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- [00:00]
Sophia Donner
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [00:02]
Amazon Health AI Announcer
Guaranteed Human Amazon Health AI presents painful thoughts.
- [00:09]
Cold Sore Searcher
Why did I search the Internet for answers to my cold sore problem? Now I'm stuck down a rabbit hole filled with images of alarmingly graphic sores in various stages of ooze. I can clear my search history, but
- [00:24]
Dani Shapiro
I can never unsee that.
- [00:27]
Amazon Health AI Announcer
Don't go down the rabbit hole. Amazon Health AI gets you the right care fast. Healthcare just got less painful.
- [00:35]
Starbucks Tropical Butterfly Refresher Announcer
What's up, y'?
- [00:35]
Laurie Herzl
All?
- [00:36]
Starbucks Tropical Butterfly Refresher Announcer
Summer's got a different tempo. Everything's a little looser, brighter. One plan turns into another. You hear something, you stay a little longer. Next thing you know, you're somewhere you didn't plan to be. It's those in between moments. That's where the ideas hit. Conversations stretch out. Little memories sneak up on you. Sometimes it's just about what's in your hand. That color. That chill. The new Tropical Butterfly Refresher from Starbucks. Guava and passion fruit flavors with mango pineapple flavored pearls. Yeah, that feels like summer before you even taste it. Funny how one small stop becomes the best part of the day. Start your summer rhythm with Starbucks. Try the new Tropical Butterfly Refresher from Starbucks.
- [01:23]
Martha Stewart
When Kohler, global design leader in luxurious kitchen and bath products, asked me to be their ambassador for timeless, elegant, durable cast iron, I said, I'm in. Soon after, I was in their Kohler Wisconsin foundry watching molten iron poured, enamel applied by hand, and the beautiful finished pieces ready to ship. Since 1883, Kohler cast iron has been crafted by incredible artisans and and seeing it firsthand gave me a whole new appreciation for their craftsmanship. Now I'm proud to lend my stamp of approval to my favorite Kohler cast iron products for their durability, beauty and enduring style. Shop my curated picks@kohler.com as the Kohler Cast Iron Ambassador, I say long live Cast Iron.
- [02:16]
Kal Penn
Hey, everyone, it's Kal Penn. I'm inviting you to join the best sounding book club you've ever heard with my podcast, Hearsay, The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. Every episode, I nerd out with amazing guests and dive into the best new audiobooks available on Audible. It's the book club for your ears. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart audiobook club on the iHeartradio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [02:45]
iHeartRadio Announcer
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartradio.
- [02:50]
Laurie Herzl
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. 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 just changed 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?
- [03:34]
Dani Shapiro
That's Laurie Herzl, journalist, book critic and author, most recently of the Memoir Ghosts of 4th street, my family, A Death and the Hills of Duluth. Laurie'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 Dani 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.
- [04:31]
Laurie Herzl
I was born in Louisville, number seven of ten children. And we moved from Louisville to St. Joseph, Missouri when I was two and a half. My father had somehow left his job. I wasn't quite sure if he quit because it didn't make enough money or if he somehow was asked to leave, that's unclear. But we moved into my grandparents house in St. Joe. This was my father's parents. There were seven of us. My mother was pregnant with twins. It was very crowded in that house. I don't have strong memories of that summer, but that summer has always intrigued me. We lived there for about six months and I do have some memories of living in St. Joe. And then in the fall of 1959, we moved to Duluth, where my father was hired to teach at the University of Minnesota in Duluth. And that's where I grew up.
- [05:24]
Interviewer
And so by the time you moved to Duluth, the twins had not been born yet and your youngest brother had not been born yet. Right. So you went from seven kids to eight, nine, ten kids in pretty short order.
- [05:38]
Laurie Herzl
My mother was pregnant when we moved to St. Joe, so she did have the twins that April. So they were born, they were newborns. So there were suddenly nine of us. And yeah, the youngest one, my littlest sister, was born in Duluth a year or two later after we moved there. We did not call our Parents, mom and dad or mother and father. We called our father Gov, Guv, like guvnor. And we called our mother Trish. Her name is Patricia. And that was, I mean, that was all of us from the time we were born, that was what they wanted to be called. So Gov was a university professor. He was a World War II vet. He was very controlling and I don't know if he was bipolar, that my mother had a lot of theories about why he was the way he was, but he was angry a lot of the time. And I think, you know, there were stresses, financial stresses. So many kids. A beginning professor did not make a lot of money. My mother, very beautiful, not well educated, never wanted children, and now she had 10. So, you know, I don't think she was very happy.
- [06:40]
Interviewer
How did that happen?
- [06:42]
Laurie Herzl
Oh, my father was Catholic and she had to convert to Catholicism in order to marry him in case any of their children wanted to be priests or nuns. That's what she told us when we were kids. None of us wanted to be priests or nuns. And, you know, she was not a strong willed person and he was a strong willed person. And I think he liked babies too. I mean, he was really good with kids when we were very small, until we started having opinions and talking back and then I don't think he knew how to handle us. Neither one of my parents had great role models. My mother's family, she didn't talk about her family much at all. She didn't tell us family stories much at all. She had an older brother who died in the war. She had a baby brother who died in infancy. Essentially she was an only child and her father was a railroad man. And she said her mother never talked to her very much. So she was sort of the same way with us. My father's parents, very interesting people. His mother was Irish, grew up on a farm outside of St. Joseph, Missouri. Wanted to get to the big city, which for her was Kansas City, Missouri. And she married my grandfather. We called him John by his first name. He was also very uneducated. He was a Western Union telegraph operator. He was the youngest of 12. And his older siblings were born in Ukraine. They were Germans from Russia. They came to the United States after the Herzls had been in Ukraine for, I think it was 99 years. And if you stayed for 100 years, then your family could be conscripted into the Russian army. So they all left at that point. His father immigrated to Missouri and his father's brother emigrated to Argentina. So I have cousins in Argentina that I'VE never met. So they were not great parents. Grandma and John. They didn't really, you know, they weren't educated. It was volatile. Grandma was a very. She was just a very volatile person. And there were times when my father would come home and one or the other of his parents were, you know, in the yard shouting, and the other one was in the house with pointing a gun out the window. And there were never any actual shootings, but I mean, it was just not. He didn't learn any parenting from his parents. So we grew up kind of haphazardly, I think.
- [08:59]
Interviewer
So there's a 14 year age span between your oldest sibling, whose real name is John Patrick, but everybody called Bobby, continuing the theme of names, and your youngest. So there's 10 kids within 14 years. And one of the things that I found very striking is that there are essentially three groups of kids within your sibling group. There are the older kids, the big kids who are the first three, and then there are the little kids who are the youngest three. And then there's Laurie in the middle, which you describe as a clique unto herself. Yeah, and that's gotta be. I mean, in all of the research and, you know, which I always find really interesting about birth order, a family of 10 kids is like. Is a whole other. It's a world unto itself. Right.
- [09:54]
Laurie Herzl
Mm.
- [09:55]
Interviewer
That must have been so extraordinarily formative for you growing up in this volatile and very crowded house where there wasn't a lot of privacy. And it seems like what you did was escape into reading. Escape into books.
- [10:12]
Laurie Herzl
Yeah, I learned to read very early. I was 3. As far as the birth order goes. I saw the older kids as sort of this group, and the younger kids were a group, but the older kids tell me we were not a group. You know, we were all doing our own thing. And, you know, every one of us felt sort of alone in that house, which is kind of interesting because it was such a crowded house, as you say, you know, four girls in the girls room, three boys in the boy's room. You know, there was no privacy. And maybe that's why some of the people in my family, including my mother, were so private and were so secretive about things because there wasn't any other kind of privacy. But for me, reading was. I mean, has always been where I went. You know, I went in the basement where my father kept his books, and I read down there and I locked myself in the bathroom, which was kind of horrible because there really was only one bathroom for 12 people. And, you know, I Refused to come out because it was like the only room where you could shut the door and lock the door and no one could bother you. And, I mean, I read all the time, and I read books that were way beyond my understanding. My father kept his books in the basement on shelves in alphabetical order. And I read, you know, Eudora Welty's short stories and Catherine Ann Porter and Oscar Wilde. And I read Shakespeare out loud in the basement to myself. And not sure I got that much out of it, but it was, you know, it was a place I went where I could just be by myself and in this different world. I loved books about orphans, you know, I guess, you know, if only I was an orphan, and I wouldn't have all these people around me and all this strife.
- [11:47]
Interviewer
It's so interesting what you said about your siblings feeling like each one of them in some way in that crowded house and in those, you know, bedrooms full of sleeping siblings felt so alone themselves. What do you attribute that to? I'm connecting it to what you said about your mother being secretive because it was the only kind of privacy that could be had.
- [12:14]
Laurie Herzl
Yeah, I have talked about all of this with some of my older siblings, quite a bit, actually. And we were not raised to band together and trust each other. There was a lot of self protection. And it might be because there just wasn't enough stuff to go around. You know, at dinner, you seldom got seconds because, you know, you give everybody their helping, and then the food is gone. Space was at a premium. Food was at a premium. Everything you were sort of, you know, we weren't raised by wolves. It's not like every man for himself exactly, but in a way, it kind of was. We had to look out for ourselves. And, you know, the younger kids are extremely close. And I think part of the reason is because twins are gonna be really close anyway. And then there was one more after the twins, their baby sister, you know, all of our baby sister. But she was really close in age to them, so they were and still are very close.
- [13:08]
Dani Shapiro
When Laurie is a little kid, one day she climbs a tree, reaches a pretty high branch, and realizes that she can't get down, or at least that if she tries to jump, she might really hurt herself. One of her brothers sees her up there and watches Laurie, asks for his help, and he just says no, it's every sibling for himself in the Herzl household.
- [13:30]
Laurie Herzl
He and I talked about this maybe a year ago, and he said he felt bad that he hadn't helped me, that he should have helped Me. And I saw it differently. I mean, I thought he didn't leave. He stayed there with me, but he wouldn't help me down. And I felt like, you know, in retrospect, not at the moment, obviously, I was terrified. But in retrospect, it was like he knew I could do it, and he wanted me to be successful. But I don't know for sure that's what he was thinking. You know, he's my big brother.
- [14:00]
Interviewer
Well, and it can be both, right? It can be.
- [14:03]
Laurie Herzl
Yeah, that's true.
- [14:04]
Interviewer
And you're on your own.
- [14:06]
Laurie Herzl
Yep, exactly. And we were. We really were. I mean, you know, the older sisters, older than me, they were given the twins to kind of take care of. And, I mean, we were sort of parceled up in that way because my mother was really. She was pretty overwhelmed, and my father was pretty demanding. And you were either taking care of someone else or you were left to take care of yourself. There was not a lot of great parenting that went on in that house.
- [14:32]
Interviewer
So a motif for a theme that comes up again and again on this podcast with my guests and has been true in my own life as well, is where there are family secrets, there are children who become little spies.
- [14:48]
Laurie Herzl
Yes.
- [14:50]
Interviewer
And so you were a little spy. You write that you were looking for clues, and I'm wondering about the nature of your spying and also whether you had any sense what kind of clues you were looking for or was just. It was just information. Any kind of information.
- [15:05]
Laurie Herzl
That's such a good question. I spied on my siblings. I sat under the table, the dining room table, and the tablecloth would, you know, come down and kind of hide me and watched what was going on in the house. There was a coat closet between the front hallway and the kitchen. You could go back in the coats. It didn't have doors for a long time. And you could sit back there and kind of hear what was going on in the kitchen. I mean, I was always doing this. I was always hiding and listening. I followed my father on his evening walks, like, trying to figure out, why does he do these walks? I felt like when I was growing up, I didn't understand how the house worked or who these people were that I was living with. I wasn't really close to any of them. And I think part of it was just sort of survival. You know, how do you get through when you're living in a house with 11 other people and you sort of need to understand what's going on and when your parents are as volatile. My mother wasn't volatile. But she was more passive. But my father, you know, he was angry a lot. And if he got angry at a child, he might just sort of give them the cold shoulder. But then he'd yell at. And then we'd feel terrible because he's yelling at her because of something we had done. I mean, it was. Everything was sort of twisted in that way. So I felt like I was always trying to look to understand what was going on. But the other part of your question is, was I just looking for information? Information was power. And that remains true today in my family. You know, that people are always trying to find out stuff about the other ones and power for what? I couldn't even put that into words. But information has always been something you kind of trafficked in. In that. In that family.
- [16:52]
Interviewer
That's so interesting. And also, there's a lot that's kind of about visibility and invisibility or the invisibility of being one of so many siblings in a home where, like the very fact. Look, I was raised as an only child. The idea that you could disappear into a coat closet and nobody would know where you were.
- [17:12]
Laurie Herzl
Yeah.
- [17:13]
Interviewer
Is just so. It's hard for me to fathom. And yet I'm sure that that was. Nobody was saying, where's Laurie? But at the same time, there's also this sense that you preferred being invisible. You describe going up to a place in your house or on the roof. I'm not sure exactly, but where you could see everything and nothing could see you.
- [17:39]
Laurie Herzl
Yep. That was in the attic. Yes. I loved that. It made me feel not powerful exactly, but, you know, kind of invincible, I think. But I grew up, and it's interesting you say all of this, because I hadn't really thought about it, but I grew up feeling kind of invisible. The girls room was in the front of the house. It was actually meant to be the master bedroom, but with so many kids, you know, it was given over to the Thorer sisters. But there were no shades on the window. I mean, our house, it's like they didn't really know how to be parents or put a house together that worked. And so, you know, you're in this big room in the front of the house, and if you have the lights on, everyone outside can see you. And so my sisters, at night, they would all take turns going into the closet to put on their nightgowns. And I never did that. I just figured nobody ever saw me. Nobody could see me. I would just put my nightgown on in front of the window because no one's going to see me. I'm invisible. And that was really a feeling that I had through most of my childhood.
- [18:44]
Dani Shapiro
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
- [18:56]
Amazon Health AI Announcer
Amazon Health AI presents Painful Thoughts why
- [19:01]
Cold Sore Searcher
did I search the Internet for answers to my cold sore problem? Now I'm stuck down a rabbit hole filled with images of alarmingly graphic source in various stages of ooze. I can clear my search history, but
- [19:16]
Dani Shapiro
I can never unsee that.
- [19:18]
Amazon Health AI Announcer
Don't go down the rabbit hole. Amazon Health AI gets you the right care fast. Healthcare just got less painful.
- [19:26]
Public Investing Announcer
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- [20:27]
iHeartRadio Announcer
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- [20:56]
Ryan Seacrest
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- [21:33]
Dani Shapiro
At one point, Lori is given a dollhouse. It once belonged to her older sister, but before passing it down, her mother transforms it meticulously, remodeling the interior, papering the walls to match their real home, filling it with furniture collected piece by piece. The dollhouse becomes a near replica of their house, but an idealized version, A place where nothing is out of order, where no one disrupts the calm. But there's meaning behind this replica. Laurie grows up understanding, in a quiet and unspoken way that her mother never really wanted children. It's something that's been said often enough to settle into the background of her childhood. So the dollhouse. The dollhouse reflects a version of family life that feels controlled, contained, perhaps even preferred. Laurie can move the dolls from room to room, but the world inside never truly changes. It stays fixed, intact, a small, silent model of a home where everything holds together.
- [22:39]
Laurie Herzl
I think she had a lot more fun with the dollhouse than I did, you know, kind of making this world that was like our world, but quieter.
- [22:48]
Interviewer
It also seems like, just in terms of the atmosphere of your childhood and the house and all of the kids, that in Duluth, you all were outdoors a lot. It was cold a lot and just like sort of everybody out of the house and come back in when it's time for dinner. When the church bells ring.
- [23:07]
Laurie Herzl
Exactly. The house was so crowded. You never knew what mood my dad was going to be in when he came home from work. You'd have to retreat until you figured out if it was okay to be in the main part of the house or if you needed to stay away, because his moods did really dominate. And I think a lot of us, I mean, I used to go exploring by myself a lot. We lived near Old Main, which was the original part of the University of Minnesota Duluth. And there was a ravine there, and there was a playground, and, you know, I'd go through the streams and of the ravine and, you know, I was by myself a lot. And I think the other. My other siblings did that, too. The older kids had bicycles, so they would get on their bikes and go. In the winter, we all had to be outside. Now, I can't remember if it was a half an hour or an hour, but it didn't matter how cold it was, and it didn't matter how snowy it was. My mother made us all go outside for an hour a day so that she could have some peace and quiet. And I remember being so cold that I'm like, pounding on the door, wanting to get back in the house and couldn't, not till the hour was up. It wasn't abusive. We had, you know, we had mittens, we had boots. But, you know, there's not that much to do out there when it's 20 below zero and a foot of snow on the ground.
- [24:23]
Interviewer
Did you have any sense of what your mother did during those hours that she had to herself?
- [24:28]
Laurie Herzl
I have no idea. She was a reader. She read magazines, she read books. So she might have just sat in the quiet and read for all I know. I don't know,
- [24:40]
Dani Shapiro
Gov. Laurie's father is a force at the center of the household, unpredictable and commanding. His moods swing between anger, hostility and relentless teasing. It's constant, unsettling, a kind of emotional storm. The children learn to weather. And yet, beneath this volatility, there is a sense of structure. The family sits down to dinner together every night. Her mother cooks for all 10 children. Gov has his ritual a martini, sometimes two, prescribed, he insists, for his blood pressure. After dinner, he leaves the house for a walk, following the same loop night after night. Laurie watches him closely, trying to understand the logic, if any, behind it all. The patterns, the contradictions, the rules that aren't spoken but somehow govern everything. Sometimes Laurie even enlists her younger brothers to follow him at a distance on those walks, trailing him through the neighborhood. Would Laurie ever be able to crack the code of her father?
- [25:46]
Laurie Herzl
It's funny, because of all the kids, I think I'm the one who liked him the best. And he liked me because I was a reader and I was a writer from an early age. And he was a reader and a writer. He was an English professor, so we had that in common. And I was curious about him. Some of the other siblings preferred my mother. And, you know, I tried really hard to get close to my mother, but she was very standoffish. She was very cold. She didn't reveal much. My father told stories. He told family stories a lot. And I loved listening to those stories, the ghost stories in the book, you know, the stories about his family. And he. He told us more than once that he thought it was very important that we understood where he had come from, you know, that when he was a child, his parents had no money and they lived in one rented room, the whole family, you know, in the house of a woman named Mrs. Donnadilla. So I felt like I kind of understood him a little, or he kind of gave glimpses, and I wanted to understand him better. I think my father tried to keep order by rules, you know, and demands. And you have 10 pretty, intelligent, willful children. They're not going to follow your demands, you know, the older they get. And I think that really frustrated him and added to his anger and trying even more to control people. So it was not a successful way of running a household.
- [27:12]
Interviewer
Teasing can be such a form of veiled anger, veiled hostility under the guise of. I was just teasing.
- [27:21]
Dani Shapiro
You can't take a joke.
- [27:22]
Interviewer
And I imagine all of you had different levels of tolerance for that kind of teasing.
- [27:30]
Laurie Herzl
Yeah, I mean, teasing in that way is. It's like bullying, really, you know, but when it's your father and, you know, if you get mad in response, then he can pull the father card. Right. He's in charge. He's the adult, and claim that he was just being funny. And my mother would support him. And I understand her, I think, a little less than I understand him. Did she support him because she thought what he was doing was okay, or was it because she knew if she defied him, he would get angry at her and yell at her, and she didn't like being yelled at. So I think that's one reason we were all kind of looking for information. It's like, why is he behaving this way? Why is she defending him? What happens if we defy him? But the teasing was. Sometimes it was playful, but no one ever liked it because I don't think anyone ever really trusted it. And, you know, he had all these nicknames for us, and nobody liked their nickname. And some of the nicknames were pretty cruel.
- [28:28]
Interviewer
Yeah. Could you actually go through those?
- [28:31]
Laurie Herzl
Yeah. My oldest sister, who did not like her curly hair. Her nickname was Curly. There was another sister whose nickname was Pig for absolutely no reason that I could fathom. She was not fat. She was not, you know, I don't know why he called her Pig. Maybe it was affectionate, like, you know, you give little pet names to babies, and it just stuck. But I don't really know, you know, he called me Hurlbird. I don't know what it means, but I hated it. I thought it was ugly because hurl means vomit, you know, And I didn't know what it meant. And I would ask him not to call me that, but then he would call me that more often. And my little brothers, the twins, they were Deenie and Fleety. They did not like those Names. And they still don't like the names. So nicknames seems like they should be affectionate. Right. But they also seemed. I don't know, it's a way of sort of reminding you that he's in charge, I think.
- [29:23]
Interviewer
Yeah, they're all belittling.
- [29:25]
Laurie Herzl
Yeah.
- [29:26]
Dani Shapiro
Did Bobby have a nickname?
- [29:28]
Laurie Herzl
Punky. He was called Punky. And I mean, when I. You know, if you look at the old photo albums, when he's just a baby sitting on my mother's lap, it says Punky in my father's handwriting. So again, I think it was a name that they gave him as a baby. And then it stuck, and he did not like it. And he did not like Bobby either. I mean, his name was not Robert. His name was John Patrick. And I don't know why we called him Bobby, but he didn't like it either.
- [29:51]
Interviewer
So tell me about the tensions around Bobby, the oldest, as he grew up and became more and more of his own person and less and less tolerant or, you know, sort of able to deal with your father and your father to deal with him. And it also strikes me that he may have been, in certain ways, or at least in one way, the most like your father because he, too, was a writer. And they got along the least well, it seems, of your father and any of your siblings.
- [30:30]
Laurie Herzl
Yeah, well, probably because Bobby was the oldest, the oldest boy, the oldest child, and I think had a lot of pressure on him because of that, because of birth order. Again, you know, a lot of expectations are put on the oldest. Right. A lot of hopes. And he was a writer. He was not interested in school. He cared not at all for high school. School got terrible grades. He had no plans after high school to go to college or get a job. He liked to walk the streets at night and write poetry. And he started missing dinner, which was an incredible sin in our, you know, dinner time. As my father said, quite often, that's the only time of the day when the entire family comes together. And it's very important that we do this every day. So it was, again, one of his rules. Right. And expectations. And when Bobby got into high school, he's, you know, he had other things he wanted to do. He was in theater, and he had friends, and he just wouldn't come home for dinner. And sometimes they would lock him out of the house. So he was not like my father in that he was not volatile. He would just stand there and listen. When my father would yell at him, he would not yell back. And my father, I think, enjoyed fighting. He argued with my mother all the time. And I think it was just something that he enjoyed. He liked to win arguments and be the victor, I guess. And Bobby just wouldn't argue with him. I think he knew I can't win an argument with this man. So I'm just going to stand here. And that made my father angrier than anything, just having him just stand there passively and listen.
- [32:14]
Dani Shapiro
Laurie feels a special unspoken connection to Bobby. Each of them retreats to the basement of the house for different reasons. Laurie is drawn to the bookroom. And as a teenager, Bobby takes over a small utility room and makes it his own. He brings down an old mattress, a battered wooden desk, and his black typewriter. In the bookroom, Laurie is comforted by the sound of the keys of Bobby's typewriter as he pounds away.
- [32:42]
Laurie Herzl
I was interested in him. I don't think he was interested in me. You know, I was nine and there were five siblings between us, so I don't think he was terribly aware of me, but I was very aware of him because he was a writer, because he had this power that could really make my father take a step back. And not many of us had that ability to do that. And it was also comforting just to hear him down there when I was down there, too, because the book room was this wonderful little room with a light and with bookcases all the way around and, you know, a little blanket on the floor, and I would read. But the rest of the basement was just a basement. And it was very scary. And I was always a little bit afraid to be down there alone. And so having him down there was. It was kind of a comfort. And I used to go in there and snoop. I mean, I snooped everywhere in that house. You know, I snooped through everybody's stuff. And I would go in his room and snoop around and see these poems that he was writing, you know, and that was mysterious and kind of wonderful to me.
- [33:44]
Dani Shapiro
As Laurie grows older, the tension between her father and Bobby intensifies, becoming sharper and more unpredictable. Small things take on outsized heft. Bobby's glasses, for example, essential for him to see, become a flashpoint. He leaves them around and gov simply cannot handle it. At some point, the story enters family lore. Guv takes the glasses and breaks them on purpose. But even this moment exists in fragments. Laurie wasn't there. The details shift depending on who tells it. Did Guv stomp on the glasses or snap them in half? In a family this large, this fragmented itself, information travels in pieces. It's always like A game of telephone. When Bobby's 17, he leaves. He takes the family car and drives it to Missouri, to their grandparents house, Gamma and John's, without anyone quite knowing how he even managed it. Laurie didn't even know he could drive. He sells his beloved typewriter, the one he uses to write his poems, to pay for gas. It's a decisive act, another flashpoint. Bobby isn't just leaving the house, he's actively trying to escape it.
- [35:02]
Laurie Herzl
Grandma loved Bobby, he was her favorite. She wanted him to stay and my father said absolutely not. So my grandparents had to drive him back to Duluth. One of them drove the family car and then the other one drove their car and brought back the car and brought back Bobby. And yeah, it was a terrible time. It was just so difficult. My father didn't beat us, he didn't hit us. It was more just the emotions of the house. And Bobby was kind of the focus of that because he was the oldest and because he wasn't doing well in school and he had no plans. And you know, my father thought that all boys should join the army. Not that he was a, you know, he wasn't a warmonger or anything like that, but he thought that the army would, you know, straighten out teenage boys. And I guess because it might have straightened him out, I don't know. And you know, Bobby had no interest in joining the army.
- [36:00]
Interviewer
Tell me about the last time you saw Bobby.
- [36:03]
Laurie Herzl
Oh, I'll never forget that. It was shortly after he graduated from high school. And I was coming in the house and going up the stairs to the second floor where the bedrooms were and he came rushing down from his room and he had something in his hand. I don't know if it was a duffel bag or a paper sack or, you know, something. And he kind of shoved me out of the way and said move. And I kind of flattened against the wall and he ran down the stairs and out the door and from where I was standing on the landing, I could see out the window, you know, outside the house. And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off. And that was the last time I saw him.
- [36:45]
Interviewer
And you were 9?
- [36:47]
Laurie Herzl
I was 9 mm. He turned 18 on May 25, graduated from high school and died on June 11.
- [37:00]
Dani Shapiro
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
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- [38:43]
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- [39:12]
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- [39:49]
Dani Shapiro
On the day Bobby dies, Laurie and her little brothers have been out doing errands with her mother. When they pull up to the house. Her father comes over to the car and says, john Patrick drowned this afternoon. And then Laurie hears her mother say, oh, Leo, he tried so hard.
- [40:10]
Laurie Herzl
You know, sitting in the front seat of that car and observing this, it felt like I shouldn't be there. This is not something I should be observing. But I was old enough to understand what was happening and to remember it. My little brothers were in the backseat, but they were six maybe, you know, five or six. So I don't think that they realized what was going on, but I did. I just felt the weight of it, the burden of it. To witness this felt like. I'm not sure I'm supposed to know this. I don't know who. I can tell, even in the family. I don't know who already knows, who doesn't know. I don't know what to do with this information. And I just. You know, I went upstairs and kind of crawled in bed.
- [40:56]
Dani Shapiro
Did you put the pieces together of
- [40:58]
Interviewer
what had happened to Bobby, or were you told what had happened?
- [41:02]
Laurie Herzl
I had no idea. I didn't know where he was going when he was running down the stairs and jumping in the car. I didn't know where he had been. When my father said to my mother, john Patrick drowned this afternoon, then I knew that. But, I mean, I thought he drowned in Lake Superior because I didn't know of any other lake. You know, he had gone to a friend's cabin. But I didn't know any of this. I knew nothing. It was not, you know, we were not a family that we weren't talking about important things or what's going on. So I'm not sure how I. I think it might have been that night when I was in bed and my sisters were in their beds, and my oldest sister, Kristen, talked about how she had to go and identify the body. And, you know, she was very upset, obviously, and I think she might have been the one who kind of put it all together for me.
- [41:53]
Dani Shapiro
So what happens in the aftermath of Bobby's death? The family changed.
- [41:58]
Interviewer
And it seems like there's this really haunting parallel with your mother's family and the way that her family changed and never recovered after her brother James died.
- [42:12]
Laurie Herzl
Yeah, I think the family just sort of fell apart, really. I mean, both of my parents really pulled away from their children. My father was drinking a lot. Then my mother announced more than once that she was starting over with the three little kids. So the twins and my little sister, and they would be her new family. And she. I mean, lavished attention on them and was devoted to them. And the rest of us were just sort of left to figure out what we were doing. And Kristin went off and got pregnant, and another sister left and later also, you know, got pregnant quite young and got married. Brother, you know, started hitchhiking around the country. I mean, it was just. We all just kind of dispersed in whatever way we could
- [43:05]
Interviewer
and. Did you ever talk about Bobby?
- [43:07]
Laurie Herzl
No, it was not something that we talked about. I remember in high school, I did the Ouija board with some friends, and I said at dinner to my parents and whoever else was at the dinner table that night, you know, that I did the Ouija board, and it said that I was going to get married and I would have two sons named Doug and John. And there was just this silence, like I had said something very wrong. And then my father. I mean, his voice actually kind of broke, and he said, well, we obviously have no objections to the name John, because that was, you know, Bobby's real name. I mean, it was just like if you said the word John in passing, it just felt like you had done something terrible. So there was no feeling that this was, you know, we were going to talk about him or our memories of him or regrets or anything. There was just. We did not talk about it. We did go to the cemetery. My mother would take some of us to the cemetery. I'm not sure if my father ever went there. And, you know, we would maybe brush off the headstone and leave some flowers and feed the ducks. But no, it just was clear that it was not something to talk about.
- [44:19]
Dani Shapiro
About.
- [44:20]
Interviewer
You know, there's a lot about ghosts in your book. I'm wondering where this belief in ghosts or this fascination with them resided for your parents after losing Bobby, if you have any. Was there any sense that you know of that they went on and had some kind of sense of his continuing
- [44:41]
Laurie Herzl
to be present for my parents? I don't. No. My mother considered herself to be very psychic, and she didn't like it. She found it disturbing. So I don't know if she ever had any experience or thought she had any experience. My father scoffed at his parents because his parents believed in ghosts and had all these ghost stories. And the house that we lived in in St. Joseph for that summer before we moved to Duluth was profoundly haunted. And my father would mock them and say they were ignorant peasants for believing in ghosts, but it was also clear that he believed in them, too. So I don't know. I do know my sister Kristin, my oldest sister, the one they called Curly, she did experience something some Years after Bobby died, she said she was just so haunted by his death and having to identify his body. And, you know, they had been pretty close because they were the first and second children to be born and they were just a year apart. And she said she woke up one night in the middle of the night and he was standing by her bed and he said, don't worry about me, I'm happy now. And that that made a big difference. It made her feel a lot better with how things had turned out. But I don't know about my parents. If they had, they would never have told us.
- [46:07]
Dani Shapiro
In the years following Bobby's death, Laurie does what she needs to do to survive. Mentally, psychologically, emotionally. Books help. Reading helps. Work helps. She goes to college on scholarship, but then quits. She moves out of her parents house. Her dad is drinking heavily. The air is thick with unprocessed grief. And she begins what becomes her lifelong career in newspapers, working first as a clerk, then a librarian, then copy editor, then reporter and columnist. She forges her own path, never graduating from college, but receiving a master's in fine arts in her early 40s. She marries and she and her husband settle in the Twin Cities. She has a thriving life. But still Bobby lingers. Of course he lingers. She writes about the ghosts of her childhood over and over again and puts them in a drawer.
- [47:11]
Laurie Herzl
I wrote about the day he died many, many, many times over my life, starting when I was in high school. I wrote a story called the Dandelion. And the Dandelion was our family. And we were all the little seeds that go flying off, you know, that's all I remember about it. But it was something that I thought about and thought about. And when I turned 18, I remember his death really hit me that year because I, you know, on my birthday I was thinking, if I was Bobby, I would be dead in two weeks, you know, and it was just like, oh my gosh. And it had not really struck me until then. I mean, I was a child when he died. I was nine. And you know, you don't have fully complete emotions at nine. But as I grew older, I wrote about it a lot and I didn't think I would publish anything, but I remember being very interested in, you know, that summer in St. Joe that I only have some memories of. And mostly I remember all the stories about that summer that we lived in St. Joe.
- [48:17]
Interviewer
So you wrote this book and you put it away. You had the sense that your mother would not be pleased and she was still living. Gov had passed away at this point, right?
- [48:28]
Laurie Herzl
Yes.
- [48:29]
Interviewer
Mm. But you did publish a piece in a literary magazine that was that story that you had been writing over and over about the day that Bobby died.
- [48:42]
Laurie Herzl
Mm.
- [48:43]
Interviewer
And you didn't think that your mother would see the story. It was in a journal. It wasn't on the front page of the Star Tribune. It was something that she could easily not see, but she did. It was either shared with her or somehow she saw it. And you describe how upset she was and that she never spoke to you again.
- [49:03]
Laurie Herzl
That's true. That's right. She lived just a few miles away from me at that time. She had moved from Duluth to the Twin Cities after my father died in 2005, and she was 10 minutes away from my house. And so I saw her every Sunday and sometimes at other times, too. And during COVID I was not allowed to visit. My little brothers visited her, but I was not allowed because I was. The ostensible reason was I was out in the world, you know, reporting and being in an office, and I could bring her germs. The world was starting to open up again after Covid, and I did go back and see her once, and I was making plans to go back again, when this email popped up in the family email thread, and the subject line was, this makes me sick. And it was from my mother. And I opened it up, and it had gone to the entire family, and all it was was a link to that essay. And there was a bunch of exchanges over the next couple of days. It was really unpleasant.
- [50:04]
Interviewer
Was everybody or just between you and she?
- [50:06]
Laurie Herzl
Oh, it was everybody. It was the family email thread, you know, so siblings and some nieces and nephews and a lot of people just lurk. But everybody's got these messages, this exchange, and she never allowed me to come visit her again. And she was quite deaf, so calling her wouldn't have. You know, I couldn't really call her. And she lived in a security building, and my little brothers had keys to get in, but I did not. So, no, I never saw her again. Mostly, I remember all the stories about that summer that we lived in St. Joe and his life and his death. I have always felt very, very close to the little girl that I was at that time. And I remember things that I thought, and I remember how I felt about things, how I reacted to things. I remember sitting in that car when my father came up and said, john, Patrick, John this afternoon. And I remember that I almost laughed, which was not because I thought anything was funny, but because sometimes that's what emotion does. It comes out wrong. And it was just this very powerful feeling of not funny laughter, but just needing to let something out. But I just always felt really close to that child. Now that I have written it as a book and the book is sitting here in my hand, I don't think about that little girl much anymore. And I have for my entire life. And I've always wondered at people who said, I don't know how you remember your childhood so clearly. It was like, how could I not? That little girl walks beside me every day. But now that it's done, she really doesn't.
- [51:48]
Interviewer
Well, you kind of. You made her visible.
- [51:53]
Laurie Herzl
Yes, I did, didn't I? Yeah, I did. She's not a ghost anymore.
- [52:04]
Dani Shapiro
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartradio. Molly Zakur is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is 1-888-SECRET-0. That's the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram annnyriter. And if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir, Inheritance.
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- [53:24]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway for you. Save days are here now through June 23rd. Find hot deals throughout the store and earn four times a point. Look for in store tags to earn on eligible items from Tostitos, Cascades, Tide, Red Bull, Sparkling Ice, and Ferrero. Then clip the offer in the app for automatic event long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more. Enjoy savings on top of savings when you shop in store or online for easy pickup or delivery, restrictions apply. See the website for full terms and conditions.
- [53:55]
Sophia Donner
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- [55:19]
Laurie Herzl
Guaranteed human.