This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Family Secrets is a production of IHeart Radio.

This episode contains discussion of suicide.

Listener discretion is advised.

It is a vertigorous feeling, trying to reconstruct the past,

realizing how much my memories have been revised to fit my later

understandings of and rationalizations for what happened.

If something doesn't fit the story, it just gets left out.

Until it sneaks back one day, suddenly appears amid the other memories, and the simple narrative line is wrecked.

The neat explanation no longer works.

If there is a truth at all in this world of overlapping subject activities,

it sometimes seems too complicated to hold in my head.

I wish so much sometimes he could come back and tell me everything, fill in all the blank,

exactly what happened, and when, and why.

I think maybe we could be straight with each other now.

I know he would want me to get this right.

That's Marian Winnick, journalist, author, book critic, and frequent commentator on NPR's

All Things Considered. Her memoir, First Comes Love, was first published 30 years ago, and is

just out in a new anniversary edition. Marians is a story of love, loss, and the secrets our hearts

silently instruct us to bury.

And the way those secrets tend to nonetheless reveal themselves in the fullness of time.

...