Secrecy - A Sanctuary in a Transparent World
I GREW up hating secrets.
At age 10 I learned from my cousins that my father had been married before and that his first wife and their little girl were killed in Auschwitz. When I was a senior in high school, my father became ill with lung cancer, information withheld from me until he died that summer — while I was in Australia on a trip that was a graduation gift from my parents. My mother wanted to wait until I returned home, weeks later, to tell me, but my sister persuaded her to make the dreaded call.
No surprise that my favorite childhood novel was “Jane Eyre” (with secrecy at its core, the “ghost” stashed conveniently in the attic) or that the title of my first book was “White Lies.” Transparency became my watchword, journalism my profession.
In the last three years, I’ve been consumed with the subject of secrets while I’ve been writing a biography of Wendy Wasserstein, the New York playwright who dedicated herself to controlling narrative, in both her life and her work. She grew up in a family so private that when relatives died, it was said, “They went to Europe.” She was in her 20s when she learned that her two oldest siblings had a different father from that of the other children. She was almost 50 years old when she first met one of her brothers, who had lived apart from the family since boyhood, when illness left him developmentally disabled. [...]
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