The Power of Family Stories

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“That's why many startups are happy and happy.”

And if it's going to be done, it's not just in the beginning. Yet start an Alfanta.com. In today's episode, I'm going to have a conversation with a gentleman named Bruce Filer. Bruce is a lot of things. He's written over 15 books, including some New York Times bestsellers.

He's a public speaker who has given TED talks with millions of views. He has degrees from Yale and Cambridge, as well as multiple James Beard Awards for his writing at Gourmet Magazine. He has walked around 25,000 miles through the Middle East, retracing the stories of the Bible. And he has a new book out called A Time to Gather, how ritual created the world, and how it can save us.

But the reason I initially wanted to talk to Bruce is because back in 2013, he wrote a book called The Secrets of Happy Families. It's a fascinating book, and if you like this podcast, I think you'd enjoy reading it. Bruce explores a lot of different topics in the book. But he spends a decent amount of time looking at the way family stories,

function, and a family. Why do we tell family stories? What do they say about us? Which stories do we choose to tell?

“And what is the impact of a story on a family, adults and kids alike?”

In his writing, Bruce encounters and discovers some interesting answers to these questions. So I wanted to have him on to share some of that knowledge and wisdom with us. Bruce Filer, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you, like thank you for inviting me. You write about family about ritual, about religion, you write about big life transitions,

and being a dad. You're drawn to these big questions about life and how to live it. But in your own words, how do you categorize your field of interest? I grew up in a family that's very into the idea of family, okay? And we talk about it all the time, and I, in some ways, would describe my childhood family

as a sort of hyper-functional family, as opposed to a non-functional family, which turns out to have as many problems as the opposite. But I'll leave that off stage for right now. But I grew up as a kind of merger of two cultures. Five generations of Jews in the American South, right?

And I love being southern. I love the familyness, and I love the stickiness, and I love the story tellingness.

But I always grew up a part from mainstream to southerners, if you were.

And I also grew up Jewish, and I love being Jewish. I love the familyness, and the stickiness, and the story tellingness. But I grew up not only separate from the global Jewish experience, but also the American Jewish experience. So I felt a part of it and a part from it.

And in a lot of ways, it is that sense of being in something and being outside of it, that's always motivated my work. But to answer your question kind of directly,

“I think I have fundamentally two skills.”

Number one, I'm an experientialist. Like I grew up in the age of discounted airfare. Well, like when I went and learned something, I like want to go there, and like immerse myself. And so have the experience.

So that's kind of one obsession of mine. I'm an experientialist. And I'm also an explained-aholic. Then I like coming out of where I've ever immersed myself, and explaining to people what it is that I saw and that I experienced.

Well, let's talk about what you've experienced and explained in the writing of the secrets of happy families. Your book opens with a quote from Leo Tolstoy, which he uses to open the novel and a Karinana. Tolstoy writes, "All happy families are like.

Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I love the choice here because with respect to Tolstoy, you're sort of looking at the neglected side of the quote. You are explicitly investigating the ways in which quote "all happy families are alike."

Before we get into the book and some of the ideas stemming from the book, I want to know what you mean by happy families. I know what you mean by family, but what do you mean by happy? You know, I sort of have this idea that happiness is this thing, right? Like, it's the, I'm old enough to remember Johnny Carson,

right, coming out of that behind that curtain and going and standing as a star and like, "Oh, that's what happiness is." It is this thing and you go find it and you stand on it, and that's when you know you're going to be happy. But that's not what happiness is.

And that's not what we know about happiness now, a generation into the positive psychology movement. Okay, for those who aren't familiar, tell us about the positive psychology movement and what we think we know about being happy.

So, you know, for the first century of psychology,

the dominant way that the whole approach to life and human psychology was was we're going to study people that are deviant, that are somehow broken, that are troubled,

It was Marty Seligman when he took over the American Psychology Association

“and gave this speech in the turn of the 21st century and said,”

"We need to focus on what happy people have in common and see if we can help people to be more positive," which was the birth of the phrase, "Positive Psychology." There was a problem in this approach and the problem in this approach was that it was also just focused on individuals.

And so when I began this project, basically in the first decade of the 21st century, so what if we take that interest in how individuals can be happy and apply it to groups? Right, so you take the approach to the individual

and you apply it to the group. In the group that you choose is family. Tell me, why family? Just to kind of set the stage here, I was a parent of identical twin girls, okay?

And you're always playing defense, right?

It's sippy cups and diaper catties and nap time and food time and wake up time and bed. Like you're just responding to what's coming toward you. You're undersea. Yeah, exactly.

And you're underseaged not only from your children, but for all the things you're supposed to do and not supposed to do, right? I mean, there's this deluge of rules and wisdom and now it's social media, like kind of overburdening with you whatever you're doing it right. You're doing it wrong, try this, try that.

Here's a hack, here's a better way to do it. Human beings have something that basically almost no other species with one or two exceptions has, which is, as soon as the offspring stop waning, their children, the offspring can have children of their own.

That doesn't happen with human beings. We have this, like, decade.

“I think of it as, like, between potty training and the prom, right?”

That's where we build the sense of family. That's where we learn to communicate. That's where we learn to tell stories about who we are and who we want to be. So a minute ago, you were talking about how you're writing career started.

You're essentially telling stories to your family. You're writing narratives in letter form and sending these letters back from Japan, which go kind of viral among your friends and family on a pre-digital level. In your work sense, you deal with narratives on at least two levels. One, you construct narratives in your work.

And two, you talk about the power of narrative itself. The power it can have for a company, a military platoon, and more unexpectedly, a family. I say unexpectedly, because I think the idea of story and corporate culture is well understood at this point, companies will even have a tab on their websites

that say our story and the function of narrative in the military makes logical sense as well. Tales of heroism and sacrifice, I'm sure has long been used to inspire soldiers and camaraderie. But the role a story plays in family feels like newer territory, at least in terms of our discussion around it. So let's get into this discussion around story and family.

How does your investigation begin? So what got me into this was actually family dinner. So in one way, nothing is more mythologized than family dinner. It's great, it holds the family together, it's food, and camaraderie and sharing, and let's romanticize it.

So I have two children, my wife runs an organization at the time, was probably in 20 countries today, it's in 50 countries, helping entrepreneurs around the world. She's working at 6 o'clock, like when our kids were young, we had to have them bathed and fed in bed by seven if we had any hope of functioning, or of surviving at 5 o'clock when they're waking up.

And it turns out, family dinner is great, but Americans rank 31 on the list of 35 countries that actually, for most of us, it doesn't work, okay? So I set out to find out what are we going to do with this tension between the pressure, like the parenting culture puts on dinner and the reality that for most people, you know, it's a hell zone in their lives. I called a woman named Lori David,

it was Larry David's first wife who had written a book called Family Dinner, and I was like,

starting to ask you a bunch of questions, and she's like, you don't want to talk to me. You want to talk to a guy named Marshall Duke. So I go to his house, he lives in Atlanta, and Marshall is like the grandfather we all want, right? He just retired after 50 years teaching psychology at Emory, and I go to his house for a Friday night dinner, and he basically tells me this story, and the story goes like this. His wife works with special needs children,

“sometimes are called, you know, differently abled, but the time that's how we refer to them.”

And his wife Sarah came to him to Marshall, I noticed the students I work with, who know a lot about family history, seem to be able to handle the challenges and the upendings and the upsettings and their lives more effectively. So Marshall's a psychologist, and he and his colleague Robin Fivesch went and did a study. They came up with a test that I later, and then your time's deemed the "Do You No Test," which is, "Do You Know Where Your Grandparents

were born?" "Do You Know It," "Antern Uncle," who had a difficulty. Do you know what happened

highest on this test, which is to say that children who know most about their family history,

“it was the number one predictor of their own emotional well-being. They compared it to all”

these other tests, and it was the most clearly defined thing to understand how children function in the world. They did this study in the summer of 2001. I said, "I don't have to tell you, I don't have to tell you. I don't have to tell you. I don't have to tell you." I'm 11 came at the end of this, National Trauma. They went back and did it again. And sure enough, the children who knew more about their family history were better able to process the living history

that we were all experiencing at the same time. So, obviously knowing where your Grandmother went to high school does not make you happier, more resilient per se. So, what is it about knowing this information that gives you the qualities these children had of being more resilient, adaptable,

stable, whatever the terminology was? So, I basically asked him my version of this, exactly

that question. Like, what would explain this? It doesn't on the surface, you know, make any sense. It's fascinating to know, but there must be a reason behind it. And what he told me is what brought you to this question, and to a certain extent, would brought you to me, and that is, that families themselves have narratives. And he said, basically, there are three types of narratives. There's an ascending family narrative. We came from nothing. We worked hard. We have it all.

That's an ascending family narrative. There's also a descending family narrative. We had a lot. There was a recession, a war, a natural disaster, and we lost it all. Or, there's the third type, which he called an oscillating family narrative. Grandpa came from the far country. He worked hard. He became the vice president of a bank. His house burned down. His daughter was the first in the family to go to college. She got breast cancer. Families have this natural kind of oscillation.

Now, obviously, a parent or a grandparents is not saying to a five-year-old, we have an oscillating family narrative. What they're doing is they're telling these stories in a sort of age-appropriate way, and what they're communicating is people that you know have also had difficulty. You look up to them, and they got through it, you can do the same thing. Now, I have talked about this, Lloyd. This appears in my book, The Secrets of Happy Families. It appears in the TED Talk that I gave

about this, and the first question people always ask me in response, which you may be about to ask,

so I'm a little bit cutting you off, is what about adoptive children? At that dinner where I was, Marshall has three children, two are natural born, and one is adoptive. There's anybody who knows

“the answer to this, and here's the thing about it. It's not passed down through the blood.”

It's passed down through the lifeblood, if you will, of the family, because it's a way of communicating and sharing. And the other thing people say, oh, I do that. Oh, I'm really good at this. I tell my family stories, all I'm here to say, I'm sorry, I'm calling bunk on that. Because the truth is, we have a different culture now. Don't trouble the children, right? Don't tell them your burdens, keep your own difficulties to yourself, because they're supposed to focus on being a child.

And as a result, you know, they say like if you, if you use too much puree when the baby is young, right, you're not going to give them the immunity to disease, that's what we're doing now. By keeping these family secrets ourselves and not telling our children, you are communicating to them, that these secrets, your difficulty, tease your challenges, your moments when the oscillation is at the bottom of the sin curve, you're saying to them, that's too difficult to handle in

an age of appropriate way, bring the skeletons out of the closet and learn to talk about your own challenges with your own children, because you will then empower them to be able to handle their challenges better. So after learning this information, did you put it to use in your own family, or did you find that you were already doing it? Yeah, I was probably one of those people that was diluting myself that I was doing it. I would say that I'll take a half a step back.

So the first thing I did was change my approach to family dinner. Okay, so it turns out nothing is more studied than family dinner. Every you know, um, and like has been taped and analyzed with an inch of its life, and the number one finding from this is there's only 10 minutes of real conversation and every dinner. The rest is taken up with take your elbows off the table and pass the catch up. If you can do that at dinner, great. Do it at dinner. Good for you. Give yourself a good

start. Pat yourself on the back, okay? The family dinner police will be very happy with you. You will not be arrested. But for the half of us who don't, take that 10 minutes and put it elsewhere. Have a snack before bedtime. Do family breakfast, right? Do when the kids come out

“from sporting practice or ballet dancing as it was in the case of my family? That's what matters.”

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It's almost a university on a siege. Listen to and follow campus files. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so Bruce, I'm wondering if you could take us through the next step

of your journey to understand the secrets of happy families. You've told us that family dinner is

a somewhat mythologized ritual and that what's really important is the valuable time that doesn't have to be at family dinner. You know, it's probably not that hard to find 10 minutes in a day with your kids, but the question is, how do you take that time and make it valuable time? Like what's one example of something that you can do with that time? Have your kids tell you stories about their day? That will help imprint the idea of storytelling so that as they get older, you know,

and by the way, one of the things that I love about the whole storytelling thing that you're doing and families is there's another thing in the research of family dinner that seems incredibly relevant here, which is the thing that happens if a family dinner that doesn't happen elsewhere, or this 10 minutes whenever it is, is what they call co-narration because you and I are siblings Lloyd and we were playing around wrestling in the backyard and then there's a snake and then you

“start telling the story about the snake and I'm like, that's how it would happen. This is what”

happened. You're like, no, that's not what happened. And that actually has a name called co-narration, which is enough itself, a great skill to have to learn how to tell a story together, deal with the differences deal with the conflicts, deal with the idea that there are different perspectives. Is that all that different from what Falker was doing? He just was doing it himself, but it shows that there are different points of view to all of these stories. That's what

they were like in your family, they were a little like sound and fury. The more I'd be with some

but, you know, it's funny. One of the things I like about your work is that there's always more to

the story than the initial claim. It's not just supporting one idea with a bunch of different examples. It's continuously turning and moving and developing, discovering, so Marshall Duke says kids who know more about their families are more resilient. So tell your kids more stories about your family, right? Not entirely. What you're saying is you also need to get your kids to tell stories about their lives. So if there's one thing you take away from this conversation other than

tell family stories, is it's that make sure your children do most of the talking when you're around them and you do more of the listening. And what that's doing is that's harmonizing and balancing the sound because the biggest change in the culture right now, I could try to make the argument and I believe this, is that everyone has a microphone now. And we've gone from a single microphone world to a multi-microphone world where everybody is talking at the same time and what they're doing

is they're leaving the family where there might be people who disagree and they're gravitating to social media around people who mostly agree with them. So the art of balancing, the art of disagreeing and in effect, the art of co-narration is exactly what we're missing. And the lot of it is that the ritual is what brings people together and compels them to learn to cooperate

“and navigate through conflict. And that's why the ritual is so effective, whether ritual is”

family dinner or the ritual is a wedding or the ritual is a funeral or the ritual is a summer backyard barbecue. These are collective activities where we practice collectivity and that's exactly what we're not doing today. Right and if I understand you correctly the reason we're not doing that is because there are these things in your pocket and your hand, these portals to other conversations where people who already agree on everything can engage in a kind of simultaneous monologue.

That's certainly a very big reason that it's happening and it's not only that when we go through those portals to other places, there are people who agree with us because of the anonymity that comes from being online, you conduct yourself essentially in a very, very, very anti-social way in many situations. There's something about being together eating the food, being in the backyard, taking the walk, being on the boat, watching the movie night playing the scrabble that doesn't allow

you to escape because elsewhere you can just narrate, you can just be on speaker. Whereas when you're sitting in a family, you also have to be on the input and you also have to be listening and that

to succeed. Yeah, it's interesting. It seems to me you're adding another layer to a familiar idea, the idea of being in the present. These tools that we have on us all the time, these phones are just distraction machines. They're so distracting to us and we can get out of anything, whether it's a line for a hot dog or a taxi ride to the airport, anything. We can go somewhere else and not have to exist in the present moment. The idea of being in the present at this point is

a cliche. It's a virtue that people understand whether or not they practice it as an other idea, but people understand it's probably important. But what you're saying is that, yes, it's important to be in the present, but there's extra weight. There's added importance to being in the present

with your family. So this brings up a very interesting question, which gets back to the first thing

you raised in our conversation, which is what is the definition of happiness? And I'm a little terrible-cut secrets of happy families and I exist in this world to a lot of extent. I'm grumpy about the word happiness. And the reason I'm grumpy is that we now know that happiness is something that you experience in the present. It's a feeling. It's an emotion and animals can feel happy in the present. But one of the things that distinguishes animals from human beings

is that we have the ability to stitch together past present and future. What stitches together past present and future answer a story stitches together past present and future? We have the ability to create stories. And we are, let's just say, 100 years in. I mean Aristotle did it,

“2500 years ago. But we're out 100 years into modern social science saying, what is a story?”

What is lore? What is a family story? And the interest scholars almost don't agree about this

at all. But here's what they do agree on. A story is two things connected over time.

So a snowball is not a story. A bloody nose is not a story. So what's the connection between the snowball and the bloody nose? Now that's a story. I'm going to tell you a story right now. I get up in the morning. It's snowed overnight. I go downstairs. I put on my coat. I open the door. What is going through your mind? What am I seeing when I open the door? Like snow dripped on the top of the cars?

I'm not going to continue my story. It's snowed overnight. It was cold. It was big storm. I wake up. I go downstairs. I have a cup of coffee. I eat my breakfast. I put on my coat and I open the door. What do I see? A giant pile of donuts. So now what's happening? I have upended the story. Okay? I have a plot twist. And you know what happens? You're paying more close attention than you were before because one of the reasons that we all say now were wired for stories. I remember

being in Marshall's house at that dinner and he had a copy of the storytelling animal. We were talking about how we're wired for stories. You're so wired for it. When I'm telling you my story, you're trying to answer it. You're finishing the story. And you're sort of falling asleep. And then when I say a pile of donuts, you'd like to now I'm paying attention. So now I'm going back to the story. It snows overnight. It's been a big storm. I go downstairs.

“I have a cup of coffee. I have half my breakfast. I put on my jacket up there. What do I see?”

A giant pile of donuts. Now what am I going to do? I'm not going to go back inside and say I'm not leaving. Am I going to start to eat the donuts? Am I going to start to give away the donuts? Okay. This is what an oscillation is. We get piles of donuts every single day. That pile of donuts could be something small. Like a fender bender. It could be something like a storm that hit where I'm here in New York City that shut subways down yesterday. It could be a natural

disaster. It could be a global pandemic. Life is about piles of donuts and how we react to them. And there comes a moment where you're stuck and you don't know what to do and you don't know how to react and you don't know what's going to happen next. And in that moment you can't tell the story. But you know you've gotten through it. You know you're on the other side and to bring this back to where we started. When you start to make meaning from it because the story itself does not

have meaning. You have to give it the meaning. And it is that act of giving meaning that is the act of

“being alive. That's why meaning is more important than happiness because it's about how we react”

not only when we're happy but also when we're unhappy. Back to Marshall Duke's study and the impact that family stories have on success of generations. The family story tells the descendant.

People I'm related to have dealt with piles of donuts before. I can do this. Is that basically

what the stories are giving children confidence? So now you get a story for me. The secrets of

Six months later my father then in his late 70s who had Parkinson's for some period of years

at that time got very depressed. This was a man who would never been depressed a minute in his life.

He got very depressed from Parkinson's and he tried to take his own life six times in 12 weeks. I mentioned before that come from a very hyper-functional family. I'd brother was focusing on the family business. My sister was focusing on the medical. I'm a storytelling guy. What was I going to do? I had been immersed. I spent decades of my life writing stories about the old stories ever told.

“I just published this book called The Secrets of Happy Families. And I thought you know what?”

Maybe my dad has a narrative problem. Maybe he's lost the plot of his own life story. So one Monday morning I said down I sent my dad an email. Tell me about the toys you played

with as a child. Now people think I'm a writer. My dad had never in anything longer than a memo.

And probably like an eight-word memo in his life. But he answered that story. So I sent him another one. You know, tell me about the house you grew up in. This process continued for the next eight years. Until my father weeks before he died, completed a 65,000-word memoir. One question, one story at a time. As it happens on the day that I am recording this conversation with you, I just received a proof of that book which we are going to share in a gathering of his friends and in

his honor next week in Savannah, Georgia. There is not a person in my family that does not believe that that process of storytelling saved my father's life. And the reason I've told this story is because what you asked me was, is the purpose, is the lesson, is the gift of the family story that the children understand that when they have difficult times that they can turn their life into a

story. The answer is yes, that is a gift, but it is not the gift because the gift is also for

the parents and the grandparents. You have secrets that you have not told. And the process of processing those secrets, the process of reliving those experiences and the process of turning them into stories, not just stories that you tell the children and grandchildren, but often stories that you tell yourself, that helps you make meaning of your life. You become the creator, the teller, the writer of your own life story, and then that life story. And all the life stories of the

members of the family, co-narrate, co-exist, co-burge into what becomes the family story. So, Bruce, we've been circling around this idea you've written about this, but one of the big lessons I'm getting from what you're saying is that it's as if we've been aiming at the wrong target. We've been aiming at this happiness target when we should be aiming at the meaning target. And happiness, whatever that is, will be a byproduct of hitting the meaning target. Is that

“fair to say? I think that that's beautifully said, and I think it relates to what you're doing,”

though. Because you're going to people and say, tell me a story. I'm let's use that story as a portal to understand you, your family, and a certain subworld of American life. What we're fundamentally talking about here is the elements of a story, okay? So we've agreed that there's at least two elements and they're connected over time. And part of the purpose of the story is to connect the snowball with the bloody nose. But there's something else that's being connected here. The teller and the

listener are being created. After this experience with my father, when I found that the storytelling helped him reclaim the plot of his life, which is also what happened to me in my life, that I had a story that I could tell you from that first book I wrote about Japan, you know, to the books I wrote

“about the greatest stories I've ever told in the Hebrew Bible, like I had what I think of as a linear”

life. Like I figured out what I wanted to do early. I did it for no money. I had some success. I got married and I had children. Then my story blew up in my 40s. First I got cancer as a new parent of identical twin daughters. I had financial problems because my family owned a bunch of real estate. They got wiped out in the great recession. And then my dad went on this suicide spray as I have called it. And I lost the plot of my own story. And I couldn't talk about it. I was like a

shame. I was confused. I was embarrassed. You know, I was sad. But when I did it turned out that everybody has their own story of when their own life story got disrupted. And so I went out and I

have collected and analyzed 500 life stories of Americans from all ages and all walks of life

“and all backgrounds. And I've written now basically three books on this. The life is in the transitions”

throughout of that. The search about work and a new book called A Time Together about the role that rituals play in our lives. And so I have had 500 conversations. I look people in the eye and ask them to tell me the story of the most difficult things that they experienced. And what I found is that in every conversation there was a moment where the storyteller was telling a story. Then me the listener said something in response and we together created something new. And by the way, that's exactly

what just happened between you and me. I was saying something. And you said, "Oh, what I'm hearing is this and that took us to a new place." That's what happens when the story gets told. There's a connection not just between this no ball and the bloody nose, but between the storyteller and the listener and between the past and the present. You're taking a story from the past where it appears to belong and you're telling it in the present and the stellar and the listener are together

creating some new connection. What is the name of that connection? That's the meaning. And I guess they're in lies the challenge that we've been talking a little bit about in this conversation, making time to make connections. If happiness is a byproduct of meaning or purpose and meaning is made through connections, then that's where it all begins. And I suppose that's a big part of what's missing in our lives and in a world that is increasingly fast-paced and distracting

and withdrawn, frankly. So I saw a study recently, I'm not sure if you've seen this, is that we walk 15% faster than people walked on the street 20 years ago and as a result, there are fewer encounters with other people and there are fewer moments of connection. Because if you look at all of the challenges that we faced collectively, loneliness, isolation, that's an absence of connection. Polarization, right? That's an absence of easemaking and

connection. Decivilization, dehumanization, AI. These are all about the absence of connection. And you say accurately that we are craving story because fundamentally we're craving connection because fundamentally we're craving belonging because fundamentally we're craving humanity.

“You write about in your book the family narrative. You know, I think that people understand”

family stories, of course, but family narrative seems like a slightly more developed idea. How do family stories form a family narrative? Does work need to be done to do that? Is that something that happens organically? Yeah, I love this question and I don't fully know the answer to, but it's part of a new idea that I'm trying to flesh out in my own mind and try to piece together. And I guess maybe the simplest way that I can say it is to use a word that we

don't use a lot and that doesn't have necessarily always a great connotation, but the word is

inheritance, that we inherit many different things from our families. We inherit biology, right? We inherit the house or the car or whatever it might be. But we also inherit a story, okay? And that story has to do with movement. It has to do with beliefs. It has to do with origins. Yeah, all the tomato sauce, the grandma made, right? Or the trip that the Antenucle made across the plains to settle in this place. And then we all went and follow, right? Or, oh, yeah,

oh, that person who was the war hero and that person we don't talk about who did that thing that we want to forget. Right? And this goes back again to the oldest stories, right? This idea is in the opening verses of the book of Genesis, right? What is that story? It's a story of generations, right? It's a story of the patriarchs and the patriarchs, right? What is any religion? Is a story of some hero figure who left the civilized world and went into the wilderness

and had a transforming experience and came back and wrote it down. So we have the memories that may live before us in oral stories or in objects or in land, you know, or in appearances, or in things that are up in the attic. But we also have a deeper historical inheritance of a narrative of who we are and what made us and how we became this way from people that we

made almost assuredly have never met and whose objects we cannot touch and whose stories we never

“heard. And so I think it's important to remember that when saying we passed down in our generational”

resilience, if you will, we also passed down in a generational trauma. Right? And both of those are passed down, not only biologically and not only in the hormones and cortisol levels and whatever that we now know in a generational trauma is passed through, but also through narrative. So if you

are spreading with resentment or bitterness or regret or hostility, recognize that you're passing

“that on to your children and grandchildren and why are they going to do? They're going to”

act it out. Tell the story. If there's a motto here, tell the story. Don't be afraid of the stories

that don't sound good on first telling. You can make pigs fly as Steinbeck said. You can create

the happy ending. You can create a better ending, even a story that's not happy. That's the power

“of the story. And in this case, with family stories, the power of the story you tell together.”

Bruce Filer, thank you for joining family lore. Thank you for assembling this tool kit

for family's all over the world. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for your during my role listening. If you have stories you'd like to share about your family, please email me at

“[email protected]. That's family [email protected]. Family lore is an Odyssey original podcast.”

It is written and narrated by me, Lloyd Lockridge. Our executive producers are Leah Restennis and I. Our lead producer and sound editor is Zach Clark. Our story editor is Katie Mingle. Additional sound editing mixing and mastering by Chris Basel and production support by Sean Cherry. Special thanks to more occurin, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, Hillary Schuff and Laura Berman. Thanks again for listening to Family lore. And if you have time, we'd love for you to

rate and review the show. For years, gone south has been a podcast about crime in the American South. But for our new season, we're widening the lens. Through deeply reported narrative-driven stories. We're digging into the myths, scandals, and power structures that still shape the South. In in a lot of ways, the country itself. Follow and listen to Gone South Season 5, an Odyssey podcast, available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your shows.