Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
I never thought I would tell this story. For years, I deflected and demurred when people asked me questions about where I grew up and what my parents did. Guarding secrets was so ingrained in me that I could not imagine a world where I actually discussed them, let alone put them down on paper. But as my comics have become more personal, there has been a small and persistent voice growing within me that has insisted, this is my life,
my story to tell. But these stories and secrets also belong to all the other people who share my history, some of whom have devoted their lives to protecting such secrets. At the early stages of this project, I would tie myself up in knots over what to say and how to say it. Would my parents approve what I embarrass my family? Would I hurt someone's feelings? But sometimes the trick to writing is giving up the pretense of pleasing anyone at all.
So I began to right.
That's Sophia Glock, a cartoonist who lives in Austin, Texas, and author of the recent graphic memoir Passport. Sophia's is a story of a childhood spent moving around a lot to some exotic, dangerous places. And the reason for all those moves, well, that, of course is the family secret. 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 in my childhood was pretty evert changing, but the majority of it was tropical to subtropical.
I lived in very kind of.
Verdant, overgrown type of places.
There were a lot of flowers.
The landscape in my childhood were the kind of places where fruit was falling off the trees almost year round.
And there were any number of these different tropical and subtropical places in your childhood.
Yes, the majority of the places I lived in would have a rainy season and a less rainy season, not all of them.
But the countries I lived.
In as a child were warm, and I craved like winter. I wanted four seasons. You know, A lot of the literature I read as a kid was based more sort of like northern climates, so I definitely thought I was missing out on snowy adventures. But of course now I realized that I was living in like really gorgeous weather year round.
I should not have been sad about it. I was actually born in the States.
I am the only one of my siblings who was born stateside, but.
I have no memory of it, and my very early years were spent in Europe.
Actually, if you, as a child, if somebody had said to you, where do you consider home is, what would you have said?
I would have said the USA.
I might have, you know, claimed the city of my birth, which is New York City, But I, as I like to say, born, not raised. It wasn't until I got older that I comprehended the United States in all of its sort of regional glory. It was just the States, good roads, great malls, and possibly snow. In early childhood, I was very deeply in love with my mom, and I think that we all were, including my dad. My father was more of a sort of like intimidating, frustrating
presence in my life. I think that I tim I was a very sort of headstrong kid, and I resented him being in charge, if.
That makes sense.
But sort of the central fact my parents, like the first and foremost thing about my parents in our lives was that they were in love with each other and that nothing was better than the experience.
They were having been married.
They were very much not just genuinely attached to each other, they were also invested in their own love story. And that's kind of how I always imagine them as a unified sort of pair.
What did you know about their love story?
Very little, because they've met at work, and they didn't talk to us about work. That was very grapotent.
They were very sensitive to the fact that, like, you know, I guess they didn't want us to eavor to say anything even in confidence, that we might then repeat to the wrong person or speak about casually in public. They even to people. You know, we socialized with other Americans, but not all Americans that we socialized with overseas were doing what my parents were doing, So, you know, I kind of just thought like any American overseas was kind of doing the same sort of work, but I didn't
know what that work was. I remember asking my mom once where she met my father, and she said in a parking lot, And we were literally walking in a parking lot when I'd asked her, and I think that's why she said that. So I didn't have details about their love story. Until much later in life, I was less aware of my mother's work. They kind of hid that from me, and I'm not even really sure why. I mean, I think that she made more sacrifices in
her career. My father's career sort of took the center stage, and we were going around on his assignments, and she had five children altogether, so there was a lot of childcare to contend with. So it wasn't really until later that I began to appreciate that she was working as well.
I think she also once told me.
That when I kind of like confronted her and asked her why she hadn't let me know where she was going for huge chunks of time, she said she didn't want to hurt my feelings. And I don't know if that's true or not, if she was just being like very circumspect, or if she really thought that her child would be like hurt if they realized that their mother
had a job. My parents also did a really good job of selling us this lifestyle as totally normal, you know, inasmuch as we were ever in danger or ever had to be on the lookout for danger. When I was a small child, I took it for granted that everybody kind of like looks over their shoulder, So I never felt scared. It was either my own disposition or they did a really good job of sort of protecting me from the idea that I should be scared.
It was more that we should always be aware.
I think it's interesting that when we're children, we just assumed that whatever our lives are are just quote unquote normal, or everybody's life is like that.
Yeah.
It wasn't until I was eight years old and I asked my friend where she was born and she said here.
And I was like, no, what country were you born in?
And she said here in, not just this country, this town, like around the corner, you know. And I was like, wait, I thought everybody in the world was just born in a different country.
And moved constantly.
And then that's when I fully appreciated that our lifestyle was special.
Nine apartments, eight schools, seven uniforms, six countries, five quote unquote best friends, and the list goes on. This is the kind of motion and disruption that defines Sophia's childhood, picking up, then settling down, then picking up again, going to a new school, making new friends, then leaving them. Soon thereafter. How's a child supposed to act during all this change? What's she supposed to say? According to her parents, not much. She's told not to volunteer too much information
about herself. At one point, her mom tells her to stop broadcasting to strangers that they're American.
I was a friendly kid, and it wasn't in step with my parents' objectives.
To be too obvious.
They modeled and often instructed me on how to draw people out, and sometimes that was by like acting guylus and you know, seemingly open. But we were Americans. There was no hiding that we looked like Americans. We sounded like Americans. When I was five year olds around that age, I was approached constantly on the street by men who wanted to talk to me about being an American. And I don't know if those were casual people. I don't
know if those were people with bad motives. But I tended to answer honestly, and I had to be instructed out of that habit as a pretty small kid.
Yeah, there's a word that you were taught about that, which is deflect.
Yes, you ask them questions, right, I.
Was about to say, it's an interesting social skill. To learn as a kid.
My dad gave me this piece of advice and it was very free. And you know, this came to me in many ways. I watched my parents do it. I was often instructed specifically to do it. My mother always wanted to know what all my friends' fathers did, why they were there, why was ex child's family And she might be coming from a country in southeag Asia, what was she doing in this particular country in Europe? You know, and usuallybe I'm sure, I doubt I passed anything useful
on to my mother, you know. Oh, he's an engineer, you know, But that was her remo, that was the machine that made her work. She was literally collecting information, even if it felt, you know, haphazard, even if it was about like her children's classmates, and both by like sort of modeling it and often just instructing it.
You know.
Told me that if you're uncomfortable, if somebody's asking you too many questions, you can always turn those questions.
Back around on them and begin the.
Process of redirecting it to them. Because one, people love talking about themselves, and two they're not paying too much attention. People probably aren't going to notice that you deflect. And it was one of the most freeing.
Things that my father ever told me was that people aren't.
Usually paying too much attention, which is of course ironic because they were paying attention to everything, but it is wonderful, Like we're all pretty, you know, narcissistic and as a teenager when you're kind of want to crawl out of your own skin and you're for self conscious and you feel like the ugliest, strangest, weirdest creature that has ever dared to exist, to truly internalize the idea that people aren't caring as much as you think was deeply freeing
and you know, opens you up to a world's possibility.
Yeah, I would imagine too, Because you were in a situation where you had to make new friends over and over again. That must have been a pretty useful tool for you.
I had all sorts of useful tools. Ask people questions. People love being asked questions. I know I do, so this is a treat. These were tips my mom gave me. You know what I mean, use people's names. People love the sound of their own name.
Yeah, things like that.
I mean, you know, these are people's skills, right, And I'm not saying that I was actually even very good at it. I had made success moving as stressful moving. It's hard, it's hard to start over. But there's again something very freeing about knowing, like, oh, is it not working out here? Guess what you're going to get another go in about a year, and maybe it'll be better next time.
We'll be right back. Sophia is not alone in her deflection training. She's in solidarity with her siblings Christopher and Julia, who Sophia calls the perfect one, who are older than she is, and Byron and Patrick, who are younger than she is. And then there's Michael, the mysterious half brother from her dad's first marriage.
The subject of my father's first marriage was fairly tabboo in the house. Nobody ever told me about it.
It was information that was shared with me by my older siblings kind of in secret again when I was about eight years old, and nobody ever doubled check to make sure I knew.
It.
Was just kind of assumed that it had gone through the grapevine my younger brothers because I never talked about it with them, they didn't find out until they were.
Teenagers about the existence.
Of this other brother, and it was one of the great preoccupations of my adolescence because when I was around twelve years old, I realized that I had a dad, and I'd always had a dad, and my dad was in my life, and I really took it in that my dad hadn't been in my brother's life, and he was my brother. You know, he's my half brother, but that's my brother. You know, I'm surrounded by these siblings, so.
I adore we were all really close.
And there was somebody else out there who's a part of me who I didn't know who he was.
Well, you know, it's interesting because there's this thread of the unspoken or the unseid or what can be said that runs throughout your story in a whole variety of ways. You know, I was struck by your saying when your dad would go to work that he was going out, you know, and if you pressed, you know, like where you're going, what are you doing, he'd say, to see a man about a horse, And that was like his deflection.
He was practicing what he preached. When Julia the perfect One goes off to college, this now makes Sophia the newly appointed eldest sibling at home with her two younger brothers. Sophia's in high school, a chaotic and dramatic time for most of us. I mean, would any of us really want to go back? But Sophia's peculiar family life certainly doesn't make matters easier. Plus she really misses Julia, her north star. One day, a letter from Julia arrives in
the mail. It isn't addressed to Sophia though, it's for her parents, and they don't want Sophia to read it, but she does, and in it she reads Julia's confession that she's told friend in school what their dad does for work. She writes, in abject apology, that she's spilled the beans.
She very rarely wrote me, and I had express permission to read all of her letters. So when my mother hid this letter from me, I lost my mind. I couldn't believe that they were denying me this basic need that I had to be in touch with my sister, and I felt like I had a write to it.
So I just waited until the letter wasn't guarded.
I'd seen that my mother had put it away in her purse, and like I said, I felt I had the right to know what my sister was talking about, and it was all coded. Basically, she told the secret. She was so disappointed in herself. She was begging my parents for forgiveness. She was clearly alarmed. And what had happened was there was a boy at school who found out how often she moved and began to say, your dad's a spy. Your dad's a spy, and he was
harassing her at school. And I don't know how long she sort of tolerated the harassment from this kid, who I'm sure thought he was being incredibly clever, but she snapped and kind of more or less confirmed his suspicions and then felt compelled to confess to my folks. So I find the letter, and he just all clicked into place, you know what I mean, like that one thing and another. It was all just like these little tiny things. It was like realizing Santa Claus doesn't exist.
That's right, the moves, the secrecy, the need to keep their nationality under wraps. Sophia's dad is a spy and her mom is too.
You don't necessarily need to find the closet full of toys. It's a random comment that your grandmother makes about where she bought the headband and your stocking, and you go.
Wait a second, none of this makes sense. So yeah, and I just knew.
And then I couldn't even tell them that I knew, because then I'd have to confess this, you know, this sin of going through their stuff.
So it became this.
Kind of like double ended lie that I had to balance. And the greatest tragedy was that I had to pretend to be amazed when they told me.
That's just fascinating. So that was the moment that you put it together for yourself, like all of the little pieces added up. So then you're keeping a secret about a secret.
Yes, I couldn't tell my sister that I knew. It's easy to speculate about it now, but I might speculate that the information on some level also was as well green, and that it gave me permission to have a double life, for whatever life, to have a secret life, to have
any sort of amount of secrets. I didn't really feel guilty about, you know, pursuing friends or activities or interests that weren't lining up with what my parents you know, thought was appropriate for me, because clearly they felt fully justified to have, you know, a deeply secret.
Life, and you know that it was official.
They were doing it out of deep sense of like conviction and patriotism.
But you know, I just felt like, if they can, so can I.
Yeah, that's so interesting. So it kind of gave you carte blanche to have a teenage rebellion and feel no guilt.
Yes.
So once I figured out that, you know, and I knew it was CII how one, it was really the only intelligence organization that I knew of, And this is like, this is the way I conceived of it, you know, spy, like technically officially and unofficially.
Cover, you know, uncovert.
This word spy's like it's a bit of an euphemism, you know, for all sorts of intelligence work.
Right.
Also even things like the fact that, you know, I loved the movie Patriot Games as a kid, and we thought that my dad looked like Harrison Ford. We always like, oh, it's just like daddy.
It's just like daddy.
And my parents were just delighted in that. They would laugh too hard.
You know what I mean.
And I just knew it was agency because it was the only acronym that I was actually familiar with at the time, and I just happened to be right, and then yeah, No, it was strange to keep the fact that I knew that they were quote unquote spies from them because I'd been.
Spine on them and the irony wasn't lost on me.
But it just wasn't worth the risk, you know, I knew that if they wanted me to know, they would have told me.
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. Meanwhile, things are also fraught outside the home. There is the ever present sense of instability and danger. A massive historic hurricane hits where they're living at the time, it's international news. People are being evacuated, but not Sophia's family. Her parents aren't going to leave. There are city curfews and rationed food and all sorts of restrictions, but Sophia's parents stay put.
And against this backdrop, Sophia is courting danger herself. She's in the midst of a teenage rebellion and in a third world country in the midst of a crisis. She sometimes finds herself in unsafe situations.
Maybe what I was doing was more risky than the average teenage rebellion for a number of reasons. Like I said, I was conspicuously American. My parents were pretty convinced that we were easy targets for all sorts of things. Kidnappings were fairly common in many of.
The countries I lived in.
A few years before I started at the school I attended, one of the student body had been murdered during his kidnapping ordeal, and it was a horrifying shock to the community, which was a very sort of privileged, ensconced type of community like this was definitely like the elite of the country attended the school I ultimately attended in high school,
you know, in that sense, it was risky. In the other sense, I think that my parents used their perceived risks of living in a third world country during a crisis or not during a crisis, as a way to keep me under wraps. I think that being a teenage girl was just simply a lot for them to handle. The fact that I was a teenage girl rather just petrified them. They, like many parents, thought that there was something inherent in my girlness that made me vulnerable, and
perhaps they were right. But you know, there's another side to it where you can like actually repress someone. So I did do it with very little guilt in the sense that I also felt like they put me here, like they put me in that country. They took me to all of these countries, and then in the end, we're literally asking me to stay behind a wall, and I definitely.
Sort of carrying their secret around with me.
I felt deeply justified in ignoring that advice because you gave this.
To me, You gave me. They literally gave me the world.
I decided to try my best to experience it as much as I could.
Being a girl, I think was a point against me.
I just felt like all of these restrictions were deeply arbitrary, so, you know, on a day to day basis, I we resented them and wanted to do whatever I could to trick them.
Into letting me do what I wanted.
There was a point in my relationship with my parents in high school where I told myself that I was only pretending to love them so that they would leave me alone, which is a horrible feeling.
It's horrible to say that out loud.
Now, and I think it was a defense mechanism on my part because I was young and I did want to get away, and I was about to go to college, and I think that was something I told myself to soften the burden. But also, teenagers do desperately, at least I, as a teenager, desperately was ready to start my life independently.
Yeah, sure, and to separate. But I'm thinking too, that you were carrying around the knowledge that they had this huge secret that they were keeping from you and from everybody else, but from you. Did you feel betrayed at that time?
I think it would have been far more poetic if I'd been personally aggrieved by the fact that they were keeping it from me. But once I figured out what it was, I understood.
It's covert work. It's called being undercover.
And maybe they'd done a really good job throughout my whole life of indoctrinating me to the merits of covert work and the necessity of it. But I understood why, and whatever sort of personal feelings I had more anger that my sister knew before me, like I was more jealous of my sister, I think I must have processed it by the time they told me.
So when they did tell.
Me at this sort of like appropriate age, which I believe was fifteen or sixteen years old, not only did I have to pretend that, like I was amazed and impressed, I'd also processed any sort of like bitterness I might have had around it. They told me after breakfast one Sunday morning, at the table, my little brothers had gone off to play, and they were there was a little bit of a ceremony around it. They were like, we
have something very important to tell you. We believe you're old enough, you're mature enough.
You know. They built it up as this like a great privilege of.
Being grown up enough to keep the secret along with them, along with my elder siblings, and you know, I think that's something else. Whether I felt it in the moment, I definitely felt it as the years went on, that to be brought in on a secret after I was officially even though I had already known, even though I had to like literally pretend and act and hope they didn't figure out that I had already figured it out. You know, all of a sudden, you're part.
Of a team.
And it's actually the problem with secrets is that they corrode intimacy. But if you want to build intimacy, the quickest way to get there is to share a secret.
So I felt very close to them.
Actually I love that. So they tell you and you say your spies, and I believe it's your dad says no, so intelligence officers.
Yeah, that officially they were not spies.
I not supposed to characterize it like that.
And yeah, there's all sorts of official.
Categories to intelligence work, and there are many different parts of it and different.
Ways that you can like work with it. But yeah, that's kind of the way he would have characterized it to me.
And my father even double checked with me and asked, you know, so you're not mad.
You know a lot of kids apparently get really mad, and I genuinely, I genuinely didn't feel that way.
Well, you had this sort of like intermetso exactly, you had a couple of years there, you know, from fourteen to sixteen or so, of knowing and of having your own secret, which is that you knew.
Yeah, so there might have been some guilt in there too.
Sophia has a conversation with her father in which she asks him, so you lied because you had to write, and he responds not exactly by answering, but by telling her that their work depends on people seeing only what they expect to see, and he also imparts this bit of wisdom. He tells her that this strategy only works because most of the time things are just as they seem, except when they're not.
This sort of was a sort of essential understanding between me and my dad, but it heads a lot. But we also had this sort of understanding. He believed in privacy. He believed in my privacy. I think on some he knew obviously on some level, what I was up to, and I think he had a lot of trust in me as well. I think that we related to each other.
So that conversation where I basically, you know, confirm you lied because you had to again is me seeking permission in my own lives because I felt that I lied because I had to, you know, it was the only way to get what I wanted. Again, like a human being can justify anything, but that's how I justified to
myself at that age. And that that was also just something that he always drilled home that people will fill in the blanks, and if they think they know the story, you can sort of control the narrative of what details they fill in.
And then he asked, would you ever consider a career in the CIA.
I think my parents thought that I would be very good at it.
Actually, I think they were minorly disappointed when none of their children followed in their footsteps exactly. And there was a time that I considered it very seriously. Actually, I saw my parents had each other, and I think they created a very sort of like secure and you know, in many ways like beautiful, interesting life together, but it sort of depended on the other person being in on
it and otherwise. I think that the sacrifices people who do undercover work do, and in all sorts of realms in the world, you know, when you purposefully have to hide a massive part of your life, it isolates you. It's deeply isolating. It affects all of your relationships. I knew that it would be lonely for somebody like me, who was a great chatter, you know, like who was still that five year old who wants to chat up strangers on the street and doesn't mind sharing all of
my stuff too. The oversharer and me perhaps knew that it wouldn't ultimately be a good fit.
I did work briefly at the agency.
I don't talk about it very much, but I did consider it very seriously interesting.
Well, family business, the family So, now, after this childhood and adolescence and young adulthood of not being able to talk about what it was that your parents did for work, or to be able to explain the truth of your life, what does it feel like now to have been able to tell the story and to have it be a part of your story. Now that is you know, that's in the world.
Yeah, the fact that it's known is something that I still don't even know how I feel about. Sometimes there's a lot of relief. I'm relieved to put it down. It was something that I was asked to carry, and I think was a great privilege to carry. But I'm glad that I don't have to anymore. But I don't know,
secrets die hard, even when they're not secret anymore. The muscle memory of deflecting, you know, skipping over huge central details of my life so that people don't ask too many questions, so because I don't feel like lying to them that day, you know, having that same conversation.
Over and over again at a party.
If somebody asks me why I grew up overseas and I don't feel like talking about the CIA, I'll just sort of skip over it and say, oh, I kind of had an interesting childhood.
What do you do?
I took my mother to a Christmas party though this year, and somebody, a friend of mine who you know, also had a very interesting childhood overseas, mentioned it enthusiastically and gestured towards my mother, Well, you were in the CIA, and my mother's poor face. Somebody who's knows that.
I've written this book, who's proud of me, has supported me, gave me, you know, passit permission to.
Do it her face, their poor face. I knew that I'd witnessed the first time in her entire life where somebody casually said this at a party and mixed company, and like the blood drained out of her face because she wasn't.
Used to it, just because she wasn't used to it.
Intellectually, she knows it's not really a secret anymore, but she was so uncomfortable and shocked for a moment before she acclimated and remembered that the book exists in the world. So I felt bad for her in that moment, But I kind of feel like that too.
Ultimately, it's free that I.
Wouldn't say I'm totally comfortable with it yet maybe I will be one Day.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly z Acur 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 Ryder. 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.