When she was a teenager, her elder brother started to become abusive toward her, subjecting her to physical as well as psychological violence. She describes growing up with radical survivalist Mormon parents in rural Idaho, isolated and at odds with mainstream society. This is brilliantly illustrated in Tara Westover’s memoir Educated (2018). In some situations, they can amount to a doubling of violence as, for instance, in families where the abuse is not recognised as such and the victim is perhaps even forced to keep living with the perpetrator. Whether it’s as a result of DNA testing or the internet or of the #MeToo movement, the explosion and revelation of secrets all around us is allowing us to begin to understand that we may trust others with our deepest fears, our most deeply held secrets.įrom the perspective of the individual and the family, secrets can certainly be both oppressive and destructive.
Having made it her mission to purge such nasty, even ‘deadly’ family secrets, she suggests that we are in the middle of a revolution of revelation: we are experiencing the era of the end of secrecy. But if we shine light on those secrets, the most extraordinary thing happens: we realise that we are not alone.Ĭonjuring up an image of growing abscesses and employing well-worn metaphors of light and darkness, Shapiro leaves no doubt about the illicit and negative power of secrecy. They grow larger and scarier, and they have the power to shape our whole lives without our even knowing it.
#DIRTY FAMILY SECRETS SERIES#
In the trailer to her podcast series Family Secrets, she asserts: secrets fester in the darkness.
No one captures the current antipathy toward family secrets more succinctly than the popular American author and podcast host Dani Shapiro. In our engagement with the contemporary public, we might need to think harder about which secrets are worth keeping and which ones are not, and perhaps most importantly who is entitled to reveal which secrets and under what circumstances. Instead of shunning family secrets, we might therefore use them as a lens through which to take a closer look at the family and its complicated relationships to wider society. What looks like a final battle against oppressive social norms could in fact help to enable the operations of power in less tangible ways. And although lifting a taboo might be unburdening, as the philosopher Michel Foucault has taught us, there is nothing innocent about the push to confess our innermost secrets. Secrecy might be suffocating, but it can also save lives. Although the history of family secrets is one of fear, shame and repression, it is also one of trust, tenderness and tolerance. It might be a good idea, however, to re-examine this attack on secrecy. Let’s pull them all out of the closet! Secrets are harmful, and killing them will be liberating and healing – so we are promised. The schizophrenic grandmother, the abusive father, the suicidal brother, the sister who turned out to be one’s mother, the queer uncle, our own history of addiction. From revealing status updates to self-scrutinising memoirs and exposing podcasts, we are now witnessing a seemingly endless flood of confessional outbursts. It’s in our zeitgeist that it’s salutary to disclose secrets voluntarily, publicly even. These secrets are baggage from the past, sometimes carried over several generations. Secrets tie families together through bonds of trust, they weigh on them as an often increasingly unbearable burden, or they tear them apart leaving behind hurt feelings and unanswered questions. A trauma, a dubious deed, or a disgracing detail that is kept under wraps through more or less elaborate practices of concealment.
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