SUBURBAN BIGAMY

In this memoir, a man recounts the emotional and legal fallout of the shocking discovery that his father led a secret double life.

Zimmerman grew up idolizing his father, Norman, and considered him his best friend. And while Norm was often absent, presumably because of his work commitments, he was a deeply involved parent who made his loving presence felt. The author grew up in Winnetka, a tony suburb of Chicago, and by all conventional measures lived a normal life and a reasonably happy one. But he came to doubt everything about Norm when he was confronted by an extraordinary revelation. For 42 years, Norm managed to secretly maintain a double life—not only was he married to Zimmerman’s mother, Ann, but also to another woman, Margaret, with whom he had two children. Norm’s frequent absences from home were not professional in nature—he was escaping one family in order to spend time with another. The deeper Zimmerman dug into the sordid affair, the more extraordinary were his discoveries—while Norm’s other children had no idea about this duplicitous arrangement, Margaret did. The aftermath of these disclosures was thunderous—Ann divorced Norm, and what ensued was an acrimonious legal battle over finances. The author alerted Norm’s children with Margaret of the lurid predicament, news they received with alarm and disgust. Even after Norm was found out, he refused to either explain himself or apologize, an obstinacy that left an indelible imprint on Zimmerman, which he powerfully captures: “After a lifetime of lies and then screwing us out of our inheritance, this was the one thing he could’ve done—really the least he could’ve done—to give me some closure. But he simply refused. That cemented for me the fact that I did not know this man. He was an enigma. The man I thought I had known did not exist. I had been so close to him but I didn’t know him at all.”

With admirable candor, the author chronicles the profound effect Norm’s perfidy had on him—he was emotionally hobbled, unable to sustain a trusting relationship, and lost himself to a “wild and unserious life.” Zimmerman poignantly details the pain he suffered, especially the pall of suspicion his father’s mendacity cast over all of his memories: “The hardest part of processing and moving on from that are how my father’s deceptions left me with a lifetime of tainted memories. Recollections of love and joy and fondness still surface, as they would for anyone, but in my mind, they quickly turn sour. There’s this feeling that they can’t be trusted—that the feelings I recall in these moments are themselves full of untruths and contradictions.” For the most part, the author writes in a stylistically unembellished manner—his prose is cleanly straightforward, an approach that adds a certain plain radiance to the story. In the book, Zimmerman finally decides his father was a “sociopathic manipulator” but also concedes, with great philosophic restraint, that he was ultimately inscrutable, an unsolvable mystery. This is a frightening story intelligently told, one that exposes the frailty of even people’s most pedestrian certainties.

An engrossing work about the explosiveness of secrets exposed.