This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

Hi, Family Secrets Family. The season is not remotely over, but this week, this Christmas

day, I'm going to do something a little different, a gift for you, and perhaps a gift for myself

as well. Over six years and now 13 seasons of hosting this podcast, I've heard hundreds of stories

of family secrets, and the way what we don't know, what has been hidden from us, acts upon

us nonetheless.

Long before I discovered the secret that had shaped me, there were other secrets.

As a child, I simply felt them, hungry ghosts in the room. When I grew up and became a writer, I began to

write about these secrets, digging for them in my fiction and my nonfiction, trying to get to

the essential why. Why had I been born into such a legacy of secrecy?

In 1998, I wrote a personal history piece for the New Yorker magazine.

I was terrified.

It was a huge opportunity for a young writer,

but that wasn't the only reason it scared me.

It scared me because I was going to have to

dig without knowing what I would come up with, how complex and painful I might find it.

I'm going to tell you that story, which is titled The Secret Wife. I may interrupt myself,

as I'm telling it, annotate it in a way, because when I wrote this story about my father and what I thought was his most profound secret, of course I did not yet know his biggest secret of all, which is that I was not his biological daughter.

So let's go on this adventure, together. Here's the secret wife.

In 1953, nine years before I was born, my father fell in love with a young woman named

Dorothy Gribbitts. She was a beautiful Orthodox Jewish girl who was 27, startlingly old to still be single in the moneyed religious urban world of my father and his family.

My father was fresh out of a miserable marriage, stinging from a custody battle for his six-year-old daughter, Susie.

...