The Vampire Bat

me that Laura is dead. She was killed while flying home with her entire family grandmother to infant brother, on the pan Am flight bombed by Libyan terrorists over lack of the Scotland. I am eight. I fall quiet for a long periods. I feel like my head is full of cotton, feel sleepy and mute and numb. Finally, my dad teaches me to read the London Times. You have to understand the forces that took her. It will seems scary if you do. I think of the faceless monster

on the cardboards spook House, and I know that he's right. Slowly, my world is filled with a new cast of characters, Kadafi and Thatcher and Reagan and Gorbachev. They sound like exotic fairy tale people, wizards and witches and woodsmen living in distant magical forests, but their storybook showdowns can spill over into the real world, into my world, and steal my friends from the sky, so I have to pay attention.

That's Emeralist Fox. You know. If I were writing a novel about a spy and I had to come up with a great name for that spy, I'd like to think I could invent a name as perfect as Ameralis Fox. But the thing is, Emeralists really was a spy, recruited by the CIA at the age of twenty one and working under deep cover for nearly a decade. She's the author of the memoir Life Undercover, Coming of Age in the CIA. This is a story about what happens when being a secret and keeping a secret is a matter

of life and death. 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 changed every year, and I think as a result, eventually I realized that my landscape was planet Earth, you know, and that whether it was a suit in the Middle East or it was a refugee camp in Tanzania, or it was a beautiful Downton Abbey type house in the countryside and England that humans and the humans that inhabited them were the same, you know, and I think that was an enormous gift.

It didn't always feel that way as a kid, being in a new place every year, but I suppose the landscape of my childhood was in a sense my family, because it was the one consistency between all of these places we moved every year because my dad was an economist who focused on developing economies and took us with him to new countries every year. And you know, my birthday since September, so every year I would know nobody in a new place to invite over for my birthday.

But it was an amazing range of experience. I think, looking back on it now as an adult, it seemed ordinary to me as a child, but it was really

quite magical. Sure it always does. Right our childhoods just feel like that must be the way the whole world lives, absolutely, you know, And I think actually it's to milestone when you realize that there are so many ways to live a life, and the people who have taken another path through their life, have from all of the different hills and valleys that they've been through that we haven't have, had a completely different vantage point on the terrain, and

have intelligence that they can share with us. But definitely as a child, I thought, I mean, I knew people didn't move every year, but I thought that everyone felt as at home in the world as I did. And I think it was really sort of getting to university and realizing that for many people that was kind of the first time that they had had any horizons beyond their hometown. Every September when the new school year started, Amarillis would find herself beginning again. This might be New York,

or in the UK, or Jakarta, Zanzibar, Moscow, Thailand. Each country had different customs and modes of dress and sights and smells, and she grew up having to make sense

of it all to witness, learn and adapt. It's such a primal period and you're kind of trained in a very primal sense to look for the archetypes that you need to recognize to survive when you're a young child, and you look for the caregivers and you look for the potential friends, and those people exist everywhere, and so I think in a way that the terrain of my childhood on the surface looked incredibly varied, but when I

look back on it, it all feels very warm. I had a great sense of safety in my early childhood. I think that that changed, as it always does as we grow up, But in my early childhood and even beyond that, physically, I felt very safe, even in very tumultuous environments as a kid, because I've kind of never known anything else. Describe your mother me. My mother is

a poet at heart. She's an artist. Um, she's English, and she comes from a very old, you know, kind of snazzy English family that kind of knows all the rules about what to say and what not to say, and what salad work to use and so on. But in her heart she is this incredibly free thinker and

this really radical poet and artist. She went to a really interesting school as a child in England called be Dales, which has a reputation for kind of breaking out of the stiff upper lip British mold and creating the kind of the hippie free thinkers of the UK. And you know, she really gave me a love of the spoken word and the written word. I memorized poetry all through my childhood,

and that was very much down to my mom. You know, she had learned poetry growing up in Britain, poetry growing up, and she walk home from school, skipping classes and walk home through the meadows reciting poetry. And it was really important to her. And it is now to me to have kind of the wisdom of ages past in a place that no one can ever take it from you.

You know, I think the things that we learned by heart are hours and even in a terrible circumstance, even when everything else has been stripped away, you know, no one can take that. And my mom really gave me that love of art and literature as a way of understanding society, challenging society. Tell me about your father. My father is much more analytical, much more almost like a

human computer, I guess you could say. I as a child and even now, I sort of always had the sense of his knowing everything in terms of fact, not so much always in terms of the life experience or wisdom emotionally in terms of emotional intelligence. To put those facts to work in a way that you kind of

might think of as wisdom. But he is incredibly curious and incredibly intelligent in his capabilities, in his ability to always be seeking new information and to pull all of that information in to kind of constantly update his model of the universe and crunch as many numbers as you could kind of possibly put in front of him. And he is in fact an economist by training. He's American.

Grew up in a little small town called Franklin, bill And upstate New York, and was one of only two kids in his class to go to college the first, and his family very different childhood from my mother, you know, working class, single mother. And he ended up at the University of Chicago and was kind of a wonder kinds there, you know, it was loved by all the professors and advanced really quickly and up being one of the youngest

tenured professors there in his early twenties. And met my mom that as he sort of moved towards his thirties and she was much younger, and they just were as different as two people could be. How did they meet?

They met actually by mistake in a way, and my dad had been set up on a blind date with my mother's sister when he was visiting London for business, and my mother's sister got the stomach flu and and send my mother instead, and they went to a little night music to play the musical in the West End in London and had, you know, by all accounts of very romantic evening. And then my dad went back to America and my mom went and traveled around Greece and Italy as a as a kind of backpacker, because she

was still just fresh out of school. And my dad wrote to her and kind of, you know, my Mamo says he drew birds on the top of the paper in that way that you can write the that looks like an m you know, and that that seems so romantic because he is so analytical and not an artist, and it was sort of his attempt to be romantic at any rate. He eventually center of one way playing

ticket to Chicago, and she went. And I think it was such a new world for her, because she was coming out of the world of country manor houses in England, surrounded by ideas and art and literature and these kind of six hundred year old rooms that are incredibly grand, but like the heat doesn't work, and there are mice in the covers, you have to knock on it before you open it, you know, just all the contradictions of English country life, and suddenly was in the midst of

this kind of intellectual cauldron at the University of Chicago, where every night they were at a different dinner party with incredibly articulate, fast, intellectual men and women. But I think the women in particular really struck my mom because they were so different from anyone she had come across before that could just repartee on any topic, and we're so worldly, and we're ten years older than she was, because so is my dad, and I think it was

quite bewildering for her at the beginning. I think she kind of struggled to remember her own worth a little bit. Then two huge events occur during Amarilla's childhood. First, her older brother, Ben, her partner in crime, compatriot closest person, is sent off to boarding school. Ben has learning challenges and is also exceptionally bright, with the kind of mind that retains detail history musical scores. Ben and Amarilla's have always spent lots of time together, haunting museums in various

cities or attending concerts. He is the consistent backdrop of her childhood, her everything, and then just like that, he's gone away. He puts a brave face on it, but e Marilla's is terribly lonely. The family is now living in London and Marilla's is in the third grade. She makes new friends, particularly a girl named Laura. Then Laura and her entire family are killed on PanAm flight one oh three, blown up by a terrorist bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland.

My mom waited until after Christmas to tell me, so I always think of it as just after Christmas, but it was just before. You know. She'd been traveling back with her mom and her dad and her sister to go home for Christmas, as so many people on that flight were, and they were all gone, you know, And I remember my mom saying it's a blessing that they were all together, and there's you know, there's no one

left to grieve them. They all went together, and I just it was just so much to process and to absorb. I'd never lost anyone really close to me. I'd like death was kind of a something I'd read about in books, but I'd never really experienced in a deep way until then. And it's also the first time that you have any awareness that there's terrorism in the world, and that's something like this can happen, and it can happen on purpose.

It can happen on purpose that somebody somewhere who never knew Laura, never knew me, could make a plan for some reason that made no sense to any of us and had nothing to do with our lives and steal my friend and her entire family from the sky. It was just so scary and huge, you know. It was just such a big revelation that really shook my world. And I think I was really struggling with it because my dad stepped in, which was quite rare in general.

My mom was very much kind of the heart of our family, and my dad was sort of, I guess, more than the mind, but he was often deploying that mind out in the world doing his work, and wasn't really a big part of child rearing. But I remember him stepping in there and introducing me to the newspaper, and I think he sensed that I needed to make sense of what had happened. I needed to understand why somebody had done this thing, and why they had done it on purpose, and how it might or might not

happen again. And I think I've had a hard time at the beginning reading those stories as more real than the kind of fictional stories that I was used to reading. But I also kind of had this constant, sort of Damocle's idea hanging over my head that at any given moment, one of these things might spill over into real life

and do this kind of incredible harm. And so you know, when I look back on it, it's definitely something of the kind of end of innocence, but also the beginning of feeling an urge and desire and need to understand what was happening in the world, and some sense of responsibility of kind of understanding it so that maybe someday I could do some small thing to help it be better. Will be back in a moment with more family secrets. Amarellis grows up paying attention to the news to world events.

When she's twelve, her father is working in Moscow and there is a siege. For a number of panicked hours, he is unreachable. When he returns safely home, he registers that Emorrealis needs to see more of what's actually happening on the ground, so that in its tangibility, it will be less frightening to her. So on his next trip to Moscow, during a time of protests and a fight for democracy, he invite try to join him. I think

it was a great insight on his part. I think he probably recognized the part of my d n A that was his, you know, which is this part that finds things that I can understand and no up close and personal, much less scary than the kind of shadows

and boogeymen and monsters in the closet. You know. I also was scared for him going back, and he felt as though if I could go and see the thing that was scaring me up close and personal, that I would understand it, and then maybe there would be some jagged edges that really were there, but in seeing them I would not be imagining them as worse than they were. And he was right about that, not only that time,

but pretty much in every other circumstance thereafter. I mean, it became, I guess you could say, a coping mechanism for me every time something really scared me to try to take it apart and understand it, or to get

to know it better rather than to avoid it. And that practice has turned out to be a great gift because I think you know, especially if you fast forward to today's world where everything is seen through the lens of media and social media, all of which is kind of designed to make scary things even scarier for profit.

The habit of sidestepping that narrative and going out and meeting the scary people or seeing the scary place for yourself, that's been an enormous gift in my life and making me feel safer and making me feel better about the future that's to come. That reminds me of a great moment in your story where it's like kind of a perfect metaphor where you describe this little toy vampire bat that your brother had had and it scared you. You

started dreaming you hated that bat. And what your father did in that situation, which struck me as so wise, and it's the same really as as what you're saying is it's like a childhood version of it. Is he sat you on the floor and pulled apart the bat, and I took a part the bat, laid out all the pieces of the bat, the battery and everything about what made that bat look scary, and then you write after that I had never been afraid of him again. Absolutely.

It was a story that I went back to so often in my mind um as I got older and older, and things that seemed just as existentially terrifying as that vampire bat had to me when I was a child. And I mean, by the way, this thing was really scary. It had like it had read pretend blood that swirled around, and it's probiscus and my brother, would you know, bring it up and squeeze its stomach to get the get

blood swirling. And as it as it approached my arm, and I was pretty young, I really felt that this thing was a threat to my survival, you know. And as I got older, there were other things that I thought were threats to my survival, and that memory of kind of okay, but what if you give this the

vampire bat treatment. You know, what if you set out the towel and you take this thing apart, piece by piece and figure out that that blood swirling around in the probiscus is really just a piece of plastic with red paint, and when it swirls, it looks scary, but when you take it out, it's not, you know, and understand what the source of fuel is that's fueling this

what is that battery? And as I got older and began thinking about the things that scared me in my own personal life and then the things that scared me in geopolitics and in security and in the world, that same idea applies. And it's allowed me to see people as the humans that they are instead of the kind of vampire bat that they might feel when you first hear whatever the threat and the story is, It's like there was a training ground there almost for Yeah, what

would end up being your path? Yeah? I think my dad was just trying to get some sleep, honestly, because I kept having nightmares about this thing. But it turned out to be a really great life. Lesson A Marillas grows up to be the kind of young woman who, as a senior in high school, cuts school because she hears that Houston Smith is speaking in d C. It's a rare opportunity to hear Smith, who is one of the world's most influential scholars in religious studies. So she

plays hoockey and gets a demerit. Can you believe it? She isn't off somewhere smoking weed or making out with her boyfriend no, she's educating herself, but hey, that's high school. Her innerpendulum swings back and forth between her passions and interests poetry, literature, the space program, a life of public service. For college, she debates between the Naval Academy and Oxford University.

She chooses Oxford, and when she graduates from Oxford, she enrolls in a master's program in conflict and terrorism at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service. So you go to graduate school at Georgetown and you are recruited by the CIA. Yeah, I mean it sounds crazy when you say it that way. I A friend of mine said, you know, it must be hard if you ever go to therapy, because the therapist is sort of trained to think that anyone who

thinks they work for CIA is crazy. Um. But the approach at the time nine eleven had just happened, and nine eleven for me was an incredibly I guess the word today is triggering thing in in that obviously was for all of us an incredible national trauma. I think on top of that, for me, it brought back Laura's death, and this idea of terrorism is something that can completely, um, you know, derail the world old and the lives of

people in it with no warning. And I was in d C in that day, you know, and the black smoke over the Pentagon, and my little sisters were evacuated from the Cathedral school because they thought it might be a target, and it was. It was all kind of it felt very reminiscent in odd ways of losing Laura.

And so after all of that, I was really set on kind of in a way, I guess you could say, going back to that vampire bad advice of my dad's from my childhood and trying to figure out, you know, how do we take this thing apart and figure out

what makes it tick. The agency person who I first spoke with was a CIA officer, but he was declared, he wasn't undercover, and he was working as a professor at Georgetown teaching classes in the subject of intelligence, you know, what what it means and what its impact is on

geopolitics and so on. So he was kind of openly teaching students, and so when we first talked, I think I was so surprised by kind of how humble and curious and quiet he was, and it was just nothing like the movies, and he really seemed to have that same interest that I did in taking this thing apart and and understanding what drives it and from what the humanity is behind it, in order to find some way

to make it stop. And that really spoke to me in a way that I never expected the intelligence world to be something that I would find any appealing. Like the CIA officer who is Emoralyss's professor, other CIA officers she meets strike her as curious, humble, and genuinely interested in questions beginning with the word why. She begins a long process of interviews and exams while playing language aptitude tests, psych evaluations, and polygraphs. At the age of twenty two,

she receives a provisional offer of employment. She has a friend from Georgetown named Jim, who has also undergone the arduous application process. The two of them confide in each other traveled together as they await word. Then Amarillis receives a cryptic message her security clearance top secret clearance is complete. She's given instructions to report to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia the following week, and in the meantime to tell anyone who knows she's applied that she did not make

the cut. She meets Jim that night, looks him in the eye and tells him her first lie, and then she starts to cry. He was the last person who had known her truth, and now she has lost him. But maybe maybe there's one other person who can know at least something of the truth of her life. Her boyfriend from the UK, Anthony, if he's to move to the STA, it's to be with her. They'll have to get married, and the Agency will have to approve. This

is what's known as an agency marriage. Anthony has put through a battery of tests, including a polygraph, and he passes muster. He and Emoryalis get married, but this doesn't mean that she can share much with him. The secrecy continues doing what secrecy does, causing rifts, opening fault lines

to make matters more complicated. A month after their marriage, Emorialist is moved into the most elite operational training program on Earth and is sent to a covert base in Virginia known as the Farm, which is a little like the CIA meets the Truman Show. It's an incredibly lonely way to spend your twenties, There's no doubt. I mean, it's almost like a kind of Russian nesting doll or something where you're the only person who knows the real truth of who you are. Is like the little doll

at the center. You know, and the people that you work with who've trained with you at the farm or who work on your behalf on your desk back at headquarters, they kind of know the next level out. And then the people who work for your cover company and provide your cover maybe know the next level out. And and then eventually the people around you in the field don't

know you at all. And the difficult part, I think the hardest part really is that your family and your friends from before are in that outer shell layer for you know, for their protection, for your protection, for everyone's protection. But for me, it was really difficult and really lonely to not be able to lean on my mom in particular, but lean on my family in general and ask their advice.

You know, you're suddenly in some of the most really complex and challenging moments and scenarios you've ever been in, with enormous responsibility and obligation, and and then right at this time where you would need guidance and wisdom from the people you trust most, you can't ask anybody's advice, and you can't seek anyone's wisdom because no one knows what you're doing, and then they can't know what you're doing.

So the farm is really this, as you say, wild Truman Show simulation, where you know you're you're pretending to be a first tour officer in a kind of fictional country for six months um and working on operations against diplomats, against terrorists, against other spies and every person there from you know, the sources that you're developing, to the police officers who are throwing you in the gravel and searching your car, to the newscasters that are on the twenty

four hour TV news in your bedroom are all actually officers, officers who are taking a tour away from the field back home to help train, you know, the next generation of operatives. And it's an incredible investment that they all make,

and the government makes in all of us. And I think it's an appropriate investment because once you get out there, you are so alone, and you have the lives of other people in your hands, and I mean your own life, yes, but also the lives of people who are putting everything at risk in order to warn us about an attack to warn us about something that is coming down the pike, um that would put their own life in danger. For sharing. It was just a small group of us that we're

in this incredible pressure cooker. But at least during training we had one another to lean on. And then once we were all out in the field, your sense of self sufficiency and your self knowledge really has to kick in because you're the only person who knows you at

that point. Yeah, you know, I'm just sitting here thinking about what you said before about moving every year and starting a new school and being in a new country, and developing the skill set of looking for the caretakers, looking for the people who will make good new friends, like the survival skills that were in a way already taking root in you in a certain way, like you had to start over again and again and again as a child, and that must have created a great sense

of self sufficiency that then was at least a piece psychologically of what made it be possible to be that tiniest nesting doll. Yeah, I think that's true. I think my childhood was probably my first training course. In many ways. There are skills that I was given at the farm. Obviously, most of what you're doing is is a kind of actual deep relationship building and how to keep your sources secure and so on. And then you do the stuff you see in the movies. You know, the defense of

driving and land navigation. And I qualified on the block and the m flour even though I never carry the weapon in the field, but you know, you do all of that kind of the sexy stuff you see in the movies. But one skill that I learned there that was immensely useful to me was meditation. And it it kind of seems surprising that that would be part of

the spy school training, as it were. But having the ability to get quiet every day, um in a formal way, but also in my own head in the middle of a sequence, when I'm not sitting on a cushion somewhere, and when I'm in the middle of something that is unfolding very quickly with a lot of kind of kinectic uncertainty. To be able to remember the kind of true self and true purpose in that moment was really the bed rock that I relied on for so many of those years.

So it was really grateful to have that. I still it's one of the few things that I learned there that I still practice on a daily basis, that was taught as kind of part of the standard issue. Here's your glock, here's your MPO, Here's how you flip a car, and here's how you get quiet sitting on a cushion. You know, we'll be right back. And a realist and Anthony's marriage doesn't survive her time at the farm. She returns home to find an empty apartment and Anthony gone.

In the stillness, she says, I was flooded with relief. She's now working under Nona ficial cover, a coveted dangerous position and charged with keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of global terror groups. She travels around the world, returning home only to switch out bags and pick up new alias documents. But eventually it's time for a more permanent cover, and it isn't easy to find just the right identity for a year old white girl

in places like Yemen, Libya, Pakistan. So Emeralss, who has grown up steeped in the art world whose parents are collectors, becomes an art dealer as her cover. She meets her family for brunch at a cafe and tells them she's going to try her hand at dealing indigenous art. Her parents believe it. She hopes al Qaeda will too against this backdrop, and could there be anything less conducive to

form a lasting relationship. Emeralss has begun and on again, off again really lationship with a guy named Dean who also works for the agency. They each understand that by necessity, they have secrets from one another. A Mailla's continues to rise to the top of her field and is eventually asked to take on a highly sensitive six year assignment in Shanghai, and she and Dean are given a choice. Either they can go together another agency marriage, or they

won't see one another for the next six years. This isn't a marriage based on great love as much as it is on practicality and a bomb against loneliness. I think as much as it would be kind of romantic to say that it was all about not wanting to not see each other, I think it was as much,

maybe more, about not wanting to go alone. You know what, both of us were looking at long deployments in dangerous places, doing complicated work that we could not talk to anybody else about, and the only kind of possibility of having having a shoulder to lean on and somebody to ask counsel from. Was to marry someone who you trusted their judgment.

And even in that circumstance, we weren't totally both read in on what the other one was doing, but we knew enough about each other to at least share, you know, a pretty significant part of our truth that nobody else around us knew. And I think we had immense professional respect for each other and a good, strong friendship and we have both of those things to this day, and we share an amazing daughter. So I think ultimately, in

its own funny way, it was the right decision. But definitely I now look back on it as as a mom of two girls who I I know we'll fall in love one day themselves. It was a sign of how the work and the mission was not only expected to be the number one priority, but really the only priority, you know, and anything else, whether it's a relationship or love or family kind of only was there in as far as it sort of fit in the space around that priority, which was the work itself, you know, preventing

whatever the next attack was. And in my case, I worked on m D and it just you know, the potential scale of of a disaster that seemed to kind of drown out everything else. On top of the secrets, on top of the secrets, and Marillason Dean are both aware that their house in Shanghai, their every move is likely bugged, that, as they say, the walls have ears. So the play acting of the young woman art dealer must continue even during all hours is an identity she

has to assume through and through. It was a time that emerging art was sort of suddenly on the fine art scene in a big way, and I was working on WMD that had the potential to fall into the hands of terror groups, which is a required being in places and mixing with sort of the people that your average kind of like twenty something, your old white girl wouldn't necessarily have a logical explanation for being in or

meeting with. And so emerging art seemed like a plausible reason to be in the places that I needed to be in. So that was what we want with what did it feel like camera lists like during those years, I mean, you had such a sense of purpose for a very good reason. But I keep on going back to that image of the tiniest nesting doll of you know, you were close to your family and they didn't know where you were, or vaguely they knew where you were, like what you were doing? What allowed you to stay

as steady as you did? I mean, I think it was this constant kind of how can I do this? But also how can I not? And you know, each step you get farther in and then you're in this place where you actually have the operational ability to build a relationship with a source within a terror group or within an arms network that has the potential to prevent an attack where hundreds, maybe thousands or more Laura's you know, which is how I'm thinking of it at this front.

But I had lost and their families will die, you know, not just on our side, by the way, but on all sides of this thing. And I think it became a way of trying to make things right in some small way, or do right by this friend who never got to make choices about what she was going to do as as a grown up, you know. And it wasn't just Laura, but I think this idea of so much lost potential, and especially once I had my daughter, that the idea of how much there is to lose

through conflict. You know what it means to really love another human being, which I think you understand in a kind of completely new way once you have a child, And what that means for the mothers and fathers on all sides and in all places who are affected by division and by conflict. And how can each of us do some tiny part, you know, to get ourselves to peace.

That became a real preoccupation and purpose for me. But I think with it was the recognition that you can't ask a source to put their life on the line unless you can look them in the eye and say, there is nothing in my life more important than keeping you alive. And I got to the point, you know, towards the end of that decade, once I had my daughter, where I began to realize I couldn't honestly, honestly say

that anymore. And I felt like maybe that meant that this sort a particular form of service for me had to really come to an end, and I had to entrust it to the next generation of amazing kids. And they are kids, We were kids, you know, we're so young the people who do this work. But it came time, I think, to pass the Baton at that stage. In two thousand nine, when Emorless is not quite twenty eight,

she returns to the States with her family. This was initially so Dean could undergo and advanced surveillance course, but the agency marriage is fraying, and so is Amoryless sense that she can balance being a spy was being the mother of a very young child. Did you know when you returned that that was it, that you weren't going to go back? Maybe in some deep place in my soul, but I don't think i'd really practically grappled with it

or come to that conclusion. I mean I was at headquarters, working there in support of some things that were happening in the field, well, thinking about what what my next tour would be, which is pretty typical. You know, you spend some time rebuilding relationships at at headquarters and kind of doing some support work there while you figure out what you're going to do next, And people do that

with multiple tours throughout their career. But I think as I was there and thinking through what another tour would mean, and that it would necessarily as so he got older, I mean asking her to participate in secrets in some form or another that I realized I couldn't ask that

of her. I could ask it of myself, but I couldn't ask that of her, And that there were other forms of service out there, you know, And I wasn't exactly sure what that would look like or what was next, but I think I began to sense that period of service in that form of service for me was drawn to an end. So now she's back. She's given nearly a decade of her life to the CIA, and Amarillis is done after years of building alias after alias, cover

after cover, secret after secret. What was it like to sit down with her parents, her brother, the people who had been imagining one life while she was living quite another, and to tell them the truth? It was? It was a great relief for me to tell them, but I think in large part because I could do it with

it being in retrospect, right. I could tell them this thing that I knew would be very scary, especially for my mom and say, and then we all lived happily over und you know, you know, I don't think that my family was as shocked as kind of maybe you might be if you had a different kind of daughter or had raised her in a different kind of way.

But I think, you know, if I remember back to nine eleven and the decision to go to George Shown and study the causes of terrorism, the thing that I gave up in order to do that was going back to the type of these border and pursuing a career as a human rights and war journalists focused on the conflicts in northern Burma, and so I don't think they ever expected me to kind of be an accountant. So, but it was an immense relief to be able to

kind of reclaim real intimacy. And I had never felt as though we were strangers to one another, even though they didn't know these kind of very important facts of my life. For a while, we were still intimate soulmates throughout all of that. My mom is my best friend in the world. But it makes it a lot easier when you can actually really open up all of those nesting doll layers and look into one another's faces again. Um, so, yeah, it was a it was a beautiful moment. We were

out on a boat. Actually, I thought it was easiest to be able to do it in a place where we could have a whole conversation without interruption and with without the ability of anyone to walk away. I think in so many cultures there's a period during the transition to adulthood where you go through some kind of experience in the wilderness, or some kind of service to your country or your community, or a period of fasting and growth.

And in a weird way, this was all of those things, you know, And it was wonderful to be back in real life, in the arms of my family, but knowing that I had served, and that I had grown, and that I had learned enormously, learned so many things, and was kind of ready to return to life as a grown woman when I had really left as a child. Here's Amarillis reading a brief passage from her book about

those remarkable years. When I'm invited to speak publicly about my work, my body physically revolts, like jerking my fingers back from a hot stove. I get it. The journalist jokes, you want to keep all your lessons locked up so only you can enjoy them. No, I laugh, I'm just scared of. I pause of. He prompts me. Every instinct and every piece of training I've ever undergone is in

opposition to this moment. What will happen if I tell the world the truth, spill that most secret of secrets, but always soldiers and spies, all the belching, booming, armored juggernauts of war, all the terror groups, and all the rogue states, that we're all just pretending to be fierce because we're all on fire with fear. What will happen if I speak those words out loud? Will I get hurt? Will Zoe get hurt? Will our life be disrupted all over again? But then I remember my daughter came up

at me and laughing. I think of the white flowers on the table in Karachi, and the girls sitting in their dusty circle outside Mosco, of the prisoners here at home making amends to their victims and themselves, of the gang members removing their tattoos of nothing. I answer, and instead of hiding, I sit in front of a camera and tell the truth. Family Secret is a production of I Heart Media. Dylan Fagin and Bethan Macaluso are the

executive producers. Andrew Howard is our audio editor. If you have a secret you'd like to share, leave us a voicemail 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's secret that inspired this podcast, check out my New York Times bestselling 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.