Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.

I'm Danny Shapiro and this is a bonus episode of family Secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.

Today, my guest is Gretchen Ruben, best selling author, creator of the podcast Happier and Brilliant Student of Human Nature.

Let's dive right in.

So, Gretchen, even though this is a bonus episode, I'm still going to begin with the question that I love to begin my episodes of Family Secrets with, which is tell me about the landscape of your childhood.

Because you've spent so much of your life making human nature and happiness in particular your central subject, I would say, and I'm curious about your childhood and whether the seeds for that were in there.

Well, probably the seeds of that were in that.

I was a huge reader as a child, and like my happiest memories were going to our local library and checking out the maximum number of books, and on the rare occasions when we were going on our day long car trip to visit our grandparents, we actually got to buy books for the trip, and that was always a highlight.

But the landscape of my child is I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, with you know, a mom and a dad and a little sister and a dog, and visiting my grandparents in North Nebraska every summer.

So I had a very kind of comically like standardized child that of course you didn't feel like that to me at all.

Felt extremely rich and strange and particular.

But from the outside, that's what it looked like, and.

I would think, looking back, that's what that's what it looks like too, right, mm hmmm.

Well, one of the things that's interesting looking back is my sister, who's the television writer.

Now, like we both are professional writers, and growing up, we had no idea that that was our fate.

We weren't talking about it or seemingly working toward it like our whole family read a lot.

But looking back on it, there was really no sign of that, which is kind of odd to us, all of us now thinking back, So what do.

You think sort of led you in the direction of exploring particularly happiness, because I'm thinking that, you know, it's so interesting.

I mean, you've got this fantastic podcast Happier that you do with your sister Elizabeth, and you know, you have your massively best selling Happiness Project, and you have your wonderful life in the Five Senses, which I would argue is also about happiness in a way.

What do you think either pushed you or led you in the direction of wanting to explore what makes us happy?

Well, as you said at the beginning, my true subject is human nature.

Yeah, I'm just interested in who are we?

How do we understand ourselves, which, as you know, is extremely difficult to do, how do we change if we want to change?

And happiness is one aspect of that.

It's probably the most hopeful and exciting aspect of that question.

But I'm really interested in all of it.

Before I wrote The Happiest Project, like, I wrote a big biography of Winston Churchill, and that's really all about just using one person to explore human nature.

He has such a tremendous life, it's easier to see him.

He's so magnified, so he makes a good study.

My first book was called Power, Money, Fame, Sex, A User's Guy.

That was a very that was assive, but also a study of human nathers.

Because happiness is relationships, it's the body, it's purpose it's work, it's you know, it's every it's so many things come into it.

And it's also I think a kind of mythical holy grail in terms of, you know, what is happiness even what does it mean?

You know, there's so many there's so many colors to it.

You know, there's contentment, there's coziness, there's things that could kind of masquerade it as happiness but really are more like, you know, kind of mania, you know, And there's kind of the way in which and I think in terms of the Family Secrets podcast, I think a lot of my guests and a lot of the people who really relate to some of the stories that we tell feel like they need to kind of put a good face on things as opposed to what the true nature of happiness or joy is, which is kind of a very internal and private experience.

I started my career in law, where you know, you found an entire semester arguing about the definition of contract, and happiness is even more elusive to define, has something like fifteen or seventeen academic definitions, and you can get very caught up and is what I'm feeling tentman or joy or peace?

But I think there's a kind of happiness that comes from clarity and from like unders like having the pieces fall into place, and when, as someone who listens to here, I don't miss an episode of your podcast, For many people, there is that moment, and you certainly write about this in Inheritance, where the pieces fit together and you are like, Okay, now I have a much clearer view of things that have fogged my vision and confused me.

And and so sometimes even if it's a very what you might say, unhappy secret, there is a kind of serenity that comes from understanding and so, and that's why I think it's a mistake to get really caught up and like what is happiness exactly, because well, one of my secrets of adulthood is happiness doesn't always make us feel happy.

And so something can make you happier even though it doesn't really make you feel happy.

And I think a lot of times in family secrets, it's sort of in that zone of human experience.

Yeah, absolutely, And I through your book, which is told in for the most part in aphorisms, and was really looking in particular for the aphorisms that I feel most connect to the sort of family secret stories that we tell.

I take down some too, So it'll be interesting if we picked out the same time.

Oh will it be well?

So before we even do that, I mean, I want to say first of all that your book Secrets of Adulthood, and the subtitle is simple Truths for our Complex lives.

And I love both that title and the subtitle because the idea of I mean aphorisms as you define them.

A couple of different times in the book, brief and sharp aphorisms distill big ideas into few words.

By saying little, they managed to suggest more.

The clarity of their language promotes the clarity of our sinking.

And then a little bit later you write, the discipline of the aphorism forces precision of sinking.

So I mean, could you just like talk a little bit.

You've spent you know, most of your life, like from the time that you were a kid, I think, writing down, you know, aphorisms of others and writing down aphorisms of your own, and it seems like a great source of like mental play and pleasure for you.

Absolutely.

Now I have a giant trove of my favorite of other people's aphorisms and they and then I started writing my own and it is It is an interesting thing because it's like that old joke, you know, I'm sorry I wrote I wrote yourself a long letter.

I didn't have time to write a short one that trying to really crystallize a thought into just a few words, Like you really have to understand what you're thinking and let you even agree with your own thoughts.

So that's why I think it's really a very creative and intellectually gratifying thing to do as a writer or as a thinker.

I think a lot of a lot of people have these aphorisms that they've created through their own time and experience and yeah, and studying other people's they do.

They run through my mind more because since they're they're short, they sort of sticking your mind more.

Like one of my favorite aforicts is Mariva and Idna Eeschenbach and whom everyone has forgotten, but she's my favorite efforist.

And like she has one that I think of often.

You can fall so fast you think you're flying.

Yeah, like once you internalize that you can't untie it, you forget it.

Right, and it expresses something that you might have.

My favorite, my favorite kind of aphorism is the one where you read it and you think I've thought that myself.

I never quite put it into words, but I've had that thought myself.

And so I was, you know, trying to write those myself, as you know, just kind of as well as gathering them from other people, because I do feel like there's something you can say in short that's better done than evil when you do it long.

Yeah, And it was so interesting to me that in some of the you know, of what you describe as being on your on your crowded bookshelves, you know, with these masterpieces of philosophy and literature.

I've been actually listening every day for the last few months to Latsa's dow Da ching just one reading a day, and it's just kind of amazing how clarifying and enlivening that isn't how much it sort of stays with you because of its simplicity.

Well, and that's interesting that you do like just one a day, because there is something when when you just have one, you really sit with it and you really, you really sink into it.

I'm doing this thing called a slow read a Worn Piece, where Simon Hazel does a thing on Substack where you read one chapter of Worn Piece a day for a year.

It has like three hundred and fifty five chapters, so it works out very well.

And when you read just a short thing, it does land differently.

It's like binge watching Worse versus watching one episode.

When you read just one and really think about it, it's a very different kind of experience.

So that it's funny because when I was writing this book of afrosm suer like, oh this is fun It's like people will just whip through it.

It's bite sized, it's easy, and like, no, it's actually very dense because if you is reading, if you read more than a few you start feeling like, whoa, that's a lot on my mind.

So I love the idea of doing just a little bit of each day with like a classic like that.

Yeah, totally.

I mean, this is your book is a book that I can imagine living on a bedside table because it really feels like you want to take it in these bite sized pieces and just even just drift off to sleep or wake up in the morning with you know, just a lot of this wisdom.

The one I quote most often is, or my family quotes the most often is something that can be done at any time has often done at no time, because that's just just like we've all done, and we've all experienced it, you know, and you're like, what's you have a phrase for it?

You're like, Okay, I'm saying that all the time.

Yeah, yeah, totally mourning myself.

Yeah, we'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.

The first of the aphorisms in your book that I jotted down as being relevant to family secrets is we should pay special attention to anything that we lie about or try to hunt.

Yeah right, yeah, yeah, I mean to me, every episode, every every conversation, whether on the podcast or not on the podcast, with people who have either been holding their own secret, or have discovered a secret that has been withheld from them, or have a secret that they can't even quite touch because it's a live wire.

Well, this is your opening line about it is the secrets that people.

How does it go?

The people that keep people keep from us, that people that.

Secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves, which always to me, that's the secrets we keep from ourselves are to me the most interesting.

That's what we lie about.

That's right, even if we're not conscious that we're lying.

I mean, in a way, this aphorism is so fantastic because just the language, we should pay special attention to anything that we lie about or try to hide, because even if we don't know that that's exactly what we're doing, we do know it's the it's the unthought known, we kind of know it in our bones.

Well, it's also the snoop.

Like you also, you say often that this is a theme that comes up with your your guess is the snoop.

And so there's a sense of like, I can't ask for this information straight out somehow, it's it's taboo.

I have to sneak around and look for it, you know, because it's there's I have to hide the fact that I want.

To know right right.

And there's a real theme of often people in their childhood's snooping, snooping on their parents, snooping on their on the adults around them.

And and another thing that comes up is that when we're doing something like that, I mean, it's like what you said about your own childhood and the endlessly rich and sort of fascinating it was to you because it was your childhood, we don't know anything other than our own childhoods.

So you know, if like I snooped all the time as a kid, and I just alternately thought either there's something very wrong with me, or maybe everybody does this because I had no I had nothing to go on.

So I'm just the idea of the special attention.

I think that will really stay with me because that that feeling of oh, yeah, I need, I need to pay attention to this, even if I don't know exactly what it is that I'm paying attention to, need to sit with it right exactly.

So the next one I came up with, and then I'm going to ask you about what you came up with and whether there's an overlap.

Build your shrine at the top of a long steep path.

A view is more beautiful when we've earned it.

I feel like them, part of them, the power of efforts are just sort of like the drop my quality.

Like that's what I had to say, Yeah, build your shrine on the on the top of a long steep path.

Yeah, And that is also what I feel like, the earning, the discovery the long steep path.

You know, the idea that so often guests are and again not just guests, but also people I encounter.

They make these discoveries later in life, and you know, after a long steep path and that feeling of oh, the recognition that that is making the pieces fall into place, and there's something really beautiful about that.

And then the word shrine and there's something that is you know, sort of poetic and divine about that.

It's making it holy in some way.

That's one of my favorites.

Well, here's one that I thought of.

Tell me if you think it, you think it resonates with your themes, which is the place that hurts isn't always the place that's injured.

I wrote that down, Gretcha, there you go.

Yeah, that was the last one I wrote down.

That's so powerful.

The place that hurts isn't always the place that's injured.

I mean the level on which that is you know, sometimes physically true, but metaphorically true.

Why do we behave in certain ways based on you know, something that is painful or something that is like doesn't feel right, and we don't know the origin of it, we don't know where it comes from, and yet it has the power to shape our entire lives until we do.

I mean, Carl Jung said, until we make the unconscious conscious, it will direct our lives, and we will call it fate.

One of the things I've write about a lot or talk about a lot, is identify the problem, because a lot of times people have a sense of uneasiness or distress or a feeling like they need to change, but without identifying the problem, a lot of times we change what's easy to change or what's obvious, or we blamed somebody else for something that we're feeling instead of really probing to understand, like what where is this actually coming from?

Which sometimes looks quite different from the pain that we're experiencing.

And and so I think that that often happens where Actually a friend of mine said, she said, you know, I live in New York City.

And the friend of mine was saying, she's going to look for a new apartment, and I said, and as I see her like six months later, and because she really wanted outdoor space, so I saw her six months later and I said, oh, how is the apartment hunting going?

And she said, well, I gave it up.

And I said why, like you were so excited to do it.

She said, well, it's I told by broker I thought I wanted outdoor space, but I realized I really want a husband, and it's like, right, it's a lot.

You know, you'd be like, okay, getting outdoor space.

That's what she thought she wanted.

That wasn't really going to address her problem.

But fortunately for her, she figured that out in time before she made a huge change that wouldn't really have resolved what was bothering her.

I think that's really easy to do, and so you say like, oh, it's the fault of this or that person or this situation, when in fact it might be something quite different that might be more painful to acknowledge.

So here's another one that I picked out.

Sometimes we choose to confess our deepest secret to a stranger rather than a friend.

Mm hmmm.

You know, I was thinking about that because I once I think in the first season, maybe the second season of Family Secrets, I had a guest on who did not want to be identified, and I decided that that was okay, and we had a great conversation and it was a really good episode.

But I got quite a lot of blowback from Family Secrets listeners who were like, wait a minute, you know, we thought this was a podcast about eradicating shame and you know, owning our own stories and you know, becoming sort of comfortable with whatever has made us who we are.

So why would it be why would you have a guest on who didn't want to be identified?

And I've never done it again, and I think there's something in this aphorism that speaks to that.

But on the other hand, is there privacy versus secrecy?

And maybe somebody feels that they can confess to a bunch of strangers, but they don't really want to deal with it.

They want to deserve there.

I mean, I think the reason that it's easier to tell a stranger is that there's no consequences, Like, there's no there's no aftermath, there's no talking about it again, nobody else gets drawn into it because it's just it's just a stranger and there's something kind of beautiful about that.

And in a way, a big public can also do you like that stranger, But maybe you're saying you don't want you don't want to talk to people who are not ready to deal with that exactly.

And there's there are different kinds of consequences.

I mean, there's certainly the consequences and This is something that we run into a lot.

Is not wanting to betray or hurt someone else's confidence or in a family, one person's I'm comfortable with this not being a secret is another person's nightmare.

But there's another and I understand that completely.

There's another kind of I think fear that I think about more in terms of just my guests and the stories, the way that I hope they land, which is the eradication if that's even possible, of shame of the the you know, the feeling that there are so many people who are listening or reading and nodding their heads and saying like, yeah, I get that, or something like that happened in my family, or even if something like that didn't happen in my family.

You know, you're you're okay, this is your you know, this is this is okay.

I'm you know, sorry, sorry that this happened to you, but you're like, you know, there's a there's a kind of humanity, I guess, like the shared human nature of There's very little I think that we could say to each other in terms of our inner worlds that we can sometimes feel are so shameful or mortifying.

Very little that would actually genuinely be shocking.

Right, No, your on secrets seemed so much more in full than the secrets of other people.

No, it's it's very true.

Yeah, you'll read about somebody who's like they they they agonized for decades and then they you know, and then and you're like, oh, that's it, that's not that big a deal, right, Yes, now it's true.

But it is tricky though.

And I was like, let's say there's there's there's something that big and traumatic that happens to person a.

And person a has a brother and sister and parents and children, and they are all talking about their own story about what happened with somebody who was very close to them, and yet there are secrets.

If one person talks about it, then they've all essentially talked about it.

So I see how you should get tricky depending on the situation, right, exactly exactly.

So then that leads me to one more the last one I have, which is decisions will be made by choice or by chance.

Yeah, because not deciding is a decision.

Not choosing is a choice.

And wow, that's yes, that's really powerful.

Uh, yes, and it's and and if you've ever felt that happen.

It feels like going with the flow is it's taking you someplace against your will, just as if you were fighting against somebody else.

Yeah.

No, I have experienced that many times myself.

Yeah, and in ways both small and large.

I remember when my memory Inheritance came out, like literally the day it came out, and I gave my first reading in a bookstore.

There were a lot of people there who just did not seem like my usual readers, And among them were couples sitting there looking really uncomfortable and stricken and holding hands or just sitting kind of stiffly.

And I realized that these were couples who had not divulged to their children that either yeah, you know that they that they used a donor, or possibly even that they were adopted, but you know, given the times, it was more likely that it was, you know, they used a donor, an egg donor or a sperm donor and just made the decision that the child never needed to know.

And and this came up again and again and again for me in you know, q and as and or therapists would say, I have patient insteader going through this, you know, what should I tell them?

And Meanwhile, I'm not I'm not a therapist and I'm not an expert.

I'm someone that's happened to And I tried to come up with something to say that would be true and useful and without a whiff of judgment.

And so what I came up was that I would say, is they're going to find out.

Ah, They're going to find out because there are no more of these kinds of secrets, these these are these are going to go the way of you know that.

It's just it's not going to be possible anymore.

And so, but not deciding is a decision, and not choosing is a choice, and.

Exactly, Yeah, but I love that that was your response because it's right.

It's there's no advice to it, there's no judgment to it.

There's merely minding them of something that is very obvious to anybody who thinks about it, which is they're going to find out.

And then given that, if you know they're going to find out, what are you going to do?

Right?

That affects your choice?

I mean, it may not affect your choice.

You may still decide that you're too afraid or have your own reasons, but you are definitely making a choice to not that your kids are going to find this out at some point and maybe maybe you're not alive anymore.

I mean, one of the things that I've really time to believe and for myself, because I've fallen into this many times, most significantly when I went to law school, because I just drifted into law school.

I was like, it was this the easy default decision.

I just I did it very it was sort of the easiest non choice I could make, even though it was incredibly difficult and hard work to do it.

I did it for all the wrong reasons, and I'm glad that I went.

And that's sometimes confusing because sometimes we don't decide or are We drift into a decision and then we're happy with it.

So it's not like it always ends badly.

But I really now very uncomfortable when I or anybody close to me is making a choice without intention.

Then like you can make the wrong choice, or you can decide to do nothing at all as to the person, like maybe we've just decided, you know, we're not going to raise it.

That's our decision.

But that's very different from just being just not confronting it and not making a decision.

It's it's that kind of non choice choice is very unsatisfying in the end.

Yeah, I agree.

But what you're really talking about, I think is a self awareness, you know, a self knowledge.

It goes back to the paying special attention.

Yeah, that's the great aim, is self knowledge.

And you think, I just hang out with myself all day long.

What can be easier than self knowledge?

And yet I think it's a great challenge of our lives, which is well, which brings me to another secret of adulthood.

See if you think this is relevant to family secrets, which is we know what matters to people when they repeat themselves.

Yeah, I love that one.

Yeah, because it does seem like sometimes the family secrets, people are saying nothing.

But then sometimes it's like certain things just get repeated over and over and in that way you're like, Okay, that's significant in some way or a certain pattern and get repeated over and over.

Yes, and you may not know for a very long time why.

It's almost as if it's in bold when you hear it.

It's just something that you you know, that one makes note of without knowing why.

And I think if we're if if we're fortunate and eventually we are able to come to know what that means.

Then it's like, you know, in reverse, we look back and think, oh, that's what that was.

I get it.

That's such a gratifying feeling when you look back and you sort of see a pattern where.

I mean, I think this is what a lot of people get from therapy, and a lot of times when people get from keeping journals or any kind of like narrative practice, which is as you're telling the story to yourself, you can start to identify patterns that in the ongoingness of life sometimes you don't see because you don't have that kind of reflection.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's also you know, we talk a lot about trauma.

It's one of the hallmarks of like the narrative that someone who's in the midst of being traumatized by something tells is like a loop.

It's like a closed feedback loop.

It's it's the same story over and over again with absolutely no deepening until one is finally begins to be able to take like a half a step back and start to start to see a little more clearly, a little bit more from a distance.

Mm hmm, We'll be right back.

So any others that you remarked.

Well, what of them was?

We care for many people we don't particularly care for, because that seems to be a big scene that family secrets were just people where they really are struggling in a way that where they're like, I do love this person or care for this person, or I do have to ignore and my mother is still my mother or or whatever the case, and I do, but sometimes that it's really hard to care for people we don't care for.

Right, right, and everything that gets placed on top of that, the guilt or you know, feeling like you know, the feeling conflicted or feeling like a bad person.

But that is the reason why it's an aphorism is because it's kind of it's just true, it's kind of unimpeachable.

Well, one of the things I like about aphorisms and sometimes you disagree, and just because they're so short, you can sort of think about it more clearly and come up with your own conclusions.

Like I'm sure there's I have aphorisms in my book that people might disagree with, but I'm like, but now now you know your own mind better, Like, and even in disagreeing, there's clarity because you're thinking about something that you might not have ever sort of stopped to inquire about your own views into which is also helpful.

Yeah, because we don't.

We get caught up in just the the busy slipstream of you know, our daily lives, and we just else.

We don't stop and you know, sort of interrogate what's going on until we're you know, we're all forced to at some point or another.

We're all forced to or until it becomes a kind of habit or a practice.

I mean, your practice of keeping these you know, this massive file of aphorisms is has been something that's been like among the building blocks of your life and your adult life.

Mm hm No, it's something that I've done, I mean back to when I was eight or ten years old.

It's like copying out quotations and keeping them in categories.

And I'm always interested in one.

Like the things that we do as children like play into what we do as adults.

And this is definitely something that I did as a child, was collect collect collect copy.

Yeah.

Yeah, I share that with you and I and it's so interesting because when you're doing it, you're not doing it with any aim in mind.

No, it's just pure admiration.

Yeah.

But you know what's interesting, though, is I will some time write something where I'm like, this seems very significant to me and I don't even know why, But I'll find myself like I'll finish a book and then I'll find myself thinking about a passage or something and I'm like, I don't know why that struck me, but I need to copy it and keep it.

And then years later I'll be like, oh, now I understand what that meant, or like why I cared about that or why that struck me.

And it's such an it's just such a gratifying feeling where you're sort of like, Okay, these ideas have been swirling around in my head for such a long time, and now finally I understand what I was just groping toward.

Yeah, it's like you catch up with yourself.

Well, for years, I was absolutely I love the writing of Andy Warhol.

I don't even really like his visual art, but I love I mean, he's this bonker's thinker.

And so I've read and re read like the books that he wrote in his interviews, and one of those things is he tells a little story about how he was going to Woolworths with a friend and his friend is like, oh, I can't stand that buzz.

And he was like, what buzz?

And then he said, oh, yeah, there was a buzz, but for me, it was completely drowned out by the smell of roasting peanuts.

I was like, what is that?

How can a noise be drowned out by the smell of roasting peanuts?

Like, I just thought it was an example of his kind of just strange mind.

But it's actually true.

I wrote Life in Five Senses, and it's actually true that when one sense is really activated, the others kind of fade back.

And so it literally was true for him.

But but you know, it took Andy Warhol to to describe it as such a like interesting and poetic way, But it was just I was like, you know, years and years and years later, I finally caught up to the day that I copied that out of the philosophy of Andy Warhol.

I love that, and like it also makes these kinds of collecting of these quotes, aphorisms, you know, pieces of wisdom into a kind of journal of its own, because you can you can see what preoccupied you.

Yes, yeah, it's so true.

It's so true.

It's so true.

No, like I went through that because I wrote this unconventional biography of Whist Churchill, and I had this giant collection of quotations that are all about kind of the nature of biography, and and then I just sort of moved on, and so I wasn't preoccupied by the nature of biography anymore.

And then I was in this period where I was absolutely preoccupied with color.

I mean, I can't even describe to you how I how much I spent thinking and talking and reading about color, and has this huge file of color quotations which I now still sometimes add to from time to time or look at that.

It's not the way that it was for a while, because then I just moved on.

But yes, you're right, it is.

It's a kind of intellectible journal.

Absolutely, it's so true.

So would you read a few of the passages.

I've earmarked a couple first one page thirty nine.

It's in the self realization.

Oh, I love the story.

We're often better off admitting uncomfortable facts about ourselves rather than trying to disguise them.

Nebraska saw great success with its tourist slogan.

Honestly, it's not for everyone.

Marmite, the Yeast based savory spread declared their love it or you Hate It?

I mean I just love that well.

And there's been there's been a kind of an update to that, which is the city of Oslo did a huge campaign called is it even a City?

Where it's all about like we're this kind of disgruntled inhabitant of Oslo is like is this even a city?

And everything that he's describing that he doesn't like about it.

Of course you're like, oh my gosh, I must immediately go to Oslo.

But right, it's uh, honestly, it's not for everyone.

It's it's the truth.

And there's something there's something that's so disarming about that.

Yes, and you trust the person who's saying that well.

And as a writer, one of the things kind of relatedly that I remind myself is a strong voice repels as well as attracts, And just like Nebraska, honestly, I'm not for everyone, you know, And and that's okay.

You don't.

You don't.

You don't have to be you have to Just the more you face that and can laugh at it, the less the less upsetting the criticism of is.

Okay, I have a couple more, and that's on the next page.

Are you painting your own fakes?

Oh?

Can I just say that one of the things that's interesting after your book comes out is what resonates with people, because you never really know what is going to strike people's attention.

But this is one that so many people have mentioned to me.

So I'm glad you're I'm glad you're you're appointed to it.

So the aphorism is the question are you painting your own fakes?

And the illustration is There's a story about an art dealer who bought a canvas signed Picasso.

To verify its authenticity, he visited Picasso at the artist can studio.

After a glance at the painting, Picassa declared it's a fake.

Just a few months later, the dealer returned with another of Pakasso.

He returned to can showed it to Picasso, and Picassa so dismissed it as a fake.

But Charmetstra said the dealer, it so happens that I saw you with my own eyes working on this very picture several years ago.

Pakassa replied, I often paint fakes.

Sometimes we paint our own fakes, and we should try to recognize it when we do.

So.

That's very relevant for Family Secrets because it is this idea of like, is there a fake?

Are you painting a fake?

Yes?

And do you know it?

Do you know it?

And do you know it?

Yeah?

I mean that goes back to, you know, the part of our conversation about even just kind of putting on a happy face right exactly, or your basic garden variety cocktail party chit chat of like how are you doing good good?

Yes?

Here's Gretchen reading one more passage from Secrets of Adulthood.

When uncertain about how to proceed, make the choice that allows you to choose the bigger life, step into the future, live in an atmosphere of growth, deepen or broaden your relationships, or put your values into the world.

Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.

Molly Zacour 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 could appear on an upcoming episode.

Our number is one eight eight eight Secret zero.

That's the number zero.

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.