The Lives of Secrets

Has a secret shaped your life?

Lawson Wulsin, MD, is recruiting volunteers to talk with him about how a secret has had a formative effect on your life. You should be 18 or older, willing to participate in a 2-hour initial interview, and possibly participate in follow-up interviews for a forthcoming book, “The Lives of Secrets.” If you are interested in participating, call Lawson at 513.558.5192 or send me an email at lawson.wulsin@uc.edu.

What drove Albert Einstein in 1902 to deny the existence of his daughter Liesrl?  How did he and his wife Maleva Maric choose to abandon their first child, successfully hiding her birth and her existence from his family, their friends, their two sons, and several biographers until 31 years after Einstein’s death?  Walter Isaacson, Einstein’s most recent biographer and author of Einstein, His Life and His Universe, remains baffled by this secret in Einstein’s life. Our most celebrated physicist of the twentieth century proved to be uncommonly clever and tenacious about guarding this family secret, one both he and Maric guarded to their deaths in spite of their wrenching divorce and his disloyalties to her. What made this secret worth such unfailing loyalty?  

Impressive secrets make news. And revelations raise fascinating questions about the mystery, the universality, and the power of secrets to shape lives. An accomplished actress, soccer mom to three teenage daughters, and wife to a physician is arrested and revealed to have lived under the alias Sarah Jane Olson for 23 years, a fugitive from charges of terrorism. A happily married Episcopal bishop and father of seven, Paul Moore, concealed his gay love affair of twenty years for the duration of his illustrious career. How many successful people harbor secrets which, if revealed, could ruin their careers? How does one secret beget another? What kinds of people have a talent for concealing?

The Lives of Secrets aims to explore through fiction narratives the lives of formative secrets—how they begin, how they develop, how they shape and reveal character, and how they are disclosed. No single story captures the whole picture, but as a collection these stories will show us key dimensions of the psychology of secrets.

I will draw these stories from extensive interviews with people who volunteer to talk with me as part of a qualitative research project on the psychology of secrets conducted through the University of Cincinnati. Following standard procedures for informed consent and qualitative research, I will use a semi-structured outline to guide the interviews in an effort to explore the key dimensions of secrets in each interview.

For those whose initial interview leads to promising drafts of stories, subsequent interviews will often be necessary to fully develop the stories. Each participant will be offered the opportunity to approve the sufficiency of the disguise before publication of the related story. The aim is to represent the salient features of secrets in a dramatic form that preserves the truth of the interviews as well as the confidentiality of those who shared their tales.