well, you know, okay. So he sent away for two of these tests, and they arrived, and you know, as many people know, you have to spit into a plastic vial. They sat on my kitchen counter for weeks actually, because they were that unimportant. And then at some point one night after dinner, he you know, opened mine and he told me to spit in the vial and and I did. And I felt sort of vaguely ridiculous and like why am I doing this? And

how much spit do you need? And but I did it, and and he sealed mine up, and he sealed his up and sent them back off, you know, to be evaluated. And a while later, I don't know, six weeks eight weeks later, one night we were watching TV after dinner, just sitting there and he had his laptop sitting on his lap, as he often does, and and he said, oh, your results are in. And I didn't even know what he was talking about. It wasn't like there was any since I have had at all that I was waiting

for these results. But he opened my results and started looking at them. I wasn't even looking at them. I was incurious, and he was like huh. I was like, huh what And he said, well, look like it says here. Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but it seems to be saying here that you are fifty percent Eastern European Ashkenazi. And I was like, well, that's ridiculous, that's not right. I mean, I'm probably Eastern European Ashkenazi. Both of my

parents are from that background. And he's like, yeah, it's weird. But I just thought like there were no, like even faint warning bills. I just thought there must be some mistake. Testing company must you know, have mixed up my results or gotten it wrong, or maybe all people are a little of this and a little of that. We're just learning that now. I just had no nothing. But it actually did from my husband. I think it's set off a little bit of his journalistic kind of m also science.

I mean he was like, yeah, the science of this is pretty clear. Um, they don't make they don't really make mistakes. And he didn't say that, but when you take one of these tests, you can opt in, and most people do to see other people that you share DNA with that you're related to genetically, and almost everybody

opts in. And I did. And a little while later, maybe a week later, Michael, my husband, I'm sitting there having tea with a friend and he comes in to where we're sitting and interrupts and says, you have a first cousin on your ancestry dot com page. And I was like, yeah, I have lots of first cousins and he said, no, no no, no, like you have a first cousin. Who isn't for your first cousin? I mean, you don't

know who's on here? And he points to this icon and I'm basically my mood at that moment is irritated. He's interrupting my tea date with this, like, what do you mean first cousin? I want to just finish having my tea with my friend. And he points out this little blue icon blue for boys, actually blue for boys and pink for girls. The only way we could possibly know that's right, that's right. There's no you know, there's no yellow or lime green. So there's a little blue

icon and it only has initials on it. It doesn't have a name, it just has initials. And it's not somebody that I know that I at that point, I'm certain that the testing company has just simply mixed up my results with the results of somebody else who is wondering what this first cousin isn't appearing on their page and there must be a mix up. Still, no no

alarm bells, no danger, danger feeling at all. But my husband starts exploring this a little bit more and he sees that there is a name connected to um the first cousins initials. There's actually a name, and he starts kind of digging into that name, and he's not really getting anywhere, and finally he says to me, you know, you know, we could really get to the bottom of this. Michael's pitch is to reach out to Susie, Danny's much older half sister, her father's daughter from an earlier marriage.

That two of them had not grown up together, but Susie was someone that Danny had always admired. She was intelligent and sophisticated, part of a world that was wildly different from the one that Danny grew up in. I kind of revered her in a lot of ways. We had not been close for a number of years. Susie and my mother hated each other, which was something that always left me feeling of very divided loyalty. And after my mother died, we hadn't talked in a few years.

But Michael said to me, why don't you reach out to Susie. Do you think she's done a DNA test? And I remembered that she had told me years earlier, she being an even more of an earlier after adapter of technology. Then my husband is that she had done one of the early back when it was pretty unusual DNA home tests, mostly for health reasons, wanting to know if she had, you know, any genetic diseases that she could know about. So I sent an email this is

now happening very very quickly. It's nighttime. We had been out to dinner with friends. I had told them the whole story about how there was this crazy thing with this first cousin, and the friends we were out with later told me like they went home and said, Danny doesn't know what what's about to happen to her because Danny really didn't know what was about to happen to her. I still thought, this is just, you know, kind of nutty stuff. This is your husband just like chasing a

rabbit hole. You're like, are you bored? Are you between projects? But like that, get a life. Yeah, totally totally just a feeling of like, this is this is just too much, this is this is like a conspiracy theory almost um. But I did reach out to Susie. I sent her an email asking if my memory was correct that she had in fact done DNA testing and if so, did

she have any information regarding that? And I heard back from her within an hour that yes, she had done DNA testing and that she was actually away she was at a TED conference in um Canada, but that she would look on her computer that she had with her to see if she had her results with her, and another email saying she indeed did, and there's a site that exists that she knew about and that Michael also knew about. That's called um jet match, and jet match

exists entirely for the purpose of comparing DNA results. So you can upload a kit number you know your name isn't on it or anything like that. Just your your kit number of your d n A results and the kit number of someone else's DNA results, and see how closely you are related. And that's when everything went kind of at warp speed. So Susie sent her kit number. Michael knew about this technology. We were leaving the next day on a trip. I was upstairs packing and putting

everything in its proper place. All of a sudden, here Michael like running up the stairs with his laptop, and I think the moment that I saw his face, I began to hear warning bills because he looked that kind of wide open look I had only seen on his face a couple of times. I saw it on his face the moment our son was born. I saw it on his face. I came home one day and my mother had been terminally ill. But I like, he was standing on the porch and I looked at his face,

and I knew my mother had died. I had seen it on his face in moments of like huge before and after kind of moments good and you know, the most beautiful and the most terrible, and and what I saw in his face was that. And he sat down next to me, and he pointed to this whole series of numbers on his computer screen and I was like, I don't know what this means. And he pointed to a line and he said, right there, and there was

a series of letters, a series of numbers. And I said what is that And he said, that's your most recent common ancestor with Susie. And I said what does that mean? He said, you're not sisters. You're not related. You're not related. And I was like, well, what do you mean, like, no kind of sisters? And because you know, we had always very studiously referred to each other as half sisters, something that I've later discovered that in many families happier than our family, people don't feel the need

to do. You know, you can be step siblings, half siblings of a family is kind of healthy and intact and feels good about each other. You just are sisters or brothers, your siblings. It's not like that, but it had always been like that for us. So I said, no kind of siblings and he said, no, you're not related, And at that moment I knew what that meant. Like all of the noise in my head, all of the

I guess one would have to say denial. All of that vanished, and I knew that it meant that if we did not share a father, that it meant that our father was not my father. I never entertained the thought, oh, well, maybe he's my father and not Susie's father. I knew instantly, like in this deep way, um, like, ah, we don't. My father wasn't my biological father. Danny's father was not

her biological father. Danny's parents saw fertility doctor when her mother was trying to conceive, and as was the custom in the fifties and the sixties, the doctor makes donor sperm from a young medical student, in this case with her father's sperm, a way of preserving a patient's ego while also giving them what their hearts so desperately wanted. It is not great, not great, not a great practice. Definitely wouldn't happen now, but it happened then. I think

my parents were both kind people. I think they were decent people. I think that each of them, in their own ways, were doing the best they could with what they had been given. But I think, particularly my mother, when she looked at me from the time that I was born, when she looked at me she looked at a secret that she was keeping, or something that she was very afraid aid of, something she didn't want to think about. She was keeping, I believe, on some level,

a secret from herself that she buried so deeply. She so desperately just wanted me to be, you know, both of my parents biological child, and forget that that whole thing ever had happened. But of course it had happened, and pushing it away doesn't make it go away. And you know, I used to wonder why when I would look at my mother her eyes all my life as a child, I do remember feeling this way. Her eyes were always darting. She had very giggle ee eyes. I

don't know how else to put it. They were always moving very very quickly from not like glancing from side to side, but literally like there was a little earthquake going on in her eyes and like a little seismic quality, and it always like kind of disturbed me. And I didn't understand it, but I think I do now. I think that that's how she looked at me, was that I was always kind of creating a little seismic explosion inside of her, whether she was aware of it or not.

This secret was one her parents had assumed would stay with them in their graves, not be resurrected by a science that was unimaginable at the time. But the secret is out, and the secret this whole time was Danny. Danny, who thought she was nine percent Eastern European Ashkenazi, is actually part English, French, German, Irish and Scandinavian. There's this beautiful John Didion line about feeling like she's navigating the

world on a borrowed passport. Um. I mean, I think it's one of the reasons why it's one of my favorite of her descriptions or her sentences, is because that was the feeling. It's like I don't have a right to be here, and one of the things that I've thought a great deal about and I probably will think about for the rest of my life. And it's something that a lot of people who have had experiences not unlike my own report feeling, which is, you know, people who have had a huge secret that has to do

with their identity kept from them. Is growing up with that feeling of like having a borrowed passport, of being an interloper of you know, again, the not belonging, and it's something I think that is intuited and that is kind of like sort of a deeply buried feeling. But I think it also comes from the fact that there are parents or a parent in some cases, who have kept that kind of magnitude of a secret from child,

so that in fact, the child becomes the secret. This is a stunning, dizzying, absolute wrecking ball of a revelation. And Danny does what she has done for decades. She writes, She writes about this, She pulls it all apart and puts it back together and tries to make sense of it. And the full story is detailed in her best selling memoir Inheritance, which you probably have read, but if you haven't, absolutely should. But I've been reading Danny Shapiro since forever.

Hers were some of the first memoirs to grab me by the throat and pin me to my chair until I was finished. I actually can't overstate what reading Slow Motion, the memoir of her twenties, did for me in my twenties, when I was spinning out and wondering if I would ever just stop. Danny has her own podcast, Family Secrets,

which is You'll Never Guess what it's about. Actually, you'll never guess m and she knows that every day there are people having their past and their present in their future rearranged without their consent, learning truths that turn the puzzle pieces of their life into one of the boxes that's always in rental cabins, where literally none of the pieces are from the same puzzle. But you don't realize that until you've spent three hours trying to find edge

pieces and none of them fit. Lots of people go through this, but most people aren't writers. What you have that other people don't is this record of your life. It might be the Maybe the only good thing about being a writer is um is having so much documentation, not just of what happened, but of how it felt. You know. People always ask me when I knew um that I was a writer, and I think I mean,

I was always a writer. I was always If a writer is someone who has the compulsion to write in order to figure out what she knows, to figure out what's going on inside of her. That was always my tool for self examination or self illumination, or understanding anything about the world that I lived in. I didn't know that I could grow up in and and actually, you know, make books, write books, you know, as what I do in the world. I had no idea that that was possible.

But from the time that I did, from the time that I first started trying to tell stories that other people would read from practically word one, my subject matter, my themes really so often had to do with secrets and a family. Um and I I didn't know why, It's just what I did. I really didn't look too carefully at my motivations for why I was writing what I was writing, because I was almost superstitious about doing that. It's like taking a car apart and then suddenly the

engine doesn't work anymore. I didn't I was wilfully not wanting to know why I was compelled or even obsessed to explore what I wanted to explore. And what I wanted to explore was almost inevitably secrets within a family, the corrosive power of secrets, and what we do to each other in the name of keeping secrets or having

secrets or having secrets kept from us. And you know, earlier when I said that there was this subtle disconnect that I always felt as a child, I think that the subtle disconnect ran directly along the fault lines of what was beneath those secrets. And I mean, writers, you know, we never want to revisit our earlier work. It's like it's it's it's like hearing your own voice or seeing, you know, seeing pictures of your it's like, it's kind

of vaguely embarrassing. It's you know, the self that wrote that book has long since been left in the dust, and hopefully has been both cellularly and intellectually and philosophically and emotionally and psychologically um evolved into the self that writes the next one, and then that self gets left in the dust for the self who can write the

next one. I mean, I think it's it's true of writers, it's true of all of us, that you know, we are hopefully constantly evolving, and that we are we are many different versions of ourselves over the course of a lifetime. But Danny did go back, and so did I, to all her previous works, except for her first novel, which she did not have a copy of it, neither did I until I had earthed one in the depths of the internet. Long after we had this interview. Danny went

back to see what she knew before she knew. I am holding in my hands the most the most mortifying paperback of Playing with Fire, my first novel, which was first published in hardcover. But I don't think I have any so I um, I'm holding the sort of pale pink paperback of Playing with Fire. I think of my Christmas card displayed across the nation, my six year old Scandinavian self, my father receiving phone calls from friends in Boston, Richmond, Phoenix, Minneapolis. Joe,

do you know that, Lucy Is? They would trail off, not knowing what to say, as if it was some sort of sin. Daddy would laugh, wishing you a merry Christmas. It was a story he loved. Imagine. I can almost hear him say, Jacob Gleenberg's granddaughter a regular little ships and you didn't know you were a Scandinavian when you wrote that. Nope, that's fiction, but the story of that Christmas photo is real. Little Jewish Danny was a model in a Christmas ad, a little taste of fame that

her mother was exceptionally proud of. But even in her earliest memoir, written after her parents have died, there's that sense that she had in her childhood, the sense of not quite fitting hints that now look like clues. I have so much from slow motion underlined. So I've got the paperback from that Danny I bought from a library sidewalk sale when I couldn't afford books in New York. I was so excited to have this book. Okay, um, if you go to page seventy at the bottom, I

rummaged through her purse for a compact. Rummaging through my mother's purse is nothing new to me. As a child. My desire to find out the real truth, which I also defined as whatever I didn't know, began with my mother's handbag, the romance of little slips of paper, contents of wallets, to do lists, lipsticks. When I think of myself as a child, even though I can't fully put myself back there, it was always as this sort of you know, like Nancy drew of my own life, constantly

looking for clues. I mean I rummaged through everything. I rumaged through her desk drawers, I rummaged through her papers, but there was something in you know. She had beautiful clothes, and she had beautiful jewelry and a lot of everything like a lot of You know, there wouldn't be a perfume bottle like what I might have on my vanity.

There would be dozens of them. And it was as if I could as if I knew that she was holding something that like maybe that these objects could clue me in or give me a sense of what what was missing, what I didn't know. But it was obsessive and it was wordless. I wasn't I couldn't have told you why I was doing it. It was like I was sleepwalking when I would do these things. My side of the family heals well. My mother tells me proudly, your father's family scars like nothing you've ever seen, but

we're survivors. We snap right back as if nothing's happened. She tells me this as if I were not also my father's daughter, when the fact is I have inherited that particular trait from him. I am not as physically strong as my mother, and I don't bounce back as if nothing has happened. If I had been in the passenger's seat of the audi that night, I doubt I

would have lived. The room swims. All my life, I've felt as if I've done something wrong when I see a police car on the highway, even if I'm not speeding, I think I'll be pulled over. And when walking through metal detectors and airports, I imagine that the alarmal sound and a gun or bomb will be pulled out from my luggage. Doesn't everybody feel that way? Are you telling me?

You're telling me that's that One's just me many years from now, when my father is a skeleton in the ground, when my mother strides the streets of New York City with her arms swinging, when Lenny Kline is reduced to a colorful, if painful story. In my mind, there will occasionally be a day when I feel the fear. Then not inside me will unravel, and suddenly my heart will pound uncontrollably, my palms will dampen, and my ears will begin to ring. Wherever I am, I will be desperate

to escape. The urge will be to run as far as I can, as fast as I can, away from my own body, like a tidal wave. It will come out of nowhere, this nameless, faithless terror. I will try every so called panacea, every cure, meditation, homeopathy, behavioral therapy, and nothing will make it go away. Not really. Sometimes I will be lulled into thinking that it's gone for good, but then years will pass and suddenly it will be

there again, haunting me like an old lover. It will return to remind me that I am my father's daughter, that I inherited his terror along with my mother's will to survive. Booh. You know the I feel, in some ways, in many ways, like an object lesson in nature versus nurture um. And I feel such sadness and compassion for the young woman who wrote those words, and the still younger woman herself. You know that she was writing about

because I was always looking for reasons. You know, why did I have that terrible anxiety at the point that I wrote Slow Motion? I was very much in that place. I believed that I came by it genetically. My father was an extremely phobic, anxious person who would suddenly, you know, in the middle of dinner, at the dinner table, check his pulse. I mean, his father dropped dead of a stroke, and I think he was always afraid that that was

going to happen to him, and he monitored himself. He was acutely aware, sort of hyper vigilant about his own heartbeat, literally, and I was laboring under false information. I mean, did I grow up to be anxious at that stage in my life because I grew up watching a father who took his pulse at the dinner table. Very possibly that that was part of it, um, but it was not something I inherited genetically from him. And yet that story, the story that I did, you know, it became important

to me. You know, people who are raised in families where they're biologically connected to their parents never really have cause to unpack any of this or think about it, because it's just the way it is. You know, you kind of understand, Oh I walk like that, or I sound like that, or you know, I share this sensibility with or you know, there's like a wider net that actually really does have to do with biology and genetics.

And then people who are raised by families that they're not biologically related to but they know that also know, well, I don't look like my father or my mother, or I I don't have these traits in common with my parents who are raising me, my adoptive parents or my you know, my social parents. But I know why. I'm not saying that that's easy, but I think that that's it's true that there's that knowledge, and that knowledge becomes

woven into identity. But when you don't know, and you don't know that you don't know, then, I mean, it's become really interesting for me to have to go to doctor's appointments now in the last five or six years, where I have to actually go, you know, I need to revise my medical history, father living, you know, family history, you know, pretty pretty darn healthy as opposed to I mean, my father died when I was twenty three years old in a car accident, but not, according to you a

physician's interests, you know, a physician's interests is my father is living and eighty something years old and in good health.

So it's a very very you know, I read this and I just see the burdens that I was carrying and the desire to make narrative, you know, And I think, to go back to the subtle disconnect, I was always trying to create narratives that would make sense of myself and would make sense of where I came from, and I was always coming up short, which I think is in a way a great gift, because it propelled me book after book to try to fill in the pieces of the puzzle that I didn't understand all the while,

not knowing that there was kind of this essential piece, you know, that I was sort of whistling in the dark in some way, which also is why I feel now so um, I mean it's it's I don't remotely disavow my earlier books. I kind of love them as um like artifacts of my unconscious and I stand by them, and you know, and I know people care about them

as books in their own right. But I feel like I've been liberated in the last five years by knowing a much fuller truth, so that the kind of digging that I was doing, I feel like the world opened up to me. And I finished, in a way a lifelong project when I wrote Inheritance, because I finally like, why the turn from novels to memoir? You know, you

started reading me with slow emotion. Most people did. But there was three novels before slow motion, um, that were like my baby novels that were my like learning how to write in fact a public way. But they were, um, there's a reason why those books are out of print. There out of print because I was being led around. I was being you know, when you like walk down the streets sometimes when you see a dog walking a person.

But the feeling in a literary sense, in a creative sense, that I began to have, and it's why I wrote Slow Motion, was the dog was walking me. My unconscious material was in charge of me, not me in charge of it, which you know, any novelist will tell you that's tricky territory. You never want to be in full charge of your unconscious material because then you know there's

no magic. But I was really really not in control, and beginning with Slow Motion, I felt like I was big inning to be more and more in control, and I and I do think that that's true. But I really veered into the territory of memoir as a writer, and I wrote two more novels that I think are good novels and where I definitely felt like I was writing in a more mature way and more in control of my material. But then I went back to memoir.

I wrote my memoir Devotion, and then I wrote still Writing, and all the while I kept on thinking why I didn't set out to be a memoirist. Why did I return to the form again and again? And the image that I always have when I think of myself during all of those years, is like I was literally digging, like digging on my knees in the ground with a shovel, and I would dig, dig, dig, and I would make a nice, you know, some kind of nice big hole with like you know, inelegant metaphor, but like a pile

of dirt. You know, it was kind of pretty big pile. But I would not have kind of hit. I would not have found the thing that I was digging for. I would have approximated finding the thing that I was digging for, but I hadn't found it. And then one day, because of this random recreational DNA testing, suddenly I'm like there, and I'm on my knees and I'm digging, and like my shovel hits the fucking black box. My my shovel just hits this metal thing, and inside it is like

the story of literally my existence. Everything that wouldn't fit in your mom's purse, everything that wouldn't fit in my mom's purse exactly, or in her jewelry box or in her closet or in you know the rooms of the you know, the home that I grew up in that was like a kind of you know, wax museum, where I've described it that way in my writing, where you know, look too closely and it doesn't add up, or look

too closely and it's not real. In Danny's second memoir, detailing her infant son's diagnosis with a rare seizure disorder, you can sense Danny trying to look more closely, not quite knowing what she's even looking for. No wonder. I had been running as hard and as fast as I could. Anxiety was my fuel. When I stopped, it was all waiting for me. Fear, anger, grief, despair, and that terrible, terrible loneliness. What was it about? I was hardly alone.

I loved my husband and son. I had great friends, colleagues, students. In the quiet in the extra hours, I was forced to ask the question and to listen carefully to the answer. I was lonely for myself. Now, I'm not saying all of your writing you you deserve fear, anger, grief, despair over losing your parents and having your child to be diagnosed with a very rare seizure disorder that he just through through the eye of a needle, like escaped from.

But does that feel like something else to you when you read it. I think, when I'm most struck by is is the um the loneliness, because all those other feelings I could explain as you just did. You know, I had experienced a great deal of maternal terror, and you know, a fair amount of of loss and grief and trauma in my life at a relatively young age and certainly as a young mother. The thing we are all, you know, so terrified of is you know, something being

very very wrong with my baby. But the loneliness that I think about now as something that had to do was not my connection with other people, but was my connection with myself, because you know, I mean, I think in writing Devotion, I mean Devotion was such a deep dive for me into, Like when I realized that I was I felt almost called upon to write this book.

I saw the word devotion before I started writing the book, and I realized what it meant and that I was going to write this book that had to do with my sort of early midlife spiritual existential crisis, and I just thought, oh, ship, like it was the last thing the world I wanted to do was delve into. That was dive into that was tune out the world and get very very quiet and try to tune into um my religious upbringing and what it had meant to me, and you know, and to just go wherever, like the

deep questions took me. And one of the places I think that I came to understand in writing Devotion, but not as deeply as I later understood, was that that feeling of loneliness was something that was kind of endemic to me. I would have diagnosed it at the time as a kind of spiritual malaise, like, oh, what I'm missing is a connection to a greater being, a higher

power God. And and perhaps the reason is because so much was made of that when I was a child, and it was you know, our way or the highway. It was all or nothing. It was believe in, you know, in this God in this way and in this very strict ritualized religious way, or not at all. You don't get to make your own path. So I think I

attributed that sense of loneliness to that. But when I read it now, I and again feel sad for the Danny who who felt that and who wrote that, because I think it was a deeper feeling um, when the very essence of our identity is something that is kept secret from us. I mean my identity. The stories that I was told from the time that I was a very small child about who I was and where I came from, We're not true. They were hidden and secret and obfuscated and pushed into the remoteist corners in the

hopes that they would disappear. And I think that created in me a kind of void that couldn't be filled. Lacuna geology a large gap in the stratigraphic record, Lacuna amnesia, psychology, amnesia about a specific event Petrovsky, Lacuna mathematics a region where the fundamental solution of a differential equation vanishes. MS has been terrible. Thanks for asking. I'm Nora McNerney. Our

producer is Marcel Malikibu. Our team is me Marcel jacob Aldo, Nato Medina, Jordan Turgin, Megan Palmer, um Beth Proman is our executive producer. Our executives in charge our Lily Kim, Alex Shaffer and Joan Griffith. We are a production of a PM Studios at American Public Media. Our theme music is by Geoffrey Lamar Wilson. I recorded this in the coldest closet in my house. I am so cold. Um. Oh, if you guys want to call in, leave comments, questions, concerns,

um compliments. That's another See can call six four four four one or email podcast at Nora Borealist dot com. Thank you for listening to you our show. We appreciate you a lot. Um. Have you haven't listened to Danny's podcast? We link that in the show notes. We also linked to her books, including Inheritance, which is brilliant, but all of her books are lovely, wonderful, and oh my god, her voice. Don't you want to take a nap in it? That's what I've always said, I want to take a

nap in Danny Shapiro's voice. Okay, bye you