Daria Burke spent several years digging into the science of how our brains and bodies carry the imprint of early experiences. She wanted to understand the trauma she lived through growing up in 1980s Detroit with a mother who battled addiction. She suffered years of neglect before finding stability through school and rising in the corporate world. In her new memoir, Of My Own Making, she writes about the limits of success, how she was shaped by her past, and the work it took to change course. Plus, our critic at large, John Powers, reviews The Golden Hour. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: How did Daria Burke's childhood shape her identity?
We often didn't have a working telephone, so I didn't give my phone number out to people generally, really until high school. But it was really clear to me that there was something that should be hidden from people. And that was, I would say, my first instinct.
Did you ever feel ostracized from the kids? You were hiding this big secret from them. You were trying to avoid them by not letting them come visit your house and You didn't have a phone many times, so you didn't give out your number. But for those who did know, was there ever a moment where people, you knew people knew and maybe you felt ostracized?
Not at that age. I don't know what anyone knew. If they knew anything, they never said anything. And so my earliest, you know, if I think about it now in reflection, I think the first people who probably had instincts were were probably folks in my life when I was in high school.
And I think I had a different kind of freedom and could therefore be in places with friends and with their parents that maybe created more points of exposure. I think as small children, there wasn't a lot of investigation or interrogation necessarily. And to be fair, one of the boys who lived next door, his mom had four children. Each of the children had a different father.
You know, they had their own kind of chaos, for lack of a better word. And so everyone had their own story that they were living in. And I imagine it's easy to get lost in the details of your own life when you're also working really hard to put food on the table and keep the bills paid and take care of aging parents or whatever the case may be.
I will say that there was one moment that there was a song that That came out in the 90s about it was children taunting another child that the child's mother was on crack.
And that's right. Yeah, that song.
And I do remember when that song came out. just wondering if anybody would figure out somehow that that was my story, that that was true for me. And I hated that song because it felt like I was being taunted through the radio.
Were you ever with friends or with others and that song came on?
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Chapter 2: What impact did Daria's grandmother have on her life?
And when I look at all three of those populations or identities, experiences, they're all groups that have been forged despite conditions that weren't always favorable to them, to us, right? As a girl who was born poor and black and female, right?
I was consistently consuming messages, right, even subliminally that I shouldn't want very much, I shouldn't have very much, that I wouldn't have the wherewithal or the intelligence or the strength to create the kind of life that I've made. And so in learning that these populations are actually most likely to experience growth and a sense of strength and greater sense of relationships after trauma
really revelatory for me.
Daria, thank you so much for this conversation. This was such a pleasure, and thank you for this book.
Wow, thank you so much. This was incredible.
Daria Burke's memoir is of my own making. Coming up, critic-at-large John Powers reviews The Golden Hour, a book about how the movies and America have changed since the 1950s. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. Writer Matthew Spector grew up the son of a famous Hollywood agent.
In his new book, The Golden Hour, a story of family and power in Hollywood, he uses his parents' lives, and his own, to explore how the movies and America have changed since the 1950s. Our critic-at-large, John Powers, found that the book reveals something fresh about Hollywood.
I was raised by sensible Midwesterners who believed that no good could come of psychology or introspection. That may be why I get impatient with memoirs that dwell on their writers' inner lives. What I want are memoirs that go beyond the personal, to offer a portrait of something larger, a culture, a historical period, a whole way of living.
You find that in The Golden Hour, a story of family and power in Hollywood, a new book by Matthew Spector, a child of the movies who happens to be a really terrific writer. Spanning more than half a century and speckled with the caviar of famous names, this isn't a tell-all, pity party, or diatribe.
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