Family Secrets Live: In Conversation with Gretchen Rubin

about my own family secret. We also talked about the still almost totally unregulated world of sperm and egg donation and why the era of recreational DNA tests could mean the end of secrets for anyone who wondering where they really come from. Stay tuned for the second half of my conversation with Gretchen. We opened the discussion up to our audience, who had incredibly moving stories of their own

to share. That's out tomorrow. My first question, Danny, is I mean, you're a writer, You're having this intense experience. Did you know from the beginning that you would write about it? I really did, I really did. I It wasn't knowledge like I thought, Oh goody, my next book. It was my life has turned upside down. This is great copy, right, That's what Nora says. And I even had writer friends saying, like, boy, this is going to be an amazing book, and I was almost insulted initially,

like this doesn't feel like a book. This is my life that's been so upended. But as a writer, I have always um written in order to understand what I feel, what I know, what I think, what I the world around me. It's how I it's literally how I how I process. And so I began writing very quickly, even just scribbling on index cards, because I wanted to remember what it was that I was feeling, because my um,

my emotional life was moving sort of so rapidly. Um, I don't know that we can remember what shock feels like, you know, months later, that kind of thing. But there also was a ticking clock because I was aware that anything that I might learn about the truth of my identity, about what my parents had known or not known, about what the world of medicine was like at the time of my conception, literally the story of my life and how I came to be. Anyone who still knew anything

about that was going to be elderly. And so my my husband and I like, forgive me for this. My my husband I had a running joke because I'm I'm a writer. I don't like picking up the phone and calling people who don't want to hear from me. Um. I would or make a good investigative journalist that way. And if you're reaching out to people in their nineties that they probably don't have email, which was always like the writer's first refugees, I can just send an email.

It's uh, the easier way to go about it. So I would be in the position of having to pick up the phone and call people and I was dragging my feet, and my husband Michael would say, he may be dead by Friday. Yeah, so that that that guy

made that that definitely got me going yes. Um. And one of the things that was interesting was as you approached your biological father and he and his family became sort of comfortable with connecting with you, how did they respond to the book And also sort of the two stages of the book, because it's one thing to be like, hey, there's gonna be this book, and then it's like, hey, this book is actually like a huge runaway bestseller, and now I have a podcast and maybe there's gonna be

a TV show and I'm giving lectures all around the country. I mean, it's one he may not have, they may not have conceived of what the book might become. So how did they how they grappled with that? Well, to begin with, I was transparent with them from the time that we were conversing with each other that that I would be writing about it. I mean, all they would need to do is that's a good example, like do the right thing right away, because if you had just

sprung a book on them, slid that by. Yeah. And also I think energetically it wouldn't have it would have polluted the air between us because I would have really been secretly taking notes. I was never doing that. I was and anyone who knew anything about my history as a writer that I've always written about family secrets, I've always written about identity. These have been my subjects. And then it turns out that I was the family secret and that my identity has been upended. Of course I'm

going to write about it. So I was transparent about it from the beginning. Um, what I did when I finished the book and it was really done and ready to be turned into my publisher is I sent it to them. I sent it to my biological though. Note that's pretty unusual usually with memoirs there they really don't do that. It's unusual to allow someone the opportunity to weigh it. Well, it's a little dangerous because it's like giving someone wet clay. I'm like, here, you can shape

this now. It can feel like, um, it's giving permission to really kind of make changes. What I was interested in mostly was that he felt that his privacy was protected. UM. I had taken great pains to protect his privacy. It was very important to me to do that. UM. But I wanted him to feel that his privacy was protected. I wanted to make sure that there was nothing I had missed. Uh. I guess I wanted his blessing too.

I wanted him to like it. I wanted him to feel that it accurately reflected what it happened between us. But mostly it was that I wanted his privacy to be protected. And so the second part of this, which is that UM, the book came out and did strike a chord and did start to be a book that you would know about, you know that you couldn't really

avoid knowing about. I was on a lot of TV shows, and there were a lot of pieces written, and there was a big piece in Time magazine right before the book came out, So the question of like, how did that feel too, Um, people who were in the book, even with their identities protected, but they were in the book. They've been wonderful and I think actually proud, I would say, and UM in a certain way, very interested in following along. So that's another way in which this has been a

kind of remarkable. Um. I you know, one of the things that I've said often since the book came out, and I've met so many people who are having these discoveries of various kinds because of easy, accessible DNA testing and the impact that it's having on our society and on so many families. My story is a good one. Not all of the stories are easy. A lot of them are quite painful. There's pain in all of these

stories of discovery. I mean, it was a very very hard thing for me to metabolize that my dad, who raised me and who I adored and who loved me into being and is a huge part of why I am the person that I am, UM, that he wasn't my biological father, and that I had never known it. That was really hard. But then there have been so many gifts in the wake of this discovery, and one of them really is that my biological father and his family have been as kind and as open as they

have been. Well, Um, I have a podcast called Happier with Grudge and Ruben and Elizabeth at My Cost and I interviewed you for our book book club, and one of our listeners asked a question that I thought was really interesting, which was, do you think that your biological father and his family would have been as willing to meet with you if they couldn't have seen that you were so accomplished, Like they could just look you up and see like And then I remember in your first

letter to him, you say I'm a wife, I'm a mother, I'm a writer. You know you sort of say I'm a ordinary, stable person with a good life, a rich life. But he could also look that up and see that you were very accomplished. Do you think if you hadn't been so google able they might not have been willing

to open themselves up to you. One of the things that I'm hearing a lot um as I've been traveling for the last year since Inheritance came out, UM, is that whenever there is a situation like this in a family of any kind of someone sending an email or calling or writing a letter saying I'm confused. I mean,

but I have this information. I think we're related. I think i'm your biological daughter, or I think i'm your half sibling, or you know, I got these results from my DNA test and they point to some kind of genetic connection. The very first response that across the board every family that I have encountered UM has is feeling threatened, every single one. And I think it's hardwired into us. It's a primal reaction. It's a primitive reaction. It's like,

you know, we're sitting here in a synagogue. It's like it's the outsider, you know, it's it's the it's the it's the outlier. It's the stranger in our midst that kind of feeling. But it's more than a stranger. It's somebody who might have a claim, and that's even more threatening in a way. And and the threat usually UM goes straight to financial. What do you want from me?

You want my money? Um, even if it's you know, I know a story where the person who has made the discovery was a extremely wealthy person, uh, and the the discovered biological family was not. But there's still that feeling of what do you want from me? I, um, I have nothing for you, and the times that families are able to get past that. I mean, it's just my I mean my biological family. The same thing that was the first response was what do you want? No, No,

I I donated anonymously. I signed a contract. I was guaranteed an anonymity. You know you're you're you're intruding into my life. Yes, I was google able. I also when I initially wrote to him, I was very conscious of wanting him to understand that I was a human being, you know, a wife, a mother, living in Connecticut. You know that I was um that I came in peace.

But at the same time, on my website, the very first thing you would have seen at that time on the home page of my website would have been a picture of me with Oprah with her arm around me, because I had recently been on super Soon Sunday. Now, that is both good news and bad news. And I really think, as someone very concerned about his privacy, that the idea that Oprah could come bring out spring out

from the bushes with a microphone episodes. So I do think, and and and also he started, I think digging into my history a little bit as a writer and seeing that I've written about family all my life will be back in a moment with more family secrets. So talk for a moment about what this was. You write about this so beautifully in the book, and it's it's the moment.

It's this tremendously thrilling, terrifying moment when you and your husband, and your husband's like, here we go, here we go, and you're opening up the page and there's a little video of him and you see that it's your father and it's your features, and your husband says, oh my goodness. He even runs a question an answer session the way

you do, and you recognize yourself in his gestures. I mean, talk about what that was like after all this time of feeling the sort of sense of not quite fitting in and now suddenly seeing your face in someone else's face. I think it will stand forever as the most surreal moment of my life because it wasn't so much looking at someone who looked like me and gestured like me. It was also realizing that I hadn't had that familiarity before. And you know, when we grow up in our biological

family and we know it's our biological family. There's that thing that we do just as human beings that's sort of like, oh, he walks like Uncle Mo. You know, oh he has Grammy's nose, or oh, you know, we don't even think it. It's just when we know that we're part of a biological family, that is part that familiarity is part of being part of a biological family.

If we are adopted, and we've always known that we were adopted, and it's been woven into our identity from the time that we're very small, then we know why we don't look like our biological family or why there is this sense of unfamiliarity. In an adoption literature, there's a beautiful phrase called um genealogical bewilderment. We know why

there is this geneological bewilderment. But if our identity has actually not been told to us, as you know, our identities are formed by the stories were told from the time were very small, and it's a story that we're told is this is your biological family. But in my case, on my father's side, it was not. I did not have that familiarity. I did not have that recognition. In fact, I looked completely unlike a Shapiro and and that was

a big part of the story of my life. People constantly telling me that I didn't look Jewish, that I didn't look like my father's family. Um. I was constantly mistaken for, you know, just being not not not being Jewish. And meanwhile, and I would come back with raised kosher you know, when to achieve us, you know, like, don't talk to me about not being Jewish. Um. But it

was the story of my life. So when I saw my biological fathers phase for the first time and was lecturing for those of you who haven't read the book yet, he was standing by, you know, behind a lectern, delivering a lecture on medical ethics, and you can't make it up. You can't know. I couldn't. I changed identifying details. But that wasn't one of them. That would be cheating, that wouldn't have been fair. Um, But there was. I saw his gestures, and when I saw his gestures, I recognized

my gestures. And that was like a heart stopping moment because it was seeing the familiar in a stranger. He's a stranger. But it was also like I wasn't looking at a video of a fireman. You know, I wasn't looking at a video of something I've never done. I stand behind podiums all the time, and I deliver lectures all the time, and I run q and as all the time. So he was doing something that was very familiar to me. So I could see I could see

myself in that way. Well, in speaking of medical ethics, it's interesting since the book has come out, and since it's it's made such an pression on people, you have become sort of the voice of kind of all the people who are experiencing what we might call like technology enabled UM secret discovery, and you are starting to talk to people about medical ethics and bio ethics. How has that been for you to kind of be pulled into

this expertise UM? And and also in kind of a larger way, you are also sort of a a person where many people who have secrets like this want to confide the secret in you. And now with your your podcast Family Secrets, that's given you a way to sort of give boys to that. UM. How has it been for you to sort of be thrust into these roles by what happened to you personally? You know, it's interesting.

The other night I was in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and I was having UM an onstage conversation with Dr Bessel Andrew Kolke, who is the leading expert on t mamma UM in the world. And one of the things that Dr Vander Kolch writes about in his book, which is called The Body Keeps the Score, he writes about the necessity when you've experienced a trauma of some sort one of the ways that people recover best is if they're able to take action, um, if they're not in some

way trapped, either physically or emotionally. And I was reading Dr Bandicooke's book, and I was thinking about what I was able to do in the wake of my discovery. I was able to do something with it. First, by I mean, my journey and my book are the same in many ways. I was trying to understand what it meant that my dad wasn't my biological father. Both of my parents were dead. I was trying to piece together as best as I could what they had known and

whether they had consciously kept this from me. I was, you know, there were so many mysteries that I was kind of trying to untangle and I as a writer, that's what I do, that's that's my toolbox. And then the book came out, and from the very first event, it was clear that people were coming who had their own stories and had their own discoveries, and and they were from all different kinds of discoveries and different roles

in the discovery process. There were older men who were coming to my events, and I would realize that they had been sperm donors and they were trying to figure out how to deal with the fact that they might be contacted. I would see couples sitting together and looking kind of stricken, and I would realize, Oh, you have donor conceived children who don't know, and you're trying to

figure out what to do about that. And then I would see many people who were had recently discovered that they were adopted, or recently discovered half siblings, or recently discovered fathers who discovered children that they had never known about, um adopted children, discovering birth parents and vice versa. All

of this was happening. And I think that for me becoming having this voice and ending up having you know, a megaphone in a way, has been the action that has allowed me to process, metabolize, and heal from what was really a very shocking UM discovery. And in terms of the bioethics of this, I mean, we're in this moment where can I ask a question, just show of hands, how many people have bought a DNA test in this room? Yeah?

A lot of you. Yeah. So the number are I think last year was twelve million kits were sold this year. I think it was a little bit. They were expecting it to be higher, and I don't think it was at least I read an article about twenty three and me laying off some of its staff because they were expecting a bigger explosion. But I can tell you that of those many millions of people who are gifting families, gifting each other at Hanukkah and Christmas. You know that's

what my mother in law gave it to me for Christmas. UM. I saw on Twitter recently somebody posted something like, you know, all all those people who who got their DNA test for the holidays, Easter is gonna suck. But they're they're hundreds of thousands of people who are making versions of this discovery and the bioethics community, I mean I've spoken at Harvard and at Stanford, i was us at Johns Hopkins. I'm going to pen speaking with the head of the

program at Colombia. It is one of the I mean, we have many ethical issues of our time, but it's one of the big ones, because what does it mean that the science has changed everything and that men and women to now because of egg donation who were promised anonymity no longer have it. Secrets are are no longer possible. There's a huge stream of people who are making really difficult identity shifting discoveries and the question of what is

our moral responsibility to each other. I think one of the reasons why Inheritance has resonated so much is because I have become an expert on this from the inside, from the inside, right, it's it's not a research project, it's um And you know. One of the things that happens that I feel that I can give voice to is, for example, in the adoption community. I think a lot of people thought who hadn't read the book yet, I thought that I was saying that nature is all important, right,

it mattered to me to meet my biological father. I actually had people saying to me like, why would that matter? And it was usually people who grew up with their biological parents, you know, who just couldn't kind of imagine themselves in my shoes. But one of the things that I feel like I'm here to say is my mother, who was my biological mother. I actually double checked. Um. She and I weren't close. I never felt connected to her. We were just kind of oil and water. She was

my biological mother. My dad, who it turns out is not my biological father, is like a soul connection to me. Um. He died when I was twenty three years old, and there hasn't been a day that's gone by that I haven't spoken to him and thought about him. My books have been for him in a certain way. I've written about him, I've wrestled with him. I've tried to understand him.

He's on the cover of your book now. He is now on the paperback that you all have that is a picture of myself as UM a little girl with my dad, and you can see the connection between us. I love that picture so much because there's so much unfettered joy. It matters not at all that he's not my biological father. That it didn't matter. Then I'm sure

that didn't matter to him. I didn't know. The problem is not knowing um And that's what I really kind of feel like I am trying to give voice to because there was a huge amount of secrecy in those days. It's just it's what was counseled, it was what was believed. Everyone felt that they were doing the right thing. And and I've come to understand one of the gifts of this process for me is there's this great term um in in ethics, which is retrospective moral judgment. We can't

judge the past by the standards of the present. And when I first found this out, I really thought, how could they? How could they? How could they? Everyone has a right to know their own identity as much as possible. How could they have kept this? For me? My journey was to get to a place of imagining my parents as people, as people of their time, as people who existed before me. And that's a great gift. We don't often get to do that about our parents. We don't

think of our parents as people separate from us. And I had to think of them as this traumatized, deeply ashamed couple who were childless in the late nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties, male infertility was so shameful it didn't exist. You couldn't get a doctor to diagnose it. And that was the beautiful scene with the rabbi when you go to find out sort of describe that where he says, no, I would have thought that if my wife had wanted a baby, you know, all honor to

him for having been willing to do this. That was such a beautiful moment. Explained that a little bit. I'm so glad you brought that up. Yeah. So one of the elderly people that I reached out to early on was Rabbi Haskel Lukstein, who is one of these sort of venerable Orthodox rabbis in Manhattan, UM. His father founded the Roma's School UM. His father and my grandfather knew each other. Haskel and my father, he was a bit younger than my father, but they knew each other and

they were in the same social circles. And I went to see him in part because I thought, maybe my my father was an Orthodox Jew, maybe he would have gone, maybe he would have sought rabbinic advice, and if he had, maybe he would have gone to Rabbi Lukstein. I was looking for anyone who could tell me. Yes, I spoke to your father about this or um. But instead what happened was I explained what had happened. I explained my discovery.

I explained what I knew um, and Rabbi Lupstein, once he understood it, his immediate response was colaka, voted to your father all the honor. If God forbidd it had been my wife and I who had struggled with this, I would have done the same thing. And what was so interesting to me over the course of my journey was expected. It was not because I had read the Hallaja.

I had read the body of Jewish law around this stuff, and it was it called um sperm donation an abomination, which was a terrible thing to read, because then I felt like, well, am i am? I am an abomination? Did my father think of me as an abomination? It was awful. And both Rabbi Lukstein and another elderly person who I visited and sought out was my my aunt Shirley, my father's younger sister, who is devout. Both of them were so completely willing to throw the rule book out.

You know it was so interesting to me, Like I thought, like, yes, there's the law, and then there's the humanity, Like, yes, there's the law, and then there's the what's right? And I saw that with the two most um religious people whose insights I saw it. We'll be back in a

moment now. One of the things you make a point in the book that you felt that when you were approaching your biological father, you were you were fortunate that you were the first, because in many cases, when these secrets come out, they come out in large groups, and that that makes the bioethics of it and the human problem of it more complex. Um. I'm sure people are curious, have you found any other have siblings and um like? And how do we think about these people who find

each other? Some grow up knowing each other, but then some are find out about it much later. Yea, So there's a number of different layers to that. UM. No, I have not um discovered any other biological half siblings, which makes me fairly unusual. Most people who are making these discoveries are discovering significant numbers of half siblings because often donors donated over a long period of time, or

in more recent years, because of frozen sperm. There could be half siblings that are generations apart, right, And I have regularly encountered people who make a discovery like this and then discover that they have half siblings, twenty three half siblings, some cases half siblings numbering in the three digits. My sister's writing partners a single mother by choice, and there are twenty three known done our siblings and that

in their group. And it's getting you know. But one of the things that you're bringing up that is interesting and sort of different from sort of the older generations where this is these discoveries are happening, is that today, for the most part, people understand that it's important for their children to know, you know, to be told the

truth from an early age. There are tools. There are books that can be read to children, you know, that have illustrations of trees and seeds and leaves and you know, just ways for children to process this information. And there's also much more transparency lead I think, initially by the same sex community, where there's got to be somebody else, right,

so they've got to tell. And then there are communities of these kids who grow up who are half siblings with biologically with each other, who get to know each other, and it's all this sense of normalcy around it. It's it's a different way of making family and of of processing this. And that's a beautiful thing because it's because it's out in the open and there's no shame involved. As soon as there is this secrecy, this non disclosure, their shame underneath it, their shame because it means that

why does it need to be kept a secret? Now in my generation and generations older than me and a little bit younger than me, it was I mean, I'm constantly people in their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties and older are making these discoveries and then discovering half siblings. What does it mean to be related when there are more of you than there ever would be in a traditional family? The last question I want to ask you, and then we're going to open it up for questions. Just um

coming up of that. So you have your podcast Family Secrets, which if you haven't listened to you should just run and listen. It's so interesting. You highlight, you do long, hot interviews with people who have a secret. And then you've also been doing this fascinating thing where people has mentioned in the introduction, people can call in and just sort of like tell their secret. So, given all of the thinking that you've done about this kind of what's

your bottom line about how to think about a secret? Like, how do you know when it's your secret to keep, when it's not your secret to keep? How do you how do you think about secrets? It's so individual? Um, there are you know? It's interesting. I actually UM did a bonus episode with the therapist and writer Laurie gottlieb Um between my first season and second season, and I asked Lorie if she thinks it's ever okay to keep a secret? And her response I was asking her as

a therapist, and her sponse was really no, never. Secrets are simply just toxic. UM. I think it was Carl Young who referred to them as UM toxic poison, which is kind of redundant, isn't it. Uh, it's a curative UM. I think when a secret is revealed is as important as what the secret is or that it's revealed. I think there are times in UM someone's life where they're too vulnerable to handle the information. UM. I feel very fortunate that when I discovered this secret, I was very

much a mature adult. I had a family, I had stability, I had my life's work. Um, I was in a place where I was as grounded as I had ever been. If I had made that discovery when I was in my twenties and I was not in that kind of shape at all, I don't know what it would have done to me. So I think we have to take care with the secrets that we hold if we're holding them.

And yet, at the same time, because of the combination of the Internet and I remember you said that on your podcast one time in Passing, You're like, well, with the Internet there there's not going to be any more secrets. Well, I think we're Yeah, we're heading into an era that I really do think is the the end of the secret, because you know, it's it's a misunderstanding that people have that if if they haven't had their DNA tested, it means that they couldn't be discoverable. Um in any family.

I mean, I've had people who were donors say to me, well, I don't want to I'm not going to do my DNA testing because I don't want to be found. It's like, well, your nephew could do it. Your first cousin, your second cousin, even your third cousin could do it and somebody would be able to figure that out. Your your grandchild could do it. It's it's the it's the unintended consequence of this development in science and what's complicated. Um, many things

are complicated about it. But there's secrecy and then there's privacy, right, and they're very connected and they're not the same thing. And you know, I think we can agree the privacy is important and we want to have privacy. UM. And secrecy I think is toxic. But there's you know, there are families now in which there are some people keeping secrets from others because some people want to know and some people don't want to know. UM. And it's it's

it's very complicated. So I think it's as individual as um the person and the family that it's happening to. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.