Hey, it's Empair's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Parents keep secrets. For better or worse,

I imagine all of our parents have at least a little thing about their lives that they're keeping to themselves.

Carrie Washington's memoir, Thicker Than Water, is all about a very big secret that her parents kept from her.

And what's interesting about the way she lays out the story to NPR's Juana Summers

is that Washington's parents didn't reveal their secret because they had all come to some,

you know, ineffable right and good place in their relationship.

No, no, no, instead, her parents got boxed into it and had to come clean.

But it sounds like that was the impetused into it and had to come clean.

But it sounds like that was the impetus for the three of them to achieve, that place of better understanding.

This message comes from Wise, the app for using money around the globe.

When you manage your money with Wise, you'll always get the mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees.

Join millions of customers and visit Wise.com. T's and C's Apply.

Carrie Washington is no stranger to playing characters holding on to massive secrets.

It was an occupational hazard for political fixer Olivia Pope on the hit series scandal. If you don't get subpoenaed, this never happened. And in Little Fires Everywhere, Washington stars as

Mia, a surrogate who runs away to raise the baby she carried for another family as her own.

Only one other person knows her secret by the time Mia's daughter is a teenager.

Did I do the right thing?

Keeping the truth from her.

Only you know that.

As Mia listens to her friend, her face buckles in pain, tears streaming down her face.

In real life, Carrie Washington says that take of the scene mirrored the pain of a real life secret.

It's one of many private, personal revelations that Washington lays bare in her new memoir,

...