Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio Things.

I want to know?

Where did you grow up?

How did you grow up?

Did your father hurt you?

Did your mother hurt you?

Where did you go to high school?

What did you like to wear as a little girl?

What did you like to wear as a teenager?

Did you like being a sister?

What was your favorite book as a kid?

Did you pick at your skin?

Are you glad you had kids?

Why didn't we stop the New Orleans in nineteen ninety six?

Were you afraid to die?

Where was your ropa vieja recipe from Do You Miss Me?

Are you still Mad at Me?

That's e A Hanks journalist and author of the recent memoir The Ten, a memoir of family and the Open Road.

Eas is a story of contrasts.

As a child, she was exposed to the depths of mental illness and the heights of Hollywood celebrity.

As she learned to navigate her place in the world.

As an adult, she goes on a journey to understand those contrasts, buried secrets, and to make peace with the generations who came before her.

I'm Danny Shapiro and this is Family Secrets.

The secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.

So I always begin with this question, but in your case it feels even more like the place to begin.

So much of your story is about place and how it informs us.

So tell me about the earliest place that you remember, the.

Earliest place that I remember.

My childhood memories of location are as bifurcated and bipolar, as my adult sort of identity conundrums were because I was born in Burbank, California, which is a suburb of Los Angeles, part of the pulsing megalopolis that is LA.

You can't tell when you've left LA and entered Burbank for people who don't live here.

I was born in southern California, and I ended up in Sacramento around the age of five.

So I had a typical childhood of divorce, which is that I went between cities.

The arrangement was that I lived with my mom and I visited my dad, so my winters and the bulk of my life was in Sacramento.

Sacramento is as maybe it's the most famous citizen.

Johan Didean describes it the ubiquitous valley town.

It's extremely flat.

The air kind of sits on it in between the Pacific and the Sierra Nevadas, so the heat really lays on the city.

The summers or kind of one hundred winters, are very rainy.

I grew up a horse girl, and so the bulk of my time was spent out in this area that unfortunately doesn't really exist anymore.

It's all been built over by track homes and fulfillment centers and god knows what else.

But when I close my eyes and I say, what is the landscape of your childhood?

I toggle back and forth between the rice patties outside of Sacramento, because there's a huge Japanese American community in Sacramento that used to grow the bulk of rice for the world outside of Sacramento, and it was just as far as the eye could see, these kind of like emerald fields that are water logged because rice is grown in water, and so the sun would hit the water and the green rice shoots, and I just remember the sense that this green could go on forever, and between the ocean and the mountains.

It was not a hidden valley, but a place that was separate from the rest of the world.

And then the opposite side of that is my childhood memories of southern California during the weekends and the summers i'd be with my dad when he wasn't on location shooting.

Those are all of Malibu, which at the time certainly had money and stature, but was not quite as built up and fancy as it is now, kind of run down, a lot of old hippies, and the sort of beach esthetic of early nineties Malibu was baywatch and breakfast burritos and the smell of a warm wetsuit and it's called sex wax, what you rub onto your surfboard.

So I had these very classic Californian landscapes of the valley farming town and the southern California beach, and I'm of both of them equally.

I can't prioritize one over the other because my childhood is so rooted in both of those places.

That makes so much sense and such a beautiful answer.

It seems the way that you're describing this sort of split screen of these two very different landscapes is also mirrored in these two very different experiences of being a kid with a parent.

Tell me a bit about your mom from those Sacramento years when you were little, and then a little bit about your dad as well.

My mom, even when I was an adolescent, was this sort of romantically tragic figure to me.

And it's strange that when I think back about her in my childhood to realize how young she was at the time.

Your parents are just perpetually middle aged to you, but I it's very strange to look back at these memories and realize I'm describing someone who's twenty nine years old, thirty three years old, thirty six years old.

At that age when I was a child, my mom had this failure to launch in a way that there was something about her life that had never You know, when you're learning how to ride a bike and you're trying to get your sense of balance and then you wobble a little bit, but then you find that center and you find your balance and you can take off, or you know, like the surfboard, when you pop up you funny hit your stride and you can glide.

My mom just never hit that.

Everything was always difficult with her.

Friendships were difficult, Parenting was difficult, making sure the kitchen sink was empty and the fridge was full, was difficult.

Everything was a struggle, and this sense that she had already been benched by my father's fame, by her lack of a career as a stage artist, which is how she thought of herself.

And in the background of this varying degrees of dysfunction was the art that she so valued and cherished.

I grew up in a house with many books and newspapers and being told this weekend, we're going to watch Churrosawa films because they're important to watch.

And there was classical music because my mom's mom listened to quite a lot of classical music, and so did my mom, and so do I.

Now my mom was romantic to me in the way that romance is tragic, and this sense that her relationship with reality was never obviously a defense mechanism.

It was something she was not in control of.

I'm trying to describe the depths of my mom's evangelical fervor.

Because my mother was, as she would say, washed in the blood of the Lamb, and she had accepted Jesus Christ as her personal Lord and savior.

Her dependence on her faith was such and it loomed so large for her that you know, as a child, I once said, why is the date ten sixty six important?

And maybe another parent would start explaining the Anglo Saxons and the Battle of Hastings, But my mom's answer started, when you don't have the love and light of Jesus Christ in your heart, which is an interesting approach to teaching medieval history.

So she was baffling to me in a way that all parents are baffling to their children.

But even as a child, I had a sense that something was not adding up about her life, that her interpretations of events that happened days previously never matched mine.

But that also the barometers of adulthood that I was aware of even as a child, that a house should be clean, that you should have help with your homework, that there should be regular meals, that your life should be populated with friends and loved ones who pop in.

That was all absent, and I was able to sort of clock that at a very early age.

No, that's so interesting because our childhoods are so often these kinds of echo chambers, where the reality that we are contending with is the only reality we know.

And you did not have that because of your parents' divorce, you had two different realities that you were to some degree in those early years toggling back and forth between.

This word has kind of fallen out of use in this capacity, But I had a very Catholic childhood in the small sea of like very high highs, very low lows.

My existence with my mom verged on the gray gardens.

There weren't quite raccoons, but it was two crazy biddies knocking around this house with stacks of newspaper and petae everywhere.

And then my life with my dad came equipped with not just my dad, the whole cast of characters that was my Greek step family.

Because my dad married I call her my other mother, Rita Wilson.

They married when I was around five or six, and she came with cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents, and so I had the view of what family could be like, and I was aware that my mom was not up for any of that.

I just knew that my mom was not like other parents, but I didn't understand how deeply strange and off putting she was to other people.

That stuff I thought was normal when she would speak to herself, because from her perspective, she was in a conversation with the voice of God, the way that she could not take care of her hygiene and clothing, all of those things I mistook for normal because that was all I knew, and the blueprint had already been laid before I would start going back and forth between my two different families.

Really strange blend of being aware that something isn't quite adding up.

And then also you only know the aquarium you're swimming around in, you think the castle is supposed to be that size.

It's an odd sort of chamber of mirrors of what is normal.

And for every friend I had that was not allowed to come to my house and certainly was never allowed to spend the night.

I had other friends, non school friends, for whom my mom was the cool mom who said, Oh, dinner will be cookie dough, and you can dye your hair whatever color you want, and I will drive you all over the state to compete in horse Things can be hard to pin down with that childhood experiences because it was in its nature different every day.

So my dad, for listeners, is a man you might have heard of.

His name is Tom Hanks, and my dad has his own sort of family struggles in that my dad's parents divorced, and then his mom and his dad each had a succession of failed marriages, which meant step parents would show up and step siblings, and then a couple years later they'd be gone again.

I think his dad married two more times, and my grandmother remarried four times.

So they worked that courthouse.

There's a lot of people coming and going.

So my dad had a very lonely childhood of being an artist in his bedroom, working out jokes to make the kids at school laugh.

And by the time he bumps into my mom, their college students at sax State in Sacramento, and their theater kids, and they're not really friends.

They don't really know each other, and they're not particularly close.

But my mom had just had her heart broken by a guy I think she thought she was gonna marry, and he was certainly on paper, more of what she was looking for.

And my dad was funny and charming, but he was awkward and very sensitive, and she let him take a crack because she was on the rebound.

My dad was twenty two when my brother Colin was born, and my mom was only twenty four or twenty five, and so these are kids, they're young adults who have no concept of how to be parents, to have a home, how to raise people, and so they're both working with what they've got.

The difference between them is my dad lives in reality and my mom is already starting to show signs of significant mental health struggles.

She's already lying and stealing from people that she loves and who love her, and has different versions of events.

She has rage, she has all of these sort of issues that are disquieting to my dad, but coming from a broken hon himself.

He has a young son now, and he has a burgeoning career, so he's gonna make it work for as long as he can, and as long as he can goes till around nineteen eighty five, nineteen eighty six.

Colin's born in seventy seven.

I'm born in eighty two, and the best part about having famous parents is being able to google their birthdays and anniversaries.

So I can't remember when Dad and Rita got married.

I think they got married in eighty eight.

So that's where all of the cast of characters are coming from, which are funny, talented, ambitious young people who have no concept of stability of parents who will be there every Day of How to Be a Family on the regular, and they find themselves with two young kids.

When Colin is born, my parents are living in a hellhole apartment in Hell's Kitchen in New York in nineteen seventy seven.

They don't get married until Colin's already two years old, so around seventy nine, and that is around when the second season of Bosom Buddies, everyone's favorite television show.

So Bosom Buddies had happened, and my parents are still married.

When my dad shoots Splash, which is his big breakout moment, but it's not until Big which I think is eighty nine or ninety.

I know there's going to be a Tom Hanks fan who is listening who is so deeply disappointed in me that I do not have this IMDb in front of me.

In the grand tradition of show business, we'll fix it in the post.

I think it's accurate to say that in terms of my dad's fame, I was not born on third base, but we certainly moved there in the mid nineties.

Colin and I have a sort of verbal marker for when things get crazy, and we call it beg and ag, which is my dad's fame is one thing before Forrest Gump, and it's a completely different thing after Forrest Gump.

He was famous, and he had made movies and was out of the significant and crushing financial stress that he had been in his young adulthood.

Basically, my mom kidnapped us, Colin and I and took us to Sacramento without telling my dad, and they were in the middle of divorce proceedings by the time we end up in Sacramento.

My Dad's kind of on his way.

He is not Tom Hanks's global movie star, but he is Tom hanks promising actor who's going to do big things.

I'm like twelve years old when the full sort of experience kicks in.

We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.

In February nineteen ninety six, at the age of thirteen, Ea makes the pivotal move from Sacramento to Los Angeles, a shift set in motion by escalating tensions and abuse in her mother's home.

The realization that she needs to escape is validated by lawyers, police, teachers, and neighbors, all finally storming the bestiale of the custody arrangement, which now needs to be changed.

She leaves mid school year and lands in a very different world, her father directing his first film, a newly blended family, and the beginning of a new chapter.

That summer, in the emotional wake of her departure, Ba's mother comes back into focus.

She wants to take her on a sprawling, enigmatic road trip, one that seems to aim at connecting the dots of a fractured family history.

EA barely knows.

So it's in the thick of all of this that my mom announces that we're going to buy Owennebago and drive to Florida, where my grandmother lives.

And that's really the only thing I know about my mom's family.

I know that my grandmother at some point lived in Sacramento with us, and then she moved back to her hometown, which is Palatka, Florida, which is a central Florida town not too far from the Okaala National Forest, which is sizable and impressive.

And I know that my mom's father is a military man who is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

And all I know about him is that when I told my mom that I had peeled off from an eighth grade school trip to Arlington to see his grave.

She looked at me.

I finished my sentence.

She went up to her bedroom.

She closed the door and did not come out for I think about a week.

She would not speak to me and did not acknowledge my questions.

So I did not know where my mom was born.

I did not know where she went to high school.

I had no idea where she grew up, or who her friends were, or what her relationship was like with her parents.

I had not met two of my uncles.

And so she buys this Winnebago and we hit the road because we're going to Florida and then we will eventually continue on to the nineteen ninety six Olympics in Atlanta.

Was Colin on that road trip as well, or was it you and your mom?

No, it was just me and my mom.

Colin had a coterie of incredibly close friends.

We grew up in a neighborhood of East Sacramento.

It's very idyllic, it's really beautiful, and there was just a pack of boys all around the same age, and they all hung out at the same place.

It's misleading to call it a country club.

It is a country club, but it's small and very ramshackle and old, very waspy.

It's like the nice it is falling apart around the edges.

And it was a place for all of these boys to eat chips and watch Brend and Stimpy reruns and occasionally play water polo or tennis on the one tennis court that they have.

These boys became family to the extent that at some point before I had left my mother's house, he had already moved out and was living with a family that had seen what was going on and just very casually said, you can spend the night on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then it was you can spend the night on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

So it got to the point where essentially Colin had already moved out, and that is in part what precipitated things really starting to fall apart with my mom because there was no one watching the store.

Colin, as older siblings very often are, was the great protector and had kept an eye on my mother's increasingly fragile mental state.

And so when once he wasn't around is kind of when everything started to go pear shaped.

And that summer he was not on the road because he had really started to individuate and to begin his own life, and he was headed off to college.

It's so interesting the way that two siblings or multiple siblings can have such different experiences depending on luck of this posse of boys in the neighborhood.

And you just didn't have your version of that.

Yeah.

I remember I had my friends who were my horseback riding sort of friends, but they knew my mom was the cool mom.

They didn't see the other stuff that was going on.

They were not an avenue out.

They were about staying in one place.

So when we hit the road, I had just moved to Los Angeles and my mother was barely speaking to me.

And because it was just the two of us, we move into this Winnebago barely saying a thing to each other, and I don't think we had really had a conversation until we got on the far side of Texas.

And if anybody's driven the tent through Texas, hits a long road with very little on the horizon.

It got very faulkner.

It got very as I lay dying very quickly until we got to Florida.

By that time things had warmed up a little bit.

You're stuck You're in this Winnebago with your mom, who you're very much not getting along with and who has a loose grip on reality, and you're making this journey.

How would you characterize your inner state during that time?

It was surreal.

Basically, I leave my mother's house because her sort of usually vague threats of violence had become concrete.

My mom had been physically intimidating for as long as I could remember.

She spanked, but she also pulled hair and dragged and shooked and shoved, but she had never just hul doubt and started hitting me across the face.

But that's what had happened, and that's why I was finally able to leave.

And now suddenly I've had to give depositions, and I've talked to lawyers and court appointed psychotherapists, and we've had screaming fights where she does not remember hitting me, or if she does, she remembers that I deserved it.

And now we're in a van, stuck in a very small space together, barely speaking and trying to cross Texas the hours of silence or having my headphones on while my mom just chain spokes because she really wanted to get to Florida as quickly as possible.

So it was just this unrelenting pace of just driving for hours and hours and hours until she would finally pass out.

Because I was too young to drive at this point.

We would drive as far as we could, and then we'd try the inn too, some campground of America, and she would just go to the back bed and completely pass out.

There was no Okay, what are we going to do for dinner or where are we It was I paid for a spot, I'm going to park it and fall asleep, and then me, fourteen year old, I'd have to set up the gray water tank and the poop shoot and the electricity and get the generator going.

So it was just this very bizarre month and a half of this surreal experience of being on the open road with a woman who we love each other more than anything, but also I'm terrified of her.

She's furious and broken hearted with me.

And the worst thing that can happen is the batteries on my discman get worn out because I've just listened to my four CDs too many times as a way of filling the silence of these miles on the highway and the vast expanse the American South.

There was a bunch of trips that kind of I only found out after much much later, were actually sort of court appointed mother daughter things.

I remember we went to Disneyland in the middle of all of the court proceedings.

It was absolutely hilatious.

It was a horrible trip, and I didn't know until years and years later that we went because some judge or some lawyer said, you guys should have some quality time together, go to Disneyland.

I was like, Okay, I guess we're going to Disneyland.

I think there had been maybe some sort of conversation about there needs to be a trip this summer, and maybe that was what was the thinking behind the Atlanta Olympics, because my mother certainly did not have it together to be like, I'm going to research Olympic tickets and airplane costs and book the hotel and all of that.

That was just all of that was way beyond her.

She's not agoraphobic, but she's not leaving the house because she doesn't have anywhere to go or anyone to see.

And suddenly we're at the Olympics and stuff like that.

So I think there might have been something around that and the Olympics, and thinking that was a good idea, But there was no sort of stated narrative around I want you to see where we're from, and I want you to know your grandmother better, and I want you to see the South.

That's how she would conceive of it after the fact, But I think it was just that's actually a very good question that I have never thought of.

Why did my mother want to go on the trip?

I was just kind of part and parcel.

But I wonder if after the trauma of the year and now both of her children being out of the house, and the stress of the court case and everything around the custody agreement, if there was some level of she wanted to see her mom.

I would not be surprised if that was a deep desire for her at the time.

Did you return from that trip feeling like you knew anything more about your family history or your mother's than you did before you set out.

No, I didn't learn anything on that trip because my grandmother, much like my mother, refused to talk about anything.

That trip was the first time I'd even seen a picture of my grandfather.

So it's very shocking to walk by and be like who's this man who looks like me?

And realizing that it's my mother's father.

My grandmother lived in reality, my grandmother was not mentally ill, but she was maybe as I would go on to discover the true Southerner in the family, and that came out in a lot of different ways.

And one of the ways it came out was we don't talk about that.

So when I asked her, I think that was the first time I had anyone to ask explicitly who was my grandfather?

What was your marriage like, and why did it end?

And what did he do?

That was my first experience being told to my face, we don't talk about that, and furthermore, you shouldn't ask what I do remember thinking that I had finally seen and understood was the South and being called, oh, you're Harriet's Yankee granddaughter.

I've heard about you.

Being called a Yankee to your face for the first time is a bracing experience.

And that was also, you know, my first time at Waffle Hut and Cracker Barrel and Pigley Wiggly and seeing drive through dackery shops in Louisiana and seeing the emptiness of West Texas and seeing the desert and seeing the swamps of like, Oh, I think my family is southern, and now I know what that is.

I know enough to be curious, but I don't know enough to understand anything.

It's now the spring of EA's senior year in high school, and her mother is dying.

My mom did not trust doctors because she thought they were all She thought my dad was sending people to kill her or to hasten her death.

Sometimes it was that remarkable, and sometimes she just didn't trust doctors, and she thought that they were crooks who would say something and take your money, or that they would be so blindsided by the name of her ex husband that they would somehow not have their priorities in line.

So she put off going to the doctors for many, many years, and finally she was in such crippling pain because her arm hurt, and so she finally went to the doctor and discovered that, in fact, she had stage three, stage four lung cancer that had completely taken over one of her lungs and had spread to her bones.

And actually the reason why her arm hurt is because she had bone cancer and it had spread to her rib cage and headed into her endercin system and her brain stem.

So she was diagnosed right around Christmas of my senior year of high school, which is right before two thousand, nineteen ninety nine, two thousand and she dies my spring break of my freshman year of college, which is two thousand and two, so it was brief.

She lasted about a little over a year.

After EA's mother's death, EA and Colin returned to Sacramento and put all her mother's stuff into storage.

And she has a lot, a lot of stuff.

It's nineteen ninety nine and some people are experiencing panic about Y two K.

EA's mom is one of them.

EA calls her a Y two K aficionado.

She has enough canned goods to survive the apocalypse.

It's all too much to deal with, so the siblings put everything into storage, figuring they'll deal with it sometime soon.

I think it was Haley Ephron, one of Nora Ephron's talented sisters, and I remember on NPR she was asked, why write about your childhood when you're much more famous sibling already did just a toozy of a question and lot more empathy for that question now, And the answer was genius, which was that no sibling grows up in the same house.

Exactly Colin's experience of that is he was already a working actor.

He was already in the grand tradition of Hanks's.

He had not finished college because he got cast in something, and so he was already on his way.

And so he had really wrangled the bureaucracy of my mom's death, putting the house on the market, dealing with the last will and testament, paying for all the little things that a crewe and by the time all of that was handled, he had nothing in the tank, and I had nothing to offer.

So it became let's just get all of this stuff into storage and we can deal with it quote unquote in a couple months, and that becomes a full decade.

My mom gets put on the back shelf as it pertains to her stuff and also the woman herself.

It's like, well, we'll deal with that when we have the bandwidth, and we didn't have the bandwidth.

Arguably I still don't, but we cracked open the locks about ten years on.

And during those years, you're working as a journalist for Vanity Fair.

You were trying to get on with your life, but there was also this detritus of a life that's like sitting there.

It's like it's got a heartbeat, it's ticking.

Yeah, it's waiting.

Yeah.

I had graduated college, which was absolutely devastating, and hit the ground running because I wanted to be a writer and I wanted to work at magazines and that meant living on as I call it, work Booze Island.

So I had a series of really high stress and demanding jobs that kept me in the Manhattan run around.

And I was also very clearly not just trying to get my career started, but I was also trying to see how long I could go without dealing with it all on any level.

No makes so much sense.

So then it's ten years later and was there a reason or a moment?

So by the time Colin and I go back to Sacramento to finally deal with everything, Colin is in the middle of working on his first documentary, the most excellent All Things Must Pass, The Rise and Fall of Tower Records, which is a Sacramento story, and so Colin and his producing partner, one of the boys from East Sacramento, that posse we were all going to be back, and it was the sense of, Okay, we're all going to be in Sacramento, so maybe this is the time to do this.

At that point, I had left New York, I was living in Los Angeles and was pretty lost in that late twenties to mid thirties.

Oh God, I have a diminishing runway to get my act together and figure out if I'm going to have a good life post college.

You have a horrific realization of it might not be just a bad summer.

It could be like a bad life.

I don't want to be my mom.

I don't want to have this failure to launch.

I want to succeed in being a whole person.

So what did that mean?

That meant starting some pretty serious therapy and saying, whatever is sitting there in storage, I think I'm ready to start going through it.

And up goes that clanging metal door, and what we see is essentially a life frozen in time, because when we threw everything in there, it was really like we didn't edit anything or go through anything.

One of the things I found was this bag of maggots because we had thrown all of these boxes not knowing what they were.

And part of it was my mom's y two K like food hoard that next to six boxes of horseshow ribbons and romance novels.

Who's a real grab bag of a confusing life.

And in that storage also there's a white binder of poetry that your mother had written, and a dozen reporters notebooks.

But that's like a bridge too far.

You don't look at those for a few years.

Yeah.

So I find essentially these huge sort of storage tupperware boxes of all of her papers, and there were a handful of things that I'd been looking for, and then there were a couple of things that I just grabbed with that sort of journalistic idea, that hunch of maybe there's something in there.

My journalistic predilection is I will go through your trash and piece together shredded facts if it's going to help me put the story together.

So when I saw that there was some version of a paper trail, I was like, I don't even know what would be in there.

And there were these notebooks of cars that she thought were following her, or numbers that she was convinced were the CIAH tracking her phone calls as opposed to like people trying to sell you a set of encyclopedias or something.

And this binder of her poetry, which I knew that she wrote, but I had never read.

And at this point I had become an aunt, so I had an eye on trying to find something of my mother to share with my three nieces.

That was an instinct as well.

And what I end up with ultimately is this white binder of my mom's poetry and this red journal of hers, which is the thing that kicks it all off.

So tell me a little bit about what you started to read.

You're like piecing together a puzzle, but it's not just a puzzle.

It's like aasmagorical puzzle, Like it's putting together a puzzle when you don't actually know whether the pieces you hold in your hands are actually pieces.

Yeah, or even from the same puzzle.

Yeah.

So I'm reading this sort of red journal and it was like the sort of stream of consciousness images very often written as prayers.

Dear Jesus, thank you for showing us where to find the dead Sea scrolls, Oh, my beautiful Lord and Savior, thank you for getting all of the drug dealers out of Sacramento.

And then, just in the middle of it, almost as an aside, I read, thank you for protecting me and keeping me from going insane when I remembered my father raping, murdering, and cannibalizing a little girl.

And when I read it, it is the best example I have personally in my life and also in my body of being deeply shocked and not at all surprised.

This is the first thing I've heard about my grandfather from my mother.

I barely know his real name, which is John Raymond Dillingham.

I don't know where he was born.

Well.

I know when he died, in part because my father told me that.

I had asked my dad, was I save the marriage, baby, and he said no, but you were a someone died, and I feel the urge to create life baby.

And that's because my grandfather died in nineteen eighty one, and it's his death that made my mom want to have another child in a marriage that was already failed.

So all I know about this man is that my mom won't speak about that.

No one will speak about him.

I've met three of my uncles in passing.

I've asked my grandmother about him, and she's explicitly said, we don't talk about that.

And now here's my mom just offhandedly describing what I can only say is like a podcast worthy cry of rape, murder, dismemberment, and cannibalization.

Just for clarity's sake, was this This is the grandfather who is buried at Arlington Arlington.

Yeah, and when you peeled off from the class trip to visit his grave and you told your mother about that, and so that must have also been this kind of callback to that moment.

Yeah, I remember reading it.

Suddenly, of the very few pieces of information, I have this memory of saying, hey, I went to go see Grandpa John's gravestone.

And the response is, oh, that's so incredible, or isn't it remarkable that he's buried at Arlington, or let me show you some pictures of him.

It's to look at me blankly and then shut herself in a room in silence and refuse to come out for a week.

And it's my grandmother refusing to even say his name.

So suddenly it's okay, I have person experience of how bad my mom is at keeping reality straight of this is what we did yesterday, This is what this person said to me.

This is how my marriage ended.

This is why my ex husband is famous.

This is why my son lives with another family.

Those are all things that my mom could not hold the truth of And yet here's this accusation or this bit of information that suddenly makes all these very disparate and strange memories of mine kind of make sense.

And it becomes what I know about mom is there's always a grain of truth in her version of events.

It just ends up deformed and hard to follow.

How much of any of this is true?

Is it possible that the whole thing is true?

And what does that mean for the way my mother was raised and the lessons that she taught me about God, everything, men and women, marriage, parents and children, what a family is, what should be discussed and what shouldn't be discussed?

How do we feel about the concept of justice or sex?

The chasm of how in the dark I was about who my mother was and what card she was playing with, and what is the hand that she in turn dealt me?

It all opened up in front of me in a very obvious way.

It was as the sort of adventure and question and deep emotional process appeared to me with as much nuance as the yellow brick road in front of Dorothy.

It became very clear to me that I had an opportunity to do all of that work around my mother and our relationship and her death and my concept of who she is and who I am.

That was all suddenly the work presented itself.

We'll be right back.

Two decades after her mother's death, Ea feels not only an opportunity but also a profound urgency to understand the woman who shaped her and in turn, the roots of her own identity.

She has an idea a road trip.

Driving a trusty old Mini van named Minnie, her father's indestructible, well worn vehicle, Ea sets out to retrace the journey her mother once took her on.

What starts as a drive down to ten quickly becomes something far more layered, a search for meaning, memory, and the elusive pieces of her past.

This is the story she's meant to investigate, to write.

So by the time I discover the journals, I'm in a creative and professional rut, which is when I leave New York.

I have a book deal, I've worked for Vanity Fair, I've worked for the Huffington Post.

I am officially on my way, and then, as so often happens, getting everything that you want makes everything completely blow up in your face, and the anxiety and the stress around this book deal and how I have actually no idea how to write a book, because at that point I've been living on a four hour news cycle for three years and had the beginnings of an ulcer before the age of twenty five.

I had no idea how to write a novel.

And yet here I am with an opportunity to not just write one, but to write two with an option for a third, and I don't have any time to do it, and I choke so hard and so completely that it quickly becomes a writer's block that is a decade in the making.

And because I can't write, I'm teaching at preschools, I'm teaching at bookstores.

I'm trying to claw my way out of this block that I'm so deeply ashamed of that everyone ten years on is saying things like, so, how's the book, And I'm like, almost done, and of course is not anywhere.

I can't even write a paragraph, let alone finish to possibly three books in six months.

And that sort of struggle is what happens during that ten years where everything is sitting in storage.

When Colin and I start going through everything, is when I have basically I've had six months of creative recovery.

At this point, I'm living in La so I'm back around show business, and I start writing jokes for other people's scripts, which doesn't make me anxious because it's not my script and I won't have to tell the joke.

So I start writing for other stand ups, and I start ghostwriting speeches for people who I used to edit at the Huffington Post, and I'm kind of clogging my way back into being able to write and being how I pay the bills, and I start being able to live this Los Angeles existence, which is for show business civilians.

There are many very creative and successful writers in Los Angeles, and you've never seen anything they've made, because you can write television shows and movies and sell them for a lot of money and they will never get made.

And I found myself in that writer experience where I'm successful but nothing's actually getting made, and I start thirsting for something.

And so I had started wildly unsuccessfully pitching this story that was the ten.

But it had nothing to do with myself.

It was just a political story because I wanted a big swing about America and who we are and these issues that were coming to the forefront and I knew that I knew the Ten and I could report on it because I had been there.

If I needed to hit the road, I would know where to go.

I tried for five years to sell that magazine story, and everyone was just sort of like, no one knows you as a political reporter, No one trusts your take on what any of this means, and why should they.

What we're interested in is you.

So if you have a story you want to pitch us that's about you and your story, then come back.

So when I read the journal, I had already had this idea about doing a trip on the Ten.

I had already had the idea about America and the South and the Southwest that I want to talk about.

I had already been told the only way anyone's going to want to hear from you is if it's something about you and extension your family.

And in that cutthroat, deeply ambitious journalist part of my brain looked at their a journal and immediately knew that's the ticket.

This is the personal aspect of the story that's been missing.

And I think it was also a very helpful psychological relief, like a tool to inject emotional distance.

I'm not dealing with this.

I'm reporting on this, which is very different and certainly gave me a permission structure for getting into that work.

It's so interesting because my sort of hot take on that is that when you were out there pitching the story of the ten, the journalistic story, this was already somewhere hovering, and then like a thunderclap when you read the Red Notebook, it came together, but you had already been paving the way for it, without knowing that you were paving the way for it.

Yeah.

I don't have kids, so I have no experience of there's a soul waiting to enter the family, or there's an apple and there's a gleam in my eye that will one day be my progeny.

I don't have any personal experience of that.

What I do have experience with is that sort of the bizarre mysticism of creativity and how the work comes to us when we need it.

Maybe the deepest cynics become the most fervent mystics.

And I can say that my experience of creative block and creative recovery from block made me a deep believer in when the work presents itself, say yes, and the work entered the chat with tap dance shoes on and a cone brawl on fire.

It was just like this is happening.

Buckle up, and so Ea tries to follow the map of notes as burning questions and no way of knowing whether or where she might find answers.

She and Minnie make stops in Phoenix, Tucson, White Sands National Park in New Mexico.

They go to Marfa, Texas, New Orleans, until they finally arrive in her mother's hometown of Palatka, Florida, And though she doesn't find exactly what she was looking for, she finds something infinitely more meaningful, a way of understanding her mother and her history and therefore herself.

So my mother's family is one girl, three boys.

My family is one girl, three boys.

My father's family one girl, three boys.

The biggest significant difference between my life when I wrote the book and my life now is I have a partner and their family one girl, three boys.

Have no idea the significance or meaning of that, And I think meaning is usually what we decide to place on things.

I have no idea what the meaning of one girl, three boys is for me, but it's a pattern of significant presence in my life.

Yeah, it calls to mind this quote from Alice Miller that you highlight fairly deep in the narrative near the end of your story.

Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness, the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood.

And so you by making this trip and by coming to understand holding the cognitive dissonance of all these things, being unable to prove that your mother was assaulted by her father, but knowing that violence was definitely a part of her childhood, quite possibly sexual violence, and knowing that your grandfather was a successful army man and also was a drunkard, a charmer, and a dark presence who was expelled from his own family.

Like, both of these truths can be held in the same palm.

And this journey, to me feels like your journey to be able to do that in a way that you can make peace with.

Yeah, I mean, I think the book.

I really love that Alice Miller quote because I find it fascinating that people think that the therapeutic process is an inherently egotistical process, the concept of like, oh, you're just going to sit there and talk about yourself.

Don't you ever get tired of talking about yourself?

And I actually find that therapy is ego destructive because your problems are so common, so basic, that they are in a book called the DSM, and that in fact, the process of sitting and sharing with someone who you trust and who is capable of meeting you in that space, you tell them a series of stores reason they help you connect the dots so that the dot of what happened last week at brunch with your girlfriends is connected to the dot of what happened between you and your mother when you were six years old, and how you're just recreating the moment over and over in an unconscious attempt to resolve the dynamic.

I find that this idea that the therapeutics process and the creative process about being ego driven comes from a place where it's like, you must acknowledge the unconscious and the subconscious and the fact that we do things for reasons that we are not aware of ourselves.

I think the therapeutic process is a permission structure for acknowledging that we are not always aware of why we do things and the repercussions not only on ourselves but of the people that we love.

And my mother made many references to being very wary of psychiatry and psychologists, and the language that she uses is always like entrapment.

But the idea that there is grace to be found in the realization that we are not always in control of why we do things, which meant that holds space or creates even more space for the understanding that my mother loved me to the best of her abilities, and that everything that she did to me in that power dynamic of mother and child, she was not aware of why she was doing them.

She was not making the connections, she had no one to share the data points with, She could not see the patterns, and that allows me to understand her and to hold primarily the memories of the good days and not so much the bad days.

And that is as I think anybody who is buried someone with whom they have a complicated relationship with, it's easier on the other side of loss to prioritize the good day, I would say.

Joan Didion says that basically her entire life is determined by the fact that she's from Sacramento, in the Sacramento Valley.

It determined everything about her and everything she ever was that she'll ever do.

And Georgia O'Keefe basically says, it could not matter less who I am or where I'm from.

It's what I do that determines the course of my life.

And I think these are really about meaning that Didion, in her drive for narrative is a form of control.

What she's really trying to figure out is not what happened, but what does it mean?

And Georgia O'Keefe is someone who says, you can tell me that for you, my paintings of flowers mean vaginas, but I do not co sign that you get to tell me what my paintings mean.

And I think that when you're talking about family secrets journalistically, emotionally, poetically, the follow up is not what is the secret?

But what does the secret mean?

What does it mean for your family?

What does it mean for your relationships, what does it mean for your self?

Concept And what I realized is that not having a clean ending did not signify a lack of meaning.

What it meant was that I had much more flexibility to determine the meaning of what I discovered about my mother.

That it was not going to be something external.

I wasn't going to find the meaning outside.

The meaning was always going to come from inside, inside the house, inside the journal, inside the dynamic, inside the process.

Here's Ea reading one last passage from her memoir, The ten.

I think there must be something between truth and narrative.

As much as narrative can give us meaning, it can just as easily deceive.

I took to the road in an attempt to find out what really happened, to try to divide truth and narrative.

Back home in my own big bed with music on my own radio, I look over the white binder one last time before setting it on the shelf next to Yates and Whitman and Plath.

Reading my mother's words was a conversation with her on her own terms, and she told me that she lived honestly in accordance with the story she needed to survive.

Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.

Molly's Acur is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.

If you have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story appear on an upcoming episode.

Our number is one eight eight eight Secret ero.

That's the number ero.

You can also find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder.

And if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.