When You’re Not From A Nice Family

This is an episode of Inside the Tent, a podcast going behind the scenes of Campside’s award winning shows.

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From the outside, Diana Keough’s family looked like the kind everyone admired. Her father was a successful attorney. The family sat in the same church pew every Sunday. There were six children, sporting events and family vacations. Everything appeared picture perfect.

Then, in 1988, her father was diagnosed with AIDS. People might describe that moment as the one that changed everything. But that’s not quite true. It was the moment everything hidden began to come into the light.

Trained as a journalist, Keough did what came naturally: she picked up a tape recorder. Over the next several years, she recorded more than one hundred hours of conversations with her parents and siblings, never imagining those tapes would one day become the heart of a podcast.

And she couldn’t have known then where the story would lead - not just to long-buried family secrets, but to unexpected grace. To a father transformed near the end of his life. To a mother whose heart was changed by a friendship with a woman on Texas’s death row.

Diana and sound designer John Delore are both from the Milwaukee area and begin their conversation with an important question: where to find the best frozen custard. (Perhaps it’s Gilles!)

And they move onto something even more pressing: why share the story of Not From A Nice Family publicly after thirty years? For Diana, it was about having perspective and the cooperation of her five siblings.

John asks about the distinction between journalism and memoirs. For Diana, her experience as a journalist - reporting on the pain of others - prepared her to face her own past and to use the hours of cassette tapes to report on her own family.

And Diana admits why she felt compelled to tape her mother over the years: she needed to fact check the woman who often retold stories as she wanted to remember them, rather than how they were.

John asks about the experience of listening to old tapes and rereading old journals. For Diana, it was traumatic, but also a chance to process what happened. And making the show was a chance to tell a sensational story with care and find the elements of redemption.