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Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway with Melissa Harris-Perry from WNYC and PRX in collaboration with GBH News in Boston.

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Every family has skeletons in the closet. For Author Jessi Hempel, they were more concealed than she realized. Over the course of five years, Hempel's family truth rose to the surface. First, Jessi came out as gay. Then her siblings came out as transgender and bisexual. Jessi and her family learned that her father was gay and that her mother was still haunted by her past romantic entanglement with an alleged murderer.

Jessi Hempel: I thought I was the expert on my messy overwhelming family then. I thought I understood my parents, that their missteps were both unusual and unfortunate. I thought I understood my brother and my sister, that their indignities were somehow undeserved compared with my own. I've always been an effective storyteller, I think.

If you had asked me about my family back then I would have held you in an uncomfortable mix of horror and pity with stories about my adolescence, about mom's depression and dad's absence, and then left you laughing with the punchline, "We all came out of the closet, and now we're okay."

Melissa Harris-Perry: That's Jessi Hempel reading from her new memoir, The Family Outing. I sat down with Jessi, and talked about her new book, and what it meant for her and for her family to come out and be okay. I just heard you reading from the introduction when you talk about back then you would have thought that you were an expert on your family. First of all, what is back then? When is back then, and what made you realize you weren't so much an expert?

Jessi Hempel: I am an oldest child, the oldest of three. If you are an oldest child, maybe you connect to this, I always felt that I knew everything about my family, and I always like to be in control. This was something I didn't really deeply understand until I embarked upon this memoir project that is just published. What was true was that 20 years ago, 25 years ago, actually, when I was just an adolescent, all five members of my family came out of the closet.

I came out as gay. I was first. My father followed just a few years later, he also came out as gay. Then in very short order, my sister found a voice to tell us that she was bisexual. My brother called me up and said, "Hey, I prefer the male pronouns, I am transgender." Through that entire time, my mother was working through some very difficult experiences from her own childhood and was able to find a voice to say, "I am a survivor."

During that very messy period in our lives, I will tell you, I did feel like I was the expert on my family, and it was a mess. I was angry about it, and I was distant from it, I wanted space from it. Then like many people, I grew in this story, the story that I tell today, it starts from now, from 20-some-odd years in the future.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I love your point about being the oldest. I'm the youngest of five and have particular adoration for my oldest sibling, but definitely don't think that either she nor I know everything there is to know in part because you're always seeing your family from where you are positioned within it. You tell this story, but it is not just your story. You took some time to be in conversation with your family members, to talk with them explicitly. Can you talk about that process?

Jessi Hempel: I trained as a journalist. I spent most of my career a couple of decades as a magazine writer. A wonderful quality of journalistic training is that you are asked to assume that you do not know the story, but in fact, to interview other people, and listen to them tell you their stories. This was always my favorite part about magazine writing, getting to just take a deep dive into somebody else's life, their lived experience.

Despite the fact that I might have been a good listener professionally, I wasn't that great of a listener in my personal life. I definitely know that my sister and my brother would tell you that. I thought the opportunity with this book would be to approach my family members the same way that I approached the people that I had written about, to go into conversation with them, not assuming that I knew the answers, but making space to ask the question and listen to the entire answer. I was very interested in how coming out had impacted us.

What it really meant for all of us to have lived in the closet for most of my childhood, and then what happened when we all began the process of coming out. I would literally make appointment with each member of my family, and we would get on Zoom or on the phone together, I would record the conversation, I would ask the questions, and then I would just be quiet. I know that doesn't seem like a big deal, but you have to understand I was very bad at it at first. It took me a little bit of practice to just make room for each member of my family to tell me as much as they could remember about growing up.

Melissa Harris-Perry: As you got better at listening, did it get easier or harder to hear the stories?

Jessi Hempel: It always felt to me like a great privilege to hear the stories because what happened over time is that my various family members got more comfortable talking about their lives and talking about how they experienced them. The most challenging thing about that was that the stories rarely lined up, and I mean lined up at all. My mother would remember a dinner that happened in 1982 that my father would have remembered happened in 1997.

I wouldn't remember the dinner at all or think it was significant, and that was when all of us were trying our best to get the story right. That was with all of us trying as hard as we could. What I took from that was that in the end, the actual factual lived experience wasn't what was important, or even what I was listening for, it was the emotional truth of our experiences, and after eight months of listening, that finally came into focus.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I want to talk about the idea of closets and outing. I think if we were having this conversation in 1982 or 1997, that language of being in a closet, of coming out or being outed, were I think really standard ways that we talk particularly about queer identities. In some ways has shifted in our understanding, as we sometimes come to understand that it's not so much that a person's in a closet, but that we are making presumptions about the kinds of rooms that people are standing in. Talk to me about why the notion of closet was still so valuable in your retelling here.

Jessi Hempel: I began to take a very expansive idea of what it even means to live in a closet. I think there was a much more binary expression of it for me in late '90s when I was first coming out. You were in the closet, and then you discovered these things about yourself and found a voice to talk about them and you were out of the closet and that pertained to your queer identity. What I began to feel was more true as I talk to everybody in my family about this deeply, is that we're all born in a closet, in that we're all born with things about ourselves we feel we must conceal.

Usually, by the way, I think this happens out of love first and foremost. You're born into a set of expectations that your parents have for you. You're born into maybe a religious culture, or maybe a geographic culture. You're born into a set of interests in your community, and then you grow a while in the world, and you come into a more authentic version of yourself, and there's a distance between who you know yourself to be and who that community wants you to be. I think about coming out of the closet is just the way to explain how we step into our authentic self and ask the people around us to let go of their expectations for who they expected us to be.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Talk to me about the role of dreams, and particularly the recurring anxiety dreams that you experienced.

Jessi Hempel: I think my experience of coming out is an experience of over time growing into who I am and being more comfortable with who I am. A lot of that takes stillness. It takes listening to yourself deeply. For me, the first place that I heard myself at a very, very young age trying to express something was a dream. I had a reoccurring dream. I had it throughout my entire childhood. It took me a really long time to figure out what that dream was trying to tell me because I was a literalist. I wanted to know, it was a dream, it was just a flat-out anxiety dream, but it was a dream in which people that I knew when I was very young.

The first time I remember having the dream was about three. They were chasing me and they had a water gun and I was scared and running from them. I spent so much time trying to figure out, "Well, who were those people?" It took me a long time to say, "Oh, what is that feeling? What is my body trying to tell me? What is my consciousness trying to tell me that I can't hear yet. Probably, it took me well into my early adulthood.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I also appreciate that even as you were exploring and revealing for all of us that anxiety, revealing secrets that had been concealed, that you also gave us space by writing that even when we're concealing these radical secrets, we have these seasons of the beautiful. Tell me about some of the good, the joy, the beautiful, even as the family was in these individuating closets.

Jessi Hempel: Nothing is as binary is good and bad and my experience growing up in my family was definitely shaped by the fact that my father was gay and hiding it even from himself and that my mother was concealing her experience with somebody who turned out to be an accomplice to a murderer, but they also were young people who legitimately fell in love for whatever reason they did and started a family and we had a lot of fun things happen when we were young.

One thing that I write about in the book is when I was about seven, my family moved to France for half a year. My dad's job brought us there and it was this great collective adventure we had. It was just so fun. My parents had to work together to figure out how to navigate the foreign culture. I fell in love with traveling at that point in my life. I think the reason why I shared that is so that people can understand that nothing is good or bad. Everything is everything all at once and my family had a lot of really beautiful moments.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Tell me about falling in love with travel. What is it you love about it?

Jessi Hempel: I love the unknown. It comes back to listening, which is the thing that I most cherish in my own experience. In order to travel, you have to listen very well to all the cues around you because you're navigating so much that it's new, whether it's a language, whether it's a way of spending money or a way that people are interacting with each other. I think that it forces me to then reflect back on my own lived experience and understand myself better. That's why I've always loved to travel.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It's interesting on the one hand, you consistently express this compassion for and interest in the unknown. It also seems to me in reading the book and just in reflecting about how we are as people that our own experience of growth, whether that is a coming out of a particular closet around identity or other closets of just coming into self knowledge. Sometimes we want everything else in the story to remain static.

Parents, you just be what it is I think you are. Siblings, you be who I think you are. Institution, you be that, and then I can be the dynamic one in the story. The part of what's going on in this book, in this memoir is everybody is in motion in ways that make it hard for any one person to be the moving part because everybody is the moving part.

Jessi Hempel: It's so true and I think about this book much more from the perspective of what it means to have someone come out to you than what it means to come out. I came out first in my family, I remember focusing really hard on whether my parents were going to say the right thing or do the right thing and being pretty critical of them. My mom, in the end, she really did do the right thing in that she said a couple of things that made me raise my eyebrows, but then she said, "I love you no matter who you are."

At any rate, fast forward five years, my brother calls me up and tells me that he's transgender. My first instinct, I am not proud of this at all. My first instinct is to just minimize his experience. I immediately think about my relation to it. I think about how I just saw him a few months ago. It was the holidays and he was wearing a dress and how could he have worn a dress then and be telling me that he wants to use male pronouns now? My first response to him was, "Oh, come on."

I think that it is an incredibly challenging thing when the people you love most are dynamic in that way and shift these things that you have found so central in your knowing to them. It was scary to me because I then needed to also reflect on my own experience and shift as well.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Is it harder to shift when the ground is shifting, when the pieces of the puzzle of ourselves are also shifting size and placement?

Jessi Hempel: I think acknowledging that is acknowledging what is most true about life. Things always are shifting. You may try to hold onto things that you recognize as tightly as you can, pieces of identity that you recognize, but I think it's only when we truly open up to the idea that everything is shifting all the time, that we have more solid ground to stand on.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Your mom's story is a bit different, each person's story is actually quite different. your mom's is taken from a different source of what would constitute this personal sense of shame, secrecy, survival. Can you tell us just a bit about your mom's story just to ground it here for our listeners?

Jessi Hempel: My mom, when she was a teenager, she lived in a community where there was a serial killer. This was in the late '60s. A serial killer who was preying on women in her community who were about her age and often people she knew, like the assistant art teacher at the high school or somebody in their church. His secretary, my mom's dad became a volunteer policeman. Everybody in the community was leaning in to try to protect the people in the community, especially people like my mother who was a teenager who looked a lot like the victims.

There was a curfew for the young women. My mom needed to figure out how to go about her life against the backdrop of this very unusual thing happening in her community. She worked at a local department store and she met and fell for this guy. Very innocent thing to do. Then it turned out that that guy was somehow involved with the crimes. This all came down at once. She had a very scary experience with him.

Then following that within the week, it came out that his best friend had been accused of these crimes and there was a question about how he was involved in it. All of that was absolutely terrifying for my mom and terrifying to her parents and embarrassing to their family. They told my mom, you should never talk about this. Don't be in touch with him, don't talk about this, pretend it didn't happen and she did for decades and that's what she did.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Talk a little bit about the ways that you frame up the notion of pride and shame and particularly drawing on the work of gay pride and of queer pride and of pride month and setting that in opposition to shame, which shoves people into closets.

Jessi Hempel: I think that all of us as humans, we have shame. It's so core to our existence and shame, I think of as the secrets that I believe shouldn't be revealed about who I am. That somehow make me a bad person. Then I think about pride and in particular, I think about the LGBTQIA community that I came out in and the way that it embraced pride.

I think about it as I love and a warmth for those aspects of ourselves that had to be so quiet for so long.

Pride is the reaching into the core of who you are and lifting up and lifting out what you thought you needed to be ashamed of but what you learn is actually just absolutely core to who you are. It's figuring out how to have love for that. That seems a little ethereal and a little cheesy, but pride is also the organizing principle that let me know I had a place to be safe and to be accepted as a young person just like straight up. That was so important to me.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What I think is maybe the final paragraph or final page of the book, you reveal one more piece and it's about the loss of one of your children. If you could imagine yourself 30 years from now or 40 years from now on a Zoom call having to tell a story. If there are ways that maybe you think about your parents' stories differently, having become a parent and a parent who has already experienced such loss.

Jessi Hempel: It's in the very end of the acknowledgements that I mentioned. I knew that I wanted to write this book and I started work on it and then we found out that my wife was pregnant, which was so exciting for us. Then we found out she was going to have twins, which was exciting and terrifying. Not what I expected at all. As we got closer to the birth, we learned that one of the baby boys was not growing as expediently as his brother and it became clear that it was likely that we would lose him.

We fought very, very, very hard to keep him. It was very difficult to figure out how to make a good decision for our healthy baby boy who was growing on track and for our not-healthy baby boy. Finally, we decided and it really was our choice. We decided you know what? We're going to deliver these babies at 29 weeks. We think our healthy baby boy will have a shot. We think the baby boy who is not healthy, if he makes it to 29 weeks, we can save him.

We went into the doctors, we went into the NICU, we went into the hospital, we learned where we were going to deliver, and then we went home and overnight we lost the baby. When my wife gave birth, she gave birth to a healthy baby boy and a stillborn baby boy. I can't describe those two minutes in a way that does justice to them because it was the happiest moment of my life and also the saddest moment of my life and they're entangled.

Then that moment I looked at those babies and I thought, no matter what mistakes my parents made, they loved me this much. If they could love me this much, then I can have compassion for anything that might have happened in their process of trying to guide me to adulthood. Maybe that's a bit of a long story, but I couldn't have written this book if I hadn't have had both of those experiences. I think profoundly that most parents step up to parenthood with the desire to do right by their children and knowing that and understanding that shaped how I was able to talk to my own parents about a very difficult childhood that I had.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Jessi Hempel is author of the Memoir, Family Outing. Jessi, thank you for your empathy. Thank you for your listening. Thank you for your voice and thank you for joining us on The Takeaway.

Jessi Hempel: Thank you so much for having me.

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