Katya Cengel | The Atavist Magazine |November 2023 | 1,709 words (6 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 145, “The Truth Is Out There.”

Bruce Champagne stood in a small clearing next to a stump. It was mid-November 2022, and snow was already visible on the nearby mountains. All around Bruce were stands of reeds known as phragmites, some so tall they reached well over his head. Just a short walk away, through a swampy area, was the western edge of Utah Lake.

Bruce, a retired cop in his sixties, had come to this no-man’s-land to research a mysterious sighting. A few years back, an elderly couple living in a house on a nearby bluff saw something they couldn’t explain. The couple refused to recount their experience over the phone, so Bruce visited them at their home in Saratoga Springs, about 30 miles south of Salt Lake City. They told him that they went into the backyard one day because their dog was barking. Not far away, near a stump in the field behind the house, they saw a figure. A creature.  

It appeared to be six or seven feet tall. It was dark, hairy, and humanlike. The creature stood up, paused, then walked away, disappearing into the reeds. The whole thing lasted three or four seconds.

After he heard the couple’s account, Bruce measured the distance between the backyard and the stump. It was 60 yards, a range at which, Bruce knew, the couple would have been able to see the contrasting shades of clothing or skin. But they said that the creature was uniform in color. Bruce also noted that it was May when the sighting happened, which is when carp spawn in Utah Lake. Perhaps the animal, whatever it was, had been feeding.

Now Bruce was weighing whether it was worth placing game cameras in the area. He’d installed them at dozens of sites over the previous decade; a blue dot marked each location on a map on his computer. He told me that retrieving data from the cameras, usually after 30 days or so, felt like Christmas morning. Except in this metaphor, Bruce’s gifts always turned out to be socks and underwear. He spent a lot of time watching footage of deer and squirrels, because the cameras never caught what he was looking for: the relict hominoid Sasquatch, popularly known as Bigfoot.

Bruce considers himself a cryptozoologist, someone who searches for and studies animals whose very existence is disputed. Unlike some of the more eccentric types in the field, Bruce is organized and methodical. He has published papers every bit as dry as those in other areas of study—they just happen to be about relict hominoids, sea serpents, and lake monsters.

His specific obsession with Bigfoot began when he was a kid, more than 50 years ago. In fact, it was right around the time his father disappeared. Bruce is reluctant to allow that the two things might be connected, but it’s hard to see it any other way.

Bruce hasn’t looked for the truth about what happened with his father nearly as hard as he’s looked for Bigfoot. Still, the truth keeps finding him and his family. Over the past five decades, revelations about a man who left home one day and never came back have taken Bruce and the rest of the Champagnes by surprise—again and again and again.

1.

Bruce’s parents met in the Navy. Alan Champagne, the oldest of five from an East Coast family, joined up right out of high school. Lynn Marie Brown enlisted after a brief stint in college studying art. An eccentric young woman who loved science fiction, especially Ray Bradbury, Lynn was 19 when the couple married. After several more years in the Navy, including a posting in Japan, Alan and Lynn settled in Bakersfield, California, a sprawling city of oil wells and orchards populated by the descendants of dust bowl migrants. It was where Lynn had grown up.

Alan found work in the communications sector and then as a probation officer. He attended and graduated from college while working. Lynn took care of the children. There were four boys—Bruce, Brad, Brian, and Barry—and one girl, Deirdre, whom everyone called DeeDee. The boys all had the same middle name: Alan.

Bruce was the oldest. His dad took him shooting, and Bruce used his father’s Winchester 12-gauge. Once when they went fishing at a bass pond, Alan oared out in a rowboat to dislodge a fish his son had caught when it became tangled in some underwater weeds. He could have cut the line, but Alan wanted to make sure Bruce saw the fish he’d caught.

Alan also liked to fish in the ocean. Bruce didn’t go on longer fishing trips, like the one his father scheduled in the late winter of 1972. On Friday, March 10, Alan drove two and a half hours from Bakersfield to Morro Bay, a small community about halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. He was meeting a group of friends who worked in law enforcement; they would be gone for the weekend.

Morro Bay got its name from the 576-foot volcanic plug sitting at the mouth of the narrow channel connecting the bay to the Pacific—morro means “snout” in Spanish. The harbor, completed in the 1940s, was a popular launch point for recreational fishing and boating. But there were times, especially in winter, when big swells made navigating the foggy channel treacherous.

According to the Morro Bay Harbor Patrol logbook, word that Alan’s fishing trip was in trouble reached shore at 8:30 a.m. on Saturday. Someone reported that they’d heard a voice calling out for help from a sandspit stretching like a spindly finger up the bay’s western edge. The voice belonged to 15-year-old Steven Stranathan. The boat he was on that morning had capsized.

Steve had been excited to embark on his first fishing trip with a group he called “the guys.” It included Steve’s stepdad, Jack Stranathan, 58, a deputy sheriff and veteran of the Navy and Coast Guard; Joseph Boydstone, 64, a doctor at a Bakersfield jail; and Harry Morlan, 58, and Irlan Warren, 39, both probation officers like Alan, who at 32 was the youngest of the adults aboard.

Steve would later remember kneeling next to Alan just before the accident happened. They were on the cabin deck of a boxy, 28-foot leisure craft made by a company called Land N’ Sea. It was part boat, part travel trailer. It belonged to Jack, who was down below steering. The vessel was more than a mile south of the entrance to Morro Bay and a few hundred yards from the sandspit. The seas were rough. As the boat battled the waves, Steve joked to Alan, “Well, if we go, at least we’ll go laughing.”

The next thing Steve knew it was dark. The boat had split in two and capsized, and he was in the water trying to swim. The cowboy boots his stepdad had mocked him for wearing on the boat were dragging him down. Steve kicked them off, then wriggled out of his Levi’s, flannel shirt, and parka—everything but his underwear. He swam toward the surface. The water got brighter, then brighter still. Steve wondered if he’d make it. Just as he felt sure his lungs would explode, his head burst out of the water.

Steve saw his stepfather floating lifeless nearby. He also saw Harry Morlan clinging to the engines at the stern of the overturned hull. Steve and Harry managed to swim to the sandspit, where another body had washed up: It was Joseph Boydstone. Steve dragged him from the surf.

Soon a Harbor Patrol boat arrived. By 9 a.m. the Coast Guard cutter Cape Hedge was conducting a shoreline search of a five-mile area. Rescue personnel found debris from the boat: two fenders, a canopy. Irlan Warren was also found, alive. Irlan said that after being flung into the water, he swam to the surface. Sometime later, he was able to grab the boat’s propeller shaft and wait for rescue.

The only man unaccounted for was Alan.

At 10:57, an Army helicopter was dispatched to the scene, followed by one from the Navy. By 11:05, a Coast Guard plane had arrived. The pilots made low passes along the ocean side of the sandspit but found nothing.

Meanwhile a dozen firefighters and harbor patrolmen headed toward the white and yellow hull, which by then had beached. Scattered among the driftwood and kelp on the sand were ripped sections of fiberglass, a yellow seat cushion, and a paper plate. Using axes, a crowbar, and a power saw, the men cut a hole in what Land N’ Sea claimed was a “virtually unsinkable” boat. Someone reached into the boat’s cabin and pulled out a leather sandal and a gray plastic box. The crew shone a flashlight inside but couldn’t get a clear view. A rescuer was lowered headfirst into an opening, but if Alan’s body was inside he couldn’t see it.

The Navy tried to flip the hull upright. A rope was slipped under the bow and the other end was attached to a chopper. Three times an attempt was made to lift the wreckage, without success. Shovels came out, and men loosened the sand around the hull. On the fourth try, the helicopter was able to lift the hull and then slam it back down, right side up.

It was now 12:40. The tide was coming in, the ocean lapping at the men’s ankles. From the hull they pulled a waterlogged suitcase, a pillow, and a dented teakettle. Scouring the beach once more, they found a sleeping bag and a tabletop. But there was no body.

There never would be. Which was strange.

“We do have probably a disproportionate amount of accidents out here just because the coast is rough,” said Eric Endersby, who recently retired as director of the Morro Bay Harbor Patrol. Endersby didn’t work the 1972 rescue, but he knows the history of the bay as well as anyone. He said that boating accidents resulting in death are rare. But what’s even more unusual is someone disappearing after a wreck. “If somebody’s lost in the surf, even if they sink, they eventually wash in just because all the wave energy pushes them,” Eric said.

“In my thirty years,” he continued, “we’ve never not recovered somebody.”

Still, it is not a job with universal appeal. While Q branch now has more women than men at senior levels, they are under-represented in the department as a whole. Ada is keen to change this, but the wider shortage of women in science and engineering makes recruitment more difficult. She is not from a technical background herself. Her strength is operational expertise honed on a series of overseas postings, where she learnt Arabic and ran agents, including in war zones. For some of this time she was also raising a family, which presented unusual practical problems. At the start of one posting, she was given an armoured car and became the first officer in the service to ask where the Isofix points were so she could insert her baby’s carseat. “There was a lot of scratching of heads and people saying, we haven’t had a request for one of those things before,” she says. “And actually, it turns out it’s very difficult to do.” (They did, eventually, find a way.)

Christine Grimaldi | The Atavist Magazine | January 2022 | 10 minutes (2,653 words)

This is an excerpt from The Atavist‘s issue no. 123, “The Shadow and the Ghost.” 

1.

Jennie Otranto slept on the same floors that she scrubbed clean. She was the Lord’s humble servant, too intimidated to ask her employer, the woman she called Reverend Mother, for a spare bedroom. Unlike the innkeeper in the story of Christ’s birth, Reverend Mother had ample space, especially compared with her parishioners, who lived in packed row houses and cold-water flats that rattled to the roll of Brooklyn’s elevated trains. Reverend Mother never even offered her maid a blanket. Jennie made do with her own coat and a small rug—if her minister-turned-master’s Scottish terrier and Siamese cat relinquished a favorite sleeping spot.

Come morning, Jennie shook out her coat and any fur that stuck to it. She smoothed the wrinkles left overnight in her clothes. Her scallop-edged top and skirt are crisp in a black-and-white photo old enough to be from her domestic tenure. In one hand, she clutches a box of Super Suds detergent, perhaps to wash dinner remnants off Reverend Mother’s plates or clothes—the brand’s tagline was “floods o’ suds for dishes and duds.” A fistful of Jennie’s hair is coiled around a barrette pinned just above her forehead, while the rest falls to her shoulders. The dark circles under her eyes seem to give the truth away: Jennie is a profile in exhaustion.

The circumstances of her employment amounted to forced labor. According to the 1940 census, 22-year-old Jennie earned $650 a year as a maid, and 54-year-old Reverend Mother made nothing as a pastor—a double-barreled lie meant to protect the person who told it. Jennie reaped no earthly rewards under the arrangement reached about a decade earlier between her mother, Serafina, and Reverend Mother. A friend had told Serafina about a woman who performed miracles out of a Pentecostal storefront church on 69th Street, also called Bay Ridge Avenue. It seemed as if only miracles could soothe Serafina’s arthritic joints, which confined the 40-something mother of six to bed for weeks at a time. So she went to the church, which largely drew from Brooklyn’s Italian immigrant enclave of Bensonhurst. As many as 200 self-proclaimed “full believers” sought cameos in Reverend Mother’s prayers and remedies from her “holy napkins,” pieces of cloth she anointed with oil over which she’d prayed. Reverend Mother preached that no other church in the world understood the Bible like La Cappella dei Miracoli (the Chapel of Miracles) did. And make no mistake: She was the church.

Reverend Mother expected full believers to pay for her grace, one way or another. Like many church leaders, she cited Bible verses to justify collecting a 10 percent tithe from her followers’ poverty-level wages. She went a step further, commissioning “scouts” to find families tending to dying relatives so that she could pray with them—and claim 10 percent on the relatives’ wills. But nothing was ever enough for Reverend Mother, and she levied the first of many egregious tolls on Serafina’s family around 1930. “After a while she had a stronger hold on us,” Jennie later wrote, “and decided that I should go live with her as her maid.” Serafina agreed. She considered her eldest daughter a gift to God.

Jennie’s delivery into involuntary servitude marked the end of her formal education. Eighth grade was as far as she’d go. Reverend Mother squeezed everything she could out of Jennie and her family. She once instructed Jennie to pull her mother aside after a church service to discuss Serafina’s life insurance policy. “Tell her, ‘Mom, God was good to you, why don’t you cash that policy and give the money to Reverend Mother?’ Letting it sound like it came from me,” Jennie recalled. The Great Depression plunged Jennie’s parents into darkness more than once when they couldn’t pay their electricity bill. Still, Serafina gave Reverend Mother the $200 or $250 her insurance policy was worth.

Teenage Jennie cleaned, cooked, and worshiped without complaint, but by the early 1940s, after a period in which she was sent back to her family, only to be enlisted as an unpaid maid again when it suited Reverend Mother, the twentysomething version of Jennie had to be stopped from testing the limits of her employer’s power. “As time wore on living under these conditions my patience was waning. One day, I don’t remember what happened. I might have answered her abruptly,” Jennie wrote. “She happened to have a metal can in her hand and banged it on my head.”

The can sliced into Jennie’s scalp. She pressed a Turkish towel to her head, but its fibers couldn’t absorb the blood flowing through her hair and down her neck. “Reverend Mother saw all this but did not try to help or even care,” Jennie wrote. “I then left her home without saying a word.”

It was nighttime. Where would she sleep? Grown women in Brooklyn often lived with their families until marriage, but Jennie’s parents would offer no refuge. Her father, Frank, was even more devoted to Reverend Mother than Serafina was. Reverend Mother regularly dispatched him to the homes of delinquent parishioners. “I would go and ask them how they felt and why they did not come to church,” he later told authorities. Jennie feared her father would force—or beat—her back into servitude. “Having no place to go, I rode the trains all night,” Jennie wrote.

The next morning, she went to see Serafina. Jennie mentioned only that she and Reverend Mother had had a “misunderstanding.” What happened next sounds a lot like love bombing—the showering of appreciation by abusers, narcissists, and cult leaders to overwhelm a target’s resistance. “When Reverend Mother realized where I was, she called and sweet talked me into going back,” Jennie wrote. “Why wouldn’t she? She missed having a good free maid.”

Jennie returned to work, but only in body. Her soul was her own. Reverend Mother, it seemed, had reached the limit of her power.

Nanny picked me up from elementary school every day of my childhood on Staten Island. The moms of my classmates idled outside their cars, gossiping. Nanny was the only grandmother in the crowd. We met each other with hugs and kisses, and our ride home never began until we raced to see whether Nanny’s automatic seat belt, a fixture of some 1990s cars, would cinch into place before I could latch my manual strap in the back seat. I inevitably won, but the thrill of my victory was never tainted by any agony of her defeat on her part. Nanny celebrated my safety.

Among my few after-school obligations were the weekly catechism classes that would rub off like a temporary tattoo once I got older. Nanny waited in her silver Toyota Camry while I was taught Catholicism’s particular brand of shame. She also took me to borrow books from the Great Kills Library, and to buy Archie comics at a store kitty-corner from a Sedutto ice cream shop. Occasionally, on the way home, we stopped by Dazzle Cleaners, where my parents, Nanny’s son and daughter-in-law, sweated as many as 14 hours a day, six days a week. But Mom and Dad preferred I stay away from their business, especially in the summer months, when the boilers spiked the heat index in the store, making it a sauna with none of the health benefits.

Home was in the Honey Bee Condominiums behind the Staten Island Mall. There, Nanny and I settled into our afternoon routines, starting with homework. I recited my vocabulary words, and she paged through a dictionary for the corresponding definitions. I wrote short stories, only remembering to cram in the assigned words at the end, while Nanny wrapped breaded chicken cutlets around cubes of mozzarella (mutzadell in Brooklynese) or formed tiny meatballs for minestrone soup. She could also put together a solid kids’ menu whenever my best friends, Andrea and Jen, came over to cosplay Buffy the Vampire Slayer with fake wooden stakes or Clueless with our teddy-bear backpacks. We loved Nanny’s English muffin pizzas with homemade sauce and her grilled cheese sandwiches made with Kraft Singles.

Depending on their nightly ETA, we ate dinner with one or both of my parents. Mom and Dad worked harder and longer than I ever have, or will, to fuel the last segment of their white flight from Brooklyn to Staten Island to New Jersey, a path worn by many Italian Americans before them. Living with my long-widowed paternal grandmother for six months was supposed to help our little family save for a house in the suburbs. We stayed for seven years.

From the time I was five through the summer after my twelfth birthday, Nanny was a constant in my life. I never missed one of her Saturday morning beauty parlor appointments at the Staten Island Mall. Weekday mornings, she power walked through the mall’s corridors with her septuagenarian friends. I gave Nanny a set of one-pound pink weights that she pumped through the Cinnabon-scented air, and during summer vacations I’d join the group now and then for a bialy in the food court. On many afternoons and evenings, fueled by homemade rugelach or pound cake, I was dealt in to card games with Nanny’s friends at our dining room table. Other nights, just the two of us, Nanny and I played round after round of Rummikub, the tile game that “brings people together.”

Oftentimes we snuggled on the den sofa to watch our shows: General Hospital bleeding into Oprah, and The Golden Girls in perpetual syndication. The sofa contained the folded-up mattress where Nanny slept after insisting that my parents take the only bedroom in her condo. It was there that we wore out The Goonies, Home Alone, and the rest of my VHS collection, supplementing them with Lifetime melodramas and the classics starring Audrey or Katharine Hepburn. On Friday nights, I’d curl into Nanny for an hour of Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters. We were devoted to the golden era of 20/20, and to each other. “You’re my shadow,” Nanny would say.

Our bedtime routine was an exercise in role reversal: I tucked Nanny in with many kisses and traced the sign of the cross on her papery forehead, smoothing the wrinkles up, down, left, right, with my thumb. She smelled of Noxzema and hair spray. After I lay down in my bed in the windowless nook next to the den, I often snuck back into Nanny’s room, drawing close to check that she was still breathing. She was a generation older than my friends’ grandmothers. My copy of Claudia and the Sad Good-bye, the Baby-Sitters Club book about the death of the protagonist’s beloved grandmother, Mimi, was my only guide for navigating the inevitable.

My parents and I moved to New Jersey in 1998, and Nanny took over the sofa bed in our new house about five years later. We both had senioritis: I was 18, and she was 86. I was filling out college applications as her health was declining, due largely to congestive heart failure. Claudia and the Sad Good-bye was still wedged between the more mature literature on my bookshelf the night an ambulance arrived at our house. Something was wrong with Nanny. “Bring the living will!” she yelled at Dad as the medics prepared to take her to the hospital. Mom stayed behind and tried to prepare me for the worst. In a big teenage mood, I sobbed as much to drown her out as from sadness. Nanny was not going to die that night if I had anything to do with it.

I didn’t, of course, but she lived anyway. My teenage hubris validated, I made a deal with Nanny: She just had to make it to my college graduation. In retrospect, it was a cringeworthy framing her chronic illness as a battle to be won or lost. Yet Nanny’s health improved. We had four more years of summer vacations, secrets, and frank discussions about politics and sexuality. Nanny watched me take my first dose of birth control, and she opposed the Catholic Church’s anti-abortion teachings long before I rejected them. She was the most open-minded adult in my culturally conservative young life, which isn’t to say she was perfect. Though she never used the N-word or its Italian-American stand-in, derived from the word for eggplant, she occasionally toggled between color-blind and coded racism, which I in turn absorbed. She believed that in his twenties my father had lost out on a job because of affirmative action, though in truth Dad probably wasn’t qualified for the position, with his two semesters of college and a life that revolved around hanging out in bars and on street corners, where the police never bothered him and his friends.

I wish Nanny and I had discussed the things we were wrong about and why. But there wouldn’t be time. Nanny’s lungs started filling with liquid during the last semester of my senior year of college. I brought my cap and gown home so we could re-create the graduation ceremony she was too weak to attend. She died five months later, on October 14, 2008.

I had dreaded Nanny’s death for so long that when it happened, it didn’t seem real. I never cried. Tears flowed from small disappointments in newsroom jobs and from bigger ones I dated in my early twenties. It was easier to feel gutted over someone I thought was my soul mate than to recognize that my soul mate had come and gone.

I knew that Nanny and her younger siblings shared secrets. I had caught the occasional whisper about abuse: physical, emotional, spiritual. Then, a few years after Nanny died, I learned that these dark memories had been committed to paper.

At my great-uncle Joey’s urging, his three sisters had joined him in writing testimonials about their childhood. Late in life, Joey left Catholicism for an evangelical church and gave the testimonials to a fellow parishioner, who in turn produced a short, spiral-bound book called “Bazaar [sic] but True.” Apparently, Joey believed I could do a better job with the story the book told. He approached my mom about it before I left for college. She told him it was too much for me then, but I’d tell the story eventually. Later, when I started a graduate program in creative nonfiction, my dad’s cousin Patricia gave me copies of the testimonials.

In looping, spindly script, the documents revealed that, while I may have been Nanny’s shadow, she also had a ghost. Nanny, whose real name was Genevieve “Jennie” Grimaldi, née Otranto, was haunted her whole life by the specter of Josephine Carbone, a woman as cruel as she was charismatic. Carbone was better known, to both her followers and her critics, as Reverend Mother.

Nanny and I had talked about everything else—why not this? I summoned a memory, a Turkish towel soaked with blood, an echo from a phone conversation in a nearby room. My childhood instinct had been to file away such things instead of asking Nanny about them. But even if I had asked, I don’t know that she would have had the heart to tell me the truth.

A decade after Nanny died, I quit my latest journalism job, in no small part to investigate what happened to the love of my life. The testimonials were the starting point. With government records and newspaper clippings, the memories of the few churchgoers who are still alive and the descendants of those who aren’t, I pieced together the narrative of Reverend Mother’s rise to power and her eventual downfall. I learned the stories of families who, like the Otrantos, were all but destroyed by La Cappella dei Miracoli. In studying the one chapter of my grandmother’s life she never shared with me, I found a sense of purpose.

Nanny may have been shielding me from her pain, but in doing so she also gave me a final gift. Her secret was my inheritance.

Deena ElGenaidi | Longreads | November 2018 | 11 minutes (2,651 words)

My dad pulled his car over — the Jeep Wrangler he’d bought after divorcing my stepmom — to tell me that he’d gotten secretly married a year ago.

“M said you think I’m a hypocrite,” he’d said a few minutes earlier, just before putting the car in park.

He’d come to New York for the day to see me.

“I didn’t — what did M tell you?”

I was sure my aunt hadn’t betrayed my trust fully, that she couldn’t have told him what I’d found: the women’s bath products in his bathroom, signs that he was still dating the woman 20 years his junior. I was 28 at the time of the discovery, which would have made her 35. I knew that despite his Islamic religious beliefs, he was likely having sex before getting married.

“She said you think I’m a hypocrite because she’s not Muslim,” he said, the second “she” referring to Alexa, the woman whose name we both avoided saying out loud.

My dad had been twice divorced — first from my mom when I was 4, then from Anne-Marie, the woman he married when I was 10 and stayed married to for about 15 years. Now, he’d moved on to someone younger, someone only 7 years older than me.

I told him the truth, that about a year earlier, I’d gone into his room to see if he had any suitcases I could borrow for my trip to Southeast Asia, and spotted the flowery body wash, the women’s deodorant, the pink razor.

“I don’t care what you do,” I said, with the knowledge that I also kept secrets.

Still, though, I felt anger at my father’s hypocrisy. He claimed to be religious and was often judgmental of those who weren’t — judgmental of me. For years, I’ve kept my own secrets from my parents. I grew up in an Egyptian, Muslim home, and in many ways, keeping secrets has been my mode of self-preservation, as it is for many children of immigrants. My family is conservative — not politically, but in their everyday lives. They don’t drink or believe in sex before marriage, and if you are dating someone, it is with the intention of eventually marrying them. They expect their children to uphold the same Islamic values, and they’d prefer us to marry within our own culture, if possible. In this sense, it’s ironic that my dad has been with two white women — Anne-Marie and now Alexa — whose cultural backgrounds are starkly different from his.

I’ve talked to other children of immigrants, and children of religious parents, and have found an almost universal experience among us all. Though the values vary depending on culture, there is the same sense of understanding between us. Our parents, unlike many white parents, absolutely cannot know about certain aspects of our lives. A part of me is afraid to disappoint and disillusion them, but now knowing of my dad’s secrets, I wonder if I even care about their finding out about mine anymore.

“I wish you’d told me when you found that,” my dad said, referring back to the women’s bath products.

“I don’t care,” I repeated.

“Well, no, I want to explain.”

I didn’t know what he wanted to explain, but I absolutely didn’t want to hear about my dad’s sex life with a younger woman.

“We got married,” he said.

Instantly, my stomach dropped, and I looked straight ahead of me, out the window. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t expect this at all.

“We’re not legally married, just Islamically.”

As he spoke, I played back the timeline in my head. I saw the women’s bath products in May of last year, moved out of my Philly apartment at the end of July, and stayed with my dad for two months until I moved to New York. If they were married at the time, why was there no trace of her beyond the flowery soaps that had since disappeared?

“She has her own her house,” he said, as though reading my thoughts.

They were “married” Islamically, but they didn’t live together. What this meant was that they had to convince an Imam to marry them in the mosque, with no legal documents. An Islamic marriage is no different from a Christian one or a Jewish one, and in almost all cases is accompanied by a marriage license obtained from a courthouse. In this case, though, my father requested a religious ceremony with no legal marriage license. The Imam was hesitant at first, for fear of the woman losing her legal, marital rights in the process — losing alimony or child support in the case of a divorce, for instance. But my dad didn’t want to get legally married, as he’d just finished paying the alimony from his previous marriage, and he didn’t want to lose more of his assets if he went through another divorce. He also wanted his own space, his own home, he said. But in the same sentence, he talked about wanting to eventually make it legal and move in together, and I couldn’t tell what was true and what wasn’t. And I certainly didn’t know why Alexa, whom I’d never met, had agreed to these conditions.

“This isn’t marriage,” I said. “You just married her so you could sleep with her.”

I demanded he take me home, then locked myself in my room and cried, avoiding interaction with my roommates or anyone else for the rest of that day. I couldn’t believe my dad had been married in secret for a year and kept it from his daughter, from his entire family. He’d waited, even, until his mom died to tell me.

***

I found out about Alexa’s existence roughly three years ago, mostly by accident. My dad, my cousins, and I had gone jet-skiing for my cousin’s birthday, leaving our phones in the car’s glove compartment until we returned. As my cousin handed the phones back, she spotted a text on my dad’s screen.

Alexa: I love jetskiing 🙂

My cousin didn’t tell me until the next day, after my dad had left. We did some snooping, hacking into his iCloud from my computer, almost getting caught through a series of technological blunders, and we confirmed that my dad was, in fact, dating someone named Alexa. So I confronted him over the phone.

“Who’s Alexa?” I said, more of a demand than a question. He’d been separated from my stepmom for exactly a year at that point.

“How old is she?” I asked, another demand.

When I found out how young she was, I couldn’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of repulsion. My dad had turned into a cliché — the older man dating a woman young enough to be his daughter.

I told the rest of the family, and we all fought, my objection being the age difference and my aunt’s being the cultural and religious differences.

“She wants to convert,” my dad said.

“You tried that before,” said my aunt. “Isn’t that why you got divorced?”

She was referring to my stepmom, the previous white woman he was involved with, who’d also converted to Islam for him, but whose lack of religiosity eventually became an issue for my dad — one of the reasons their marriage didn’t work out.

It was through our conversations about Alexa that I became quickly disillusioned with my dad and how incongruent his values were with his actions. I wondered why I worried so much about my own secrets when he had so many. Was it even worth my effort to keep those secrets? What was I still trying to preserve?

Help us fund our next story

We’ve published hundreds of original stories, all funded by you — including personal essays, reported features, and reading lists.

Become a member

A few weeks after learning of Alexa’s existence, my dad told me he’d ended the relationship. But that, too, turned out to be a lie, and again, by accident, I found out they were still dating.

“Why do you keep lying?” I asked.

“I’m not lying. It’s just not anyone’s business,” he said.

***

Not long after finding out about my dad’s secret marriage, my mom visited me in New York. That same weekend I saw on Instagram that someone I dated over a year ago, who’d moved to Los Angeles, was in New York for the weekend. Neither of my parents knew he existed because I kept my life a secret, just as my dad was doing. My roommate came home after my mom went to bed, and as we sat on the couch watching a movie, I told her, in hushed tones, that I was thinking of texting him. I didn’t want my mom to overhear. At around 10 pm, I sent the text.

Are you in ny? I wrote.

Sure am, he replied. You around?

I left my apartment an hour later, and as I headed out the door, I turned to my roommate and said, “If my mom asks, I went out with ‘platonic’ friends.”

She laughed, and I said goodbye, worried about what I would say to my mom when I didn’t come home until the next morning. Later that night, in his hotel room, I mentioned that my mom was visiting and currently sleeping in my bedroom. He asked: “What will you tell her when you don’t come home?”

“I haven’t really planned that far,” I said.

“Yeah, but you knew what would happen tonight.”

I texted my mom early the next morning to say I stayed at a friend’s place, not wanting to get back too late and wake her. I felt no guilt or consternation, and the lie came easily because I was so used to telling untruths in order to protect myself — to protect my parents’ idea of me. I would have said the same to my dad, and in many ways, I was acting just like him, keeping the details of my life hidden from my family.

When I finally arrived back at my apartment, my mom was chasing my cat around with a feather stick, trying to get her to play and clearly antsy for me to arrive home. The cognitive dissonance in that moment was alarming, but I put the previous night and morning out of my head as we walked around Central Park that afternoon.

A few days later, I told a friend about the conversation I’d had in bed, when he asked me what I would tell my mom.

“Okay, well first of all you’re an adult,” my friend said. “You don’t need to explain yourself.”

“I mean, I kind of do,” I replied.

I told her that though I’m almost thirty, I know that in order to protect myself, to protect my relationship with my parents, I had to lie. It’s difficult to imagine what would happen if either of my parents knew the truth. Sometimes, I wonder if they actually do know, but don’t say anything. Just as I’ve discovered some of my dad’s secrets over the years, has he discovered mine? Maybe it’s willful ignorance, or maybe I’ve developed a knack for lying. In the end, it’s just easier to keep secrets. It’s easier to live my life the way I want, and avoid conflict. Perhaps this was my dad’s thought process when he chose to get married in secret.

“Wait, so do your parents think you’re a virgin?” my friend asked.

“Yes,” I said.

***

A few years back, my younger brother and I had a conversation about the secrets we keep from our parents. He spoke of a desire to come clean entirely.

“Don’t you want them to know who you really are?” he asked.

“No,” I replied.

“I just want the same relationship with my parents that some of my friends have,” he said.

“White parents are different,” I told him, though I knew also, the rules were different for him growing up — maybe because he was a boy, maybe because he was 10 years younger than me. Though he kept secrets, the stakes always seemed lower for him. He didn’t care as much.

My mom grew up in Egypt, and my dad came to America at the age of 7. They divorced by the time I turned 4. I don’t know everything about their childhoods, their teenage years, their 20s, but I’ve gathered a bit from my own fuzzy memories and stories from relatives.

One day when I was in second grade, my dad was supposed to pick me up from school. My parents both worked, so I was in the after-school program. Usually, my mom would pick me up, but for whatever reason, she couldn’t that day. At a certain point, I was the last child left waiting, afraid my dad had forgotten about me entirely. The after-school teachers stuck around, past the time they were supposed to, I assume, and I tried not to cry. Eventually, my dad showed up. He apologized for being late and drove me home to the apartment I shared with my mom, where we waited and watched TV until she arrived.

I don’t know the details, but somehow my mom knew that my dad had picked me up late. Maybe the school called her. Maybe he told her. They went into the bedroom and left me alone in the living room, but I could hear them arguing.

“You were drinking,” she said.

We didn’t drink. We were Muslim. He denied the accusation. I don’t remember what else was said, but that day stood out in my mind for years after.

Now, as an adult, I know that my dad did drink in his 20s and 30s, after he divorced my mom. He’s never told me this, and I don’t believe he ever will. I learned it from another member of the family. I know less about my mom, about her sins, but my dad’s lies stand out the most. He claims to be religious and pious, refusing to admit to any past transgressions.

It’s normal for parents to keep secrets from their children and vice versa, but I’ve often felt that I’ve had to hide details that seem innocuous in American culture. In my case, this is a combination of both cultural upbringing and religion. My parents grew up with Arab, Islamic values that they expect me to uphold to a certain degree. However, from the looks of it, neither my father nor I have managed to uphold these values. The only difference is that I don’t claim those values to be my own, preaching one set of ideas and acting in another way altogether.

In a restaurant a few weeks after finding out about my dad’s secret marriage, I asked him why he lied for so long, why he kept the relationship a secret.

“I didn’t have any other choice,” he said.

I balked at that answer. “You had a choice, and you chose to get married secretly. Is that Islamically sound, do you think?”

“You were so against it,” he said. “I didn’t want to upset you.”

He was referring to my anger at learning of the relationship in the first place — learning that she was so close in age to me. I never guessed he would marry her.

“How is this better?” I said. “To find out a year later?”

He didn’t apologize for his actions, instead repeating that he had no choice.

“Are you 19 years old?” I asked.

I was trying to imply that people his age didn’t behave this way — eloping in secret because of family disapproval. But maybe I was also thinking about myself. I wonder when I’ll grow out of the secrets. I’ve been lying to protect myself and also out of concern for my parents’ feelings. But at this point, it feels like none of that matters. Maybe my dad deserves to know the truth — to know that we are not very different, keeping secrets from one another.

* * *

Deena ElGenaidi is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn. She edits for Hyperallergic, and her work has been featured in Electric Literature, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and other publications. She is currently at work on a novel.

Editor: Sari Botton

Deena ElGenaidi | Longreads | November 2018 | 11 minutes (2,651 words)

My dad pulled his car over — the Jeep Wrangler he’d bought after divorcing my stepmom — to tell me that he’d gotten secretly married a year ago.

“M said you think I’m a hypocrite,” he’d said a few minutes earlier, just before putting the car in park.

He’d come to New York for the day to see me.

“I didn’t — what did M tell you?”

I was sure my aunt hadn’t betrayed my trust fully, that she couldn’t have told him what I’d found: the women’s bath products in his bathroom, signs that he was still dating the woman 20 years his junior. I was 28 at the time of the discovery, which would have made her 35. I knew that despite his Islamic religious beliefs, he was likely having sex before getting married.

“She said you think I’m a hypocrite because she’s not Muslim,” he said, the second “she” referring to Alexa, the woman whose name we both avoided saying out loud.

My dad had been twice divorced — first from my mom when I was 4, then from Anne-Marie, the woman he married when I was 10 and stayed married to for about 15 years. Now, he’d moved on to someone younger, someone only 7 years older than me.

I told him the truth, that about a year earlier, I’d gone into his room to see if he had any suitcases I could borrow for my trip to Southeast Asia, and spotted the flowery body wash, the women’s deodorant, the pink razor.

“I don’t care what you do,” I said, with the knowledge that I also kept secrets.

Still, though, I felt anger at my father’s hypocrisy. He claimed to be religious and was often judgmental of those who weren’t — judgmental of me. For years, I’ve kept my own secrets from my parents. I grew up in an Egyptian, Muslim home, and in many ways, keeping secrets has been my mode of self-preservation, as it is for many children of immigrants. My family is conservative — not politically, but in their everyday lives. They don’t drink or believe in sex before marriage, and if you are dating someone, it is with the intention of eventually marrying them. They expect their children to uphold the same Islamic values, and they’d prefer us to marry within our own culture, if possible. In this sense, it’s ironic that my dad has been with two white women — Anne-Marie and now Alexa — whose cultural backgrounds are starkly different from his.

I’ve talked to other children of immigrants, and children of religious parents, and have found an almost universal experience among us all. Though the values vary depending on culture, there is the same sense of understanding between us. Our parents, unlike many white parents, absolutely cannot know about certain aspects of our lives. A part of me is afraid to disappoint and disillusion them, but now knowing of my dad’s secrets, I wonder if I even care about their finding out about mine anymore.

“I wish you’d told me when you found that,” my dad said, referring back to the women’s bath products.

“I don’t care,” I repeated.

“Well, no, I want to explain.”

I didn’t know what he wanted to explain, but I absolutely didn’t want to hear about my dad’s sex life with a younger woman.

I grew up in an Egyptian, Muslim home, and in many ways, keeping secrets has been my mode of self-preservation, as it is for many children of immigrants.

“We got married,” he said.

Instantly, my stomach dropped, and I looked straight ahead of me, out the window. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t expect this at all.

“We’re not legally married, just Islamically.”

As he spoke, I played back the timeline in my head. I saw the women’s bath products in May of last year, moved out of my Philly apartment at the end of July, and stayed with my dad for two months until I moved to New York. If they were married at the time, why was there no trace of her beyond the flowery soaps that had since disappeared?

“She has her own her house,” he said, as though reading my thoughts.

They were “married” Islamically, but they didn’t live together. What this meant was that they had to convince an Imam to marry them in the mosque, with no legal documents. An Islamic marriage is no different from a Christian one or a Jewish one, and in almost all cases is accompanied by a marriage license obtained from a courthouse. In this case, though, my father requested a religious ceremony with no legal marriage license. The Imam was hesitant at first, for fear of the woman losing her legal, marital rights in the process — losing alimony or child support in the case of a divorce, for instance. But my dad didn’t want to get legally married, as he’d just finished paying the alimony from his previous marriage, and he didn’t want to lose more of his assets if he went through another divorce. He also wanted his own space, his own home, he said. But in the same sentence, he talked about wanting to eventually make it legal and move in together, and I couldn’t tell what was true and what wasn’t. And I certainly didn’t know why Alexa, whom I’d never met, had agreed to these conditions.

“This isn’t marriage,” I said. “You just married her so you could sleep with her.”

I demanded he take me home, then locked myself in my room and cried, avoiding interaction with my roommates or anyone else for the rest of that day. I couldn’t believe my dad had been married in secret for a year and kept it from his daughter, from his entire family. He’d waited, even, until his mom died to tell me.

***

I found out about Alexa’s existence roughly three years ago, mostly by accident. My dad, my cousins, and I had gone jet-skiing for my cousin’s birthday, leaving our phones in the car’s glove compartment until we returned. As my cousin handed the phones back, she spotted a text on my dad’s screen.

Alexa: I love jetskiing 🙂

My cousin didn’t tell me until the next day, after my dad had left. We did some snooping, hacking into his iCloud from my computer, almost getting caught through a series of technological blunders, and we confirmed that my dad was, in fact, dating someone named Alexa. So I confronted him over the phone.

“Who’s Alexa?” I said, more of a demand than a question. He’d been separated from my stepmom for exactly a year at that point.

“How old is she?” I asked, another demand.

When I found out how young she was, I couldn’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of repulsion. My dad had turned into a cliché — the older man dating a woman young enough to be his daughter.

I told the rest of the family, and we all fought, my objection being the age difference and my aunt’s being the cultural and religious differences.

“She wants to convert,” my dad said.

“You tried that before,” said my aunt. “Isn’t that why you got divorced?”

She was referring to my stepmom, the previous white woman he was involved with, who’d also converted to Islam for him, but whose lack of religiosity eventually became an issue for my dad — one of the reasons their marriage didn’t work out.

It was through our conversations about Alexa that I became quickly disillusioned with my dad and how incongruent his values were with his actions. I wondered why I worried so much about my own secrets when he had so many. Was it even worth my effort to keep those secrets? What was I still trying to preserve?

A few weeks after learning of Alexa’s existence, my dad told me he’d ended the relationship. But that, too, turned out to be a lie, and again, by accident, I found out they were still dating.

“Why do you keep lying?” I asked.

“I’m not lying. It’s just not anyone’s business,” he said.

***

Not long after finding out about my dad’s secret marriage, my mom visited me in New York. That same weekend I saw on Instagram that someone I dated over a year ago, who’d moved to Los Angeles, was in New York for the weekend. Neither of my parents knew he existed because I kept my life a secret, just as my dad was doing. My roommate came home after my mom went to bed, and as we sat on the couch watching a movie, I told her, in hushed tones, that I was thinking of texting him. I didn’t want my mom to overhear. At around 10 pm, I sent the text.

Are you in ny? I wrote.

Sure am, he replied. You around?

I left my apartment an hour later, and as I headed out the door, I turned to my roommate and said, “If my mom asks, I went out with ‘platonic’ friends.”

She laughed, and I said goodbye, worried about what I would say to my mom when I didn’t come home until the next morning. Later that night, in his hotel room, I mentioned that my mom was visiting and currently sleeping in my bedroom. He asked: “What will you tell her when you don’t come home?”

“I haven’t really planned that far,” I said.

“Yeah, but you knew what would happen tonight.”

I texted my mom early the next morning to say I stayed at a friend’s place, not wanting to get back too late and wake her. I felt no guilt or consternation, and the lie came easily because I was so used to telling untruths in order to protect myself — to protect my parents’ idea of me. I would have said the same to my dad, and in many ways, I was acting just like him, keeping the details of my life hidden from my family.

When I finally arrived back at my apartment, my mom was chasing my cat around with a feather stick, trying to get her to play and clearly antsy for me to arrive home. The cognitive dissonance in that moment was alarming, but I put the previous night and morning out of my head as we walked around Central Park that afternoon.

A few days later, I told a friend about the conversation I’d had in bed, when he asked me what I would tell my mom.

“Okay, well first of all you’re an adult,” my friend said. “You don’t need to explain yourself.”

“I mean, I kind of do,” I replied.

I told her that though I’m almost thirty, I know that in order to protect myself, to protect my relationship with my parents, I had to lie. It’s difficult to imagine what would happen if either of my parents knew the truth. Sometimes, I wonder if they actually do know, but don’t say anything. Just as I’ve discovered some of my dad’s secrets over the years, has he discovered mine? Maybe it’s willful ignorance, or maybe I’ve developed a knack for lying. In the end, it’s just easier to keep secrets. It’s easier to live my life the way I want, and avoid conflict. Perhaps this was my dad’s thought process when he chose to get married in secret.

“Wait, so do your parents think you’re a virgin?” my friend asked.

“Yes,” I said.

***

A few years back, my younger brother and I had a conversation about the secrets we keep from our parents. He spoke of a desire to come clean entirely.

“Don’t you want them to know who you really are?” he asked.

“No,” I replied.

“I just want the same relationship with my parents that some of my friends have,” he said.

“White parents are different,” I told him, though I knew also, the rules were different for him growing up — maybe because he was a boy, maybe because he was 10 years younger than me. Though he kept secrets, the stakes always seemed lower for him. He didn’t care as much.

My mom grew up in Egypt, and my dad came to America at the age of 7. They divorced by the time I turned 4. I don’t know everything about their childhoods, their teenage years, their 20s, but I’ve gathered a bit from my own fuzzy memories and stories from relatives.

A few years back, my younger brother and I had a conversation about the secrets we keep from our parents. He spoke of a desire to come clean entirely.

One day when I was in second grade, my dad was supposed to pick me up from school. My parents both worked, so I was in the after-school program. Usually, my mom would pick me up, but for whatever reason, she couldn’t that day. At a certain point, I was the last child left waiting, afraid my dad had forgotten about me entirely. The after-school teachers stuck around, past the time they were supposed to, I assume, and I tried not to cry. Eventually, my dad showed up. He apologized for being late and drove me home to the apartment I shared with my mom, where we waited and watched TV until she arrived.

I don’t know the details, but somehow my mom knew that my dad had picked me up late. Maybe the school called her. Maybe he told her. They went into the bedroom and left me alone in the living room, but I could hear them arguing.

“You were drinking,” she said.

We didn’t drink. We were Muslim. He denied the accusation. I don’t remember what else was said, but that day stood out in my mind for years after.

Now, as an adult, I know that my dad did drink in his 20s and 30s, after he divorced my mom. He’s never told me this, and I don’t believe he ever will. I learned it from another member of the family. I know less about my mom, about her sins, but my dad’s lies stand out the most. He claims to be religious and pious, refusing to admit to any past transgressions.

It’s normal for parents to keep secrets from their children and vice versa, but I’ve often felt that I’ve had to hide details that seem innocuous in American culture. In my case, this is a combination of both cultural upbringing and religion. My parents grew up with Arab, Islamic values that they expect me to uphold to a certain degree. However, from the looks of it, neither my father nor I have managed to uphold these values. The only difference is that I don’t claim those values to be my own, preaching one set of ideas and acting in another way altogether.

In a restaurant a few weeks after finding out about my dad’s secret marriage, I asked him why he lied for so long, why he kept the relationship a secret.

“I didn’t have any other choice,” he said.

I balked at that answer. “You had a choice, and you chose to get married secretly. Is that Islamically sound, do you think?”

“You were so against it,” he said. “I didn’t want to upset you.”

He was referring to my anger at learning of the relationship in the first place — learning that she was so close in age to me. I never guessed he would marry her.

“How is this better?” I said. “To find out a year later?”

He didn’t apologize for his actions, instead repeating that he had no choice.

“Are you 19 years old?” I asked.

I was trying to imply that people his age didn’t behave this way — eloping in secret because of family disapproval. But maybe I was also thinking about myself. I wonder when I’ll grow out of the secrets. I’ve been lying to protect myself and also out of concern for my parents’ feelings. But at this point, it feels like none of that matters. Maybe my dad deserves to know the truth — to know that we are not very different, keeping secrets from one another.

* * *

Deena ElGenaidi is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn. She edits for Hyperallergic, and her work has been featured in Electric Literature, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and other publications. She is currently at work on a novel.

Editor: Sari Botton

Ben Huberman | Longreads | February 2015 | 13 minutes (3,354 words)

For the past ten years Frank Warren has been collecting and publishing other people’s anonymous secrets, sent via postcard, on his blog, PostSecret. The stories behind the postcards span the entire spectrum of human drama, from tales of petty revenge to accounts of abuse and severe depression. This richness of experience — along with the secrets’ visual design, by now a recognizable mishmash of Americana, well-executed kitsch, and ironic arts & crafts creations — has kept the site popular through multiple waves of internet fads. Originally a local mail art project in suburban Maryland, the site has spawned several books, including The World of PostSecret (released in November 2014), as well as a play, a TED talk, and numerous live events.

I have a longstanding fascination with the history of the Post, a system of communication based on the competing interests of technology, surveillance, and intimacy. Ever since first visiting PostSecret, it has struck me as a project that builds on and plays with that original postal tension: does sending a postcard bring reader and sender closer together, or stress the distance between them? PostSecret harkens back to the days of handwritten correspondences and epistolary novels, but requires a very modern, digital infrastructure to spread its message of healing-via-sharing. Intrigued by the multiple layers at play in his project, I recently chatted with Frank Warren over the phone about the meaning of secrecy in the age of Snapchat and Whisper, the relation between authenticity and anonymity, and the way he chooses which postcards to publish, having received more than 1,000,000 over the past decade. 

We all have a fairly decent idea of what the Post is. What is a secret?

I’ve been collecting secrets for ten years and my definition continually evolves and expands. One way to think of a secret is as dark matter — this stuff that makes up 90%-95% of what’s in the universe but that we can’t see, we can’t sense. The only way we know it’s there is how it affects the behavior of other objects. That’s the definition of a secret I’m living with now.

What happens to that dark matter once it becomes visible through a platform like PostSecret?

Maybe it goes from anti-matter to matter? I think the results of sharing a secret can be transformative. They can change who we are, they can create relationships. They can hurt, they can harm, they can heal. My hope is that when people share a secret with me and the world on a postcard, it’s a first step in a longer journey reconciling with that secret.

Do you ever receive follow-ups or updates from people who had sent you their postcards?

Yes! One follow-up I received was from someone who said that he had made up a story that he thought would make a good PostSecret secret and mailed it in. But then, after I scanned it and posted it on the web, he saw that through the mail process, some of the text that he had put on the postcard had been ripped away. And the secret had a new meaning. He went on to say — that secret that went on to appear on the postcard, on the website, was a true one in his life.

I’ve received another email from a woman who said, “I wrote down six secrets on postcards that I was going to send to you, Frank, but instead I left them on the pillow of my boyfriend as he was sleeping, and I went to work. Later that day, he arrives at my work and asks me to marry him, and I said Yes.”

How do you explain — to yourself — the power generated in the process of creating these postcards?

I think that when you’re speaking about secrets you’re talking about self-revelation. You’re talking about, in some cases, coming out to yourself. I was looking at a postcard today to make a selection for the Sunday Secrets on the website. And I saw one about an hour ago that said “Writing out this secret for the first time and reading it made me realize it wasn’t true.” So our secrets can have very complex relationships with who we are. Sometimes by sharing a secret you confirm it, and sometimes the sharing act in and of itself changes the nature of the secret.

We live in a strange moment right now — everybody is extremely concerned about surveillance and privacy, yet at the same time we seem to be compelled to share our innermost, most intimate emotions. How does your project relate to this tension?

You talk about the line between what we decide to reveal versus what we decide to conceal. We’ve always had to make that decision — it’s part of the human condition. I would say, though, that it’s much more of a tension now — now it’s an earthquake, with security, social media, and people presenting an image of themselves for public consumption.

I feel like PostSecret is almost like an anti-Facebook. It’s the true story that you would normally never share in a public arena. But in some ways, the more of ourselves we share online through social media, the less value it has. Sometimes the more we try and project an image of ourselves to others — and perhaps to ourselves — the deeper our secrets can hide from us. And so if we can find the courage to look deep and discover, uncover, and share a vulnerable secret, I think those kinds of stories have the most value of all. Not just to the person who’s confessing, but to the community that can hear it.

You’ve been doing this for a long time now — do you sense any shift taking place since you started PostSecret? Social media wasn’t nearly as ubiquitous back then. Apps like Whisper or Snapchat didn’t even exist.

I have the feeling that we’re in the middle of a transition now, but you can never really sense it when you’re in the midst of it — maybe we’ll be able to look back at this period and understand what was happening here. Generally, I think that every generation feels comfortable sharing a little bit more about themselves than their parents’ generation.

PostSecret’s been around for ten years, long before most social media. It gives people an opportunity through this unique marriage of digital media and a very traditional kind of communication — the postcard. And with the postcard, the anonymity is 100% transparent. If you send me a postcard and you don’t put your name on it, I might see a postmark, but there’s no way I could ever identify it back to you. And people get that. Anytime you’re online sharing anything, no matter if you’re guaranteed anonymity or not, there’s no way you can be certain if you’re truly speaking anonymously. I think that pure anonymity is potent and powerful, and one of the reasons PostSecret allows people to talk about their deepest secrets — things they never told their partner, their priest, or their family.

The intersection of the analog (postcards, handwriting, people’s artwork) and the digital (scanner, email, blog) has always been one of my favorite aspects of PostSecret. Which side is the more important one, from your perspective?

The amazing artwork on each postcard created by the sender, for me, is one of the most interesting parts of the project. The postcards themselves have been exhibited around the world — in Rio, at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, at MOMA in New York — and they’ve all been created by everyday people. I think of this sometimes as people’s art, or punk art. It just shows the investment people make in this ritual of finding the words to take ownership of their secrets, expressing them on a postcard, and then physically letting them go to a stranger.

That process carries so much more weight and gravity than if I allowed people to just email me their secrets or text the secrets. People ask me that, and I say, “No! It’s got to be on a postcard,” because I think there’s something cathartic about that process. And if you look at the artwork on the cards, sometimes the most expressive part of sharing a secret is done visually. In a way they’re able to do it because maybe the words would be too painful to say, or even to write.

Did you ever imagine that people would create such elaborate visual representations of their secrets?

Thankfully PostSecret started as an art project, so that kind of visual creativity is in its DNA.

Was 1960s mail art — I’m thinking about the Fluxus movement, for example — ever an explicit part of your vision?

Well, when I started PostSecret I had a pretty boring, monotonous job, and I was living in a suburb, I was a husband and father, so I would pursue these postcard projects after work and on the weekends. PostSecret was the third postcard art project I worked on and it just caught fire. But I do think of the project of being in the tradition of mail art, and I would even go back a little bit further — to Dadaism.

Speaking of Dadaism, you’ve been branching out recently from visual media to the performing arts — how did PostSecret: the Show come into being?

We’ve been working on the play for five years, and it’s had multiple workshops, and we’ve crafted it until we were all pleased with it.

I was invited to give a TED talk which led to me touring and sharing secrets with live audiences, listening to secrets live, especially from college students at PostSecret Live events. The play is a way for us to continue that tradition in a way that doesn’t require me to be there at every event, although I still continue to tour and have live events.

One of the things we do is share secrets that were created in the location where the show is performed, and we also invite audience members during intermission to write down a secret on the postcard and submit it for the second act. One thing that separates the show from the website is people coming together in this audience. For the first time they’re sharing a communal experience of the revelation of the secret. It’s a very different experience when you’re sitting as part of a large group, a community, reacting and hearing the other folks reacting to the secret, than when you’re reading the PostSecret book or scrolling through the website.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m hearing quasi-religious overtones in your description of a community congregating and processing through their own secrets (or sins) together.

I don’t think of secrets as confessions, or as sinful. I think of secrets as being very human — they can be funny, or sexual, or hopeful, or painful. Or criminal! My PostSecret Live events have evolved into trying to create a safe, non-judgmental space in a specific social setting, rather than online. With an audience of over 1,000 people I’ll be inviting members to walk up to a microphone and talk about a secret, a story they have not told anyone before. And that’s the most cathartic, and emotional, and memorable part of the night.

When we talk about a connection to spirituality, I think something’s there. In this country, for example — suicide is one of America’s secrets. It’s a secret that we keep to ourselves. And if you can broach the topic — which I do in my shows, I talk about my connection to the issue of suicide, my struggles — if you open up that conversation, instantly you find out that other people have their stories that they’ve been waiting to open up and talk about, they’ve just been waiting for the right moment.

Secrets are the currency of intimacy, and if we can just create a safe place for others to share, they’ll start this conversation that has a very deep and lasting meaning. Before PostSecret — maybe I’ll keep my religious experiences secret from you, but one thing I will share is before I even had the idea for PostSecret, I was a volunteer on a suicide prevention hotline, volunteering on that midnight-to-4 A.M. shift, listening to strangers call me up at that crucible in their life, and tell me their deepest secrets.

Has being exposed to so many confessions of pain and suffering over the years affected you? Has it changed who you are?

I think it has. I think it has in a good way. I feel as though I have a greater sense of understanding and compassion and empathy. I think I have a larger acceptance of the wide range of human behavior. I think of the postcards as songs or poems or novels. And maybe the more we’re exposed to people’s personal truths, the more we can put ourselves in the shoes of other folks, and feel a greater sense of connection.

When I grew up I had some struggles. I had some losses. And I think that because of that suffering as a young man and feeling alone with it, now as an adult, as I read secrets from others coming from a sense of suffering alone, I feel a greater sense of solidarity. And that’s my hope — when I share these kinds of secrets on the web, I think in some cases there can be great relief. When you feel like you’re alone in the world with a secret you haven’t told a soul and then, in a PostSecret book or on the website, you discover a stranger who has articulated your secret even more accurately than you could, that experience doesn’t make your secret go away, but it lets your burden of keeping it lift.

Do you tend to aim for some sort of balance in the topics you cover? Do you try to create mini-narratives with the secrets you select? Walk me through the way you approach the selection process.

The answer is yes to all of that! When I select a secret for the website — the Sunday Secrets — it’s a painstaking experience. I’m thinking of myself as a storyteller trying to weave together these individual secrets to become a conversation, a chorus. I see myself almost like a filmmaker, taking these single shots from individual people’s lives and editing them together to tell our story. And I want that story to be rich. Like a great novel. And I want it to have a rhythm, like a song that has a satisfying melody to it. So it’s all about fitting the secrets together, almost like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, until they all become something greater than the sum of the parts.

Are you at all concerned with the authenticity of secrets? Fact-checking them might be counterproductive, not to mention impossible, but is it something you care about?

That’s a question I get a lot from reporters! I think it has to do with the tradition of journalism and how, when you’re writing a story for a newspaper, you need attribution, you need sources. What I do is very different, and it has a different approach. In some ways I think there are deeper stories you can tell when you are allowed to remain anonymous. If you’re given a postcard and told: “You can put anything you want on this postcard and mail it to a stranger, and it’ll remain anonymous,” that allows you to really think a little bit deeper about what you’re willing to share.

We touched on it earlier — the idea of secrets as being self-revelatory. I think if you gave somebody two postcards, and you said: “I want you to write an anonymous secret on each one and I want one to be true, and one to be untrue,” in many cases the untrue secret would actually have a deeper and greater meaning than the one they consciously shared as being true. It’s the same way that walking into a bookstore you can find just as much meaning and truth in the pages of the books in the fiction section as in the nonfiction ones.

So, whether the content is factually correct or not, something of the sender is going to be revealed in the postcard anyway?

To take the time to purchase a postcard, get a stamp, write your secret, walk it to the post office, let it go, and know that more than likely it’s not going to be put on the web or in the books, because I get so many, that takes a lot of effort, and works as a pretty good screening process.

But honestly, if I gave you a postcard, and I said, “Make up a secret about your life and write it on there,” whatever you put down in that postcard, that idea that you think you’re making up has to come from somewhere. And I’ve had people mail in secrets thinking they were making it up but when they saw it on the website they realized it was their way of coming out to themselves. Or I’ve heard from other people who’ve been inspired to change their lives based upon a stranger’s secret. So even if it wasn’t true for the creator, it was to many others.

I’m really curious: is there a secret you’d never publish?

Yes! I have been contacted by the police and the FBI about secrets before, though that doesn’t necessarily prevent me from publishing them on the web. But one postcard I’ve never shared the image of and probably never will was a postcard made out of a family portrait. And the secret written across the portrait said: “My brother doesn’t know that his father is not the same as our father.” And you look at the faces of the children in the family, you could identify which brother he was talking about.

I don’t doubt the veracity of that secret, but I question who has ownership over it to share. I would not feel good about posting that on the web, and outing that young man, sharing the secret with him for the first time. That’s not the intent of PostSecret. So that’s an example I can share with you over the phone, but I would not post that image of that family and that young man on the web, in a way that could be hurtful to someone.

The number of secrets out there is infinite. Do you also consider PostSecret to be an infinite project?

Well, as we were talking I’ve been staring at a pyramid of secrets taller than me. I received over a million postcards in ten years. I think of secrets as poems or songs. I think they’re inexhaustible. And I’m thankful for that.

***

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Then he had things to tell her about himself. The fact that he had produced a condom did not mean that he was a regular seducer. In fact, she was only the second person he had gone to bed with, the first being his wife. He had been brought up in a fiercely religious household and still believed in God, to some extent. He kept that a secret from his wife, who would have made a joke of it, being very left-wing.

Corrie said she was glad that what they were doing—what they had just done—appeared not to bother him, in spite of his belief. She said that she herself had never had any time for God, because her father was enough to cope with.

-From Alice Munro’s 2010 short story, “Corrie,” published in The New Yorker and recommended by author Elliott Holt: “Alice Munro writes so well about secrets. ‘Corrie’ is a suspenseful story about adultery and blackmail, about illness and faith, and about the compromises we make for happiness.”

Read the story

Photo: Kyle Lanningham, YouTube