Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio.

Without the contents of the shopping bag, I could never have crouched open the marrow bones of my parent secrets.

The coded their concerts, their zigzagging passions, the craggie map of their marriage.

Their letters to one another answer questions I didn't know enough to ask.

That's Ledy Cotton-Pogorban, a founding editor of Ms. Magazine, writer, lecturer, social justice advocate,

and author most recently of Shanda, a memoir of shame and secrecy.

Ledy's story is like one of those Russian nesting dolls, secrets within secrets within secrets, each one giving way to the next,

and Ledy un-Earths them tenaciously and courageously discovering one after another until she finally arrives at the tiny heart kernel of what is true.

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.

The landscape of my childhood had had very few hills or valleys. It was just a sort of flat plain of pleasure in my everyday life, except that I had very, very, very unhappy parents.

They argued every night after dinner. I was raised in Jamaica, Queens. My parents moved there from the Bronx.

When they moved, they imagined a landhired new life for themselves. We lived next door to my aunt, Hilly, my mother's sister, a very close to her person of my life.

I was a street kid. I mean, I went out in the morning and didn't come back until dinner time. We played stickball.

Jamaica was really like a suburb at that point. It's in the borough of Queens, but it felt like it was Long Island.

I went to Hebrew school from age three until I graduated from Hebrew High School. And in between, I went to the Ashifah Queen for two years.

And my dad was the president of the shoe, which made him what we call a big maca, which made me the daughter of a big maca.

So I sat on his lap on the beama and I got a lot of privileges.

Tell me about the mother of your childhood.

The mother of my childhood was an omnipresent mother. One would call her a helicopter mom, I guess. She didn't work outside the home. At that point, she was devoted to me and my father and the house and making it beautiful and cooking.

Decorating, and eventually she was an amateur painter. She always took lessons. She was always going to adult education.

She was the kind of woman who had a maja group and a bridge group. And she and my dad were sort of the years of the Jewish community.

...