Michael Zimmerman will be the first to tell you his dad, Norm, was his childhood hero. Born in Chicago but raised in suburban Winnetka, Michael believed he had the aspirational nuclear family: He and his brother, Allan, grew up wanting for nothing, his mother was a prominent community figure, and his father was an attorney and ran a Lincoln car dealership. He graduated from the University of Rochester in 1993, ski-bummed for a bit, and eventually began a career in finance. But in 2013, while living in Philadelphia and working for Vanguard, that idealistic image imploded when Michael and his mother discovered his father had been harboring a secret second family, just six miles away, for 40 years. He shares this story and how he and his family weathered the fallout in his memoir, Suburban Bigamy.

This wasn’t the family’s first experience with infidelity, but it was a far more sinister and traumatizing experience than Norm’s prior affair in the ’90s. The ruse finally unraveled because Norm suffered a stroke while on a weekend “fishing trip” away from the family, and when Zimmerman and his mother called the hospital, staff said his family was already with him. This set off alarm bells in Zimmerman and his mother that led them to discover that Norm had a second “wife” and two children just out of sight—he’d even had his first child with this other woman, called Margaret to protect her privacy, 14 months before Zimmerman himself was born.

“I don’t think he ever intended to get stuck the way he did,” says Zimmerman, looking back. “I can’t imagine someone would deliberately put himself in that position. And ultimately, he probably had a pretty miserable life. He was stuck between two worlds. One of his comments to me, when I was a teenager was ‘life is not a dress rehearsal.’ At the time, I always took it to mean ‘seize the day, do everything you want to do, live life to the fullest.’ Now that I’ve gone through this experience, and I look back on his words, he was probably also giving guidance to not make the mistakes he’d made.”

The story has all the potential for an HBO limited series, or as Zimmerman puts it, a Lifetime movie. But he hadn’t seriously considered writing the book until his father passed due to complications from COVID-19 in 2020. Kirkus Reviews praises Zimmerman for wading through not only the painful memories of the last decade but also exploring the stain and shadow that his father’s deceit cast upon all of his memories, calling it a “a frightening story intelligently told, one that exposes the frailty of even people’s most pedestrian certainties,” told with “admirable candor.”

While Zimmerman hopes that few people can relate to his story exactly, he sees the broader emotional beats as accessible to many kinds of readers dealing with family trauma. One of the book’s most poignant aspects is Zimmerman’s introspection on how his dad’s secrecy—missed or incomplete holidays, time away from home, and lack of emotional intimacy with his family—permeated his children’s psyches well before his bigamy came to light:

The lie impacted us long before the truth ever did. His absence and non-committal nature toward women and family led my brother and me down a similar path as his. In fact, all three of my father’s sons were single into their forties. I treated my relationships with women as disposable and avoided commitment. This was not just a product of observing his behavior but also a consequence of growing up with his absence…By my early 40s, I was on a self-destructive path of selfish indulgence and emotional avoidance. While I always maintained my professional responsibilities, my social life was a hedonistic blur better fitted for a college student than a middle-aged man.

Eventually, Zimmerman reached out to the family with the truth. But an initially diplomatic encounter with his half-sister quickly devolved into a yearslong legal and personal battle that destroyed Norm’s relationships with Ann, his legal wife, Michael, and Allan. In the book, Margaret bears a resemblance to Misery’s Annie, isolating Norm from his children, writing them out of the will once he’d divorced Ann and could legally marry her, and for a time sequestering him in a nursing home. They weren’t even personally told of Norm’s death; Ann received a notice from Social Security that her payments were increasing.

Zimmerman’s transparency comes from catharsis. He began therapy soon after the revelation and began journaling to help make sense of what amounted to lifelong deceit. Writing it all down helped him keep a record, to finally get the true picture of a father who had deceived him and his family. But a depression that arose as a result of his father’s “sociopathic manipulator” antics and utter lack of remorse caused him to pause the project. It was Norm’s death, and a very thorough vetting by a defamation lawyer friend, that helped Zimmerman put it all to paper and get his story out. As it turns out, others in the suburban community were harboring their own suspicions.

“In the last couple of months, I’ve had some of their former neighbors reach out to me, people who lived next door and across the street from them in the late ’70s and early ’80s, which has just been fascinating,” he says. “They would say things like, ‘Gosh, we knew something was up, but we didn’t know. We saw your father very rarely.’ Little things, like how little they saw those children and how the children weren’t allowed to play freely in the neighborhood—these are things that we didn’t have insight into. It sounds like my father and that other woman were really trying to keep their world small.”

If such a situation can have a silver lining, Zimmerman believes it’s that seeing the hole his father dug himself into catalyzed Zimmerman’s own emotional growth. After dating his wife, Beth, on and off for years, he put his frat boy days behind him. They were married amid his and his father’s festering estrangement, and one of the last times he attempted communication with his father was to try and let him know that he was going to be a father himself. Margaret called the police on him, and he never made contact.

Zimmerman still lives in the Philadelphia area with his family, working as a product manager for a fintech company. Unlike his father, he works from home, which gives him a hands-on relationship with his now 4-year-old son, Weston. Both time and fatherhood have lessened the betrayal and anguish at never receiving closure and true honesty from Norm, but Zimmerman says he has deeper regrets for not “catching more powder” on the ski slopes than for how he’s handled the repercussions of the last decade. Norm has been dethroned as his hero too; that honor now goes to Weston.

“I think about the things my father missed, and I don’t want to miss those things; I want to be a bigger part of my son’s life in everything. I want him to think of me as his best friend, and I want to be a huge part of his life. Part of doing that is being there for him in the ways that my father wasn’t always there for me.”

Amelia Williams is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.