Because of William

Published Nov 23, 2023, 8:00 AM

Daniel grows up idolizing William, his friend and future brother-in-law. William is adventurous, effervescent and inspiring. But William has other attributes, too—secrets locked inside himself and when they come out, Daniel’s world unravels.

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This episode contains discussion of suicide. Listener discretion is advised.

William was a boy. The way they used to make them what he would call the platonic ideal of a boy building things and breaking them, fixing them back up again. But there were two Williams. One was the man with no name, the William all of us knew. There was another we didn't know, a man who wanted to be named, to be known, the William who lived in his own secret room. The narrow confines of an interior life with space for only one, and a much darker space than I'd ever imagined it would be.

That's Daniel Wallace, author and professor of English at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, reading from his recent memoir This Isn't Going to End well, the true story of a man I thought I knew. Sometimes, in our most impressionable years, a person comes along who changes the course of our lives. We develop a kind of crush on that person and model ourselves after them. Daniels is a story of just such a relationship, one of emulation and unknowability, and finally, the uncovering of a very secret life. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.

I grew up in Birmingham, in Suburbsingham, Homewood at first, and then Mountain Brook. Birmingham is this constellation of neighborhoods and doesn't really feel like one place, but just this collection of places. And my father, when I was in sixth grade, after many false starts, started making money, became very successful at the work he was doing. He was a great salesman. So we moved from Homewood, which is a sweet little neighborhood, to a metrorieskier place called Mountain Brook, and it had everything. It was a vaunted place to live and my mother and father and I lived there with my little sister Barry and my two older sisters, Holly and Rangely. And it was through this mix and mingling of people in ages that was definitely not sequestered. We were all part of this hive. I started growing up.

What was your mother like?

She was a lot of fun. She was for the first few years of my life until I was probably in sixth or seventh grade, not employed, worked at home, and she and my father had a kind of tepid relationship. She was not an admirer I don't think of my father, and they were not always at odds, but they were always sort of dueling with each other, and there was this shimmering hostility and competition that sometimes would boil over. But she was really affectionate and did anything, almost anything that we asked of her, very very supportive, and was there in the beginning in my early life a lot more often then my dad was. He had to travel so much for his business that he was gone in a way that made his return to the house feel as if he were a border. We established this routine while he was gone, and if he was gone, you know, eighteen nineteen days out of the month, we would have our own little routines which he would interrupt when he would get back. And so he felt that, I think, and we felt his presence too, as being something of an imposition on the freedoms that my mother allowed us to have, as much as we wanted to believe that it was this kind of ideal Kennedy esque sort of family, which is, you know how we would imagine ourselves being, you know, smarter, better looking. Whatever it is that we wanted to believe about ourselves wasn't true. When my dad found his success, he became the person that he wanted to become because he was so so ambitious and so hard working. He sort of filled his own shoes and saw me, I think, as the next chapter. He never had the success that he needed in order to see me in his sights as a potential follow up to who he was. So one we moved from Homewood, I left public school and went to the private school a couple of miles away. He and my mother actually were no happier with his success. She wasn't really supportive, I believe it or not. She had said to him that she didn't want him to make more than twenty thousand dollars a year because if he did, he would become insufferable. So I was in this position of being in this private school beginning in sixth grade, wearing ties every day, and not really in touch with any sense of myself. I tend to think of these years leading up to the seventh grade as this continual, almost fetal evolution that I am still growing, that I haven't assumed a real self yet, and that's when I met William. So I came home from school and was standing at the back door in the kitchen looking out, and the perspective was at the roof of the house where we lived, in addition to the house where we lived, which is my parents' bedroom, and it was a flat surface with the rest of the house was not And on the edge of that roof, looking down twenty five feet or so to the pool below, was William. He was cut off, jeans, nothing else, spotlighted in the sun, his long golden hair draping over his shoulders. I remember it as being this moment of a heightened reality, kind of a movie moment in a way that just wasn't the kind of experience that I usually had in my life. He was about to jump, and that in and of itself, this idea of this potential act that was about to take place, was so antithetical to my own experience as a boy in the world, which was illustrated by me at the back door in the air conditioning with my tie on, looking at an almost naked man about to jump off the roof. And he did that. He dove off the roof into the pool and lived. It wasn't clear to me whether that was going to be how this all turned out, but he did it. He got out of the pool, climbed the house again, which was no easy feet, walked across the hot tar to my parent bedroom and jumped off again.

And your parents, they had removed a diving board from the pool, right right. This was a pool that was not meant to be dived into in any way, much less from twenty five feet above in the roof exactly.

And that was another aspect of my life which was choreographed. My mother lived in a very cautious kind of fear that something terrible was going to happen to her trol and so she choreographed, tried to choreograph our life so that chances for harm were diminished. And one of the ways that she did that was by removing the diving board, which again was just maybe two feet above the water. But before we could even get in the pool, she had that removed. So this was the life that I understood is being safe and sane. And then here comes William jumping off the roof ten and a half times higher than I was allowed to go.

Well, this is the first time Daniel is really seeing William up close, spotlet by the sun. He's not a total stranger. Daniel knows him sort of. He knows of him as a ghostly presence who's dating his older sister Holly. Daniel has seen them leave together, come back together, but that's been about it until now. On this day, in this movie moment, he is captivated, spellbound in a way that will continue for many years to come.

After that, I saw him more and more. He was would be in the kitchen when I got home from school with Holly and a couple of their friends, or I would see him drive up on his motorcycle. He had a look that is hard to pull off, and it was at once kind of poetic and tough. I compare him to this a commingling or confluence of all these different ideas of maleness which abounded back then and I guess still do in a lot of ways. But there was this Shacob varas James Dean Himmingway kind of feeling to him that was attractive in part because he wasn't asking you to pay attention to him. He wasn't the kind of person who was trying to get attention, as hard as that maybe to believe by how I'm describing him. He was very quiet and was not the first person to walk in a room, maybe the last. Because when he did say something, it was smart, it was important, it was usually always right, and he didn't need to be loud, and that, to me, not being allowed person myself, was phenomenally attractive. That you could have this presence without turning up the volume. So he would come over and eventually, the way that kind of a sidekick does, I'd hang around with them until they told me that that was enough, and later as they were getting more and more serious. It was really important for Holly to have William accepted by my father, who, as any father would in what is this now eighteen seventy three, when his daughter brings home a long hair hippy on her motorcycle, it's not your first choice for a mate. So she would have him do tasks around the house that none of us could do. He would build things for us, he would fix things for us.

If something needs fixing in Daniel's family, they either hire somebody to do it or it doesn't get done at all. So the fact that William is handy and resourceful adds to his particular brand of magic and allure. Daniel has carved out his own special place in the basement of his family's home that he thinks of as his secret room. It's not a secret in the sense that people don't know it exists. They do, but it is secret in the sense that it becomes a place for Daniel to call his own, his space, to keep secrets and to live his adolescent life. At one point, he decides he wants a water bit in his secret room. I mean, who wouldn't. His mom actually says okay and gets him one. But of course, what a better tricky and perhaps cooler in theory than practice. The bed slashes all around and is uncomfortable. But one day William comes to pay Daniel a visit in a secret room, and William notices the waterbed has no frame, a crucial detail missing. So he steps in and saves the day.

And that is perfect illustration of who he was, contrasting with who I was. I am the kind of person who says I'm going to get a waterbed. They're cool, and I'll get a big plastic bag and fill it full of water without reading the other side. Of the directions, which is you need a frame otherwise you're going to feel like you're in the middle of the Atlantic and a typhoon. So William knows these things. He knows what's necessary to make things work. I think probably that is if there was one way to sum him up that with him, he knew how things work and he knew how to make them work. So he measured, got the wood, brought it back. He brought all the hammers, the tools that saws, everything that he needed. I watched as he assembled it and handed him nails, whatever he needed. But again I was passive in the background while he was building this beautiful frame for my waterbed. William and Holly Day had taken me to see my first rock and roll concert I was thirteen. Up until that point in my life was the Apex. The Apergy did not get much better than that. To be with these two incredibly cool people that made me feel completely bulletproof. There was nobody in the world who was cooler, and therefore I was cool too, when the fact is I was really just running their fumes. But the concert itself was wild. It was else Cooper who decapitated baby heads on stage and hung himself on stage and walked around on stage with this bowl constrictor on his shoulders around his neck. It makes sense in that respect that later I would want a Boa Constrictor of my own. I wonder how many Boa Constrictors Alice Cooper actually sold, But you know, I mean he kids that bowl constrictor's because of Alice Cooper. But I was one of them. And I asked my mother if I could have a Boa constrictor, and she said, of course not. Snakes were one pass that she would not go down. But I had my secret room, so I had a place to keep my secret snake. And Holly and William and I went shopping. They were in on it. I got a bowl Constrictor. I brought it home in this little aerated box, and William built this beautiful terrarium for I'm shocked Off, as I named him, because I was reading Slaughterhouse live by for Bonnigut and schlucked Off didn't work out in the and for whatever reason, my snake would not eat the mice that I gave him, So eventually, of course I got tired of the snake and gave him to William. I wouldn't be surprised if that was his goal all along, because he knew me, he knew the wallaces, our family, and we didn't have a ton of staying power. So after he built the frame for the waterbed, and after he built the terrarium for the bowl constrictor, I was a co worker with a friend of mine in high school who had a family business selling pot. His cousins had done it, and every generation of cousins had sort of passed it on to the next, and it was his turn. He would bring the pot over to my room, my secret room, where it was safe for us to clean it, get the stems and seeds out, bag it up into ounces or lids, as we called them then. I don't know if anybody calls them that now, but he would leave the stems and seeds in a hefty bag under my bed because there was always something left behind. There was always something left on those stems that you could in dire, dry times, you could sort of salvage enough to throw a joint. And William would sometimes be in those dire situations himself, and so he came down to my secret room occasionally and he would say, what what's in the bag, And I knew even then that he would not be there chatting with me were it not for this hefty bag I had underneath my bed of stems and seeds. It didn't bother me. I think I knew enough to realize that I was not going to be as buddy the way that people his age for his buddy. So whatever I could do to get him into my life, it was fine. I was you know, I would definitely bribe somebody if it meant getting him to spend more time with me. So while I had a nice bag of stems and seats, he would visit. He made me a pipe. It's beautiful, beautiful, precious pipe out of a jina tile where he had Again, this is just a way that a lovely minor illustration of his ability to create eight things out of the world, which is, he drilled a hole in the side of a jina tile, carved out a bowl in the top, and got a little top of a coat can, the pop top of a metal can for the carburetor on top, so in you know, tacit trade. One day he gave me this pipe and I still have it, and that's fifty years.

I guess where do you keep it?

I have it up in my office and the top drawer to the left, I've got it up there with my glass eyes, which I also collect. I guess that's another story. But I've got, you know, little valuables in this drawer, and that's right there when I'm working. We went to see Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns they were called, and one was just fulve dollars for a few dollars more and the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. And we were in the theater by ourselves, nobody else was there. Of course, he was wearing his sunglasses he always wore sunglasses, even inside, and his leather jacket which had all these lovely pockets and them suitable for bringing beer into the theater. First beer I had was watching Clint Easwood in the Green Springs for Theater in Birmingham, Alabama, when I was fourteen or so. With William I love the movies, and the character of Clint Eastwood in those movies, those early movies that he made were eerily like who I later saw William as this really strong but detached force of not necessarily good but not definitely not evil, somebody who was so quiet sometimes as Clint Eastwood was in these movies that his character was called the Man with No Name.

Tell me a bit about Holly, you know, there's so much about Holly and William. But Holly as she was as your much older sister. Was she cool on her own? Were they like cool squared together or did his magic fairy dust sort of wrap off on her or did they each have that?

Oh no, they each had it, one without the other. It's hard to imagine. Actually, he was perfect for her in many ways, but she was more perfect for him. She was the person who could enter a room and every head return. She was beautiful, She was sharp and funny and fearless, and she would say anything, and she would answer any question you asked her. The more intimate, the better. There's nothing that was off limits. And William, he would fade back behind her. His nature was not to be a front person anyway. So she did that. She was able to go into a room and by the time he got into the room behind her, she would have already made friends and something he didn't have to do. The vital never known any more body more vital or open to take a chance in life. So yeah, she definitely brought her own bag of tricks.

We'll be right back. When Holly is twenty one, a terrifying thing happens to her physically. Daniel is only fourteen at the time. After a series of tests, Holly receives diagnosis that will change the course of her whole life and William's two.

It wasn't clear what was going on at first, because she actually woke up one morning and couldn't move. She was like ossified. She had been at school, but she was at home at the time and was in my room and could not be moved from the room. And we finally discovered what it was, a rumator arthritis, which at the time there was nothing you could do for it. You could ameliorate it with these gold shots and other treatments. It was just totally pernicious and a disease which beats you up, or it used to do that every joint in her body. So William around the same time, a little bit before this actually, but in the same era, had become a kayaker. He was always an outdoorsman. He loved camping, he loved being in nature, mountain climbing, fishing. He was an eagle scout, of course, and so he knew everything about knots. He knew plant jugit eat, and he loved this solo adventure that kayaking, wise and canoeing, and the two of them would go kayaking together. She was out on the river as much as he was, but this disease of course, made that impossible. She couldn't do that anymore. Her life in every way was changed. She had to make other plans. William, also being who he was, he had an idea about what his life was going to look like, which was one of being outside of doing boy things with his girl. And there was this moment where we were all sure that he was going to leave because she was not what he had in mind for his life. And they were still young. If she was twenty one he was twenty two. He could have easily gone off to school and just let things sort of cool off. But he doubled down and started taking care of her, started allowing her to have the kind of life that appeared to be lost.

After the magical high school years of being Holly and William's sidekick, Daniel goes off to study at Emory, where he spends his first two years of college. When he's there, William and Holly moved to Chapel Hill in North Carolina. Daniel ends up moving to Chapel Hill as well and finishes his final two years of college at UNC.

They moved to Chapel Hill so that Holly could go to graduate school in political science, and for the first two years I lived in a cinder block house where graduate students lived. But then, through the large ass of my father, who was really devastated by what had happened to Holly and this ongoing deterioration of her body and the way that her life was being made smaller and smaller, paid for a house to be built by William So. William designed and built a house on twenty acres of land out in the country, down the trees, removed all the copperheads. My hand didn't kill any of them. He designed it so that it would be the perfect place to what they call now aging in place. It's the perfect place for somebody whose body was basically going to betray them to live. Everything is on one story, totally accessible well if there was a pool, hot tub. Once you got in, it was this joyous, art filled, weird different world. They lived in their art. They both made things. Holly was be a wonderful arts herself. By this time, though, William had actually discovered what his path in life was going to be, which was as an artist on the river. He's always drawn. He was always a cartoonist, a playful cartoonist, all through high school and into his truncated college years, but he had never been able to harness that into any way to make a living. And what he discovered is that he could kiak these rivers and understand them in this holistic way and draw them so that you could know what to do when you got to a bend in the river. You knew how to good around a rock, you knew where the dangerous rapids were, where the takeouts were. And along with the maps, there were this little narrative of characters that he would draw, so they were instructive and funny at the same time. He was drawing these maps and traveling and taking Holly with him to every river in North Carolina and Tennessee and drawing every single one of them.

And he becomes over a pretty short period of time, once he discovers exactly what it is that he is meant to do and how to harness it. He's found the perfect subject for his unique skills and passions, and sort of a subculture seems to kind of spring up around his art in some way.

Yes, isn't that rare too. It's such an accident sometimes that you fall into the thing that you are supposed to do or the thing that you're supposed to be. And William was able to bring his love of outdoors of the river, of kayaking with his love of art of cartooning, and they met in a way that took William into a completely different zone. He did become a cult hero in the adrenaline sports world. He became this mysterious artist in the Whitewater culture, which back then was predominantly macho and male. He's hewed that in his books. His first book was a compilation of his maps. Then he did a book of cartoons that were about reflecting on what the culture of the Whitewater world really was. And the next ten years he published ten books and became iconic and still is remarkably, even though it's been so long since he had published a book on anything happy to do with with Whitewater. Yeah, he had really found a way to make the life that if he had the ability to, he would have created that is, he'd created the life that he only could imagine, that that habit. He seemed to have it.

All really in this life, in this home on twenty acres that he built himself, where he and Holly were doing their art. There's also this menagerie of animals that they have with them, right.

Right Without animals, who wouldn't feel alive, there are always animals around. They of course had dogs, cats, They had snakes, obviously not the Bowlken stricture anymore, but William had a couple of copperheads. They had pigs, two pot bellied pigs, Sherman and Harold. They were rabbits. There were turtles. There really was a kind of an Edenic menagerie of animals they had, And occasionally they would take a blanket out into the banks of this little river that ran through the back of their yard and have a picnic with all their animals. Holly said that was the highlight.

William had another highlight, extreme adrenaline sports, river running, mountain climbing, mountain biking, all bringing him to the edge of death. At one point, he tells Daniel he considers this edging up to death as a healthy way to truly feel alive. One day in two thousand and one, he calls Daniel and tells him to go over to the house to be with Holly. He won't be there and makes up an excuse about why he doesn't want Holly to be alone. This is the day William dies by suicide.

What's really unique about suicide or knowing somebody who actually does take their own life. It changes everything that happened before it. Do you have a different perspective on it? When somebody chooses to end their life that way, you say, oh, that's why he was so quiet, or oh that's why I didn't see him for a week. You know, things that wouldn't necessarily have seen significant suddenly become significant. So after William took his own life, you immediately start revising your life in light of that, trying to make sense of it. At the same time, it is a shock. There's nobody that I've spoken to, and I did a lot of research talking to folks in his life. No one saw him as a person who would do this, So for a long time it was a mystery, and it was even a mystery to my sister Holly Widow now who knew him better than anybody else. She lived for another ten years after he died, and when she died, and her death of course was related to room to arthritis and a lot of other autoimmune diseases that she had. We were cleaning out her house, my wife and i'm and I found in the back of a closet in her home two big boxes of journals that turned out to be William's journals. I showed them to everybody. I said, look look what I found. And we decided together that it wasn't our business. Whatever was in these journals, whatever William wrote, there were kids, and we should leave it be and put them in the stea dumpster where so much stuff was going. So I agreed, and I took the journals outside and on the way to the dimpsty dumpster, took a detour to the trunk of my car and put them in the trunk without telling anybody, and took them home and put them at a bookcase. Eventually I told Laura, my wife, that they were there, but didn't look at them. I felt like, these are things that should not be disposed of. He was a writer, he was an artist. These are books by a published author. But I was also a writer myself, and it was important for me to understand this person, this man who had been so integral to the choices that I'd made in the world. He was so integral in that my father sent me to go work for him in Japan for two years. I was twenty one to twenty three. I didn't want to turn down an opportunity to live incredible country, and I went without any strings attached. I said I would go there live and work, but it didn't mean that I was going to go into his business with him. And he said that's fine, just try it out. And after two years he said, well, now there are strings, and I need to know whether you were going to come into the business or not. My eventual decision was no, of course, I'm not going to do it. The only reason I could have made that decision was because of William. If I had an idea of what the life of an artist should be, the only way that I would know what that looked like was because of William. I did not want to be William because I never could be William. I knew that from the get go. You know, I did not have his No, how I did not have his strength. I didn't have most of the virtues that I saw in him. But he was a type of person who lived on the fringes, outside of the mainstream, who made his own life. He was a self made man, and he did it through his art, and that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to make myself through arc. But if you don't have that person, if you don't have that example in your life, it's difficult. It's not impossible, but it's just much more difficult to come up with it on your own.

We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. William's journals sit on Daniel's bookshelves for two years before he decid to read them.

I thought about them all the time. They were in this old antigue bookcase with glass doors, and I could see them every time I walked to my office. They were there, and I was well aware that they were there. It was crossing the rubicon. I didn't know if we weren't right in the beginning and our family decision that we'd made to get rid of them, because I think there's a real arguments be made that they're not my business, that they're not anybody's business, that they were his private journals. How can you do that? How can you broadcast or read at the time, just read the private thoughts of somebody else who didn't share them with you on his own. And what happened was it was a parallel experience that really led me to do it. Is after Holly died, and as I experienced so inanimately with her her last ten years, which were terrible, I started having a shift in my feelings toward William. I hated him for leaving Holly, for leaving Holly, Yeah, for doing this to Holly. And of course I mean I missed him terribly, But it wasn't my life that was dependent upon him the way that hers was. He was her other half. He allowed her to live in the world. You have a really big life in the world. And when he died, that died, and then she lost everything.

When you actually did, like take that leap and open that first journal, was it coming from that rage or was it coming from the kind of profound need to solve this mystery, this conundrum, this not just of William, but of yourself as well.

When I was finally able to get them out of the bookcase and start reading them, I was tired of hating him, and I wanted to understand what had happened. And I didn't know what was in the journals, but there were a lot of them, and he was brilliant, and he was a great writer, and I knew that there was something there. And sure enough, as soon as I opened the very first one, it was there, from the very first page, that he had been thinking considering taking his own life since he was twenty five years old. It could have happened before this, and I missed some of the earlier journals, but from the very first page, this is what he's talking about, a suicidal ideation, and this sense of his place in the world as being so tentative and fragile, as if he were a stranger in a strange land, so much so that he created self consciously created the person that we've been talking about, this capable, brilliant man. Who is that person that you would want with you if your plane goes down in the Amazon and all you have is a piece of gum and a half piece of string and he can somehow get you out of that. He's the guy that you want with you. He had created this very real persona. I mean, it wasn't false. You can't pretend to build a house. You can't pretend to be an artist. You either are one or you're not. He was one. These are the things that he really did in the world. But it was a very very willful creation of this secondary personality or person that allowed the other part of him to be completely perfectly shrouded.

Yeah. I mean, there's this moment where he writes the only place in all of the journals and all in caps in nineteen ninety five, this entry, I must not let them see who I really am exactly.

And then after that he says they couldn't handle the real meed, which was astounding to read, because the truth was he was the only person that couldn't handle the real him. We could have handled him, for sure. But again it's this old story that we struggle with, which is that if I show you who I really am, you will not love me. You will not like me anymore. You like me because I've created this idea which you're attracted to. But if you actually sell the real need, you know, you wouldn't give me the time of day. And so he was that person, but in a very sophisticated and on another plane, an exaggerated kind of invention of self that I don't know anyone else who had done what he did, perfected the second self as well as he did, and by doing good, what's remarkable about William is that the second self he created was so good. It was great, you know, he was great, but it ended up being the reason why I couldn't live anymore.

Do you think that that second self, that there were a periods of time in his life where that second self did feel like the real William to William or was it always something that he worked to, you know, sort of like the deepest cover of who he felt he really was, as outlined in his journals.

I don't think that he was ever able to escape that, because that was him, that was as real a part of him as the self that we all knew. I never have liked this idea that when you talk about somebody like William as having the interior unseen persons the real William. I don't see that as being the case. I think that they were both real. But because of that, there was no way that he was going to be able to on his own separate the two. So we can't live like that. It's just unsustainable. Something is going to give. And when you wake up every morning and have to make a decision, as I feel like he did, whether today was going to be the day he was going to take his own life or live, and then decide to live as he did for decades. It was a decision that he had to make every day. That cannot sustain itself.

Daniel describes the journals as the longest suicide note in the history of the world. But there's more. There's an envelope that is unlike anything Daniel has ever held in his hands. On the front of the envelope, in Holly's handwriting, is the phrase William's intense self hatred. It's clear that Holly opened and read the contents of this envelope shortly after William's death.

Yes, she read the envelope just a few weeks after he died, and clearly had also read all the journals. But the envelope was different. It was separate from the journals. It was all by itself, and the envelope itself was taped shut, and in the tape were three of hairs from her head that she had taped there. And I thought about it a lot. I don't know why she did that, why she taped her hair on there. It's one of those things that private eyes do or to discover whether anybody got into something. You know, the hair is broken, the seal is broken. So I would not break that seal. I could not open that envelope even after I'd read the rest of the journals. But I knew that I was going to read it one day, and I couldn't at the same time break that seal that had Hi's sister's hair in it. So I did this kind of a cheat maneuver where I took a razor blade and sliced the top the side of the envelope open, so that you couldn't tell that it had been opened. And if Holly, Say, came back to life and looked at the envelope, she wouldn't necessarily know by looking that I had gotten into it. Said, this is one of those weird choices that a person makes that essentially doesn't make any sense, but it seems to make sense. And still I still feel like if I had to do it again, I would definitely do the same thing. I would not break that seal, and I haven't broken that seal, but sliced open the top of the envelope and got the three pages line paper from a notebook in which William had written everything that he was most ashamed of in his life. It was a list of things that he had done, but also things that had been done to him. And it was a key. It was a key to who had made him, maybe not entirely, but defined for me the moment that his life became intenable. When William was a boy, he had bright red hair his mother cut into a bowl cut. He was very, very skinny. He had white skin, really white, with freckles. He wore coke bottle glasses. He had terrible eye sight, and he was the kid that was really the punching bag, right, and his parents never came to his aide, apparently, you know, they never put a stop to it. They never helped him. And he could have been like that, you know, a helpless character who was brutalized. But he didn't stay that way. He got into the Scouts, got into the boy Scouts, and he found this is a place where he really excelled doing things on his own solo time, not you know, life saving techniques, how to get it around in the woods, how to build things. This was a world where he was gaining power, He was coming into another self, a bigger and better William than he was before. And then he is abused, sexually abused by his hero a counselor that they were on a camping trip with. And that's all William says about it. He doesn't go into detail about the before for the after. He just goes on to another humiliating moment in his life.

And all of the other humiliations are basically your garden variety humiliations that everybody walks around with who's been on the planet for any length of time. The sense of private shame being that which you can't speak about because you're afraid of being shunned. But that really is, in fact no big deal as opposed to this piece of information, which is a whole different holoax.

It's the only thing that is done to him in this list of shame, which is not really a very scary list, it is a very human list. But this one thing that was done to him is included with him stealing his grandfather's medals from World War two, you know, and having read the journals and having been writing about it for years. I realized that his path to this other William was destroyed, then that he was not going to become a full fledged William. There was no path that way.

So did that go a long way for you to understand, you know, to the degree forensically that you can, you know after the fact, to understand more of what made William William.

Yes, if everyone who had lost someone by suicide had the opportunity to do what I had been able to do reading his journals, families would feel differently about everything. Most people who do this, who die in this way, die mysteriously. Even people who leave notes, they leave more questions than answers behind. I had a thousand pages of journals to read and to understand William, and all of this anger that I had for him toward him, and for a time, this overwhelming hatred, all that diminished. And when you can really understand somebody, you can't not forget them. Understanding his life changed my life.

And I would imagine since Holly had also clearly had read the List of Shame and never spoke about it from the time that she would have read that until the time that she died, that she must have also had some greater sense of what made William William.

Yes, she did. I don't think that for her it was enough. Sometimes understanding it's not enough, and I think that forgiveness is possible, but her sense of being not just abandoned but culpable, she felt in some ways for the choice that he made, that she became too much for him. Perhaps that's really really hard to let go of.

You talk about the nature of influence and the profound influence that this man, your brother in law, William, had in shaping your life, so much of your life now more than ten years since Holly's death and more than twenty years since William's Where does that sit with you?

This book is kind of a mystery story, right. It's trying to figure out what happened with William, what led him to do what he did, And through the course of that, of my reading the journals and writing and talking to people, I try to come to an answer of a kind. But the other mystery is how all of us become who we are, and this me that I've become is its own mystery story. But through writing this book, Through writing this book, which initially was all about William, it really wasn't about much about me at all. In the early drafts, I was able to understand not just myself, but also what the nature of influence is, or what I think it is, and how in the same way that I didn't want to become William, I wanted to become like William. I wanted to become my version of William. I was able to take the bravery that he had in his own life, but not take it to a river. You know, I could do it on the page. I had the ability to not be overwhelmed and frightened by the idea of leaving behind something like my father's business, which would have been the logical choice for me to make, and it would have been, you know, financially the better choice. But we're all little Frankenstein monsters, you know, we're all made of different parts of different people. I am and for that, you know, I have so many people to think because it's not just one person to so many people to think. But William and to the degree that he is an influence in my life, I didn't really fully understand until I wrote about it.

Here's Daniel reading one more passage from his probing revolutory memoir.

Without William I wouldn't be who I am, but I am not him, which is a blessing. Without William, I would be something wholly different, possibly unrecognizable, a distant relative of myself, writing invoices instead of novels. And though I can't imagine what my life would be like if I weren't a writer, being one is in a way, not like living at all on a dark and stormy night. A writer arrives at a way station between experience and understanding and really never leaves it. But writing is better than living in one way. At least, there are an infinite number of opportunities to correct your worst mistakes.

Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zacour is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Family Secrets

Family Secrets. We all have them. And while the discovery of family secrets can initially be terrify 
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