This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Family Secrets is a production of IHeart Radio.

All my life, I've been knocking on doors, digging through boxes, grasping for answers.

Who were these people?

What drove them?

How did all of this happen in our strange lives?

Why am I here?

And why, in our malaise and our love and our stories and savagery and tenderness of all those years together,

did we never remember that long is a verb?

To feel a strong desire or craving, especially for something not likely to be attained,

to pine, to yearn.

That's Amanda Yule, writer and executive editor and publisher of McSweeney's.

Her memoir, Destroy This House, was recently published.

Amanda's is a story of extremes,

what things look like on the outside and what they're really like on the inside.

It's about being a child of parents who have trouble parenting themselves as well as their children.

And it's a story about a child who learns to navigate in a world not of her making until she grows up to become a woman with a successful, beautiful life,

while still loving and caring for the people she comes from.

I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,

the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.

So I always begin with the question, tell me about the landscape of your childhood, but in your case, Amanda, I feel like I have to phrase it as, tell me about the landscapes of your childhood.

...