‘Family Secrets’ is an interesting effort to uncover the evolving history of privacy and its relations to secrets in British families, from the Victorian era to roughly the 1960s. Deborah Cohen has uncovered some rich sets of sources including adoption records, Mass-Observation data, court records, and personal diaries. She uses these to explore areas of shame in family life: illegitimate and mixed race children as a result of colonialism; adoption; mentally disabled children and the institutions that cared for them; divorce; and homosexuality. The result is a telling portrait of the shifting line between what can be shared widely, what less widely, and what never spoken about. The book also, not incidentally, is a description of how painful it is when we cannot meet our own or others’ expectations. Cohen’s book does demonstrate that much of the shame created by secrecy exposed came from well-meaning notions about the social interest of providing abject examples of behavior people should avoid and the cost of making mistakes. Not so now. “To have privacy, as we now define it,” Cohen writes in the Epilogue, “is to be able to conduct one’s affairs and develop one’s personality without significant social detriment.... In the twenty-first century, privacy is not the ability to hide but the right to tell without cost” (268).