Family Secrets: What we hide from those we love and how it hurts us all

For over 10 years it has been Cary Tennis' strange and unexpected pleasure to be told intimate family secrets by strangers. They write to “advice@salon.com” and he reads their letters. No one else reads those letters. He protects them and he protects the anonymity of the people who write them. Those who write these letters tell him things they would tell no one else. They tell him for many reasons. Secrets exert a pressure upon the soul for release. Writing out one’s secrets relieves the pressure of many years lying and avoiding and prevaricating and equivocating and changing the subject. And then he responds, thinking through their dilemmas and their lives. He allows a creative empathy to occur. He suggests remedies. A secret can begin its life in politeness. There are many things we do not say in front of strangers or outsiders. There are things we do not tell children until they are older. There are things we do not tell our wives or husbands not because we are consciously keeping secrets but because we make an emotional calculation. Then a secret can take on a life of its Once not told, it becomes something that cannot be told. Once we have kept a secret, the initial act of keeping it becomes itself a secret that must not be told. And so it goes. Here are collected many strange and moving tales of family secrets and the circumstances that gave birth to them, along with Cary's attempts at analysis and narrative and suggestion and empathy and occasional insight and poetry. He offers them to you, taken from his many years receiving the confessions of strangers across an electronic portal and replying to the universe, not knowing who is listening or who might answer, or who might recognize herself in a letter as though looking into a mirror.