A Family Across Town is a memoir about secrecy, legacy, and the long shadow of a father’s hidden life. Aynah Askanas and her siblings grew up in a Los Angeles suburb with a pediatrician father whose frequent absences were explained away as “hospital emergency calls.” Only in adulthood did they learn the truth: for decades, their father had maintained a second family across town.

With that revelation, the fragments of their childhood fell into place–their father’s missed holidays, secret phone calls, and irrational refusal to bring them to hospital and office social gatherings where colleagues knew only his other family. All were part of a carefully managed double life. Living on the inside of this secret took a toll. Their father endured constant anxiety and dependence on sleeping pills. Their mother struggled with depression as she navigated a relationship built on deception. The siblings carried the emotional consequences into adulthoods marked by insomnia, anxiety, and a persistent sense of something perverse being withheld.

A powerful, clear-eyed, and compassionate memoir, A Family Across Town examines what children absorb when truth is concealed and what it takes to reckon with the past after deep-rooted secrets emerge.