× Expand Photo Courtesy of Steve Marsh Mom and Dad on their wedding day. Mom and Dad on their wedding day.

I’ve always felt that famous people run the most effective self-help programs in America. Whether it’s Maury Povich revealing the truth about your dad, or the Fab Five from Queer Eye barging into your house to save your marriage, how many of us are quietly waiting for a beloved television personality to step in and solve our personal problems?

The fantasies of an urbane hipster like myself aren’t that different from yours. Though when I needed help with my family’s most painful secret, I eschewed Maury for Jonathan Goldstein, a podcaster who is, if not Oprah-famous, extremely popular with 30-something NPR listeners.

Goldstein records his show, Heavyweight, in a small studio in Minneapolis’s Longfellow neighborhood. But it’s produced by Gimlet Media in New York, under the podcasting umbrella of Spotify, the Swedish music-streaming conglomerate. Heavyweight’s production values sound so lush—a seemingly inordinate amount of time and technical skill and writerly thought go into the show—that the term “podcast” doesn’t feel adequate. It’s more apt to say each episode is an audio documentary about somebody’s long-term relationship with regret.

As host, Goldstein has cast himself in the Columbo role: an unassuming detective with sly comic timing. But rather than solving crimes, Goldstein endeavors to get to the bottom of family secrets, friendships that have gone sour, and promises that weren’t kept. Some episodes are heavier than others, but almost all the conflicts have been weighed down by the steady compounding interest of time. People drag their feet, and all that dragging makes each step more difficult.

There’s an episode about a sorority sister who gets kicked out by her fellow Greeks and years later still wonders why; another concerns a guy lending a cherished box set of CDs to a famous musician friend, who never returns them. (Spoiler: The musician is Moby.)

Goldstein always does his best to bring about a resolution of some kind, something that satisfies everybody involved—the people with the secret, and his audience—through the twin powers of longform narrative and droll radio humor.

My family’s mystery had gone unsolved for nearly a decade: long enough that my siblings and I were making increasingly awkward jokes about it at holiday dinners. So it wasn’t too long after meeting Goldstein that I asked him if he could help us.

The weirdest thing about the ask was that I’m supposedly a professional journalist myself—you know, somebody who’s supposed to be able to solve his own mysteries. But after nearly a decade of failure, I clearly needed help.

•••••

Ok, I’ve made you wait long enough for the secret. The story starts over Fourth of July weekend in 2008.

I was bicycling across Loring Park in the middle of a perfect midsummer night when my phone started blowing up in my pocket. It could’ve been a heads-up about an afterparty, maybe even a booty call. But I was alarmed to see instead an entire screenful of missed calls from my sister. She was spending the weekend near Motley on the Crow Wing River with my parents and most of our extended family. I called her back immediately, fearing the worst. Had there been an accident? Did Dad have a heart attack?

The phone was ringing again. “Megan?”

She was hyperventilating through the snot-choked sounds of tears. My little sister, then 27, has been a constant loud and dramatic presence in my life, but I had never heard her like this.

“If y-y-y-you knew we h-h-h-had a s-s-s-secret brother, w-w-w-would you tell me?”

I froze. Think about how bizarre that hypothetical is. I did, standing there in Loring Park. I can’t even remember how I answered her.

I hope it played out something like this: “Megan, it’s OK. Just calm down and tell me what happened.”

I remember her quickly establishing the scene. She had been drinking with our cousins and our Aunt Cindy around a bonfire, singing songs and telling stories. My parents must have returned to the camper for the night. Megan was regaling the stragglers with a story about a Ouija board.

All three Marsh kids—my younger sister Megan, my younger brother Kevin, and I—had grown up Catholic in White Bear Lake. And although Milton Bradley was hocking this occult board game during Saturday morning cartoons, our mom imposed a strict Ouija-board ban throughout my childhood. I’d relentlessly lobbied for one, at one point getting my mom to admit that something happened to her, in the distant past, with a Ouija board.

Megan, at some point, had scored the scoop, and it involved a Ouija séance my mom had conducted sometime in the late 1960s. In an Uptown apartment, my mom held hands with a coven of her friends and asked the sinister toy two questions. First, the initials of the man she was going to marry: The board had answered P-M. And then, how many kids she was going to have: The board had answered T-H-R-E-E.

It was at this point that my Aunt Cindy dropped the most dramatic #factcheck in our family’s history. “But that’s not true, Megan,” she said. “Your mom had four kids.”

Megan described the entire campfire going silent as Cindy realized what she had just said. This was no Freudian slip, but the leaking of a deep family conspiracy. My parents and our aunts and uncles and cousins had all been keeping this secret from me and my two siblings.

Back in Loring Park, my pulse wobbled. Did I have an older brother somewhere out there?

The next morning, I got a call from my mom. I remember how gentle and embarrassed she sounded, as she explained that, yes, she had given birth to a baby girl seven years before I was born. She was our full sibling—my dad was this girl’s dad, too. She told me that Cindy had apologized profusely the next morning. We agreed that once they got back home, we would all get together as a family to talk it through.

On Monday afternoons in the summer, I still go trapshooting in a league with my dad. Back then, he would pick me up from my apartment in Uptown, and we would listen to Rush Limbaugh until an inevitable political argument would detonate and we would find ourselves shouting over both Rush and each other on our drive up to the gun club. But when he picked me up that Monday, he was as quiet as a monk.

Sitting shotgun, I asked him if he remembered what he was feeling when he gave up his firstborn daughter for adoption. He ducked the question by saying, “Steve, I used to drink a lot.”

Then I asked if he still thought about her. “Every day,” he said.

We sat in silence for a quarter of an hour. Somewhere over the 610 bridge, we spotted a mallard and her three ducklings attempting to cross the freeway. My dad swerved deep into the gravel shoulder before fishtailing back onto the road. The sentiment in the car was so heavy that I’m not sure if his eyes glassed up with tears or if I imagined it. But it was another few miles until he asked, “Did you see those ducks?”

× Expand Photo courtesy of Steve Marsh Road trip The author’s parents take the top down on a ’70s road trip.

Two nights later, we all got together: Mom and Dad, Kevin, Megan, and her three-year-old son Ashton. We ordered cheeseburgers and fries from Wagner’s Drive-In, sitting on a picnic table in the early-July sunshine.

In 2008, my parents had been together for 36 years (today, the number is 47). Their story was never quite a fairy tale. There were awkward class differences and personality types that bordered on incompatibility: the good Catholic girl from the city meets the pistol-packing hellion from small-town Staples. But they’d loved each other for so long that the heart of their origin story always came in an outer shell of happiness. The story we heard now was an unknown and revelatory prequel.

In this early chapter, the whirlwind Uptown romance had faded sometime in 1969. My dad had lost his job in the city, so he moved back to the family’s country home on the Crow Wing River. When my mom discovered she was pregnant, she wrote him a long letter, and he invited her up to Staples. I can imagine my mom, just starting to show, being received by my dad’s intensely affectionate family.

Here, the narrative diverges. I gathered that together, in the country, they decided on a course of action. They planned to name this little girl Leisha—a pseudo-anagram of Alice, after Dad’s mother. But they weren’t ready to commit to either this baby or each other. They decided the best course for everybody would be adoption.

But there’s another possible version that, years later, seems like a more likely rendering of what happened: My mother , sensing no marriage proposal would be forthcoming, set a course and followed it—alone.

Back at the picnic table, my mom explained that going through this trial had, somehow, brought them closer. (Well duh, Mom: You’re at a burger joint surrounded by your husband and kids.) They married some three years after that birth and adoption, and then struggled a bit getting pregnant again. I was born in ’76, followed by Kevin in ’77 and Megan in ’81.

My mom told us how painful it had been to give up her firstborn, and it was obvious how soaked in Catholic guilt she still was. But she’d forced herself to make peace with her vow: She’d given up this little girl in a strict closed adoption. My dad didn’t say anything at all.

It was such a moving story that I remember asking gingerly about their feelings as we talked about our own, and about this person we started immediately referring to as our “secret sister.”

My curiosity ran toward the abstract: Here was a control group for nature versus nurture. How would a Marsh kid turn out in an environment without other Marshes around? My little sister had an actual beef. Just a few years before the discovery, at age 23, she’d decided to become a single mother herself. And throughout that fraught decision, my mom and dad kept their secret.

We explained that we wanted to meet Leisha, although we understood that we weren’t entitled to that reunion. My mom explained that she’d heard how the nearly medieval process of contacting your birth daughter worked: You send a letter to your file at Catholic Charities, and they tell you if there is a letter waiting for you. Mom’s understanding of the process made me think about my dad’s response to my question in the car; apparently, she’d thought a lot about Leisha, too. Mom agreed in the coming weeks that she would start what could be a reunion process.

And then she proceeded to methodically, passively, and completely avoid writing that letter for five solid years.

•••••

I met Jonathan Goldstein in the summer of 2014 at my friend Pat Condon’s wedding. Goldstein was married to Pat’s sister, Emily Condon, who ran the Oak Street Cinema in Minneapolis before moving to New York to work for Ira Glass and This American Life.

Two years later, at another wedding weekend, in New York, I ran into Goldstein again. When I excused myself for a cigarette along the waterfront in Battery Park, Goldstein asked if I had a spare. Outside, I asked him what he was working on, and he told me he was debuting a new podcast about solving cold-case family mysteries. The first episode would investigate why his father and his uncle hadn’t spoken in decades.

I’m sure he wasn’t fishing for a personal confession, but I spilled the entire Leisha story anyway. And Goldstein seemed genuinely intrigued. He suggested that I send him an email about it when I returned to Minneapolis.

I sent that email, but I can’t say I had a lot of hope for it. Starting after that first family confab, years earlier, I’d made my own efforts to break the story. And I’d run immediately into barriers.

First of all, the hospital no longer existed. I had a buddy on the police force run what I thought would be her name: “Leisha Marsh” or, after my mom’s maiden name, “Leisha Stanchfield.” Nothing.

When my mom told us that she didn’t have the up-to-date paperwork, I called Catholic Charities and discovered that they no longer had the resources to service their own adoption records. Apparently, they’d transferred their cases to the management of Lutheran Social Services. I called the Lutherans and asked them to send my mom a new packet.

Meanwhile, it became harder to even remember Leisha’s name. My brother and I would joke about it. “What was it again? Lisha? Licia? Alisha?”

I wasn’t frustrated with my mom. I understood the emotional risks involved for her. What if the little girl she gave up for adoption was hurt or crazy or angry or dead? Maybe she just wouldn’t care.

But I felt that figuring out what had happened to Leisha might help alleviate my mom’s deeply held anxiety. And despite my dad’s Abrahamic emotional silence, I suspected he wanted to find her more than anybody, perhaps driven by an even deeper guilt than my mom’s.

In my email to Goldstein I wrote about the psychological weight I believed my parents were still carrying. Goldstein wrote me back, thanking me for thinking of him, but explaining that he and Emily were soon having a baby of their own.

“I don’t want to keep you from diving into this,” he wrote, “but if it’s something that you still haven’t started exploring by November, I’d love to figure out how we could help.”

A few months later, after Goldstein’s paternity leave, his producer, Kalila Holt, got in touch. She asked me to recount my family’s story, this time for tape. She would be calling from New York, but she booked time for me in a studio at WCCO, in downtown Minneapolis.

This is how Goldstein and Holt determine the viability of a potential story. They listen back to figure out how well-intentioned the subjects are, their capacity for honesty and openness with both themselves and the people in their lives. Producers are also looking for “good talkers,” a radio term of art for somebody interesting enough to hold an audience’s attention.

× Expand Photograph by Cameron Wittig Kalila Holt and Jonathan Goldstein Producer Kalila Holt and host Jonathan Goldstein in his new Heavyweight studio, in Longfellow.

“We get a lot of email submissions,” Holt told me recently. “And you can often tell from an email submission if something’s too raw or the person has a real blind spot. It’s a little easier when it’s people Jonathan already knows.”

In February of 2017, Goldstein flew into Minneapolis and picked me up at my apartment. We drove together to my parents’ house in White Bear Lake. My mom and dad both agreed to meet Goldstein, and I brought a raspberry pie from Stockholm Pie Company for the occasion.

It was a cold day, with a fresh blanket of snow. Once we stepped inside and introductions were made, Goldstein started to unpack what appeared to be a bottomless Mary Poppins bag full of radio equipment. He attached lavalier mics to my mom and my dad and me, and he unfolded this big mic, with a foam windguard wrapped around it. Goldstein seemed strangely official with all his radio gear, as if David Attenborough from BBC’s Planet Earth were operating as a one-man band.

Then we all sat down at the table in the middle of my parents’ kitchen to eat pie and talk about the most painful memory in my parents’ lives.

During the course of our conversation, my dad must’ve got up to offer coffee refills about 175 times. At one point, when we were talking about what my childhood was like, he reached up to show Goldstein a .45 automatic that he had hidden on the top of a cupboard. Looking at a photo I took of my dad’s handgun next to the raspberry pie, I joked to Goldstein, “Chekhov’s pie” (a call-out to the dramatic principle that a gun introduced in the first act must go off by the end).

My mom, by contrast, came off calm and sweet. At Goldstein’s gentle urging, she recounted the story she had first told us at the picnic table seven years earlier. She explained what it was like being a single pregnant lady in 1969.

Her own mother, also a devout Catholic, labeled her a failure and wouldn’t allow her to visit home unless she held an overcoat in front of her belly. Shame compelled her to quit her office job at the Star Tribune. She found a new job at a temp agency and wore a fake wedding ring to work, telling her new colleagues that her husband was serving in Vietnam.

She took adoption and birthing classes with other single pregnant women at Seton Residence, a home for unwed mothers, run by Catholic Charities. Later that fall, she took a nasty spill on an icy sidewalk and started hemorrhaging. A week or two later, she went into premature labor.

My parents huddled together to watch their baby behind glass at St. Mary’s Hospital, a Catholic hospital in Cedar-Riverside. But my mother was alone when the nuns took Leisha away.

Having run through her history, feeling vulnerable again to everything she’d experienced back then, she explained why she hadn’t written the letter yet. And Goldstein quietly asked, “Would you like to write that letter now?”

First she tried it longhand. When that proved unwieldy, I offered to type for her. I got my laptop out, and she dictated to me. When we were finished, she looked at what I’d transcribed on my old work computer, and copied it down longhand on blank laser-printer paper.

Within a few months, my secret sister would read my mom’s letter and respond.

•••••

It's funny—not funny ha ha; more like ha ha, that was a miracle—that when I finally asked somebody for help, I stumbled on the perfect guy. It’s as if the roof of my house were about to collapse, and after frantically googling “emergency carpenter,” the person who showed up wasn’t some shady handyman, but Jesus himself. In this case, a bald, Jewish Jesus from Montreal, with a bottomless bag of radio equipment.

Now that he was in my life—and he’s really in it: Goldstein and Condon moved to Minnesota last winter—the least I could do was read the book on Jonathan Goldstein, right? And so I went back and listened to every episode of Heavyweight and each of his This American Life segments.

On Heavyweight, Goldstein fulfills the job of a radio host, letting the audience know who the characters are and what’s going on. But he’s also an investigative journalist, oftentimes an amateur therapist (if not a full-on rabbi), and always—always—a comedian, employing a deadpan delivery to cope with his own dysphoric social dread.

Having gone through the reporting process with Goldstein, I suspect that he’s socially awkward not because he’s clueless about his effect on others but because he’s too self-aware. He’s trying to anticipate every nuance of the interaction while it’s happening.

Still, somehow, ever since he was an adolescent, he’s felt compelled to entertain—starting off safely behind a word processor. He first contributed to zines, and he was past 30 when he finally published his first novel, Lenny Bruce Is Dead, in 2001.

After a stint on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Goldstein moved from Montreal to Chicago to work as segment producer for Ira Glass’s This American Life. That’s when Glass realized he could send Goldstein anywhere and he would come back with a good story.

“We totally realized the power of Jonathan Goldstein,” Glass said by phone from New York. During the course of his tenure on the show, Goldstein rang up almost three dozen This American Life appearances—a usage rate that’s approaching David Sedaris territory.

What were Goldstein’s specific powers on the program? “He’s an unusually good interviewer, for starters,” Glass said. And he praises the way Goldstein strings together the quotes and the story. “The writing is equally sort of funny and melancholic, which is a combination I think is really hard to beat.”

Glass believes Goldstein discovered his tone and approach in a 2002 story about a long-lost answering machine message that Goldstein’s friend Josh heard while going to college at Columbia University. The crux of it involves The Little Mermaid, a missing school notebook, and a California mom with a filthy mouth.

Goldstein agrees that he found a successful storytelling technique with that one. The trick involved “applying the tools of investigative journalism in service to stories that weren’t stories that you would see in a newspaper,” he said.

He brought the same approach to a CBC show called WireTap, typically soliciting appearances from his friends and family in Montreal. When that show ended after 11 years, Goldstein moved to New York to develop a new podcast with Alex Blumberg, an old colleague from This American Life.

× Expand Photo courtesy of Steve Marsh Marsh Family (Not quite) all in the family. Left-to-right, Megan, Pete (Dad), Jean Ann (Mom), Steve (the author), and Kevin. Not pictured: Leisha.

I reached Blumberg at the New York offices of Gimlet Media—one of the first podcast-industry success stories. (Goldstein seems to have realized the comic potential of casting Blumberg as a Bruce Wayne–style oligarch on Heavyweight, and technically, he’s correct. Last winter, Blumberg sold his podcast startup to Spotify for $230 million.)

Blumberg has an explanation for Goldstein’s role on the show. “Part of it is because he’s a little bit of an uncomfortable presence in the world,” he said. “And part of that is just him milking it.”

I’d noticed this about Goldstein’s presence in my parents’ kitchen. He isn’t gregarious or overly comfortable in space. But after setting up all his equipment, he listens intently and without judgment, and you feel compelled to share.

“It’s such an unusual trick that he’s pulling,” Blumberg says. “To be able to sort of balance that level of humor with meaning. I don’t know if there’s anything else like it.”

It was Goldstein who came up with the idea of investigating his own family’s big mystery: why his dad and his uncle hadn’t spoken in decades. Together with his wife, he took that story idea and expanded it.

As Condon explained over tea at a Tibetan restaurant in south Minneapolis, “He’s just obsessed with the past. That’s really where we started, I think.”

The two of them worked for a few months to come up with a name until Condon landed on Heavyweight.

“It’s funny, because we worked so hard to refine this concept,” she said. “Then when I sat down with Ira at last, and I was telling him about Jonny’s new show, he was just like, ‘Oh. So like every story Jonathan’s ever done?’”

For his part, the meaning of the title has morphed for Glass into a reflection on Goldstein’s creative process. “It’s not just about the heavy weight that the people in the stories are carrying,” he said. “I feel like each story is actually such a difficult piece of personal journalism that Jonathan is the heavyweight fighter getting in there and knocking out these masterful stories, one after another. It’s like he’s the heavyweight actually—like he’s the Muhammad Ali of this form.”

•••••

When I thought about the weight in my own family’s story, it was all loaded into the baggage of not knowing what my sister’s life was actually like. My mom had made a choice to give up this little girl and then never found out how that girl had turned out.

I couldn’t stop thinking about how my parents had been pulled back together to deal with this unplanned pregnancy and the adoption process that followed. And how that reunion had created the family that ultimately included me and my siblings.

I talked to my friends about their own adoption stories. Most of them were complicated; some of them were straight-up devastating. I heard tales of birth mothers repeatedly flaking on that first meeting, brothers who were so angry they cut off all contact. I didn’t know if my no-longer-secret sister was even alive.

She would be nearly 50 years old now. And who knows how disruptive it would be for her to come into contact with the people who’d given her up for adoption?

•••••

In November 2017—nine years after my Aunt Cindy spilled the beans around the campfire and nine months after my mom wrote that letter in the kitchen—my older sister returned my mom’s overture with a note of her own.

She was alive, and she lived in Minnesota, with a family of her own. Her name wasn’t Leisha, but Natalie. She’d grown up in a suburb of Minneapolis, and her parents had stayed together for 46 years. She played soccer in college and now worked as a marketing executive for a software company.

Natalie explained that she’d known she was adopted from the beginning, and loved the idea of being chosen by her parents. They’d always told her she was “a gift of love.” She wrote that she had considered reaching out to her birth parents before, but was concerned about her own parents’ feelings, and also harbored some anxieties about rejection.

She had some questions she had been harboring her entire life: Where did she get her auburn hair? What part of her personality came from nature and what from nurture? Would she ever be able to answer health-history questions at the doctor’s office?

It was a warm, eloquent, beautiful letter: in many ways the absolute dream scenario. And it offered a real kind of absolution for my parents.

She said she would like to meet, but wanted to take it slow. In the summer of 2018, my parents met Natalie and her husband for the first time at a family restaurant near Minnetonka.

The only complicating factor now seemed to be Goldstein and his podcast.

•••••

At this point it would be good to point out that each season of Heavyweight includes eight episodes. And while my family’s episode has taken longer than usual to produce, many of them are multi-year, multi-hour endeavors.

Almost four seasons in, Goldstein has realized there is a rhythm to reporting these things. There often comes a point, often just after halfway, that Goldstein refers to as “the honeymoon,” where the interests of the subject and the interests of the show overlap in a perfect Venn diagram. And then, he says, “you have to talk people into finishing the story.” He realizes there’s a “showbiz” aspect to what he does—hitting deadlines, commitments to sponsors. “It’s a weird fucking thing,” he says. But he’s also aware of the imbalance in stakes. “I always need to remember, this is your life,” he says. “This is your mom’s life.”

And on cue, as soon as Natalie responded to her, my mom started worrying. How could she tell Natalie about the podcast, and would she have to talk to Goldstein again? She acknowledged how much his help had meant to us. But she worried about how Natalie would perceive the way we had pursued her. My mom started to duck Goldstein’s calls. And when my dad would hear me talking to Mom about Goldstein or the podcast, he would sometimes explode in anger.

In August of 2018, my sister Natalie felt ready to meet her siblings for the first time. I was in charge of figuring out the most convenient place to meet—halfway from the western suburbs and White Bear Lake. What kind of food goes with meeting a secret sister for the first time? We picked pizza.

Goldstein wanted to fly into Minneapolis to record our feelings about the upcoming meeting. My mom agreed to talk to Goldstein, but she didn’t want to upset my dad. So she met him, like a CIA agent, in the park down from their house.

The next day, Goldstein asked if he could come to my apartment “to get you applying aftershave, putting on a necktie, etc.” It was amusing seeing Goldstein in full-on documentarian mode again, with his big fuzzy mic.

This prompted another awkward espionage moment: We didn’t want Natalie to spot this guy with a boom mic and his scanning-for-change-at-the-beach-style headphones. So we let Goldstein out a couple blocks before arriving at the pizza place. My then-fiancée, Maggie, and I shook our heads as we pulled away, seeing Goldstein with all his gear, standing on the sidewalk by himself.

That dinner at Red Wagon Pizza was magic. The air pressure was just holding off a storm as we all found our spots at the big common table: Maggie and me; my parents; my siblings, Kevin and Megan; and Natalie and her husband. Natalie stood a foot shorter than the rest of us, but she had some striking Marsh family features. She revealed a sharp sense of humor and she laughed a lot.

None of us said a word about the podcast.

•••••

Maggie and I were getting married on Labor Day 2018, a month after meeting Natalie. I told my mom that I wanted to invite Natalie and her husband. I didn’t know what would happen to our relationship: Would we become friends? Would we ever relate to each other as siblings? If either one were a possibility, I wanted Natalie to be there.

Goldstein and Condon would also come to the reception, and a lot of my friends were really excited about this—especially my women friends. Jonathan Goldstein is going to be there? they would practically squeal. Evidently, for 30-something millennial women, podcasts are the new Beatles, and Jonathan is the cute one.

My mom wondered if Goldstein would be bringing his recording equipment with him. I assured her he wouldn’t—although with all the weirdo artists on the guest list, no one would have noticed. But I did ask her if she could please talk to Natalie about the podcast before the wedding. She said she would, but I had heard that from her before. Sure enough, as the wedding got closer—and closer—my mom still hadn’t said anything to Natalie about Goldstein or the podcast.

At the reception, I put my arm around Natalie and thanked her for coming. I told her that she was a part of our story and always would be. And then later, at the punch bowl, I introduced her to Goldstein, explaining simply that this guy helped us find her.

A couple of days after the wedding, Maggie and I were eating Mongolian barbecue when I butt-dialed Natalie on Facebook Messenger. I rushed out to the entryway and, finally, told her about Goldstein and his podcast. She explained that she’s a private person and so is her family. But, after consulting with her husband, she recognized the positive impact the podcast could have.

This negotiation about access with my new sister felt stressful. But it’s what I do for a living: cultivate sources, juggle schedules, talk about the parameters for discussions and what’s off limits.

In the social media and reality TV era, I understand that sharing details from your private life can feel like you’re trading on your emotions for the attention of an audience. I didn’t want my parents or my long-lost sister to feel like they were on the set of Maury.

But I also don’t think we ever would have found Natalie without an investigation. And I think we lucked out with the investigator I chose, even though I hadn’t even realized the scope of Goldstein’s talents when I initially offered him my family’s story. In the end, I realize that I trusted him more than I trusted myself.

That being said, I’ve asked so much of Natalie at this point that I couldn’t ask her for an additional interview before sitting down to write this story. It gave me heartburn to request anything more from her. At this point, I just want to figure out what it means to be her brother.

•••••

In the spring of 2019, Goldstein finally got his interview with my secret sister. And both of them told me it went well.

But then, a month later, he had another idea. I would interview Natalie in his Longfellow podcast studio, while he helped guide the conversation.

We did the interview over the lunch hour on a weekday. I sat across from Natalie—now, all of us were wearing the stupid studio headphones—speaking into Goldstein’s expensive microphones. And for more than two hours, I asked her all about her life. I definitely caused her to be really late getting back to work.

I was emotional, and I can’t remember the precise specifics of what we talked about—another reason I’m happy to have turned this story over to somebody who records everything.

But I do remember one question that Goldstein kept asking: “Steve, do you have anything you want to thank Natalie for?”

We had been discussing this idea of a karmic debt. Natalie’s birth inspired my parents to get back together. And the butterfly effect of that event led to my own existence.

Natalie dismissed this idea. She’s a very religious person, a devout Catholic like my mom, and she didn’t see the world this way. Natalie professed that she “didn’t do anything.”

A little while later, Goldstein asked again, “Steve, do you have anything you want to thank Natalie for?”

And again I demurred, this time because I kind of felt protective of her last answer.

But when Goldstein asked a third time, I tried to think deeply about his question. What do I have to thank Natalie for? And I realized that by simply participating in the podcast, by meeting me in the studio and answering my questions, by being open to my family contacting her 50 years into her life—through all these acts of kindness, Natalie gave my family a sort of new faith in the world.

× Expand Photo courtesy of Steve Marsh Steve Marsh and his sister Natalie The author at his wedding reception, in 2018, with sister Natalie.

When you give your child up for adoption, when you have to ask the world for help, there’s a chance that request will be returned with love.

•••••

I called my mom as I was working on this story to ask if she regretted—or resented—the fact I’d brought this podcast into their lives.

“I didn’t have any problem talking to Jonathan,” she said. “I guess I never really thought ahead to having it on a podcast. And when I finally wrapped the idea around my head, I wanted it to be more private. But he truly helped me. He helped me to open up about it.”

More than that, Mom told me that Natalie feels the same way.

I asked her if she knew how Dad felt about it, if maybe some of his hostility toward the podcast is connected to the guilt he’s carried ever since the week they spent up in Staples, when she made that decision to give up her baby. He’s not the best at admitting his mistakes.

“It’s hard to gauge,” she said. “He didn’t think we needed a podcast in order to find her. And I don’t think he understands what a podcast is. He really was uncomfortable with the microphone. He kept getting up and offering Jonathan coffee and pie.”

Bang—there it is. The pie gun just went off.

But my mom admits they needed the help. “To be honest, I don’t know if I would’ve done anything. I was so guilty about it. And I was guilty about not telling you kids. And I kept it secret for so long. I don’t know if I would’ve found her.”

My mom is deeply happy to have Natalie in her life. “I love her personality,” she said. “I love her sense of humor. I want to write a letter to her dad because they did such a marvelous job.”

She reflected back again on that day in 2017, with Goldstein in her kitchen, when she handwrote that letter, filling two pages in 10 minutes. “I think I must’ve had that letter in me the entire time,” she said. “I just think there’s something about Jonathan. Just his soft-spoken way of asking, Do you want to write that letter right now? I don’t know what it is, but it opened up these feelings in me.”

•••••

Our family’s episode of Heavyweight will come out this December. Holt reports they recorded over 20 hours of tape, spread out over nearly three years, which they now need to log, prune, and piece together. Which parts of the story will they include and which parts will they leave out? What jokes will Goldstein write to tie the segments together?

And how should we listen to it? Will we invite Natalie over to my house and tune in together—or is that weird? Do we just listen to it individually and then come together with a group text message later that day?

If I listen with my dad, will he switch off the podcast, like I always switch off Rush on the way up to the gun club?

These are the kinds of questions you ask when you’ve relinquished control of your family’s story. I think I’m at peace with it.

But now that the microphone on this long adoption saga is finally switched off, I do find myself replaying the question that Goldstein kept prodding me to answer—with an edit at the end. Steve, do you have anything you want to thank Jonathan for?

And this time, I think I can get the answer right on the first try: Jonathan, thanks for everything.

Listen to the Marsh family episode of the Heavyweight podcast.