These days, families stream their pleasures in various activities: a child’s first dance performance; hiking on a fall day; joyful and serious rites of passage; home-cooked meals; and holiday parties. These images represent the way we want others to see us and the way we wish we always were. Yet, as every member of every family knows, these are partial images. They ignore (and for a moment let us forget) other realities of our private lives: the everyday hassles, the times when we wound each other, the cranky children, the sullen partner.In many families, members comfortably cross the line between the way they wish they were and the way they often are. They might not want to share some knowledge about their private lives with outsiders (and even with each other), but they suspect no one will be surprised or shocked to learn that the parents fight, that the children misbehave, and that the Thanksgiving dinner ended with overcooked turkey and slammed doors. But in some families what gets concealed by the Instagram feed is so deeply significant that great effort is taken to deny it.In this book I explore that effort as it occurs through the creation and maintenance of family secrets. I draw on over 150 memoirs about growing up in the United States after World War II and before the transformations of the 1960s. I use these memoirs to discuss four different secrets people kept from other family members and especially from those outside the family. The four secrets include having same-sex sexual attractions as boys, being pregnant and unwed, having an institutionalized sibling, and living with parents who were Communists. I also investigate what happened when adults discovered that parents had kept secrets from them during their childhoods. These secrets included learning that one or both parents were Jewish (or African American) and learning that they had been adopted (or conceived outside of the marital union).The book is unique both in its use of memoirs as the data for analysis and in its focus on family secrets from a sociological perspective. The introduction reviews the relevant literature and might be a bit tedious for a lay reader. The individual chapters can be read without that preliminary material and because the chapters stand alone, readers can pick and choose among them, focusing on whatever they find to be of the most interest.