The Local Intelligentsia

My father went to Europe during his army service, but then they both came back to this little town and just stayed there and raised me and my two younger brothers, surrounded by my father's family. My father ran the local funeral home. I didn't live in the funeral home, but it was just up the street where my grandmother lived, and his sisters lived on the same street. His brother lived nearby. Just this whole clan of Bechtels, and the

funeral home itself was a family business. Several generations of Bechtels had run it. And we lived in this little town between the Allegheny Plateau and the Bald Eagle Mountain. I feel like that that topography is somehow significant, like it was sort of a rift between this plateau, these big empty mountains where nobody lived and where they were

strip mining for coal all the time. And then this Ridge and Valley region of Pennsylvania, which if you look at maps, are these really tidy ranges of mountains that move off to the east. And we were right on the edge of that, right between those two features. That's the extraordinary graphic memoirist Alison Bechtel. You may have heard of Allison's memoirs fun Home and Are You My Mother, as well as her recently. Really the Secret to superhuman Strength.

Alison's story revolves around a secret that began well before she was born, one that was always kept from her, and yet in the light of retrospect, seems to always have been hiding in plain sight. But she didn't see it. Of course, she didn't see it. We never do. If a secret is embedded into our childhoods, it becomes our reality because that's how we survive. We inheritors of shame and silence, until survival means knowing the truth rather than

living in a lie. 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. I'm so interested in the way you described your parents as you know, sort of the local intelligentsia. It has sort of little echoes of revolutionary Road the Richard Yates novel. Yeah, I've always been curious, like why did they stay there? I myself was desperate to get out of that place, and both my parents loved going

to New York. They go make the four hour drive to New York to go to the theater and museums. So why why were they living in this place that was really cut off from all that. I still don't know. I don't know anything. The older I get, the less I know, especially about my parents. But one thing was my my father's father had a heart attack and needed my dad to run this family business. So my father

did that. He came home from Germany where he was in the army, where my one where my mother had just gone to meet him and get married, and they were very excited to start this life in Europe together and travel around after he was done with his stint. But instead they came home and stayed there. But they were both just passionately interested in different kinds of art

and literature. They both loved poetry. They met in a play my mother was a more serious actor than my father, but they both acted in college, and my mom went on to do an internship at the Cleveland Playhouse and she continued to act in summer stock all through my childhood and beyond. And my dad, although his day job was teaching in the high school and running this funeral home, his real passion was for antiques and for restoring our

old Victorian house. This was a really unusual house. It seems like it became more unusual and more unusual as your father sort of had his way with it. Yeah, this was his real love and his life was restoring this house. Um. It was built probably in the eighteen sixties, a big American Gothic house that was all decrepit by the time my parents bought it in the nineteen sixties. Talking about the library, the library was amazing. I mean,

who has a library in their house? But we did, like a real library with Florida ceiling, glassed in bookshelves, um, lot lots of you know, calf bound antique books as well as plenty of new books. Just a wall of books that people were just struck dumb by. They would always ask my father if you'd read all of those books. He would always say, has read most of them. There were velvet drapes, there was flocked wallpaper. There was another Florida ceiling feature, this giant peer mirror. It was like

twelve ft tall. It was a very grand, beautiful Victorian library. And your father did all this himself. This is a passion of his. Yeah, he did. And um, it wasn't cheesy. You know a lot of people do that sort of thing on their own and it just looks like a i don't know, like a bad B and B or a Laura Ashley explosion. But now it was very tasteful.

And you know, he studied a lot, got lots of magazines and journals, and he knew a lot about this specific period, and he was always collecting stuff, discovering stuff, talking to old people. And it was beautiful. How would you characterize, from like Alison, the child's point of view, your parents marriage during those childhood years and maybe sort of into your teenage years. My parents fought a lot, but I didn't, you know, I didn't really think about

their marriage. I mean, who really thinks about their parents marriage? It's the air that you breathe. And I was surprised later when my mother would describe to me, Oh, that was when your father wasn't speaking to me for three months, Like I never noticed that, but apparently it would go for long stretches of sulking and not talking to her.

Do you think that has anything to do with, you know, the fact that you had siblings, Like I asked that as an only child, because I think for me, I was a student in a way, not of my parents marriage because that would have been sort of beyond my comprehension, but of my parents. I really studied them because it's kind of all I all I had, is my subject. Whereas I wonder if you have siblings, whether you kind of are often in sibling world in a certain way. Yeah,

I wonder if that's true. I was just sort of having a parallel life in the same house. I mean, I was certainly taking them in, but I never thought about their marriage. What was it like to live in in the constant presence of sort of death as a fact, you know that it just it just was that there

were corpses, there were dead people. There was this funeral home, and there's this moment where a young man has died and your dad calls for you and asks you to come, and it's you know, there's this naked, hairy young man with a chest wound lying there, and your dad asks you to hand him a pair of scissors in a very very matter of fact way, and then you very very matter of fact LYE do so. Yeah, I mean mostly the funeral home was kind of cool. I liked

seeing the dead bodies. It was interesting. I felt like I knew something other people didn't know. My school friends would be like, oh my god, you see dead bodies and what's it like. I liked being able to just play it cool, you know, and to have the sort of hidden knowledge that other people didn't have. But it's pretty alarming when Allison's dad shows her this young guy's body,

which has been opened up for an autopsy. Up until then, she had only seen dead people once they were in their caskets, all dressed up and with their makeup done. So Allison, who's ten maybe eleven, plays it cool. It was traumatic, but there wasn't any allowance for it to be traumatic. So much of Allison's story has to do with what isn't said, what can't be said. There's what people say, like please pass the scissors, and then there's

the subtext. Everything, it seems, can be experienced and discussed, everything except for feelings. There's a lot of exchange of of information, of literature, of poetry, of you know, many different things, but not feelings, not how did you feel about that? Yeah? And I you know, only much later did I understand that that if anyone had talked about their feelings, the whole edifice would have just come crashing down.

When you're in high school, you end up in your father's English class, and it seems like like sort of that's the period of time where you're most able to communicate with each other in a certain way, with with the texts between you as like the bridge. Yes, my father had always tried to guide my reading. He was always suggesting books and trying to get me to read things that he liked, and I would always resist that. It was like the only way I had to rebel as a child. But when I was in his class,

of course I had to read the books. So it was an interesting situation, and what I found was I really liked them. We read Um Pride and Prejudice that semester catch her in the Rye. It was a class on coming of age. So it was really so meta, you know. But yeah, we started really bonding and connecting, and you know, I was one of his better students.

He always liked his sharper students. Yeah. I mean there's a moment in fun home where you or he says to you, You're the only student class who is sort of like worth teaching to or something like that, and then and you say, your class is the only class, you know, sort of worth taking. Yeah. Yeah, we were

a mutual admiration society. Yeah, it was. It was really kind of a tender moment, even though what's happening is that the literature and these coming of age stories and the inner lives of the characters on the page are standing in for anything that might resemble, um, you know, a feeling. Yeah. Well, my my dad, I think, was very eager for a friend, and the older I got,

the closer I got to him. He died when I was nineteen, but we just were on this trajectory of just getting closer and closer and talking more and more, and it was great. I loved it. I loved having that connection with him. Although later a therapist told me that was probably inappropriate, that he was leaning on me so heavily for connection. We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. Allison goes off to Oberlin College

and really begins to come into her own. What this means, most deeply and powerfully for her is that she comes out. She knows she's gay, and in the great surge of energy of that realization, she wants to tell her parents immediately. She wants to share it with them. So I wrote them a letter, and the grand tradition of my shutdown Emily, I shared this intimate news with them in a typewritten

letter sent through the mail like with a stamp on it. Yes. Um, at that point I hadn't had sex as anyone yet. I wasn't really absolutely. I mean, I felt certain that this was true, but yeah, it was all still somewhat theoretical, and I was just starting to tell like friends and people close to me. So I told my parents and been waited in some trepidation for their response. It should be said too, because listeners under a certain age, it

will be incomprehensible. The idea of waiting two days, three days. Now, we write an email and we hit send, and we hold our breath, and you know we hear back five minutes later. Um. Yeah, I was holding my breath for three or four days. My father called me on the phone, and I was a little taken aback that it was just him, even though I was used to talking to him all the time. I thought this was like an important family piece of news I had broken, and that

maybe my mother would be in on it too. But she wasn't and wouldn't come to the phone actually, as I as I learned, because she was so upset, and my dad had this sort of giddy air about him, like he was sort of excited, like, well, it's it's good to know that you're human at least, and it felt almost like sort of leering or I don't know, like he was this I don't know, something paternalistic about it. That was annoying to me, and I didn't quite understand why is my dad being so giddy and why is

my mother not coming to the phone. My mother and I had another exchange of hard copy letters before we spoke on the phone. She sent me a very confusing letter saying she wished that I would rethink this lesbian thing and just focus on my work. What was the tone of the letter, like, what was the emotional tone of it? Well, it was kind of cold and formal, like my mother was with me. It was very articulate, very carefully thought out, and I responded to her letter

in kind with a letter. I think I even broke it down into like a B C, you know, into sub paragraphs and things, rebutting all the things she was saying. And then following that exchange, she called me, and here's where the real information finally reached me, and she told me in this phone conversation that my dad had had affairs with other men over the course of their marriage, and some boys, some of his high school students. And I was just completely floored, just blown away. Never had

never occurred to me. Remember at the beginning, when I talked about the secret hiding in plain sight and the way we who have been living in the shadow of that secret can't see what is patently obvious. Alison and I share this two very different kinds of secrets about our fathers. But what is striking is the way that each of us talk to this knowledge away. I mean, it was obvious that Alison's father was gay. In my case, it was obvious that my father wasn't my biological father.

So many of us have that sense when we discover the truth of wanting to smack ourselves upside the head. I mean, my god, how could we not have known? But that's the thing. It was too dangerous, far too dangerous to know, so we just didn't. So you find this out and it makes like no kind of sense and all kinds of sense in a way. Yeah, it immediately I just began sort of reassembling this puzzle of my life and and it he actually he used that metaphor too, I think, but I've always thought of it

that way. I mean, it was just so very strange that I had stumbled onto their deep dark secret in my you know, in my youthful naivete, just thinking, oh this is I'm a lesbian. I'm gonna tell everyone. I'm going to be open and above board about this. I had no idea what what I was triggering. You saw your father only a few times from the time that those conversations and that letter writing campaign was happening until

he died. Yes, once he came, he stopped at my school briefly, and I saw him, and then I came home for spring break, it's spent a week. There was another time I came home at the end of the school year, very briefly and brought my girlfriend that time, Yeah, and so he met my girlfriend and my mother met my girlfriend, and it was all very stressful. Did you have further conversations with him? What you know? Was there sort of bed on that initial you know, I'm so

glad you're human kind of conversation. Some of it happened again in this epistolary format by letters. I have these treasured letters that my dad sent me during that time, although they were all quite cryptic and increasingly not making a lot of sense. We had one conversation about it, which was during the spring break that I was home and he and I went out to the movies one night, and I was determined to bring it up and to

make him talk about it. It was very one of the most you know, frightening things I've had to do. I tried to think of a way that I could get in, and it was he had given me a copy of Collects Memoirs at Christmas time, and so I used that book and I said, did you know what you were doing when you gave me that book? Because of course, that there's a whole long scene in her memoirs about her the lesbian subculture of Paris, which I

found quite riveting. And he said no, he hadn't really thought about it, but it was it was an opening and I had gotten in and we just had this short conversation until we got to the movie theater. But he opened up to me and he said, well, here's

another interesting thing. When when my mother called me on the phone to tell me this shattering information, she explained it that my father had been molested when he was young, when he was fourteen, and on this night that my dad and I were talking, he described to me this incident with this older man on the farm where he grew up. I don't think he used the word molested, but I'm not sure how he would have said it if he described it as a as a pleasurable encounter

and described this man as quite attractive. With me, it was a positive experience. With my mother, it was an excuse for why he had turned out this way. But clearly I could see how deeply ashamed my dad was of all this. It was really painful for him to talk about it with me, but he did at one point. When she's home, Alison and her dad have a really uncomfortable conversation. She pushes hard for it. She needs to

talk with him about his sexuality and hers. She broaches the subject in a car on their way to the movies. Moving cars are such great places for these scary conversations. I find no one can escape. The conversation isn't exactly satisfying, but still it's something. Then she's back at school and she receives the worst kind of news, terrible news. Her dad has been hit by a truck. Her dad is dead. One of your responses, and it's it's such an incredibly

human grief responses. You know, you and your brother have it too, Like you're laughing. Yeah, it's such an uncomfortable thing. It's like, what do you do. You're not laughing because it's funny. You're laughing because you're expelling something. Yeah, we didn't. Oh my god, you know, I don't. No, I can't remember what I even thought I was. It was a five hour drive away, so I got this news. I was completely traumatized, but not you know, in my in the in the tradition of my family. I cried for

about half a minute. Maybe maybe thirty seconds, and then I was like fine, I I insisted on driving. My girlfriend had a car, but I drove, and we both drove five hours home. And I can't tell you what I was imagining had happened at that point. I know that that night my mother confided in me that she was pretty sure my father had done this on purpose. And and I don't think it that had occurred to me until she said that. It just all seemed so crazy,

but everything had been crazy for months. Why do you think she told you that so quickly? Um? I think I was her only confidante. I know that her best friend, to whom she told absolutely everything. Else I didn't know and wouldn't know for a long time. I think she just needed to tell someone. And when she did tell you that, did that make sense to you? Yes? Completely? It felt absolutely right, and I think it consoled us both in some some strange way, because at least it

was intentional. And I try to explain this to people and they look at me like I'm insane, but it somehow seems different. For a death to be an accident, that's really terrible, But if someone intended for it to happen, then at least something went right. You know, No, that makes sense to me. It's like, even if it's something that might have passed, it was something that was a choice. I mean, when we started talking, you were you were saying,

I don't remember how you put it. But you know, the older you get, the more it's a mystery to you. You know, the more you the more your parents are

a mystery to you. And I I do think for those of us that keep on thinking about this stuff, either because it's our nature or because it's our circumstances and we have to um, there's nothing resembling closure or being at a place where it all feels like tucked away, even and maybe especially when we've written about it, you know, when it's bound between the pages, I know, it keeps

evolving and you can't do anything about it. I keep finding out bits of information that completely changed my story, and I'm like, wait, right, it's a very strange plight, because it really is like you're holding the world still between the covers of a book. You know, the relationship between the you that wrote fun Home and fun Home that's the story. It's the relationship between the self and the story. At the moment the story is told, We'll

be right back. Allison's book ends up being adapted for the stage, and Fun Home becomes a musical, Yes, a musical that wins the Tony Award in two thousand fifteen for Best Musical, among many other accolades. I saw the show when it first ran off Broadway, and in the stage adaptation, there are three Allison's. An actress plays her as a kid, another actress plays her around the age she was when her father died, and an actress plays the adult Allison, who stands off to the side and

watches it all unfold. To hear the three Allison's sing together, their voices creating a tapestry of harmony, is to witness a dramatic depiction of wholeness. I've got to admit there's been part of me that feels almost you know, guilty or bad, pulling you back into that time. And you know, and that material because it lives on in the pages of your fantastic book, and so it's always finding new readers,

and it's always sort of newly alive for people. You know, new people are finding it newly alive, and for you, it's something that is, you know, sort of very much by both in the past and not. I guess yeah. It has been a bit weird having this part of my life keep sort of bringing itself to the surface over and over again. But that's fine. I can handle it. There's a phrase Alison uses con substantial paternity that I actually had to go look up. Consubstantial is defined as

of the same substance or essence. We can be genetically linked consubstantial, but there is another kind of link as well, which is a spirit rual length. In a beautiful moment, Alison's father and she are discussing James Joyce's ulysses since this is the kind of thing they did together, and Allison's dad says, is it so unusual for the two things to coincide? I did find myself thinking, and I suppose it was because of my own story and my

own experience. But the idea of having deep and profound spiritual connections which can or cannot be part of having a consubstantial or genetic connection. And there's this part of your book where you're trying on your father's clothes as as a kid, right, and he's trying on women's clothes at the same time, or is it's kind of there's a lot about again in that sort of hiding in

plain sight kind of way, all of it. She would buy my mother's clothes or her and he confided in me that during that one conversation we had that he dressed in girls clothes as a kid when he got a chance. There's this other sentence, which is sexual shame

is its own kind of death. And I would love for you to talk about that a little because I think the silencing of the deepest parts of ourselves, either because we live in a way and in a place where it feels like it's out of the question or it will be too mortifying, is so much at the basis of so many of the kinds of secrets that

people keep. Yeah, that's the real tragedy of my father's that I feel like, with only a little bit of time or a little bit of help, or a little bit of being born slightly later or having some slightly different experiences, he might have been able to do that, you know, to confront that. But he just wasn't. He just couldn't do it. And when I talk about sexual shame being a kind of death, I think precisely because our sexuality is, you know, it's it's your literally the

core of your vitality. It's what keeps us all reproducing. So to have that stop it up in some way, you know, I just think of my dad living this sort of half life in this little conservative farm town, or a double life, half or double I don't know. At some point after his death, you come across some photos, and among them is a photo of Roy, the babysitter who babys that for you and your brothers in the

summer of sixty nine. And there was a trip that your father took you on and Roy was the babysitter, and it's clear that they were involved with each other. And there's this very handsome picture of Roy mixed in with these other family those and he had your father had blotted out or inked out the date on the Roy photo, but he had left it in. These are the mysteries that were left with right, like why why did he leave the photograph in with the rest of

the photographs but block out the date? Honestly, Danny, I was like, that's weird. I don't know. I didn't go any further with it. I mean, it was literally in an envelope with all the other pictures with the same date stamp on them, And so if he really had been concerned, you would have destroyed the freaking photograph, you know. But I think it was I think I felt like it was his way of saying, look, there's nothing wrong. That's why I have this picture right here, because it

was perfectly open and above board. Yeah, I mean, like what, you know, what what we're left with in the end, Like you write, what's lost in translation is the complexity of loss itself. Right, That's one of my favorite lines, because what do you do with that? You can't you don't know, you can't know, You're not going to know, And it just kind of stands as an artifact of

that time and of your dad. Yeah. This was a year after my dad died when I found it, And I suddenly knew when I found that picture that I wanted to tell this story, that it was just too good of a story. I felt guilty about having that feeling, too, but it all kind of came to me in a kind burst in that little photograph. Everything was there. You know, Allison grew up on an artist's colony of sorts. Her dad is in the library exploring his profound connection to literature.

Her mom has her work in the theater, and then all the kids are each doing their own artistic thing in their own rooms in this rambling house. It wasn't the artistic life Allison's parents had dreamt of or anticipated. They returned to central Pennsylvania because Allison's dad's dad had had a heart attack. These things happen, plans get derailed

or dreams deferred. But perhaps Alison's parents found it easier to stay in her dad's hometown, for him to work as a high school teacher as well as in the family business, for them to be the local intelligentsia. What would have happened if they had moved to Greenwich Village? Would their marriage have survived, would they have stayed together? I feel like the message I got from both my parents was don't have children, and I didn't you know. I took that very seriously. It was like children had

put an end to both of their artistic hopes. Um, but I think that was part of the cover. Children aren't necessarily what gets in the way of an artistic or creative life is dishonesty with oneself. That gets in the way of, you know, being able to express that life. Yeah, and they had a compact that they were not going to confront the truth of their situation. And then I came along and you know, threw it down on the

floor like a gauntlet. I feel like there was something about that life that served their purposes that kept them from having to really face the real I don't know. I mean, the truth is they shouldn't have been married to one another, But where does that leave me? Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Media. Dylan Fagin and Bethman Mcaluso are the executive producers. Andrew Howard is our audio editor. If you have a secret you'd like to share, leave us a boy smell and your story

could appear on an upcoming bonus episode. Our number is one secret zero. That's secret and then the number zero. You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer, Facebook at facebook dot com slash Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at Fami Secret Spot. And if you want to know about my family secret that inspired this podcast, check

out my New York Times best selling memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,