Family Secrets

“I've been kind of a student of family secrets all my life,” writer Dani Shapiro says. All of her novels have centered around family secrets, and her memoirs have explored secrets in her own family history, some of which she didn’t know existed—until she took a DNA test on a whim. When the results came back, Shapiro learned this: Her father, her beloved father whose deep Jewish lineage Shapiro had always identified with, was not her biological father. Did this mean she was not the person she thought she was? Did it change everything? Did it change nothing? What did her parents (who have both passed) know? Following the publication of her new memoir Inheritance, Shapiro talks with our chief content officer, Elise Loehnen, about searching for answers, exploring what defines us, and ultimately “being willing to embrace and live with a certain amount of uncertainty—just simply not knowing.” (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.)