What Brings Healing, Strength, and Connection with Dani Shapiro

you think, ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscience, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in

the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Danny Shapiro, the author of eleven books and the host and creator of the hit podcast Family Secrets. Her most recent novel Signal Fires was named Best book of two by Time Magazine, Washington Post, Amazon, and others, and is a national bestseller. Danny's most recent memoir, Inheritance, was an instant New York Times bestseller and named best book of two thousand nineteen

by l Vanity, Fair, Wired, and Real Simple. Danny's work has been published in fourteen languages, and she's currently developing Signal Fires or its television adaptation. Danny's book on the process and craft of writing, Still Writing, is being reissued on the occasion of its tenth anniversary. She occasionally teaches workshops and retreats, and as the co founder of the

Siren Land Writer's Conference in Positano, Italy. Being consistent with your habits is the engine that drives your transformation and growth. Think about it. You can't feed your good wolf one big meal a year and expect it to thrive. Consistent steady bits of food fuel a good, healthy wolf, but it's hard to create consistency. You might listen to this podcast on a Thursday feel really inspired, but then life takes over and by Saturday night you've forgotten all about it.

That's why I'm hosting a free live Q and a town hall zoom meeting on Thursday February, where I'll be answering your questions about how to take what you know and turn it into what you consistently do. Had to when you feed dot net slash town hall to register for this free live session with me. During this town hall, you'll ask me your specific question and I'll answer it.

It's that simple. So if you would like my help creating some tools to deal with real life when it gets in the way of your best intentions, let me help you. If changing habits feels overwhelming, if you struggle to make time for things because life is so busy, if it's easy to get caught up with your to do list, you feel consistently behind and taking time for yourself feel selfish, then let's talk The things we do consistently are more important than the things we do once

in a while. In this free town hall session, you'll ask me your questions and I'll help you find what works for you, how you might look at things differently and create the structure to help you do the thing you really want to do. And if you don't have a specific question, just come listen to the conversation a little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing. Truth is, you can make a lot of progress by

doing just a little bit. To register for this free zoom session on February, go to one you feed dot net slash town hall. That's when you feed dot net slash town hall. I hope I get the chance to meet you there. Hi, Danny, Welcome to the show. Thanks, it's great to be with you. I'm so happy to have you on again. I can't believe how long it's been since we talked. It has been a good number of years, and a great number of things have transpired in your life and my life since then that we'll

talk about. We're also going to talk about your outstanding new novel called Signal Fires. But before we do that, let's start like we always do with the Parable. In the Parable, there is a grandparent who's talking with a grandchild and they say, in life, there's two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things

like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparents says, well, which one wins, and the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I love that parable. It's so resonant. That's one of those questions. I think the answer changes probably, if not day to day or week to week, certainly year to year.

I would say, for me, in my life and in my work, that directing myself or inclining myself in the direction of compassion, of kindness, of generosity, of openness. And in Buddhism they talk about the you know, the the near enemy and the far enemy, of various traits, and I think I used to in my life get caught up a lot more in comparison. And where does comparison lead.

That doesn't sound like such a bad wealth necessarily comparison, but it can lead to greed, it can lead to envy, it can lead to a lot of ego defining things. And I think probably it's about fifteen years ago that I realized that my mind, when left to its own devices, would move toward comparing. And it's just really such a useless thing to do and creates such separation or distance between people, between me and the person I might be

comparing myself too. So I really pretty much catch myself if I'm ever doing that, and I have found over the years that that just brings me so much more peace and contentment and joy and sense of connectedness. Comparison is definitely, I think, a bad wolf for a lot of people. And what's kind of amazing to me about comparison is that it doesn't matter who we are, if

we engage in that game, it's a losing battle. Like there's a lot of people that would look at you in the life you have and be like, that's it. That's everything, right, A great writer and a good marriage and a successful career, and you know, it would be like, what does you have to compare to? But you certainly and absolutely could. We all can. And that's why I think it's one of those things that just ends up

being kind of a losing game all the time. I'm so glad you said that, because that is exactly the lesson or the turning point for me where I really started to understand that is. I remember once an agent of mine saying that she had clients authors who were number three on the New York Times bestseller list, and they were obsessed with you know whoever was number two or number one. I was a young writer when she said that to me, and at the time I thought,

that's ridiculous. I would never do something like that. I mean, if you hit the New York Times best seller list, then you are set. There's no other mountain to climb. And then I did hit the New York Times best seller list, and I realized how easy it was to do that. How wherever we are in our lives, if that's a way that we're thinking, we can always be doing that. And if we're doing it, we're generally comparing

ourselves to one aspect of someone's life. Which is why a kind of close cousin to comparison is is envy. I've never been an envious person. I mean, that's just not a particular quality that I've had. But whenever I have the sense that someone is envious of me, what I really want to say to them is do you want all of it? Or do you just want this

good moment in my career? Or do you just want my long and happy marriage, or do you just want some aspect of whatever you think I have that you want, because there's been a great deal of pain and shock and hard things and complicated things and grief, and so the idea of saying I want that, really would you just completely trade lives because these are what the stakes are. Yeah, it's interesting. I watch TV series on say Netflix or HBO, you know, really high quality ones, and there's been a

couple that have really made me think. And the two that I think about a lot are The Crown and Succession. There's a lot of things to think about those shows that are deeply layered and really amazing shows. But what I think about is I look at in The Crown, I particularly looked at Princess Margaret, and I went by any standard in the world, she's in the top one percent of one percent of one percent of people's wonderful lives, and yet she compares herself to her sister, and thus

she's always losing and it's just heartbreaking to watch. Succession is another example. Those people all have what we think we want money, just the stupid amounts of it, but they're deeply unhappy people. Or you look at someone like Robin Williams, that's so tragic who had so much commercial success, so much critical excess, was widely seen as a genius,

and still couldn't find a way to stay here. And those are really sobering and teachable moments for me, where I go, ah, look, that doesn't matter what you get. If you don't know how to appreciate it, then it's not going to matter. That's so true. Um. You know,

a few years ago, my husband was sick. He was diagnosed with a very serious kind of cancer, and we moved from our home, which is in rural Connecticut, into a borrowed department, which was its own kind of miracle, but a borrowed apartment that friends had in New York City and it was in this building. It was an empty apartment. They lived elsewhere, and they have bought it as an investment. It was just sitting there in a

building full of billionaires. I think it would be safe to say that part of Manhattan is actually called Billionaires Row. And there's this very very skinny, very very very tall building.

My call it the fun You Building because it looks like a middle finger going straight up all the way to the sky, like the New York City skyline is giving heaven the finger, and the reason why I'm mentioning it is, you know, we were in this devastating, terrifying time and we lived in that building for the better part of a year, and every time I walked into

the elevator of this building, I encountered unhappy people. They were very very rich people who were very very unhappy, and who were like looking each other over in the elevator. There was so much like comparison going on or which floor you're getting off on, you know, are you are you on a very very high floor, Are you on the penthouse floor? I mean, it was all penthouses, basically, but I just was so struck by, as I have been many times, none of these things bring us happiness.

Great wealth doesn't bring us happiness. Beauty doesn't bring us happiness. Whatever the thing is huge success, a claim, different kinds of a claim. I think what brings us happiness is purpose and meaning making and love, and those things are really kind of all up to us to some degree, right, I mean, purpose is up to us. Making meaning of whatever life has presented us with is up to us. And how loving we are, maybe not how we are loved to some degree, but how loving we are is

also up to us. Yeah, yeah, And as you were talking about your husband being sick, it also made me think about there's I think it's an old Chinese proverb or Chinese philosopher said it, which is the healthy man wants many things and the sick person wants only one thing. You know, illness has a tendency to sort of really make clear, like if you've got health, that is a lot. That is a lot, because the minute it goes away, nothing else matters. I always think about that super clarif tying.

It's a lesson that we were able to learn and continue to apply to our lives, for which I feel incredibly grateful. My husband recovered. And you know the neighborhoods around hospitals. You know the neighborhood around Mount Sni Hospital in New York City where he was being treated, it's a neighborhood full of It's like several square city blocks that are full of illness, except for the people who were there are having babies. Actually, that is the hospital

where I was born. It's the hospital where I gave birth to my son. It's the hospital where my mother, when she was operated on for cancer, was treated and now I was there as a you know, women in my fifties with my up until then, very healthy, you know, relatively young. You know, we had been living such ordinarily lucky lives. You know Joan Didion calls it ordinary blessings, and you know, bam, we were suddenly in that several square block territory of the unwell and the very unfortunate,

the stricken, and you could just feel that. And this is now three years later. I carry that with me, not as a burden, but really as a feeling of my desire to see at the moment, to be in the moment, to be really awake to the moment, to really think. And it's such a privilege to be able to ask this question, but to think, how do I want to live? What do I want to accomplish? Who do I want to surround myself with? How do I want to be in the world, and how can I

make that happen. So let's change directions here. I want to bring up a line from Signal Fires and allow it to lead us into sort of what a big portion of your work before Signifiers, most recent has been about, which is your podcast Family Secrets and all that, But one of the characters is musing on something and they say silence may have been a mistake. No, silence was definitely a mistake. And so you talk very eloquently about

how damaging secrets are. And that's part of Signal Fiers, and it's a part of your podcast Family Secrets, and part of your book Inheritance. For people who are not up to speed, can you give us the two minute version of what led you into that territory. From the beginning of my writing life, I was writing about secrets. I didn't know why. They were very much a theme of mine. And you know something I've often thought about, you know, theme is sort of a fancy literary term

for obsession, you know. And we don't choose what obsesses us. It chooses us. That's why it's an obsession. And I was writing always about secrets and family is the corrosive power of secrets, why we keep secrets, and different kinds of secrets. But I kept coming back to them, and then in I took a DNA test for no particular

reason at all. It was completely random and recreational. My husband was sending away for one prices have come down over the holidays, that sort of thing and I was incurious about my family history, mostly because I knew it. I knew it cold, I knew everything about it. I came from a family that was very interested in its own history, particularly on my dad's side, and it was a history that I was very invested in. I cared

a great deal about. I was proud of in a certain way, which is his own weird thing, Like, what is there to be proud of in terms of, you know, history or ancestry. It's got nothing to do with us, really. So I took this DNA test, and when it came act, I learned that my dad had not been my biological father, and that I had been the family secret. I was the secret that my parents had both known that my

dad wasn't my biological father. It wasn't an affair. It became crystal clear very quickly that they had used a sperm donor because they had trouble conceiving me. And at that time in history and the history of reproductive medicine, parents were told never tell the child, never tell a soul, never talk about it ever. Again. It doesn't matter. It's not even a secret. It's as if it never happened.

And what we don't know doesn't hurt us, which is just one of the most erroneous, cliched pieces of wisdom that there has ever been, or non wisdom. So I grew up as my parents biological child, except I wasn't a father's biological child. I looked nothing like either of

my parents. I looked nothing like any of my family, and this was something that was commented on all the time when I was growing up, and so on some level, I think I intuited that there was something amiss, that there was something that I couldn't quite piece together, that there was something what it felt like. You know, when you're a child and you feel like something's wrong and you don't know what it is, you tend to blame yourself. And that was the story of my life. It was

hugely formative for me. It ran all the way through my childhood, my teens, in my early twenties. I now feel like some of the rough patches that I went through and some of the rebellion that I really put myself through, stemmed from this thing that was forming me, you know, from the inside out that I was unaware of, but I was, you know, that I intuited. And so when I made that discovery, it was like the lid blew off all of that. It was painful and shocking

and challenging, but it was also enriching, liberating. I remember really early on after making that discovery actually out loud saying to myself, uh, like it made the whole of my childhood and history kind of come into such sharp focus. It was like I was wearing the right prescription glasses for the first time in my life. And it also led me to really understand why secrecy and secrets had been so front and center for me and why I

continued to write about them. Yeah, it's remarkable that secrets who were such a focus and then, as you said, you kind of were the secret. And you know, I found out through your work that what I'm about to describe is not as outlanded as I thought it was. You've heard countless of these stories. But I also, like,

you took a DNA test. I think Ancestry sponsored our show, and so they're like, here's a free test, and so I thought, right, fine, whatever, And you know, I didn't think much of it, and I didn't think that they offer you a choice. Do you want to keep this data private? And I didn't think anything about it. I thought, well, who cares, right, Like, I just wasn't giving it any thought.

And I didn't give it any thought. It took the test that it came back and it said you're German and your English primarily, and I was like, I kind of knew that, you know, carried on well. After a while, I got an email from a woman and she said, I have been looking for my mother, and you know, it appears that we have some matches. I was wondering if there's anybody in your family that you might know about, and I said, well, I'll ask around, but I don't,

you know, I just didn't give any thought. But then I started looking a little bit more closely at the nature of the match, and I was like, this is not a like a third cousin or a second cousin or a cousin. It's saying that this is either a grandparent or a sibling. And I still thought, well, whatever, But then I asked her for a little more detail. She said, well, I was born in New York City in this year, and I went my mom was in

New York City in that year. So after a little while sort of looking at all this I went, well, this is really strange. And so I was like, how do I approach my mother with this? You know? And I tried to do it in the most general like, Mom, I you know, took this DNA test, and you know, there's this woman who thinks that maybe somewhere in our family there might be somewhere like as general and nonchalant

as could be. I didn't have two sentences out of my mouth, and my mom went, that's my daughter, and I went, excuse me. And sure enough, my mom, a year before I was born, was in New York City, got pregnant, had the baby, gave it up for adoption. Her parents came and picked her up and said, we will never talk about this again. And so a year later, my mom is married to a very unsupportive husband and

has me. And it was kind of stunning. I'm a pretty easy going person, so I wasn't like very judgmental or anything. But what it turned out to be is that this woman and my mom have formed a beautiful relationship, and I I so think that something that has plagued my mom for so many years. You know, my mom has had lots of battles with depression and lots of you know, and it's not like that's all gone, but I feel like this thing that was this deep secret for her finally got opened up. Not only did it

get opened up, but it really got healed. And it's been a remarkable sort of thing to have this new sister in my life. And it's really been beautiful. And again, you know, I know you've heard a version of that story, you know, countless times from so many people. This whole DNA testing is just opened up like a It's like the great secret box opener. That's exactly right, And that's a beautiful story, right. I mean, your mom was haunted and plagued by having put up a child for adoption

and not knowing whatever happened to her. One of the things that I've thought about a lot in these last several years is that we're in a moment in time because of these DNA tests and the unintended consequences of you know, what was really something that was done for science and you know, sort of very much billed as recreational. And I mean, I can tell you ancestry dot com

has not sponsored my podcast. You can be sure. You can be sure because there also are a lot of really hard stories and and some stories that are unresolvable for people, which is, you know, where it can get extremely hard and painful. I mean, I've heard stories of people in their eighties who find out that they were adopted and they had never known what are you going to do at that point in terms of meaning making

or purpose or any kind of resolution. But the thing about this period of time that we're living in is that it was unthinkable twenty years ago that you could spit into a vial and said the thing off in the mail for less than a bucks, and it would come back and and and you know, would be the great secret box opener. But twenty years from now it will also be unthinkable because all of these secrets will

have they will all have tumbled out. The idea that anyone could keep this kind of secret will be like something like the cassette tape, or like plastics or you know, a cigarette smoking, or you know, bad for you, bad for you, And that will happen eventually. I mean, I really do think there's this huge course correction going on right now that really does have to do with secrecy, which of course is totally different from privacy and that's

a whole other conversation. But but secrecy, I really think anybody today in saying what we don't know can't hurt us, that's just silly. We now know that what we don't know really cannon does hurt us. But you know, when your mother had her first child, her parents, I'm sure that that was well meaning advice. We're not going to talk about this. It's going to go away. We're not just going to shove it under the rug. We're gonna disappear it. And that was true with my parents too,

completely different story. But when we're just we will never speak of this again. Yep. And my story is very fortunate. It turns out with a happy ending. I can see plenty that don't. A funny part of this is right after I told my other sister my sister I've known, I've had she she went, oh, no, I really feel bad now because she said that she used to say to my mom all the time, like can you give Matt our brother up for adoption? Like it was a

constant theme. She hit my mom on and she was like, I had no idea what sort of torment I might have been causing her? Right right, And amazing that of all the things that she might said, that that was the one she did say. You know, so, yeah, yeah, yeah. I love this idea that you say, that Carl Young talks about secrets is psychric poison. And I heard you say something on another show recently that someone said to you, which is that the problem with secrets is when you

buried them, you bury them alive. That was actually the epigraph of one of my upcoming guests in the next season of Family Secrets, Carmen Rita Wong. Oh, I'm talking to her sometime in the new year. I think, oh, yeah, goody good, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that doesn't surprise me that we would have that kind of overlap. But that was this phrase of hers that I thought was probably the most powerful description of what it is two quote unquote bury a secret. It doesn't die, and it doesn't

stay buried, you know, you bury it alive. So now let's move into signifiers, which I said to you is just a stunningly beautiful book. And I want to start with a paragraph or two that happens very very early in the book. And I don't want to give too much of the plot away, but you can set up to whatever extent you want to set this little paragraph up, or you can just sort of bring it on its own, because I think it stands alone. So however you think

is the best way to go into it. So I guess the way that I would set it up is simply to say that there are three teenagers in a car, and here we are in the head of my fai genio old boy named Theo, who is behind the wheel of the car, and I think I can just read from there there's a girl he wants to impress. Her name is Misty Zimmerman. And if she lives through this night, she will grow up to be a magazine editor, or a high school teacher, or a defense lawyer. She will

be a mother of three, or remain childless. She will die young of ovarian cancer, or live to know her great grandchildren. But these are only a few possible arcs to a life. A handful of shooting stars in the night sky. Change one thing, and everything changes. A tremor here sets off an earthquake there, a fault line deepens, a wire gets tripped. Let's dive into that idea of change one thing and everything changes. What's the significance of

that to you. I think that's also something that I've thought about all my life, that everything we do matters, sometimes greatly and sometimes hardly at all, and we won't know, we won't know until later. And if we were to walk around with consciousness of that, you know, idea that everything we do matters, that every decision that we make, is every choice, every action has consequences or or leads

to the next action or thought. If we lived thinking about that all the time, we would be hiding under our beds and never live our lives. And we would, you know, sort of psychically speaking, like burn to a crisp, you know, just out of that sheer weight of that idea. So we can't live that way all the time on that level. And yet the idea of change one thing and everything changes, that everything that we do matters, can actually really impact the way that we move through life,

the way that we experience life. And in the case of that moment really early on in signal fires, you know, these teenagers, I mean they're teenagers. I mean, no teenager thinks about consequences, I think it's safe to say, including myself as a teenager. And there's the sense of immortality the sense that nothing bad can possibly happen, and then

something does. And you know, these characters spend in some way a great deal of the rest of their lives wishing that they could roll back time to that one moment when they make the choices that they make and sort of begin again, which, of course is one thing we don't get to do. Yeah, that made me think of the poet Mark Nepo, who describes something called the terrible knowledge, which is basically the knowledge that anything can

happen to any of us at any time. It's just terrifying, right, And it made me actually think back to a previous book of Yours, Devotion, and in Devotion you say that the world could be divided into two kinds of people. Right, there's people who are aware of the inherent fragility of life. And you were one of those people at this point you had gone through having when your son was born,

he was really really ill. And so there's these people who have this real intense and intimate closeness with this terrible knowledge. And then you describe there's other people just doesn't seem to occur to them, and they seem like different people, a different species. But then you went on to say, but there was a third way of being. Do you remember that? Do you want me to read it or do you want to sort of talk about it? I do remember it, but I love and I think

about that actually quite a bit. But if you would read that last little bit about the third way of being, that'd be great. Yeah. I didn't know there was a third way of being. Life was unpredictable. Yes, a speeding car, a slip on the ice, a ringing phone, and suddenly everything changes forever. To deny that is to deny life, but to be consumed by it is also to deny life.

The third way, inaccessible to me as I slunk down the halls at that moment in your life, had to do with holding this paradox lightly in one's hands, to think it is true. The speeding car, the slip on the ice, the ringing phone, It is true. And yet here I am listening to my boys sing as we walked down the corridor. Here I am giving him a hug. Here we are together in this our only moment. Yeah, thanks for reading that. I think that that might encapsulate

sort of everything that I believe. And I'm sort of proud of my younger self for having that awareness, because I have it, you know, a hundredfold now. I've thought about that actually a lot during the last few years of the pandemic, because you know, the people that I described in devotion as it never having occurred to them that anything bad could ever happen, We're really you know, some of whom are friends of mine, were really so

completely flattened. I mean, we were all flattened by the pandemic, but they were flattened in a different way. It was almost as if they took it personally or you know, like just the idea that when the unimaginable happens, Like there are always are things that are unimaginable. But when my husband was diagnosed with cancer, the kind of cancer he was diagnosed with, I was like, that's a thing

that wasn't on my list of things. And I mean so much of life is like that, but with the pandemic, I mean, I know people who absolutely imagine something like that coming, you know, for years and years. I have a dear friend, the writer Jim Shepherd, whose work is you know, pretty much all about that kind of imagining. I mean, it's imagining it because he's a fiction writer, but it came as no surprise or you know, months

before the pandemic. I was with a friend of mine, well not months, maybe a month before the pandemic, who was supposed to come to Italy with us to our writer's conference, and she said, you know about this thing out there, right, this virus. And I remember even me thinking, oh, come on, it's gonna be fine. It's so far away, it's not happening here. And I mean even I, who tend to imagine a lot of what is hard to imagine, fell into that kind of um hubris, I guess I

would call it. And so during the pandemic, the people who had the muscles for that period of time that we all found ourselves in and into some degree still are in, were better equipped to not hold it lightly. I mean everything was very heavy, and there was so

much heaviness that was happening during that time. But somehow we're able to have that feeling of this and that, you know, can we hold that there is joy and there's pain, that there is beauty and there is terror to quote Rilka, you know, like at the same time, can we hold that because that is in fact the truth of our lives? Always always, that's the third way, right,

it's to hold both. And this is maybe a little bit of an oversimplification, but I sometimes think of it like I've told the story before about my dog Ralph passing, and you know, he had cancer. He passed younger than he should have. He passed like nine months after my first dog passed, And there was a part of me that started to protest, you know, that started to be like, what's not fair, and it's but I don't really react that way, and I kind of went, well, he's a

living being. Living beans get sick. You know, it happens. So I am incredibly sad, But I don't have a quarrel with the universe over this, right, And I think living with this terrible knowledge in a health the or a helpful way is when we realize that, like, that's the nature of life. Terrible things happen. They happen all the time, and I can't live scared of them all the time. But I don't also have to deny that

that's possible. And when it happens, to not be sort of, as you say, like caught off guard or surprised of course anything when something terrible happens it's always jarring, but I think it is a little less jarring with a particular world view that says, if you're really paying attention to reality, how do you not see that? Yeah, I'm glad you brought up that word fair, you know, fair, unfair? I have, I think for a very long time. You know. For example, I I lost my father when I was

quite young, when he was quite young. I mean I was twenty three and he was sixty four, and that is just it's it's too young. And never once did I think why him? Why in me? Actually I did think why him, I did, but I never had that sense of that's not fair. It's not fair that we didn't have more time together. It's not fair that he didn't get to know me as a grown woman, that he never got to know his grandchild, even when my

baby was sick. I didn't have that particular way of thinking about fairness or unfairness, because one of the things that that leads to is then if that were a way that I thought, I would look at other babies and think, well, why not you? Why couldn't have been you? Why did it have to be? You know? Or you know, look at other people you know, I have friends in my life who are my age with kids who are you know, heading towards being grown people who still have

all their parents, and I've never looked at them. I have felt a pang knowing that there are families out there who have multiple, multiple generations around, you know, they're all day tables, and I don't. But I've never thought that's not fair that I don't have that and that you do, because then we go back to the whole idea of like coveting or envy and all of that is just so useless if we think about what it

is to be here. Every time I'm on a flight that takes off, I mean just yesterday, I was on a flight that was taking off. I do this every time, I say the meta blessing for everybody on the plane. And I'm aware that very few planes crash, but this could be one of them. And it probably won't be, but it could be. And I think that that's really kind of the way that I moved through life is

with that feeling. Yeah, I don't want to spend too much more time here because I want to get to some other parts of the novel, but I do think there is something about learning to really not deny the difficulty of life, but also not be overwhelmed by it, and that, in many ways, you could say, is perhaps the whole of the spiritual quest. And in a lot of ways, you know, I think, is how do I reckon with the difficulties in life but not be broken

by them? Yeah? I think that when I finally arrived at a way to tell this story, which is in this completely sort of a chronological way where I'm moving through time in a more sort of kaleidoscopic way, that is really what I was trying to get at was We're looking at one particular character, say an eleven year old boy, who is you know, in some pain and

is lonely and sad and special and brilliant. And because as the novelist, I get to play god and you know, create this sort of omniscient container for the story, we get to glimpse that low, only special, brilliant boy at other stages of his life, when he's a grown man, or when he's a college student, when he's an esteemed professor many years later, and we get these glimpses, and that makes it tolerable in a way more than tolerable. To be with him as he's going through these harder things.

Except the thing about actually living as opposed to being inside the world of a novel, is that we don't get those glimpses. I would occasionally like them, and I'd like to, you know, just have a word with the future. Can just have a little window shade go up? And or maybe I wouldn't. I don't know. But in the structuring of the book, that's something that I was able to do. That was what allowed me to tell the story.

And I think that that was I mean, if a structure could be spiritual, I think that this structure has a spiritual quality. Yeah, I mean it points to a core idea, which is that I think the bigger perspective that we can take on things, whatever ways we can broaden our perspective, tend to be a way of seeing and dealing with the world that leads to more peace

and wisdom. Right, And in this case, in the book, as a novelist, you have sort of the God's eye view, right, when we can take more of that view in our own lives, whether it be like this thing that's happening right this very minute isn't going to matter in five days, from the very littlest things to the very big things.

You know, that idea of zooming out, at least for me, is one of the core elements of living a life that has some degree of wisdom in it, which is to be able to take that much bigger perspective absolutely, and I think that that's why the sort of ever widening circles of you know, this is what's going on in my life, in this room that I'm in, in this house that I'm in, on this hill that the house is sitting on, in this town, in this community, in this state, in this country, on this continent, in

this world. And I think it's the human condition to always struggle with that. We don't get to walk around feeling that way all the time. I mean, maybe the most enlightened among us maybe do, but I think that

is always the challenge. And I think one of the great great pleasures of writing this book for me was that there is this character who does have that view, and that enabled me to see the world of these characters over the course of the fifty years in which the story takes place, as this very capacious place and time, and you know, the ability to move in and out of their lives in that way, you know, through time. Yeah,

and the book does that. I think it's two core elements, which I'm not saying anything that you don't already know and hasn't already been pointed out by other people have looked at the book. Is the two core elements to me are the idea of sort of interconnectedness, right, and that all time kind of exists all at once, right, or a huge view of time. Both those are much wider perspectives than we normally take. We normally take a

perspective that says I'm concerned about me and mine. This is a view that says, hey, that's much bigger than that, and I'm concerned about this particular moment in time generally, and you sort of break that out too. I'm wondering if maybe we could now move into a piece of writing that does explain some of Waldo's This is the young man who does you know, in many ways talk like an enlightened zen Master. We could see some of

his perspective on the world, and it starts with the sentence. Also, he doesn't really know how to talk about it up through. He wants the conversation that they have together in the car, are every day to go on without end. Also, he doesn't really know how to talk about it. Once Mrs Wolfe was dead, she was no longer in her body. Her body was just a thing, like the discarded carapace of an insect. But she wasn't gone. She had escaped. Within the walls of the playhouse. There was a field

of energy he could almost reach out and touch. No more than that. It was as if the two of them, he and Mrs Wolfe, were enveloped by that field of energy. It wasn't exactly like time stopped. More that time had seemed to expand, so that they were a part of everything that had ever happened or ever would happen. She would never really be gone, this new knowledge, and it felt like knowledge has stayed with him like a superpower. If when we die, we don't just vanish, then there's

nothing to be afraid of. Right, He doesn't know what to call them. Not spirits exactly, not beings, but a barely visible web like those intricate spider webs that glisten when the sun hits them. Those glistening strands form patterns just like constellations. But now he's being put to the test. He wants more time with his mom, a lot more time. He doesn't want her to be a glistening strand part of the invisible pattern. No, he wants her to be at his high school graduation. He wants her to take

him to college. He wants the conversations that they have together in the car every day to go on without end. M I think that's so beautiful, And what I love about it is this idea that we can take this broader and more expansive view of life. We can take this sense that everything's connected, that that all is one, and at the very same time, we can absolutely not

want our mother to be gone. And I just love that paragraph because it calls up to me something that sits kind of at the heart of a lot of the spiritual life. We keep coming back to this. But the idea that the goal of this isn't that we just now float over everything and don't feel anything. It's the both. And yes, there is a bigger and a deeper and inner connection. You know, he doesn't want his mom to go. I don't want my dog Beans, he

who's laying behind me, to go. In a couple of weeks, right, I desperately don't want her to go, and so it feels to me the both and we talked about how do I carry both those things at the same time, not make one more important than the other, but not

lose sight or get stuck in one side or the other. Well, that's the sweet spot, right, That's the place where I don't know if it's paradoxical, it might be, but that's the place in which we are absolutely the most alive, is when we are in holding both of those pieces

of knowledge. And it does feel like knowledge, I think when you're in that sweet spot, the feeling of absolute connection to this body, these loved ones, this specificity, these creatures, and at the same time that sense of the greater vastness and the feeling that it all has always been and will always be. I've started sending a couple of text messages after each podcast listener with positive reminders about what's discussed and invitations to apply the wisdom to your life.

It's free, and listener have told me that these texts really helped to pull them out of autopilot and reconnect them with what's important. When you get a text for me during your day, to day life. It's one more thing that helps you further bridge that gap between what you know and what you do. Positive messages when you need them from me to you. So if you'd like to hear from me a few times a week via text, go to one you feed dot net slash text and

sign up for free. I could stay on this topic for the next four hours because it's so right in my interest, in my heart. But I want to hit a couple other aspects of the book that I thought were really I don't know if I want to use the word beautiful, because this next part is not beautiful, but it's very I would call this part a little bit wrenching. There's a character in the book by the name of Shankman. He's just is called Shankman, and he's

Waldo's dad. And let's say that Shankman is a fairly highly competitive man and sees life in terms of winning and losing, and he's a man's man to a certain degree, right, And Waldo is, as we've just witnessed from that last paragraph, a guy who sees you know, a little boy who sees the world very differently. And you know, in the book, what was so difficult to listen to. Was to hear Shankman trying so hard to be a good father to

Waldo and failing and failing and failing. If I were to put myself in either of those characters shoes, I would put myself in Waldo shoes. And I had a father who was a pretty angry man who I have no doubt loved me and didn't understand me. And so reading that for me it was kind of healing in a way, even though I've had some of those insights, but it was healing to recognize that Shankman, there's a line he says his love for his son is a

vast and forceful thing. Whatsoever threatens Waldo must be destroyed. But given that it is Waldo who seems to be hurting himself, what can he do? And that's just really st una because he wants to love his son and he just can't, and he has to face that over and over and over in himself. When I started Signal Fires, which I actually began a long time ago, and kind of like lost my way, I couldn't figure it out, but I Shankman was a fully blown character in my imagination.

I was the mother of a boy around Waldo's age, who's now, you know, just graduated from college. And I would see Dad's on the sidelines of little league games and hockey games and school functions and stuff, and and moms too, But it was mostly Dad's, this idea of what love can transform into when there's this desire or need. In Shankman's case, he is so profoundly and secure in some way himself that he values more than anything quote unquote normalcy, and he actually can't imagine a life in

which special illness would be a good thing. And Shankman is enormously comparative in his nature. He compares himself to everyone around him and finds himself wanting in some way. And he loves Waldo, and he recognizes that Waldo is different, and he wants to like excise that difference, that special illness, and he's unable to meet Waldo where he is. And to me, I had a lot of compassion for Shankman as the novelist or in some way as the omniscient

rader myself. I loved him, I felt for him. I kept on wishing that he could get out of his own way. Um And to me, he's the tragic character in the novel because he can't, and he recognizes that he can't, and he realizes that he at one point he says, or he thinks, you know, that he's failed at the one thing that you can't fail and kind of do over in life, which is that he's been a lousy father and his son has grown up really to not want to be around him. He's resigned to

that by the end of the book. And I'm it's not really a spoiler. I mean, it's just the way it is. You kind of know it's not gonna go well in that relationship, but Waldo has survived him, which was also to me really key is that it's possible to not be parented well, to not grow up. Mean.

Waldo actually has this whole speech about this, not speech but an inner an inner monologue about this, and in the book, you know, that's possible to grow up in the wrong place, at the wrong time, you know, with the wrong parents, but still be able to hold onto this like one ray of light and like a beam, and hold onto it. And in his case that beam is you know, his across the street neighbor and his

mother who loves him. I heard it said to me once, not that long ago, and it really stayed with me, Like, go where it's warm. This as a piece of advice that I just loved. Go where it's warm, Like just don't go where it's called, don't go where it's sharp. Don't go. I mean to the degree that you have the capacity to make those choices, go where it's warm. And Waldo was ultimately able to do that in his life.

And Shankman did not destroy his son. God knows he did not want to destroy his son, and he did not. But where they end up with each other, nobody's singing Kumbaya at the end of what we see of their relationship. Yeah, I love that little section in the book. You say, Wado is having the rumination it's possible to be born in the wrong house, town, the wrong dad, to be pushed to do the wrong things, but it's possible to

survive all these psychic indignities. I love that phrase, psychic indignities. If you have one or maybe two people who recognize you for who you are, and that is such a true thing, you know. I know that to be true for me. And it's not like I was horrifically abused we mentioned my mom her depression, my dad is sort of depression that showed up as anger and me being sort of a highly sensitive kid. But there came a time where there were a couple of people throughout the years,

and they were primarily school teachers. God bless them, who saw me for who I was, and that was enough, you know. I mean it didn't stop me from a multi year skin into serious addiction, but nonetheless it got me through high school and it gave me something to sort of reference back to. And I just love that idea. And I do think Shankman is is heartbreaking, and I think that all of us have a little Shankman in us. Right.

You can't be a parent for me, I feel like I was constantly pushed up against my limits, up against my ability, you know. I feel like I'm pretty happy with the way I was as a dad, but not entirely, and no one is. And so I think to be a parent is to know that you could do better, or you wish you could do better. You know, I guess that's what it is. You wish you could do better,

but you don't currently have the capacity to. Yeah, the parent child relationship is to its own set of lessons that begin, you know, at the moment of of you know, first meeting one another, all throughout our lives, and Shankman didn't have the tools of self inquiry the well, actually that's not really true. Shankman knows that he's messing up. It's not like he's in denial. He's not oblivious to that.

But he can't change. Yeah, that's the heartbreaking part. He would have been far less tragic if he just hadn't known. But he knows as that's happening. He makes resolution after resolution after resolution himself. I'm not going to yell at Waldo. I'm not gonna yell at Waldo and the next day he's screaming at Waldo. I mean, that's what is just so painful. And I think we all know to some degree what it's like to be like I really want to change, but for whatever reason right now, I can't

seem to. And that's a painful place to be. Yeah, painful, and I think completely relatable and human. I don't think there's anyone among us who has not contended with that about something that's absolutely right. So I think the last thing that we can maybe end on is I told you in the email I sent you after I read your book that my partner Jenny and I listened to it on our drive to Atlanta, and we've driven back and forth from Columbus to Atlanta for six years. Her

mom has been in Atlanta at Alzheimer's. My mom is needed care here, and her mom passed a few weeks ago, which finally I will say, you know, it's always hard and it was a mercy that she went. But your chapter, or I don't remember, it was one chapter of multiple chapter, there's about this character who has Alzheimer's. I was kind of blown away by that you got into the head

of someone who has Alzheimer's to the degree you did. Now, of course we don't actually know if that's what someone who has Alzheimer's is like, but watching from the outside, there was so much of it that seemed like I could totally see, like I see that in her. How did you do that? Did you have that experience in your life of having been around someone at Alzheimer's. Yeah, my mother in law at Alzheimer's, as did a number

of her sisters. Um, so that you know, sort of the specter of Alzheimer's is very much in our family. What I watched over the years was first the confusion like early stages and the almost covering up of it, that very heartbreaking time of the Alzheimer's patient who knows that they have Alzheimer's yes, and is kind of trying

to fake being okay. I think one of the things that I really noticed as my mother in law went on her journey that sounds like it was about as long as your mother in law's, was that she did not forget who she loved. And there was something in this character of Mimi when I did enter her head. I mean, there were a couple of times writing this novel where I really thought can I do this? You know, can I do this? And that was certainly one of them. But she was a character who very much wanted life

to be lovely. It's a family that sort of kept a secret for all these years, never spoke of it again, even with each other, because if we don't speak of it, then maybe we can just had life be lovely and go back to nothing ever happened. And to enter her mind once she sort of lost her ability to control her thoughts, her memory, the way that I thought of it,

time becomes a jumble for her. And so her children, who are grown at the point that she's in the throes of Alzheimer's, are every age they've ever been, and she is everywhere she's ever been. So as she's walking in the snow, you know, on the side of a highway, in her mind, she's looking for her children, which is what I found so incredibly poignant. There's somewhere she she's

misplaced her children. Meanwhile, her children are in their forties, but she's thinking that she's on a beach and that they must be in you know, that little shack over there. And the closer she gets in her memory to a moment where they are at an age where this really difficult, scary, tragic thing happened, the more she's like, oh no, no, don't go there, don't go there, you know, Like she even has that feeling in her own mind where her memory kind of wants to go. But it's the jumble

of it that it's kind of all in there. It's just like sand through an hour glass, like there's nothing to hold onto. I mean, memories not narrative to begin with. I mean, our memories are not narrative. Nobody's memories are narrative. That's why in literature when somebody remember something and it's an entire story, I always feel like, no, that's not

how that's not how our memories work. So that's what I was trying to do, was create this kind of kaleidoscopic sense of the way that she was experiencing both time and and what she was doing. But mostly she knew exactly who she loved, which was something that was very true in my own life and my own experience with my mother in law. Yeah, I would concur I

think Jenny's mom to the very end. I mean, there was a point which she slipped beyond knowing anyone or anything, although you know, we would still talk to her as if she did, you know, and there was still a belief that, you know, Jenny's voice would maybe in some way be comforting to her. But even up to the very end, that was what remained was the love. It

was very clear. And then the other piece of it was, as you described, the thing that I found fascinating was to watch the way that her mind would bring things together that simply don't belong together in the normal reality, whether it be a memory from fifty years ago and a memory of two minutes ago, and they're combined into this new thing, and you're like, I sort of see how she arrived there. It was just fascinating to kind

of watch. The other thing that I found completely fascinating about it was, you know, there's this idea that like, there's a part of our brain that all it does is it basically makes meaning out of things. It basically is the part of us that just says, you know, this is what happened and why. And what I was amazed to watch in her was how it was clear from the outside that she had absolutely no idea why something occurred, but she was instantly and a hundred percent

certain of what had happened and why. And it wasn't that she was lying, but that was not it at all. It was like the brain simply could not tolerate not having an explanation of what happened, so she would grab it one, no matter how crazy it was from the outside, but then defend it to the death and be completely convinced of with certainty. And what I saw in that was we are all doing that all the time, not

to that extent. We might be a little bit more anchored in reality, but that is what we are doing. We are interpreting the world, we are creating a meaning out of it, and we believe it without doubt. I love what you just said, and it actually helped me to make a connection that I hadn't made before. This novel is the combination of not just of all of my work, but really of all of my life experience and all of my spiritual work, and just pretty much

everything is in it. And one of the things that I realized after I discovered that my dad hadn't been my biological father was that I had been putting together pieces of the puzzle of my life and of my family's life, creating narratives. I mean, both on the page and off the page, creating narratives. This is why my dad was sad. This is why my dad was depressed, um, this is why he took pills, this is why this is why my mother was angry. You know, this is

why my parents marriage was the way it was. And the thing that I realized after I made my discovery about what they had been through and the secret that they had kept, is that all of that was true, it just wasn't the whole truth, and that I also had to get comfortable with and truly make peace with the fact that I will never have the whole truth.

You know, when I was writing Inheritance, the book based on that journey, I had to find a place within me that didn't want to tie it all up, you know, or that real is that I couldn't, and that some of the beauty was in not being able to do that. But the desire, the desire to do that was very strong, And I think that with Mimi, probably a big part of what seemed into her internal life for me as a novelist was her desire to find a way to make these pieces fit together, to tell a story that

she could hold on to. Yeah, well, Danny, thank you so much for coming on. I've been looking forward to this one. I loved the book. I could not recommend it higher as a beautiful work of fiction that is a beautiful and philosophical and spiritual and also a great read. I could not wait to finish it. Bravo. That means a lot to me, and I've been looking forward to this conversation to Eric's really good to talk to you again.

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