My passion for many years now has been telling women's stories. First I wrote as a journalist for magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, reporting on transitions in women's lives. Then, beginning in the early 1990s, as an oral historian, I interviewed and recorded the life stories of American Catholic nuns, once again looking at difficult transition times in a woman's life. That research ultimately became two books. The most recent, Habits of Change, was published in 2011 by Oxford University Press. I also interviewed close to 100 New Jersey women for an oral history project at the College of Saint Elizabeth. During all those years, my own story was far from my mind. I was focused on other women. Then, just as my mother was dying, I learned facts that changed my life--and introduced me to my three grandmothers, women I had never known, whose stories I have now finally told in Hidden Lives.Learning that my mother was born Jewish on the Lower East Side of New York City, that she was adopted into a German Catholic family in the Bronx, that my father had also kept secrets about his mother...these are the underpinnings of the book. But the learning hasn't stopped. As I continue to hear from readers who tell me now about their family secrets, stories shared are better for all of us than stories kept hidden.