Just as Adam approaches an exciting apex in his career, he receives life-shattering news which stems from a deep and painful family secret.
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Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. 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. For the next year, I was always on the road, or on the phone, or lying on my couch a Washington television gathering the strength to leave again. I answered every question like no one had ever asked before. We do not turn into what we pretend to be, but what we pretend. You can still unmake us, worship the false idol and tell yourself you are only playing the game of survival. How long before that graven image comes to mean something or everything? How long before we confuse happiness with distance from disaster, closure with being unable to remember? That's Adam Man's back. Award winning novelist, screenwriter, cultural critic, and number one New York Times bestselling author of the hilarious instant classic Go the Funk to Sleep. Yes, there are going to be cuss words in this episode. It's in the book's title. After all. You know that expression, God doesn't give us anything we can't handle. I hate that expression sometimes God or the universe or whatever gives us a lot, and sometimes something absolutely terrible coincides precisely with something absolutely wonderful, And how are we supposed to manage. Adam's story is about exactly that, when it all explodes all at once. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets they are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. I grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, which is a close suburb to Boston. My parents moved to Newton, like a lot of people, because it was known to have good public schools. Both of them are from the Boston area. My father grew up in Boston and Brookline. My mother is from Cambridge, so I had also four grandparents living in the area for most of my childhood. Now that I'm a parent, and I look at the relatively constrained level of freedom that my kids have because of the way we are placed geographically, I look back at my childhood and think about how much freedom we had to just kind of run the neighborhood, you know, walking to school, taking the train into Boston, playing pickup basketball or football at different arcs and playgrounds, walking to friends houses. Like there was a game we played there was kind of a modified, more violent version of like Hide and Seek, where it was hide and Seek plus throwing tennis balls and people and uh, it raged over you know, like probably a couple of square miles, which was ridiculous because you never found the other team. They were hiding for like three days. So when I think about the geography, that's the first thing that comes to mind, is just sort of having the run of a large, pretty safe suburban space and then also having the freedom to take the train and explore. I could get on the train and go to my grandparents house in Cambridge, you know, take the green line, switched to the red line, be there in less than an hour. I could take the train two different record stores. You know. I was a DJ, so I was always looking for vinyl. So I could, like even before I could drive or anybody I knew could drive, I could get around the greater Boston area with a certain amount of ease. Tell me about your mother, your father, and your younger brother, David So. My parents met at the Worcester Telegram and Gazette. Um, my dad was an editor and my mom was a reporter fresh at a grad school. My mother is very funny and a serbic and has a quick wit and curses like a sailor. So like when go to fund to Sleep came out, you know, I placed a lot of blame on her for teaching me to talk like that. My mom comes from a family of writers and words smith's my grandmother. Her mother was a poet and a playwright. Her father was a law professor and a judge who was known for the eloquence of his legal writing. Both of them were very present in my life growing up. I think in a lot of ways, my mom sort of rebelled against the culture of their house. They were both very social. They threw a lot of parties. They went to a lot of parties. Their friends and their careers in some ways came first. I mean, this was also a different time, but like you know, they weren't probably as present as parents as she would have liked them to be. And as time went on, I think she found the elevated, sort of intellectual, artistic social life of her parents house to be a little bit oppressive um and kind of rebelled against it. She didn't like to go to their parties. I like to go to their party. She brought me to their parties and then like hung out in the kitchen and ignoring everybody. But she was pretty close to her parents, I think in her own way, and her parents were very much a presence and an influence on me growing up. You know, these were the first My grandmother was the first writer I ever met, And as I grew up and got into hip hop, I found this very close parallel in my grandmother's work because she was writing rhyming political poetry that you word politicians and social morays, and it was like published in our local newspaper ship poetry column called the Muse of the week in Review that was in the Boston Globe, and um syndicated in a bunch of other newspapers, which seems insane in retrospect, but like in the eighties you could have a syndicated political poetry column. Yeah, I'm sitting here shaking my head. Oh those right, right. Also, there are these things called newspapers in those days. Yeah. Imagine that. My father was very much a working class kid from Brookline. My dad came from a family without much money. His dad was various kinds of salesmen over the years. I always think of him as kind of a Willie Loman kind of guy. His mother was a painter, but not really a successful one, and also was manic depressive, although I don't think they had that diagnosis then, and was in and out of the hospital. So my dad lived at home through college, went to Boston University, and then went straight into the workforce as um a reporter at the Worcester Telegram and Gazette the tn G as they called it, and uh, you know, is a brilliant guy, and spent forty years subsequently in the Boston Globe newsroom and became kind of the institutional memory of the Boston Globe newsroom. My dad has an incredible memory and spent forty years like laying out the front page of the paper deciding how it looked and what went there. One of the things about my dad that I really always loved and noticed was how much he loved his work. He worked weird hours. He went to the newspaper at like three four in the afternoon, he packed a dinner, he didn't come back until one in the morning. But he loved it. It was somewhere he was excited to go every day, and because of that and his job and his sensibilities, we lived in a house where everybody read the newspaper and discussed what was in it. We were very much creatures of politics. We followed elections the same way we followed the Red sox. Um. You know, it's kind of the culture that that I grew up in. And so how old are you when you moved to Newton? Uh? I was two years old when my family moved from Worcester to Newton and my dad moved from the Telegram to the Boston Globe. I think in nineteen. And your brother David is born when you're he old. I was born in seventy six and he was born in seventy nine. We're two years nine months apart. My brother was I think, you know, some of my earliest memories of him were of a certain kind of unspoken worry and anxiety around him for reasons that I think didn't actually make any sense, but that as a parent now I understand very well. Because kids developed differently, and I was really gregarious and learned to speak really really early, as firstborn kids often do. My brother didn't learn to speak quickly, and when he did he had kind of a minor speech impediment, and I think these things made my parents think that he might not be smart. And in my family, particularly my mother's family, there's really nothing more important than being smart, and I think that was their big fear that he like wasn't so bright. This is a kid who went on to get a six hundred on his s A T S go you get a PhD in atmospheric science. But I remember there being a certain kind of like worry and coddling of him, um particularly around the talking. And I remember being the only person in the house who could sometimes understand what he was saying, and I would translate what he was saying for my parents. And then, you know, I remember just a goofy, giggly kid. I remember, even at the time seeing how some of my friends and their younger brothers or sisters interacted. And I don't know that David and I were like as easy and free with each other. You know, we fought a lot, all kids do, I guess, but I loved him and we hung out to some extent, and we sort of did our own thing to a large extent as well. We had very different kind of interests David didn't have as many friends as I did. He went on to not be a creature of like words and jokes and arguing the way that I was, in the way that kind of the rest of my family also was. He became a scientist, and I mean, even at a young age, he sort of had the proclivities and the inclinations of a scientist. A lot of my childhood memories do revolve around like how we were each treated by our parents and the compensatory things they seemed to do um maybe to give him more agency or more of a sense of himself. Like I remember them buying him like a Nintendo and basically telling him that it was his and that I could only use it with his permission. So you know, like in retrospect, that's kind of a it's kind of a weird move, right, Like, Okay, you bought your like eight year old a Nintendo and he's the gatekeeper of it. There's no equity here. There's no like you're gonna play for half an hour and your brother is gonna play, or like we're gonna set a timer, or like you gotta share. I think that they felt like giving him sort of ownership was was gonna be i don't know, good for him somehow, empowering to him somehow, or that I would overwhelm him if they didn't. I remember feeling a lot like there was the fear that I would overwhelm him, or my superior ability to speak would somehow sort of subsume him, which in some cases was true. I also remember being a real dick to him because I could talk circles around him, and knowing that a eventually, if I did it long enough, he would just resort to hitting me, and and and that's and that was sort of like when I knew I had won, you know, if he just gave up and started flailing his fists at me, that was a victory for me. It's so interesting because now I'm sure as a parent yourself, once you become a parent, so many of these moments from your own childhood are understood differently, right, or the or the worry of your parents when they were being your parents as as as little kids. From the way you're describing that story to me, probably a lot of thought went into David's Nintendo, you know, and like leveling the playing field somehow, or like the idea that they needed to level the playing field so that you know that it could be his. Yeah, I think I think a lot of thought probably did go into it. I wonder in retrospect if any of that thought was directed towards consulting people who knew anything about child psychology. Um, my guests, maybe not. Yeah, it sort of wasn't the time. You know, in art in our times, that would be stop number one. But in those times, no matter how educated and sophisticated people were, it wasn't the first thing they thought about. Adam and David are two very different kids, with different interests and different paths. David is on track to become a scientist and Adam is on track to become a writer. Though of course, when it comes to a career as a writer there is no well lit path. It helps that Adam comes from a family of writers, which gives him a kind of permission, the sense that such a life is possible. His father is an editor, his uncle is a sportswriter, his grandmother is a poet. It is, as you might say, the family business, and yet it can take a long time for writers just starting out to find their footing. There are no guarantees you write in your extraordinary poem slash memoir, sort of genre defying book. I had a brother once. It's a sentence that begins with not even just the word and but actually an ampersand and you you're right, And now it was eleven. What was going on in your life at that point? So you know, for a number of years, I've been basically just a novelist, a literary novelist who at any given time was like knee deep or waist deep or shoulder deep in a book and coming up to maybe do a little journalism on the side. I had a two year old daughter. I was teaching in the m f A program at Rutgers Camden, which was kind of the first full time academic job I had had. I was lucky enough to get it, and then lucky enough to get offered a second year in my visiting writer position. And you know, I was just kind of trying to figure out how to make a career as a writer. Like I had a career as a writer, but I was trying to figure out how to not lose that career, not have to fall back on teaching full time, which I enjoyed but didn't want to do forever. And I suddenly had a kid and a greater degree of sort of financial responsibility than I'd ever had before, and my teaching appointment was going to end in a couple of months, and I was going to go back to California, and the mortgage on my house and all kinds of things. So I was just trying to figure out what my next move was going to be. While he's figuring out his next move, Adam writes an unusual and unquantifiable twenty eight page book. He really writes it for himself. He's not sure there's any market for it at all, and neither is his literary agent. He ends up selling it to a small press owned by a friend with very low expectations. The book in question, though The Funk to Sleep, is not quite out yet, but it will be soon. It's about to go viral, but Adam does know this yet. He's a new dad in Philly. He's teaching dj ing, hoping for the best. I wrote that book really with no expectation that it was even publishable. Certainly was not part of my like strategy to secure future for myself, for my family. Um, you know, the book was really just kind of something I did for fun. It was my attempt two kind of cross stitch all of the board books B O, A, R D. But it kind of works both ways because they're incredibly boring, like the little cute see books that you read to your kids at bedtime that have all of these A, B, C, B rhyme schemes and these like cute animals who are all toddling off to bed. To try to kind of remix that by inserting a real parental monologue into it, something that expresses the frustration of a parent who cannot get his kid to go to sleep, which was the position I found myself in every night with my daughter Vivian, who was probably two two and a half when I wrote the book in two thousand ten, and you know, a year later when the book started to inexplicably make all this noise. The book was supposed to come out in October, but the day after my daughter Vivian's third birthday April, I did a gig in Philly where basically I read the book out loud on stage. I had just gotten a PDF of the entire book with illustrations, and I was able to project it on the screen and I, you know, I read it to maybe a hundred and fifty people, and I got a good reaction. They thought it was funny. People asked me where they could buy it. I told them they couldn't because it wasn't coming out for six months. So from that initial reading, people began to order the book, and the buzz began to spread. By the end of the week, the book was number one on Amazon. This book that that that did not yet exist, hadn't even been printed yet, was not even on a boat headed for the United States yet. And from their things sort of accelerated and got even crazier because the fact that an obscenely titled book from an obscure publisher was number one sort of engendered around of media attention, which I think then led to a PDF of the entire book beginning to ricochet around the Internet. And meanwhile, we're rushing to get the book out as soon as possible, so instead of October, we publish it on Father's Day, which I believe was June four, So we're sort of rushing towards that, and I'm fielding phone calls, and we're trying to make decisions about whether I'm even going to talk to the media. Because now there's an element of strategy in place, like someone, if I remain quiet, can get an exclusive with me. And I'm like, you know, an exclusive, like I'm I'm used to talking to anybody who's willing to talk to me. Like, you know, as a literary novelists, you're not giving exclusives. You're hoping that your phone rings, you know, But we have at this point, like a publicist in place, and she's talking to the Today Show and Good Morning America and pitting one against the other, and you know, people are trying to get the exclusive, and things are just out of control. We're auctioning off foreign rights and audio rights and movie rights and all kinds of stuff again for a book that does not technically exist yet. So it's kind of a whirlwind. And I'm doing this as I'm wrapping up my final weeks of my tenure at Rutgers and Adam, how did it feel to go from being a literary novelist spending years at a time with your head down working on one book at a time. You know, the sound of a literary novel being published is a little like a tree falling in a forest. Um, except on the rare times when when it's not and this entirely left field thing happens completely unexpected, no impossible to have imagined. Along with trying to do everything right, what did it feel like? There was definitely a lot of joy and exhilaration and shock and surprise. Um. I mean I was feeding off of the people around me, and my friends were watching this happen, and they were tickled by it because it was something that was just done with so little calculation, And I was excited, but I was also nervous or kind of jitteryan on edge, I guess, because what was happening was clearly very good, but it was impossible to see even three days into the future, so, you know, it was impossible to know whether this was such a flash in the pan that the book would actually be forgotten already by the time it was published, or whether it was conceivable that we could ride this and stay at number one until it was published. I was refreshing my Amazon page every fifteen minutes, you know, I was like, Okay, still number one, still number one. Click, okay, still number one. You know, go make a coffee, come back, click still number one. Okay, so far, so good. It was a wild moment. I mean, it was more exciting than anything that had happened in a long time. But I also felt like I had to be very strategic and careful and do anything I could to help this thing continue to succeed. And I also felt powerless over it. I didn't really know what the hell I was doing or whether any action of mine could affect this in any way. At the very least, this was an industry I knew and had been making a living in for the better part of the last decade. So you know, it's not like I was just some schmuck who'd never written a book before and this was happening to me. I was some schmuck who'd written several books and this was happening to me. So at least I had that going for me. We'll be right back with Father's Day just around the corner. Adam is cautiously riding the high of his forthcoming publication in June. On May eleven, he's playing records in a lounge bar in Philly. He's just taught his last class at Rutgers, and many of his grad students are in attendance. It's a joyful night, a victory lap of sorts, and a goodbye to his students, and a goodbye to Philly too, as he's planning to move soon. A lot of good friends are there, and Adam is basking in the great energy of the evening. Then his phone rings and he sees that it's his father. He doesn't answer. It's unusual that his dad is calling so late at night, but doesn't clock it a stranger, unsettling in a state of cognitive dissonance, he ignores the call with no inkling that anything could be wrong. But then his phone rings again. It was about twelve thirty nine times out of a hundred, I would have been home and asleep and in bed at that time. My father was always up at that time because he would be coming home, probably from the newspaper. So I saw his name on my phone, and I didn't pick it up because I was in the middle of playing this set um and you can't DJ and talk on the phone at the same time. And inasmuch as I thought anything, the quick calculation that I made about my father calling me unprecedentedly at this time he never called me that late, was that it had something to do with the book, that some new bit of news around go to funk to sleep had emerged that I didn't know about it. He did because he'd spent the last eight hours in the news room and he was haul in to tell me something funny, or you know, tell me that one of his colleagues had had the PDF land in their in boxing, you know, some something trivial and cool like that. So I didn't answer, and then he called back again, and so I answered. And the first thing my father asked me was whether I was sitting down, which I don't think anybody had ever asked me that in real life before. You know, I guess, I guess that question is only asked when you think that the news you're about to deliver might literally knock somebody on their ass, that that the person's legs might stop working. So I walked outside through the back room of the club and then also through the front room, and sometime I think before I got outside, my father said to me, David has taken his own life. That was the phrase he used, and and I was unable to even really process he was saying, it seems so outlandish that the first thing I said was what I mean, it's I couldn't even wrap my mind around it. UM. So I made him say it again, and by that time I was outside, and he proceeded to explain to me that my brother had been missing all day, that he and my mother had been at my brother's apartment with my brother's wife um with the sinking growing feeling that something had happened, um, but that they had just received the news from I guess it would have been the police officer or the emergency worker or something who found his body in his car where he chose to kill himself. So this is what my father told me A twelve thirty On that night, I had some further conversation with my father that I can't really remember very well. I remember the it was extremely hot, even at night. We're in the middle of a heat wave, and I was sort of, you know, I sort of stepped outside into this hot air and it felt like somebody was breathing right in your face, and I remember crying. I remember asking further questions. I remember my father sort of inquiring into my safety and well being, like he really wanted to know, like where are you and what are you gonna do now? And like can you get yourself home? You know, like what are you gonna do, like I he I think he made me promise not to drive or something like that. I got off the phone with my father and I stood there crying hysterically. And I don't think that I spoke out loud to my brother, but I think I spoke in my head to my brother, and you know, I said something along the lines of like what have you done. I don't think I was out there very long. I think before I was even done crying, I went back in the club. I walked straight to Emery, who was a good friend of mine, be my closest friend in Philly, and I told him then that my brother had killed himself. And you know, the look on his face was sort of the first it was the first kind of mirror that I had. It was the first reading back of what had happened on someone else's face, which because he's like, what do you need? Do you want me to drive you home? I basically just was like, I'm leaving, grab my records when you go, or something like that, and I, you know, I just I just kind of got out of there. I think I called my father back from the car, having already promised not to drive, and you know, currently driving to try to get more information, to try to, I don't know, understand this thing better in some kind of way. I remember just driving down the freeway, blinking back tears and just kind of like feeling a lot. I mean, there was there was the shock, there was the attempt to understand what was happening. I should say that I can't imagine that then NWS that someone killed himself would ever not be surprising and shocking. But in the case of my brother, he had gone to Great Pines to hide his depression and make sure that no one knew about it. So this was entirely surprising to me. I had not known that my brother suffered from depression in any way. I thought he was a weird but happy guy. So, you know, I was learning this entire history and this entire secret that his wife had kept from everybody, that he had insisted she keep from everybody on pain of him never speaking to them again if she told them. Tremendous shame on his part about what he was going through. I learned that my parents had known for a little while that my brother's wife had eventually kind of buckled under this tremendous pressure and told them but that my brother had downplayed it, but that they had all been extremely worried for the past few months, and that I had not been brought into this confidence, which even at the time, like I felt very frustrating, and I think immediately took me down the track of like, what if I would have been able to do something? What if not telling me was the worst thing you could have done? What if I'm the person in this family best equipped to do something at least and convince him to seek help. But there was another part of me that, as I was sort of navigating my own grief, navigating the roads of Philly, was filled with enormous trepidation because I knew that when I got home, I would have to wake up my then partner, Vivian's mother and tell her what had happened. And that seemed, you know, incredibly hard even I mean, saying it out loud felt in it will be hard, but having to break that news felt almost too much. Um. But that's that's what I went home and did. There's something that, you know, in the midst of just profound shock, having to say it, being the bearer of it, suddenly you know which you know you were when you when you told Emory, but then you know you're going home and you're telling your your then partner. It makes it more real, I think, Yeah, definitely, it makes it more real with every time that you say it, with every repetition you you bring it more fully into reality. Somehow you feel like you're lying, like these words can't be true. I'm saying these words that I know are true, but they can't be true. And then each time you say them, it becomes more true or more real. Yeah, and then even realer than that is watching it becomes true for someone else, destroying someone else's world with that information, you know. I mean, for months and months after his death, I really strove to never be the one to break the news to anyone. I wanted people to know. I wanted the roads sort of paved ahead of me, Like I wanted all my friends to know, but I didn't want to be the one to tell them. And you know, I found ways to navigate conversations with strangers. I've developed kind of a sixth sense for when a conversation might turn in the direction of families, so that I could steer it another way. Before I was asked to kind of account for my own family, you know. And this was a time when I was like around a lot of strangers because the funk to sleep continue to happen, and I continue to like have to deal with what that meant and tour and travel and chat and schmooz. But yeah, the actual simple act of stating that my brother had killed himself was probably the single most painful, Like it was the thing. I there's the thing I guess that I felt like I had enough agency to be able to avoid, so I tried very hard to avoid it. Adam returns to Newton to his parents home, where they observe the Jewish ritual of sitting Shiva, a prescribed week of mourning. Though they are descended from ancestors who are famous rabbis, the family are secular Jews, not religious at all, and these religious practices in the case of David's death do not feel exactly healing or helpful to Adam. Because my family is deeply culturally Jewish. I think my sensibilities are very Jewish. My sense of humor, my sense of art coming from the margins, all of these things to me are quintessentially Jewish. But we do not go to synagogue there's an, if anything, a hostility and a skepticism towards organized religion. I was not born mids, but my parents don't belong to a synagogue, nor did their parents, and you know, we go pretty far back as secular, agnostic Jews in this country. So when we were sitting shiva, we had no idea what the funk we were doing. It was an approximation of a shiva. We didn't have any guidance. We didn't really have a connection to these rituals. You know, suicide in some ways is a is a dramatization of that, because you're at a loss. I think almost no matter what your tradition is, like most religions, and most traditions kind of fail us when it comes to suicide, or they have a few terse words to say and you're not allowed to be buried in the cemetery or whatever. But my family was particularly poorly equipped to deal with any of it because we you know, we don't have that as at our fingertips at all. We don't have those traditions. So yeah, I found myself trying to grapple with what it meant, whether you could invent a ritual, whether that counted as a ritual, what a ritual was intended to do, and who it was for, and how it was meant to be carried out. Like, all of these things were adding to my state of distress, particularly the feeling that, in the absence of a regimented path, I was going to do it wrong. This idea that if you sort of mourned incompletely, like pushed it away, didn't deal with it fully whatever, that meant that the grief would somehow gree group and come back stronger. And if you didn't sort of face it now, it would become more and more unbeatable later. And and I remember, like I kind of internalized that and let it scare me even even more. And I don't think that was a useful thing to to have put in my in my mind. Like I think the opposite is true. I think that people grieve in all kinds of different ways. Certainly there are ways to not fully grieve. But the idea that that there is one way, I think for me it was a very damaging idea. And remember, this terrible grief is now coinciding with the crazy roller coaster ride of Adam's book publication. The high point of his career is now underscored and forever tied to his agony over his brother's suicide. In the midst of all this, Adam struggles to understand his brother's life and his brother's death. One of the ways I think in which for me anyway, suicide is so difficult to deal with and difficult to mourn, is that it effectively rewrites everything you thought you knew about a person, at least in the case of my brother. I am someone who, if I'm trained in anything, I'm trained to kind of create and craft narrative and pulled together threads and weave together something that makes sense and tells a story. And in trying to understand my brother's life and my brother's death, I was sort of torn between these warring impulses, one of which was to create narrative, create a narrative, and one of which was to resist the creation of narrative, even my own narrative, because fundamentally I knew that I did not understand and probably could not understand what had happened and at certain things about his actions. We're going to just be resistant to the project of creating a coherent story. Um. So, I mean, there's a lot of there's a lot of parts to that, Right, there's the part where a person can both be planning to live and planning to die, and these are simultaneous impulses, and you kind of just have to understand that his mind was running on both those tracks at once. Like I went to his apartment with my cousin, and among other things that we found there, we found in his email the receipts for the chemicals that he had ordered that he would mix together and use and breathe to kill himself. He had ordered those, and after he had ordered those, he had ordered an expensive skateboard that still hadn't arrived. Um, he had printed out directions to a memorial service for our grandfather, which wasn't for a couple of months. So like he was planning to live and he was planning to die. And you know, there's a part of you that might see all that evidence laid out and turn it into a detective story and say, something is amiss, something is a rise, something doesn't add up. Why would he do this if he was going to do that, I suspect foul play. You know, you could, you could, you could spin up any kind of narrative but the struggle for me was to understand that all of these things were kind of true at once, that this was a paradox that I was not going to resolve, but that instead I merely had to kind of hold and look at and not try to on ravel, not try to turn the two things into one thing. There was also the way in which everything I thought I knew about my brother was now rewritten by his act of killing himself, and by the revelation that he had been depressed for years and years. So, you know, things he had done and said that I had described one meaning to suddenly took on a different meaning. Even something as simple as looking at a photograph. You know, it's like a photograph in which he up until now seemed to be looking at the camera. Now he no longer seemed to be looking at the camera. He seemed to be staring into sort of the abyss, you know. I mean. It sounds dramatic and melodramatic and maybe dumb, but there's a way in which even looking at a simple artifact which has not changed in any way, it feels different now that this life has concluded. In this way, Adam also suspected looking back that perhaps has brought or had Asperger syndrome. As David's character bore some of the hallmarks of being on the spectrum. He was extremely intelligent, high achieving, and academically gifted, but it was hard for him to connect to have an emotional conversation. The type of questions one might expect to elicit an emotional response from him often did not. I remember one time, you know, at the time he and I were both involved with partners who were from other countries. His wife was Brazilian, my partner at the time was Swedish, and I remember sort of trying to talk to him about being somebody who sort of has a foot in two different cultures, and you know, do you think you'd ever moved to Brazil? How does she feel about living in America? Blah blah blah, And his response was sort of just a recitation of crime statistics in Rio, and I was like, huh, that's that's a that's a weird response. But like, you know, with the revelation of this crippling depression and the suicide, it's like I found myself looking back on things and saying, well, maybe it's not that that was the response that like made the most sense to him. Maybe that was the response that prevented him from opening up the Pandora's box of his own emotions and quickly getting lost. We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. Adam's book is hurtling towards existence, picking up speed in the midst of all his grief and family turmoil. He's thrust into the public eye in a way that's highly unusual for a writer. He's the subject of many interviews and it's booked a coveted spot on morning television. He's worried that some interviewer is going to learn about David's suicide and ambush him, forcing him to talk publicly about his loss. He's caught between two selves, needing simultaneously to perform and to retreat. It's almost like there's another there's another Atom who is suffering and his grief stricken, and that Atom needs to kind of sit out right and not be the one who's talking to Matt Lower on the Today Show. Right. Yeah, I knew even at the time that it was not a rational fear that like Matt Lower is going to blindside me in the middle of this fluffy interview and asked me about my brother's Nason death. Nobody actually is invested in doing anything of the kind, right, It's completely outside the narrative that all of us are agreed upon in the in that setting and in every every setting. At the same time, weird ship was happening on a daily basis, like bizarre, somewhat unthinkable, certainly implausible stuff was continuing to fold day by day. One day, a bunch of topless photos of me quote unquote leak and are like on the internet. I mean, what this was was me. What this was was like me playing basketball with a bunch of friends and students at a summer program in Anne Arbor that I taught at every summer. They did not leak. Somebody took him and they existed. But I was just famous enough for somebody to think that anybody might give a ship and to like put them out there and be like, go to funk to sleep. Author, you know whatever it was, You're like, that didn't make any sense either. It didn't make any sense of like there was a censorship fight over the book New Zealand, it didn't make any sense that Sam Jackson was reading the book on the Dave Letterman show like nothing made any sense. So it seemed just barely plausible enough that in a moment where everybody was rushing to find some angle in some way to write about go to Funk to sleep and use it as fodder for their think pieces and their takedowns and their handwringing about the sorry state apparent and whatever it was, that somebody might find this more sol of information and think to use it. But I mean, more than anything, I think, what I felt and what I was aware of was that just as David had sort of chosen to wear a mask and chosen to obscure his real feelings and hide them, and then in some real sense, this, as much as anything, was the thing that had killed him, that he chose hiding and chose that shame and that secrecy over telling anybody what was really going on and living in that and allowing us to help him. It was very real to me that I was making a not entirely dissimilar choice in putting on this different mask, but still a mask, and sort of cleaving my public persona from my real persona and going on this kind of like victory tour of American media and then international media and repeatedly telling a story about my life and my current circumstances that we're not in any way reflective of what I was really going through. That felt on one hand, it felt disrespectful to my brother to be out here pretending that I was indeed like the happiest, luckiest shmuck in the world. And it also, in an uglier and darker way, felt to me like there was a way to spend it as an affirmation of everything that he had thought and the choices that had led him to kill himself, because you don't I think a thing if the literature is to be believed, a thing that suicidal people convinced themselves of is that everybody will be better off without them, that everybody will be okay, will survive, will recover the loss, and it will be okay. And in presenting this public face to the world, it's like I was turning myself into a walking dramatization of that fact, Like I was walking around being like I'm okay um. And at the same time, I knew that my family very much needed to see me be okay and do all of these things, like they very much were of the opinion that I should go out and promote the book. And then there was the part of me that was struggling because I wanted to at least feel more conflicted about whether I should go out and promote the book. But on a very basic level, I wanted to. And I was ambitious and desirous of all of the success and the fame and the money that would come with this book being successful and sort of achieving escape velocity. Right, this was the moment where with enough booster fuel, the thing could get into orbit and potentially just kind of circle the planet forever. And I knew this this was that time, and I knew that I could play a role in that because all of these opportunities were available and we could see the results from them, like you know, when you're tracking a project that closely, you actually see the sales bump after you do the Today Show or the sales bump after you do this thing or that thing. So like it was all right there at my fingertips, and I was sort of struggling with all of those things and taggling between all of those things. Yeah, And I think also there's a kind of self protection involved there too. I mean, you're right, something that struck me as really a very universal feeling there, which was, if tragedy was ever allowed to step into the winner's circle, triumph would be incinerated. You know that somehow the magical thinking feeling of there are two worlds and they can't coexist, which of course they can and they do, but that that feeling. Yeah, Adams an event for his book in Georgetown. He knows the woman who's organized it. She had gone to the same school as him and David, so he knows it's going to come up. She's going to ask how David's doing, what he's up to. Adam can feel it coming, and then there it is. She finally asks, and he flat outlies. He tells her David is married and living in Brookline. I knew I wasn't going to get out of this without accounting for him in some way, like it was, you know, no matter how how I deflected or flipped the conversation. I sort of knew the entire evening that this woman was going to ask him about my brother, and I truly did not know what I was going to do when she did. Like, you know, We're at some dinner with a whole bunch of people. I didn't know anybody. This is her event. So I just lied to her. I just told her he was he was fine, And you know, it felt like it felt like it cost me something. It felt deeply unco comfortable to me. But also I think I think better than better for all of us than me telling her that actually, three weeks earlier, he had killed himself. Suicide is also so different than every other kind of of death and every other kind of grief. That was something that also struck me again and again. You know, I would be sitting down to remember getting back to California months and months later and sitting down for dinner with two very good friends of mine, both of whom in the in the previous six months had lost a grandparent and listening, you know, and they both knew about David, and we had talked about it already, so I wasn't in the same situation. But I just remember sitting and listening to them each talk about the funeral and all of the surrounding activity and emotion and how it feels when an elder dies in the way that everybody gets a bumper here, just all of this stuff that that was very like recognizably in line with the natural flow of life. Sad but not unnatural in the way that suicide continued and continues to feel to me, and just feeling like the three of us are at this table talking about death, and yet I can't talk, you know, I can't contribute. My story does not intersect with these stories, and so life continues. Adam's riding the wave of his public success while privately contending with his grief. Many opportunities are coming his way. It's now and he's at a storytelling event at the Moss in Boston. The evening is a turning point for Adam. He feels in this moment that he wants and needs to tell the story of his brother. The other writers participating in the event are being vulnerable, and he feels like a fraud. But first he needs to shed his mask, the protected shield that has kept him well shielded for so long, and he also needs to find the length which to write about David. He's written in all sorts of forms and genres, supernatural thrillers, screenplays, literary novels, but now he feels the pull to return to where he began, with a form he'd inherited from his grandmother, poetry. Perhaps in poetry he can begin to unpack the story that needs unpacking to tell the story that needs telling the story of his brother David. I certainly think that that moment in Boston was a touch point. Well, it was the closest that I probably came to even thinking or attempting to, certainly to attempting to talk about or write about David. I think that from very soon after his death, I always knew that I would have to write something about him. This is It's just it's just too central and too critical to the way that I processed the world to not um And yet I continued to not do it, and to not really even attempt to do it. I thought about doing it. I never stopped thinking about doing it. I never stopped thinking about it, and I never stopped being stymied by things like what the form would be, what the architecture would be, what the kind of scaffolding of it would look like. I never considered doing it as a poem until I did it as a poem. I thought about a novel, a screenplay, an essay. I wrote one half of one scene of a screenplay, which was basically me djaying in a club and my phone ringing, and I don't even think I answered the phone, and seeing that I wrote, that's as far as I got um. But you know, I never stopped thinking about writing about him, and I never stopped feeling like something was out of whack, like my my life and my my creative life was out of balance for not having written about him. That, like everything else I was writing, was relatively easy, was light work, was trivial because there was this thing that I had to write about it and was not even really spending any time thinking about writing about you know that that moment that the Moth in what got me to that producers door at you know, ten o'clock the night before the performance was the fact that earlier that night we'd rehearsed and I've heard all these other stories, and everybody's story was so honest and raw and vulnerable, and there was so much bravery in them getting up and talking about whatever the thing was. Because you know, the Moth doesn't typically do too many light breezy stories, like often they take a dark turn. The classic Moth story is four or five minutes of fun and games and laughter and light, and then somebody is diagnosed with something or somebody goes through something horrible and the rest of the story is really dealing head on with whatever that turn that tragedy is. The story I was telling was none of that. The story I was telling was basically a stand up comedy routine. Now they needed that to end the night with so that everybody walked out of there. You know, able to operate heavy machinery. But yeah, I felt newly dishonest in the face of all this other courage and bravery from my other co storytellers. And it also felt very different to me. Three years later, I felt like it was one thing to do my go to Focus League tour and bullshit with Matt Lower and whoever else and promote the book and the way it needed to be promoted, and keep my grief and my pain to myself. But it felt like a new level of dishonesty, and maybe an unhealthy one. Two three years later, be crafting my own story in my own words, under my own sort of motor, and still be telling the story that didn't include my brothers, still be telling the fun and Games version. I went out and told that story exactly as I was supposed to, and got big laughs and had a ball, and they kept bringing me back, and I ended up telling that story and probably you know, ten different cities and sort of subsuming the part of me that felt like, I, you know, shouldn't be telling that story, but should instead be working on telling the real story. In many ways, Adam's book about his brother reads like a ritual itself, even though Adam is not religious. It has an incantatory quality like the Jewish mourner's prayer the Kaddish. Another staggering moment begins with an amber's hand, Adam writes, and so all I can do is grapple my way back? Is right this or maybe I mean mine, make ritual of being known as he would not build a bridge, I do rapple a lot in this book with the idea of telling his story, this notion of being resistant to narrative versus deeply deeply dependent on narrative, the idea that the fundamental thing David refused to do was tell his story like live in the honesty of what he was going through and who he was. And so I think I say those lines in the context of my own children and thinking about what tools I want them to have that David didn't in the event that they ever deal with any of the things he did. You know, I've been lucky enough to sidestep the genetic inheritance of depression, but it runs on both sides of my family, my mother's and my father's, through the generations. So I look at my own three children, and what I really want more than anything is for them to not feel the kind of shame that would lead them to keep something like depression or mental illness a secret. So the building of a bridge, I think, is the idea of helping them construct a language of framework, a life in which they never feel the need to hide that really characterized David's life. Suicide is so particular there are no natural bridges to it, like nothing connects to it. It's sort of an island, and to get there you have to swim. Here's Adam reading one last passage from his beautiful, powerful book. I had a brother once. Soon after his death, my mother tried to make me promise I would never write about David. I said nothing, and continue to say nothing until now, and still do not know what she asked, because it is nobody's business, or would be too painful to see rendered on the page, or simply because when my mother was a girl, Felicia promised never to write about her, and this, she feels, is what a writer owes his family. But I will make a different plea to my children. I will implore them to write it, speak it all, shed light, and who knows what else you might shed. Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Molly's A Core 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 Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram at Danny writer. And if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.