I grew up in Normal, Illinois, but had lived in New Jersey for more than thirty years when my father died at the age of eighty-four. I was fifty-four at the time and soon learned that family secrets had been kept from me. Strange deaths, tragedies, indiscretions, and relationships lay in my past, totally hidden. It took me seven years to uncover these secrets from personal interviews, genealogical studies, public records, and cutting-edge scientific work done by worldwide experts. Along the way, I trace my own life path from wanting to be a mechanic to gaining a master’s degree at MIT and working at a famous research laboratory. I also tell my own fifty-year love story. The secrets are now known, and I thought it was time at the age of seventy-nine that I should write this memoir to tell you all about my Normal Secrets.

I grew up in Normal, Illinois, but had lived in New Jersey for more than thirty years when my father died at the age of eighty-four. I was fifty-four at the time and soon learned that family secrets had been kept from me. Strange deaths, tragedies, indiscretions, and relationships lay in my past, totally hidden. It took me seven years to uncover these secrets from personal interviews, genealogical studies, public records, and cutting-edge scientific work done by worldwide experts. Along the way, I trace my own life path from wanting to be a mechanic to gaining a master’s degree at MIT and working at a famous research laboratory. I also tell my own fifty-year love story. The secrets are now known, and I thought it was time at the age of seventy-nine that I should write this memoir to tell you all about my Normal Secrets.