This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Family Secrets is a production of IHeart Radio.

Once upon a time, I disappeared.

I was one person one day and the next someone else,

both the same woman I'd always been and also utterly, eerily unfamiliar.

There was a story in this, I felt,

one built around a universal question. How do you know who you are? Answers would be grounded in the body and bound to memory. But for many years, I could not write it. I couldn't figure out where to begin, and I had no ending.

Moreover, trauma had scrambled my understanding,

the need to make meaning stymied by an inability to see.

I was unable to sink beneath the surface of events,

down to the truth of who had done what and why.

That's Karen Palmer, author of several novels and the memoir She's Under Here.

Karen's is a harrowing story of a vulnerable young woman who finds herself in the wrong place,

at the wrong time, in the wrong circumstances,

without the tools or experience to recognize the danger she's in until finally she does.

It's also a story of extraordinary resilience and the power of love to transcend seemingly

impossible odds.

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.

I am an adopted-only child, and my parents were transplanted New Yorkers. They were both children of Irish immigrants who moved to New York City, probably around the turn of the century. And both my parents grew up during the Depression, and my father went off to World War II, and my

mother, who was, I guess, about five years younger than him, at the time he left the neighborhood

in New York, she was still in high school, and he kind of knew her from seeing her around,

...