Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
I Lived, shadowed by an uncertainty about my parents' marriage and a sense of some fundamental instability lurking just beneath the surface. Lynn and Dick were held up as a model couple by many of their friends, and were profiled as such in several newspaper pieces, celebrated especially for the ways my father made my mother's business success possible. They complimented each other well, my father the extravagant romantic, my mother the cool realist.
As my father would.
Give disquisitions on a new play, will whoop excitedly with his buddies as they watched a sports game, my mother would break in to someone everyone firmly to the dinner table. If my father luxuriated in meandering after her conversations that continued even after coffee and dessert, it was my mother who reminded everyone how late it was and briskly ushered guests out the door.
That's Priscilla Gilman, writer, former professor of English and author of the recent memoir The Critic's Daughter. Priscilla's story glitters on the surface. A rarefied New York City childhood, highly successful parents who were at the epicenter of literary life, a world of intellectual stimulation and famous friends. But beneath that shiny exterior was a darker, harder truth. Things were very, very unhappy in the Gilman household, and Priscilla, as a
young child, absorbed it all. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape of your childhood.
Three Central Park Wests.
That was an incredible historic building on Central Park West in ninety third Street, inhabited by a slew of people we would now consider luminaries, lots of PBS producers and artists and therapists.
It was rent controlled. My parents paid about one hundred and forty one hundred and fifty dollars.
A month, and we were on the Central Park West. Literally my bedroom looked out onto the park, huge three bedroom apartment. Paint was peeling, the tubs were chipped, but we didn't care because we were living in this kind of almost sesame street world. And I say that street began in nineteen sixty nine. I was born in nineteen seventy and the Upper West Side in the seventies. It
wasn't all that safe. It certainly wasn't upscale, but it was filled with academics and artists and writers and actors and interesting people who were at the center of intellectual and artistic culture.
It's so amazing to hear you say that that New York is a disappeared New York now.
Absolutely, And when I think back on my childhood, there's this kind of wistfulness for that feeling of vibrancy and artistic secundity, and the sense that any night some person could come over to my parents' apartment bearing a magical story or an exciting idea that they were developing a project that they wanted to work on, that they wanted advice from my mother on or my father. And there was just this continual sense of discovery and excitement and wonder in my childhood.
So you and your mother and your father and your younger sister, Claire lived at three three three until you were about.
How old, until I was eight, And when I was eight, in nineteen seventy eight, they bought their first apartment in New York City. They bought forty four West seventy seventh Street. It's across the street from the Museum of National History, and I think they bought the apartment for about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and it was a thirty two hundred square foot apartment with the living room and
my father's office fronting onto the Natural History Museum. We looked out over it because we were on the tenth floor. And I think the year that we bought that apartment, there was a drug rehab facility on the block. There was a neighborhood Block Association. It was just sort of starting to get cleaned up.
But we in a couple of.
Years Columbus Avenue exploded and became one of the sheekest parts of the city.
Tell me about the mother of your childhood.
So my mother, Lynn Nesbitt, had moved to New York City in her early twenties from the Midwest as kind of the wide eyed girl. She used to listen to the radio when she was a kid, and there was a show called Grand Central Station, Crossroads.
Of a Thousand Lives, and she listened to that and said, I want to be in that place.
I want to be in New York City, meeting exciting people and doing exciting things. And she worked her way up from being an assistant at a women's magazine to being the assistant to a literary agent. And when she was working for that literary agent, she got a manuscript from a Harvard medical student named Michael Crichton, and it was called The Andromeda Strain, and she signed him as a client and soon began representing everybody from Tom Wolf to Hunter S.
Thompson Cairo. She represented Tony Morrison.
Tony's first book was published in the year I was born, The Bluest Eye, and Rice and Beaty, just a flew of.
And high Low and everything in between.
So your mother was already successful. She was doing very well as a literary agent by the time you were born.
Yes, yeah, she was. She married my father when she was twenty seven. She had three miscarriages before I was born. She had to have surgery on her uterus, one of the first to kind of a pioneering surgery, and she was able to get pregnant and carry the baby to term, and she had me and my sister within fourteen.
Months of each other.
And so she was in her early thirties, two young children, a vice president at ICM International Creative Management in the literary department, representing a ton of incredible authors.
And how about your father.
So he in the sixties when he met my mom. I believe he was working at newswol when he met my mom. He was the theater critic, the staff theater critic for Newsweek in an office. Another example of how we've lost a lot in our culture. I don't think it's a staff theater critic in Newsweek anymore. And in nineteen sixty seven he was hired to teach at the l School of Drama. And in the sixties and the seventies he mainly taught dramaturgy or dramatic criticism, but he
also did teach playwrights. He taught actors. Meryl Streep was one of his most beloved students. He taught Henry Winkler, Wendy Wasserstein, Sigourney Weaver, a whole bunch of performers, writers, directors at the l School of Drama. So he was up there two nights a week. He would stay in a hotel in New Haven when we were in the city, and then we had a country house in western Connecticut where we spent our weekends. My father was a very
powerful formidical critic. He also wrote literary criticism. He had been the editor of The New Republic's literary section at one point, and he was known in public as being tough and difficult to please and rigorous and almost fear inducing because of how honest and how ostensibly harsh she could be in some of his reviews. But in his personal life he was warm and congenial and playful and affectionate, and he.
Had grown up in Flatbush, Brooklyn.
Was very sort of down to earth and loved sports and loved deli food. My mother, who came from the Midwest, was a cooler customer. I would just describe my mother as, although she was author's advocates, she was nurturing talent. She was supporting people through their dark moments when they doubted if they could write, or they doubted if they could produce. She's just a cooler, more rational person than my father.
My father, even as he was that rigorous critic, he was essentially a romantic and idealist somebody who loved musical theater passionately. My mother was just more. She was very hard working, She was very competent. She worked incredibly hard and kept her cool in very difficult, tough situations. My father was more insecure. My father struggled with writer's block, and he smoked compulsively, and I could tell as a
young child that he was self medicating with cigarettes. He could get irritable, he could get depressed if he wasn't.
Producing enough writing.
And my mother was very good at sort of laying down the law and saying, Okay, you're going in your office now, and you're going to come out in two hours, and you're going to give me some pages. She was very good at pushing him.
And my mother is a rock solid person.
She was then, she is now. You can always count on her in a crisis. In Joan Divien's The Year of Magical Thinking, my mother appears in one of the opening of that book as the first person Joan calls when John dies. My mother was both John and Joan's literary agent. And I don't think it's an accident that she called my mother. Yes she was a very close friend, and yes she was the agent. But Joan also knew my mother is the person you call when you're in an emergency situation.
She's going to take care of things.
And she's not going to cry in a way that she's not going to be able to manage herself. My father was more vulnerable emotionally than my mother.
Yeah, you write that even though your father cultivated the pristine and protected sanctity of your childhood, even though he was the one you'd go to for reassurance when you had to worry, you never felt entirely secure about your father. It seems like your mother was certainly much more disciplined than your father.
Absolutely, my father, he always had this cough that worried me. The kids would try to get him to quit smoking, and he would get very angry and say, no, I'm fine. My parents live until their nineties, and they my father smoked. I'll quit when I'm older. So I always worried about his health in that way. It just didn't like the way that cough sounded. I also always worried about his mood because I could see I didn't know what to
label it. I didn't know what to call it. Today, we would say that he was suffering from untreated depression. He would get into kind of quiet and dark moods or sometimes not often, but sometimes he would get irritable.
He had a temper.
He could get angry, particularly at my sister, who was just a little bit more of a difficult child. If she would spill her milk, he might get angry, or she would complain, or she would talk back, and he would get angry. And so I just always felt when I entered a room my father's face lit up. When I was with him, he was calmer, he was happier, and he seemed more secure.
So from a very young age.
I sensed that I was almost what we would call today like I was my father's prozac.
In a way, helping him manage.
His moods, which is a tremendous responsibility for an eight nine.
Ten year old.
Yeah, and you know, one of the things that strikes me so much about your story is that there are some bigger secrets in it. But the secrets in it really have to do with what is left unexpressed, what is left unspoken, which is a more subtle kind of secret keeping. Right like you were, you were as a member of your family who was really never going to say anything that was going to rock the boat for any of them.
Absolutely, I viewed myself as my sister's protector. I was only fourteen months older than Claire, but she was fragile. She would cry when my parents would go out and they would go away, and I would be comforting her. She didn't have the filter that I had in terms of if she was upset or we would be taking a trip, she'd say.
We have to stop the car. I'm hungry, I'm thirsty.
And I really admire her ability to advocate for her needs and to say how she was feeling. But because she did that so openly, it almost hardened me in my role of being Okay, my parents need one child who's easy. My parents need one child who's not going to complain. My parents need one child who's just going to be that boy and happy child. And I was born that way. I should say, you know, it's important to say that my parents cast me.
In this role.
But the role wasn't a stretch, right. I didn't cry when I was a baby. Everybody always talked about that.
In the family lore.
My sister was very difficult. She didn't sleep through the night. My parents were at their wits end. Claire would have tantrums, and everybody from our babysitters to my brother from my father's first marriage talk about how all little easy Persula. She was always so sweet and easy and she never cried. And I took that role seriously, and I love what you say about It was almost like I couldn't voice any feelings of worry or dissatisfaction, or this is hard
for me, anything like that. I had to keep those things even from myself. I know you do talk often in this podcast about these different types of secrets.
And I was almost keeping it from myself.
How hard this was at times for me to always have to play that role of the good girl.
Priscilla is ten years old. The tensions between her parents have been mounting. They aren't getting along even when they go on vacation together. Priscilla wonders what do they do while they're away. They really don't have much in common, but one thing has been clear. They've promised Priscilla and Claire that no matter what, they'll never get a divorce. But then one October night in nineteen eighty, Priscilla hears her parents arguing in the kitchen and it's filled with
a sense of doom. This foreboding feeling is born out when her parents sit their daughters down at the kitchen table and announce that they're going to have a trial separation.
I remember my sister got worried and thought it had something to do with court or the legal system, you know, when daddy's going on trial. What my mother said, No, no, no, we're going to be living in separate places. And when Claire started to look upset, she reassured her and she said, you know, it's just kind of like an experiment. We're just trying it out seeing And I knew in that instant that it was not an experiment, it was not a trial. That what I had most dreaded for a
long time was going to happen. And I will say also that you know, this is nineteen eighty starting to enter the era where more and more people that would have stayed married ten twenty years ago are splitting up. And a number of their friends, couples that we used to hang out with, had split up. And so this is one of the reasons why Claire and I start asking them, right.
Are you going to split up? And then they would have these kind.
Of fiery arguments where they would yell at each other, and after those arguments, we would ask them and I think, you know one thing that I do want to say about their marriage.
They had two major things in common.
One, their children. They adored their children, They loved being parents. I could tell that they were in very invested in the family and the larger family unit, bringing the grandparents together. My mother loved my brother from my father's first marriage.
And I think my mother appreciated what a wonderful father my father was, and even Crtic allows and have this major career because he loved taking care of us, playing with us, and reading to us and doing all those things that she wasn't that interested in doing with us. And at the same time, they were both passionate about art and literature and that a life devoted.
To the arts could be meaningful.
They had both broken from their families of origin. Both sets of grandparents were Republican. Both sets of grandparents had businessman or lawyer right paternal figures, and my parents bonded I think over that yet we're both escaping from the oppressiveness of for my mother small town Illinois, from my father Russian Jewish immigrant parents living in Flatbush and saying a critic, how can you make money being a grip that doesn't that's not a job, right, And they believed in each other's work.
My mother thought my father was a genius. My dad was wholly.
Admiring of my mother, supportive of her having a major career.
Not that many men were at that time.
So my father being sort of ahead of his time and taking on more of the child rearing and just caring for us and supporting her.
I think that's what held them together.
But their personalities were not compatible ultimately, And when my mother announces this, I knew not only that this was going to be irrevocable, that they were going to split, and not just separate the divorce. I knew that my father did not want this, because I could.
Always sense from a very young age.
That my father loved my mother far more than my mother loved my father, if she really loved him at all.
I knew she revered.
Him intellectually, but I never saw any physical affection between the two of them, And I did feel often as a little girl my father wanting my mother's approval and my mother not giving him the affection that I could sense that he wanted.
And that night, when you leave the kitchen, you go into your father's study and he tells you as much he's crying, and he tells you, I don't want this.
He says, I don't want this. I don't want to lose our family. I went after him. My mother took Claire back to bed, and I could have gone to bed, but I felt I need to go check on my father. I need to go see if he's okay. And he was crying, and I'd almost never seen him cry, and I'd seen tears in his eyes and like sentimental moments and movies maybe, and he was heaving with crying, and immediately I was just hugging him, and I was trying not to cry myself because I didn't want to make
it worse for him. But that wasn't a revelation to me. When he said that, exactly as you said, Danny, I knew. I mean, I went there and I had it confirmed. My father did not want this.
My mother wanted this, and I could tell from the expression in her.
Face that she was out. There was no chance that he was going to be able to convince her.
And for a couple of.
Mon he did try, and it was very painful to watch his fumbling around trying to praise her, and he'd say, oh, you know, I've smoked only ten cigarettes today, right, or I'm not going to bet on sports anymore, or any of these things that had bothered her or have been issues I knew as a little child.
Those were cosmetic things like that's not what it really was. It was something deeper.
There was some deeper fault line between them.
We'll be right back when Priscilla's parents separate. The change is jarring for the whole family. The life and home they all once shared is now fractured.
So, you know, we had moved into this really grand apartment two years earlier, and my father had had this incredible office with this huge white desk that looked like a president could sit behind it, and all of a sudden, he doesn't have a home at all. We're not told
where he's staying. He moves out in January, and I assumed, you know, he's basically what we would today call kout surfing, staying with different people friends for us, students, former students, and my sister and I are only able to see him for a quick lunch or a quick dinner at a neighborhood restaurant maybe once or twice a week, and he is alternately kind of shaky emotionally, like as soon as he would see us, he would look like he was about to cry, or he would get irritable because
he would say, girls, you have to split a dish, and Claire would say, no, I want more food.
That's not enough food. I want more, and he would get annoyed, and so I would be sort of kicking her, trying to get her to stop.
And then I would notice that my father was taking the containers in the McDonald so that have like the packets of salt and pepper.
Or the ketchup packets and the mustard.
Packets and pouring them into his shoulder bag or sugar right, and I'm thinking he can't even afford a box of sugar. And meanwhile, my mother's career is going better than ever. She's doing a lot of business in California. We go and we stay for the summer in Brentwood, in Joan Diddy and in John Vanna's house, and we're going to all these movie premieres, and she's getting even more glamorous.
My mother seems free, my mother seems lighter, she seems happier, and my father is overcome by this profound depression he'd always teetered on the verge of falling into that. One night, my father had come back to the apartment. My mom was in California on business, and she allowed my father to come into the apartment and stay with us, so
we would have a couple of nights with him. And we're playing a game with Claire, and Claire spills her juice and my father had been warning her, you know, watch out for that glass, you know, don't but it's so near the board, and it spills, and he yells at her, and she starts crying, and he gets up and he stalks out, and he walks back into the room that had once been his office, and I comfort her and I go after him, and he's immediately contrite.
And he always was about his temper. He didn't think it was a good thing. He never felt justified and raging. He was always immediately apologetic. And he just looks absolutely distraught, and he says, you know that I love you girls more than anything in the world, right, and I'm so sorry. You know that I didn't mean to get that angry, and you know it bothered me because I told her not to do it.
So he's basically apologizing and then he looks out into space and he says, you know, sometimes I think I kill myself if it wasn't for you girls.
And that's a moment where it just clicks in me. You know, you could describe that as a secret that I kind of perceived, but I didn't really know it for sure until that night. My father's survival is my responsibility, and I am the most important thing to him, and I have to do everything in my power to keep him alive.
You're in fifth.
Grade, yep, I'm in fifth grade.
You are in fifth grade.
I'm curious, Priscilla, like, what did it feel like that huge effort to push away everything that felt dangerous or you know that felt like a live wire. There was such vigilance on your part.
Vigilance is a great word.
It's something that I think we don't even often recognize in ourselves until we're through it. I mean, it's something that becomes so habitual that you don't even notice that you are constantly on the alert. Like I have this preternatural ability as a very young child, the sense when my father's mood was going dark, when Claire was about to lose it and have a tantrum and I think what gets you through it is feeling this is my role,
Like this is what it's like to be alive. I don't know if that makes sense, but you know, it's like, this is what it means to be a human. I've been assigned this role and it's what makes life meaningful for me. Like these are my people, these are the people I love. I am blessed by having a steadier temperament than they have. I am not as prone to crying, I am not as vulnerable to moods. You know, I'm just lucky that I'm born with this temperament where I'm
more buoyant. I'm generally an optimistic person. This is true, and this has been true throughout my life. I'm not prone to darkness. It's easy for me to spot if somebody's feeling left out, if somebody's feeling afraid of and I'll go in and I'll make them feel better. And I think you know that ability has served me very well. But it is can be very, very exhausting. And I remember coming back from meals with my dad where I'd think, okay, I got a ninety eight on the math quitz.
I'm going to tell him that and I'm going to tell him.
About the play and how I got this part, and I'm not going to tell him, you know, about this this mean girls school, because I don't want him to worry about me. So I'm just going to tell him all these good things. And I'd almost make a list in my mind of all the things I was going to tell him, and then i'd come home and I remember just sometimes going into my room and just lying on the bed and just feeling completely exhausted, like emptied.
And one of the ways that I could say, maybe this was, you know, a form of rejuvenation and also distraction. But as I'm getting a little bit older, my father didn't allow us to watch any TV except PBS, and then he allowed us, in a weird exception, to watch The Hardy Boys and Nancy Droop, And all of a sudden, my dad's out of the house, and Claire and I are like, let's watch Love Both, Let's watch Fantasy Isisland, and let's start watching all these fun things that our
father didn't let us do. And I thought, at one point it's almost like sort of papering over the loss with these fun you know, and I'm entering adolescents. Let's go to the Love's drug Store and buy some Bonnie Bell lipsmackers.
We couldn't tell Daddy about that. I genuinely enjoyed these things.
And you know, I liked going to Canal Jean and buying an overcoat and thinking Daddy wouldn't want to see my McJagger button, you know, because he doesn't approve of McJagger, and cultivating my new kind of adolescent fun life as a distraction from and something that could be just sort of more mindless. Because when I'm with my father, and you know, to a certain extent, with my sister and with my mom, I'm curating myself around my mom. I'm not telling my mom.
How depressed my dad is.
I'm not telling my mom I'm sad that I missed my father. I'm pretending with everyone, and I'm pretending to myself that I'm okay because I need to be okay because other people are not okay, and I need to help them because I'm more.
Okay than they are.
I guess was another way that I would think about it. Right, what do I have to complain.
About my poor father? He doesn't even have a bedroom.
Right, there's this list that you include in your book that's really just heart wrenching. And it's from a diary that you kept in middle school. And here's a page from that diary. Things not to do when I'm with daddy. One don't cry. Two, don't complain, Three, don't be difficult. Four don't tell him anything but good news. Five don't mention mommy, and six don't expect him to be the daddy of old.
Yeah.
When I found that, I have no memory of writing that none, It just hit me like, Wow, that's a little girl trying to podify rules for herself in a way, trying to give myself structure, almost like if I write it down, it'll remind me, but also it maybe gives me more of a sense of control.
Over what I felt I needed to do in an uncontrollable situation.
Around the time Priscilla writes this list in her diary, she discovers a letter It's just sitting there out in the open, written by her father to his first wife esther. The letter contains some really unsettling and disturbing imagery and language. How does a child process something like this? Though Priscilla has made a habit out of caretaking, protecting the minds
and hearts of everyone around her. In this case, she's so perturbed and in many ways scared by what she reads in the letter that she unc characteristically doesn't keep the secret.
She tells her mom about the letter.
I don't remember how soon after my mother came back that I told her. I know that I told her when Claire was not around, because I knew it would worry Claire and it would upset Claire. And it was a letter that shocked me, not only in terms of its graphic details. My father we would now call had BDSM tendencies, wanted to be dominated, was submissive, was asking esther.
And I'd only met esther once or twice, like she was my brother's mother, and I adored my brother twelve years older though, so he didn't really live with us growing up.
I didn't really know Esther.
It freaked me out that my father was writing to esther and asking her to be sexually involved with him like that in and of itself felt really weird to me. And then the details of what he was asking her to do also kind of shocked me, And I think it unsettled me so much much that I felt I have to see if my mother understands this at all, Like I did not know how to make sense of it. Why is he reaching back out to esther. It hasn't been with esther in years. Why is he asking esther
to do these things? And I think, to me, you know, as a ten year old, asking to be dominated.
Felt to me like a cry for help.
And I thought, this is not something that I can handle on my own, like, I need to tell my mom about this. And the biggest surprise of all was that my mom was not at all surprised by it.
Now. I was expecting her to say, what he's what is he saying?
Oh my gosh, that sounds crazy, And She's like, oh, oh.
Wow, wow, wow. Yeah.
You know, I've been trying to protect you girls from stuff like this for years. And I just looked at her and I'm like what, and she says, yeah. You know, he had all these pornographic magazines, and he had this dash of pictures. And I would sometimes find that under the cushions of the sofa, you and Claire would have just been there like a minute before, and I'd worry, oh my gosh, you know, your grandparents are going to
find them, You're going to find them. I've been protecting you girls from uears, and she was angry at him. I could tell that he'd left this out and that I'd been exposed to it, and I'm.
Just very calm. While she was talking, I sat.
There and I just sort of listened, And when I told her, I didn't present it in an emotionally overwhelmed way. I just said, Mommy, I found this letter and I'm wondering what you think about it, and I sort of just tried to describe it, trying to summarize it to her.
And then she said, you.
Know, I never did any of those things with him that he was asking esther to do, and so I think that it suddenly clicked in her head. She's like, is my daughter going to start thinking that like that was our sexual relationship, And so she felt she had to tell me that, and then we both agreed were never going to tell anyone else that Claire.
Would get extremely upset and not be able to handle it.
And very shortly after this, my mother initiated a conversation with me in which she told me that my father had had multiple affairs during their marriage, that some of the affairs had been with.
His students, graduate students.
Was very upsetting to me that he'd had affairs, and especially with students. I remember thinking that is disgusting and vile. And I even though I knew that a lot of my parents' friends and had affairs, I was aghast at that. But I remember thinking even more when my mother said, and you know, in a way, the affairs were sort of a relief for me because these women were sort of taking him off my hands.
The thing that's so striking, Priscilla is that this confiding in you, ten year old you, your father making that statement about you know, if it wasn't for you girls, I would kill myself. Your mother telling you, you know, even oh, I didn't do those things with him, and he had affairs, the kind of turning you into each of them in very different ways, but into their confidante.
Yes, absolutely, and confidant is a great word, because I think one of the reasons why, as my mother is telling me all these things, I'm not more upset is that I was kind of flattered that she was telling me that she was confiding in me, and she was singling me out as the mature child. You know, you're so strong, and you're so mature, and you're so smart.
She would always say to me things like you can handle things, and it made me feel proud, and it made me feel closer to my mother, because as a young child, I had been much closer to my father, partly because he was around more, but also because we're just more alike and was genuinely invested in this world of childhood that my sister and I created and cultivated, and my mother was felt more adult. And now in this moment, it was more like we were on the same not the same level, but we.
Were closer to each other. She was sharing her own vulnerability with me, and that felt good because I felt.
I understand my mother better and I still to this day am grateful for that in the sense that it might sound odd, but she trusted me, and she felt that she wanted me to understand why she had ended the marriage. And you know, I remember talking about this with a great family friend when I was growing up, and she loved both of my parents and she understood both of them, and she's someone that I could always speak to who wouldn't come down on one side or the other.
And I remember her saying to me you know, when is the right time to find this kind of stuff out.
Whatever time it is, it's never the right time to find it out.
And I do feel that my mother was genuinely not just venting to me.
She was trying to help me, in a way make sense of what had happened. Why had this seemingly perfect family broken. Why was my father, who was this sort of magical childlike being, and I mean childlike in both the senses of being vulnerable, but also in the sense of being adventurous and playful and delightful to be around and a joy to have.
How why had he been expelled? And I think she probably felt Prisolla doesn't get.
It at all, and I want her to understand.
So each time your mother disclosed more difficult and damning things about your father, she tells you not to share it with Claire and what struck me there, And she says to you that she's tired of deception and she's tired of secrets. But at the same time, she is asking you to keep a secret.
Yes, and she didn't say this explicitly, But I also felt, I can't talk about this with my grandparents. I can't talk about this with my babysitters. I can't talk about this with my friends. This is like loaded dangerous information.
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. It's a hot July night in nineteen eighty one and the family's getting together for Claire's birthday. They're having dinner at a restaurant followed by a Broadway musical. At the time, Priscilla's parents are deep into their bitter divorce negotiations, and animosity is palpable, but they try to keep it together for their girls, try being the operative word.
So he rushes in, and I'm starting to get really worried, and I see him and he was sweating, but I could see that he had dressed in his nicest clothes, and he was not typically a particularly natty fellow, so I was sort of touched by seeing that he had this.
He was dressed up, and he was rushing in, and he went to sit down in a chair and he missed the chair and he fell on the floor, and Claire exclaimed, and the waiters are rushing over, and I'm just thinking, oh my gosh, this has gone from bad to worse.
And he's sprawled on the.
Floor and he's quickly getting up, and we're trying to and I start nattering on the way I do about all these good things and not wanting this to turn into a scene. Of course, it was imprinted in my brain as one of the most painful scenes of my childhood. And you know, we had to get through the dinner because we had we were going to see Barnum on Broadway.
That moment that was exceptionally poignant, and I could see my mother just looking irritated and almost contemptuous, like, oh, of course, right, he's late.
And then he falls on the floor.
And then we're sitting in the musical and there is a love song and I start to hear something and I look and my father is crying, and he's trying to stifle it. And I can tell he doesn't want anyone to notice it, and I make noise, I rustle my program, and.
I pile up my sweater so that i'm.
Not he doesn't worry that I'm seeing him, and I'm trying to protect him from what I know will be my mother's contempt for you know, what she might call or think of this is kind of sloppy sentimentality. I'm protecting him from her judgment, and I'm protecting him from knowing that I know. And I think that's similar to you know, the letter. I never told him that I found that letter, never told him, never told him that I'd heard all these things about what he.
Did during the marriage.
Never ever told him, but he knew he had affairs, any of them.
Again, you're you're in sixth grade. It's so young.
I kept on as I was, as I was reading your book, thinking, oh, surely by now she's you know, a sophomore in high school. Like, No, this is all happening to a very a very young person.
And you had to be so careful.
You would hide any interest in popular culture or fashion, you would hide your body, and you're beginning to enter puberty, and you know, just wear the baggiest clothes you possibly could, and you know, so careful to just not rock his world in any way.
Yep.
It was certainly at this point that there was no hope that they were going to get back together, and that my father was asking for money for my mom really unusual and shamed in my mother's eyes, Like why would a man ask a woman for money?
Like there was something very shameful about that.
Your mother never sees how your father is living during this whole period of time.
She never picks you up there. She doesn't want to know.
Nope, And I don't want her to know.
And I think maybe I should have told her, because then maybe she would have been more willing to.
Give him the money.
He did start to have apartments that we could sleep over in, you know, the first one there was no furniture. There was a room that we could sleep in, but he couldn't afford to buy us beds, and so we could sleep in sleeping bags on the floor. And I remember my back just killing and just not wanting to
say anything. And you know, Claire and I going to this series of temporary crash pads or sublets that he had, and how dingy they were, and how almost unsafe some of them felt in the lobbies, you know, this was still the early eighties on some of these side streets, and just feeling I don't want my mother to know. I don't want my mother to look down on my father. And my father never spoke about my mother to us ever.
If it came up in conversation, if we slipped and brought her up, he would always look stricken and so I would really.
Try not to talk about her.
And because it was New York City, we were able to go by ourselves.
We didn't need to.
Be dropped off or picked up because we'd walk, you know, five blocks here, take the bus. I mean we were taking the bus when we were eight and seven years old. Talk about young out on their own in the big city. So she didn't need to. But I could have asked her to, and she would have. But I didn't want her to know. I didn't want to expose my father to her judgment, and I didn't want her to feel guilty.
I was protecting her too. I didn't want her to feel guilty.
It's interesting that your father never spoke of her, but she did speak of your father, yes, around this time. Alice Miller's seminal book about surviving narcissistic parents, The Drama
of the Gifted Child, has recently been published. Priscilla's mother gobbles it up along with millions of other readers, and she uses what she learns or thinks she learns about narcissism to pit Priscilla against her father, saying that he doesn't really love her because he's a narcissist and what he loves is the false self Priscilla has created for him.
But what Priscilla's mother doesn't realize is that she too has been exhibiting narcissistic behavior by asking Priscilla to create and maintain a false self for her as well.
I think that book. We really cannot overstate what an explosion that book made. And I remember friends of hers calling to ask if she'd read it and talking about it with all these friends, and she showed me some passages in the book, and she did it in a very loving, protective way, like, oh my gosh, this must have been so hard for you, and it's a lot of pressure to have to have a false self and all of this, and she's doing it in a way where it's like a light bulb moment for her.
And my father was not a narcissist, he really was not. She got it wrong.
She was wrong, and Alice Miller in a way got him wrong about that, in the sense that the dynamic that had been set up for me as a kid was almost like what we would call a codependent dynamic, where I was a parentified child that was taking care of my parents' needs.
Both my mother and my father and.
That's what she didn't see in that moment, Like I'm telling you something very disturbing, Isn't that in a way implying that I have to have a false self in this moment because I love my father. I adore my father, and our love was real. But I'm not going to cry about it in front of you when you're saying this to me. But I think that it was a moment where she was kind of thinking, oh, that's why I was so tired during my marriage to him, because it was really about her experience of him.
And she was wrong about that too, in the sense that it wasn't a narcissist.
It was more of a co dependency dynamic where he was insecure and she was a nurturer and a fixer and a solver, and she was taking care of him.
That's exhausting for the code dependent.
But I feel like that's what she was thinking, Oh, wow, life bulb moment, Now I get it. That's why I felt so tired when I was married to him, because he was so insecure and he was and also, you know, it occurs to me now. She was probably still trying to assuage her feelings of guilt about ending the marriage. And I think on a deep level, looking back, she did love my father. I mean, I've had so many family friends, family members tell me, you know, there was a love between them.
It wasn't a romantic love on her part, but there was love.
And I think she was still struggling with that guilt of breaking family and plunging this man into a deep despair, and.
So it probably slaged her guilt to think, oh, you know, he didn't really love me. He was loving my false self, you see. And then she was extrapolating from that and saying, oh, wow, I felt a lot of pressure.
Priscilla must have felt that too, And I don't want her to make the same mistake I did. I don't want her to end up with a very insecure, dependent man having to be stroking your ego and taking care of them all the time.
Another way Priscilla indirectly takes care of her parents is by excelling academically. She knows this will make both her parents happy and even unite them in some way, since education is one of the few values they share. They don't want her to become an actress or a writer. No, they want her to be a scholar, so that's the path she takes. She even hears her mom and dad using friendly voices with one another, a rare occurrence these days,
when they're discussing her report card. Now flash forward a few years to nineteen eighty six. Priscilla's father has just published his book, Faith, Sex Mystery. The book is dedicated to Priscilla and her sister Claire, but they don't read it. Often children of writers don't as a way to protect themselves. But try as they might, the girls cannot be completely shielded from the book or its contents. One day, they're
on a flight together reading magazines. Claire is reading Vogue and in it there's a piece called Spiritual strip Tease.
The piece is a.
Takedown of their father's book. In the piece, the critic writes about masochistic fantasies, and it's just this horrifying download of information for the girls, even for Priscilla, who knew more than her sister did about their dad, but not this much. After Claire reads the piece, she wordlessly passes it to Priscilla. Here they were just thinking, they were casually reading Vogue, and then just like that, secrets about their father are uncovered.
And I remember it had Cindy Crawford on the cover. It was it was our fun plane reading.
You know.
It was like the last place that you would ever think that you would find something like this.
And you know the book.
It was reviewed on the front cover of the New York Times Book Review, he was on NPR with Terry Gross.
It was everywhere. But this was like a place where we thought maybe we'd be spared, maybe we wouldn't have to be dealing with it.
And it quoted extensively and in a sort of disingenuous way, the worst passages as far as Claire would have been concerned, right, because she knew something about it having some masochism stuff in it, but not really and she hadn't read that letter, and we'd never filled her in along the way, and she's reading this quote and it's just horrifying. And I remember also we're both thinking, oh god, this is a really bad review.
This is going to upset him.
It's not fun to see be taken down in print. That review is still it haunts me. I ripped out the page and I bawled it up, and that I said, Declara, Oh, well, don't worry you know Daddie will never Readvoke, and there wasn't the internet then, so if he didn't have a physical copy of but he's never going to see this, He's never going.
To hear about this.
So and yet another way of kind of just burying something or absolutely protecting him and keeping it a secret.
Yes, six months later, he meets Yasico. I get into Yale early that fall of eighty seven, and then I'm at Yale with him. I can have lunch with him or dinner with him every week. And he's doing wonderfully because he finally finds his permanent home on one hundred and eighth Street near Columbia. He's able to buy an apartment. Everything is going really well, and he's able to be very strong and supportive and wonderful for me.
When I'm a student talk about my papers.
We have these delightful lunches and dinners, and everything is good.
I guess a blessing during that early time is that your father was in a much better place in his life. He had met and fallen in love with Yosco. It was complicated, she was married to somebody else, had a job as a professor there, so this was a hard won relationship, but a real you know, a real love story. Oh yeah, genuine joy and happiness and you know, being
with his soulmate. So there was a period of time there where you were worrying about other things, but you weren't worrying about your father.
Yes.
Though Priscilla is having tremendous academic success at Yale, at some point her nerves are afraid. She's suffering on mental and physical overload. For once, she cannot perform perfectly, so she steps away and takes an academic leave.
I needed to hit pause.
I started having a lot of health problems when I was in high school, like sinus infections that I just couldn't get rid of, strepped throat, all sorts of sort of upper respiratory stuff, and also aching stuff in my body. After my first year at Yale, I was in an
honors program. I won the prize as the best student in this program, and I remember, you know, getting this letter that said that I won the prize and feeling, oh, my parents are going to be so thrilled about this, and every grade that I got back it was good, and every paper that I got back, Oh, I'm going to mimeograph this and give it to my parents and this is going to make them happy, and I just
remember feeling empty inside. In that summer between what would have been freshman and sophomore year, I went back to school for my sophomore year. I was there for a few weeks. I got sick again. I was exhausted, and I felt listless in my studies, and I said, I've got to take some time off. And I think that was so the first moment where I stepped off that you know, good girl fast track, because part of being
the good girl in my family was being precocious. That was part of the legend around me and the family that I read when I was three that.
I got into Yale early admission that I was moving along in a smooth.
Trajectory of success. And I was like no, And I was terrified to tell my parents, and they both actually took it really, really well. And that was the first indication it's okay to say I have needs, it's okay to say I need to slow down. And I went into Fordian analysis, and I.
Think it was, you know, all of the residue of the split catching up with me.
The problem was that the analyst that I went to was my mother's analyst.
Yes, you heard that right, her mother's analyst. And it isn't just that doctor T is her mother's analyst, but also that Priscilla ends up knowing a lot about doctor. His wife is ill with cancer, and Priscilla, in what Freud might have had a field day analyzing, feels she needs to take care of him. And most amazingly, he regularly calls her by the wrong name, and she doesn't correct him because she doesn't want to hurt his feelings.
He was such a kind, wonderful, wise man, and there was a lot that he told me that I held on to. He was the first person to say you are going to be a writer, and not an academic writer. His wife was dying. His wife lived in Florida.
He was kind of flying up to do his sessions near Grand Central. He created a lot of famous writers.
My mother sends a number of people to him, And I just knew he was like this wonderful.
Man, and I just found myself thinking.
Oh, my gosh, I don't want him to know that I'd noticed that he fell asleep. I mean, isn't it a repeat of this what I did with my dad? It's crazy.
Did that occur to you at the time, No, definitely not.
But Priscilla actually does get the help she needs from this doctor, and her time off from school turns.
Out to be very restorative. She goes back to.
Yale feeling much better. But the reprieve from worrying about her father is brief. That worry returns.
I guess we could say it's almost like a return to having to worry about him. Is when in nineteen ninety two, the summer I graduated from Yale. In nineteen ninety three, he marries also go in Japan and they're going to have another wedding in New York, so we didn't go to Japan for that little wedding.
He has a very severe heart.
Attack in Japan and they make him quit smoking, which is a good thing. But for a while it was not looking good and he was not in good health. But ultimately it becomes a positive because he's becoming healthier.
He's going to lose weight, he's going to stop eating so unhealthily.
He never took care of himself, he never exercised. He ate red meat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and bacon bits in between.
Positive changes are happening for Priscilla as well. She's just finished her undergraduate degree and she decides to pursue a doctorate in English literature. During this time, she also meets and falls in love with a man named Richard. They get engaged and eventually marry, but as time moves forward, her worry about her father continues to underscore her life.
So in nineteen ninety seven, when he went in to do his chock up on his heart, they took an X ray. I was in graduate school and they found that he had terminal lung cancer. I just turned twenty seven, I had been married for two years. My mother in law had died of cancer the year before, and my father is.
Given seven months to live.
At this point, in that moment, when we get this news that he has lung cancer that has metastasized to his brain, we thought, oh, he quit, he quit five years earlier, but it was too late.
And those cigarettes that I always feared would kill him, we're going to kill him.
And when you tell your mother that that he has terminal cancer, her response is a last dick, never took care of himself.
Yeah, I mean, she's sort of like it was expected in a way, for her and for me.
I mean, we just always had this feeling.
But he had this nonchalance because his parents both lived well into their nineties. There was no cancer in the family, and he was one of those people who just banked on his good genes. And you know, he basically did everything a person could do if they want to get a heart attack.
But it's still, even though.
I had always feared it, it still felt unreal when it actually happened.
And at this time, Danny, you know, when.
We talk about secrets, I thought my father was seventy two years old at this time. My sister and I went to a doctor's appointment with him a couple of months after he was given this very grim prognosis, and this was like a second opinion doctor's appointment. It was sort of an intake appointment with an expert at Columbia Presbyterian.
And the doctor was just running through, you know, a series of road questions and Claire and I are sitting there listening attentively, and the doctor says, so how old are you in my father's causes and it's weird, and his voice kind of cracks in a strange way, and he says seventy four, and Clara and I look at each other and I'm like, And then later when we're home, we go to Osico and we're worried because my father had lung cancer that was in the brain, and we think,
oh my gosh, this is a symptom that he's really adult, that the cancer. You know, he's doing something to his brain.
And we said, you know, he.
Told me the doctor he was seventy four, and she says, she looks at us calmly and says, he is seventy four.
And it's clear that she doesn't want to talk about it. It's clear that she knows that we didn't know that.
She's asserting that this is the case, and it's a secret that he had shared with her, and this is very highly wrought secret. We call my mom, we called his friends. No one that we talked to knew this. My father in nineteen twenty five was like a date that he would say all the time, and it was like who's do in America?
Richard Gilmot born nineteen twenty five. It was everywhere, and he would use it.
He would refer to it frequently, and he had this whole thing about how he graduated from high school when he was sixteen.
Because he was precocious.
He went to college when he was sixteen, and you know, we made jokes about it.
We're like, well, if you're going to lop ears off your age, why only do two?
Right?
Why wouldn't you go for five or eight or ten?
And we never mentioned it to him, We never acknowledged to him that we noticed it. He didn't seem aware that he was outing it in front of us, probably because he was just in so much ear about his cancer and just focusing on the doctor and he just didn't think about it in that moment.
But we never discussed it with him.
Yeah, it's unsurprising because it's a pattern.
You weren't going to start discussing those things at that late date.
Yes, exactly.
Despite the very grim prognosis, both Priscilla's life and her father's go on. Priscilla and her husband start a family. She's hired as an assistant professor at Yale and eventually moves to Vasser. She's thirty two years old, doing impressive work she isn't even sure she wants to be doing, and is the mother of a three year old and
an infant and Priscilla's father. He surpasses every prediction and statistic and lives with stage four cancer for another nine years, and more secrets keep tumbling out, this time in the form of a manuscript in which he describes his sexual escapades, including sleeping with hundreds of women and several men.
We were in Japan, staying in their apartment and my father was in the hospital at this point, and Nikki, my brother, was sleep being in my father's office. And one day he called me in and he said, and he was sort of gleefully swelling because my brother is gay, and you know, half of my parents' friends are gay, you know, And it was never a big deal. My brother came out in nineteen seventy eight. It was all completely fine. So there was no there would have been
no reason for my father to hide this. Why would you have hidden this? Why is this something that's a secret. And Nicki says, look at this, you believe this, And we're looking at it, and we're thinking, who was it?
Because my father was.
In the Marines in World War Two, he was on an island in the South Pacific. We're thinking, was it was it a marine?
Was it w.
Johnon my father had a famous story about W. A.
Todden made a pass at him. I was like, maybe he took W. A. Dodden up with that. You know, wasn't Harold Bronkey who.
Was famous his good friends and then died of age right, So we're thinking who could this have been? And I've since Stanni asked many close friends because no one knows.
We don't know.
Priscilla's father dies at age eighty three. The Yale School of Drama hosts memorial and prior to this, a package arrives from Japan. It's from Yasica and it's addressed to both Priscilla and her sister Claire.
It was a package of things that he had taken.
So he ended up living permanently in Japan because he also had better health insurance than he had and he was at home in a hospital bed the last few years of his life. So when they sold the apartment in New York and moved to Japan, he took what he could. And this was a manila envelope that's had girls on it, and it was filled to bursting with photographs of us that had you could see the tape marks on the edges, and I remembered them hanging on
walls of different apartments that he'd been in. It was envelopes that had our hair in them that said girls hair, programs from plays and shows that I'd been in, notes that I'd written him over the years, because I would often give him a note when I left after a lunch or at dinner with him, saying you know, I love you so much, Daddy, and don't worry, You're going to see us soon and all this, and it was just the evidence of our love for him, but also
his love for us that he had kept everything. He had kept all this memorabilia, these tiny little.
Notes, you know, on like almost like a post it note size.
And he had this poem that I had written when I was nine, called Loneliness in that envelope as well. He also said, you know, this is the evidence of your father's great.
Love for you.
And maybe she said, Daddy's your daddy's great love for you. She always called him your daddy because that's what we called him. We never called him father, we never called him dad.
We called him daddy always.
Sometime after her father's death, Priscilla asks her mother to put her reasons for marrying her father down in writing, she yearns for clarity, if not closure, and Lynn sends Priscilla an which reads, why did I marry him? Well, he had a brilliant and refined mind, which I respected and admired. I knew he'd be an excellent father for you girls. Basically he was a kind and ethical man.
It was something that I had been waiting for forty years for her to say to me.
And I knew.
About the brilliant and refined mind. I knew she felt that, and I had been told in various ways that she did think he would be an excellent father, although I hadn't heard enough of that since they split, so that was important.
But basically he was a kind and ethical man.
You know, I thought, thank you for finally acknowledging it. It wasn't that I needed to hear it because I doubted it. I always knew my father was a basically kind and ethical man.
And you know, I had.
Those moments when I was younger when I heard the secrets about his affairs with students, and I was absolutely disgusted and horrified by it. But as I grew and I came to understand the complexities of our parents that he was a human being, that he had failings, that he was in a terribly unhappy marriage to.
Someone who didn't love him.
And you know, another thing that my mother revealed to me when I was in college was that she had never been in love with my father, and that she had told my father that she wasn't in love with him, and he had asked her to marry him anyway, and he said, passion faiths, but companionship blasts. And when I figured that out, how terrible for my mother to be in a marriage to somebody she wasn't in love with.
How terrible for my father to be in a marriage to someone he knew wasn't in love with him, and he was in love with her, and.
He was medicating depression by smoking.
He was medicating those feelings of inadequacy through affairs. You know, another thing that I think is important to say is that my father kept his sexuality secret from most people. And when he wrote that memoir where he acknowledged his sexuality, he wrote in the book about being unfaithful to his wives and how guilty he felt about it. He wrote about going to prostitutes to get them to do what the women his girlfriends and wives didn't want to do.
I think that is what.
Enabled him to find the woman that you described as his soulmate.
He got over, to a large extent.
The shame and the guilt. He wasn't keeping secrets anymore. He was telling the truth in a book. Now, it wasn't the complete growth because he was still supposedly born in nineteen twenty five when that book came out, but a lot of the secrets came into the light.
And I think that's.
What enabled him to get the confidence to be accepted and to meet and share with the Ostigo because she knew all his secrets, she knew about his age, she knew about the men because that was a book he was working on, and she was helping him with us, and he wanted.
To publish that book.
If he had not gotten so sick, perhaps that would have also been in a book that was published.
And now it is right, that's right, that's right, in the fullness of time, Yes, now it is right. Here's Priscilla reading from her beautiful love letter to her complicated father. In this moment, she's a frightened child, awakened by a thunderstorm, being offered a gift.
My father didn't give me a hug and a kiss and send me back to sleep.
He brought me to the window.
In the face of the unexpected, the frightening, that disorienting. He was a mad cap sportscaster, a wise stage and a builient enthusiast. As one arm embraced me, the other helped me face a world beyond him, a world of challenge and intensity and wonder.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zacour 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 eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram at Danny Rider. And if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.