Julia McKenzie Munemo’s late father made his living by churning out trashy novels—that was about as much as she was willing to admit. But she had no desire to crack open any of the dusty paperbacks she inherited, until a nationwide reckoning made it clear she had no choice but to confront the racist legacy her dad left behind.
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Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Warning. This episode contains discussions of suicide. Listener discretion is advised. If you are a loved one is struggling with suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at three and four and huddled in the backseat of the VWS square back. My fingers are dusty from the dirt of the community garden. The patched knees of my jeans are caked and brown. The community garden is a city of square plots with this figot in the middle. It's a sea of green beans and lettuce. There's no room to grow at home. It's communism and free choice in the land of the people. It's ideals. I don't understand. Home is a left out of the parking lot, and we always turn left out of the parking lot and go home after. But today Dad turns right, and I can hear my heart and my ears when I reached my thumb into my mouth. I have never turned right out of the parking lot. And what is up this hill? What is beyond these gardens? How far does this road go? And where will it lead us? We are lost, Dad says, And it's laughter in his voice and cunning. Let's get lost, he shouts, And am I alone in the car? And how far do we drive? Lost? The word throbs through my head like lightning, and I can't see out the window, but I strained to see something I recognize, and my thumb is in my mouth. And then I close my eyes, but I still see him wild at the wheel. He drives a cartoon car with television abandoned. We are lost. That's Julia Mackenzie Muonemo, reading from her new memoir The Bookkeeper. Julia grew up beneath the shadow cast by her father's mental illness and suicide. You might think that this would be her family secret, But the secrets surrounding Julia's father involve dusty paperbacks written under a variety of pen names, hidden in a box that Julia couldn't bring herself to open or face for the longest time. 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, you know, I would say the landscape of my childhood was sort of like indoors and somewhat anxious. I came home from school and I found my mom in the TV room. Most of the time, she worked from home, and her office was just outside the TV room, and we would sort of gather there and watch soap operas all afternoon. She periodically had to dash off to answer her business phone, but that was really our time together. And you know, I vaguely knew that I had friends who did sports or other things after school. Even my siblings did sports and other things after school, but I wasn't interested in that. For most of my childhood. I really needed to be near my mom, and that's where she was. What soap operas did you watch? What was her? Um? The Guiding Light was the big one, that's what That's what came on right at three o'clock, was around the time I got home. Um, but on like half days or vacation that you know, they're whatever the ones were on Channel three. But that was what it was in Northampton. So we were the Guiding Light side of things, not the general hospital side of things. It was kind of a war, yeah, I was. I was more of a general hospital kid myself, so almost everybody was Yeah, So the other place I spent a lot of time as a child was at um My mother was a nikedo instructor and she ran a dojo a couple of miles away from home, and so I spent a lot of time there with her on weeknights and Saturday mornings, and you know, sort of watching her throw people around. And it was not anything that was interesting to me. I wasn't interested in niketo. I wasn't there to study. I was there just to make sure that she was safe. I think I spent a lot of my childhood kind of paying attention to my mom and making sure that she was alive. There was this big absence, which was my father, who was always missing, and you know, sort of the absence also of talking about the fact that he was missing. We didn't really, I didn't really do that. We didn't talk about him or mourning him or missing him. We just sort of plotted along with soap operas and aikido and things like that. Describe your mother a little bit for me. My mother, I think before my father's death, and I think certainly before we were born, I think she was a very vibrant, socially active woman. You know, they hosted dinner parties all the time they traveled the world. They had lots of friends. After his death, a lot of with friends I think sort of faded away, you know, some remained, but a lot of them didn't, And so, you know, it's sort of a lonely time. And I think my mother sort of wore the suit of that almost as an armor. You know. She would never have said that she was lonely, and she wouldn't call herself lonely. Now she you know, lives alone and says she's happy to do that. But I see her as lonely, and I think I saw her as lonely as a child too. She's incredibly intelligent. She's one of the smartest people I know. We had a joke when we were little that she didn't know the answer to something, she would just make it up, and often the made up answer was better than the real answer, so we liked it better. I always trusted her implicitly to sort of see us through whatever needed seeing through. You know, she was a fierce advocate for us when she felt that people had wronged us. So there was a time when I was placed in an English class that she thought was below me. In high school, and I just remember her kind of charging in and talking to the guidance counselor and taking over, and you know, my whole curriculum shifting as a result, much for the better, obviously, but that was work. I don't know that I would have ever done right. I didn't see it really as a lack and so that my mom kind of came to my defense. She advocates for us when she needs to. Yeah, you know, she's fears she's a niketoist, right. She was one of the highest ranking female aketoists in the country who was in Japanese. How did your mother and father meet? They met at a bar in New York City, um called the Riviera. So when they met, they were both married to other people and were introduced by a mutual friend. And my understanding is that it was just kind of immediate that spark was was quite alive right away. And my mother's marriage first marriage was very young, and she very quickly discovered that he was an alcoholic and there were all sorts of lives that he had told her, and she was able to get that marriage annulled. So I grew up with the sense of, like my mother was sort of married before, but there's this word that means she really wasn't ever married before, and it's annulment, so she had her marriage annulled. My father was married to a Dutch woman who I always understood to have been around for not a very long time, much like my mom husband. Doing research for my book, I learned that she had been around for actually quite a long time. They were married for a while, but he left her, and he and my mom got on a freight ship and sailed across the Atlantic to write books under contract for various sort of what they called factories of paperback originals, these publishing houses that just kind of put out what my mother would describe as trashy novels, And so they had contracts to write those, and I have pictures of them on that ship, sitting in there underpants, you know. Add two typewriters romantic huh, a couple newly in love sailing across the ocean on a freighter, pecking away at their twin typewriters turning out trashy, pulpy novels, sort of like f. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, the non literary version. These are the kinds of books that might display a man and a woman wrapped in all manner of torrid embraces on our paperback covers. It's so interesting that very often in that generation, if there were early marriages and there were no kids, especially if they were brief marriages or even more especially annulled, the kids would never have known. Parents wouldn't have told. So that wasn't a secret. No, we knew. There were things that a lot of people would have kept from us that my mother just insisted on being truthful about. And so the whole sort of definition of secret in our family is feels a little different. Julia's mom and dad were from very different backgrounds. Her father was Jewish, raised in Brooklyn by Holocaust survivor parents who were Orthodox. Her mother was raised in Albany in a waspy family who were members of the local country club. Her dad's mother is very unhappy that he's marrying a non Jewish girl, super unhappy, and that doesn't change as they start to have kids. The story is that she said to my mom while she was laboring with my sister, who's the oldest. You know you're not religious anyway, Susie, So why don't you just convert, and my mom was like, it's because I'm not religious that I can't convert. Right, I have a sort of moral compass about this. So you know whether or not that conversation happened actually during her labor, I cannot confirm, but that's sort of the legend way to choose a moment. Tell me about what you remember of your father. Yeah, my memories are spare um, although I started to develop more as I was writing. I remember this sort of you know, this larger than life figure. I just he was physically enormous, you know, very tall, strong and muscular, and you know, sort of dark hair, mustache, glasses, this kind of not really Clark Kent, but he felt like a superhero to me. Right. I definitely stories from friends of his about the way he yelled my name when I came into a room, or um sort of the way he held us and how much he loved us. So there was the sense of this warm kind of they're like figure, And I don't mean teddy bear, I really mean like sort of animal kind of again. Vibrant also, you know the word I used to describe my mother too. I think that there was a vibrancy to him, and my brother certainly talks about the sort of before and after. The dad he knew before his illness set in was just you know, he was Daddy. He was this loving, larger than life figure. You're the youngest of three, I'm the youngest of three. And what's the age difference between you and your older siblings. So my brother is three years older and my sister is five years older, so enough of an age difference that they would really have had much more concrete memories. Yeah, they definitely knew him better than I did. Will be back in a moment with more family secrets. Julia's father is frequently absent. He's looking for nothing less than the meaning of life. It starts with the practice of Aikido, which both of her parents become deeply involved in, but then he branches out into other philosophies and spiritual seeking. I don't know that he always knew what he was seeking, but I think a sense of sort of answers he had a he had a kind of quest to understand cosmos in a way, I think he wanted there to be something better than, something bigger, and he wanted to be a part of it. He went on sort of any excursion that would take him into the path of someone he thought was sort of enlightened, right, So he went to see the Dalai Lama speak he would go on a retreat, eat and meditate for days on end. So when I was I think two and a half, he left for one such retreat, and it was at ten days, and it was the kind of retreat where I believe that it was meditation primarily, and there's a teacher who you follow, and he was very eager to impress the teacher, and he was very eager to return enlightened. He felt that he was sort of ready to receive enlightenment, whatever that might mean. And so his plan, which I believe he executed, was to go there and in addition to meditating all the time, also not sleep and I believe eat as little as possible. So he was really sort of taking this ten day retreat to an extreme, and it didn't go well. So he had an altercation with the teacher, who pointed out to him that the quest for enlightenment was not one you could speed up or compete to win. It was really a journey, and he didn't like that at all. Julia's father sort of falls apart. On this retreat, he steals a sacred bowl, and then he escapes and drives back home. While he was driving home, my mother got a phone call that that it hadn't gone well and that he didn't look right when he left. And this is actually, this is a memory that I have, is um the moment that he came home, which you know, the memory is very vague. I was very young, but just this image of him walking in the door pretty obviously transformed physically, not the dad who had left. And in the image that I have, he's just sort of standing in the entranceway of the house, looking pretty rattled and confused, and he turns and looks at me and starts coming towards me, and I don't I don't think anything horrible happen next. But that's where my memory sort of shut out. And so that was his what his family says is his first breakdown. Are sort of the family lore that that was his first breakdown, and he didn't really ever come back from that one. So he spent a lot of you know, the next two years two and a half years in and out of psychiatric institutions and in and out of therapy. There weren't the same kind of treatment then, so um, he didn't like the treatments that there were that he didn't like the way they made him feel. Um. And he was really, really smart, and you know, one of the things that he could do quite well was sort of trick a therapist into into thinking that he was better, better enough to sort of lower their guard. And so then in probably November of the year that I was five, he agreed to go to a psychiatric institution in western Massachusetts called Austin Rigs, which I don't think anyone knew very much about at the time, but it was a place that he was willing to go because, like James Taylor had gone there to kick a habit or something, it felt like a place that he could respect. There were people he respected who had gone there, and he went and it turned out not to be the kind of facility that was prepared to deal with his level of illness. And he was there for a month. He came home briefly at Christmas to see us, and went back to the hospital, and on January five, he hanged himself in his hospital room. Did you know right away as a five year old what suicide talked about Yes, I did as a five year old to know that his parents wanted us to be told that he had had a heart attack, and my mother was unwilling to lie to us, and we also knew that we also knew that his parents wanted us to know that he had an heart attack, so we knew from the beginning that it was a suicide. I didn't know the method of that suicide. My sister and brother both did, at least earlier than I did. My mother was certain the line to us was not the solution that we needed to know that it was suicide. We had known he was mentally ill. I think we didn't use words like schizophrenic or bipolar at that time, but we knew that he was mentally ill, and the suicide was not kept a secret. But it wasn't for several years until she told me that that he had hanged himself. And that just that piece took up a lot of space in my imagination as a very young child, not knowing how he had committed suicide, I spent a lot of time like, oh, well, did he shoot himself? No, where would he have gotten a gun. He was in a psychiatric institution. Did he slid his wrists, Like again, where would he have gotten the razor blade? I was sort of plagued by this question. And when I did finally find out that we know, when my mother told me that he hanged himself, I still had the questions because I didn't know with what I was so sort of fixated on these details as a kid. Just think of the imagination of a very young child, a precocious, creative child, thinking about how her father took his own life. Julia doesn't ask her mother, it's just too hard. It was years before she learned that he had hanged himself with his belt. Julia survives the tragic loss of her father, grows up, excels intellectually and academically, and heads off to bar to college. At what point do you meet the man who will become your husband? M hmm, Very early in my last semester of college. So I'm going it comes from Zimbabwe and I was a student at Barred and they had an exchange program with schools in South Africa and Zimbabwe as part of a program in international education. And he arrived at Bard in you know, early February, in the middle of a snowstorm in clothes you might expect someone to arrive from Africa in, right, like light pants that didn't go all the way down to his ankles, and you know, a sweater that he had probably bought at the airport. He looked so out of place and so handsome. And I've noticed in the minute he stepped into the cafeteria. I'll never forget that moment. Yeah, what had been your in a sort of dating life before that? I had had a relatively serious boyfriend earlier in college who I had felt great seriousness for. Right, I think that I was, from a pretty young age, kind of seeking a partner and like a family. I wanted that sense of security and that sense of sort of constancy that I didn't have as a child. And so I had sort of attached myself to this white Jewish man in college and that didn't last terribly long or end with any grace. My best friend in college said to me at one point when I was trying to figure out how I was going to go forward and date someone, she said, you know what, it was so great. You're not the kind of girl but a man wants to date. You're the kind of girl that a man wants to marry and like college boys don't want to get married. And what do you think she meant by that was it is kind of a seriousness about the way that you were taking your life that you know, a lot of college students aren't kind of there yet. Yes, I had taken time off between high school and college before it was called a gap year and a cool thing to do. Um, I had taken time off because I wasn't ready, so I was a little bit older than the other people. But yes, I was serious. I was interested in kind of figuring out the great mysteries of my family, of my dad, of what that meant, what his history meant about who I was. I had this real, deep sense that I needed to connect myself to someone so that I would never be alone again. Right, of course, I'm now much older and understand that that's impossible, but at the time I just thought, well, isn't that what you do right? You find love and you get committed and and that person is your rock. And I think I was really looking for a rock and lo and behold in locked and Gone from Zimbabwe. And he too was very serious and was very interested in these larger questions. He too came from a family with lots of complexity and also with mental illness, and we just had a lot of questions and common and we were both willing to sort of be that rock for each other from very early on. I love that phrase, questions in common. What a great way to go through life with a partner with shared questions. And this is just what happens. Julia and Goni become bonded and serious from the start. They're together for two semesters and then Goni returns to Zimbabwe. This is by now, and Zimbabwe is beginning to fall apart politically. The university where he hopes to do his graduate work to eventually become a professor is shut down. Julia fears Forni's physical safety, but there is a way he can come back on a fiance visa. As Julia and Goni plan their wedding, there's one person she fears isn't going to be happy about it. Remember her father's mother, the Holocaust survivor who hadn't approved of Julia's parents marriage. Julia's grandmother had met and Gooni once and had been rude to him. Tell me a bit about that encounter with your grandmother when you went to see her and tell her my grandmother was a you know, she obviously had had more heartbreak in her life then really and anyone should have had to survive. But as a result, she was pretty broken. By this time. We had relatively regular contact up to the time that I started dating Goni, but she really did not approve and so communication had already been tense for some time. But I think she felt that she had sort of dodged a bullet when he moved back to Zimbabwe. So when I came to her to tell her that we were getting married, she I don't think was ready for that news. She had this very physical you know, she'd move her body, but her face just I had never seen someone's face just go white, and it was clear to me immediately that this was it. This was the sort of breaking point for us. And at first she cried. There were a lot of tears. She then sort of exploded in anger. And at this point where so we're at her condo in a development for older people in Connecticut, and we're moving between her living room and her kitchen, and she's sort of having this breakdown. I think, you know something. She stands at her counter in her kitchen and she sort of punches her fists onto the counter and she just says, to me, where will the children be? And that's when I realized that it wasn't really about me being white and going to being black. Her anxiety was about what would come of the children of such a union. And at the time it was so naive. But at the time I was like, I have the answer to this. This is so easy, right, because she also thought that my mother and father were such a union that would create children who didn't have a place. And so I said, oh, but Grandma, look at me. I'm fine. No one wonders what I am. I'm half Jewish, I'm half Christian. It's not an issue. By the time our children are born, it won't be an issue. Like I was. It was just so naive, and you know, in love and wanted love to answer all problems. But you know, she knew much more than I did about racism and hatred and what hatred could do to a people. Right, she had lost a lot of people in the Holocaust, and you know it had of course soured her. What I grapple with is this question of why it soured her in this particular way why she became what I see is as really racist. So she asked me that question, where will the childre and be? Ferociously I answered it. She wasn't satisfied with my answer, and then she sort of turned around and picked up this thing that I had never You know, I'd spent some time in this condo of hers. I had never seen it before, this strange glass basket like thing. Was her grandmother genuinely concerned about the future of Julia and Boni's children or was she just using them as a cover for her own bigotry. Regardless, it seemed impossible that she could get out of her own way and realized that she was perpetrating the very thing that had been done to her. In fact, she was willing to lose her granddaughter over it. After we had the rest of our conversation, which did not go well, um, she told me, you know, if I was going to marry and Gony, I could never come back to her. I was heart of standing in the doorway with the door open, ready to leave, and I turned around to sort of say, are you sure do you really want me to leave this way? Because I'm choosing and GONI right if there's a choice, it's obvious to me. And she thrust this glass basket thing into my hands and close the door. And it was such a strange moment for me. It was really surreal, you know. I sort of walked back to my beat up Toyota Corolla and put this basket on the seat next to me and drove away. It was not the last time I saw her, but it was last time I saw her for a very long time. Do you think it was a wedding present? God, I'm asking him, because you know the way you're describing it, it's like wedding presents are often these strange glass things, right, Like just it's like something maybe just happened in her psyche that was like, I'm not going to see you again, but you're getting married, and here's my gift. That's so funny. I have never thought of that. Maybe, yeah, maybe it felt like this heavy sort of talisman of her hatred. Right, it was not. It's not something I held on too. We'll be right back and Gooni and Julia Mary and have two sons. They moved to Williamstown, Massachusetts, Whereon is a professor at Williams College. It's a lovely town. They're a lovely family living a lovely life. But there's a secret lurking beneath the surface, because that's what secrets do. They lurk. You knew that your father had written these kind of pulpy novels, that this was what your parents did when they traveled across the Atlantic, and this is how he made his living, and he had all these different pen names. You didn't know what the contents of some of those novels were and what they would reveal to you about his preoccupations and his psyche and this whole kind of history. So can you maybe start from your discovery about that. So when my first son was born and was a toddler, and my cousin came to visit us and sort of dropped this box of books on my dining room table. And this is my cousin on my mother's side, and so it was a surprise to me that what they were were books my dad had written. And they each had these very racially charged, selecious covers on them. They were clearly pornography, and you know, each one had a muscular black man in some form of undressed with his wrists and chains and a sort of stereotypically Southern bell type white woman. On the cover, Julia's father wrote slave porn, or what was sometimes known as plantation porn. This was a thing, a dreadful subgenre of the trashy novel. There was an appetite for this kind of racist kinkiness, enough so that Julia's father turned out a whole bunch of them, along with the other less offensive pulp. When my cousin plopped those books on the counter, I was shocked. I was horrified. I was certain I had never seen them. I couldn't believe that anyone would want to bring them into a house with this two year old child in it and let him see them. I was just the whole thing. I was filled with shame, and I didn't believe that my father had written them. And she said to me, no jewels, look in the back, right, and her mom had written written by George Wolk on the back so that everyone would remember, right, sort of posterity. I hid them away when my cousin brought them to me, and continued to hide them. You know, we moved a couple of times. By the time we landed in Williamstown, I thought I might be ready to face those books. We've moved around, We've lived in Zimbabwe and Batswana and Virginia, and so our stuff has been in storage for a long time. And we're finally settling down and I think, oh, but I'm gonna I'm gonna alphabetize all the books and I'm just gonna put all of Dad's books out. I'm just gonna see how that feels. And it immediately felt so horrible that I packed them right back up and put them in the back of the closet. How many of them were there, But at this point I still just had those four that my cousin had brought me um, and I had no real sense of how many more I might find. I didn't even have a sense of wanting to find more. I just knew I didn't want those books out in the world. He had written four books under his own name that I did have on, you know, alphabetized on my bookcase, but which I had never read. And you know, people would ask me over the years why I had never read them, and I was like, well, yeah, I just I just don't think he was probably a very good writer, and I don't want to know about that. I want him to still be some kind of a great person in my memory. Um, I don't want to be disappointed. And that was sort of the story I told myself, and so then passed forward more years. The kids are probably nine and twelve. Yeah, they were nine and twelve. It was when Tamir Rice was killed, you know, twelve year old African American boy killed by a police officer. He had a toy gun in his hand. And when that happened, Julius was also turning twelve very soon, and I just was sort of shattered awake. It was way too long in coming. I had these boys who were nine and twelve, who are growing up as black children in the United States. I should have woken up much earlier than I did. But when Tamir Rice was killed, I just I couldn't see a future in which I didn't figure out who I was, what my race meant in my household, what my legacy meant. You know. I knew that I had been hiding these books in my closet for ten years. So by this point I know what I'm hiding, right, and I just couldn't keep that up. I knew that it was time for me to to face that history and to face my whiteness. So at that point I sort of crept to the closet and picked up one of these books, and it was hard. It took months to read just the first one. When your cousin first brought those books. What was the quality of your response in that moment at your kitchen table. Were you shocked or stunned or was there more of a sense of Oh, I kind of somewhere somewhere within me, I knew this. And this This is where I have loved listening to your podcast so much, because you talk about the unthought known? Is that what it's called? Yes, ah, the unthought known? When it comes to family secrets, this psychoanalytic phrase comes up again and again what we know deep down absolutely no, but cannot allow ourselves to think because it's just too dangerous. Julia is certain that she's never seen these books before, But when she mentions them finally to Goni and shows him a particularly disturbing cover, he's strangely nonchalant, and he said, oh, yeah, that one, And I was like, what do you mean that one? And I was completely confused. When would he have seen this? Did my mother show these to him? And I just don't know. And I this time did ask this question, and he said, you showed these to me when we were dating. They were in the bottom shelf of a glass fronted bookcase in your mom's bedroom, and you showed them to me. And I believe him entirely. I mean, in part because he remembers it. He wouldn't have made that up. But also I have no memory of that. I can't even like construct the memory of that, now that he's told me all the details. You know, at what point did my shame kind of wash over me and shut that down? You know? Was it that I showed him one and saw the look on his face and was so ashamed that I just pretended it never happened. Maybe I think that's possible. Or was it later? Was it after the kids were born? I was just couldn't imagine that my father had made his living doing this thing, but felt like it went so against who my family was. I don't know, I don't know, but in that moment at my kitchen counter, I was shocked and believed I had never seen those books before. Um, but that isn't true. It's so extraordinary the way we can know and yet not be able to bear the thought, and so the thought can really just vanish. And so then when you do come back around and you are actually interrogating these books for the first time, and you know, as you said, it was very difficult to took a long time to read. What was that feeling? Like, what was the If you can bring back the feeling of beginning to read this material, that's so horrifying. Yeah, So at this time in my life, I was back in school, I was getting an m f A. And I was working with a writer who was so supportive of this journey and really encouraging me to do it. And I said, I can't, you know, I can't read these books. I took a picture of it to show him, like some of the covers, and I was like, how could you expect me? You know, because it was a little residency m f A, so we were we were very rarely in person. I took a picture and I sent it to him. I said, you can't expect me to read these books. You know, this isn't even what I'm working on right now, this isn't even my project. And he said, I want you to read one book, and I want you to trace physical description. Just write a write a paper about how your father described black people and how we described white people. I was like, okay, that's dumb, right, Like I was at so dismissive of this idea. In giving me an assignment, it gave me a path in and now I felt like, well, I have to do this, right. My professor told me that I have to do this, and so I will. So I read the first one over the course of I don't know, a month probably You know, these are not long books. They don't take to read um, but I had to read them in very small doses because they were really upsetting, right. I mean, you know some people have when they hear the beginning part of the story, Oh, my father wrote pornography that you know. I've had friends before they know the whole story, laugh and say, well, what's it like to read something that your dad wrote? Have it turned you on? And I was like, no, no, wait, no, that's not that's not the problem. The problem, of course, was encountering her father's racism right there in start well, black and White, what has it been like for you to trace and discover things, very uncomfortable things about your father's psychology By becoming in a way, sort of a literary salue, and you know, trying to piece him together, this man that you know that you lost when you were five, and that you make this really difficult discovery about. I went into reading his books believing that they would hold the key to his racism. That I once I could finally read them and had sort of gotten over the hump of that first one, which took me so long, I was like, well, this is the key. This is the place where I'm going to understand what made my dad a racist and why he could make his living on stereotypes, and what that reveals about the beliefs that he held, even if they went against his kind of liberal politics. So I went in with this very clear aim, and I was frustrated, as makes sense, right, how does any one of us trace our racism to its route? Right? But that was sort of what I hoped I would be able to do with his books. What I didn't expect was to trace his mental illness through his writing, and certainly not through his writing under pseudonym I somehow believed that I would learn some being about his mental illness. It would be under his books that he wrote under his own name, which it's foolish, right. No matter how many different names he used, they were all him. And so it was jarring to sort of enter this project expecting to go on a journey about race and my race and my husband's race, and the race of the characters in my father's books, and end uh also taking this sort of parallel journey into his mental illness. And so what I discovered was that in every single one of his books, there was a hanging, There were multiple suicides. There were many times his protagonist was black and was someone who had either been stolen and was on the slave ship or who was living as a slave. And these men are often in his novels grappling with their sanity, trying to do anything to stay sane. Julia's deep reading into her father's books and her delving into his history leads her into a greater awareness not only of his racism, but also drives home the legacy of his mental illness. Gooni too as a mentally ill father. What will this mean for her two boys? One thing is certain, the legacy of family secrets is one that is not being passed down. Julia and Gooni's sons know about her father's racist move They also are aware of the rocky shoals of mental illness that exists in their genetic history. Because this tough inheritance has not been covered up, it will not fester. There's no cause for secrets because the shame is not theirs to carry. You know, there are unanswerable questions about the genetics of mental illness, and I mean, one never wants to believe that this is the kind of thing that could pass on to your children right through your genes. And here are my children who have two grandfathers who neither of whom they ever knew, both of whom were mentally ill. It was a difficult journey to take. It was uncomfortable most of the time. How has it settled within you? You know, probably as much as you can, as much as it's possible to know. And now there are no more secrets. I guess I would say I feel very lucky to have two sons who are there now fourteen and seventeen, and they are open to the world, right they're open to me. They're very clear about who they are. They're they're very different from each other, but there's very little about their sort of inner psyche that feels like a mystery to me. Obviously, the older one is beginning to do things that I don't know the details of, and that's fine, but I feel like I know who he is and how he is, and that's also true for my fourteen year old. I'm also married to a man who is so aware that the world can kind of shift at any moment, which is very handy at times like this. It's good to sort of be grounded by someone who's like, yeah, well, anything can happen. There can be a pandemic. What we have control over is what's happening in our house. And so he's also quite clear that we need to continue that sort of vigil that I started as a teenager and that I imagine he did too, to make sure that our kids have what they need, but that we don't have much control over over any of this, and so really the best we can do is stay tuned into them. What has become clear is how much it matters to my kids that they know this history and that not a secret. And if we had kept from them my father's illness or my husband's father's illness, it would feel dangerous and it would feel probably like something that couldn't talk to us about, and so it's so important for them not to feel those those pressures that secrets can bring. Family Secrets is an iHeart 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 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 pot. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.