Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio.

I lived shadowed by an uncertainty about my parents' marriage

in a sense of some fundamental instability lurking just beneath the surface.

Lin and Dick were held up as a model couple by many of their friends

and were profiled as such in several newspaper pieces.

Celebrated especially for the ways my father made my mother's business success possible.

It complemented each other well.

My father, the extravagant romantic, my mother, the cool realist.

As my father would give disk physicians on a new play,

a loop excitedly with his buddies as they watched a sports game,

my mother would break in to someone everyone firmly to the dinner table.

If my father looked surreaded in meandering after dinner conversations

that continued even after coffee and dessert,

it was my mother who reminded everyone how late it was

and briskly ushered guests out the door.

That's Priscilla Gilman, writer, former professor of English,

an author of the recent memoir The Critics Daughter.

Priscilla's story glitters on the surface,

a rarefied New York City childhood, highly successful parents

who were at the epicenter of literary life,

a world of intellectual stimulation and famous friends.

But beneath that shiny exterior was a darker, harder truth.

...