Hey, Family Secrets Family. It's been a minute. The last episode of the ninth season dropped

way back on January 11th, with Alice Carriere's extraordinary story of growing up with her

mercurial mother, the famous painter Jennifer Bartlett. Last season was my favorite season yet.

I keep saying that each season because it's true.

The stories keep coming, each one as individual as a snowflake.

When it comes to family secrets, every secret is unique and powerful in its own way,

and reckoning with those secrets is nothing

short of liberating.

I've seen it again and again in my guest's lives, as well as in my own.

Currently, we're hard at work on the 10th season of this podcast, which will drop in early June.

We have an array of fantastic guests lined up, and I've been inspired and provoked by

the conversations I've had thus far.

Some of you may have noticed that we haven't been dropping in our usual bonus content,

like conversations with great minds about prior episodes of the pod.

And there's a reason for that.

One of my favorite writers, Joan Didion, once wrote that life changes fast.

Life changes in an instant, the ordinary instant.

In my life, that fast change came on an ordinary day in the form of a

frightening diagnosis. On January 15th, just a few days after the last season of Family Secrets ended,

I learned that I had a rare cancer in the back of my eye. It's hard for me to even say these words.

Only six in a million people are diagnosed with this particular form of cancer.

As the days turned into a blur of doctors, hospitals, new words, new terms, surgery, and treatment,

...