Steve Luxenberg's Blog: About "Annie's Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret" - Posts Tagged "secrets"

This week, I began touring and talking about Annie’s Ghosts. I’ve been fascinated to hear how readers react to the book. One book seller told me the other day, “It’s a love story. . . I don’t mean in the usual sense. I mean that there’s so much love in your family, along with all those secrets.”

On Tuesday, when Robert Siegel of NPR’s “All Things Considered” interviewed me for an eight-minute segment that aired that night, he seized on the universal nature of the story. (Listen to the interview.) Siegel asked me to read a passage from the book that he thought particuarly underscored that notion. It was too long for the segment that aired, but I thought readers of this blog might like to see what had captured Siegel’s attention.

Here’s the passage, from pages 47-48 of Annie’s Ghosts:

Without really trying, I have become a collector of other families’ secrets. Whenever I tell anyone about my detective work, the first question is invariably something like this: “Can you tell me the secret?” Sure, I say. The next question often is: “Want to hear my family’s secret?”

There’s no shortage of heirlooms in this attic: Hidden affairs, of course, but also hidden marriages, hidden divorces, hidden crimes, even hidden families. I have heard so many secrets that I started a list. One of the most memorable: A man who learned, as a teenager, that his father was leading a double life—two wives, two houses, two sets of children, all two miles apart in a Detroit suburb. Perhaps it’s a testament to the insular nature of suburban life that this master of deception managed to straddle these skew lines for more than a decade before his double life came crashing down around him.

Even when secrets do emerge, the reasons for the secrecy often stay buried. Families never learn the motivations, the circumstances and the pressures that compel people to choose deceit rather than honesty. In this shroud of silence, the secret takes on the characteristics of an artifact—interesting to examine and exotic to behold, but mysterious and often impossible to fathom.

Families need not live their lives as open books, for anyone to read. Just as a cure can be worse than the disease, revelation can be more devastating than reticence. That’s the fear that drives many of us to embrace silence or deception. But too often, I think, we’re just telling one more lie, this one to ourselves.

Now that Annie was no longer a secret, now that Mom wasn’t here, the revelation had lost its power to hurt anyone. Or had it? Would understanding Mom’s reasons make me wish that I, too, had left well enough alone?

Siegel said on the air that the book had “different levels of discovery.” As I continue my conversations with readers at my coming events, I’m betting that their reactions to Annie’s Ghosts will reveal new levels that I hadn’t discovered.

Read the rest of NPR’s coverage of Annie's Ghosts here.

This week, I began touring and talking about Annie’s Ghosts. I’ve been fascinated to hear how readers react to the book. One book seller told me the other day, “It’s a love story. . . I don’t mean in the usual sense. I mean that there’s so much love in your family, along with all those secrets.”

On Tuesday, when Robert Siegel of NPR’s “All Things Considered” interviewed me for an eight-minute segment that aired that night, he seized on the universal nature of the story. (Listen to the interview.) Siegel asked me to read a passage from the book that he thought particuarly underscored that notion. It was too long for the segment that aired, but I thought readers of this blog might like to see what had captured Siegel’s attention.

Here’s the passage, from pages 47-48 of Annie’s Ghosts:

Without really trying, I have become a collector of other families’ secrets. Whenever I tell anyone about my detective work, the first question is invariably something like this: “Can you tell me the secret?” Sure, I say. The next question often is: “Want to hear my family’s secret?”

There’s no shortage of heirlooms in this attic: Hidden affairs, of course, but also hidden marriages, hidden divorces, hidden crimes, even hidden families. I have heard so many secrets that I started a list. One of the most memorable: A man who learned, as a teenager, that his father was leading a double life—two wives, two houses, two sets of children, all two miles apart in a Detroit suburb. Perhaps it’s a testament to the insular nature of suburban life that this master of deception managed to straddle these skew lines for more than a decade before his double life came crashing down around him.

Even when secrets do emerge, the reasons for the secrecy often stay buried. Families never learn the motivations, the circumstances and the pressures that compel people to choose deceit rather than honesty. In this shroud of silence, the secret takes on the characteristics of an artifact—interesting to examine and exotic to behold, but mysterious and often impossible to fathom.

Families need not live their lives as open books, for anyone to read. Just as a cure can be worse than the disease, revelation can be more devastating than reticence. That’s the fear that drives many of us to embrace silence or deception. But too often, I think, we’re just telling one more lie, this one to ourselves.

Now that Annie was no longer a secret, now that Mom wasn’t here, the revelation had lost its power to hurt anyone. Or had it? Would understanding Mom’s reasons make me wish that I, too, had left well enough alone?

Siegel said on the air that the book had “different levels of discovery.” As I continue my conversations with readers at my coming events, I’m betting that their reactions to Annie’s Ghosts will reveal new levels that I hadn’t discovered.

Read the rest of NPR’s coverage of Annie's Ghosts here.

At a discussion/reading/signing of Annie's Ghosts this past Saturday at the Red Canoe Book Store and Café in Baltimore, I asked those in the crowd with a family secret of their own to raise a hand. That brought forth hands from about half the audience. Someone else stole my punch line: “You just don’t know it yet.”

From the crowd, knowing laughs.

Afterward, several people murmured to me as I signed their books, “I’ve love to tell you about my family secret.” Talking about my family’s seems to free others to talk about theirs.

That wouldn’t have happened as readily, or at all, a generation or more ago. In response to a question last night about how my mother managed to keep her friends from finding out about her institutionalized sister Annie, I recounted a scene from the book that involved my mom’s bridge game in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Every week, for more than a decade, the same four women got together to play cards. They smoked cigarettes and swapped stories, but they didn’t talk about Mom’s secret. Later, I learned that all three eventually came to know about Annie, but that Mom never realized it.

One of the bridge players, a woman named Ann, had two relatives with disabilities. She was upset and angry, she told me recently, that my mom had chosen to hide Annie’s existence. But Ann never said anything to Mom.

I asked her why. “It wasn’t my place,” she said. “It wasn’t my secret.”

Instead, the bridge players kept their silence, compelled—by custom, by culture, by circumstance—not to say anything to each other.

Something to think about on this Mother’s Day 2009.

P.S. It felt so good to do my first bookstore signing at the Red Canoe. Not only do authors and readers need to support the independents in this time of consolidation and change in the publishing industry, but it’s within walking distance of my house. How cool is that?

As I watched the computer screen at WPYR-FM in Baltimore, the calls began stacking up.

"A sister no one talked about."

"A half-brother I never knew existed."

"An uncle airbrushed out of family photos."

During an interview Tuesday about Annie's Ghosts on "Midday," Dan Rodricks's public affairs show, listeners jammed the phone lines to talk about the secrets in their own families. We only had time for three calls, unfortunately. Each story was compelling, and each secret was different. Some involved institutionalized relatives, like my aunt Annie, while others involved some other taboo or shame of the generation when the secret was born -- the uncle was gay, the half-brother was from a now-secret previous marriage.

Telling my family's story, and explaining the cultural forces that swirled around my mom as she decided to turn her institutionalized sister into a secret, clearly had resonated with Dan's listeners. It was quite an experience to sit in the studio, earphones on, and hear their stories.

It was also quite an experience to hear this review by Susan McCallum-Smith, which was broadcast Monday on WYPR.

No matter how other reviews turn out, I'll always have this one.