This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Family Secrets is a production of IHeart Radio.

I know that the more a person goes over a memory, the more that memory changes.

Some things assume new importance.

Your mind erases certain parts, adds new detail.

You don't know you're doing this.

You think you remember everything accurately. You swear by it.. You don't know you're doing this. You think you remember

everything accurately. You swear by it. But you don't remember accurately. Nobody does.

Memories are fragile, especially when they are of forbidden things. My family didn't talk much about

Bobby after he died, and I came to understand that it was somehow inappropriate, that we'd all

be better off if we'd just change the subject.

But I thought about him a lot, and I thought about the silence.

I wondered, isn't it better to talk than to hide,

to open doors rather than to close them?

What happens to stories if we don't tell them?

That's Laurie Herzl, journalist, book critic, and author most recently of the memoir, Ghosts of Fourth Street, My Family, A Death, and the Hills of Duluth.

Lurie's is a story about being born smack in the middle of a big family that is anything but happy,

a family haunted by its own history.

It's also a story of being the one who quietly witnesses, who absorbs, who snoops,

who has an irrepressible need to know, to understand, to make sense of all that she sees.

I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is Family Secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,

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