Family Drama Sounds Like A Summer Listen To Me
Inconceivable Truth follows the unexpected journey of Matt Katz to find his actual biological father after an accidental discovery from 23andMe
It’s not often that you stumble across a feel-good mystery based on a personal story. This terrain is more likely to make you feel like a blowfly, there to feed on the decaying corpse of someone’s life, now lying in the ditch so that it can financially benefit someone else.
These stories rely on gripping details of an intensely personal nature. The more sordid and ugly the detail, the better. Outlandish details and incredible events of coincidence and luck? Check check. Shadowy figures with questionable morals act in a way that should be illegal if it’s not already. And please, get the tissues ready to service your big emotions because these stories always hinge on universal archetypes. Like, for example, the question: Who’s Your Daddy?
Behold, Inconceivable Truth, a narrative series from WAVland that chronicles the mystery of Matt Katz’s genetic heritage, and the irreversible truth he accidentally discovered from 23andMe, the popular online ancestry company that offers a detailed constellation of your genetic ancestry (eg 54% Asian from Vietnam, 22% Eastern European, 20% British and Irish, that sort of thing).
One day Katz spit in a vile and mailed it off. His goal had been to determine the more precise origins of his Jewish genetic roots. It was an amusing lark for him; he wasn’t an adoptee child looking to trace back his biological history.
This is where the plot becomes a bit of a sci-fi thriller, but this time, based on someone’s actual life
The report was not an amusing confirmation of the life he knew. Instead, Katz’s 23andMe report would send him down a multi-year rabbit hole to figure out how he came to be the way he biologically was.
Boiled down, Matt Katz wasn’t actually who he thought he was, or rather, what he knew about himself to be true, and what had been told. But we soon discover that the mystery goes back one generation further: his mother wasn’t given the truth about the fertility treatment she received in the 1970s to help her get pregnant.
Let’s pause here for a moment
The fact that it only costs $149 to unravel one’s identity is a comment on the power and accessibility of the Internet, and Silicon Valley more specifically, where companies like 23andMe have flourished under itchy late-night search queries. The answer Katz received required him to accept that the 100% Jewish cultural identity he was raised on didn’t match his actual genetics.
This story could unseat, completely unhinge some people. To unlearn one’s biological identity as an adult is unsettling at best, and completely unraveling at the other extreme. Both the child—and in a different story also the father— could be in a destructive red-pill position to learn that parentage is not what is expected.
Although Katz plays it cool in the series—in addition to being a writer and author for various A-Level publications, he’s also an audio-native who has worked at WNYC and New Jersey Public Radio. Perhaps this embued him with the instinct to begin recording this odyssey early. His cool-headed journalist instincts allowed him to be honest and forthcoming, appropriately over-sharing in moments, and yet still present himself grounded and level-headed about this earth-shaking revelation.
Was he always that cool about this story, about his story not being what he thought it was? Fairly unlikely. He allows himself to spin as the story progresses. And he “gets on tape” some of the most awkward conversations you could ever imagine; like when he shares the result with his mother which pulls into question the identity of his biological father. Imagine asking your mother if she was having an affair around the time you were conceived. This sort of dirty laundry was crucial to make this story work; but Katz doesn’t make you feel like you’re rummaging around in his top right drawer. The straight-talking, honesty-first, emotions-second nature of his family comes through in the series. Roberta and Richard Katz, his parents, are actually the stars of this series.
As the story arc follows, he makes an example of the dark ages of fertility treatments in the way that he grounded his personal story inside this audacious medical story. Based on zero medical knowledge which must have been known at the time, gynecologists would “mix” sperm, which they told their patients “would have a better result.” To make this ruse work more efficiently, they would then tell their patients to have sex that same day of the treatment, to allow for the perception that conception was “natural,” ie, had happened in the bedroom of the couple.
It’s hard to believe that medically-trained doctors believed this bunk. But from their vantage point—the sixties and into the early seventies—they probably believed that they could successfully ‘fool’ their patients. As far as they knew, their techniques could allow happy couples to successfully conceive a child, who would be raised as their own, without the question of who the parentage actually was. In some ways, it was a perfect crime.
There’s one small quirk of this story that goes unmentioned
The clue that tipped off Katz that his biological father wasn’t who he thought he was was: Ashkenazi Jewish, which according to 23andMe is its own category of genetic heritage which be distinctly separated from others. When Katz’s genetic profile came back as half Ashkenazi Jewish (mother), and half “British and Irish” (father) this was unexpected. The father he believed to be his biological father was clearly Jewish, of some extraction.
This detail prompted Katz to dig further. Eventually, he connected with a Search Angel…one of the wonders of Facebook groups…where savvy researchers thrive and can dig up names and phone numbers of potential relatives. Had Katz’s parentage been generally British and Irish, or even, Broadly Northwestern European…even a dash of Southern European thrown in (using the lexicon of 23andMe genealogy), Katz would have been none the wiser. This is exactly the ruse that the fertility doctors of the 1970s must have been banking on, even before the dawn of the Internet: how would they ever find out? The specific detail that his family is Ashkenazi Jewish is unique, both culturally and genetically. The void of this broke the mystery wide open.
This isn’t just a story about family history, it’s also about fertility history
Katz’s mother recalled the name of the fertility doctor she was in the care of during the 1970s. Katz tracked him down, and incredibly, he consented to an interview. Oddly, he currently lives across the street from Katz’s mother (this series is full of unexplained coincidences, which is part of the wrap-up moment of this series, allowing it to all feel sort of destined to be discovered, and needing to be told).
The hubris of these doctors still shines brightly today. Did these doctors possess so little scientific information that they didn’t understand what would happen when you mixed healthy sperm with damaged sperm? Maybe they watched too many Monty Python skits and they began to believe that the donated sperm would repair the proper daddy sperm so that that could conceive? Comedy is required to discern possible logic here.
More reasonably, this is a comment on the state of women’s healthcare, along with the falsity that authorities (be it the State, who have put abortion rights on the ballot, or in the case of early fertility treatments, the doctors) have the right to decide what is best for a woman’s reproductive rights. The fact that Katz’s mother was unknowingly inseminated with a stranger’s semen is an abuse all of its own. As I said, the clear stars of this series are the parents, Roberta and Robert Katz, who decided to choose love and let the past be the past.
The story wobbles a line along the well-trod Nature vs Nurture theme. But it also considers the concept of epigenetics…the concept that your “nature” can change to be more a part of your “nurture,” meaning, you can literally become the person your surroundings tell you you are.
In an era of identity politics, gender fluidity and general leaning toward meta-narrative configurations of story and truth, this was a brave story to tackle. The conclusions get vague and feel-goody. But given this terrain, it’s a reasonable path to follow.
There are only a few real-life examples of Pandora’s Box
One of them is your own biological identity; there’s no walking back after you learn that your parent isn’t who you thought your parent was.
Katz was born in The Bronx and grew up in a Jewish household as an only child. His birth parents separated when he was young, and his mother remarried a man who adopted him and raised him as his son—in this story it’s ironic that he knowingly grew up with a man he called “dad” who wasn’t actually his biological father. They went to Synagogue every week, he took his Bar Mitzvah. Katz now has kids of his own, who appear in small bits in the series, who he’s raising as Jewish as well, along with his Jewish wife.
We only know what we know….and even that can be an illusion
These are some of the existential thoughts that mulled around my mind as I listened. What don’t I know? And what do I know that I don’t actually know…and would I ever choose to unknow any of this?
I’ll leave that for next week.
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