For almost half of her life, writer Mary Carter Bishop grew up believing she was her parents’ only child.

Then she learned about her mother’s secret son and spent the next third of her life getting to know him and understanding the mother she thought she knew. Bishop spoke honestly about her older half-brother, Ronnie, and her mother, Adria, at a talk and signing of her book, “Don’t You Ever,” Aug. 27 in the Glenvar Branch Library.

On her book tour, she will speak again next week on Sept. 6 at 8:15 p.m. and 7 at 11 a.m. at Hollins University. Roanoke resident Bishop found Ronnie, who was a barber in Vinton, three years before he died of a rare medical condition that disfigured him. “Acromegaly,” a pituitary tumor, caused his hands and feet to continue growing and enlarged his brow bone, nose, tongue, lips and jaw, she explained.

Over the years, Bishop had pieced together the story of his birth and his mother’s year-long stay in the Florence Crittenton home for unwed mothers in Lynchburg, how he was presented as a cousin ten years older than whom she knew as a child until he was sent to live in an orphanage in Covington, and his life as a troubled younger man and adult. The title comes from what her mother cautioned when they lived in Keswick, and she raised a rich couple’s little boy, J.J. “Buddy” McIntire, telling her secret son, Ronnie, “Don’t you ever call me Mama.”

Neither her mother nor Ronnie ever threw anything away, Bishop told listeners at the Glenvar Library, and that, coupled with her own years of journals, helped her hone remembrances into the book she began ten years ago and which she promised her mother she would not publish until after Adria’s death.

The story weaves together growing up as the child of servants in Keswick, east of Charlottesville, “where people from some of America’s greatest fortunes were living when I was a kid.” Much of the area remains beautifully open – as shown on the cover of Bishop’s book – as a tribute to foxhunting. She describes her parents as “servants on one of those estates…I was a baby in a carriage when Mommy began shushing me when we approached the Big House…” The place felt more like a hotel than a home, she recalled.

Even today at age 72, “The voice of a rich Southern woman can nearly paralyze me,” she admitted. So of course, in that setting, her mother would not acknowledge her secret son. “Circumstances prevented Mom from loving Ronnie,” she told her listeners Monday night, “but she could love Buddy publicly.” Meanwhile, Ronnie was a foster child of loving parents whom her mother would not allow to adopt him. He disappeared from her life when Bishop was seven. When she was 32, “I took a good look at my birth certificate” while applying for a passport, and discovered her mother had another child. Ronnie came to Roanoke when he was 18, worked downtown and in 1959, came to Vinton to the Sportsman Barber Shop. Today it is a woman’s hair salon, Bishop said. These days Bishop and her husband, Dan Crawford – who was at the talk – stand in front of that shop to watch the Vinton Christmas Parade, she said.

It was in 1990 when Ronnie was hospitalized because of his health that they grew the closest, she said. “He called me by my baby name, ‘Pie,’ …” “I loved to hear him tell stories, but he wouldn’t let me take pictures of him.” She played a recording of Ronnie talking, and showed a picture of him as an adult, which another person took, she said. Bishop, who spent her career as an investigative journalist for the Roanoke Times and before that, the Philadelphia Enquirer (she was part of a team which won a Pulitzer for work on Three Mile Island nuclear erosion), told listeners Monday night, “Of all the dramatic stories I heard in my life, Ronnie’s was the most compelling of all.”

In answer to a question from the audience, Bishop said Ronnie’s medical condition made him feel uncomfortable. “It was a shame he didn’t go past the 8th grade. He was quite bright, but didn’t trust people,” she added. She was concerned Ronnie might resent her for the life she had and what he didn’t, but he did not, Bishop said. “He was happy to see me…I hate to see you leave, every time you leave,” she quoted him as saying. “You’re the one who makes good things happen.” Glenvar Senior Library Assistant Sarah Vecere asked Bishop why she felt compelled to share her family’s story in a book. “I wrote it mostly for myself,” Bishop answered.

Bishop’s book, “Don’t You Ever,” was published in July by Harper/HarperCollins. It is available at Book No Further in downtown Roanoke, and other locations.