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New podcast "The Secrets We Keep" aims to understand the stories we don't tell

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

Secrets are a fact of life. Whether they're small - the name of a crush, a family recipe - or something a lot bigger, we all keep secrets. In a new podcast from New England Public Media, host Karen Brown explores society's taboos and stigmas through the secrets we keep. And it only makes sense then for her to begin with her own family's secret.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

KAREN BROWN, BYLINE: That's when my father said, you know Michele, right? Well, she isn't my goddaughter. She's my actual daughter. It felt like five minutes before anyone could say anything. It wasn't necessarily bad news, as we really liked Michele, but it felt big, confusing, daunting.

DETROW: Host Karen Brown joins me now to talk about the little things we don't talk about and how they can actually say a lot about us. Hey, Karen.

BROWN: Hi. Great to be here.

DETROW: That clip is from the first episode where you talk about the fact that your parents hid the fact that Michele was your half-sister until you were in your 20s. Why start this series there?

BROWN: Well, I felt since I knew I was going to be talking with a lot of other people about their deep, dark secrets that it was only fair to sort of out one of the biggest family scandals from my own childhood. And it also explains a little bit why I find secret keeping so fascinating. You know, this is a big part of my makeup, my life - is this big secret that was kept from me, and I just never understood it. I never understood why the grown-ups in my life were ashamed of it, why they didn't want to talk about it. And I think that might have even had something to do with why I went into journalism to out other people's secrets.

DETROW: Yeah. I - no, that's an exact feeling that I feel like I know a lot of people who were told some big reveal about their family had. Like, OK, and what - so? (Laughter) You know, like, this isn't that big of a deal, but...

BROWN: Yeah, it's very generational, I think.

DETROW: Yeah, absolutely. Let's listen to an excerpt where Michele talks about the origins of the secret.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

MICHELE: It appears the deal was between Mum and Rex that he could have the relationship with me - no problem. But it was on Mum's terms when I would find out who my dad was.

BROWN: When I talked to my mother, Dalia, recently, she had a somewhat different recollection. She says it was also her condition that Michele would only be invited to hang out with our family if no one knew she was Rex's daughter.

DALIA: I was just too protective of my immediate family. It was maybe a competition. No, I have no idea what it was. I can't tell why.

BROWN: But it sounds like you have a little bit of guilt about that now. Is that true? Do you feel...

DALIA: Yeah, I feel guilty, but I also can't help the way I felt then and I feel now. I mean, these days, kids know everything from age 5 to 6 already. But at the time, it wasn't something that people talked about.

DETROW: Karen, I'm curious, approaching this as a reporter, did you learn more? Did you understand more about why your family kept the secret for so long?

BROWN: I did. I mean, I will say it was helpful to go in reporter mode as opposed to daughter mode.

DETROW: Yes.

BROWN: I mean, the whole thing was quite awkward, I will say, to interview my own family members about something that was so sensitive in my childhood. But I could just sort of ask the questions straight out as a reporter. Whereas, growing up, it was always something that we sort of tiptoed around. But I hadn't heard these reasons. You know, why did you keep this - you know, my own flesh and blood a secret from me? Why did you get in the way of me having a sister relationship with somebody? Like, those were big things that had really bothered me for years, and I finally basically just used the podcast as an excuse to ask my mom straight out.

DETROW: Let's talk about some of the other secrets that you get to because I think a few of these areas are areas where a lot of people keep a secret in one way or another. Let's talk about sexuality and gender identity. In your reporting, you talked to a gay man named Bill Hudson, who kept his marriage to another man secret for years because he worked for a conservative Catholic school in Minnesota.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

BILL HUDSON: I got good at kind of scanning a crowd to see if I would, you know, see somebody from school, somebody from my professional life. He could sense that, and he would just step back as though we weren't side by side. If we were walking to the mall or at the state fair or someplace, you know, in a public setting, he would just kind of fade off to the side.

BROWN: At the time, Bill didn't fully appreciate how one secret, his secret, had tentacles that reached into other people's lives. And even though Ross went along with it...

HUDSON: I did not realize what I was asking of him.

DETROW: Keeping a secret like that for so long can take so many different tolls - emotional, physical, mental. Is that something you talked about with him?

BROWN: Yeah, I mean, he explained how he is an extrovert in his core identity, his core personality. And he had to really suppress that. He is a very friendly man, but he found himself not able to talk with his colleagues 'cause he was worried he would accidentally reveal this big secret. He found himself being just very quiet and shy and cut off from other people in his life, which was very psychologically hard for him and for the other people in his life. And he was asking this of them too. So it became - he just became wrapped up in this ball of anxiety, which was not at all what his natural personality was.

DETROW: Yeah.

BROWN: And speaking of burden, I mean, this is actually something that a lot of researchers that look at secret keeping, they actually talk about the physical weight, the physical burden that people feel in their bodies when they have to keep a secret for so long, and that can take a psychological and a physical toll.

DETROW: Interesting. Let's talk about another secret a lot of people keep, something that we've had a lot of focus on in the last two years due to national politics and the Supreme Court, and that's abortion and how, among other reasons, the changing political winds have led to many women keeping their abortions hidden, keeping them secret, you know, often even from their partners. How did the women you talked to explain the emotional fallout of that particular secrecy?

BROWN: Well, one woman who had kept her illegal abortion from the '60s a secret for a long time, she described having to sort of seal off her heart. Like, she stopped talking with her parents because she didn't want them to know about it, and that really affected her relationship with her parents. And she just had to sort of shut down. And in this woman's case, she - you know, after the women's movement of the '70s, she came to the conclusion she didn't do anything wrong. And once she started talking about her abortion, she felt a whole lot better.

But there are other women that I talked to who kept their abortion secret for many years, even though it was legal, until Roe v. Wade was overturned, and then they were so mad about the political situation that they felt that the secrecy itself was the problem, and that now - now that there's possibly more danger to talk about it - is when you really, really need to talk about it. So I thought that was interesting.

DETROW: Interesting. Yeah. I'm curious about you, Karen. You're a journalist. You went into this, as we talked about at the beginning, with a personal experience of a big secret and what that does to a family. Uncovering secrets is a big part of what we do - what we try to do as reporters. You know, I'm curious - has your relationship to secrecy changed at all since you started this podcast?

BROWN: Well, this project has helped me understand that there are practical reasons that people need to keep secrets. It's not just a matter - and there are some people that really maybe should keep a few more secrets, you know, with social media, and putting everything out there is maybe going a little bit overboard. But it's more understanding there's certain kinds of secrecy that is - comes from shame or from stigma or from misperceptions, and there's other kinds of secrecies that is more protecting yourself from political reality.

And I think the more that people - and then there's also the issue of privacy versus secrecy, and how do you know what the difference is? And what harm does it cause? So I feel like it's allowed me to really think about secrecy as a journalist and as a person a bit more thoughtfully and understand - where does it come from? And what is the harm? Some secrets - you know, you don't necessarily need to know what's in my Netflix queue, you know, all the really dumb romantic comedies that I have on there. That's not going to harm other people if they don't know about it, but there are secrets in people's lives that not knowing really can be harmful.

DETROW: Yeah. That's Karen Brown, host of the podcast, The Secrets We Keep, from New England Public Media. Thank you so much.

BROWN: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Mallory Yu
[Copyright 2024 NPR]
Scott Detrow
Scott Detrow is a White House correspondent for NPR and co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.
Tinbete Ermyas
[Copyright 2024 NPR]