June 5, 2025 • 47 mins
As Sarah navigates the world as an artist and writer, she must confront the genetic history—its myriad patterns and traumas—at the heart of her story, her very self.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. This episode contains
discussion of physical abuse, animal abuse, and suicidal ideation. Listener
discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
To have children and not be prepared for the possibility
of schizophrenia. Would be irresponsible, But that's not a reason
not to have them if I want them. What if
my grandmother had opted not to have my mother? What
if my mother had opted not to have me. You
become a mother, and that's who you are. My mother
used to say to me. Would she have been better
(00:35):
off she hadn't become a mother? If not, who would
she have become?
Speaker 1 (00:42):
That's Sarah LaBrie, la based TV writer, producer, teacher, and
author of the recent memoir No One Gets to Fall Apart.
Sarah's is a story of inheritance, inherited trauma, genetic history, violence, brilliant,
and ultimately, it's a story of triumph, the triumph of creativity, seeking, searching, persevering,
(01:09):
and of love. I'm Danny Shapiro and this is family Secrets,
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
I was born in Oakland, and I lived there with
my mom and dad and about a million cousins until
maybe I was one or two, and then my parents
divorced and my mom brought me back to Houston, and
then I was raised by her and my grandmother and
my aunt in Texas. And this completely one hundred percent
(02:00):
black Mottle class neighborhood. Everybody get true to black Ginnis
with black. My doctor was black. That was just the
world I knew. I was all matriarchal and women led.
And then when I was about seven, I got to
a private school which was just the opposite of everything
i'd ever no, never understood. It was also in Houston,
(02:25):
and a neighborhood called for Brookes, which was like Beberly
Hells of Hosted and you know, all the children of
Houston Royalty went there, and I had no idea that
world even existed and that crossover was. It was interesting
for me because I was I was just child. But
I think it was really hard on my mom. I
(02:46):
think it was frustrating for girl, as a single mom
who had me, which was twenty, to suddenly see this
world of privilege that she hadn't had access to. That
she worried that I would never have real access to
and I think that frustration exacerbated. It's an angerish she said,
she already had. Obviously some frustrations she already had, and
(03:08):
it means my childhood difficult.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Sarah lives with her mom and grandmother in Third Ward,
a deeply rooted African American community in Houston, but when
it's time for her to go to school, she is
sent to Saint John's in River Oaks, a private school
fifteen minutes and a world away.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
My grandmother was actually a pretty successful business woman in
Third Ward. It's interesting. She was a housing lawyer. She
worked for the city in the seventies, and she started
her own all female law firm with all black female
lawyers from her law school. And she'd done really well
for herself. And by the time I was born, she
had left her practice. She'd actually watched her mother die
(03:53):
of breast cancer and had gone back to school and
started a natural health company. This was kinda back in
the eighties when I was really doing that, And so
she became kind of a de facto not doctor, but
kind of paramedical professional for that neighborhood. And so because
of that, she had access to certain things in certain worlds.
(04:14):
So She knew about Saint John's and she understood the
opportunities that would come from going to a school like that,
and she made sure that I got on the wait list.
She took me through the testing to get in in
first grade, and I think she just thought it was
safer and it was just a better bet for my future.
(04:34):
And my mom did not agree at all and didn't
want me to go there, and it consed a lot
of difficulty between the two of them.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Tell me about your mom from your childhood, like from
that time, what was your experience of her and you know,
this matriarchal society in your childhood, what did you pick
up on before age seven? What was your sense of things?
Speaker 2 (04:56):
My mom, she was so beautiful and so beloved, and
she had grown up in Houston, in this community. My
whole family knew everybody, and I think that's something that
can sometimes be easy to forget. I think, you know,
we were, yes, we we we're a black family, but
it wasn't like she was constantly worried about racism or
(05:19):
being victimized. And same with my grandmother, like just everyone
we knew was black. I cannot stress not enough. And
that was the world that she wanted me to live
in too. There's something about sort of how strong when
those bonds are, and how comfortable she felt having gone
to the high school she went to where you know
(05:39):
a lot of black artists have come out of that
well and hopeful shuvershot as from their maybe Alvin Aley,
just like she felt really proud of that history. And ye,
she was beautiful, she was smart, but she had a darkness.
I found out more about a since got worse as
I got older. She was reactive. She couldn't really handle
all lot of emotional stress. I think having me so young,
(06:03):
and then she dropped out of college and moved home
so that my grandmother could help take care of me,
and she wanted to be a writer, and suddenly just
everything had changed for her. And I you know, I
know that she loved me. I don't presented me, but
I do you think my existence represented kind of a
division and her future and the potential for what her
(06:24):
life could have been. And I don't know how subconscious
so that was for her, how aware of it was
she was. But I think things got hard for her
after she gave birth to me and moved home.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
And your father was he in the picture at all.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
So she had left Houston to go to college. She
ended up going to community college in the Bay Area,
and then she transferred to San Francisco State and that's
where she met my dad. And he was from a
big Catholic family in Oakland, and you know, he's a
sweet guy, but he's not super interested in being a
responsible father. And the couple different versions of the story,
(07:01):
but from what I understand, he just was not pulling
his weight and was making it very difficult for her
and their kids. At this point, she was twenty one,
that's how old he was when they got married, and
I think she tried to make a go of it
for maybe a year or so, and eventually my mom's
mom actually came and got my mom at NY and
(07:22):
he left my dad behind. You know, my dad now
says he was so devastated, but he knows who knows
that's true. And he came and he visited a little
when I was a kid, but my mom was very
angry with him. And I think when my mom was angry,
it was really scary, and I got tired of big
(07:43):
threat did stop making an effort. He wasn't really in
the picture. I think maybe we would talk a couple
of tens a year, and that's why I said the case.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
So, when you're seven, you go to this new school
that's very different, just an entirely different world from the
world that you had grown up in up until that point.
Would you say that's around the time that your mother's
rage started really emerging toward you, or was it something
(08:15):
that you had experienced prior to making that shift that
was so threatening for her?
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Honestly, I think towards me it came even later. It
was only at this point that I started and now
in retrospect so that I can see that there was
a point in second grade where she thought that a
teacher was being racist towards me, And it's entirely possible
that she was. I don't know. I was one of
two black students in my grade, one of maybe ten
(08:43):
in the whole school of however many, you know, twelve
hundred people, Keithrie tells hir at school. I remember her,
you know, just ranting and calling for racist. But then
she also kind of set me down and was like, well,
this woman's going to be racist towards you. I'm going
to make or she has nothing She complained about with you.
And the problem I think is that I was getting
(09:04):
vargas on a spelling test, even though my spelling was perfect,
but I was getting handwriting docked, and so she made
me sit down and learn how to have perfect handwriting,
you know, out of kind of rage at this teacher.
So it was almost like a constructive rage or like
a spite, like you are going to win in spite
of these people. Another time, I remember we were at
(09:26):
a library and I was she was studying. A woman
at a table over shushed me. I remember my mom
lepped across the table. I screamed at this one. I
called her names, insulted her and for shushing me. And
that was sort of a story in my family about oh,
you know, she's such a mama bear. But it was
also like deeply antisocial behavior. I mean, even though it's sweet,
(09:47):
I think it was a symptom of what was to come.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Did you recognize that as a child, and I asked
this as the daughter of a very angry mother myself,
like this feeling, you know that it's not usual, that
it's not you know that not everybody experiences this, or
did you have that feeling as a child the most
more common feeling that kids have that whatever's going on
(10:10):
in their little universe is normal, that everybody must be
experiencing this because it's the only world, you know.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Absolutely yeah, I had no idea that everyone's mom wasn't
like this. I don't think it was until he was
a teenager and I remember a friend saying, oh, you know,
I got I went and got my nails done with
my mom and we played tennis. So I was like,
you got your nails down, you played tennis with your mom.
What are you talking. I mean, it is possible to
have sort of a civil relationship with one's mom, as
(10:38):
I think is often the case with what I think
was ongoing a sporderline personality disorder generally. When I started
to pull away from her so fifth grade, sixth grade, eleven, twelve, thirteen,
and I started to have my own friends, my own life,
that was when she became much more, much more physically abusive,
(10:59):
repeating me over the tiniest things like constantly ranting and
yelling over nothing, always on the drive to school, which
is why I think this school was such a trigger
for her. And then I think the other thing was
my grandmother bought us this house because for my grandmother
was very important that I feel comfortable at Saint John's,
(11:19):
that I feel like, you know, the other kids didn't
have stuff that I couldn't have, even though they were
exponentially wealthiard than we were. And so she bought us
a house and the upscale part for board, you know,
where all the black doctors and lawyers lived. And so
suddenly my mom, who was making a nurse's salary, which
was not very high at that time for her, was
(11:39):
living in this large, you know, three bedroom house with
the sunroom, herbid floors, air, separate garage, laund room, huge backyard.
And she didn't want that. She'd never wanted these trappings
as well. She thought they were artificial. And she looked
at that house and I think she saw me. Maybe
around the time I was eleven, we were silly, constantly
(12:00):
at war, and it just take our stores.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
And then it got still worse. In these new surroundings,
Sarah has first won than two, then three dogs. They
are her companions, they're her friends. Then something happens that
is so traumatic that it changes everything.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
So this was the worst thing that had ever happened
to me. For a very long time, I had these dogs.
You know, think about Texas in the nineties. I think
the relationship to dogs that people had in general was
very different than it is now. And I had a
dog that a family friend had found abandoned, and because
we had a backyard, my grandmother just said, here, you guys,
(12:45):
take this dog at midnight. I loved him so much
as white mutt. And then my grandmother, for some reason,
bought me an akc registered Now you know, I loved
his dog so much. And then my mom, maybe out
of rivalry with my grandmother or something, I don't know,
got me another Schnauzer puppy I don't I don't know why.
(13:09):
So suddenly I had three dogs. I was maybe eleven
years old. My mom had no one testing taking care
of these dogs, and they barked a lot at night,
and the neighbors would complain, and you know, I did
what I could, but I got a certain point. My
mom and I got to one of our mini fights,
and I the dogs were out of food and I
wanted her to pick them up. She just had it out.
I want her to grab some on the way home.
She got mad at me for asking, and she yelled
(13:31):
at me in this really cruel way, like she often did.
I really hurt my feelings. I threw I can of
bugspray or something at my bedroom window, and I broke it.
I was so scared because I knew that I was
going to get so much trouble. And so I wrote
a letter explaining what I had done and apologizing so
she wouldn't find it be surprised. And I put it
(13:53):
at the bottom of the stairs so she'd find it
as her child. And she got home and she read it,
she even saying, and she just like came up in
the car. She got all three dogs. But then in
the car she had this land Cruiser suv that my
grandmother had bought for her, and drove to a parking
lot like a pet coke off the side of the highway.
The head store was closed and where she thought was
(14:14):
gonna happen, and she pulled into the parking lot, opened
the doors and just shoved the dogs out into the
parking lot and drove off with me still in the
car and the dog. She's behind us up on the highway,
and then you know saw me, I screaming, I didn't
I have no idea that she was going to do that.
And I didn't know how to stop it. And then
when I got home, she sent me over the side
(14:37):
of the bathtob and beat me with a belt, which
was something that she often did. But yeah, I didn't
know why she was doing any of this at the time.
I just thought that I was just so horrible that
I deserved this. And I remember going to bed and
the windows still being broken, and there were june bugs
at this time of year in Houston, could hear, and
(15:00):
I was so scared. They're as terrified of them, and
they're going to fly in through the window. And I
stayed up all night staring at that that whole glass,
the window. And after that I pretty much stopped talking
to my mom for a long time, and I just
I think that was when I understood, oh, Okay, something
is seriously broken here. That's maybe bigger than I knew before.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
We'll be right back. When eighth grade rolls around, Sarah
starts emailing colleges. Yes, these emails are way premature, but
(15:52):
she's hatching an escape plan and the process needs to
start early. The ground must be laid to get out.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
I think I understood that because of the opportunities provided
for me by the school. I had a lot more
access to the larger world than maybe somebody had gone
to a different school would. And I was like, how
do I just make sure that I get into the
(16:23):
best college I possibly can and then never have to
come back here. I can just leave and never come
back because I knew older students who had done that. Yeah,
it's strange to think about, but I just somehow knew, like, oh,
I'm just gonna email. I remember emailing USC and thing
like here I am, I'd love to come here. Let
me know what I need to do. And they were like,
you're way too young to be in touch with us,
(16:45):
And I just kept emailing, just stayed in touch, did
the summer programs, did the AP classes, volunteered, kept my
grades up as high as possible. Like my whole body
was just like an arrows to leaving how and never
coming back.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
Did you have anyone in your life that was like
in any way mentoring you or helping you become that arrow?
Or was this all you? And was there a teacher?
Was there anybody? Or was this just driven by your
own capacity and intense desire?
Speaker 2 (17:19):
I think indirectly, yes, I was always like the English
teacher's favorite. I would win the writing awards, and that
was that was something I knew I was good at,
and I think teachers expected me to be good at
and to each year they would kind of hould me
up to a certain standard, and I think being held
up to that standard was what gave me the confidence
(17:41):
to think, Okay, well, I can lean on this and
hopefully a get into like a good college with a
full fellowship, and I just have to figure out how
to do it. What I think is probably a story
for a lot of kids who love to read and
love to write. You just realize, ok, hey, this could
be this could be my thing, and if you have
the right teachers, it can become your thing. They didn't
know what was going on at home. I think, you know,
(18:03):
there were glimpses here and there, but for the most part,
I just leaned into that sort of kindness that came
from those classrooms.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
Sarah's grandmother is on the one hand, responsible for Sarah
attending the school in River Oaks, but she's also focused
on keeping Sarah connected to her own culture and history.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
I think what was very lucky was that I had
my grandmother Earth and she, you know, she was the
one who had gotten me into this school, but I
think you a part of her felt like, all right,
but you need to also stay connected to who you
are and who your roots are, so we would travel
to Africa together. You know. She did really try to
keep me fully embedded in this third word community that
(18:49):
had been her home and was my home. But at
the same time I did pull away from that. I
think there was a part of me that wanted to
be loved at school, that wanted to assimilate, and that
meant that I changed the way I talked, you know,
I straightened my hair. I tried to just be, you know,
as skinny as possible and as pretty and perfect as possible.
(19:10):
And there was always kind of this division in terms
of like culture and taste and even language between what
the school offered, which to me seemed like the doorway
to wealth and success and freedom and life, and then
my home and sort of my roots in this place
(19:30):
where my aunt was and my mom and my grandmother
that had been our home you know for decades and
for generations, and I kind of just had to live
with that divide inside me for a long time. I
probably still do.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
Sarah's plan that first begins in eighth grade, works and
she's admitted to Brown University in two thousand and three.
Brown is a great school, an ivy, and perhaps it
goes without saying, a super privileged place, a bastion of
wealth and whiteness that makes even Saint John's look like
(20:05):
child's play.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
I was terrified to feel anything, and I was on
the opposite side of the country, and I was experiencing
extremely cold weather for the first time, and I was
still dealing with all of the residual effects of my
childhood and none of that had been resolved. And also,
I don't come from the family where you use the
(20:28):
word depression, or you talk about medication, or you talk
about singether. I didn't even know I was allowed to
see a therapist. So by the time I got there,
I was, you know, beyond divided. I think I was
already just practically on the verge of shattering. I was
so fragile psychically, and I didn't quite know it. And
the stress of being in that that sort of hothouse
(20:51):
environment is that like deeply rarefied world where yes, everyone
comes from amounts of money, you didn't even know where
possible people are literal Royalty and you're hanging out with them,
your friends are dating them, you're dating them, your exes
are dating them, and you, you know, every second of
every day, you're just like, what am I doing here?
I don't belong here, but I have nowhere else to go,
(21:11):
and so I have to make it work. I think
that would maybe be enough to break anybody, but it
was immensely difficult. Also at the same time, you're experiencing
this incredible privilege. I mean, I was a brown I
was at an ivy like school. I'd done it, you know,
a black girl makes good like that's what the story
is supposed to be. But all I wanted to do
(21:32):
was go home. And then I knew if I went
home it wouldn't work. It would be horrible too. So
it was just terrible.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Despite the sense of not belonging. Sarah does make a
very good friend, and pretty much right away at orientation.
Her name is Sadie and they have an instant kinship.
But it's complicated.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Sadie was much more of the world. Just even doing
like that was just at pleast where she felt comfortable.
She wasn't an outsider, it was she knew what these
sort of all the academic counts were like and we
were real black and we both wanted to write, and
everything just seemed too much easier for her, and she
(22:16):
sort of flowed through these various worlds and everyone had
a crush on her, and she just impressed everyone. And
she held out her hand to me and said, you know,
come on, come with me. I'm going to show you
how to do this. And that active kindness sort of
changed my whole life and my whole factory at Brown.
So this was the era of the hipster and there
were all these rich hipster boys who lorded over Brown
(22:41):
and knew it. You know, they underserved their status was
and it was seen as a privilege to be among
them by some people. I was one of those people, unfortunately,
and they went along on a trip ill advised to
the city when I probably should have been class and
you know, did some substances I probably shouldn't have done,
and got myself into a very bad situation where I
(23:03):
was basically sexually assaulted by someone that I thought was
a friend in the empty apartment in the city that
his parents owned. And this was one of those people
with that sort of crazy generational wealth that was kind
of beyond my understanding, and the level of power that
came with that was beyond my understanding. I didn't really
know what had happened until afterwards, but it became something
(23:27):
that I couldn't quite figure out how to articulate or
wrap my head around, because on the one hand, I
had chosen to put myself in a certain situation, but
on the other hand, I was definitely taking advantage of.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
And was this something that you sort of tucked away?
Did you tell people about it?
Speaker 2 (23:45):
I think I just didn't want it to be a
big deal. I think I was probably pretty angry, but
it wasn't cool to be angry. I didn't feel comfortable
expressing that anger, even to myself.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
Anger something to us, especially when we're afraid to feel it,
when we've internalized the idea that anger is very bad
and very dangerous, that it's not a safe feeling for us.
What Sarah does feel is despair. She goes back to
Houston for spring break, and all that internalized, unexpressed anger
(24:22):
morphs into suicidal ideation. She considers not going back to school,
considers giving up altogether. She's afraid that if she goes
back to school after break she'll hurt herself or worse.
Sadie knows what Sarah's going through and suggests a therapist,
but this too is complicated.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
It was one of those things where you can only
see the on site therapist at the school through three sessions,
and then if you seem worse, they try to send
you into the city or into the field and you
have to go figure out your own insurance and therapy.
And I had no idea how to do that. If
you seem too messed up, you know, to citle, then
you have to go home and drop out of college.
Like there just wasn't any help to be found. It
(25:09):
was almost like you had to know how to find
help to find help. And this is the early mid
two thousands. The conversation around this was non existent. It
was just you take what you get if that's enough,
and deal with it.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Sarah, was there a I mean, none of these things
are neat and tidy, I know, but like, was there
a breaking point? Was it after you know, the incident
in New York or was it the culmination of you know,
just this perfect storm of everything building that led to
is this like suicidal thinking?
Speaker 2 (25:41):
Throughout this I had been dating the same person on
and off. Then this deeply dysfunctional relationship, even though you know,
we did love each other from freshman year until senior year.
And I was horrible to this person. But he had
a normal family and was a normal guy, and he
was so kind, and I thought maybe he would be
(26:02):
my ticket, like he was the thing where okay, this
is my life raft I could hold on to this
person and he'll save me. And it just kept not
working out because it just wasn't supposed to work out.
And at a certain point he was just like, I'm done,
I can't do this with you anymore, and he needed
someone of his social classes. I was just like, okay, well,
(26:23):
I'm as that went up. I'm not going to get
another chance to get out of this like black hole
that I'm met and I don't know want to do anymore.
And I think it was that it was that combined
with everything else that was going on, and they were
all kind of symptoms of each other. You know, me
reaching out grassing onto this relationship and thinking that was
the thing I needed was obviously like a symptom of
this deeper dark or hurt that came from my relationship
(26:44):
with my mom that I wasn't ready to.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
Look at Sarah's grandmother does something uncharacteristic. She gives Sarah
straight up advice, perhaps even a command, to get herself
back to Brown, not to throw all her hard work,
her life away.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
It was the only time she's ever done anything like that.
She doesn't like to put her hand on the scale
in that way. After her grandmother died of breast cancer,
she got really into Ruddism and Christian Marty and holistic health.
She would never give direct advice. It was always kind
of just figured it out on your own. But this
was the one time where she said, if you don't
go back to school, basically you're going to be ruining
(27:27):
your life. You have to finish because she knew somehow,
she just knew. I think she was right. It was
the hardest thing I've ever done. I do not know
how I survived. I still don't know how I survived
that last Seinmeister, but I'm very grateful to her for
not so.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Then during that period of time, the end of college
and then post college you moved to LA Do you
have any relationship with your mother during that period of
time or have you really kept your distance from her?
Speaker 2 (27:55):
So I was in so much pain and I had
it felt like I had no one, and I would
call her to reach out and she would just scream
and scream and scream because my pain was hurting her
and she didn't know how to say that. She was
not equipped to provide, you know, consolation or advice. I
(28:15):
would just call and cry and she would yell at me.
But that was our relationship.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
(28:45):
After college, Sarah goes back home. She's living on her
grandmother's couch, and again she needs to get out, needs
encouragement to get out.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
It was my hairdresser, who was another one of these
black women that i'd always kind of grown up in
her orbit, my aunt's friend, and she said, don't stay here,
like go, just go, And I did because I think
I needed somebody to see that explicitly to me.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Back in La Sarah gets a job as an assistant
at an entertainment agency. It's here that she first meets Ethan,
who's a client. A while later, the two run into
one another again at another assistant's birthday party, where they're
seated next to one another. This is the start of
a long committed relationship. Ethan's a great guy, even tempered,
(29:36):
kind loving. They're in the kind of partnership that supports
Sarah as she pursues her dreams. She applies to MFA
programs in writing and is accepted into NYU's Creative writing program,
one of the best in the country. She and Ethan
do the long distance thing during those years, and Sarah's
(29:57):
friendship with Sadie also continues, as does the complexity of
that friendship.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
There was always this question pull between us because I'd
come from a school where I felt like I'd been
the best writer, and I knew that this is something
I could do. And then I'm at Sadie, who maybe
just write virtue of where she came from, was just
leagues ahead of me and got out of college thinking
maybe should be a doctor, and then suddenly decided to
(30:25):
be a writer, and then bam, was just a writer.
And I felt like, okay, I'm probably behind. It's we're
constantly I always felt competitive, but she was so generous,
you know, like, oh, you know, applying for this job
or do this, you know. She had her ear to
the ground. She was like really well connected, and so
she would say, well, let's do this application together, or
(30:47):
send your work here and it'll get published. And because
I know this personer, you know, I'll send you my
spreadsheet for applying to fellowships and grants. And I was like,
what's what's a fellowship? What's a grant? Like she just
she just knew so much more than me. And and
so it's hard because I loved this person so much
and she was so helpful, but part of me it
was also just like, why is it so easy for you?
And why is it phil It's never going to happen
(31:08):
for me. And it was just like that for years
and years.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
There are times in the life of a writer where
a project becomes utterly consuming, to the point of blindness.
Sarah had long been fascinated by the work of the
philosopher Walter Benjamine and his ideas about the interconnectedness of
the Paris Arcades. She began what was she believed to
(31:34):
be her magnum opus, a novel inspired by Benjamin's series
of pattern and connection.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
So Walter Benjamine had written this, he never even finished it,
but he was trying to write a book called The
Arcades Project about the Paris Arcades, which are these who
are justus last covered gas lit walkways in Paris, that
he did this forensic analysis of the people who passed
(32:03):
through them and the class dynamics and what they represented
in terms of fashion and style and French culture. And
my professor at Brown was the first reason to translate
it from German into English. So I took his class
and I kind of fell in love with Benjamine and
like a lot of people do, I think he's one
of the more accessible theorists or philosophers out there. And
(32:26):
I ended up dropping out of that class during that
terrible senior year when I basically dropped every class an
almost DISI and graduate and I had just been carrying
this work around with me, this sort of half finished
essay I'd written and had been thinking about in terms
of Benjamine and the Arcade project, and carry that with
me all the way to grad school and was like, well,
(32:47):
maybe I can turn this into a novel. I can
write a book about the arcades and about this history
of Paris. And then, of course the same thing happened
to me that had happened to Benyamine, where Benjamin could
never actually quite finish this book, and then he'd actually
died during a holocaust, and I couldn't finish my book
about Benjamin trying to write this book and just felt
(33:08):
myself getting buried and buried in the layers and the
history and the research, and you know, just losing any
confidence I had that I could be a writer because
I had taken on this huge project.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
After grad school, Sarah moves back to la and she
and Ethan are living together. They've both been working on
really interesting projects. Ethan's been making films and Sarah wrote
a libretto. Her escape plan is now fully functional. She's
feeling good happy. One day in twenty seventeen, they're at
(33:42):
a wedding celebration in Paso Roblis, beautiful wine country in California. There,
she gets a call. It's her grandmother calling to tell
her that her mother has been picked up on the
side of a highway.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
There was just a total curtain of like dread that
just fell over me. We hadn't spoken when she had
her first psychotic break. We hadn't spoken in years. We'd
had a falling out over a project that I'd done
that she'd been offended by, and I had actually just
sort of right before my grandmother called, gotten a strange
(34:19):
phone call from her in what she was like very
kind to me, and it was really weird. And then
a few days later my grandmother called and said that
she'd been picked up and taken to the mental hospital
and they couldn't see her, you know, because she didn't
want to see anyone, and she believed that FBI agents
or cops were following her down the highway, you know,
(34:40):
by the hundreds and had been chasing her all across
the city, so she wouldn't go inside. She wasn't eating,
she wasn't showering, she lost her job, and was just
living in this sort of complete state of delusion.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
There's a quote in your book where you right, I
want my mother to have the life I have to
drink champagne at a wedding on a farm. The contrast
at that point between the life that you're living and
the life that is really catching up with her and
that she's spinning into so stark. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
I felt like I'd kind of fully ascended to kind
of the creative class. I did sort of have the
beginnings of a life I'd aspired to, and then all
of a sudden I felt such guilt you know, I
just felt like, what am I even doing? Why am
I at this wedding? Why am I writing opera libretti?
What am I even? You know that none of that
(35:34):
is real. What's real is what's happening to my mother,
and there's nothing I can do about that. So the
reason we had stopped speaking in the years before she
got sick was because of an opera that i'd written
the libretto for where one of the actresses in it
sang a kind of a romantic song, and my mom
(35:54):
had come to see it, and she decided that the
actress was in love with me, and I was in
the with her, and I was cheating on my partner
and lying to everyone, and that I was gay, and
suddenly she was virulently homophobic, where she hadn't been before.
So now, obviously I can see that was probably a
first step towards her total decompensation later, but at the time,
(36:18):
it just felt like she was ascribing to me all
these lives and this life that I was not living,
and I didn't understand how to push back against that,
because when somebody fully believes something about you that isn't true,
it can be really scary. Especially when that person is
your mom and they believe it on no evidence. I
didn't know this actress. I hadn't cast the Peace, We
(36:39):
had no previous relationship. I hadn't really even met her
before experiencing that scene with my mother, and so that
I knew that her mental illness was like something that
could really get its hooks into me and kind of
pull me under. And that had been happening for my
whole life, and so I was really scared that was
going to happen and to complete s like if she
(37:03):
we were so kind of imasged, and even though weren't speaking,
she was such a huge part of my life that
I felt like, well, this is happening to her, then
it's definitely it happened to me too. And on the
one hand, I need to see as far away from
as possible, But on the other hand, I have her
daughter and I have to go home. I didn't know
what the answer was. I wanted so badly to fix
her because I had so much guilt, but I was
(37:24):
still afraid fixing her would me and breaking myself.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
So you do go back to Houston, and what's that like?
Speaker 2 (37:32):
It's very strange, I think one thing, you know, experiencing
someone else's psychosis. There's nothing like that, and once do
you experience it face to face, you're just forever changed.
She looked like my mom, but she was living in
a completely different world. She was living in this empty room.
She'd taken over a part of a building that my
(37:53):
grandmother owned and and died it out, and was afraid
that someone was going to come and steal in the
two chairs that she had in there. And she still
believed that she had been persecuted. She felt my grandmother
and my aunt were feeding her poison and she was
starving herself, and she wouldn't use a toothbrush, and she
only wanted to eat black foods like avocados and sesame seeds.
(38:15):
It was just sort of like like unreal. It felt
almost dream like. I wanted her to just snap out
of it, and she couldn't. I had been building my
life so carefully there wouldn't be spaced for chaos. I mean, like,
you know, I had spreadsheets of my budget, and I
carefully kind of calculated out my time, and I would
wake up early and write every single day, and I
just sort of made sure that nothing could go wrong.
(38:38):
And then Suddenly everything was going wrong, and my mom
had always been such a chaos agent that it felt like, Okay, well,
this wall life put up against chaos has totally been
broken down. There's nothing I can do. This book that
I've been working on for so long won't come together.
I had put all my eggs in this basket with
my hope for becoming, and I thought I was going
(38:59):
to become like this big novelist. That's all I wanted.
I just wanted to matter as a writer. And not
only was that not going to happen, my mom was
freaking into pieces. I was having issues with my best friend,
and I just I wanted to go crazy. I wanted
none of it to be my responsibility. And I thought,
if my mom can do that, and I'll do it too,
(39:20):
it's fine. I won't be afraid of it anymore. I'll
just I'll just lose it too.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
It all comes to a head, of course, Sarah begins
a destructive rampage. She destroys her manuscript, all her research.
Her intention is to get free of her existence and
slip into the abyss, but she doesn't. Ethan rescues her papers,
(39:50):
piecing back together as much as he can, and Sarah
emerges from the deep despair that her mother has caused
her yet again. In twenty nineteen, she and Ethan get married.
Her mother does not attend the wedding. Why because her
mother herself has fallen into the abyss. She is extremely unwell,
(40:15):
unable to travel, unable to be in Sarah's life. The
absence is both a wound and a relief. Sarah tries
therapy again, and this time it works. It clicks. The
right therapist can make all the difference, and this one
provides ketemine assisted therapy, a form of therapy in which
(40:37):
the anesthetic ketymine is taken in a clinical setting and
under the influence of ketemine, Sarah returns to the world
of Walter Benyamine and the images and concepts that have
long fascinated her. But now she's able to draw powerful connections.
Why was she drawn to Benyamine's work. She realized that
(41:01):
her interest was not only literary, but also something psychologically profound.
Bena means invisible patterns have contained a kind of secret.
In researching schizophrenia, Sarah had discovered a term a psychological
condition apofinia, a hallmark of which is the certainty of
(41:25):
invisible patterns. Apofinia is often a precursor to schizophrenia. Sarah
comes to understand that she has been terrified all along
that she might inherit her mother's condition. This gives her
whole new stores of empathy, both for her mother and
(41:46):
for herself.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
This therapist, she focused a lot on kind of her
child's work as well. And I had been living with
this fear that this is actually true, that there is
this sort of tree like pattern that governs the growth
of everything, every natural thing, but also construction and things
you wouldn't necessarily expect. And I had started to pick
(42:11):
up on this treelike pattern that is the same across
things like cracks in the sidewalk and the shape of
lightning and the sap of rivers and the way trees grow.
When I was living in Paris and grad school for
a summer and I just started to see it everywhere.
I just was like, it's really weird that you know,
the shape of my veins breaking open in my wrist
(42:33):
is the exact same shape of my fingers breaking off
from my palm. But I didn't know what to do
with that information, and I didn't know of seeing that everywhere,
those correspondences everywhere, not just in physical things, but and
just sort of patterns of thought and story structure meant
that I was going crazy and I didn't I didn't
(42:54):
know who to talk to you about it, because you know,
most of the time you try to explain that to
someone and they just tune out. You sound like you're
in drugs or something. But I eventually came across this
book about something called the constructal law, and it turns
out that this sheep is just a natural physical form
that that does actually, you know, is a law that
is a pattern of growth. The term was coined by
(43:14):
Adrian Vijon, who is an engineering professor at Duke, and
he applies this pattern to all kinds of sort of
thermal energy scientific things. But he actually says in the
book that sometimes civilians will discover in this pattern and
think they're going crazy because we're so used to normal people,
and I'll be able to understand universal scientific laws or
(43:34):
discover them. And I felt so indicated by that. I
just remember sort of carrying that into my understanding of
my mother and this idea of family trees, and you know,
what happens to her necessarily does happen to me, because
I'm an extension of her, I'm a branch of her.
And what happened with this therapist was something about like
(43:55):
the ketamine therapy, which she you take a loose in
the gin and then you lose it for an hour,
and then you have therapy about what you fly stated
about that sort of in the context of a larger
therapeutic relationship, and I was able to see my mother
not as the aggressor or the one with all the power,
but as a child, as a little girl of reaching
(44:16):
out her hands maybe for help immediate to me, and
understand that as afraid as I was of her and
for her, like that version of her that existed before
I ever, just before she was ever sick, still existed somewhere,
and I could find some solace and one and I
could find some kinship and some companionship with that virsion
(44:39):
of her, and that vision of her was safe and
innocent then deserved to be loved and to be held
and to be healed. And I was able to channel
a lot of love towards that version of her, which
I think was healing for me, because then I was
able to love the version of myself that existed in
that scenario too, you know, the younger version of me,
(45:00):
and realized that that version me deserved help too. You
know that now we're imperfect, but we both deserve safety,
you know, and to have a kind of relationship that
maybe we hadn't been able to access before, because that
we needed.
Speaker 1 (45:18):
Here's Sarah reading one last passage from her remarkable memoir
No One gets to fall apart.
Speaker 2 (45:30):
If the patterns I saw in Paris met what I
thought they did. If everything that grows is shaped like
a branching tree, and if the core of that shape
is the trunk that runs through it, then life itself
is that trunk, and all of us are branches, elements
of a process of death and rebirth that progresses along
a continuum. We will never be able to see both
(45:53):
of us. My mother and I are a step towards
something new, and our lives are part of something bigger,
something but Changing.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Acre 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 one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
(46:36):
find me on Instagram at Danny Rider and if you'd
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(47:07):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. This episode contains
discussion of physical abuse, animal abuse, and suicidal ideation. Listener
discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
To have children and not be prepared for the possibility
of schizophrenia. Would be irresponsible, But that's not a reason
not to have them if I want them. What if
my grandmother had opted not to have my mother? What
if my mother had opted not to have me. You
become a mother, and that's who you are. My mother
used to say to me. Would she have been better
(00:35):
off she hadn't become a mother? If not, who would
she have become?
Speaker 1 (00:42):
That's Sarah LaBrie, la based TV writer, producer, teacher, and
author of the recent memoir No One Gets to Fall Apart.
Sarah's is a story of inheritance, inherited trauma, genetic history, violence, brilliant,
and ultimately, it's a story of triumph, the triumph of creativity, seeking, searching, persevering,
(01:09):
and of love. I'm Danny Shapiro and this is family Secrets,
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
I was born in Oakland, and I lived there with
my mom and dad and about a million cousins until
maybe I was one or two, and then my parents
divorced and my mom brought me back to Houston, and
then I was raised by her and my grandmother and
my aunt in Texas. And this completely one hundred percent
(02:00):
black Mottle class neighborhood. Everybody get true to black Ginnis
with black. My doctor was black. That was just the
world I knew. I was all matriarchal and women led.
And then when I was about seven, I got to
a private school which was just the opposite of everything
i'd ever no, never understood. It was also in Houston,
(02:25):
and a neighborhood called for Brookes, which was like Beberly
Hells of Hosted and you know, all the children of
Houston Royalty went there, and I had no idea that
world even existed and that crossover was. It was interesting
for me because I was I was just child. But
I think it was really hard on my mom. I
(02:46):
think it was frustrating for girl, as a single mom
who had me, which was twenty, to suddenly see this
world of privilege that she hadn't had access to. That
she worried that I would never have real access to
and I think that frustration exacerbated. It's an angerish she said,
she already had. Obviously some frustrations she already had, and
(03:08):
it means my childhood difficult.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Sarah lives with her mom and grandmother in Third Ward,
a deeply rooted African American community in Houston, but when
it's time for her to go to school, she is
sent to Saint John's in River Oaks, a private school
fifteen minutes and a world away.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
My grandmother was actually a pretty successful business woman in
Third Ward. It's interesting. She was a housing lawyer. She
worked for the city in the seventies, and she started
her own all female law firm with all black female
lawyers from her law school. And she'd done really well
for herself. And by the time I was born, she
had left her practice. She'd actually watched her mother die
(03:53):
of breast cancer and had gone back to school and
started a natural health company. This was kinda back in
the eighties when I was really doing that, And so
she became kind of a de facto not doctor, but
kind of paramedical professional for that neighborhood. And so because
of that, she had access to certain things in certain worlds.
(04:14):
So She knew about Saint John's and she understood the
opportunities that would come from going to a school like that,
and she made sure that I got on the wait list.
She took me through the testing to get in in
first grade, and I think she just thought it was
safer and it was just a better bet for my future.
(04:34):
And my mom did not agree at all and didn't
want me to go there, and it consed a lot
of difficulty between the two of them.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Tell me about your mom from your childhood, like from
that time, what was your experience of her and you know,
this matriarchal society in your childhood, what did you pick
up on before age seven? What was your sense of things?
Speaker 2 (04:56):
My mom, she was so beautiful and so beloved, and
she had grown up in Houston, in this community. My
whole family knew everybody, and I think that's something that
can sometimes be easy to forget. I think, you know,
we were, yes, we we we're a black family, but
it wasn't like she was constantly worried about racism or
(05:19):
being victimized. And same with my grandmother, like just everyone
we knew was black. I cannot stress not enough. And
that was the world that she wanted me to live
in too. There's something about sort of how strong when
those bonds are, and how comfortable she felt having gone
to the high school she went to where you know
(05:39):
a lot of black artists have come out of that
well and hopeful shuvershot as from their maybe Alvin Aley,
just like she felt really proud of that history. And ye,
she was beautiful, she was smart, but she had a darkness.
I found out more about a since got worse as
I got older. She was reactive. She couldn't really handle
all lot of emotional stress. I think having me so young,
(06:03):
and then she dropped out of college and moved home
so that my grandmother could help take care of me,
and she wanted to be a writer, and suddenly just
everything had changed for her. And I you know, I
know that she loved me. I don't presented me, but
I do you think my existence represented kind of a
division and her future and the potential for what her
(06:24):
life could have been. And I don't know how subconscious
so that was for her, how aware of it was
she was. But I think things got hard for her
after she gave birth to me and moved home.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
And your father was he in the picture at all.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
So she had left Houston to go to college. She
ended up going to community college in the Bay Area,
and then she transferred to San Francisco State and that's
where she met my dad. And he was from a
big Catholic family in Oakland, and you know, he's a
sweet guy, but he's not super interested in being a
responsible father. And the couple different versions of the story,
(07:01):
but from what I understand, he just was not pulling
his weight and was making it very difficult for her
and their kids. At this point, she was twenty one,
that's how old he was when they got married, and
I think she tried to make a go of it
for maybe a year or so, and eventually my mom's
mom actually came and got my mom at NY and
(07:22):
he left my dad behind. You know, my dad now
says he was so devastated, but he knows who knows
that's true. And he came and he visited a little
when I was a kid, but my mom was very
angry with him. And I think when my mom was angry,
it was really scary, and I got tired of big
(07:43):
threat did stop making an effort. He wasn't really in
the picture. I think maybe we would talk a couple
of tens a year, and that's why I said the case.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
So, when you're seven, you go to this new school
that's very different, just an entirely different world from the
world that you had grown up in up until that point.
Would you say that's around the time that your mother's
rage started really emerging toward you, or was it something
(08:15):
that you had experienced prior to making that shift that
was so threatening for her?
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Honestly, I think towards me it came even later. It
was only at this point that I started and now
in retrospect so that I can see that there was
a point in second grade where she thought that a
teacher was being racist towards me, And it's entirely possible
that she was. I don't know. I was one of
two black students in my grade, one of maybe ten
(08:43):
in the whole school of however many, you know, twelve
hundred people, Keithrie tells hir at school. I remember her,
you know, just ranting and calling for racist. But then
she also kind of set me down and was like, well,
this woman's going to be racist towards you. I'm going
to make or she has nothing She complained about with you.
And the problem I think is that I was getting
(09:04):
vargas on a spelling test, even though my spelling was perfect,
but I was getting handwriting docked, and so she made
me sit down and learn how to have perfect handwriting,
you know, out of kind of rage at this teacher.
So it was almost like a constructive rage or like
a spite, like you are going to win in spite
of these people. Another time, I remember we were at
(09:26):
a library and I was she was studying. A woman
at a table over shushed me. I remember my mom
lepped across the table. I screamed at this one. I
called her names, insulted her and for shushing me. And
that was sort of a story in my family about oh,
you know, she's such a mama bear. But it was
also like deeply antisocial behavior. I mean, even though it's sweet,
(09:47):
I think it was a symptom of what was to come.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Did you recognize that as a child, and I asked
this as the daughter of a very angry mother myself,
like this feeling, you know that it's not usual, that
it's not you know that not everybody experiences this, or
did you have that feeling as a child the most
more common feeling that kids have that whatever's going on
(10:10):
in their little universe is normal, that everybody must be
experiencing this because it's the only world, you know.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Absolutely yeah, I had no idea that everyone's mom wasn't
like this. I don't think it was until he was
a teenager and I remember a friend saying, oh, you know,
I got I went and got my nails done with
my mom and we played tennis. So I was like,
you got your nails down, you played tennis with your mom.
What are you talking. I mean, it is possible to
have sort of a civil relationship with one's mom, as
(10:38):
I think is often the case with what I think
was ongoing a sporderline personality disorder generally. When I started
to pull away from her so fifth grade, sixth grade, eleven, twelve, thirteen,
and I started to have my own friends, my own life,
that was when she became much more, much more physically abusive,
(10:59):
repeating me over the tiniest things like constantly ranting and
yelling over nothing, always on the drive to school, which
is why I think this school was such a trigger
for her. And then I think the other thing was
my grandmother bought us this house because for my grandmother
was very important that I feel comfortable at Saint John's,
(11:19):
that I feel like, you know, the other kids didn't
have stuff that I couldn't have, even though they were
exponentially wealthiard than we were. And so she bought us
a house and the upscale part for board, you know,
where all the black doctors and lawyers lived. And so
suddenly my mom, who was making a nurse's salary, which
was not very high at that time for her, was
(11:39):
living in this large, you know, three bedroom house with
the sunroom, herbid floors, air, separate garage, laund room, huge backyard.
And she didn't want that. She'd never wanted these trappings
as well. She thought they were artificial. And she looked
at that house and I think she saw me. Maybe
around the time I was eleven, we were silly, constantly
(12:00):
at war, and it just take our stores.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
And then it got still worse. In these new surroundings,
Sarah has first won than two, then three dogs. They
are her companions, they're her friends. Then something happens that
is so traumatic that it changes everything.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
So this was the worst thing that had ever happened
to me. For a very long time, I had these dogs.
You know, think about Texas in the nineties. I think
the relationship to dogs that people had in general was
very different than it is now. And I had a
dog that a family friend had found abandoned, and because
we had a backyard, my grandmother just said, here, you guys,
(12:45):
take this dog at midnight. I loved him so much
as white mutt. And then my grandmother, for some reason,
bought me an akc registered Now you know, I loved
his dog so much. And then my mom, maybe out
of rivalry with my grandmother or something, I don't know,
got me another Schnauzer puppy I don't I don't know why.
(13:09):
So suddenly I had three dogs. I was maybe eleven
years old. My mom had no one testing taking care
of these dogs, and they barked a lot at night,
and the neighbors would complain, and you know, I did
what I could, but I got a certain point. My
mom and I got to one of our mini fights,
and I the dogs were out of food and I
wanted her to pick them up. She just had it out.
I want her to grab some on the way home.
She got mad at me for asking, and she yelled
(13:31):
at me in this really cruel way, like she often did.
I really hurt my feelings. I threw I can of
bugspray or something at my bedroom window, and I broke it.
I was so scared because I knew that I was
going to get so much trouble. And so I wrote
a letter explaining what I had done and apologizing so
she wouldn't find it be surprised. And I put it
(13:53):
at the bottom of the stairs so she'd find it
as her child. And she got home and she read it,
she even saying, and she just like came up in
the car. She got all three dogs. But then in
the car she had this land Cruiser suv that my
grandmother had bought for her, and drove to a parking
lot like a pet coke off the side of the highway.
The head store was closed and where she thought was
(14:14):
gonna happen, and she pulled into the parking lot, opened
the doors and just shoved the dogs out into the
parking lot and drove off with me still in the
car and the dog. She's behind us up on the highway,
and then you know saw me, I screaming, I didn't
I have no idea that she was going to do that.
And I didn't know how to stop it. And then
when I got home, she sent me over the side
(14:37):
of the bathtob and beat me with a belt, which
was something that she often did. But yeah, I didn't
know why she was doing any of this at the time.
I just thought that I was just so horrible that
I deserved this. And I remember going to bed and
the windows still being broken, and there were june bugs
at this time of year in Houston, could hear, and
(15:00):
I was so scared. They're as terrified of them, and
they're going to fly in through the window. And I
stayed up all night staring at that that whole glass,
the window. And after that I pretty much stopped talking
to my mom for a long time, and I just
I think that was when I understood, oh, Okay, something
is seriously broken here. That's maybe bigger than I knew before.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
We'll be right back. When eighth grade rolls around, Sarah
starts emailing colleges. Yes, these emails are way premature, but
(15:52):
she's hatching an escape plan and the process needs to
start early. The ground must be laid to get out.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
I think I understood that because of the opportunities provided
for me by the school. I had a lot more
access to the larger world than maybe somebody had gone
to a different school would. And I was like, how
do I just make sure that I get into the
(16:23):
best college I possibly can and then never have to
come back here. I can just leave and never come
back because I knew older students who had done that. Yeah,
it's strange to think about, but I just somehow knew, like, oh,
I'm just gonna email. I remember emailing USC and thing
like here I am, I'd love to come here. Let
me know what I need to do. And they were like,
you're way too young to be in touch with us,
(16:45):
And I just kept emailing, just stayed in touch, did
the summer programs, did the AP classes, volunteered, kept my
grades up as high as possible. Like my whole body
was just like an arrows to leaving how and never
coming back.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
Did you have anyone in your life that was like
in any way mentoring you or helping you become that arrow?
Or was this all you? And was there a teacher?
Was there anybody? Or was this just driven by your
own capacity and intense desire?
Speaker 2 (17:19):
I think indirectly, yes, I was always like the English
teacher's favorite. I would win the writing awards, and that
was that was something I knew I was good at,
and I think teachers expected me to be good at
and to each year they would kind of hould me
up to a certain standard, and I think being held
up to that standard was what gave me the confidence
(17:41):
to think, Okay, well, I can lean on this and
hopefully a get into like a good college with a
full fellowship, and I just have to figure out how
to do it. What I think is probably a story
for a lot of kids who love to read and
love to write. You just realize, ok, hey, this could
be this could be my thing, and if you have
the right teachers, it can become your thing. They didn't
know what was going on at home. I think, you know,
(18:03):
there were glimpses here and there, but for the most part,
I just leaned into that sort of kindness that came
from those classrooms.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
Sarah's grandmother is on the one hand, responsible for Sarah
attending the school in River Oaks, but she's also focused
on keeping Sarah connected to her own culture and history.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
I think what was very lucky was that I had
my grandmother Earth and she, you know, she was the
one who had gotten me into this school, but I
think you a part of her felt like, all right,
but you need to also stay connected to who you
are and who your roots are, so we would travel
to Africa together. You know. She did really try to
keep me fully embedded in this third word community that
(18:49):
had been her home and was my home. But at
the same time I did pull away from that. I
think there was a part of me that wanted to
be loved at school, that wanted to assimilate, and that
meant that I changed the way I talked, you know,
I straightened my hair. I tried to just be, you know,
as skinny as possible and as pretty and perfect as possible.
(19:10):
And there was always kind of this division in terms
of like culture and taste and even language between what
the school offered, which to me seemed like the doorway
to wealth and success and freedom and life, and then
my home and sort of my roots in this place
(19:30):
where my aunt was and my mom and my grandmother
that had been our home you know for decades and
for generations, and I kind of just had to live
with that divide inside me for a long time. I
probably still do.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
Sarah's plan that first begins in eighth grade, works and
she's admitted to Brown University in two thousand and three.
Brown is a great school, an ivy, and perhaps it
goes without saying, a super privileged place, a bastion of
wealth and whiteness that makes even Saint John's look like
(20:05):
child's play.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
I was terrified to feel anything, and I was on
the opposite side of the country, and I was experiencing
extremely cold weather for the first time, and I was
still dealing with all of the residual effects of my
childhood and none of that had been resolved. And also,
I don't come from the family where you use the
(20:28):
word depression, or you talk about medication, or you talk
about singether. I didn't even know I was allowed to
see a therapist. So by the time I got there,
I was, you know, beyond divided. I think I was
already just practically on the verge of shattering. I was
so fragile psychically, and I didn't quite know it. And
the stress of being in that that sort of hothouse
(20:51):
environment is that like deeply rarefied world where yes, everyone
comes from amounts of money, you didn't even know where
possible people are literal Royalty and you're hanging out with them,
your friends are dating them, you're dating them, your exes
are dating them, and you, you know, every second of
every day, you're just like, what am I doing here?
I don't belong here, but I have nowhere else to go,
(21:11):
and so I have to make it work. I think
that would maybe be enough to break anybody, but it
was immensely difficult. Also at the same time, you're experiencing
this incredible privilege. I mean, I was a brown I
was at an ivy like school. I'd done it, you know,
a black girl makes good like that's what the story
is supposed to be. But all I wanted to do
(21:32):
was go home. And then I knew if I went
home it wouldn't work. It would be horrible too. So
it was just terrible.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Despite the sense of not belonging. Sarah does make a
very good friend, and pretty much right away at orientation.
Her name is Sadie and they have an instant kinship.
But it's complicated.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Sadie was much more of the world. Just even doing
like that was just at pleast where she felt comfortable.
She wasn't an outsider, it was she knew what these
sort of all the academic counts were like and we
were real black and we both wanted to write, and
everything just seemed too much easier for her, and she
(22:16):
sort of flowed through these various worlds and everyone had
a crush on her, and she just impressed everyone. And
she held out her hand to me and said, you know,
come on, come with me. I'm going to show you
how to do this. And that active kindness sort of
changed my whole life and my whole factory at Brown.
So this was the era of the hipster and there
were all these rich hipster boys who lorded over Brown
(22:41):
and knew it. You know, they underserved their status was
and it was seen as a privilege to be among
them by some people. I was one of those people, unfortunately,
and they went along on a trip ill advised to
the city when I probably should have been class and
you know, did some substances I probably shouldn't have done,
and got myself into a very bad situation where I
(23:03):
was basically sexually assaulted by someone that I thought was
a friend in the empty apartment in the city that
his parents owned. And this was one of those people
with that sort of crazy generational wealth that was kind
of beyond my understanding, and the level of power that
came with that was beyond my understanding. I didn't really
know what had happened until afterwards, but it became something
(23:27):
that I couldn't quite figure out how to articulate or
wrap my head around, because on the one hand, I
had chosen to put myself in a certain situation, but
on the other hand, I was definitely taking advantage of.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
And was this something that you sort of tucked away?
Did you tell people about it?
Speaker 2 (23:45):
I think I just didn't want it to be a
big deal. I think I was probably pretty angry, but
it wasn't cool to be angry. I didn't feel comfortable
expressing that anger, even to myself.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
Anger something to us, especially when we're afraid to feel it,
when we've internalized the idea that anger is very bad
and very dangerous, that it's not a safe feeling for us.
What Sarah does feel is despair. She goes back to
Houston for spring break, and all that internalized, unexpressed anger
(24:22):
morphs into suicidal ideation. She considers not going back to school,
considers giving up altogether. She's afraid that if she goes
back to school after break she'll hurt herself or worse.
Sadie knows what Sarah's going through and suggests a therapist,
but this too is complicated.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
It was one of those things where you can only
see the on site therapist at the school through three sessions,
and then if you seem worse, they try to send
you into the city or into the field and you
have to go figure out your own insurance and therapy.
And I had no idea how to do that. If
you seem too messed up, you know, to citle, then
you have to go home and drop out of college.
Like there just wasn't any help to be found. It
(25:09):
was almost like you had to know how to find
help to find help. And this is the early mid
two thousands. The conversation around this was non existent. It
was just you take what you get if that's enough,
and deal with it.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Sarah, was there a I mean, none of these things
are neat and tidy, I know, but like, was there
a breaking point? Was it after you know, the incident
in New York or was it the culmination of you know,
just this perfect storm of everything building that led to
is this like suicidal thinking?
Speaker 2 (25:41):
Throughout this I had been dating the same person on
and off. Then this deeply dysfunctional relationship, even though you know,
we did love each other from freshman year until senior year.
And I was horrible to this person. But he had
a normal family and was a normal guy, and he
was so kind, and I thought maybe he would be
(26:02):
my ticket, like he was the thing where okay, this
is my life raft I could hold on to this
person and he'll save me. And it just kept not
working out because it just wasn't supposed to work out.
And at a certain point he was just like, I'm done,
I can't do this with you anymore, and he needed
someone of his social classes. I was just like, okay, well,
(26:23):
I'm as that went up. I'm not going to get
another chance to get out of this like black hole
that I'm met and I don't know want to do anymore.
And I think it was that it was that combined
with everything else that was going on, and they were
all kind of symptoms of each other. You know, me
reaching out grassing onto this relationship and thinking that was
the thing I needed was obviously like a symptom of
this deeper dark or hurt that came from my relationship
(26:44):
with my mom that I wasn't ready to.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
Look at Sarah's grandmother does something uncharacteristic. She gives Sarah
straight up advice, perhaps even a command, to get herself
back to Brown, not to throw all her hard work,
her life away.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
It was the only time she's ever done anything like that.
She doesn't like to put her hand on the scale
in that way. After her grandmother died of breast cancer,
she got really into Ruddism and Christian Marty and holistic health.
She would never give direct advice. It was always kind
of just figured it out on your own. But this
was the one time where she said, if you don't
go back to school, basically you're going to be ruining
(27:27):
your life. You have to finish because she knew somehow,
she just knew. I think she was right. It was
the hardest thing I've ever done. I do not know
how I survived. I still don't know how I survived
that last Seinmeister, but I'm very grateful to her for
not so.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Then during that period of time, the end of college
and then post college you moved to LA Do you
have any relationship with your mother during that period of
time or have you really kept your distance from her?
Speaker 2 (27:55):
So I was in so much pain and I had
it felt like I had no one, and I would
call her to reach out and she would just scream
and scream and scream because my pain was hurting her
and she didn't know how to say that. She was
not equipped to provide, you know, consolation or advice. I
(28:15):
would just call and cry and she would yell at me.
But that was our relationship.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
(28:45):
After college, Sarah goes back home. She's living on her
grandmother's couch, and again she needs to get out, needs
encouragement to get out.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
It was my hairdresser, who was another one of these
black women that i'd always kind of grown up in
her orbit, my aunt's friend, and she said, don't stay here,
like go, just go, And I did because I think
I needed somebody to see that explicitly to me.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Back in La Sarah gets a job as an assistant
at an entertainment agency. It's here that she first meets Ethan,
who's a client. A while later, the two run into
one another again at another assistant's birthday party, where they're
seated next to one another. This is the start of
a long committed relationship. Ethan's a great guy, even tempered,
(29:36):
kind loving. They're in the kind of partnership that supports
Sarah as she pursues her dreams. She applies to MFA
programs in writing and is accepted into NYU's Creative writing program,
one of the best in the country. She and Ethan
do the long distance thing during those years, and Sarah's
(29:57):
friendship with Sadie also continues, as does the complexity of
that friendship.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
There was always this question pull between us because I'd
come from a school where I felt like I'd been
the best writer, and I knew that this is something
I could do. And then I'm at Sadie, who maybe
just write virtue of where she came from, was just
leagues ahead of me and got out of college thinking
maybe should be a doctor, and then suddenly decided to
(30:25):
be a writer, and then bam, was just a writer.
And I felt like, okay, I'm probably behind. It's we're
constantly I always felt competitive, but she was so generous,
you know, like, oh, you know, applying for this job
or do this, you know. She had her ear to
the ground. She was like really well connected, and so
she would say, well, let's do this application together, or
(30:47):
send your work here and it'll get published. And because
I know this personer, you know, I'll send you my
spreadsheet for applying to fellowships and grants. And I was like,
what's what's a fellowship? What's a grant? Like she just
she just knew so much more than me. And and
so it's hard because I loved this person so much
and she was so helpful, but part of me it
was also just like, why is it so easy for you?
And why is it phil It's never going to happen
(31:08):
for me. And it was just like that for years
and years.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
There are times in the life of a writer where
a project becomes utterly consuming, to the point of blindness.
Sarah had long been fascinated by the work of the
philosopher Walter Benjamine and his ideas about the interconnectedness of
the Paris Arcades. She began what was she believed to
(31:34):
be her magnum opus, a novel inspired by Benjamin's series
of pattern and connection.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
So Walter Benjamine had written this, he never even finished it,
but he was trying to write a book called The
Arcades Project about the Paris Arcades, which are these who
are justus last covered gas lit walkways in Paris, that
he did this forensic analysis of the people who passed
(32:03):
through them and the class dynamics and what they represented
in terms of fashion and style and French culture. And
my professor at Brown was the first reason to translate
it from German into English. So I took his class
and I kind of fell in love with Benjamine and
like a lot of people do, I think he's one
of the more accessible theorists or philosophers out there. And
(32:26):
I ended up dropping out of that class during that
terrible senior year when I basically dropped every class an
almost DISI and graduate and I had just been carrying
this work around with me, this sort of half finished
essay I'd written and had been thinking about in terms
of Benjamine and the Arcade project, and carry that with
me all the way to grad school and was like, well,
(32:47):
maybe I can turn this into a novel. I can
write a book about the arcades and about this history
of Paris. And then, of course the same thing happened
to me that had happened to Benyamine, where Benjamin could
never actually quite finish this book, and then he'd actually
died during a holocaust, and I couldn't finish my book
about Benjamin trying to write this book and just felt
(33:08):
myself getting buried and buried in the layers and the
history and the research, and you know, just losing any
confidence I had that I could be a writer because
I had taken on this huge project.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
After grad school, Sarah moves back to la and she
and Ethan are living together. They've both been working on
really interesting projects. Ethan's been making films and Sarah wrote
a libretto. Her escape plan is now fully functional. She's
feeling good happy. One day in twenty seventeen, they're at
(33:42):
a wedding celebration in Paso Roblis, beautiful wine country in California. There,
she gets a call. It's her grandmother calling to tell
her that her mother has been picked up on the
side of a highway.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
There was just a total curtain of like dread that
just fell over me. We hadn't spoken when she had
her first psychotic break. We hadn't spoken in years. We'd
had a falling out over a project that I'd done
that she'd been offended by, and I had actually just
sort of right before my grandmother called, gotten a strange
(34:19):
phone call from her in what she was like very
kind to me, and it was really weird. And then
a few days later my grandmother called and said that
she'd been picked up and taken to the mental hospital
and they couldn't see her, you know, because she didn't
want to see anyone, and she believed that FBI agents
or cops were following her down the highway, you know,
(34:40):
by the hundreds and had been chasing her all across
the city, so she wouldn't go inside. She wasn't eating,
she wasn't showering, she lost her job, and was just
living in this sort of complete state of delusion.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
There's a quote in your book where you right, I
want my mother to have the life I have to
drink champagne at a wedding on a farm. The contrast
at that point between the life that you're living and
the life that is really catching up with her and
that she's spinning into so stark. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
I felt like I'd kind of fully ascended to kind
of the creative class. I did sort of have the
beginnings of a life I'd aspired to, and then all
of a sudden I felt such guilt you know, I
just felt like, what am I even doing? Why am
I at this wedding? Why am I writing opera libretti?
What am I even? You know that none of that
(35:34):
is real. What's real is what's happening to my mother,
and there's nothing I can do about that. So the
reason we had stopped speaking in the years before she
got sick was because of an opera that i'd written
the libretto for where one of the actresses in it
sang a kind of a romantic song, and my mom
(35:54):
had come to see it, and she decided that the
actress was in love with me, and I was in
the with her, and I was cheating on my partner
and lying to everyone, and that I was gay, and
suddenly she was virulently homophobic, where she hadn't been before.
So now, obviously I can see that was probably a
first step towards her total decompensation later, but at the time,
(36:18):
it just felt like she was ascribing to me all
these lives and this life that I was not living,
and I didn't understand how to push back against that,
because when somebody fully believes something about you that isn't true,
it can be really scary. Especially when that person is
your mom and they believe it on no evidence. I
didn't know this actress. I hadn't cast the Peace, We
(36:39):
had no previous relationship. I hadn't really even met her
before experiencing that scene with my mother, and so that
I knew that her mental illness was like something that
could really get its hooks into me and kind of
pull me under. And that had been happening for my
whole life, and so I was really scared that was
going to happen and to complete s like if she
(37:03):
we were so kind of imasged, and even though weren't speaking,
she was such a huge part of my life that
I felt like, well, this is happening to her, then
it's definitely it happened to me too. And on the
one hand, I need to see as far away from
as possible, But on the other hand, I have her
daughter and I have to go home. I didn't know
what the answer was. I wanted so badly to fix
her because I had so much guilt, but I was
(37:24):
still afraid fixing her would me and breaking myself.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
So you do go back to Houston, and what's that like?
Speaker 2 (37:32):
It's very strange, I think one thing, you know, experiencing
someone else's psychosis. There's nothing like that, and once do
you experience it face to face, you're just forever changed.
She looked like my mom, but she was living in
a completely different world. She was living in this empty room.
She'd taken over a part of a building that my
(37:53):
grandmother owned and and died it out, and was afraid
that someone was going to come and steal in the
two chairs that she had in there. And she still
believed that she had been persecuted. She felt my grandmother
and my aunt were feeding her poison and she was
starving herself, and she wouldn't use a toothbrush, and she
only wanted to eat black foods like avocados and sesame seeds.
(38:15):
It was just sort of like like unreal. It felt
almost dream like. I wanted her to just snap out
of it, and she couldn't. I had been building my
life so carefully there wouldn't be spaced for chaos. I mean, like,
you know, I had spreadsheets of my budget, and I
carefully kind of calculated out my time, and I would
wake up early and write every single day, and I
just sort of made sure that nothing could go wrong.
(38:38):
And then Suddenly everything was going wrong, and my mom
had always been such a chaos agent that it felt like, Okay, well,
this wall life put up against chaos has totally been
broken down. There's nothing I can do. This book that
I've been working on for so long won't come together.
I had put all my eggs in this basket with
my hope for becoming, and I thought I was going
(38:59):
to become like this big novelist. That's all I wanted.
I just wanted to matter as a writer. And not
only was that not going to happen, my mom was
freaking into pieces. I was having issues with my best friend,
and I just I wanted to go crazy. I wanted
none of it to be my responsibility. And I thought,
if my mom can do that, and I'll do it too,
(39:20):
it's fine. I won't be afraid of it anymore. I'll
just I'll just lose it too.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
It all comes to a head, of course, Sarah begins
a destructive rampage. She destroys her manuscript, all her research.
Her intention is to get free of her existence and
slip into the abyss, but she doesn't. Ethan rescues her papers,
(39:50):
piecing back together as much as he can, and Sarah
emerges from the deep despair that her mother has caused
her yet again. In twenty nineteen, she and Ethan get married.
Her mother does not attend the wedding. Why because her
mother herself has fallen into the abyss. She is extremely unwell,
(40:15):
unable to travel, unable to be in Sarah's life. The
absence is both a wound and a relief. Sarah tries
therapy again, and this time it works. It clicks. The
right therapist can make all the difference, and this one
provides ketemine assisted therapy, a form of therapy in which
(40:37):
the anesthetic ketymine is taken in a clinical setting and
under the influence of ketemine, Sarah returns to the world
of Walter Benyamine and the images and concepts that have
long fascinated her. But now she's able to draw powerful connections.
Why was she drawn to Benyamine's work. She realized that
(41:01):
her interest was not only literary, but also something psychologically profound.
Bena means invisible patterns have contained a kind of secret.
In researching schizophrenia, Sarah had discovered a term a psychological
condition apofinia, a hallmark of which is the certainty of
(41:25):
invisible patterns. Apofinia is often a precursor to schizophrenia. Sarah
comes to understand that she has been terrified all along
that she might inherit her mother's condition. This gives her
whole new stores of empathy, both for her mother and
(41:46):
for herself.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
This therapist, she focused a lot on kind of her
child's work as well. And I had been living with
this fear that this is actually true, that there is
this sort of tree like pattern that governs the growth
of everything, every natural thing, but also construction and things
you wouldn't necessarily expect. And I had started to pick
(42:11):
up on this treelike pattern that is the same across
things like cracks in the sidewalk and the shape of
lightning and the sap of rivers and the way trees grow.
When I was living in Paris and grad school for
a summer and I just started to see it everywhere.
I just was like, it's really weird that you know,
the shape of my veins breaking open in my wrist
(42:33):
is the exact same shape of my fingers breaking off
from my palm. But I didn't know what to do
with that information, and I didn't know of seeing that everywhere,
those correspondences everywhere, not just in physical things, but and
just sort of patterns of thought and story structure meant
that I was going crazy and I didn't I didn't
(42:54):
know who to talk to you about it, because you know,
most of the time you try to explain that to
someone and they just tune out. You sound like you're
in drugs or something. But I eventually came across this
book about something called the constructal law, and it turns
out that this sheep is just a natural physical form
that that does actually, you know, is a law that
is a pattern of growth. The term was coined by
(43:14):
Adrian Vijon, who is an engineering professor at Duke, and
he applies this pattern to all kinds of sort of
thermal energy scientific things. But he actually says in the
book that sometimes civilians will discover in this pattern and
think they're going crazy because we're so used to normal people,
and I'll be able to understand universal scientific laws or
(43:34):
discover them. And I felt so indicated by that. I
just remember sort of carrying that into my understanding of
my mother and this idea of family trees, and you know,
what happens to her necessarily does happen to me, because
I'm an extension of her, I'm a branch of her.
And what happened with this therapist was something about like
(43:55):
the ketamine therapy, which she you take a loose in
the gin and then you lose it for an hour,
and then you have therapy about what you fly stated
about that sort of in the context of a larger
therapeutic relationship, and I was able to see my mother
not as the aggressor or the one with all the power,
but as a child, as a little girl of reaching
(44:16):
out her hands maybe for help immediate to me, and
understand that as afraid as I was of her and
for her, like that version of her that existed before
I ever, just before she was ever sick, still existed somewhere,
and I could find some solace and one and I
could find some kinship and some companionship with that virsion
(44:39):
of her, and that vision of her was safe and
innocent then deserved to be loved and to be held
and to be healed. And I was able to channel
a lot of love towards that version of her, which
I think was healing for me, because then I was
able to love the version of myself that existed in
that scenario too, you know, the younger version of me,
(45:00):
and realized that that version me deserved help too. You
know that now we're imperfect, but we both deserve safety,
you know, and to have a kind of relationship that
maybe we hadn't been able to access before, because that
we needed.
Speaker 1 (45:18):
Here's Sarah reading one last passage from her remarkable memoir
No One gets to fall apart.
Speaker 2 (45:30):
If the patterns I saw in Paris met what I
thought they did. If everything that grows is shaped like
a branching tree, and if the core of that shape
is the trunk that runs through it, then life itself
is that trunk, and all of us are branches, elements
of a process of death and rebirth that progresses along
a continuum. We will never be able to see both
(45:53):
of us. My mother and I are a step towards
something new, and our lives are part of something bigger,
something but Changing.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Acre 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 one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
(46:36):
find me on Instagram at Danny Rider and if you'd
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(47:07):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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