The One You Feed - What Brings Healing, Strength, and Connection with Dani Shapiro

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

In This Episode, You'll Learn: How discovering a family secret led to a deeper understanding of herself The myth that what we don’t know can’t hurt us Exploring how every choice or decision we make impacts our lives and the lives of those around u How there is strength that comes from being able hold both the good and bad things in life at the same time Embracing the idea that love can transform anything The beauty of having both intimate personal connections and also a connection with the vast universe To learn more about Dani Shapiro, click hereSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I think probably it's about 15 years ago that I realized that my mind, when left to its own devices, would move toward comparing. And it's just really such a useless thing to do and creates such separation or distance between people, between me and the person I might be comparing myself to. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.

Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dani Shapiro, the author of 11 books and the host and creator of the hit podcast Family Secrets. Her most recent novel, Signal Fires, was named Best Book of 2022 by Time Magazine, Washington Post, Amazon and others and is a national bestseller. Washington Post, Amazon, and others, and is a national bestseller.

Dani's most recent memoir, Inheritance, was an instant New York Times bestseller and named Best Book of 2019 by Elle, Vanity Fair, Wired, and Real Simple. Dani's work has been published in 14 languages, and she's currently developing signifiers for its television adaptation. Dani's book on the process and craft of writing, Still Writing, is being reissued on the occasion of its 10th anniversary in 2023. She occasionally teaches workshops and retreats and is the co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. Being consistent with your habits is the engine that drives your transformation and growth. Think about it. You can't feed your good wolf one big meal a year

and expect it to thrive. Consistent, steady bits of food fuel a good, healthy wolf, but it's hard to create consistency. You might listen to this podcast on a Thursday, feel really inspired, but then life takes over and by Saturday night, you've forgotten all about it. That's why I'm hosting a free live Q&A town hall Zoom meeting on Thursday, February 23rd,

where I'll be answering your questions about how to take what you know and turn it into what you consistently do. Head to oneufeed.net slash town hall to register for this free live session with me. During this town hall, you'll ask me your specific question and I'll answer it. It's that simple. So if you would like my help creating some tools to deal with real life, when it gets in the way of your best intentions, let me help you. If changing habits feels overwhelming, if you struggle to make time for things because life is so busy, if it's easy to get caught up with your to-do list, you feel consistently behind and taking time for yourself feels selfish, then let's talk. The things we do consistently are more important than the things we do once in a while. In this free town hall session, you'll ask me your questions

and I'll help you find what works for you, how you might look at things differently and create the structure to help you do the thing you really want to do. And if you don't have a specific question, just come listen to the conversation. A little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing. Truth is, you can make a lot of progress by doing just a little bit. To register for this free Zoom session on February 23rd, go to oneufeed.net slash townhall. That's oneufeed.net slash townhall. I hope I get the chance to meet you there. Hi, Dani. Welcome to the show. Thanks. It's great to be with you. I'm so happy to have you on again. I can't believe how long it's been since we talked. It has been a good number of years and a great number of things have transpired in your life and my life since then that we'll talk about.

We're also going to talk about your outstanding new novel called Signal Fires. But before we do that, let's start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there is a grandparent who's talking with her grandchild, and they say, in life, there's two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparents says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

I love that parable. It's so resonant. That's one of those questions. I think the answer changes probably if not day to day or week to week, certainly year to year. I would say for me in my life and in my work that directing myself or inclining myself in the direction of compassion, of kindness, of generosity, of openness. And in Buddhism, they talk about the, you know, the near enemy and the far enemy of various traits. And I think I used to, in my life, get caught up a lot more in comparison. And where does comparison lead? That doesn't sound like such a bad wolf necessarily, comparison, but it can lead to greed. It can lead to envy. It can lead to a lot of ego defining things. And I think probably it's about 15 years ago that I realized

that my mind, when left to its own devices, would move toward comparing. And it's just really such a useless thing to do and creates such separation or distance between people, between me and the person I might be comparing myself to. So I really pretty much catch myself if I'm ever doing that. And I have found over the years that that just brings me so much more peace and contentment and joy and sense of connectedness. Comparison is definitely, I think, a bad wolf for a lot of people. And what's kind of amazing to me about comparison is that it doesn't matter who we are. If we engage in that game, it's a losing battle. Like there's a lot of people that would look at you and the life you have and be like, that's it. That's everything, right? A great writer and a good marriage and a successful career. And, you know, it would be like, what does she have to compare to? But you certainly

and absolutely could. We all can. And that's why I think it's one of those things that just ends up being kind of a losing game all the time. I'm so glad you said that because that is exactly the lesson or the turning point for me, where I really started to understand that is I remember once an agent of mine saying that she had clients, authors who were number three on the New York Times bestseller list, and they were obsessed with, you know, whoever was number two or number one. I was a young writer when she said that to me. And at the time I thought, that's ridiculous. I would never do something like that. I mean, if you hit the New York Times bestseller list, then you are set. There's no other mountain to climb. And then I did hit the New York Times

bestseller list. And I realized how easy it was to do that. How wherever we are in our lives, if that's a way that we're thinking, we can always be doing that. And if we're doing it, we're generally comparing ourselves to one aspect of someone's life, which is why a kind of close cousin to comparison is envy. I've never been an envious person. I mean, that's just not a particular quality that I've had. But whenever I have the sense that someone is envious of me, what I really want to say to them is, do you want all of it? Or do you just want this good moment in my career? Or do you just want my long and happy marriage? Or do you just want some aspect of whatever you think I have that you want, because there's been a great deal of pain and

shock and hard things and complicated things and grief. And so the idea of saying, I want that really, would you just completely trade lives? Because those are what the stakes are. Yeah. It's interesting. I watch TV series on say Netflix or HBO, you know, really high quality ones. And there's been a couple that have really made me think. And the two that I think about a lot are The Crown and Succession. There's a lot of things to think about those shows. They're deeply layered and really amazing shows. But what I think about is I look at in The Crown, I particularly looked at Princess Margaret, and I went by any standard in the world, she's in the top 1% of 1% of 1% of people's wonderful lives. And yet she compares herself to her sister. And thus, she's always losing.

And it's just heartbreaking to watch. Succession is another example. Those people all have what we think we want, money, just stupid amounts of it. But they are deeply unhappy people. Or you look at someone like Robin Williams that's so tragic, who had so much commercial success, so much critical success, was widely seen as a genius and still couldn't find a way to stay here. And those are really sobering and teachable moments for me where I go, ah, look, it doesn't matter what you get. If you don't know how to appreciate it, then it's not going to matter. That's so true. You know, a few years ago, my husband was sick. He was diagnosed with a very serious kind of cancer.

And we moved from our home, which is in rural Connecticut, into a borrowed apartment, which was its own kind of miracle, but a borrowed apartment that friends had in New York City. And it was in this building. It was an empty apartment. They live elsewhere and they had bought it as an investment. It was just sitting there in a building full of billionaires. I think it would be safe to say that part of Manhattan is actually called Billionaires Row. And there's this very, very skinny, very, very, very tall building. My friends call it the fuck you building because it looks like a middle finger going straight up all the way to the sky, like the New York City skyline is giving heaven the finger. And the reason why I'm mentioning it is, you know, we were in this devastating, terrifying time. And we lived in that building for the better part of a year. And every time I walked into the elevator of this building, I encountered unhappy people.

They were very, very rich people who were very, very unhappy and who were like looking each other over in the elevator. There was so much like comparison going on or which floor are you getting off on? You know, it's, are you, are you on a very, very high floor? Are you on the penthouse floor? I mean, it was all penthouses basically, but I just was so struck by, as I have been many times, none of these things bring us happiness. Great wealth doesn't bring us happiness. Beauty doesn't bring us happiness. Whatever the thing is, huge success, acclaim, different kinds of acclaim. I think what brings us happiness is purpose and meaning making and love. And those things are really kind of all up to us to some degree, right? I mean, purpose is up to us. Making meaning of whatever life has presented us with

is up to us. And how loving we are, maybe not how we're loved to some degree, but how loving we are is also up to us. Yeah. Yeah. And as you were talking about your husband being sick, it also made me think about there's, I think it's an old Chinese proverb or a Chinese philosopher said it, which is the healthy man wants many things and the sick person wants only one thing. You know, illness has a tendency to sort of really make clear, like, if you've got health, that is a lot. That is a lot.

Because the minute it goes away, nothing else matters. I always think about that. Super clarifying. Yeah. It's a lesson that we were able to learn and continue to apply to our lives, for which I feel incredibly grateful. My husband recovered and, you know, the neighborhoods around hospitals, you know, the neighborhood around Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City where he was being treated. full of, it's like several square city blocks that are full of illness, except for the people who are there having babies. Actually, that is the hospital where I was born. It's the hospital where I gave birth to my son. It's the hospital where my mother, when she was operated on for cancer, was treated. And now I was there as a woman in my 50 woman in my 50s with my up until then, very healthy, you know, relatively young, you know, we had been were suddenly in that several square block territory of the unwell and the very

unfortunate, the stricken. And you could just feel that. And this is now three years later, I carry that with me, not as a burden, but really as a feeling of my desire to see as the moment, to be in the moment, to be really awake to the moment, to really think, and it's such a privilege to be able to ask this question, but to think, how do I want to live? What do I want to accomplish? Who do I want to surround myself with? How do I want to be in the world? And how can I make that happen? has been about, which is your podcast, Family Secrets and all that. But one of the characters is musing on something and they say, silence may have been a mistake. No, silence was definitely a mistake. And so you talk very eloquently about how damaging secrets are, and that's part of Signal Fires, and it's a part of your podcast, Family Secrets, and part of your book, Inheritance. For people who are not up to speed, can you give us the two-minute version of what led you into that territory?

From the beginning of my writing life, I was writing about secrets. I didn't know why. They were very much a theme of mine. And, you know, something I've often thought about, you know, theme is sort of a fancy literary term for obsession, you know, and we don't choose what obsesses us. It chooses us. That's why it's an obsession. And I was writing always about secrets and families, the corrosive power of secrets, why we keep secrets and different kinds of secrets. But I kept coming back to them. And then in 2016, I took a DNA test for no particular reason

at all. It was completely random and recreational. My husband was sending away for one, prices would come down over the holidays, that sort of thing. And I was incurious about my family history, mostly because I knew it. I knew it cold. I knew everything about it. I came from a family that was very interested in its own history, particularly on my dad's side. And it was a history that I was very invested in. I cared a great deal about, I was proud of in a certain way, which is its own weird thing. Like what is there to be proud of in terms of, you know, a history or ancestry? It's got nothing to do with us really. So I took this DNA test and when it came back, I learned that my dad had not been my biological father and that I had been the family secret. I was the secret that my parents had both known that my dad wasn't my biological father. It wasn't an affair. It became crystal clear very quickly that they had used a sperm donor

because they had trouble conceiving me. And at that time in history, in the history of reproductive medicine, parents were told, never tell the child, never tell a soul, never talk about it ever again. It doesn't matter. It's not even a secret. It's as if it never happened. And what we don't know doesn't hurt us, which is just one of the most erroneous, cliched pieces of wisdom that there has ever been or non-wisdom. father's biological child. I looked nothing like either of my parents. I looked nothing like any of my family. And this was something that was commented on all the time when I was growing up. And so on some level, I think I intuited that there was something amiss, that there was something that I couldn't quite piece together, that there was something, what it felt like, you know, when you're a child and you feel like something's wrong and you don't know what it is, you tend to blame yourself. And that was the story of my life. It was hugely formative for me.

It ran all the way through my childhood, my teens, my early twenties. I now feel like some of the rough patches that I went through and some of the rebellion that I really put myself through stemmed from this thing that was forming me, you know, from the inside out that I was unaware of, but I was, you know, that I intuited. And so when I made that discovery, it was like the lid blew off all of that. It was painful and shocking and challenging, but it was also enriching, liberating. I remember really early on after making that discovery, actually out loud saying to myself, saying to myself, oh, like it made the whole of my childhood and history kind of come into such sharp focus. It was like I was wearing the right prescription glasses for the first time in my life. And it also led me to really understand why secrecy and secrets had been so front and center for me and why I continued to write about

them. Yeah, it's remarkable that secrets were such a focus. And then, as you said, you kind of were the secret. And, you know, I found out through your work that what I'm about to describe is not as outlandish as I thought it was. You've heard countless of these stories, but I also, like you, took a DNA test. I think Ancestry sponsored our show. And so they're like, here's a free test. And so I thought, all right, fine, whatever. And, you know, I didn't think much of it. And I didn't think they offer you a choice. Do you want to keep this data private? And I didn't think anything about it. I thought, well, who cares, right? Like, I just wasn't giving it any thought. And I didn't give it any thought. I took the test and it came back and it said, you're German and you're English primarily. And I was like,

I kind of knew that, you know, carried on. Well, after a while, I got an email from a woman and she said, I have been looking for my mother. And, you know, it appears that we have some matches. I was wondering if there's anybody in your family that you might know about. And I said, well, I'll ask around, but I don't, you know, just didn't give it any thought. But then I started looking a little bit more closely at the nature of the match. And I was like, this is not a, like a third cousin or a second cousin or a cousin. It's saying that this is either a grandparent or a sibling. And I still thought, well, whatever. But then I asked her for a little

more detail. And she said, well, I was born in New York City in this year. And I went, hmm, my mom was in New York City in that year. So after a little while sort of looking at all this, I went, well, this is really strange. And so I was like, how do I approach my mother with this? You know, and I tried to do it in the most general, like, mom, I, you know, took this DNA test. And, you know, there's this woman who thinks that maybe somewhere in our family, there might be some like as general and nonchalant as could be. I didn't have two sentences out of my mouth. And my mom went, that's my daughter. And I went, excuse me. And sure enough, my mom, a year before I was born, was in New York City,

got pregnant, had the baby, gave it up for adoption. Her parents came and picked her up and said, we will never talk about this again. And so a year later, my mom is married to a very unsupportive husband and has me. And it was kind of stunning. I'm a pretty easygoing person, so I wasn't like very judgmental or anything. But what it turned out to be is that this woman and my mom have formed a beautiful relationship. And I so think that something that has plagued my mom for so many years, you know, my mom's had lots of battles with depression and lots of, you know, and it's not like that's all gone. But I feel like this thing that was this deep secret for her finally got opened up. Not only did it get opened up, but it really got healed. And it's been a remarkable sort of thing to have this new sister in my life. And it's

really been beautiful. And again, you know, I know you've heard a version of that story, you know, countless times from so many people, this whole DNA testing is just opened up like a, it's like the great secret box opener. That's exactly right. And that's a beautiful story, right? I mean, your mom was haunted and plagued by having put up a child for adoption and not knowing whatever happened to her. One of the things that I've thought about a lot in these last several years is that we're in a moment in time because of these DNA tests and the unintended consequences of, you know, what was really something that was done for science and, you know, sort of very much billed as recreational. And I mean, I can tell you Ancestry.com has not sponsored my podcast. has not sponsored my podcast, you can be sure. You can be sure. Because there also are a lot of really hard stories and, and some stories that are unresolvable for people, which is, you know,

where it can get extremely hard and painful. I mean, I've heard stories of people in their 80s who find out that they were adopted, and they had never known, what are you going to do at that point in terms of meaning making or purpose or any kind of resolution? But the thing about this period of time that we're living in is that it was unthinkable 20 years ago that you could spit into a vial and send a thing off in the mail for less than 100 bucks and and it would come back and, and, and, you know, would be the great secret box opener. But 20 years from now, it will also be unthinkable because all of these secrets will have, they will all have tumbled out. The idea that anyone could keep this kind of secret will be like something like the cassette tape or like plastics or, you know, cigarette smoking or, you know, bad for you, bad for you. And that will happen eventually. I mean, I really do think there's this huge course correction going on right now that really does have to do with secrecy, which of course is totally different

from privacy. And that's a whole other conversation. But secrecy, I really think anybody today in 2022 saying what we don't know can't hurt us. That's just silly. We now know that what we don't know really can and does hurt us. But, you know, when your mother had her first child, her parents, I'm sure that that was well-meaning advice. We're not going to talk about this. It's going to go away. We're not just going to shove it under the rug. We're going to disappear it. And that was true with my parents too. Completely different story, but we're just, we will never speak of this again. Yep. And my story is very fortunate. It turns out with a happy ending. I can see plenty that don't. A funny part of this is right after I told my other sister, my sister I've known I've had,

she went, oh no, I really feel bad now because she said that she used to say to my mom all the time, like, can you give Matt, our brother up for adoption? Like it was a constant theme. She hit my mom on and she was like, I had no idea what sort of torment I might've been causing her. Right. Right. And amazing that of all the things that she might've said that that was the one she did say, you know? So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love this idea that you say that Carl Jung talks about secrets as psychic poison. And I heard you say something on another show recently that someone said to you, which is that the problem with secrets is when you bury them, you bury them alive. That was actually the epigraph of one of my upcoming guests in the next season of Family Secrets, Carmen Rita Wong.

Oh, I'm talking to her sometime in the new year, I think. Oh, yeah. Good. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that doesn't surprise me that we would have that kind of overlap. But that was this phrase of hers that I thought was probably the most powerful that I thought was probably the most powerful description of what it is to, quote unquote, bury a secret. It doesn't die and it doesn't stay buried. You know, you bury it alive. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

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Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So now let's move into Signal Fires, which I said to you is just a stunningly beautiful book. And I want to start with a paragraph or two that happens very, very early in the book. And I don't want to give too much of the plot away, but you can set up to whatever extent you want to set this little paragraph up, or you can just sort of bring it on its own because I think it stands alone. So however you think is the best way to go into it. So I guess the way that I would set it up is simply to say that there are three teenagers in a car.

And here we are in the head of a 15-year-old boy named Theo, who is behind the wheel of the car. And I think I can just read from there. There's a girl he wants to impress. Her name is Misty Zimmerman. And if she lives through this night, she will grow up to be a magazine editor or a high school teacher or a defense lawyer. She will be a mother of three or remain childless. She will die young of ovarian cancer or live to know her great-grandchildren. But these are only a few possible arcs to a life. A handful of shooting stars in the night sky change one thing,

and everything changes. A tremor here sets off an earthquake there. A fault line deepens. A wire gets tripped. Let's dive into that idea of change one thing and everything changes. What's the significance of that to you? I think that's also something that I've thought about all my life, that everything we do matters, sometimes greatly, and sometimes hardly at all. And we won't know. We won't know until later. And if we were to walk around with consciousness of that, you know, idea that everything we do matters, of that, you know, idea that everything we do matters, that every decision that we make is every choice, every action has consequences or, or leads to the next action or thought. If we lived thinking about that all the time, we would be hiding under our beds and never

live our lives. And we would, you know, sort of psychically speaking, like burn to a crisp, you know, just out of that sheer weight of that idea. So we can't live that way all the time on that level. And yet the idea of change one thing and everything changes, that everything that we do matters, can actually really impact the way that we move through life, the way that we experience life. And in the case of that moment, really early on in Signal Fires, you know, these teenagers, I mean, they're teenagers. I mean, no teenager thinks about consequences. I think it's safe to say, including myself as a teenager. And there's the sense of immortality, the sense that nothing bad can possibly happen. And then something does.

And, you know, these characters spend in some way a great deal of the rest of their lives wishing that they could roll back time to that one moment when they make the choices that they make and sort of begin again, which of course is one thing we don't get to do. Yeah, that made me think of the poet Mark Nepo, who described something called the terrible knowledge, which is basically the knowledge that anything can happen to any of us at any time, which is terrifying, right? And it made me actually think back to a previous book of yours, Devotion. And in Devotion, you say that the world could be divided into two kind of people, right? There's people who are aware of the inherent fragility of life,

and you were one of those people at this point. You had gone through having, when your son was born, he was really, really ill. And so there's these people who have this real intense and intimate closeness with this terrible knowledge. And then you described there's other people, it just doesn't seem to occur to them. And they seemed like different people, a different species. But then you went on to say, but there was a third way of being. Do you remember that? Do you want me to read it or do you want to sort of talk about it? I do remember it, but I'd love, and I think about that actually quite a bit. But if you would read that last little bit about the third way of being, that'd be great. Yeah. I didn't know there was a third way of being. Life was unpredictable. Yes.

A speeding car, a slip on the ice, a ringing phone, and suddenly everything changes forever. To deny that is to deny life, but to be consumed by it is also to deny life. The third way, inaccessible to me as I slunk down the halls with that moment in your life, had to do with holding this paradox lightly in one's hands, to think it is true. The speeding car, the slip on the ice, the ringing phone, it is true. And yet here I am listening to my boy sing as we walk down the corridor. Here I am giving him a hug. Here we are together in this our only moment. Yeah, thanks for reading that. I think that that might encapsulate sort of everything that I

believe. And I'm sort of proud of my younger self for having that awareness because I have it, you know, a hundredfold now. I've thought about that actually a lot during the last few years of the pandemic because, you know, the people that I describe in devotion as it never having occurred to them that anything bad could ever happen were really, you know, some of them are friends of mine, were really so completely flattened. Yeah. I mean, we were all flattened by the pandemic, but they were flattened in a different way. It was almost as if they took it personally. Or, you know, like, just the idea that yeah, when the unimaginable happens, like, there always are things that are unimaginable. But when my husband was diagnosed with cancer, the kind of cancer he was diagnosed with, I was like, that's a thing that wasn't on my list of things. And yeah, I mean, so much of life is like that.

But with the pandemic, I mean, I know people who absolutely imagine something like that coming, you know, for years and years. I have a dear friend, the writer Jim Shepard, whose work is, you know, pretty much all about that kind of imagining. I mean, it's imagining it because he's a fiction writer, but it came as no surprise. Or, you know, months before the pandemic, I was with a friend of mine. Well, not months, maybe a month before the pandemic, who was supposed to come to Italy with us to our writers conference. And she said, you know, about this thing out there, right? This virus. And I remember even me thinking, oh, come on, it's going to be fine. It's so far away. so far away. It's not happening here. And I mean, even I who tend to imagine a lot of what is hard to imagine, fell into that kind of hubris, I guess I would call it. And so during the pandemic,

the people who had the muscles for that period of time that we all found ourselves in and to some degree still are in, we're better equipped to not hold it lightly. I mean, everything was very heavy, and there was so much heaviness that was happening during that time. But somehow we're able to have that feeling of this and that, you know, can we hold that there is joy and there's pain, that there is beauty and there is terror, to quote Rilke. You know, like at the same time, can we hold that? Because that is, in fact, the truth of our lives. Always, always.

That's the third way, right? It's to hold both. And this is maybe a little bit of an oversimplification, but I sometimes think of it like I've told the story before about my dog Ralph passing. And, you know, he had cancer. He, well, it's not fair. And it's, but I don't really react that way. And I kind of went, well, he's a living being, living beings get sick, you know, it happens. So I am incredibly sad, but I don't have a quarrel with the universe over this. Right. And I think living with this terrible knowledge in a healthy or a helpful way is when we realize that like, that's the nature of life. Terrible things happen. They happen all the time. And I can't live scared of them all the time. But I don't also have to deny that that's

possible. And when it happens to not be sort of, as you say, like caught off guard or surprised. Of course, anything when something terrible happens, it's always jarring. But I think it is a little less jarring with a particular worldview that says, like, if you're really paying attention to reality, how do you not see that? Yeah, I'm glad you brought up that word fair, you know, fair, fair, you know, fair, unfair. I have, I think for a very long time, you know, like, for example, I lost my father when I was quite young, when he was quite young. I mean, I was 23 and he was 64. And that is just, it's, it's too young. And never once did I think, why him? Why me? Actually, I did think, why him? I did.

But I never had that sense of, that's not fair. It's not fair that we didn't have more time together. It's not fair that he didn't get to know me as a grown woman, that he never got to know his grandchild. Even when my baby was sick, I didn't have that particular way of thinking about fairness or unfairness because one of the things that that leads to is then if that were a way that I thought I would look at other babies and think, well, why not you? Why couldn't it have been you? Why did it have to be, you know, or, you know, look at other people.

You know, I have friends in my life who are my age with kids who are, you know, heading towards being grown people who still have all their parents. And I've never looked at them. I have felt a pang knowing that there are families out there who have multiple, multiple generations around, you know, their holiday tables and I don't, but I've never thought that's not fair that I don't have that. And that you do, because then we go back to the whole idea of like coveting or envy and all of that is just so useless. If we think about what it is to be here, every time I'm on a flight

that takes off, I mean, just yesterday, I was on a flight that was taking off. I do this every time I say the meta blessing for everybody on the plane. And I'm aware that very few planes crash, but this could be one of them. And it probably won't be, but it could be. And I think that that's really kind of the way that I move through life is with that feeling. Yeah. I don't want to spend too much more time here because I want to get to some other parts of the novel, but I do think there is something about learning to really not deny the difficulty of life, but also not be overwhelmed by it. And that, in many ways, you could say is perhaps the whole of the spiritual quest. And in a lot of ways, you know, I think is how do I reckon with the difficulties in life, but not be broken by them?

Yeah, I think that when I finally arrived at a way to tell this story, which is in this completely sort of a chronological way where I'm moving through time in a more sort of kaleidoscopic way, that is really what I was trying to get at was we're looking at one particular character, say an 11-year-old boy who is, you know, in some pain and is lonely and sad and special and brilliant. And because as the novelist, I get to play God and, you know, create this sort of omniscient container for the story, we get to glimpse that lonely, special, brilliant boy at other stages of his life when he's a grown man or when he's a college student, when he's an esteemed professor many years later. And we get these glimpses and that makes it tolerable in a way, more than tolerable to be with him as he's going through these harder things.

Except the thing about actually living, as opposed to being inside the world of a novel, is that we don't get those glimpses. I would occasionally like them. I'd like to, you know, just have a word with the future, kind of just have a little window shade go up. Or maybe I wouldn't. I don't know. Yeah. But in the structuring of the book, that's something that I was able to do. That was what allowed me to tell the story. And I think that that was, I mean, if a structure could be spiritual, I think that this structure has a spiritual quality.

Yeah. I mean, it points to a core idea, which is that I think the bigger perspective that we can take on things, whatever ways we can broaden our perspective, tend to be a way of seeing and dealing with the world that leads to more peace and wisdom, right? And in this case, in the book, as a novelist, you have sort of the God's eye view, right? And when we can take more of that view in our own lives, whether it be like this thing that's happening right this very minute isn't going to matter in five days, from the very littlest things to the very big things, you know, that idea of zooming out, at least for me, is one of the core elements of living a life that has some degree of wisdom in it,

which is to be able to take that much bigger perspective. Absolutely. And I think that that's why the sort of ever-widening circles of, you know, this is what's going on in my life, in this room that I'm in, in this house that I'm in, on this hill that the house is sitting on, in this town, in this community, in this state, in this country, on this continent, in this world. And I think it's the human condition to always struggle with that. We don't get to walk around feeling that way all the time. I mean, maybe the most enlightened among us maybe do, but I think that is always the challenge. And I think one of the great, great pleasures of writing this book for me was that there is this character who does have

that view. And that enabled me to see the world of these characters over the course of the 50 years in which the story takes place as this very capacious place and time and, you know, the ability to move in and out of their lives in that way, you know, through time. way, you know, through time. Yeah. And the book does that. I think it's two core elements, which I'm not saying anything that you don't already know and hasn't already been pointed out by other people have looked at the book is the two core elements to me are the idea of sort of interconnectedness, right? And that all time kind of exists all at once, right? Or a huge view of time. Both those are much wider perspectives than we normally take. We normally take a perspective that says, I'm concerned about me and mine. This is a view that says, hey, that's much bigger than that. And I'm concerned about this particular moment in time generally. And you sort of break that out too. I'm wondering if maybe we could now move into a piece of writing that does explain some of

Waldo's, this is the young man who does, you know, in many ways talk like an enlightened Zen master. We could see some of his perspective on the world. And it starts with the sentence, also he doesn't really know how to talk about it. Up through, he wants the conversation that they have together in the car every day to go on without end. Also, he doesn't really know how to talk about it. Up through, he wants the conversation that they have together in the car every day to go on without end. Also, he doesn't really know how to talk about it. Once Mrs. Wolfe was dead, she was no longer in her body. Her body was just a thing, like the discarded carapace of an insect. But she wasn't gone. She had escaped. Within the walls of the playhouse, there was a field of energy he could almost reach out and touch. No, more than that. It was as if the two of them, he and Mrs. Wilf, were enveloped by that field of energy. It wasn't exactly like time stopped,

more that time had seemed to expand so that they were a part of everything that had ever happened or ever would happen. She would never really be gone. This new knowledge, and it felt like knowledge, has stayed with him like a superpower. If when we die, we don't just vanish, then there's nothing to be afraid of, right? He doesn't know what to call them. Not spirits, exactly, not beings, but a barely visible web, like those intricate spider webs that glisten when the sun hits them. Those glistening strands form patterns just like constellations. But now he's being put to the test. He wants more time with his mom, a lot more time. He doesn't want her to be a glistening strand, part of the invisible pattern.

No, he wants her to be at his high school graduation. He wants her to take him to college. He wants the conversations that they have together in the car every day to go on without end. I think that's so beautiful. And what I love about it is this idea that we can take this broader and more expansive view of life. We can take this sense that everything's connected, that all is one. And at the very same time, we can absolutely not want our mother to be gone. And I just love that paragraph because it calls up to me something that sits kind of at the heart of a lot of the spiritual life.

We keep coming back to this. But the idea that the goal of this isn't that we just now float over everything and don't feel anything. It's the both and. Yes, there is a bigger and a deeper and an inner connection. You know, he doesn't want his mom to go. I don't want my dog, Beansy, who's laying behind me to go in a couple of weeks, right? I desperately don't want her to go. And so it feels to me the both and we talked about, how do I carry both those things at the same time? Not make one more important than the other, but not lose sight or get stuck in one side or the other?

is when we are in holding both of those pieces of knowledge. And it does feel like knowledge, I think. When you're in that sweet spot, the feeling of absolute connection to this body, these loved ones, this specificity, these creatures, and at the same time, that sense of the greater vastness and the feeling that it all has always been and will always be. I've started sending a couple of text messages after each podcast listener with positive reminders about what's discussed and invitations to apply the wisdom to your life. It's free and listeners have told me that these texts really help to your life. It's free and listeners have told me that these texts really help to pull them out of autopilot and reconnect them with what's important.

When you get a text from me during your day-to-day life, it's one more thing that helps you further bridge that gap between what you know and what you do. Positive messages when you need them, from me to you. So if you'd like to hear from me a few times a week via text, go to oneufeed.net slash text and sign up for free. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you.

And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park.

Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really.

No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I could stay on this topic for the next four hours because it's so right in my interest, in my heart. But I want to hit a couple other aspects of the book that I thought were really, I don't know if I want to use the word beautiful because this next part is not beautiful, but it's very, I would call this part a little bit wrenching. There's a character in the

book by the name of Shankman. He just is called Shankman and he's Waldo's dad. And let's say that Shankman is a fairly highly competitive man and sees life in terms of winning and losing. And he's a man's man to a certain degree, right? And Waldo is, as we've just witnessed from that last paragraph, a guy who sees, you know, a little boy who sees the world very differently. And, you know, in the book, what was so difficult to listen to was to hear Shankman trying so hard to be a good father to Waldo and failing and failing and failing. If I were to put myself in either of those characters' shoes, I would put myself in Waldo's shoes. And I had a father who was a pretty angry man, who I have no doubt loved me and didn't understand me. And so reading that for me,

it was kind of healing in a way, even though I've had some of those insights, but it was healing to recognize that Schenckman, there's a line, he says, his love for his son is a vast and forceful thing. Whatsoever threatens Waldo must be destroyed. But given that it is Waldo who seems to be hurting himself, what can he do? And that's just really stunning because he wants to love his son and he just can't. And he has to face that over and over and over in himself. When I started Signal Fires, which I actually began a long time ago and kind of like lost my way. I couldn't figure it out, but I, Shankman was a fully blown character in my imagination. I was the mother of a boy around Waldo's age who's now, you know, just graduated from college. And I would see dads on the sidelines of Little League games and hockey games and school functions and stuff. And moms too, but it was mostly dads.

This idea of what love can transform into when there's this desire or need. In Schenkman's case, he is so profoundly insecure in some way himself that he values more than anything, quote unquote, normalcy. And he actually can't imagine a life in which specialness would be a good thing. And Shankman is enormously comparative in his nature. He compares himself to everyone around him and finds himself wanting in some way. And he loves Waldo. And he recognizes that Waldo is different. And he wants to like, excise that difference, that specialness. And he's unable to meet Waldo where he is. And to me, I had a lot of compassion for Schenkman as the novelist or in some way as the omniscient narrator myself. I loved him. I felt for him. I kept on wishing that he could get out of his own way. And to me, he's the tragic character in the novel because he can't, and he recognizes that he can't. And he realizes that he, at one point, he says, or he thinks, you know, that he's failed at the

one thing that you can't fail and kind of do over in life, which is that he's been a lousy father. And his son has grown up really to not want to be around him. He's resigned to that by the end of the book. And it's not really a spoiler. I mean, it's just the way it is. You kind of know it's not going to go well in that relationship. But Waldo has survived him, which was also, to me, really key is that it's possible to not be parented well, to not grow up. I mean, Waldo actually has this whole speech about this, not speech, but an inner monologue about this. And in the book, you know, that's possible to grow up in the wrong place at the wrong time, you know, with the wrong parents, but still be able to hold onto this like one ray of light and like a beam and hold onto it.

And in his case, that beam is, you know, his across the street neighbor and his mother who loves him. I heard it said to me once, not that long ago, and it really stayed with me, like go where it's warm. Just as a piece of advice that I just loved go where it's warm. Like, just don't go where it's cold. Don't go where it's sharp. This is a piece of advice that I just loved. Go where it's warm. Like, just don't go where it's cold. Don't go where it's sharp. Don't go. I mean, to the degree that you have the capacity to make those choices, go where it's warm. And Waldo was ultimately able to do that in his life. And Shankman did not destroy his son. God knows he did not want to destroy his son. And he did not. But where they end up with each other, nobody's singing kumbaya at the end of what we see of their relationship. to be pushed to do the wrong things, but it's possible to survive all these psychic indignities.

I love that phrase, psychic indignities, if you have one or maybe two people who recognize you for who you are. And that is such a true thing. I know that to be true for me, and it's not like I was horrifically abused. We mentioned my mom, her depression, my dad, his sort of depression that showed up as anger, and me being sort of a highly sensitive kid. But there came a time where there were a couple of people throughout the years, and they were primarily school teachers, God bless them, who saw me for who I was. And that was enough. You know, I mean, it didn't stop me from a multi-year skid into serious addiction. But nonetheless, it got me through high school, and it gave me something to sort of reference back to. And I just love that idea. And I do think Shankman is heartbreaking. And I think that all of us have a little Shankman in us, right? You can't be a parent. For me, I feel like I was constantly pushed up against my limits,

up against my ability. I feel like I'm pretty happy with the way I was as a dad, but not entirely. And no one is. And so I think to be a parent is to know that you could do better or you wish you could do better. You know, I guess that's what it is. You wish you could do better, but you don't currently have the capacity to. Yeah. The parent-child relationship is its own set of lessons that begin, you know, at the moment of, you know, first meeting one another all throughout our lives. And Shankman didn't have the tools of self-inquiry. Well, actually, that's not really true. Shankman knows that he's messing up. It's not like he's in denial. He's not oblivious to that, but he can't change.

Yeah. That's the heartbreaking part. He would have been far less tragic if he just hadn't known, but he knows as it's happening, he makes resolution after resolution after resolution himself. I'm not going to yell at Waldo. I'm not going to yell at Waldo. And the next day he's screaming at Waldo. I mean, that's what is just so painful. And I think we all know to some degree what it's like to be like, I really want to change, but for whatever reason right now, I can't seem to. And that's a painful place to be. Yeah. Painful. And I think completely relatable and human. I don't think there's anyone among us who has not contended with that about something.

That's absolutely right. So I think the last thing that we can maybe end on is I told you in the email I sent you after I read your book that my partner, Jenny, and I listened to it on our drive to Atlanta. And we've driven back and forth from Columbus to Atlanta for six years. Her mom has been in Atlanta, had Alzheimer's. My mom is needed care here. And her mom passed a few weeks ago, which finally, I will say, you know, it's always hard and it was a mercy that she went. But your chapter, or I don't remember if it was one chapter or multiple chapters about this character who has Alzheimer's, I was kind of blown away by that you got into the head of someone who has Alzheimer's to the degree you did. Now, of course, we don't actually know

if that's what someone who has Alzheimer's is like. But watching from the outside, there was so much of it that seemed like I could totally see, like, I see that in her. How did you do that? Did you have that experience in your life of having been around someone who had Alzheimer's? Yeah, my mother-in-law had Alzheimer's, as did a number of her sisters. So, you know, sort of that specter of Alzheimer's is very much in our family. What I watched over the years was first the confusion, like early stages and the almost covering up of it, that very heartbreaking time of the Alzheimer's patient who knows that they have Alzheimer's, right? Yes. And is kind of trying to fake being okay.

Yeah. I think one of the things that I really noticed as my mother-in-law went on her journey, that sounds like it was about as long as your mother-in-law's, was that she did not forget who she loved. And there was something in this character of Mimi when I did enter her head. I mean, there were a couple of times writing this novel where I really thought, can I do this? You know, can I do this? And that was certainly one of them. But she was a character who very much wanted life to be lovely. It's a family that sort of kept a secret for all these years, never spoke of it again, even with each other, because if we don't speak of it,

then maybe we can just have life be lovely and go back to nothing ever happened. And to enter her mind once she's sort of lost her ability to control her thoughts, her memory, the way that I thought of it, time becomes a jumble for her. And so her children who are grown at the point that she's in the throes of Alzheimer's are every age they've ever been. And she is everywhere she's ever been. So as she's walking in the snow, you know, on the side of a highway, in her mind, she's looking for her children, which is what I found so incredibly poignant. She's misplaced her children.

Meanwhile, her children are in their 40s, but she's thinking that she's on a beach and that they must be in that little shack over there. And the closer she gets in her memory to a moment where they are at an age where this really difficult, scary, tragic thing happened, the more she's like, oh, no, no, don't go there. Don't go there. You know, like she even has that feeling in her own mind where her memory kind of wants to go. But it's the jumble of it that it's kind of all in there. It's just like sand through an hourglass, like there's nothing to hold on to. I mean, memory is not narrative to begin with. I mean, memory is not narrative to begin with. I mean, our memories are not narrative. Nobody's memories are narrative. That's why in literature, when somebody remembers something and it's an entire story, I always feel like, no, that's not how our memories work. So that's what I was trying to do was create this kind of kaleidoscopic sense of the way that she

was experiencing both time and, and what she was doing. But mostly, she knew exactly who she loved, which was something that was very true in my own life and my own experience with my mother-in-law. Yeah, I would concur. I think Ginny's mom to the very end, I mean, there was a point which she slipped beyond knowing anyone or anything. Although, you know, Ginny's mom to the very end. I mean, there was a point which she slipped beyond knowing anyone or anything. Although, you know, we would still talk to her as if she did, you know, and there was still a belief that, you know, Ginny's voice would maybe in some way be comforting to her. But even up to the very end, that was what remained was the love. It was very clear. And then the other piece of it was, as you described, the thing that I found fascinating was to watch the way that her mind would bring things together that simply don't belong together in the normal reality.

years ago and a memory of two minutes ago, and they're combined into this new thing. And you're like, I sort of see how she arrived there. It was just fascinating to kind of watch. The other thing that I found completely fascinating about it was, you know, there's this idea that like, there's a part of our brain that all it does is it basically makes meaning out of things. It basically is the part of us that just says, you know, this is what happened and why. And what I was amazed to watch in her was how it was clear from the outside that she had absolutely no idea why something occurred, but she was instantly and a hundred percent certain of what had happened and why. And it wasn't that she was lying. That was not it at all. It was like the brain simply could not tolerate not having an explanation of what

happened. So she would grab at one, no matter how crazy it was from the outside, but then defend it to the death and be completely convinced of its certainty. And what I saw in that was we are all doing that all the time. Not to that extent. We might be a little bit more anchored in reality, but that is what we are doing. We are interpreting the world. We are creating a meaning out of it. And we believe it without doubt. I love what you just said, and it actually helped me to make a connection that I hadn't made before. This novel is the culmination of not just of all of my work, but really of all of my life experience and all of my spiritual work and just pretty much everything is in it. And one of the things that I realized after I discovered that my dad hadn't been my biological father was that I had been putting together pieces of the puzzle of my life and of my family's life, creating narratives, I mean, both on the page and off the page, creating narratives.

This is why my dad was sad. This is why my dad was sad. This is why my dad was depressed. This is why he took pills. This is why my mother was angry. You know, this is why my parents' marriage was the way it was. And the thing that I realized after I made my discovery about what they had been through and the secret that they had kept is that all of that was true. that they had kept is that all of that was true. It just wasn't the whole truth. And that I also had to get comfortable with and truly make peace with the fact that I will never have the whole truth. You know, when I was writing Inheritance, the book based on that journey, I had to find a place within me that didn't want to tie it all up, you know, or that realized that I couldn't and that some of the beauty was in not being able to do that. But the desire, the desire to do that was very strong. And I think that with Mimi,

probably a big part of what seeped into her internal life for me as a novelist was her desire to find a way to make these pieces fit together to tell a story that she could hold on to. Yeah. Well, Dani, thank you so much for coming on. I've been looking forward to this one. I loved the book. I could not recommend it higher as a beautiful work of fiction that is a beautiful and philosophical and spiritual and also a great read. I could not wait to finish it. Bravo. That means a lot to me. And I've been looking forward to this conversation too, Eric. It's really good to talk to you again. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do

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