Arts & Entertainment

The Tapes That Held My Family Secrets

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A week after Andrea Skinner, the youngest daughter of Alice Munro, published her explosive essay about her mother’s silence around the childhood sexual abuse she experienced at the hands of her stepfather, one of my colleagues got an email from the writer Beth Raymer. When Beth and her sister, Colleen, were children, Colleen was raped by a relative. She told their mother almost immediately and expected something to happen; instead, in the years and decades after, nothing much changed, and the event turned into a kind of family secret, cloaked in ambiguity and denial. This is something that happens all the time, but in Beth and Colleen’s case, there was a twist. Their father, suspicious of their mother’s infidelity, had tapped the family phone lines for a number of years. When Beth would finally listen to the hours and hours of tapes in her 30s, she’d stumble upon the truth about what the “adults” in the family actually knew and how they chose to respond. This is a story about “proof” — its power, its severe limitations — as well as an account of how one family collapsed under the weight of duplicity and paranoia.

—Joy Shan, features editor, New York

The Divorce Tapes My family knew that my father had been tapping the phone lines. Only later would I discover the secrets the recordings contained.

Photo: Jeff Brown
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