This is Later with Lee Matthews, the Lee Matthews podcast More What You Here, Weekday Afternoon's on the Drive. Danny Shapiro was an author of over eleven books and the host and creator of a hit podcast, Family Secrets. Her most recent novel, Signal Fires, was named best Book of twenty twenty two by Time Magazine, Washington Post, Amazon, and other national bestsellers. And I'm curious, Dandy, how this all led to a podcast about family secrets.
Thankfully, it's going to be with you. So in twenty sixteen, I stumbled upon a really massive family secret of my own. And this was after a lifetime of writing all these books in which I was always exploring family secrets, and I never knew why I wrote novels about the power of secrets and families. I wrote memoirs in which I was trying to just kind of excavate and understand my own family. But what I didn't know was that I was the family secret, and that it turned out that my dad who raised
me had not been my biological father. And that led to my memoir Inheritance, which came out in twenty nineteen. And when I was writing about the story of making this really world rocking discovery which I had absolutely no idea about. I found myself. When people would hear about what was going on with
me, they started telling me their own family secrets. And one day I was talking to a friend of mine who is a Buddhist mindfulness meditation teacher well into her eighties, a really amazing storyteller, kind of a mentor of mine, and she was telling me a story of a family secret of hers and the thought that went through my mind was, would I wish i'd share this? You know, this is a riveting story. And the very next thing that went through my mind was, I wonder if there's a podcast about family
secrets. And in twenty eighteen or so, when I first had that thought, there wasn't. And I went to my publisher and I said, family secrets, I mean, everybody has them, and wouldn't it be amazing to do a show in which I really drilled down and did a deep dive into one guest at a time and really explored what it means to discover a family secret or what it means to keep a family secret. And that's how the podcast was born, and the podcast is Family Secrets. You can hear it
on the iHeartRadio app and everywhere you get podcasts. I can't help but think the aid of all of these services that people are using to look into their family histories and their family ancestries through DNA is seems to also be revealing some of these family secrets. Oh there's no question about that. I mean, that is what reveals mine. And that is true of some of my guests.
Not not, not by any stretch, even most of them. But you know, stories the combination in the time that we live in of easy, accessible, inexpensive, over the counter DNA testing, which over thirty five million people have done, and then the unintended consequences and discoveries Women who as very young, you know, teenagers, might have had a baby and had that baby put up for adoption, those kyds of stories and never told a soul and you know, went on and lived their whole adult lives and got
married and had kids of their own end and then that story comes out. Or men discovering children that they never knew that they had, or people discovering half siblings or other families or secret families, or you know, using either using of sperm donors or egg donors to conceive children and never telling them.
I mean, there it's an infinite number of those kinds of stories. And then you also just have social media and the Internet, in which it's very very hard to really, um have a secret, stay a secret anymore. In twenty twenty three, I would say so, Danny Shapiro is with us Family Secrets as the podcast. You can hear it on the iHeartRadio app and everywhere you get podcasts. Does do family Secrets seem to favor or seem to occur more often in a particular class of family or is it across the board?
Oh? I think it's absolutely across the board. Um. I've had guests on my show. One is coming to mind. Who was who came to this country? Um? Uh, you know on a on a on a boat fleeing Cambodia, um evident? And you know was was thought to have died on the boat and was you know, being held in her mother's arms. And the captain of the boat wanted to throw the baby over because because they thought that they thought the baby had died, and the mother said, no, no, no, I must bring my baby to land.
And baby survived, and they you know, they were they were, you know, very poor immigrant family. I've had other guests who are um, you know from uh, you know, aristocratic families who have been you know, landowners forever and ever, and you know, the secrets have to do with you know, their own histories. Um No, I think that. I think that it is a human, human trait because one thing that I've really learned about family secrets is that where there is a secret, underneath that
secret, there is almost always fear and shame. And you know, fear and shame are part of the human condition that you know, money, class, education, privilege, none of that protects us from those very human emotions. That answers my next question. The primary motivator for keeping family secrets, Yeah, it thrumbs beneath the surface. I mean, why do we keep
a secret. We keep a secret because we're afraid that if anyone knew, they wouldn't understand, or they would shun us, or they would feel somehow ostracized from their community, or that people would look at them and think that's
crazy. I've never heard anything like that before, when, in fact, what's so ironic about that is that always there is a way, you know, there's a way in which we're all deep down so similar as human beings that to actually be honest about what it is that's haunting us almost inevitably causes empathy, not know, a sense of shunning or punishing or distance. But it's it's very hard to get past the fear and feel that it's okay too,
to tell the truth of who we are. And and also to not do that is to remain siloed, is to remain isolated, which only sort of perpetuates it and creates its own vicious cycle. Danny Shapiro the the podcast is Family Secrets, and you can hear it on the iHeartRadio app and everywhere you get podcasts. Are all families just a little dysfunctional? M I.
I've never run across a family that doesn't have a little dysfunction. It's because it's a it's a system that involves people, that involves human beings, and you know, none of us are perfect. And you know, I think one of the reasons for the success of Family Secrets the podcast is that all families have them all family I mean, they might be you know, kind of garden variety, not very big deal. Really, Oh, is that all that there is? Kind of secrets or they or they might be world
rocking secrets. But but either way, you know, I think sometimes there are secrets that are kept in the name of love, and that also creates
its own dysfunction. You know, parents not parents wanting to protect their children from you know, knowing things that they did when they were young, or um or from you know, something that they think might be disturbing, and yet you know, it's it's still there, it's still kind of in the air somewhere, kind of shimmering and and doing its own kind of haunting and and that creates a kind of dysfunction, even if it's a very functional dysfunction.
Danny Shapiro Family Secrets is the podcast. You can hear it on the iHeartRadio app and everywhere you get podcasts. And as you can tell, your research has uncovered all kinds of interesting things to talk about on the podcast. And I thank you for joining us. Oh, thank you so much. LEAs great to talk to you. Thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews the Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive Live weekday afternoons from five to seven and iHeartMedia Presentation