Award-winning Wheaton actress shares life-changing discovery in new memoir

Twenty-four hours after her mother's death on Oct. 12, 2017, Cory Goodrich made a life-altering discovery that led the award-winning Wheaton actress to become a first-time author.

Goodrich and her siblings were looking through her 89-year-old mother's memorabilia when she found a photograph of herself as a baby in the arms of a man named Don. As a teenager, Goodrich asked her mother about the man and she replied he was a friend, Goodrich recalls. Upon finding the photo decades later, Goodrich asked her siblings if they knew the man. You used to call him Daddy Don, her brother replied.

"In a flash, I knew," said Goodrich, who received Joseph Jefferson Awards for her performance as Mother in Drury Lane Theatre's "Ragtime" and June Carter Cash in Mercury Theater Chicago's "Ring of Fire: The Music of Johnny Cash."

The man in the photograph, and not the man who raised her, was her biological father.

Growing up, Goodrich says she always felt her mom was keeping something from her.

"She would never tell me anything," said Goodrich, who described their relationship as "interesting." "I didn't know there was a secret and the secret was me."

Shortly after her mother's death, Goodrich began writing as a way to put together the puzzle pieces of her past. The result is her newly published memoir "Folksong: A Ballad of Death, Discovery, and DNA." An examination of grief, identity and forgiveness, the book was published this week by Finn-Phyllis Press and is available through amazon.com.

At the time, Goodrich began writing to "remember the details."

"I knew grief would come and cloud my memory," said Goodrich, who began by putting herself in her mother's place, almost as if she was creating a character for a stage production.

In fact, she first envisioned her story as a one-woman show and even composed music for a companion CD that will be released in March. Instead, a memoir emerged. A friend suggested she publish it and recommended editor/publisher Elizabeth Lyons, of Finn-Phyllis Press. Coincidentally, Lyons, like Goodrich, was born in Wilmington, Delaware. But that wasn't the only coincidence connecting them. Lyon's father worked with and knew Goodrich's biological father.

At the time she began, Goodrich was in a "not-so-nice-place" and her initial efforts were underscored by anger. But that feeling gave way to sympathy and gratitude for her mother and everyone else who kept the secret that helped give her the life she has.

"I am the me I always should have been," says Goodrich, who describes writing the book as the most terrifying and revealing thing she's ever done.

"We have to tell the truth. That's what I do as an actor," she said.

Goodrich, who was born following a relationship between her mom and biological dad, has no animosity toward her parents or the extended family who kept the truth from her. People don't keep family secrets to be mean, she says; they keep them to protect their loved ones.

"Everything was done out of love," she said. "Everything was done to protect me and my mother."

The reaction of her extended family to her discovery has been a mixed bag.

"It's been hard for them," she said of her siblings. "I think they feel they're losing a sister, which of course isn't true."

For her part, Goodrich gained a brother. She discovered him while researching her biological father, who died in 2016 before Goodrich could connect with him. Hesitant at first, she eventually reached out to her newfound sibling, who is 10 years her junior.

"He just opened up his arms to me and said 'come here sister,'" Goodrich said.

During the years she spent uncovering her past, Goodrich sometimes wished she'd never learned the truth about her parents. Painful as it was, she now says she wouldn't change a thing.

"We are given the lives we're meant to live," she said. "If my going through it can help someone else, that's what I'm here for."

Goodrich takes comfort in that, and in the fact that her story might be worth dramatizing.

"In my mind, this is a movie," she laughed. "If it's ever made, I hope I'm played by Kate Winslet."