What If Your Identity Was Built on a Secret? Late-Discovery Adoption, Family Secrets & Reclaiming Identity with Al Isaacs

What happens when everyone in your family knows the truth about your life except you? Al Isaacs, author of Finding Mary Smith and longtime comedian and improv teacher, joins Lisa Lacy to talk about discovering at 52 that he had been adopted and what happens to identity when the foundation of your own story suddenly shifts. Al takes us inside the ordinary phone call from his mother’s oncologist that accidentally exposed a secret his family had kept for more than five decades, and the search that followed through DNA, genealogy, Search Angels and the trail of a folk singer named Mary Smith. The conversation also moves into imposter syndrome, forgiveness, the power of improv’s “yes, and,” and the painful cost of family secrets, including the conversations we may lose when truth is withheld.