Explicit

Burning It Down

Published Nov 5, 2020, 2:00 PM

Nick Flynn was 7 years old when his house burned down. The official story, the one everyone laughed about, was that raccoons had knocked over the family’s Hibachi grill and set the house on fire. Decades later, Nick learned that’s not what happened at all—and started to understand the depth of his mother’s desperation.

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Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Warning. This episode contains discussions of suicide. Listener discussion is advised. If you are a loved one is struggling with suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at three. When I tell my daughter about the fire, she looks at the sun. I won't tell her that my mother, her grandmother, said it, just as when she asked how she died, I won't tell her about the gun. I'll say simply, she had a bad heart. This is the only jar I'll offer. If you're reading this now, I'm sorry I lied to you. You're only seven. I didn't want you to know, before you had even fully landed on this planet a grandmother had chosen to leave it. I didn't want you to know that it was an option, it was something in our blood. I didn't want you to know that at one when I was your age, she might considered, with one match to suit be fold me us everything back into the universe, just as I didn't want you to know at that moment that I too had considered leaving. That's Nick Flynn, poet, memoirist, teacher, and author of the recent memoir This is the night our house will catch fire. Nick's story is like an intricate piece of origami, secrets folded into secrets, folded into secrets, until finally, over the course of a lifetime, a shape emerges. It's tough and shocking and ultimately beautiful. This is one man's journey to assemble the shards of memory into something whole and coherent, something he can live with. 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. Tell me about the landscape of your childhood. I grew up in a small town in New England, in Massachusetts on the coast. For beautiful, I mean I can see that I knew it was beautiful, then I can still see it's beautiful, although I don't go back very much. So. The ocean was a big part of the Atlantic Ocean, and uh the beach and even more specifically, salt marsh that the sort of body is landform that separated the ocean from the mainland. I spent a lot of time in the salt marshes, and another part of the landscape was the woods behind my grandmother's house. Those are sort of the main places. It was a small town. It was a small town. It didn't you know one street town called the center town, the harbor, a lot of fishing boats in it. Um. Yeah, I spent a lot of time in the harbor. So you just went back and forth down the one street. And your family had deep roots in this town, right, Yeah, deep roots. Yeah, it's funny when you say that, because I don't think of them. There was a deep because we felt like like interlopers or that we didn't belong there in some way. I think as my mother broke away from her family in some way, and we dropped several class notches from her being raised probably upper class down to like very working class poor by the time I came along. But yeah, I know that her father and grandfather at least grew up in the town or had roots in the town. And then my father's also his father grandfather, so I know it goes back at least that far, you know, at least two or three generations. So tell me about the mother of your childhood. Describe her for me what she was like. By the time she was twenty, she had two kids, I was a second child after you know, probably six months after I was born, she left my father, which is a good thing, a necessary thing, and then she was on her own. Really, she had this wealthy father, but she didn't take any help or get any help from him. She was kind of on her own. But she stayed in the same town that she grew up in and well that at least the grandfather wasn't and her mother, I think mostly just two, so she does some childcare. Like we often stayed at her mother's house, at my grandmother's house. Because my mother got three jobs, you know, three lousy jobs, as Philippine would say. She worked at a making donuts at the supermarket, and she worked waiting tables and restaurants, and eventually she got her more secure job, which was a bank teller, and that gave us health insurance. So she was young. She was very young and beautiful and vivacious and fun, and she had a series of boyfriends growing up. She had these, you know, men that would sort of be in our life, and they'd usually be in a life for like maybe a year or so, or maybe a little bit longer, and you know, I got to know each of these guys, and the guys that she went with were for the most part kind of great guys, um gentle. For the most part, that wasn't like violence being brought into the house. And for the most part, I say there was something. Yeah, what was the reason behind the riffed with her father with your grandfather? Well, you know, my mother married my father, or got pregnant by my father. She was probably seventeen and he was probably twenty seven, and he was pretty clearly you know, for my grandfather to see he was maybe not the right guy. He was on his way to pretty serious alcoholism. He didn't really have a job. He just sort of drifted around. One of the things that he called himself a writer, which became a point of contention in my family. When I started to call myself a writer, it wasn't like a sign of something noble to do, so it sort of met you are disreputable. I think it was mostly that, and mostly that she sort of and she was rebellious when she was young. She was rebellious I think because the house she grew up in was there was a lot of alcohol. There was a lot of alcoholism. Her mother and her father were both alcoholics. And even if they had money, so there wasn't the consequences that come with alcoholism, you know, certain consequences, But at a certain point, I think by the time she was like fifteen or so, she was just really rebellious and we kept getting kicked out of schools, out of private schools, and it was just kind of a little bit wild, and I think that he they didn't have the tools as parents to deal with the young woman and their pardon what they were doing to adding to her her struggles. You know. It's interesting though, because she does leave your father, and so if he's the problem was sort of the last straw, then that's gone, but her relationship with them never really improves. Yeah, there was also I think by the time she was with my father, around the same time my grandparents got divorced, and so there was the grandmother who was Irish, the grandfather who was you know, waspy English. He was the one who had the money, and the grandmother, who is the one who also helped raise us. She didn't have much money then once they got divorced, and so I think from the waspy side, it's a little incomprehensible to some of my friends, and they just there's a thing about like not supporting the children, like they have to make it on their own, that they have to prove themselves, or you know, not even to the point of just offering her an education. You know, like I would think that you would think she's twenty years old, just two kids, like you just stepped in and say that we want to put you through college or something, just do something that would basically set her on the right track. They just didn't do that. I don't It's a little bit incomprehensible to me. My grandfather in some ways was the strange in that way, Like I think he had a strange relationship to money. He inherited his money and he just went through it like in his life. He sort of was nominally a businessman, but he just kind of spent the money that he had, and I think he felt like he hadn't earned it and so maybe his kids should earn it. It's really hard for me to say, tell me a little bit about your father. Well he was I didn't know him growing up at all. He left when I was six months old, or we left him. And the stories I heard you just tell there was bad blood, like if you brought him up. And I began getting letters from him when I was fifteen or so, fourteen or fifteen, and he was in federal prison at that point he'd gone to jail, but at this point he was in federal prison for passing bad checks, robbing banks with these bad checks across state lines. Was federal. And he began writing me letters and the letters were, you know, confusing, and my mother would give me the letters, but she was given some resentment like, you know, your father's in prison, did this thing. Um, it was sort of making a connection. But he's very um. You know, if he had to diagnose him, probably know, narcissism would probably be high on the on the list. He was an alcoholic but also narcissistic. And so he really just talked about himself in the letters, like he didn't seem like he was really that interested in me my life, and he was just sort of go on about himself, you know. So the letters stopped he got out of prison. You know, through some certain strange coincidences, I knew who he was and where he was, you know, I document that in one of my earlier books. And then at a certain point I began after my mother died when I was twenty two. I began working in homeless shelter, and after I'd been there for three years, he showed up at the homeless shelter. At that point he was homeless. It was well into his alcoholism, and he was homeless for about five years. And you know, he and I were sort of wrestled in the homeless shelter for for about three years until I finally got sober, and then I left the shelter, and then a little while after that, we got him into housing, into a subsidized housing. We'll be right back. When Nick is seven years old. His house catches fire. That's how it's talked about. The house catches fire, as if this is something that happens passively all by itself. Nick writes quite a bit about cover stories. He quotes another guest on this podcast, Dr Bessel vander Kolch, from his seminal book on trauma, The Body keeps the score. Trauma, by its nature, drives us to the edge of comprehension. Sooner or later, most survivors come up with what many of them call their cover story that offers some explanation for their symptoms and behaviors for public consumption. These stories, however, rarely capture the inner truth of the experience. It's enormously difficult to organize ins traumatic experiences into a coherent account, a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The truth Nick will come to realize later, much later, is that the fire didn't just happen. His mother said it herself. Well, Nick and his brother were asleep upstairs. The story of the fire is something I've been wrestling with. That it happened, and it also it appears in every book that I've written, actually is a there's a fire, there's a house on fire. This's you know, it's it's something that he sort of has always been hovering in my subconscious and and I did, you know, like vessel Vandicle and that really struck me, that passage from vessel Vandricle. He's done a lot of work with with veterans with post traumatic stress, and I really felt the thing that had this book arise was this sort of moment of sort of really seeing the fire for what it was in a way as much as I could at that moment, which was that my mother had said it, and that that was a really kind of a terrifying thing to do, and I hadn't really felt the terror of it, or the directicus of it, or the the layers the danger of that until that moment. And it's strange to say that what compelled me to see it, or what fortunate to see it, was that my daughter turned the same age I had bed and I sort of looked at her when she was set and I was just like, well, that's that's a really that's kind of a crazy thing to do, to set a house on fire with a kid in it. And it's a little embarrassing to say because before that moment, before my daughter turned seven, you know, in the beginning, when the house got fire, the story for the family was that raccoons had knocked out her botti over, we had a grill, the raccoons came knocked to have bought you over, and the house got fire. And then several years later I interviewed her boyfriend at the time, who was in the house of the night at the fire, and he just laughed at the story of the raccoon as he said, well, you know, the raccoons did say your house on fire, your mother did. And that was when I was about thirty five. Yeah, so it was more than several years later. It was a whole lot of years later, right, so like a lifetime later. Three years later, thirty years later. I lived with this story of the of the raccoons for like thirty years, and that seemed like a good story. It made sense, you know. I didn't think about the fire on a conscious level that much, because you know, there was an accident. I reckon said the house on fire, Like, we escaped, my mother got the insurance money and got the house fixed. It was it was kind of a good thing. But then even after I heard the story that she had set the house on fire, I still held onto that thing that it was a good story that, you know, because it worked out. We got the money and we got the house fixed, and you know, my mother was broke, she was young. Our house was really not in good shape, and it became a little bit better. I held onto that story until my daughter was the same age I was, and then I was like, well, wait, that's a strange thing for a parent to do. Like, you know, I don't know about you, but I had no idea what it was to be a parent until I became one. And then suddenly you're you know, one day you're not a parent, the next day you are one. And then you sort of figured out as you go along. And as she got to that age, the fire rose up again in my subconscious it rose up. Remember what I said about origami. When he's thirty five, Nick goes on a pilgrimage of sorts, traveling the country to interview each of his mother's ex boyfriends. He does this in a journalistic way and actually decides to make a documentary about it. This is his own way of giving himself permission to dig deeper, show up on the front steps of strangers, learn more about all he doesn't yet know. It's like in a dream, when there's a door and a dream you have the choice way to open it or leave it closed, And you know, it just seems if just to note to know what's beyond it, you open the door, and it might be something that's you don't want to see, or something that's somewhere terrifying. But if you don't open the door, then you're you'll never know. So, you know, when I was thirty five and I got a notice, a friend of mine told me that there was a organization in New York called The Kitchen, which is a performance arts space, and they put out a call to artists and writers who were not video we're not filmmakers, and they would train you to how to make films, how to make a videos, and they gave you editing, and they gave you equipment, and you know, you met and so I submitted a proposal. And the proposal I submitted was that I would go track down my mother's ex boyfriends. Which the reason I did that was because it really seemed like it gave me the creeps. It seemed like a really strange proposal. Just suddenly show up, you know, suddenly you're seven, and now that these guys are probably fifty or something, and now you're thirty five, and like, hi, do you remember me? And I think it was because of that they were such a strange proposal that they let me in. I made the film, and um, there's a documentary film. And I went and found these men. He's like about a dozen men all up and down the Eastern Seaboard down to Florida, from Florida to almost to the Canadian border. And you know, I rented cars and flew and didn't really relatively, you know, maybe two week or a month long period. I just canted all these interviews and then edited it into a film. I decided to just steal it down just for to make it more streamline to two questions. I just asked them how they had met her and then how they find out she had died, and that just sort of was enough to get them going to tell the story about what she was to do. And I remember them all too like, they all like, you know, I could even recognize them when I was with them. They were like these father figures in my life growing up, this rotating cast of father figures. So that's how I met I call him Vernon in the book. His name is in Vernon, but I called him Vernon in the book. That's so how I met him. And he told the story, the story being that it wasn't Raccoon's tipping over the habachi, it was Nick's mother setting the house on fire to be able to collect the insurance money. I sometimes wonder, you know, when it comes to being a writer and digging into material, opening the door and not knowing what's going to be on the other side of it, that sometimes it feels like the writing, or the assignment or the proposal, is the thing that gives you permission to go ahead and do the thing that scares you, because now it's work, now it's art, but it's something that you actually really want to know, but you would never just go do on your own. It has to have a form and a shape. Are you thinking of inheritance? I'm thinking of inheritance. I'm thinking of a piece I wrote for The New Yorker many years ago when I was just trying to understand my father better again after his death, where I knew he had been married to a woman who died shortly after they got married, and I never knew anything about her, anything about it. It was a subject that we never broached. And I pitched it to The New Yorker and I got an assignment. So I had to pick up the phone. I had to get in the car, I had to go. I had to find her family, and and my heart was in my throat. I was absolutely terrified. I really wanted to know. But the only way that I could bring myself to push it, to push myself was to feel like I had a purpose. Yeah, I mean, I think, and there there is terror involved in it too. I mean, there are a couple of the men that I interviewed that I that I tracked down. I had feared, like my mother's second husband was a Vietnam VET and he was just back in Vietnam at the time, and you know, he was he was suffering from PTSD and he was just a little bit scary, or you know, that's that's sort of minimizing it. He was. He was a lot scary, and he's also great. He was also a really great guy. And so when I found him, it was frightening until we actually were face to face, and then suddenly it all melted away. I saw this, this human being. When you're eighteen, your then girlfriend, who you referred to as the initial oh, is looking for a pad of paper to write something down on and she finds a pad of paper and on it is in your mother's handwriting is a suicide note. And it's written at some time earlier, and it's not something that your mother carried through with. She had not committed suicide at that time. But there's this note and there's a really powerful moment where you go outside and you burn it more fire, And how does that then sort of play within you during this period of time. I mean, you've you're in the midst of your addiction, you're drinking really heavily. Is it something that at that time stayed with you and haunted you? Or did it burn up with the paper that you set fire too? You know, I think I had a sense at the time that you know, I could tell you again, you can tell yourself a story. And the story that I told myself is that when you know, the Vietnam vette had left, had left our house, that my mother fell into a depression. And that had been probably two or three years before I found that note, and so I didn't know how ng that. No, there was like a yellow legal pad had been kicking around the house and maybe just somehow surfaced. And I attributed to that because she didn't seem in that state at that time when I was eighteen, and so I really was like, this is something that she went through and I'm just gonna get rid of it. I'm just gonna burn this, and that it was like a like a ritual. And I assumed in my teenage mind, my teenage cosmology, that by burning it it somehow would send it back out into the universe, and it wouldn't be real. Somehow that released the energy of it, and rather than just deny it, just like exilely to a place of denial. We you're just not going to think about this because it's too much to think about. And so that's what I did. And I did I think about it. Yeah, I thought about it, you know, quite a bit. Like when I after I got that note, I was eighteen, and I decided not to go to college. I was just gonna stay sort of closer to home to keep an eye on my mother. And so I worked for a couple of years and I ended up working for her, her boyfriend at the time, it was a gangster. Worked for those guys for about five years ago, but a lot of it was to keep an eye of my mother. And then I eventually did go to school. I eventually did end up admitted to you mass Amherst, and it just made sense to go. There was a couple years later, I was like twenty. At that point, your mom was she was home and tending bar and laundering money for this gangster. Right, Yeah, you're off in college and you're also in the thrones of your own alcoholism. Yeah, it was early on, you know, I think you can get away with a lot not everyone. But I was functional. I was doing well in school and greeting and that I just kidding. I push it at night and stuff. But I hadn't reached the bottom of my alcoholism. Yeah. And you also it sounds like, well you're in school that you really you kind of find yourself in books, in literature, and do you start to know that this is what you want to do, especially given that you've got this legacy of your father, you know, being quote unquote a writer, and that not being an okay thing to be or a thing to be or pretending to be. Yeah, I mean it seemed like there was a lot of pretend things like the Vietnam Vetpan came home Vietnam, you just put a sign in his car that said carpenter. He really wasn't a carpenter. At that point, it seemed like writers were the same thing. You just sort of put a sign up and say, yeah, I'm a writer, and then just then you just go try to do it. But I had been interested in writing though for probably at least since I was early teens, ten twelve. It was something that interested me that I was really circling around. And when I went to school, I already I've been working for a couple of years and I had become an electrician, so I knew that I could make money. I knew I could sort of support myself, and it allowed me the financial freedom to study poetry and to study uh you know, it wasn't poetry at first and became poetry, but just just to read it just seemed like such a you know, such a gift after working for a few years after high school, just to be able to live in one place and you just have to read books. It was amazing. We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. Nix and his junior year of college twenty one years old, steeped in literature but also ooze when his mother dies by suicide advance school for I think I was finishing my junior year. I had left home, which is you know, one of those codependent nightmares. You think you're you know, you're in charge of keeping someone alive, and then you leave and then I do die. Um, so that wasn't a good thing. But she did the games to this year is with He was a really sweet guy. I still know him I'm still friends with him, but they were, you know, he just sort of had morphed into cocaine, had become a big part of it. And so she was doing cocaine and he was in prison. Actually he actually got busted and he was in federal prison. He got through to five years and he was about to get out of prison. He had been in for you know, usually three or five he served too, and he was about to get out. And she was seeing someone else at that time, and it was right before Christmas, and I think she was doing cocaine and she went through with it. She went through with her her suicide, which you know, I feel that she had always been that had always been lingering as part of her one of her ways out from whatever she was suffering from. You know, some of the things would go back to her family. I think she you know, I say in the book that you can see from the age that she's like six to seven or something, that something happened, Like it looks like her face just changes and she becomes harder. And you know, she was always incredibly beautiful, but you could see there was like a look like the world is much darker than I imagined. So I don't know what that is. You know, I'm not sure what that is had happened, but we can guess, and I think it followed her through and you can see that she had even some of the boyfriends. I talked to it and said that she had actually attempted to aside even you know, when I was very younger, even when she was carrying me. I mean, there's always it was not the first time, and then this time she succeeded. But it wasn't something she talked about. It wasn't like when we were when I was a kid. It wasn't like. That's why the letter. That's why I could burn the letter and feel that it was like somehow releasing, because it wasn't. She wasn't like she was very fun to be around. She was very loving, she was very uh vivacious and fun and uh so it wasn't like she was like, for the most part, like expressing suicidal intent to anyone. It was really something she kept herself. It was a secret. The long wake of his mother's suicide follows Nick through his twenties and into rock bottom alcoholism. So often when there's trauma, there's also addiction. The two states of being go together hand in glove. It's excruciating to feel the feelings, and here is a way to number them. Nick quotes the great British psychoanalyst D W. Winnicott, who writes, it's a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found. Nick needed to stay hidden for a good long while. He finally gets sober, and in many respects he is found by recovery and eventually by marriage and fatherhood. But over the years trauma, that tricky shape shifting state of being takes many forms, including a long affair that begins when his daughter is two. Because trauma and secrecy also go together, hand in glove. My relationship to sobriety just came in a necessary time. I think I started to feel it around the same age that my mother had been. You know, if you have any astrology beliefs or anything that sort of sadom return the late or so where and then you go for another twenty seven years and that's when there's a whole creation destruction happens, so you have to sort of rethink your entire life or to it. So around when my father showed up at the shelter or I wrestled with that for a couple of years. My drinking just increased, and then I quit. I don't want to make it sound easy that I quit. It was. It was a long process of including drugs and alcohol. You know. It was actually the just say the obvious, but or say things that you always hear, But it was the thing the same. I can't imagine what my life would be if I had not quick drinking doing drugs. I certainly would have written probably anything. I was trying to be a writer all through my twenties, but I really couldn't write anything coherent, which I feel very lucky about also because that's the reason I went to therapy, and the therapist is the one who told me to get sober, because I was just I knew I could write something, but I just couldn't quite get the clarity to do it. So there was that, And then the thing about going to therapy and getting sober is suddenly there's a certain clarity. You know, it's a slow building clarity, but it does whatever trauma you have suddenly begins to rise up a little bit more. And it it does with PTSD type stuff, which probably escaping from a burning house and uh, you know, your mother committing suicide, you know, probably could definitely trigger a PTSD reaction, even though you know, I might not have been used that language at the time. But it lodges in your brain, you know, from what I read about a neuroscience that lodges in your brain in different place. Like trauma doesn't sort of always active. It's always sort of hyper vigilant and sort of reading for this traumas or to happen again. And it's very hard because it doesn't go into the deeper long term MEMBORI just sort of stays and like the other part of the brand, I'm Avigdala. Yeah. Yeah, the fight flight or freeze part of the bran, the idea of like hidings that was so important, It is so important to my life as an addict. I was one of those acts that, like, really I thought the best thing, the most clever thing, was like to be fucked up and I don't know if you could swear on this and to yet to have no one know, you know, you sort of put on dark glasses. You just sort of go and you're like no one knows you are, and that's like you're so you have two lives. It's like a very dual existence. You know though, when I quit, when I got sober and quit, pretty much everyone I knew said, oh, we knew you were sucked up all the time. You know, I wasn't really fooling anyone. There was so much I think from my childhood that was like hidden, like where my mother came from, what her childhood was, like what she was holding inside with the you know, with her relationship, her grip on life when she started dating the gangster and what she was going on. I mean, I knew, you know, gangsters only do a few things. I mean, I guess there was drugs, because you know, either it's guns, drugs, or prostitutes. I guess, so they have a limited talent of things they do, so I guess drugs. We didn't talk about it. We didn't like it. Seemed like you had to keep things sort of in this very sort of the asthma where you could deny things and you could sort of have other lives that's sort of happening outside of it. So that's what I grew up with. I really grew up with that. That's what slowly, very very slowly, and then I can return to that too. I can return to that double life very easily if I'm not vigilant, I can sort of that can seem like the best place to be still, you know, maybe not today. I think this book was part of me trying to drag that into the light too, and trying to say, like, yeah, there's this part of me that like really is comfortable with just closing a hotel room door and you know, being alone in there, or being with a lover that I probably shouldn't be with that feels to me like familiar in this way, that seems to me like the real definition of love. Maybe, well yeah, and it's like home, It's like what that's all we know. All we know is what we got way back then. That's a good, that's a good that could that could be ship bumpers. All we know is what we've got. So you're a writer and you're a teacher, you have this full of professional life, you're sober, You fall in love with the woman who becomes your wife. You have a daughter, and when your daughters too, you begin an affair that asked for a whole bunch of years. Yeah, off and on for five years. Yeah. Yeah. When my daughter turned too, I began this affair, and you know, part of it it had to do with the person I had the affair with. It was a lovely person who is a lovely person, but also probably a person who's comfortable with having a double life, at least was at that point. It happened also with a traumatic moment in my life. It was right at the moment when they began filming my first book that began making into a film, and I was on set every day and to day that um and I knew this was kind of part of you know, writing the scripts and there's a day where Juliette Moore, who plays my mother, and it would re enact my mother's suicide and being a set that day, like it's not like again, it's like almost like going and tracking down your mother's explore friends and asking him questions, which it's it's a strange thing to be and that even the director was like, you don't have to be here today, But I again, I was like, well where else would I be? Like it? I'll always wonder what this was if I don't stay here. And so I stayed through that, but I think it did some restimulated or reactivated that trauma in the and one of the ways this woman we have been friends for a while, you know, for a year or so, and we became lovers like right around then, and then it was off and on for the next several years taxt to five years. I mean, it makes so much emotional sense to me that being on the set watching that re enactment and somehow needing to like where else would you be as you said, what is the nature of that trigger? Like what would you call it? Is it like a funking I'm going to do what I want? Is itself desse itself destruction? Is it I've been through so much? This is you know, because in a way, like when you're describing the re enactment, it's a little bit like you know, when you're outter turned seven having the thought, wait a minute, that was really really not a good story. That was not okay. You know. It's like I mean, and obviously your mother suicide wasn't okay, But somehow it's now being literally played out by an Academy Award winning actress, like in front of your eyes. I just wonder what you would say about like what that was that then triggered the beginning of this long affair. It's really hard to categorize because it's you know, like most of my life. You know, I would say it is mundane in a way, or at least comprehensible. Like you know, everyone struggles with trying to figure out who your parents are, and like people get lost at the parish points in their lives, and you know, my parents got lost at various points and their consequences were maybe more intense than some other people. But it's it's within the realm of comprehension. But you know, somehow being on the set, well you're seeing this amazing actor saying lines that you've actually helped a craft that are based on things that your mother said. There was no precedent for it. There's not nothing I could sort of look back on and say like, oh, yeah, this is I know what to do with this, because I really didn't. It was really like sort of like you're in like a very strange dream that just doesn't end, because then you know, it really doesn't end because then for the next year you're editing that scene. You know, you're in the editing room with the with the director in the editor, you're working on the scene. So you're seeing it over and or then you go into the premiere and you're seeing it again, and then you're it keeps rising up in a way that like memory does too, but memory sort of changes, you know, memories more like a play where every performance is a little bit different, whereas this is like your I mean, it's different because you bring something different to it every time, but you're really seeing that that moment and then remembering that moment, you know. But it occurs to me this was utterly surreal and singular experience, and it wasn't like you could call one of your friends and been like, you know, so, so when when you've had that situation, how did you feel? You're so solitary within that and it's also playing out over and over and over again. I haven't thought about that, but that, you know, that reminds me of another line of vessel Vandercolks, where he he says, um, it's the nature of trauma that it doesn't allow a story to be told. It doesn't allow us to hold onto stories. So again and again, it's why we repeat so much. It's why we go back to either the cover story or the real story, and as a way of I'm going to try to tell the story again so that I can hold onto it because it keeps on slipping through our fingers. But there you are, and you're actually seeing the same scene played over and over and over again, honed and perfected. Yeah, and I'm not even sure if like, you know, I wouldn't want to argue with Vessel Vandercole, because you know, we created a story with the film. I mean, there's a wrote a book, so those are they have the beginning, middle, and end. But you know, the moment of trauma, I think, is what really gets sort of you know, you snap awake at even though it's embedded in a story, the moment of trauma sort of always sort of like brings you back to like that very moment, whatever it was was lost. So this relationship plays out over off and on over a period of five years, in trips and travel and motels and talking on the phone while your daughter is like, you know, swinging nearby on a playground and in Texas and you know down where where I teach. And after five years, you go to therapy, back to therapy, back to therapy, right, different, different therapists, different and this therapist tells you that you have the ethics of a drowning man. Yeah, I mean, you don't go near a drowning man, right, If you try to save a drowning man will probably are you under. He's just trying to stay alive. So take us to the moment where your wife asks you if you're having an affair, and she's asked you before and you've said no, but this time you say yes, after these five years, and what is that moment? Yeah, the moment I revealed to my wife that I was having an affair was right around Christmas, which my mother kind of suicide right around Christmas, and so it's always it's a historically a difficult time in a year from me. But that fall I had, I started to go through the sense that I talked about before about realizing that it was her reckless thing my mother did sitting in the house on fire with us inside, maybe even worse than reckless. And that's how ar wrestled with that in the book, like what was going on in her head. You can also have many You can have some very dark thoughts in your head, and you can have some little less thought like maybe maybe will all be saved, or maybe some people will die. So that was hit me and it was feeling like, um, you know, I'd call it some sort of a breakdown, a psychic breakdown, and I've been going through the fall, and my wife knew that, and as she knew that, it was about partially about the revelation, my own interim revelations about my mother and the fire, but it was also like, you know, I was also considering leaving the family too. I was considering on a metaphoric level, burning down the house that I had created, the home I created with my family. It wasn't making sense, Like what I was considering doing didn't really make sense in a way in a larger sense, like is that really what I wanted? Or set doors? I just trying to go? It was I trying to run away? Was I trying to hide more? Was I trying to get away from the pain. So therapy really helped me. I got into the therapist and he sort of recognized, you know, what I was going through and told me that I had the ethics of a drowning man with thout are struggling with and yeah, he's he's a he's a young Gian therapist, which was really helpful. Also, because he would really would really go into like dreams and into the subconscious until get to see these things pull pull it out. So that was that was it. So I came clean and then you know, likely getting sober. You know, takes a little while for it to stick. And h here we are, like five hour, six years later. Towards the end of your book, there's a really moving passage where you essentially address it to your daughter. It's really arresting and interesting moment because you know, those of us who have children who right have some tucked away, very far tucked away awareness that our children are probably going to read these words someday, you know, and we can't think about it while we're writing or it would completely stop us. Yet it's there, and I mean I actually think of it in my own life as a hedge against secrecy. Secrecy when you are a writer who is a parent is actually really not so possible ultimately, And the way I think of it in my own life, it really keeps be honest. I mean, I if my son wants to he can go read you know, some really difficult stuff about you know, what his mother was like as a very young woman his age. So you address your daughter a future version of her reading this someday. And also, I was struck by you had made a decision, at least to this point, to not tell her how your mother had died. You told her that she had a bad heart. And then your daughter sees the title of a poem of yours, and she learns how your mother died by seeing the title of one of your poems, which is on the anniversary of my mother's suicide. My daughter and I take the A train to the Museum of Natural History. Yeah, and that was, like, you know, in the writing of the book, that's what happens when it takes five years throughout a book. In the beginning, she didn't know, and at this point she doesn't know until she listens to this podcast that but my mother, her grandmother had said fire to our house. She knows about the fire, but she doesn't know about that. It felt like too much. She knew about my father being homeless, homeless, alcoholic, mostly because she saw, you know, we live in New York, we travel and we see homeless people, and it's just she she got to meet my father also before he died, when she was very young. It just seemed important for a note to know that's like to give her empathy, like, this is not far from our lives. These people are not. Each one is related to someone that they have, you know, they have children that have parents to have you know, they connected to not just these these satellites floating drifting in space. It seemed important for her to know that. But somehow the idea of my grandmother or her grandmother make suicide it felt like too much for her at the age. And then she she sorry, I was I forget I think I had a I guess I was at a piece of paper and she just said it. She doesn't always read my poems, but I was just sitting I think it's just sitting at the top and she read it. I actually burst into tears. So I didn't I didn't want to find out like that. But it was really good though, like she just really sort of got it. And I have this sense that our children sort of know everything about us anyway, like there's really nothing that they don't know. Is I don't think there's anything that spoken that she'd be like, Oh, that's that's shocking. I mean, you know the problem because I've been working on not being so you know, having a double life, and so she gets to see moments of struggle and working things out. And I think that's important. I think that's important for Case to see that one can struggle, and one can you know, suffer, and yet can come out of it and the next day or even the next minute, can be laughing about something. Here's Nick reading one last passage from his extraordinary book, one which his daughter may hold in her hands one day and not have to wonder who her father really is. And that is what I meant when I said at the start that this story is tough and ultimately beautiful. Mhm. A thousand and one times I've told this story why because it happened, because I escaped, as it involves fire and firemen and sirens. Sometimes still, this story starts with just me, barefoot in the next door neighbor's yard, looking back at the house we've just tumbled out of. All I can do now is watch as it burns. Phantasmagoria they need to freeze makes sense of the story of being six and running through a burning house. I need to contain it like a firefly in a jar. And I don't contain it. I don't know if I can move away from it. And if I can't move away from it, I don't know if I'll ever believe that it made it out of in one piece. If here I am, I stand before you, intact whole, holy, everything that lives is holy. Family Secrets is an I Heeart Media production. Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer and Bethan Mcaluso is the executive producer. We'd also like to give a special thanks to Tyler Klang and Tristan McNeil. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight secret zero. That's secret and then the number zero. You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder and Facebook at facebook dot com slash Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at FAMI Secrets Pod, m HMM. For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, 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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