Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio outwardly. I closed the door on the person I'd become and walked away into a new world. Even with my wife, even with the new friends to whom I owed my life, I almost never spoke about what had happened back there. I felt I shouldn't because it was so ugly, and I felt I didn't have to because I had survived.
That's Garth risk Hauber, author of the novels City on Fire and The Second Coming. Garth's recent essay in the Atlantic is a story of fathers, sons, legacy, and the long reach of silence and shame that is only shattered when we speak the truth of ourselves. 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.
The landscape of my childhood is a swath of land that connects Louisiana, where I was born, with North Carolina, where we moved when I was two or three, and where I grew up. The landscape is hot, humid, dusty, not particularly populated, and bisected by railroad tracks that you know even in the nineteen eighties. Divide the halves from the have nots, and it's a.
Landscape I didn't feel particularly.
Well suited to in some way, like, you know, as if I had been born without some adaptation that would make me be able to get along contentedly there. When I was a child, I always had no real way of processing this feeling of disconnection that I had from my surroundings. As an adult, I kind of go back and puzzle it out and try to figure out what was that. But one thing that's emerged for me in hindsight is just I live in the New York area now, and sort of from a distance, I can see how
deeply conservative the places I grew up were. And I don't mean that in a political sense at all. I just mean in the way that you were felt to have been born into something and your role was to accept that thing and perpetuate it. And that seemed to kind of cut across class lines. It was like everyone was trying to become their their father or their mother conservative in that way. The goal wasn't necessarily, you know, breaking out or doing something different. So I was not
particularly well suited for that. I had kind of a restless imagination, and I kind of escaped into books. The other thing that emerges, you know, in hindsight for me is I was a very expressive kid, Like I didn't really know how to turn it down. Like I talked with my hands if I still do, and I talked too much, and I talked about the wrong things. I think I knew that I was supposed to be kind
of toning it down. I think I knew that getting along with people meant putting the brakes on, but standing off the rough edges of that. I that I kind of felt like were who I was, but I I just felt like I didn't know how to do that. The adaptation I was missing was like I didn't understand how to be less who I am. My mother was from New Orleans, so she was a Southerner. Her mother was from Mississippi, and her father was from Charles. But my dad was from Ohio and he was an associate
professor at the local land Brand College. You know, on one side like even more deeply Southern, in another side like not Southern at all. My mom was also an English teacher, but she I think when we first moved to North Carolina, I think she was like an adjunct professor at the college, but she couldn't get like a full time gig there, so she ended up working as a receptionist for a few years, or like an assistant to a lawyer, and then she ended up being an
English teacher in high school. In fact, she was ended up being my high school English teacher.
That's just what you want in high school is for your to be so yeah.
Yeah, nothing, nothing will really, you know, smooth over the social awkwardness of the two expressive kid who you know does not to fit in, like having it his mother be his English teacher and everybody else's in.
Your father was a novelist.
You know. When I was a little kid, he was publishing short stories if you publish a novel, I think when I was eighty or nine. Yeah, he was doing it in that very eighties kind of like writing realist fiction and trying to get a teaching job somewhere. Way.
He was a great storyteller, which is interesting because having spent a lot of time in South I think about as being a very Southern thing, but it was in fact my Midwestern father who was the great storyteller, and he was a very expressive guy that you know that may have been some of where I got that from, and also never quite comfortable in his own skin. I have come to think, I mean, maybe this is just growing up. You feel like you're in this garden with
other people. You know, everybody's a little different, but you can still connect and be interested in what makes other people different. And then all of a sudden, you know, you're eight, nine, ten, eleven, and these walls start to
go up and packs start to form. I remember the packs that roamed my neighborhood on BMX bikes when I was like six and seven, were like the Goonies, you know, the bad News bears, Like everybody was a misfit, and I think I experienced it as you know, a sudden falling away of people, like drifting apart from friends, loneliness, and then by middle school like getting in a lot of fights, just retreating into myself.
So when you say getting into a lot of fights, was that in retrospect do you see that as kind of like typical adolescent anger or was there something more going on?
Well, this was the eighties and in the goonies phase of rolling around the neighborhoods on bikes, like that's great, you know, that's awesome. But by the time I got to middle school, I was living through that kind of like the high water mark of school integration and then
the backsliding on that. So the town had attempted to deal with this kind of white flight thing that was going on by putting eighteen hundred and sixth and seventh graders together in a school and giving us three minutes to cross the quarter mile wide campus from class to class, And it led to a lot of bumping into people in the hall and they want to beat your ass, and there was no adult around, so you just, you know,
you just fought. You just fought your way out. You had to fight to get people to respect you and know they couldn't mess with you. And I just didn't know any other way to do it. It was not a good scene, And to be honest, I think I was having my first taste to come mental health struggle, although I think I hit that pretty well. But like, you'd have had to have been crazy to not think something was going on. So my mom was teaching at
a public high school. She left to get a job at a private school, I think specifically so that I could go there where the classes were smaller, the curriculum was harder, and there were fewer people for me to fight were That was seventh grade.
So there was a sense on your mom's part, or maybe both of your parents' part, that there was something going on that needed to be addressed or harnessed in some way.
Yeah, and then additionally, like my parents were about to divorce that year, and I had a very close friend who was dying. I just think this was their sort of panacea move was I'm not sure which one the idea originated with, but there was enough of a sense that I needed help to move me.
So a bit of a perfect storm what was happening.
Even at the time, I remember kind of being like, this is ridiculous. I remember being somewhat philosophical about it, being like, this is how it works, Like sometimes things cluster, A random distribution is not an even distribution, and I was like, these things are clustering. But it was also kind of like if one more thing decides to come along and join this cluster, like I don't know if
I'm gonna survive. I started drinking toward the end of eighth grade, and I started getting high ninth grade, and I kind of graduated to well, I never you know, I never graduated. It was just kind of like add things to the lazy suason. I started taking pills at the end of ninth grade and moving on from that in tenth grade and feeling by February of eleventh grade that I was like really sick.
Did anyone around you know it?
I mean the people I was getting high.
With, Yeah, how about the grown ups.
It's hard for me to believe that they didn't, but apparently they didn't. And I've thought about that a lot. And I was very very secretive in a way that it's just really hard for me to think about. I don't I don't like that side of myself. But I was very good, I think, I mean, I felt then that I was very good, and I think now as a parent, like how can I have been that good?
But like it seems like perhaps I really was at compartmentalizing and I had shoot, you know, I had choo houses so I could play those off against each other. I mean, I say two houses. I had like a million houses. My dad had so many houses, like we moved so many times, it was crazy, you know, And he was often not where he was supposed to be, you know, like he would forget kinda that we were coming over or that I was coming over and be out. And my parents it was acrimonious enough that they weren't
you know, keeping in touch with you the other. So I could tell one I was at the other's house, and I had friends that we're going through the same experience. So we had four six, you know, eight houses we could say we were at. So there was a lot of exploiting of that. I don't know, it's crazy to me.
Part of what is really striking to me. I mean, you say you were really good at being secretive, but it's hard to imagine how good could you have been
at it. You know, it sounds like the adults around you were also really swept up in their own lives and not paying the kind of parental attention or maybe even not just parental attention, just you know, not just your parents, but just It's so interesting the way you were describing the eighties, because it sounds there have been decades like this in modern times of the adults checking out and then other times. I think the times that we're living in now, where parents are much more checked in.
In fairness to them. As a parent. Now, I see it's really hard to pick apart what's going on with middle schoolers in particular. There's hormonal things, just developmental things. You're like, you know, does my son look like a zombie because these you know, like in withdrawal, or does he look like a zombie because he's like, you know, not being able to sleep because is you know, as hormones are. There's a lot of things it could be.
And then additionally, like they're dealing with divorce, Like my mom was working all the time, Like the money situation was not good, my dad had a lot going on, a lot of girlfriends, they keeping out for Riven, and like I have like come to feel like they were doing the best they could with what they had. And then additionally, just one other thing is like I was grieving.
I was grieving my dead friend, and my family culture was distinctly terrible at dealing with grief and pain, and so it was like there was something about it that was so intense, you know, and here's me, the expressive hand talker. There was just something about it that I think was so hard to look at. And for a long time, I think I thought it was ugly. I think I thought they found it so ugly that they couldn't look at it. And now I realize as a parent that it was too painful for them to see
their child in pain. And I was in a lot of pain.
How old were you when your friend died?
Eighth grade?
We'll be right back to out high school, Garth tries to numb his pain with huge amounts of drugs and alcohol, and even though the adult around him don't seem to be clocking it, he himself is alarmed, but he manages to keep it all well hidden, not that anyone's really looking. When he's seventeen and about to leave home, Garth comes up with, as he calls it, the weirdly contrived notion that if he just stops doing drugs and instead only
drinks a lot, that his pain will subside. In retrospect, he would have been ripe for a twelve step recovery program, but that would have meant he'd have to talk about it, that he'd have to tell the truth.
When I'm, you know, seventeen, I really left to go to DC. It's still a year ago in high school, but I had exhausted what you know sort of was there curricularly for me at my high school. So as senior year, I think I took a few college classes at the local college. I went to this one week
poetry camp one summer. It was the only like, you know, summer thing I ever did that wasn't just getting a job, because my mom was like starting to panic about like what I was going to put in my college application, and to myself, I was like, ah, I'm not going to college. But I went to this poetry camp and I fell in with this kid from DC who just was like good energy. Like I was like, I don't know, like I feel good when I'm around that guy. I
feel safe. And I started going up to DC on weekends and the summers, you know, summer after senior year of high school, I got a job up there. That was really where I felm with this group of friends who were people who were just like not in the darkness, you know, they just weren't doing the stuff I've been doing. And I felt like if I could become part of that, then that would help me, like I would like insulate me. I didn't necessarily know like who to connect with to
get dope up there. That's an interesting part of the whole, like early adolescent thing like actually scoring can be challenging. So anyway that was like I was ready. I gotta do something different or I'm not going to make it.
You were ready.
And also, I mean, I'm always amazed by the way that someone can come along. It can be a mentor, it can be a teacher, it can be a friend, it can be a relative, but someone can come along. That's that's sort of like just outside of our accustomed usual emotional experience and just blow it wide open.
You know, the story of Roomy and Chams of Tabriz, No tell me Chams of Tabriz with Rumi's like muse and mentor and friend and in some weird spiritual sense of waste lover, and he like rides into Roomy's town. Rumy, I think it is already at this point like a
good poet. But they just the way that the story goes, it's like they look at each other's faces and they just instantly are like you're for me, you know, you're my people and everything Roomy writes after that, you know, he's constantly talking about the friend, and the friend means God. But the friend also means cham's you know, his friend,
and it's a mystery. It's like I think about it all the time, Like what happens in those moments when you you know, whether it's someone that you end up marrying, you know, you fall in love, or you fall in friendship, or you fall in intellectual you know, fascination with It's like, it's such a mystery, what's happening there. But yeah, that's that's the great avenue for change that I found, like
exists in the universe. Like I definitely, you know, wouldn't have made it on that the moment when I was ready. The first time I went to DC to visit this friend, I had been really sick immediately beforehand, and I remember talking to him and being like, I need to stop. I had never said that to anyone before. Friendship has been everything. I mean, it's just been everything to me. And I should say around my friend in DC, we're five six, seven other people who are my favorite people,
and we just got really, really close. It was a culture that too, was a culture in the same way that my family had been a culture. There was something very healthy about it.
Sometimes a chance meeting can alter the entire trajectory of a life and of other lives as well. In Garth's case, the friend who he met in poetry camp, who is a year older than Garth, is already at Washington University in Saint Louis, so Garth applies, is accepted, and follows him there. Seven weeks into college, when he's eighteen going on nineteen, Garth meets the woman who will become his wife.
They marry in two thousand and four, when Garth is twenty five, and one thing among many they agree upon is that they don't want to have kids. Both of them have divorced parents, and they don't want to replicate the cycle. They moved to DC, where Garth's wife goes to graduate school and Garth holnes his craft as a writer.
Then they moved to New York. Now it's two thousand and seven and Garth and his wife are standing on a Brooklyn Street corner waiting for the light to change, and she says, let's have kids.
And know her well enough that it wasn't surprising, Like I could feel her evolving. If I say something when I'm eighteen, I feel like I must never recan't. And she's much more She exists in the world and in time were naturally than I do. And I was feeling her like evolved at the point which I was like surprised that she would have ever said. She didn't what It's like we had a dog, you know, it's like you love caring for things, but she did. It was there.
There was no preamble. The herds me like, let's have well.
And the way you describe it, which I love, is you know, by the time you had crossed the street, in the amount of time that it took for the two of you to cross the street, you were on board, you know, and it was like, yeah, yeah, we're going to do that.
And this case also I was like I don't want to lose you, Like this is important to you. This was important to my wife, you know, like I don't want to lose her. And this has been really good so far. And it's an adventure and like, however, crazy kid, you know, having kids is I've been a crazy place. That's the mystery that you were talking about, right, Like, when you're not a parent, this isn't an experience exclusive
to parents. It comes in many forms. It's about friendship, it's about any life change you just literally can't imagine what it's going to be like like you think you can. You can read novels about it, but there is a true mystery, like something that you could not imagine existed a minute ago suddenly is. And if that keeps happening to you enough, you know and it's good for you, you learn to just kind of go with it.
It was Gerta who once said, whatever you think you can do, or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace and power in it. When Garth and his wife take action in starting a family, indeed they find magic, grace and power. And while this wasn't part of their plan at the onset, they end up having not just one child, but four. Garth's whole world has changed. He's a husband, a father, and he's stopped drinking.
The things that had magic, grace and power in them had expanded to take up so much room that they were like squeezing out the space for the things that were bad for me. And it was like, why am I doing this stuff that's bad for me? I know it's bad. I mean I know I'm gonna feel bad later. I know I'll feel good later if I do all this other stuff, like, you know, why not bring the same discipline to doing the stuff that makes me feel good that I used to bring to doing the stuff
that makes me feel bad. And I still will have a beer, but I'll you know, I'll stop it to you because there's no such thing as a third beer for me. It's like one two nine. You know.
One of the things that really struck me in your piece is that you didn't really want to talk about it. It just it was something that you were internally, you know, grappling with and getting to a good place with.
And I was deeply, deeply ashamed, right and remain.
So kind of like your own private burden, I guess I would say, I think I.
Didn't think of it as a burden, but as a consequence or even like a penance, like you did the crime, now do the time.
Will be back in a moment with more family secrets. Garth's eldest son is entering into middle school age, a fraught time for most when our world enters into a front time as well the pandemic. Of course, people of all ages are struggling during this time, but Garth notices a particularly concerning shift in his son.
My son has always been a beautiful child. I mean physically, although he is that to me too, but he just is. It was a really and I can say this my sample size is four, right, so I could compare him to other babies who I've lived in my house, Like he has a very He just is a smiler. He's like a light, you know. He brings kind of this a lightness into a room that is very compelling for the people in it. And he's always been that way. His favorite thing is a baby, was to look in
people's faces. Just think about that in the context of like we're to go into this thing where people's faces are going to be covered for two years. Like he's just a connector. He just wants to connect and if he can do that, he's like so happy and probably
out of personal cowardice. I also had, you know, managed to get to you know, the border in middle school with out thinking too hard about what's going to happen when he's at a party and like someone offers him a joint or some blow or what's that going to look like. And I hadn't really thought about the fact that I really struggled at that age and my father really struggled, and some of that's probably genetic. There are other people in my family who struggle when there are
other addicts in my family. And so in the pandemic experience, when he got back into school after a year and a half of computer school, which is you know, like I could save my thoughts on for another podcast, he was in sixth grade, and I just felt like a light had gone out of him and he started to be really angry. And I think now that a lot
of that is just middle school. Like I again with the sample size, I can you know, I can see my second son at the same age, and I'm like, and it's so much easier for me now to be like, Okay, that's developmental, Like that's blood sugar, that's something bad happened at school today. But with my oldest I was just like, what am I looking at? Like this is you know,
he just seemed so different. And I, you know, had also been working on a book about addiction and about fatherhood and childhood, and so I was kind of in the midst of immersing myself in some of where I had been, and I just got really worried. I was just like, I don't know if I should be talking to him about whether he's depressed, as someone certainly should
have been doing to me. But when I was that age and you know, manifesting some of the same symptoms, Yeah, I didn't think he was drinking or anything, but I was like, what if that's where this gets? What if that's what I'm looking at? Like whatever made me start? What if that's rearing its head in him? I spent a lot of time second guessing myself. I spent a lot of time living through what perhaps my own parents like what am I looking at? You know, And they
came to answers, I think. But I did a lot of that kind of like private you know in my head, like no, no, over reacting, this is about you. You're making this about you, you know, Let it be about him. But it was talking to my wife and getting her
sense also of like I'm worried. I feel like something's happening to my child, and I just was like, Okay, I've never really let myself think about having this talk with my kid, and I don't know what it's supposed to look like, but I just know it's just like that I need to open the door and walk through it and start acting before it's too late, and the rest will figure itself out. And I say that like it sounds like, you know, this kind of like confidence,
but in fact it's like naked terror. But it is someone who's like their whole everything that's good in their life has come out of that process, that same set of steps. You know you need to do this. It seems impossible, you don't know how you're going to do it. Just start, Just throw yourself off the cliff and trust that that's what's supposed to happen. So I thought, let's go into the woods. Let me take him somewhere where we can't be seen. That will make it easier for me.
And I was like, I want to talk to him, but I need to remember to listen to him.
In those woods.
On that walk, Garth takes a terrifying leap.
I was determined that I was not going to walk out of those woods without telling him two things that I owed him that And the first was that I struggle with depression, which I needed my son to hear that because I needed to not be hiding something from him.
He's a very sensitive for a very intuitive person, and I think he in hindsight, I think that some of what was bothering him was that I was going through this intense experience of writing about all this stuff, and it was like he felt that I had this secret that was really wrestling with in my study every day, but he didn't know what it was. And the other thing is that I was a drug addict, and I thought I wasn't gonna walk out of those words without
saying that. I knew that that was somehow going to be where the conversation had to go. And I knew that he needed to to know that because I knew that he needed to be able to make informed choices in his own life, and I knew that he needed to have some things he could compare what was going on with him with. So like, you know, at that age, I didn't know what the hell was going on with me,
you know what I mean? If my father had said, look like I struggle with mental illness or you know, in mood disorder or you know, something like that, I might have been able at that age to be like, oh, maybe that's what's going on with me. Let me is that feel?
Yeah?
That kind of does feel like what's going on with me? Maybe I should you know, maybe I need help. But as I said, I wanted to really listen to him. I felt like what was more important was to make a space for whatever was inside him to come off. And it ended up being like less. He wasn't really
looking for chapter and verse from me. He was looking, you know, to be able to talk about his experience of you know, what's going on drug wise and drinking wise among his friends, and what hows you feel about it. I was kind of just drawing him out on those things. You know, he seemed like you've been angry, and he seemed like you've been that. What does that feel like? He what is that about? And what's going on in school?
And then at some point I said something like the reason I'm asking is, here's my experience at that age. And you know, I said I I had a problem with drugged and it started when I was your age. And he was basically like, you know, just put his arm around me, and I was like, I'm sorry that Like it was really simple, like it wasn't like you know, like cue the Angelic chorus. It was just like a
very natural human like a good friend would do. And then I think we kind of like moved right back on to like his stuff, which is important, Like, which is the point of what we were talking about.
How would you characterize what has felt different in the time after that walk in the woods.
It sounds preposterous, it's a plausible for.
Me to say, but I just feel like it has changed everything in our relationship.
You know.
It's like now gets solved all his problems. But it's like the thing about keeping it inside just seemed to go away. Like he like trusts me with stuff that I never never would have trusted anyone with. He's a trusting kid, and that's a very good quality.
But you know, he'll come to me with stuff important, stuff that's going on with him just then just talk to me about it, you know, not even like what do you think, but just like I wanted you to know, like this is what's going on. And I mean it's crazy, like I you know, whenever that he walks out of the room after those inductions, you know, I'm just like I feel so honored, you know what I mean. Like I'm like, I can't believe you would bring that to me.
And it's really important that I like respect that trust. I feel like that really started then and and it makes me, honestly, just makes me think like that it was me. It makes me think I was doing something I was so afraid. I was so afraid to be found out or you know, to disappoint him or to let him see that I've got problems, and that he felt that and was kind of like I was alienating him.
Yeah, it's so it's so interesting because when you said what you just said about him feeling like he didn't have to keep things bottled up anymore. When you said it, I thought you were, for a moment, talking about yourself.
And so I mean it seems like that in doing that and in modeling that for him, and in showing him that you're human and you know me, one of the things I think that happens so often with our parents is that they're not supposed to have histories, or we think as parents that we're not supposed to have histories, or certainly that we're not supposed to share anything that's rough with our kids.
Like they'll model themselves on the worst parts of us. Is the fear, you know.
When in fact it can really be the opposite, when there's you know, sort of error led into the room of.
All that it's also it's very like recovery with people who go through this experience tend to arrive at some point at this sense that if there's something that you need or there's something that you want, go give it to someone else and then I'll come back to you. I find like my son, you know, I feel like my son's not trusting me, Like, wait a minute, go trust him and trust him with something. It's wild. I
mean I knew that intellectually. It's wild, Like see how much it can mean to someone you love so much in action.
Here's Gars reading a brief final passage from his moving essay in The Atlantic.
I was no longer sure which of us would the other his life, or who had been changed by whom. So little about fatherhood these days offered that kind of clarity, much less promise any lasting resurrection. But that was okay. I thought we didn't have to be miracles. As long as we kept talking, we could simply be two guys.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Acre 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 I'd inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance.
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