Good Life Project - Dani Shapiro | A Year of Secrets, Savoring and Sacrifice

Episode Date: May 21, 2020

Dani Shapiro is a New York Times bestselling author and gifted examiner of life, especially her own. Her latest book, Inheritance, (https://amzn.to/2WOiVT6) drops you into a surprise revelation about who her dad was or, more accurately, wasn’t and the familial earthquake this discovery led to. When the book published, Dani learned something else. She wasn't the only one with big family secrets. That realization became the inciting incident Dani's podcast called Family Secrets (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/family-secrets/id1441824608). And, she’s now launched a second daily podcast, The Way We Live Now (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-way-we-live-now/id1506782444), that introduces you to the individual stories of people moving through this current global moment together. And, through all of it, Dani would also find herself hurdled into her husband’s - the love of her life’s - cancer diagnosis and treatment, moving through the surreal experience of celebrating, speaking and traveling, then returning to be with her husband. We explore all in today's conversation.You can find Dani Shapiro at:Website : https://danishapiro.com/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/daniwriter/-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest today, Dani Shapiro, is an old friend of mine and of the podcast. She's been on a number of times. She's also a New York Times bestselling author and a really gifted examiner of life, especially her own. Really diving into deeply vulnerable insights that always leave me feeling inspired and curious and maybe even opening to a bit more of exploring my own life. Her latest book, Inheritance, dropped you into a surprise revelation about who her family was, more specifically, who her dad was, or more accurately, wasn't. That journey led to a bigger sort of a journey of discovery

and became the inciting incident for a podcast called Family Secrets that is all about the secrets that families from all walks of life keep. She has now also launched a second daily podcast, The Way We Live Now, that introduces you to the individual stories of people moving through this current global moment together. And through all of it,

Dani would also find herself kind of hurtled into her husband's, who's the love of her life's, cancer diagnosis and treatment, moving through this surreal experience of celebrating the launch of so much goodness and generative energy in the world, speaking, traveling, and then going back and forth and returning to be with her husband as they both navigated this profoundly difficult time together.

The powerful, real, wise, and open conversation that we have about all of this really takes you deep into the entire experience. I'm so excited to share it with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him.

Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. Danny Shapiro. So awesome to be hanging out. We have known each other for a long time now through different permutations and phases of life, meaning from what I remembered for the very first time years ago at this small writer's salon at the apartment of a writer who I think you knew fairly well.

And I was invited through a friend of a friend and felt utterly out of place at this beautiful Upper West Side apartment with all these fancy people who are so much smarter and so much more accomplished than me. And I was so thankful to find you in a corner and just strike up just a great conversation, which for this introvert,

I'm pretty sure I did everything I could to keep going for the entirety of the evening. I think we both did. I want to talk to you about a couple of things. I mean, we're hanging out now. It's kind of a weird time in the world, in our space. I'm in New York City, and in our studio, you're in your home studio. And a lot has transpired in the last couple of years in your life, and I figured it's a good time to catch up. When last we sat down in the studio, we were actually chatting about Hourglass, which was a really cool book. And I want to circle around to that in a different way. In the interim, you made some really big, shocking discoveries about

your history, wrote a book called Inheritance, which lays a foundation for some of the work you've been diving into over the last few years also. Let's set the scene there. So Inheritance was a book where you learned a massive family secret and you basically just laid it bare and the journey that you took to really uncover the details of it tell me more about how this transpires and and what really unfolded yeah thanks and i just want to say it's great to see your face over zoom or whatever the hell we're doing um and to get to talk to you about all this um so in the spring of 2016, I, as the result of doing a DNA test for no good reason, I mean, I just, my husband was sending away from one and he said, do you want to do it too? And

it was a lark. It was like recreational DNA testing. So I did. And when my results were returned to me, I discovered something that I had never, ever consciously entertained, never had the thought that my dad who raised me, who was my North Star, he died when I was 23. He was the good enough parent. He was kind of the one who saved me. I found out that he had not been my biological father, which is something that, again, I had never known. And in fairly short order, I was able to piece together this mystery of my history. And I always, all my life, felt like there was a secret. There were multiple secrets.

And there indeed were multiple secrets in my family. But from the time that I was very small, I was always like there was something that was eluding me. And it eluded me all through my childhood and all through my teenage years and all through my young adulthood, even as I built a life for myself. And I started writing books and my books all centered around secrets in some way, my fiction. It was all about like sort of family secrets, the corrosive power of family secrets, what we do to each other when we keep things from each other. And all the while,

I had no idea that I was the family secret, that my parents, I believe, I've come to believe, knew that my dad wasn't my biological father. They had been, they had struggled with fertility and had, this is in the pretty early days of. I've had one set of beliefs and one sense of my own identity all my life. And suddenly it's like tipped over, just upended. And I realize that my biological father was a sperm donor. So there's someone out there in the world who I genetically come from. And that my dad and his family, who I was very, very connected to, in ways that I hadn't realized.

I mean, if you had said to me, if you posed a question to me years ago, like, well, I'm not even sure how to put this because I think there was such an identification with my father's family, with my ancestors, with coming from this world of people, from the shtetls of Eastern Europe who came to New York and made good and did good deeds and good works in the world. It was a source of grounding for me that I, quote, came from this family. And to suddenly find out that, well, actually, biologically, I didn't, was a really shocking thing. And then to go through this, I mean, I began writing about it right away because that's what I do. It's how I come to understand anything that I feel or think. I don't know how else to process anything. And there were these really, these two twin mysteries that I was trying to unravel. And one was, who was the sperm donor? Who was my biological father? Where do I come from? And the other was,

what did my parents know? They were both gone. And what did they know? And how consciously did they keep this a secret from me? And how did it form the way that they were with me and the way we were with each other? And so there were these two different strands of mystery that I embarked on as a journey, as a human being, and as a writer that led to the book. Yeah, I mean, it's the type of experience that just shakes you to the core, you know,

because your lineage, especially in your case, because it was so theoretically well-defined and mapped through generations. And it was such, I mean, you've written about before, it was such a deeply ingrained part of your family. You know, it was the stories that were told and told and told and defined both your family and you. So to realize that it was, that was not in fact your story, you know, it's got to, to a certain extent, shatter your world. And then the question becomes, how do I recreate it? In what shape and form? And do I want to? Yeah. It's funny. People have sometimes asked me, do you wish you had never

found out? And there hasn't been a second that I wish I hadn't found out, even when it was excruciatingly painful, even when I was in the early days, I literally felt so dizzy. I thought I was going to faint or fall over. It was like, you know, I would look at my body, I would look at my legs or my hands or my face and think, like, who am I? Like, am I, I am who I've always been, but my understanding of who that is has just been challenged. And one of the things that I've learned is our identities are formed by the stories that were told from the time that we're very young. And the stories that we tell ourselves are based on those stories, those that we receive. And if those stories are based on something

untrue, then they're forming themselves around something that is not solid, which I do think actually psychologically and emotionally, when I look back, was a piece of the story of my life. There was something that didn't make sense, but I couldn't put my finger on it. And I didn't feel that it was earned this sense that I had from the time I was very small of being an outsider, of not fitting in, of something just not being quite right or adding up. And when on paper, everything that I was told, everything that I knew coming from this family, this sense of belonging, I didn't understand why I had those feelings. And when you're a child and you have that feeling of something's wrong with the way I'm feeling, a child turns it against herself, which is, I think,

what I did from the time I was really small, because I had no way of understanding why I felt the way that I did. And, you know, it's one thing when we're raised in a biological family, we think we are, and our mothers are a biological mother, our fathers are biological father, our grandparents, our cousins, our aunts or our uncles. We, I think, really take it for granted. It goes without saying, this sense of, I walk like my aunt does, or I smile like my cousin, or we have this familiarity between us. It's not something that biological families tend to even think about. Why would we? But it's there and it's very present. If we're raised in a non-biological family and we know that as in adoptees, in adoptive families, then we know why we don't have that feeling. It's got

nothing to do with love, let me just be perfectly clear, but we know why we don't have that feeling of familiarity, because there isn't that biological connection. And that can present its own sets of challenges. And there's this beautiful term that I came across in adoption literature, which is genealogical bewilderment. You know, the sense of, well, where bewilderment, where do I come from? But you know why you feel that way. But if there's something that's not true, that is embedded into a family's culture, the way it was with mine, where I believed my parents were both my biological parents, but my dad wasn't, then there's something that's kind of invisibly always forming. I think I was always working over time to try to understand. Like,

for example, I was raised in an observant Jewish home. I was told every day of my life that I didn't look Jewish. Every day, Jonathan, every day. And people felt moved to comment on this. Everyone, from strangers to walking into a building and, you know, signing in and the security guard, you know, what Shapiro, your married name. I mean, like really people would just feel completely comfortable telling me that I didn't look like who I knew myself to be. Which of course now makes an infinite amount of sense to me because one of the many things I discovered is that my biological father, the

young man who was the sperm donor, is of French and English and Irish and Swedish and German descent, which is what I look like. Yeah. I mean, it's amazing to have all of those cues around you the whole time and just kind of blowing them off because you're like, well, there is no basis for which you could draw upon to in any way infer that they were signaling something to you. There was just no reason for you to make that connection. And yet when this one penny drops, everything makes sense. But you brought up something else, which I think is really powerful also, which is this idea that, okay, so that was one part of your exploration. That was one of the big questions that pops into your

mind. But you also have this other question, which is, okay, so if it's really looking like my parents knew, how actively did they work to keep this from me? And what does that say about the nature and quality of our relationship? That's beautifully put, and that's exactly right. At the beginning of this exploration, I was convinced that this institute where my parents went to do this donor insemination, I was convinced that they must have fooled my parents. They must have lied to my parents. There's no way that my parents would have known this and kept it from me because that was the most comfortable place to begin was all three of us were in the dark. Wow, what a tragedy that we just, none of us ever knew. And it was kind of

working on all of us in some subtle, invisible way. But I began doing research. I did this deep dive into the history of reproductive medicine in this country and around the world. And I started doing it right away because I was aware that anyone who might still have information specifically about my parents or about that time was going to be elderly if they were still alive at all. And I could not get one single solitary person on board with me with the theory that my parents didn't know. Not one, not the elderly rabbis I talked to, not my father's own sister who who was in her mid-90s when I spoke with her. She didn't know. She never knew about it. I mean, but she believed that my father would have known. The

experts, the doctors, the people who know a great deal, scholarly people about that time, no one was getting on board the, parents didn't know train with me. And so then I had to think, well, what was the culture in the early 1960s? What did it mean to be a childless couple? There was no such thing as childless by choice, right? The, you know, 1950s post-war America into the early 1960s pre, you know, Vietnam and, you know, unrest was a time of just building families and of, you know, Ozzie and Harriet and, you know, 1962 or 63, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf opened on Broadway. Like that was the depiction, like Edward Albee's George and Martha were like the cultural depiction of what a childless, miserable couple would be like together. And male infertility was so shameful that it

didn't exist. You couldn't get a doctor to even test for it. So a couple dealing with infertility, and especially a couple in the observant Jewish world where the commandment, be fruitful and multiply, was like everything, there was a great deal of shame involved. And then you combine with the shame, the way that what I learned was couples would be told things in a very slant kind of way. They would be told that this is a treatment, donor sperm. The words donor sperm would never have been used. This is a treatment. It will help boost your chances. You know, so the image that I started having is like, I was like, I don't know anything about football, but like a football game

where like the quarterback is like being, you know, like sort of like running through, there's this not very good sperm of the intended father, but all the young sperm around him is going to like push him over the, you know, field, whatever. I don't, I shouldn't have gone down the football imagery route that I can't take all the way to its metaphorical conclusion. But what I came to really understand or believe is that if a couple wanted to forget that they ever had done this, the atmosphere was created to allow them to go into a place of profound dissociation or denial. And I think that my mother was somebody who was much less of a realist than my father. She was someone who would really bend reality to her will in a lot

of different ways. And I think from the moment that my mother became pregnant, she decided that I was my father's biological child. I don't think she could have handled anything else. I don't think she could have handled being pregnant with the sperm of someone who she knew nothing about. So I think she decided that this was the case. And I believe that my mother could have passed a polygraph if asked the question. When my son was born at Mount Sinai, the same hospital in New York City where I had been born, my mother came in, he was hours old, and I was holding him in my arms, and she looked down at him and she said, he was hours old, and I was holding him in my arms, and she looked down at him and she said, he looks just like a Shapiro. And she meant it. My dad, he heard all

the same comments all my life as I heard. Oh, she doesn't look Jewish. You know what, did Irene have an affair with a Swedish milkman? My dad knew. That's what I believe. I'll never know for sure. This has been an incredibly interesting lesson for me in having to accept and embrace uncertainty. narratives that I was writing and storytelling and always searching for an understanding of who my family was and who I was within my family and creating all sorts of narratives that were only partially true. I've had to spend the last few years thinking, this is what I think, this is what's very likely. But I'll never know for sure. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised.

The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him! We need him! Y'all need a pilot?

Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. Flight risk. minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Yeah, I mean, what a fascinating place to be in because as you mentioned, when we were just starting, both of your parents were gone when you discovered this. So even if they were open to sitting down and having that conversation with you, even if they were willing to be completely honest and transparent in that season of life for them, where they kind of had nothing to lose, you never had the opportunity to have that. So the closest you can get to truly knowing is still never 100%.

It's like, this is all evidence points to dot, dot, dot. And just knowing that there is no way that that is the answer for all intents and purposes. There's no better than that. And getting comfortable with that has got to be kind of a fascinating experience. I mean, and then this experience, like you said, you were writing from the beginning because that's partly how you think and process. This ends up turning into a book, which goes out into the world. Inheritance becomes this giant phenomenon and people are responding to it and reading it. And I wondered sometimes when knowing you for a while and then seeing what happened when the book came out, whether part of the experience of the book going out into the world was in a way, not just an act of creation for you, but a way to place something into the social conversation

that would maybe plant a seed to see if other people were feeling the same way, discovering the same things. And maybe if you couldn't get an answer, if there was no 100% certainty about your parents, at least you could know that you're not alone in living in this space. That is so exactly right. It's been this amazing journey since the book came out. And I didn't know. I mean, we never know, right? which was in New York City at a little bookstore on the Upper East Side, which was like standing

room only and people outside not being able to get inside in this crazy, beautiful crowd of people. And I spoke about the book and I gave a reading. And then during the Q&A, the very first hand that went up was a young man. And he sort of hijacked my event. He turned around and he said to the crowd, he said, so how many people here have had DNA discoveries? And I was so taken aback. But then I looked out at the crowd and these hands were going up and I thought, oh my goodness, what's happening? I mean, the book hadn't even been out a day. How did people even know to come? And then this really amazing, beautiful thing began to happen as I started going on tour.

And the tour kept growing and growing and growing. I was on the road for over a year. And everywhere I went, that's what happened. There was this sense that gathering was happening of people who were making all different kinds of discoveries because of this incredibly potent combination of easy, accessible, relatively inexpensive DNA testing and the internet. There was just this outpouring of people. I mean, it seems like just about every family is touched, maybe not in the first degree, but in, you know, sort of a few degrees of separation by some version of, you know, I mean, well, another thing that happened is I would look out into an audience and I would see there would be elderly men in the audience. And I would think, this isn't my demographic, like, sir, why are you here? And then there would be people in the audience that I started being able to,

as I would be speaking and reading, I was also silently identifying to myself, oh, you and you and you. I could tell it was like something was radiating off of these people that I recognized. And then there would be couples sitting there who were looking a little tense or stricken or, you know, holding hands. And what I realized was that men who had donated sperm were showing up, that couples who had made the decision not to tell their children, and now it seemed like maybe they were rethinking that decision. They were showing up. And then people who had made these discoveries themselves, either discovering a half-sibling or discovering that they were adopted and had never been told,

fathers who had children they never knew about. And I mean, there's so many different kinds of discoveries. And it made me think, not that long ago, I had a conversation with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk about trauma. He's somebody that I reached out to in the early days after I made my discovery. We had a mutual friend, and he was very kind to me, and we spent some time talking. Because I recognized that what had happened in this discovery was a trauma. It was like literally on the level of like the trauma was me, like not, it wasn't an

outside trauma. It wasn't an accident. It wasn't an attack. It wasn't something I witnessed. It was literally me. My, I was the trauma. And what do you do about that? And one of the things that Bessel talked about, and he talks about in his great book, The Body Keeps the Score, is that one very powerful way to heal from trauma or through trauma or people who do well kind of moving through it are those who are able to take action, who aren't pinned down by it, either metaphorically or literally. And when I was rereading Bessel's book, I thought to myself, oh, that's what this year plus book tour was for me. Every single day I was taking action and I was experiencing the tangible results of people

coming up to me. One young man came up to me and he said, my father told me last week that he wasn't my biological father. He read your book and he told me, and he sent me in his stead to say thank you to you. Like, what do you do with that? The stories are so moving. I've had people writing to me or coming up to me and saying, I think I may need to tell my children. I've had people writing to me or coming up to me and saying, I think I may need to tell my children. I've had therapists say to me, how do I help my patients who haven't told their children or have young children and they're on the fence about telling them? To which my response these days is just simply, well, they're going to find out. Like, let's just remove all judgment or the moral or ethical questions around it. It's just simply the case now that this kind of secret, which has always, always existed since the beginning of humanity, can't exist anymore. Yeah. I mean, it's, it is, there are too many points of inquiry to not

discover it in some way, shape or form. And that's brand spanking new in the context of our lives. Um, I mean, I wonder also if, as you're starting to see, oh, this, this book is actually turning into something different, not different, but something bigger. Whether there was a moment or whether there came a time where you had any concern, whether you're starting to say, okay, so this book is also inciting certain decisions and actions in absolute strangers. That was never the intention when you were writing it. And yet these things will very likely profoundly change the nature and structure of relationships and families indefinitely. Did there ever come a time where you kind of felt the weight of obligation or responsibility in connection to any of that. I felt that and feel that when people ask me for specific advice and they are people

whose circumstances I don't know, I'm pretty comfortable saying that I think that these kinds of secrets ultimately are best to come out. I've never met a single person who wishes that they didn't know, no matter how difficult the discovery might be. But the how and the when of that are very delicate and extremely individual questions. And they don't only affect the people who have kept the secret and the person from whom the secret was kept. They also affect other family members and have ripple effects in a whole variety of ways. What I would say though is that my book made me the person who was hearing more about this than anyone else in the country or probably the world. But I never positioned myself or ever thought of myself as an expert about it. I feel like I'm an expert about the interior of this experience. I mean, it's very moving to me when I hear from people who were donor conceived or very often adoptees

who say, or parents of adoptees or donor conceived people saying, you articulated this experience, like I feel less alone, or I understand my child's experience, or I understand my sibling's experience, because of reading your book. Now, that, to me, is the work of literature. And, you know, piercing that sense of separateness, creating an empathic connection or understanding. But I never, I mean, I've been challenged several times now at various events by the donor-conceived community, like, be our leader, you know, lobby, you know, run for office. And it's like, guys, I'm a writer. I took with the tools that I have and the way of being that is my way of being in the world, this is what I could make out of my experience. But it's funny, Jonathan, for years now, ever since my memoir, Devotion, came out, I've been writing books that it turns out

help people that I didn't set out. I've never written self-help, but I've written books that end up helping people when my intention as I'm writing them is to make this really deep self-inquiry and do it in a way that will connect with others. I mean, when I was writing Inheritance, one of the thoughts I had all the way through, and it contradicted something that I've always told my students, which is you really shouldn't think about what's universal in your story as you're writing it. But in the case of Inheritance, I actually needed to think about what was universal because the details were so outsized and bonkers and not relatable to a lot of people. Nobody necessarily sits down and thinks, I'm going to train my mind

on the question of what it would feel like to discover suddenly that one of my parents or both of my parents weren't my biological parents. What would that be like? Why would anybody do that? So I had to find a way to think, what are the big universal questions here? This story has been laid in my lap. It's the story of my existence. What is it here to teach me? And what can I teach from it? Yeah. And it seems like that also, rather than the release of the book and the completion of this giant tour around it, being sort of the completion of the experience for you, it was the inciting incident for something very different, very new. Because you end up shortly after that,

stepping into the world that I've existed in for a while, the world of podcasting, launching this podcast, which again has become this amazing sort of phenomenon called Family Secrets, which then kind of picks up the baton saying, okay, so if I'm seeing so many people when I'm traveling around the world for a year, having secrets around this one sort of aspect of the genetics or the origin story around me, I wonder what other secrets are out there and how many people are carrying them. I'm curious to know a little bit more about the origin story behind Family Secrets, in part because I'm just curious, but in part also because I have known you for a long time

as what I would call a writer's writer. That know, you, like, that is your jam. You write. You don't just write to convey. You write because you are madly passionate and in love with the craft of language and self-inquiry and revelation. And so I'm fascinated, I guess, from the maker's standpoint of the decision also

to say, let me step into this completely different creative domain and also expand the inquiry to something much broader? Yeah. It wasn't a decision. Let me start with that. I don't think I've ever made a good move in my life that's been based on a decision, like a sort of, this would be a good move in my life that's been based on a decision, you know, like a sort of this would be a good idea. You know, I've been on your podcast before and other podcasts. Never once did I have in the back of my mind, like, ooh, I want to do that. I want to start my own podcast. I've loved, you know, I love listening to them. I live in the country. I drive a lot, usually. I love listening to great storytelling, but never, never did that occur to me. What happened was I finished Inheritance.

It was in manuscript. It really put the finishing touches on it. And as with every book of mine, I always have a few early readers. And in the case of Inheritance, one of my early readers was my friend Sylvia Borstein. And for your listeners who don't know Sylvia, first of all, you should all just stop and go look her up. She is in her 80s, and she is a great teacher of mindfulness, meditation, and an author of a whole bunch of books. And she's become a really dear friend over the years. And she knew a great deal about the story because she was someone who I had lunch with within a couple of days of when I made the discovery about my dad. I was in San Francisco and she lives in the Bay Area and we had had a lunch date, which was kismet because I can't think of anyone I would rather have had lunch with

at that moment in my life when I was ready to keel over than Sylvia. She was enormously comforting. So anyway, I gave her the manuscript and we set a phone date and we were on the phone and she was talking to me about the book. And that prompted her to tell me a story of a family secret of hers. And she's an absolutely marvelous storyteller and she's got a great voice. And I was on the other end of the phone listening to her and thinking, oh, I wish I was recording this. I wish everybody could hear this. It's such beautiful storytelling. And then I got off the phone when we were done and the thought just floated through my mind, podcast. I wonder if there's a podcast about family secrets. And this is maybe more into the weeds than we necessarily need to go. But

my publisher has a department of a couple of editors who work with authors on ancillary projects. And it's a department I hadn't even known about, but they had recently approached me about an online teaching opportunity. And it was something I wasn't interested in doing. And I think everybody was kind of disappointed that I didn't want to do it. So I had in my mind, well, they're there if I ever want to come back to them with some other idea. So I sent them a note. We had a meeting. And that's just how it began.

But then when I actually started creating it, this was, again, a kind of kismet, happy accident kind of situation, which is I just think how so many amazing things happen in our lives when we don't dismiss the thought. It's like Emerson's essay on self-reliance. We don't dismiss the thought because it's ours. And I didn't dismiss the thought, nor did I think I had any idea how to do it. I started listening to more and more podcasts. I started thinking, what kind of podcast would I want to create? What kind of storytelling? And the kind of storytelling that involves a conversation with a guest and then scripting something around that conversation felt to me natural. I thought, oh, I think I know how to do this. I think I know how to,

because it feels like space holding in a way, doing that kind of storytelling, holding someone's story. And I've done that as a teacher for many years. So it didn't feel like a tremendous leap in terms of, well, it did. I mean, it was certainly a huge on-ramp and a little terrifying, but it also felt like, all right, I think this feels like a really interesting creative challenge. And Sylvia was coming east for a few days, and she was actually staying with us at our home in Connecticut. And the people that I do the podcast with sent a sound engineer to my basement where I'm sitting here talking with

you right now. And Sylvia and I had a long conversation. And then that actually became one of the episodes in the first season of Family Secrets. So that's how it began. But as you're asking me, it's such a good question what you ask. I think I also felt that inheritance was the end of something for me. It was the end of a cycle of work that had involved digging, excavating from my early novels. Like if I look at my early novels, which is something I find quite painful to do, but when I do, there is a trail of breadcrumbs throughout my work in some way embedded in my work of a young woman who doesn't know something, trying like hell to figure it out. And then when I started writing memoirs, my first memoir, Slow Motion, then Devotion, then even in my little book about the writing life, Still Writing, there's just their clues in there. I was digging and digging and excavating. And then my shovel just hit,

you know, pay dirt. It just hit the, you know, the penny dropped, as you said. And there it was. And the answer to everything that I had been in some way confused by. I mean, I had a good, solid, contented life, but there was something that was missing. And there was like some piece that I always felt unsettled about. And that's, I think it may even very well be what turned me into a writer, you know, that exploration. And so inheritance felt like the end of something. So when I'd be on tour and somebody would say to me, what are you working on? Every writer's least favorite question, but what are you working on? I'd be like, this, I've done a hundred events in the last year. That's what I've been working on. But it was more than that. It was like, actually all bets are off. I have no idea what my next book will be. Will I go

back to fiction? Will I write poetry? Will I write another memoir? Will I write a collection of essays? I don't know. But whatever I do, it's not going to be a continuation, I don't think. I think that there's a line of demarcation that has happened. And so this wasn't a conscious thing for me, like, oh, now I'll go make a podcast because I need some breathing room. But that is what happened. And then the other thing that happened in terms of usefulness, in terms of community, in terms of connection, is that because I was approaching these episodes and these guests of Family Secrets very much with a me too. Like I'm not approaching this simply out of curiosity. I'm approaching this as someone who has kind of become a student of secrets and their power, or was always a student of secrets and their power

without knowing why. So that's been, I mean, whether I'm in person or on the phone with a guest, it feels sacred to me. I wonder if you feel that way too. I'm guessing you do. I do. I absolutely, I feel like there's, it's interesting. I mean, you and I have known each other a long time, so there's a certain amount of ease and comfort we have with each other. So, you know, the fact that we're sitting in our respective studios, you know, connecting through video, I think makes it, it's a more comfortable, easy, like we can kind of hit the ground running together. Normally, you know, for six years, we always tape, you know, in our studio and we're just sitting in a chair across from somebody.

And it's so much easier to create the container, to create that sense of we're in something special together. There's safety in the walls here. There's a sense of intimacy and trust. It's sacred, to use your word. It's very much that yeah and and it's something that it's been interesting to it's a new creative constraint to work to see if I can create that same thing you know when we're actually not in the same room together it's been it's been kind of fascinating but I completely resonate with this idea of you, of that book being not the close of a chapter,

but the close of a season. Yeah. You know, and you stepping in, like, just very organically finding your way into this, you know, okay, so it just feels really interesting to me to step into this new channel of exploration and discovery and sharing in the world of audio and creating in a completely different place, learning that space also, and continuing to tell stories that expand beyond your story. But you at the same time, get to learn and grow. And there's a bigger backdrop to this whole thing, because as you're doing this, you're stepping away and you're building this incredible

new storytelling vehicle. And the book that you had written before, Inheritance, was a really sweet small book called Hourglass, which was about your reflection on a 20-year or so marriage with your husband with these beautiful time-shifting vignettes that I love. And it felt like you wrote that because, well, this feels like a good time for, I've been through a lot. It's been an incredible, beautiful journey. It's not over. I want to keep growing into this relationship, but it feels like a good time for me to reflect on this and share some experiences, not knowing that you were about to step into a very different phase of your relationship because of a diagnosis that would come his way. Yeah. Yeah. To go back to Sylvia Borstein for a second, Sylvia once said something

to me. It was when Devotion was just coming out and I was very nervous. I was about to go do TV. And she said, sweetheart, you've written a book about what you know now. And at the time that Sylvia said that, we're talking 2010, I thought, oh, what a great piece of dharma. I think I know what she means. I think she means that I'll know a little more later. If we keep on waking up to another day and we have our eyes open and we're witnessing the world, you know, we'll keep learning. And then, yeah, you know, there are these moments in Hourglass. Michael and I have been married 18 years at the time that I was writing the book. And there's this refrain about 18 years and the

various things that have happened over the course of 18 years and, you know, the losses and the, you know, the beauty and the terror to quote Rilke. And, you know, I've also written a lot, I wrote a lot about this in devotionotion, about thinking, like some kind of magical thinking, that by naming catastrophe, by naming disaster, by having the thought of it, you could stave it off. You know, I'm a hypervigilant Jew. What can I say? And so, you know, I would have all these various different kinds of thoughts about things that could happen or go wrong. I mean, not plagued by them, but just, you know, pretty sure that I was checking all the boxes. And for whatever reason,

when I would think about what if I ever lost my beloved husband, I never thought cancer, not once. It just wasn't on either of our radar, which is, of course, ridiculous. It's probably the most common killer, but I never thought it. And just about exactly a year ago, he was diagnosed really out of the blue with very serious cancer. And it happened almost, let's see, it was January that inheritance came out and exploded. And it was March, mid-March, when he was diagnosed. And so suddenly a diagnosis like that makes everything stop, shifts everything to the most elemental, what needs to be done next, you know, entirely in this kind of mode of survival and fear and a brand new language and a really steep learning curve and educating oneself and launching into that world, which was the world of how are we going

to save him? And we're not in control and all of these decisions that needed to be made. And also on the other side of that split screen, having this massive success at the same time was, I think it's going to take me years to completely metabolize that. There's a, you know, the idea that an incredibly joyful thing and an incredibly terrifying thing can't coexist, they coexisted. They coexisted within the space of the next seven months where we moved into New York.

We borrowed an apartment from friends. There were some really miraculous things that happened, like friends with an empty apartment that they weren't using in New York, a very comfortable apartment where we could be and where our son could be, choosing doctors, choosing surgeons. My husband went through really harrowing chemotherapy, followed by radical surgery. And all the while I was taking care of him and like zipping off for three days and going and putting on nice clothes and standing in front of an audience and doing my thing. And I had to really think about this. And this is the first time I'm really talking about it. I had to think transparency, honesty, being real, being authentic, being vulnerable. Those are my superpowers.

I don't know how to be in the world if I'm not doing those things. I don't know how to be in front of people if I'm not being those things. And that was going to mean that I needed to be somewhat public about my husband being sick, which was not my instinct or nature. My instinct and nature was batten down the hatches, close the doors, let's figure this out, let's keep it to our most intimate inner circle. And then at some point, it was serious enough and big enough, large enough that both of us just became aware, that's not what we're doing here. This is, there was this feeling of not wanting to be that couple, not wanting to be that family, you know, not wanting to be, oh, gosh, you know, feeling people's compassion, pity, sorrow for us. I didn't want it because I didn't want it to be happening.

I didn't want it to be, I didn't want my husband to have cancer. I didn't want us to be where we were, but that's where we were. And, and so I would then, so I kind of announced it on Instagram and the outpouring of kindness and of people just... I mean, sometimes I would be getting up and be about to do an event and someone would say, how's your husband doing? And it would be like it would pierce the veil

of wait a minute, right now I got to go up there and be public Danny Shapiro, but public Danny Shapiro and Danny whose husband is very sick are the same person right now. And I can't separate them because if I completely separate them, then I'm not being me. And that's just been the most incredible lesson. I mean, I feel like the Velveteen Rabbit at this point in terms of just like I'm so worn thin from it.

But it's also so profoundly liberating. Like all of it. My friend Karen Russell said to me recently, like, that DJ up in the sky just has a lot going on for you, lady. But, you know, I made this discovery about my dad. I wrote this book. The book blew up. My husband got sick. He's better.

And he is considered cured. He had, you know, after surgery, there was no cancer left in his body. And of course, he has to continue to be monitored and checked. But exactly a year to the day of his diagnosis was March 11. And on March 11 of this year, that was the day that I think most of us in the States would say that COVID-19 hit home. And my husband was in LA directing a movie, a project that he's been struggling with and working on, a passion project for the last six years that had come together in this magnificent way with this amazing cast, this independent film, just suddenly just caught lightning in a bottle. He's there making the movie. I remember on the 11th, early in that day, writing a post saying it's a year since his diagnosis. And

what an amazing difference a year makes. And then that night, COVID-19 came home. And now here we are, hunkered down in our homes, all of us, and the whole world is in pain. I was speaking with a friend of mine about this just the other day, this sense of when it's something that's happening in your family, that's very, or to you, this feeling that the world is going on, everyone is continuing to laugh and to dance and to dine and to party and to make things, and your world has stopped, which is very much the feeling that I had, even though my world didn't stop, it felt like it did. Now all of our worlds have stopped. We are all in this together. And there's something that's so incredibly powerful about that

too. I mean, I don't know what to make of the symmetry of it just in terms of my own journey and my own karma, but there's a loss of innocence that is different than I think any other kind of loss. I mean, I've lost my parents. I had a son who was very sick as a baby, but he survived and thrived. I can't imagine what it would be to lose a child. Or I can, and I think it's the worst loss there is. I think we would all agree on that. But when your partner is very sick, it's like it's happening to you too. There's no getting away from it. It's happening to the organism of the two of you who have been together for decades. It's happening in the soft tissue in the interior of your marriage. And this will now forever be. In my first memoir, Slow Motion, I write about this before and after moment of

getting a phone call that my parents had been in a car accident. And I write about it as a young writer, as the moment that my life divided into before and after. I was young enough to not know that it would happen again, and it would happen again, and it would happen again. And now at this point, heading into my late 50s, I've had four of them. My parents' car accident, my son's illness, my husband's illness, and learning about my dad that I would call real moments of deep internal vibration and shift. Yeah. If you're at a point in life when you're ready to lead with purpose, we can get you there. The University of Victoria's MBA in Sustainable Innovation is not like other MBA programs. It's for true changemakers who want to think differently and solve the world's most pressing challenges. From healthcare and the environment to energy, government, and technology, it's your path to meaningful leadership in all sectors.

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The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. You pretty much addressed it. I was curious, literally coming out of the experience with Michael as you and the rest of the world and the country were stepping into this collective experience. There's no way to answer this, but I was curious how emerging from the experience that you just had and reflecting on it, contemplating it, embracing it, like trying to look at how that has shaped you and changed you, and then stepping into this new moment that we're all in differently than you would have had it happened a year earlier. And again, there's no way for either of us to answer that,

but I'm slightly fascinated by the question. Yeah, I am too. A couple of things come to mind. When Michael was sick, I couldn't meditate. My meditation practice of many years, my yoga practice, my yoga practice went out the window when I made the discovery about my dad, and it has not fully returned to me. And I think it has a lot to do with literally like this body that unrolled the yoga mat. Who is this body? I was wrong about this body. Like, what is my connection to this body? I was wrong about this body. What is my connection to this body? But my meditation practice, which has been really a sacred habit, I had a really hard time sitting. And I found some meditations I could listen to instead of sitting in silence. Thich Nhat Hanh was enormously helpful to me. I'm very grateful to Thich Nhat Hanh. But the discipline eluded me and the benefits eluded

me. And I have found since in the 30 plus days of being isolated with my family at home, that my meditation practice is sacred to me. I mean, it's always been sacred to me, but I count on it. I can't live without it. There's something about the being thrust so completely into the present moment because we don't know what the future holds. We don't know the world that we're going to be entering back into when this period of time of social distancing and isolation ends. We don't know what that world is going to look like. I think that's one of the things that's most challenging to many of us and certainly to me. But there's also, you know, I mentioned that Michael was on a film set. So as we were sort of heading toward the days of this becoming more and more real, closer and closer to home, you know, we have a writer's conference that meets every spring in Italy.

We realized in late February that that wasn't going to happen and canceled it and unraveled it and undid it. It was starting to come closer to home. And at the same time, my son was in Europe, gallivanting all around having the time of his life. My husband was in the thick of the most fantastic creative experience of his life, like truly a dream come true for him, something he's worked so hard on. And I was traveling still, but also alone at home and starting to read the news more carefully and starting to worry and starting to hear more about social distancing and the importance of it. And the feeling that I had, especially in the case of my husband, was would it be safer for him to shut this whole thing down and come home? He's at higher risk because of his immune system, because of chemo.

Yeah, it would be safer. Am I going to suggest that? Hell no. Hell no, I'm not. Because if, God forbid, something happens to him, he contracts COVID because he was still out there in the world, he was out there in the world doing what he loved most. And really, like, fulfilling a dream that most people at this point in life don't get to fulfill and being his fullest self. And I really had a kind of peace with that. That's very unlike me. And I had it a little bit less so for my son because I think he'll have more opportunities to gallivant around Europe. But I did have this feeling of, you know,

let's just keep an eye on this and see what happens. But it wasn't coming from this place of like fear, terror. It was really looking at, all right, where are we today? And taking each day, each hour, each moment as it came, which I think the last year taught me a lot about doing. I mean, even the whiplash between being in the hospital and caring for a very sick spouse and being on the road and in these remarkable, you know, circumstances, like the whiplash of those things, I was able to be like, all right, for this hour, I'm standing on stage at the Aspen Institute. And for this hour, I'm going to completely inhabit this hour and bring it. I brought myself to every single public engagement. I performed at the height of my

capacities. I wasn't diminished when I was up there on that stage because I was there for that hour. And then at the end of the hour, my husband was still sick and I was getting on a plane and coming home. And I was there with him at his bedside and a hundred percent there in that fear and in that advocacy and that anxiety. But I had to slice my life and my sense of time and reality into these very small pieces of a pie and be in whatever that was. And so I think that that may be enabling me to be in what this is a little i mean i'm not comfortable but a little more comfortably than i might have been without that experience yeah what's so interesting about what you just shared also is that um what you're effectively describing was almost daily moments of forced hyper presence which is

functionally meditation and the fact that you lost your seated practice during this same window when you gained a circumstantial mandate to be hyper present as you're sort of like you know rapidly, rapidly switching states, it almost makes me wonder if in fact you just transitioned. It showed up as something different during that window of time. I love that. That feels so right to me. It was everything felt like a meditation. I mean, I don't like to fly. I was flying every day, getting on the plane, setting myself up with my, you know, my AirPods and my reading and my essential oils and all my little talismans. I mean, that was its own. Yeah. I wasn't, I wasn't sitting in Lotus

position with my eyes closed in my, you know, on my cushion in the exact place that I like to be, but everything was, even the speaking, even the speaking itself was like, it was a form of service. And I think I did enter these meditative states where, and in terms of the hyper focus, hyper presence that's required when you're making what really can turn out to be life or death decisions about treatment, about doctors, about surgeons, about hospitals. Yeah, there was like a laser-like focus to just about everything during that period of time. So that's really interesting and a very gentle way of looking at it is that it didn't leave me. It just- It's shapeshifted. It's shapeshifted, exactly. Yeah. This feels like a good place for us to come full circle too. I've

asked you this question before, but it was a number of years ago now. So as I have found with guests who come back over a window of time, sometimes the answer changes, which is in this container of the Good Life Project. If I offer the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? Kindness, awareness of love, presence. There's this Hebrew Sabbath prayer that I've kept tacked over my computer for many years, and the beginning of it goes like this, days pass and the years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles.

So I would like to not walk sightless among miracles. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com.

That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com. Or just click the link in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode. And then share, share the love. If there's something that you've heard in this episode that you would love to turn into a conversation, share it with people and have that conversation. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. We'll be right back. risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.