A conversation about the nature of truth, identity, and the detours that unexpectedly lead us home. This episode welcomes bestselling author and host of the podcast Family Secrets, Dani Shapiro. Dani and Rabbi David explore how Dani's mid-life discovery that her beloved father was not her biological parent reshaped her world, brought clarity to a lifelong sense of disconnection, and inspired her prolific creativity. With honesty and depth, Dani reflects on the power of secrets, the concept of the “unthought known,” and the healing that comes from facing the truth.
A conversation about the nature of truth, identity, and the detours that unexpectedly lead us home.
This episode welcomes bestselling author and host of the podcast Family Secrets, Dani Shapiro.
Dani and Rabbi David explore how Dani's mid-life discovery that her beloved father was not her biological parent reshaped her world, brought clarity to a lifelong sense of disconnection, and inspired her prolific creativity. With honesty and depth, Dani reflects on the power of secrets, the concept of the “unthought known,” and the healing that comes from facing the truth.
Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItgBHf0ccmA
Dani Shapiro’s website: www.danishapiro.com
Dani Shapiro on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/daniwriter
Live Taping coming up on May 4th with Jay Michaelson: Tickets - https://www.92ny.org/event/detours-and-destinations-jay-michaelson
Rabbi Ingber on Instagram @rabbiingber https://www.instagram.com/rabbiingber
92NY Bronfman Center events : https://www.92ny.org/whats-on/events/jewish-life-adults?hierarchicalMenu%5BEventMenu.lvl0%5D%5B0%5D=Jewish%20Interest&refinementList%5B10b_dd_AgeYears%5D%5B0%5D=adults
This transcript was generated automatically. Its accuracy may vary.
I am Rabbi David Ingber and this is Detours and Destinations from the 92nd Street Y. Conversations with deep thinkers about their journeys, both expected and unexpected. Today's guest is Dani Shapiro and she's an award-winning author. Her latest novel, Signal Fires, was Time Magazine's best fiction book of the year. And her previous memoir from 2019, Inheritance, a memoir of genealogy, paternity, and love won the National Jewish Book Award in the autobiography and memoir category. Dani hosts the very successful podcast, Family Secrets and Teachers Writing. And she's a friend and I welcome her to our podcast today. Dani, good to have you.
Dani:
David, it's great to be with you. It's an honor.
RDI:
It's really one of the inspirations for me to even start this podcast actually was your podcast and my experience on your podcast and your writing and your friendship and so much of detours and destinations is taken from the profound sense I have in my own life. And I know that you share this, that we never know what is a detour in our lives and what is the destination entirely. And so I just wanted to start our conversation with what comes to mind for you when you think of a detour in your life. Something that was either unexpected or you anticipated, but that in some way you experienced both in the moment and even as you reflect on it now, a sense that that was a detour. And also for us as just to begin the conversation, how you relate to seeing it as possibly also a destination of some kind.
Dani (01:40.396)
Mmm. It's such an interesting way of framing that thought or that idea. mean, what came to mind immediately was, in a way, a detour would be another way of thinking about or maybe talking about a before and after moment, like an inflection point of sorts. And I would say in recent years, the biggest one for me in terms of my own sense of myself and my identity was
discovering in 2016, it's actually a while ago now, it's like eight plus years, that my dad who raised me and who I adored and who I patterned myself after in many ways had not been my biological father and that that was this secret that my parents took to their graves with them and that certainly was something that I was never supposed to know and that in a way,
It was sort of like a detour that became a destination because all my life as a writer, I had been writing about secrets. All my life, all of my novels centered around in some way a secret or the corrosive power of secrets or what happens to us when secrets are revealed or what happens to us when we keep a secret. And then I discovered really by chance, by stumbling, by accident,
that I was the secret, that I had been the secret.
RDI(03:14.05)
That's a remarkable discovery and a remarkable turning of the tables in a way that then reshaped your life and set you on a journey of discovery and rediscovery and recovery.
Well, you know, in a way, I think that's why that's what came to mind first, because there certainly have been many detours and many destinations. But it came to mind because the detour really became, oh, this was my destination all along. I've many times have had the thought, thank God I found this out, because I am a searcher by nature. I'm a seeker. I'm a contemplative. And I was constantly circling around something that I couldn't apprehend and that I didn't have access to, but that was shaping and forming my whole life. And it wasn't until I learned the truth, until I discovered it, that I understood that I had been shaped by this driving need to know something that I couldn't even have articulated to you. I just knew that something didn't make sense, didn't add up. And I would have in a way, had I never found out.
I would have in some way have spent my whole life just slightly adjacent to, I think, my greatest purpose or, you know, my Dharma. There was just this way in which...
I always felt like I was just slightly missing the mark and I don't feel that way anymore. And I know that that feeling, that shift in that feeling began when I learned the truth because I came to realize that I had been digging and exploring, but I wasn't asking the right questions. I I wrote an essay recently that covered some of this territory, a literary craft essay, but in it,
Dani (05:06.614)
I wrote the sentence, we cannot suspect what we cannot imagine. And I couldn't suspect or dig or know or go in that direction because I couldn't possibly have imagined it.
So at risk of going in a direction, I mean, I just want to follow this because it's so rich and it's so alive. And, and I'm also super aware as I'm listening to you, a newbie to the podcast universe and being told by my producers and editors that I have to stop humming all the time whenever people are saying things, know, speak with your eyes, speak with your, with your face, like listening to you and this, I had this experience too, reading your book devotion. I read that book and, and much as I was just doing before I was going, mm, mm Like, like overriding my.
own inner editor. Like just I can't help but agree wholeheartedly and embodied with some of the things that you just said about living adjacent to a life and having a sense of a truth that you couldn't imagine, which is pretty remarkable, like that you can't suspect what you don't imagine. And yet in some remarkable way, this detour that you begin our conversation with, you couldn't have imagined it, but you still had a sense that it was there, that there was a sense in the family.
You had one image also in the book that I'm not remembering it now, but you might recall it like that sense that something was true even though you couldn't fully grasp it like you had an inner knowing about that family?
Dani (07:03.536)
didn't add up because, you know, everything, all the boxes were checked. mean, everything should have made perfect sense, but it didn't. So that something or someone must be me. And I think what you were referring to from inheritance is when I started researching.
You know, once I learned the truth of my paternity and just briefly for listeners who haven't read inheritance, I learned very, very quickly that my parents had had struggled with infertility and that they had used an anonymous sperm donor and were told to never, ever tell anyone that that had happened and that no one needed to know. And most definitely the child didn't need to know, but no one needed to know. was cloaked in a tremendous amount of secrecy at that time and for a long time.
time after. So when I started researching it, was thinking a lot about, I was reading the literature of adoption and the way adoptees feel. There's a term called genealogical bewilderment that I found really beautiful because it fit me. I didn't look like my family. I didn't see the familiar, know, the biologically familiar that we take for granted when we are in a biologically made family. But I thought I was, but I didn't see the familiar and that
is very bewildering. But the other thing that I came across was a term coined by a psychoanalyst named Christopher Bolas, and the term is the unthought known. And when I first read it, it just put me, just like I felt chills, because, and I think,
Dani (08:46.158)
My story is a pretty dramatic example of that, but I think we all experience the unthought known.
The unthought known is what we know in our bones in some way, but is like the third rail. It's too dangerous to touch. So we don't go there. We don't have the thought. We don't have the language. It's just impossible. But on some other level, we absolutely know it. We could also call that deep instinct, but we shrug it off.
So this unthought known, love it. And what we can't imagine, we can't suspect, but at the same time for you in this detour was there was a known and the revelation that came completely changed the trajectory of your life at that point. And what you learned in retrospect was that you had been just been writing about secrets.
in your entire literary career, how early do you now think that the unthought known was available to you in your life?
I think it was from my first capacity for any kind of consciousness. And I think it's something that accompanied me and that probably, I mean, in some really great ways as well as some not so great ways formed me. I mean, I think that the pursuing of that is part of what made me a writer. And I mean, I feel so incredibly
Dani (10:20.514)
thankful that I had the ability to be a writer and the gift, because there is a gift involved, because I don't know what I would have done with it otherwise. What I was able to do with it was create narratives, make up stories. I mean, if fiction writing is anything, it is the shaping of the unthought known. It is a wholly, at least in early drafts,
kind of unconsciously driven process. So, you the writer eventually sits back and kind of goes, wow, I wrote that? I thought that? I made that? I created that world? And that, I think, really came in part from being this very observant only child who, on some level, knew something was up. My parents, there was just a sense that...
There were things I didn't know and I we all feel that way about our parents or things we don't know but this was something different and it had to do with me somehow and so I was working overtime my little child's brain to try to get at that and that really was a lot of what shaped me.
So tell me more about that. You your classic question that you ask in Family Secrets when you ask the guests to frame a little bit about their childhood. But we have a little bit of a taste of your upbringing, you're an only child. Maybe bring us a little bit into some of the joy and some of the experiences of childhood also, the Jewishness as well. And when did you know you were writing? We're all kind of curious about that.
They're all connected.
Dani (11:54.644)
So I was born in New York City and fairly quickly my parents bought a house in suburban New Jersey in a town called Hillside. And they did so in large part because my father was the oldest son in an Orthodox family, Manhattan family, very prominent Orthodox family. His father was one of the founders of Lincoln Square Synagogue and founded a whole bunch
of yeshivas in Israel and to give you a sense of my grandfather, on the day that he died, he died suddenly in his 60s and on the day that he died all the yeshivas were closed, I the day after for the funeral so that people could spill out into the streets and hear his funeral.
So like a heavy, heavy Jewish. A macha, as they say. It's a macha. He was a maher.
Dani (12:49.166)
And my father, as, I mean this is a little long-winded, but I think it's worth unpacking, my father was the oldest of three kids. He married young, pretty much an arranged marriage with a daughter of another prominent Orthodox family, and that marriage produced a daughter, and then they got divorced. She left, the story goes, and
That was unheard of. That was in the 40s, late 40s. Absolutely unheard of in that world to get divorced. And then my father, a couple years later, met and fell in love with a young woman, also from a prominent Orthodox family. And he fell head over heels in love with her and found out shortly before they were to be married that she was dying. She had...
Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which in those days was a terminal illness. She did not know it. Her parents kept it from her, kept it from my father. And he found out really on the eve of their wedding that she was dying. And...
He went for rabbinical advice. He went outside of the fold of who the rabbi would have been that his family would have gone to. He and his younger sister, my aunt Shirley, went to see Menachem Schneerson.
So the chief rabbi
Dani (14:14.286)
And Rabbi Schneerson recommended to my father that he postpone the wedding, keep on postponing, which I later came to understand as I researched. I didn't know any of this when I was growing up. I didn't know that there was a second wife. I didn't know literally of her existence until one day my half-sister mentioned the name Dorothy and I said, who's Dorothy? And it wasn't until I was in
So the first marriage, of course, but the second marriage you didn't know. You thought that you were...
I had to know about the first marriage because there was a child. was a sister 15 years older than I. But they never even told me. My mother used to like to tell the story that we were on the beach somewhere in the Caribbean and Susie, my half-sister, was with us and my mother overheard some other vacationing family asking me about my...
sister and I said well actually I mean I must have been four years old and I was like actually she's my half sister. I figured it all out is what I'm saying. Nobody told me and that's the kind of kid I was and I was always trying to put it together.
Like a detective, were taking clues and you were putting it together.
Dani (15:24.01)
Exactly. So by the time my father met my mother, he had been widowed and divorced. And that meant that in the Orthodox community that he was a part of, he was very much sort of damaged goods. he started, he would go to grow singers and the Concord on weekends looking for a bride. But he met my mother on the street on Shabbat.
He was with his sister, my aunt, and my mother was divorced, no children, and she was probably around 30 years old, and she was carrying a hammer because she was going to build a bookcase in her new apartment. she was correct. Correct. So that's why I'm telling you that detail because he should have known she was Jewish, but she was not remotely observant. And they made a deal. They wanted to get married and
On the Sabbath?
Dani (16:19.746)
He proposed to her and he said, I need for you to keep an observant home and for any children we have together to be raised Orthodox. So they moved to New Jersey because there's a synagogue in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There was a rabbi that my father was following and it was within walking distance of the JEC in Elizabeth, New Jersey. And then my parents, I was going to say my poor parents, you know, they start to try to have children and they can't.
And they try for years, and they can't. And there's a string of miscarriages, and they can't. So what must have happened is that they started seeking fertility treatments. They went to Philadelphia, even though they were a half an hour from New York City, because probably to keep it a secret. And eventually, they used a donor, and I was conceived. And in a great stroke of irony,Right.
Dani (17:17.57)
I was born looking nothing like my parents, looking really as I would eventually learn, exactly like the English, Irish, French, German man who was the medical student who was the sperm donor. And I was raised an only child with this much older half sister who was already in college by the time I was three years old in this big house in the suburbs with these older parents.
who were constantly, in a way, whispering. There was this sense that my house was like a museum, and there were intercoms in all the rooms. And there were also those rotary telephones of the 1960s and 70s, and there were these privacy things on the phones where you could lift up the little doohickey on the phone, and it would allow no one else in the house to listen in.
And I thought this was normal, right? I thought every house has intercoms and doohickeys on phones that don't allow other people to listen in.
It was normal to you because you didn't know anything else.
I didn't know anything else and and that's something and you know in my podcast family secrets I'm constantly talking to people about however, we're raised in That's our world. so when you ask about sort of the landscape of my childhood it was Very quiet. It was very tense My father was devout. My mother was not
RDI(18:35.63)
That's our normal environment.
RDI(18:50.946)
That created tension.
And they fought over me and how to raise me because ultimately my mother had agreed to all this, but she didn't buy in. And she didn't fall in love with, you know, Orthodox liturgy or rituals, which I understand. And she was carrying her hammer around and here she had this little blonde daughter who she wanted something else for than an Orthodox life.
She was still carrying her hammer around.
Dani (19:22.13)
And so I don't know. I adored my father. My affiliation and my identification and my love was really very strongly weighted toward him. I felt less comfortable with my mother for reasons I now much better understand. think she was a little frightened when she looked at me. I was a secret she was looking at.
Did you sense that?
Dani (19:51.086)
And I was also a mystery to both of them. I was carrying a mystery. literally was a mystery, 50 % a mystery. But because it was a secret and because it could never be just talked about the way that people in our world today can talk about these things, it just festered. So they sent me to a Solomon and Checkter school in New Jersey until
conventional Jewish day school and your mother was keeping her end of the bargain.
She was keeping her into the bargain. I would have been sent to the JEC, Breweria, you know, the school for Orthodox girls, but my mother conveniently had a big fight with Rabbi Tites very early in my parents' tenure in New Jersey, and they literally never set foot in the shul that they moved to New Jersey for ever again. In retrospect, they would have been much better off staying in the city where there were some beautiful options and...
I think it would have been a happier situation for them. But instead, they ended up in this town because of this synagogue that they ended up not being members of and sending me to Solomon's Shecter, which would not have been my father's first choice. It was much more of a, you know, not an Orthodox. It wasn't a yeshiva. It was a day school. And then in sixth grade, my mother won the battle and they sent me to a private school, basically a prep school that was
walking distance from our home, a school called the Pingree School, where I was one of the only, you know, one of a minority, let's say, of Jewish kids in the school.
RDI(21:24.984)
So many questions. Wow, I so I still want to get back to your literary gifts. I'd love to hear when that emerged and when you knew that. But I also can imagine just as a comment that when.
And I've lived to tell the tale.
RDI(21:38.734)
I mean, I don't know if this will ring true for you or land for you, but when your mom and dad, who themselves probably perceive themselves as damaged goods, because the culture around them might have labeled them as such and might have felt like, oh, we can't do anything right, or your father meets somebody who falls in love, but he's going to have to compromise on his own commitment to orthodoxy, and she's going to have to compromise on her lack of orthodoxy, and they find a way to get together. But then they also can't have kids. And there's just a feeling of like, what did we do?
along, the miracle that you are become a mystery and that also potential reminder of their, you on the one hand, your father couldn't have a child or whatever it was. And, and that's all so intensely unfair and natural to think at the same time. And you're in that.
Yeah.
Yeah, I had the realization when I was working on inheritance, my father's younger brother, I'm still close with his wife who's still living, his ex-wife who's still living. And we were having coffee one day in the city and I came to realize as we were talking that in the time that my parents were trying and failing to have their own biological child, his younger brother and sister-in-law popped out four children in that period of time.
And my aunt Shirley, his younger sister, the middle child, had already had four, she got married, you know, young and had had four children. And, you know, prou revue, be fruitful and multiply. You know, it was, it was what my father so desperately wanted to do. And his parents were still living and they were, from what I can understand, very amazing, also very strict, also very by the book. And
Dani (23:29.848)
Here was their oldest son, just, my father's name was Paul, and at some point someone who knew him told me that at certain point people would refer to him as poor Paul. You know, just a really bad run of luck. Yeah.
That is so painful. And when you move into the private school, were you aware all of a sudden that there visually, just on the surface level, that there were more people that looked like you? was there a sense of that unthought known something was clear all of a sudden?
That's a really great question. mean, I think part of what happened was that all my life up until that point, there had been comments, many, many, many comments from other Jewish people about my not looking Jewish. Many, many comments. And...
I have to say, when they're...
I would double down all my life until nine years ago when someone would say that to me, I would double down. would say, born orthodox, grew up with two sinks and two dishwashers, fluent in Hebrew. I would just double down because it bothered me so much that people would say that on so many levels. It bothered me because on some unconscious level, I must have registered that they were saying
Dani (24:52.182)
I don't think you're one of us, right? On another level, it bothered me because it was being offered as a kind of weird veiled compliment, which I really hated the implications of that. I just didn't like any of it. When I got to Pingree, I don't think I was aware that there were a lot more people there who looked like me. I think I was extremely aware of my Jewishness and of anti-Semitism.
And this very complicated, I mean, I, in high school, my boyfriend was Irish Catholic. There was a point where his parents were taking us to the country club in Short Hills, New Jersey for dinner. And as I was getting ready for him to pick me up, my mother said to me, just so you know, it's a closed club. And she was saying it, I'm not sure how she was saying it. I want to ascribe motives to her. But I know that when I was there at dinner looking for all the world,
like, you know, Muffy McDonald or whatever, that I was being seen sort of approvingly as the non-Jewish, you know, whatever, as belonging there. And so belonging became such a, I didn't belong anywhere. And to go back to, you know, the whole idea of destination, this knowledge over this last 10 years has made me feel like I belong.
everywhere, not like I don't belong anywhere. It's been this radical shift for me.
It's amazing. I was just thinking exactly that because I was going to ask you to remember when you called me when we spoke about this revelation and what it might mean. I remember getting that phone call from you. And I remember we talked about Moses and about Moses as this looking one way. He's in the palace of the Egyptians and he becomes the Redeemer. he kind of code knows that a code shift between being an Egyptian and being an Israelite and so on. And as an adopted mom, doesn't
RDI(26:56.336)
Who knows if he really knows? At what age he realizes that the text is unclear. And as you were speaking, I just kept thinking, Dani, about the detail of the destination, the gift and the challenge of being somebody who had belonged and didn't belong. And that what a writer does is be able to embody another character, to be inside of your own character, but at the same time find a way into someone else's character or to imagine. And so I just was thinking about how the entire experience
It was a crucible for your own creative journey.
And writers must be outsiders. To be on the inside of something is to not see it clearly. And so there's this kind of slightly outsider, outcast, observer, witness way of walking through the world that is both a gift and can be at times lonely or can at times be challenging. But it's what I was
I really feel like I was born into this story. And as an aside, during COVID, when you were doing services on Zoom from Romamoo, I would zoom in mostly on Friday nights. And I had this realization because of that period of time. I don't know if I ever told you this, but I would zoom in and then I would keep my camera off.
And I would see all the people, they became fixtures in my mind, the people who came every week to those Shabbat services. And I would see, you know, the man in who, you know, looked like maybe an assisted living place, or I would see the couples on their sofas, or I would see every shape and size and color and gender of humanity on that Zoom. But I would keep my camera off. And then one day I realized why I was doing that.
Dani (28:58.094)
And it was because my experience of having been in shul in synagogue for my whole life had been feeling like people were looking at me and thinking that I wasn't Jewish. And then I'm looking at this rainbow of people. I'm looking at just a whole world of, know, what does it look like? And I turned my camera on because there was just such a sense of what have I been depriving myself of? I understand why I did.
Wow.
Dani (29:27.938)
but to not have to do that anymore. You you mentioned the National Jewish Book Award for inheritance. I also won it for signal fires for my novel. I'm the only writer in the history, in the 70 something year history of this award to have won twice in the fiction and memoir category. And I'm hosting it actually. I'm hosting the award coming up. And it feels like so,
I wish my dad could see, but also really a feeling like my feet are on the ground. And all of this couldn't have transpired if my story had been any different in any way that every one of those detours, every bit of it, if the work of our lives is, at least some of the work of our lives is to forgive ourselves, forgive our former selves.
and also in a desire, profound desire to become as whole as it's possible to become in the time that we have. I mean, to me, this is, I can kind of hold this in my hands in a way that I never could because I didn't have all the information. And so I was supplying all sorts of stories and all sorts of narratives to.
why I was the way that I was or why I felt the way that I did or why my mother was this way or why my father was that way. And all of it was true. It just wasn't the whole truth. I didn't have the whole picture.
It just reminds me of this adage that nothing changes until it becomes what it is. And to the extent, like I remember hearing that when I was much younger, it was called the Zen paradox of change. Nothing changes until it becomes what it is. And so as you were adjacent to this truth, this unthought known, that it's very much like a reclamation story, that there are parts of yourself, there are parts of your story that can only
RDI(31:30.19)
evolve once they are the true story and that the truth here was hidden from you, it was concealed, and then it remarkably becomes the fuel that you use or the capacity that you use to tell the story now in a fuller way and not have to fill in the gaps and then you write.
incredibly courageous memoir and I want to come to the memoir but for those of us who love your writing or love great writing you know you're an incredible craftsperson of language and storytelling. When did you know? We know you said that you had as a young person you were aware that you could tell stories but like when did you know that you had that particular gift? The gift to write and communicate in that medium.
I always wrote like it was my, it was the way that I came to understand whatever I could understand. Journaling, diaries, stories, letters, just making things up. I just always was compelled both to write and to read from a really early age, but I didn't connect.
Like journaling, diaries.
Dani (32:35.51)
I didn't grow up knowing any artists or writers. My mother had one friend who was a visual artist, the artist Beverly Pepper. And when I met her, it was like, that's actually the most amazing thing. This person makes something out of nothing. But that was very far afield for me. couldn't imagine that I could ever do that. And then a stroke of luck or good fortune is that I went to Sarah Lawrence College and Sarah Lawrence, because it's
close to the city has a lot of writers who live in New York teaching there who would come back and forth and there were just an array of wonderful writers including Grace Paley, a writer named Esther Bruner, writer named Jerome Badanis who became my teachers and my mentors and so then it occurred to me that there were people who actually did do this. It was a thing you could do.
It was a thing you could do.
It still didn't occur to me that I could do it, that I had the capacity to, that I had anything to say that anybody would be interested in. And when I was in my early 20s, my parents were in a very bad car accident, and my father was killed in that accident, and my mother was very badly injured. And it was a profound, profound loss and also a profound wake-up call.
And I had dropped out of Sarah Lawrence. I was in my aforementioned hot mess years. And they took me back and I went back. And when I went back, I went back with a vengeance. I had such a feeling of having a lot to prove. The way only a 24-year-old or 23-year-old can feel like, my god, it's almost too late. You know, I have to make up for lost time. But I was writing. And I was kind of writing into my grief and into the story.
Dani (34:34.86)
of the loss of my parents, of my dad. And I was encouraged to apply to graduate school. And not even to apply. mean, think Grace Paley said to me, there's the door to the graduates program. Just walk through that door. They'll know what to do with you.
You dropped out of Sarah Lawrence and now they're pushing you to walk through that door.
Yeah, I pretty much went from being having not even an advanced degree because I never graduated from high school. I left a year early to go to college. So my terminal degree at that point had been the sixth grade at Solomon Schechter. And I went from that to graduating from Sarah Lawrence, going into the MFA program. And it was there that I wrote my first novel and that I found that that was my form. The short story was not my form.
I've only written a handful of worthy short stories in my whole writing life. I wrote my first novel there, and that novel, which was my graduate thesis, was published by Doubleday. And I began this circuitous journey of writing books and teaching, but that's how it started.
I mean, would just title thus far, just listen to your biography, listen to your life, is someone who understands detours and destinations. Someone whose life has taken various remarkable turns, unexpected, and that you have almost have a preternatural commitment to learning from as much of...
Dani (35:49.801)
Hahaha
RDI(36:05.644)
your experience in this lifetime as you can and to grow and to evolve. And I kind of come to this place back to the question I had mentioned earlier, is, and it's rooted, the question is rooted in my take, a little bit a take on you, Dani, what I know of you is that you're, you feel like an extremely courageous woman, a courageous human being willing to face difficult things and a desire to wake up. You used that term that was a wake up call for you. So was it difficult for you after...
your discovery to write such a radically exposing memoir about your family, about the secrets of your family, I'm not even, I have to get it through that everybody knows how inheritance actually took place, how you came to find out that your father turns out that he's not even your biological father and the shock of that. And then also the decision to write this memoir.
So I.
found out that my father wasn't my biological father because my husband was just recreationally doing a DNA test and asked me if I wanted to take one too, which I almost didn't do. I mean, I very easily could have never known this. Very easily. I thought I knew everything that there was to know about the family history and my ancestors on my father's side. They were, as I said, a very storied family. There were lots of portraits. There was even a documentary. There was about shuttle life in Poland. There was, you know, this history that I was very connected to.
So when my results came back it showed that I was 50 % Eastern European Ashkenazi, so that was odd. I thought it was a mistake. But then what it also showed on ancestry.com, and it's true for any of these DNA testing companies, is you can choose to see who else you are connected to, who else shares DNA with you, which is why most people do it. Most people do it because they want to know about...
Dani (37:51.296)
you know, that their third cousin is whomever. So a first cousin appears on my ancestry.com page who is a stranger. I still think that the DNA company has made a mistake, but my husband's a former journalist. You know, this has gotten both of our attention, but honestly his more than mine at that point because it was easier for him to imagine.
I just thought this is bizarre. was practically like plugging my ears, just going, ne, ne, ne, ne, ne, ne, this is not happening. And in very short order, we were able to, I had certain clues without which this would have remained a mystery forever. One clue was something my mother had once said to me 30 years earlier about having been conceived in Philadelphia.
And when I pushed her on that, she told me that they had had fertility issues and had used artificial insemination, but made it very clear to me that it was with my father's sperm. So I always remembered that. It was a little strange to find that out, but it was not that big a deal. As soon as I saw those DNA results, I knew what that meant.
Otherwise, without that piece of information and without that conversation with my mother, I could have, would have leapt to the more obvious answer of my mother must have had an affair. But I didn't. I knew that it must have been a sperm donor. Then we thought, who, what kind of person, who were typically sperm donors at that time? They were typically medical students. Then we look up.
Right.
Dani (39:29.462)
fertility clinics in Philadelphia during that period of time. There was only one that fit the bill, and it was on the campus of University of Pennsylvania. So then we decide, it probably means that my biological father would have been a med student at Penn. And then there was this first cousin on my ancestry.com page, and we were able to, using nothing more than Google and Facebook, figure out his identity. And his mother had recently passed away.
And there was an obituary using Google. And she was survived by two brothers, one of whom was a doctor. And we looked up and so had a name, looked up the doctor. And there was this retired physician in the Pacific Northwest who had a website and YouTube channel and gave lectures. And guess where he had gone to medical school?
my God. You should write a book about this. This would make for a good book. This is incredible. Just an incredible...
So and, you know.
Dani (40:34.582)
It took 36 hours from the times that I made the discovery to the time that I was looking at a YouTube video of this gentleman giving a lecture at a college in the Pacific Northwest. And I looked at him. And it wasn't even so much I looked at him and thought, my god, I look exactly like this 78-year-old man. It was the way he was holding his hands. I go like this when I'm talking. And it was also he was standing behind a lectern.
which is something I do all the time. wasn't like he was a firefighter putting out, you know, he was doing something that was very familiar to me. He was running a Q and A and he was standing there and he was cupping the air with his hands. And it's not even something I ever realized that I do. We don't necessarily know what our innate gestures are, which are very often genetic. But I looked at that and I practically stopped breathing because I saw myself.
I saw the familiar. It was irrefutable. It was unmistakable. I wasn't looking for it. It was just stunning.
And after a lifetime of unthought known and adjacent familiarity, wow. And then the decision to chair it just felt like.
I'm never
Dani (41:52.558)
It was no decision. There was no decision. was like, am I going to breathe? You know, it felt to me after a lifetime of writing about secrets, the turn that my writing life took from fiction to memoir, which I never understood, like why am I writing memoir? wasn't a decision as much as like an obsession or a compulsion to dig into what I knew.
what had happened, trying to get at something, didn't know what. The image I had later was of a backyard filled with lots of little piles of, you know, I shoveled the dirt here. That's my memoir devotion. I shoveled the dirt here. That's my book about writing, still writing. I shoveled the book here. That's my memoir hourglass. You know, it was like I was digging. so really, I mean, to the question,
that one always has to ask, I think, in writing memoir of, do I have a right to tell the story? It was my story. was literally the story of how I came to be. And so I was aware that I was writing a story that my parents had very much wanted to keep secret. But I didn't get to participate in that decision.
I didn't sign the non-disclosure agreement or whatever it was that they signed. I was a result of all that. I was not consulted. And so it felt to me very much that I had the right. And I did have pangs along the way when Inheritance was about to come out and clearly it was gonna, it appeared like it was gonna kind of really blow up and be a big deal. I had written a piece for Time Magazine that was my one sort of polemical piece about I don't believe that sperm donation should be anonymous.
And sometimes today it still is. I just think that we all have a right to know our genetic origins if we can. And accompanying this piece was a big, beautiful picture of my dad and me. And I looked at this joyful photograph of this man and this little girl. And my dad had also been a reader of Time Magazine, as were like all the dads of our generation. And I had a pang. I thought, if that man
Dani (44:16.418)
holding that child could have had a crystal ball and looked into the crystal ball and seen that picture for all the world to see accompanying a piece that's telling probably the deepest secret that he ever kept. know, what would he have felt? But you know, detours and destinations in the fullness of time, it was my story. And I have lived my life to honor him.
So there isn't a feeling that I have. I think it was you, David, who said to me, I think it was you, who said, it's like, I mean, I come from three people, really. I mean, I come from my mother, who in fact is my biological mother. I have checked. I was like, I need to know. And now I really need to know. But she is. From the dad who raised me and who loved me and who was.
an incredibly warm-hearted person who did not have an easy life, and my biological father, who I inherited a great deal of his constitution. It has served me well. He has a very even-killed constitution that has probably been a damn good thing in the kind of chaos of like, I mean, for many, many years, I asked the question in therapy, like, why am I okay? I I realized.
I'm okay. Why am I okay? I should not be okay, but I am.
giving these ingredients I should not be okay.
Dani (45:44.108)
Right, and my therapist would have agreed. I mean, it didn't quite make sense. But what you said to me was that my dad was like my soul father. Like we had a soul contract. And I really believe that. And every time I talk about this, and it's happening right now at this moment speaking to you, I feel chills from my head to my toes. And I experience that as his kind of going, yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. You got that right.
That's what it feels like every time.
Hmm.
I was just thinking as you were speaking about the shift from fiction to memoir, like one of the characters that you always had, but you created other characters, was yourself. Like your own self was a fiction of sorts because you didn't really fully have the story. And so once you had, you you began to like embody yourself using, as you said, it was so beautiful what you said earlier about like you wrote into your grief, like writing into your grief. That was your way in to exploration of what was really going on for you and who you were.
And so here you started doing that in the memoir form. And then you come back to signifiers, right? You went back to fiction. Was that return for you just to, you knew again just as you were digging that this was the time to start writing a piece of fiction again?
Dani (47:03.074)
glad you're asking that because that to me is a really mysterious and interesting story. I started signal fires around 2011.
And I wrote about 100 pages of it. And I created all the characters. They were incredibly vivid and real to me. And among the characters was an elderly doctor named Benjamin Wilf and a boy named Waldo Schenkman. They were my way into that story. And I knew them cold. I knew them and I loved them. And then I really hit a wall and I didn't know how to tell their story. And...
I, with great sorrow and some despair, put a hundred pages in a drawer and I thought, well, this is the one I'm just not going to know how to tell this story. And then time happened and detours happened and in that next decade plus, I discovered the truth of my paternity.
I also went through a very difficult time with my husband being sick, having cancer and miraculously recovering. Then we had a global pandemic and it was during the pandemic that I was cleaning out my office closet and I found the pages for signifiers again. And something just told me, reread these, reread these now. And I sat down right then.
in my office and I re-read them and my head sort of exploded for a couple of reasons. One was I knew what to do. It's like in the ensuing decade I had become the writer who deserved the characters who she had created a decade earlier but wasn't ready for.
RDI(48:50.286)
Wow, what a frame. All of a sudden, you're thinking about parents, you know, becoming the writer that you had developed to now warrant those characters.
It's like I thought they were dead, but they were just sleeping. They were just in a deep sleep. But the other piece, and this is the really mysterious piece, is that Dr. Benjamin Wilf, the character that I created before I ever knew that there was another father, a biological father, wandering around the planet who was a total stranger to me. He is just like my biological father. And a lot of my readers would assume and did assume
How well.
Dani (49:31.404)
that I wrote inheritance and I discovered all this and I met my biological father and then I created this character so similar to him but that is not what happened.
That's the unfucked That's unfucked known that made its way.
And what do we carry in our bones? know, and what do we carry in our spirit? It's like I plugged into something that was invisible and that was bigger than anything that I could wrap my arms around.
It's really wild. As a child, say that I used to think about this quite a bit, meaning the unthought known also. used think about that quite a bit, a little bit of my story. When I was a little older, I realized that I would imagine the presence of my parents or whomever was part of my nurturing, the matrix in which I grew and how I was nurtured into being an adult, that they still had an energetic rocham. There was a residue of them wherever around me all the time.
Voices, of course, are interjecting to your internal landscape. hear the voices of your parents, even if you're not aware of them, the messages they send and so on, their presence, the felt sense, but also just imagining them as kind of a residue around me, like above, below, around. And in this image now, the unthought known also lives somewhere, spatially or in hidden way, like a presence of something that is intimated, that you sense, but that you don't fully know, but that it's
RDI(50:56.208)
I remember once hearing a preacher say that secret seep.
And, I, I remember that. And I guess my question to you is, as now, I just want to pivot towards your incredibly successful podcast, this remarkable series of conversations about people sharing with you their own unthought knowns and their own secrets, know, seeping. First of all, that's a lot to hold. you know, I know like therapists, when people tell stories to therapists, there's a lot of psychic holding and, and strength that's required. And also, do you think that secrets
are always important to come to light. Like are there secrets that are harmless or are all secrets holding psychic energy in a way that needs to be released? How do you work with the difference between secrets and privacy? I'm so curious.
I mean, it's such an interesting question. And this has been such an interesting journey. And I was thinking, again, going back to detours, I this podcast, I refer to it as a happy accident, which is probably not giving myself enough credit in the sense that I think what has happened for me over the years is that I've recognized rightness when I've seen it and have
you know, just kind of taken a step toward it, whatever it's been. And so when, when the podcast started, it was because my book was coming out and people were telling me, they were telling me their stories. I mean, even before they knew mine, they were telling me sometimes very intimate stories. And I just found myself thinking about what secrets, I mean, the tagline of the show is the secrets that are kept from us, the keep secrets we keep from others and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Dani (52:43.948)
What I find most interesting in that trifecta of different kinds of secret keeping, probably unsurprisingly, is the secrets we keep from ourselves. I was interested in, I my guests tend to be people who have pretty deeply metabolized whatever their story is before they ever come on my show. They've written a book about it, or they've made a film about it, or they just have metabolized it. Because I don't want to.
I mean, there are exceptions to that, but I don't want anyone, any guest on my show to ever feel like they exposed themselves more than they wanted to. That's really, really important to me. Because it's not, know, the name of the show, Family Secrets, has kind of a prurient whiff to it, which is probably why it like hit the charts as soon as it came on as a podcast. Like that, yeah.
Which was remarkable,
I mean, I had no idea. The great thing is I went into this having no idea. was visiting a friend in LA the week that my podcast dropped for the first time in 2019. And I woke up in the morning and I saw that it was in the top 10 on the iTunes charts. my friend's son was in the kitchen when I came down to make a cup of coffee. And his name is Mike. And I said, Mike, is this normal? Is this like, do all podcasts just? I really had no idea. wasn't, I mean, in the publishing world, I really know.
You know, I know the business, but I didn't know the business. I just entered the building at a very high floor and have stayed there. I mean, not stayed in the top 10, but you know, so many, so many listeners. And I often ask my guests, it doesn't always end up in the show, but I'm always curious. I'll say to my guests at the end of an interview, would you rather have not known this? And I haven't had one single guest say yes, I would rather have not known this.
RDI(54:32.334)
Wow.
Dani (54:39.542)
Not one. Yeah, I remember Sylvia Borstein, our beloved Sylvia Borstein, who's now 88 years old and is a brilliant Buddhist mindfulness teacher. She was actually my very first recorded interview. And I remember saying to her, wonderful, wonderful story of a family secret, painful, but wonderful. And I said, Sylvia, do you wish you had never found out? And we were in person for that interview. And she looked at me and she's like, I'm sorry, what?
I said, do you wish you hadn't found out? She said, I don't understand. Not found out? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. It was so Sylvia. But that has been true of all my guests. And I think that the old adage is practically a cliche of the truth will set you free. It does. I think the language we use around secrecy is we carry a secret.
A secret is a weight. A secret is a burden. Secrets seep. When we bury a secret, we bury it alive. know, Jung described secrets as psychic poison. you know, they can last generations and still be psychic poison. And eventually they out. Eventually they do. And in terms of, are there benign secrets? I don't know. had the psychologist Laurie Gottlieb on the show at one point just to interview her.
And I asked her whether she thought that there was such a thing as a benign secret. And she said no. Which is different from letting it all hang out. There's a difference between I need to tell you every thought that I have. It's like Jimmy Carter's I lust in my heart or whatever. That's not a secret. That's just we're all entitled to our interior lives.
Right.
RDI(56:26.166)
And so I think that's, you know, obviously a question for a larger, a larger conversation. I think that I look forward to having with you about how to make that distinction at a time when, when boundaries and personal lives are so broadcast, so broadly, and how do we distinguish between like what is being held with some shame and with some judgment? think there's a lot about the burden of a secret is, is directly related to the sense that if someone were to know about it, but I have to keep it from them because if I were
to tell them that that would be dangerous to me. I would be exposing myself in some way. And some of the healing that comes is when you realize, you know, there could be a secret that will be judged and rightfully so, right? Like, you know, we're seeing criminality, whatever it might be, but either way, a truth that one holds.
that is not shameful, but that one holds because one is ashamed of it can be so corrosive to the soul in such a profound way. And why telling it can also be so healing because it heals things. I'm so curious though, like as we're going to come to a close in a bit, your spiritual focus and the way that you approach life is as, you know, both a teacher, a guide, as someone who's has been through very difficult things and finds ways to reframe and also to learn from it and to teach others. What are we learning right now in
Right now, here we are in where we are now in the United States and where we are now in the world at this moment. It's a very, very divisive moment, a very intense moment. It seems like a detour to a lot of us, not maybe to all of us, but some of us feel like this moment is a detour. What are you saying to yourself to keep you connected and open and awake at this moment?
It's such a good question, such a big question. It's kind of the only thing I feel like all of us should be talking about in a way. I'm going deeper into my own spiritual practices, which are largely based in yoga and meditation, so that I can be awake. I'm
Dani (58:37.618)
finding the very complicated, I don't want to say balance because I don't think there's any balance, but sort of the place where the line that I can ride where I'm aware, I'm awake, I can be of use, I can do the things that I can do, that I singularly can do, that I'm not so distracted by. When I was writing Devotion, I remember
being so struck by in the Yom Kippur liturgy, in the Ashamanu, the line about succumbing to despair being a sin, it so struck me. And I've held on to that. And I don't want to succumb to despair because then I won't be able to write my books. Then I won't be able to be present for my family. My mind will be so full of noise that I won't be able to be present for myself. And at the same time,
If I, I mean, for me, you know, my practice, I used to like read the paper in the morning. I call it the paper, but I would read it online at some point after I meditated. Now I go, I click on the New York Times, I go like this, and I look at the art section and I want to see what's going on in the world of dance and theater and books and movies. And, and that feels to me like in a way,
cop out, you know, the news seeps in all day. I don't need to put myself on an intravenous drip of it the minute I wake up in the morning. finding those places of... And then in terms of the part of our reality as Jews and anti-Semitism, I mean, I don't know, open a whole Pandora's box at this point in our conversation, but there's so much fear.
And there's so much fear of speaking. And there's so much noise. And there's so much performance. And so much performative activism as opposed to actual. When I go back to, you know, the Buddhist notion of is it true and is it useful? Every time I post something, every time I say something, you know, as we speak, I'm in the middle of writing my speech as the host for the National Jewish Book Awards. I am, all I'm thinking about is, is it true and is it useful?
RDI(01:01:03.41)
So is it true, it useful, is it amazing and succinct? I just want to ask one last thing, is to what extent is imagination, because we began with imagination and it's such a fertile soil for you in terms of seeing characters or seeing possibilities that others might not see. Is that also happening for you? Are you working on a new book? Are you able to stay in the imaginative space at this point?
Yeah, I am working on a new book, but it's it believe it or not It's another memoir and it's about hard truth things and you know, it's kind of Philosophical in certain ways. I am longing to go back to fiction But I think that you know, one of the things I say to my students often is as writers We are our own instrument, you know musicians have their instruments dancers have their bodies painters and sculptors have their you media the blank page is not
media, it's not marble, it's not wood, it's not steel, it's not a violin. There's nothing until we throw ourselves at it and things come along that affect our instruments. Grief affects our instruments, geography affects our instruments, illness affects our instruments, joy affects our instruments. And I think we're collectively in a time where our instruments are changing and I
want to be attuned. And I'm fairly certain that when I finish this memoir that I will go back to fiction, but in a way, this is a period of time where it has to percolate. has to, you know, how do you, I read an interview of Barbara Kingslover recently where she was talking about Demon Copperfield, which is a book I loved. And she was talking about, you know, knowing that she wanted to write fiction about
Appalachia and the opioid epidemic. But it was an incredibly important subject that had to find its form. And I would say, you know, so much of being a fiction writer is waiting without hope and without despair, which is harder to do than to say.
RDI(01:03:16.674)
I love that. Waiting without it, without the spare. Just being empty and waiting for what's true to emerge from the attunement that you are working to align yourself with. are attuning yourself to what needs to be written. Well, I'm sure that anybody who listens to this and all those who listen to you more broadly at Doing Family Secrets or to listen to your books or follow you in some way or all, in some way using you too as a useful attunement, like a tuning fork to their own spirit and their own soul, their own hearts.
the way I feel whenever I speak to you. It's hard not to feel my mind open and my heart soften. So I really want to thank you Dani for this conversation. means a lot to me and I look forward to another conversation.
Well, so do I, David, and you are that for me as well. So such a pleasure, such a deep pleasure.
RDI(01:04:16.024)
I want to thank our team, producer Efrat Bigger, editor Maya Geyer, music by Shimon Smith, and special thanks to Eden Sidney Foster. Until next time, I'm your host Rabbi David Ingber. May all of your detours be destinations.