ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on developing the autoethnographic project as a way to heal wounds and transcend silence. Annette Kuhn begins her study of family secrets by closely examining a simple artifact: a photograph of herself as a young child. The emerging literature on family secrets, then, seems to suggest that, at some point in the progression of a family's story, a storyteller must emerge. And thus secret-keeping can become a central form of family communicative practice. Further invigorating secret-keeping as a communicative practice isthe concomitant dialectics at play in the presentation of the public and the private "faces" of a family. A quick glance through several leading family communication textbooks and handbooks designed for the college classroom reveals that the concept of "family secret" is often mentioned only briefly or in passing, usually in the context of discussing boundary or role negotiation, privacy, or family rules.
