There is a tombstone in Los Angeles that reads, “She did it the hard way.” Bette Davis two Academy Awards 10 nominations one of the most feared and celebrated actresses Hollywood ever produced. But almost nobody talks about what happened behind closed doors with her three children. One wrote a best-selling book about her.
One spent most of her life in a care facility hidden from the public. And one quietly inherited everything. The deeper you go into it, the more it refuses to let you look away. Part one the woman before the mother. To understand what happened with Bette Davis and her children, you have to understand what kind of life she had lived before they ever arrived.
Ruth Elizabeth Davis was born on April 5th, 1908 in Lowell, Massachusetts. She got the name Bette from a Balzac novel, Cousin Bette, which, if you have ever read it, tells you something about the kind of woman she was drawn to even as a girl. Her father left when she was 7 years old.
And her mother, known to everyone as Ruthie, raised Bette and her younger sister Barbara largely on her own, moving the family around New England in the years that followed. Ruthie Davis was a devoted, sometimes suffocating mother. And there are people who believe that her closeness with Bette shaped Bette’s own understanding of what motherhood was supposed to look like.
Intense, consuming, and always on her terms. By the time Bette reached Hollywood in the early 1930s, she was hungry. Not just for roles, but for recognition. She fought with studios. She sued Warner Brothers over the quality of parts she was being offered. She lost the lawsuit, but she won the war. The studio started giving her better material, and she made picture after picture that cemented her as one of the defining actresses of her generation.
Of Human Bondage, Dangerous, Jezebel, Dark Victory, All About Eve. She was married three times before she had her first child. Harmon Nelson, a bandleader she had known since her teenage years, divorced. Arthur Farnsworth, a businessman she married in 1940. He collapsed on a Hollywood street in 1943, and died from a brain injury two days later.
And Bette was in the middle of filming when it happened. William Grant Sherry, an artist with a volatile temper, whom she married in 1945. It was with Sherry that she finally became a mother. Davis had made a deliberate choice to delay having children until her career was established. She later said that she did not have her first child until she was 39, old for that era, and that by the time the baby arrived, she had already done what she set out to do professionally.
She was only making one or two films a year. She believed she finally had the time to give a child what a child needed. Barbara Davis Sherry was born on May 1st, 1947 in Santa Ana, California. Everyone called her B.D. And she would grow up to be the one person in Bette Davis’s life who could match her mother’s iron will, which was, depending on how you look at it, either the most predictable outcome imaginable, or the most tragic one.
The marriage to Sherry did not last. They divorced in 1950 when B.D. was barely 3 years old and Bett walked away from it with her daughter and not long after into the arms of Gary Merrill. But before any of that, there is something worth understanding about the weight that motherhood carried for Bette Davis, specifically because of how long she had held it at arms length.
She had grown up watching her own mother pour everything into her daughters after her father walked out. Ruthie Davis went without, sacrificed constantly and rearranged her whole life around what Bett needed to pursue her dream. That kind of devotion leaves a mark. It sets a standard and it also sometimes plants a seed of fear.
What if you can’t live up to that? What if you are too much your own person to dissolve yourself into someone else’s needs the way your mother dissolved herself into yours? Bett was not a woman built for dissolution. She was built for pursuit. She pursued roles, pursued recognition, pursued the industry’s respect on her own terms and she got all of it.
But she was also, despite the mythology around her, a woman who genuinely wanted a family. She wanted what she’d seen in other people’s houses. A husband who stayed, children who were loved. A life that was more than just the work. She just wanted it without giving up the work. And that, it turned out, was a much harder thing to arrange than she had hoped.
By the time William Grant Sherry came along in the mid-1940s, Bett was in her late 30s. Sherry was an artist, good-looking, intense and temperamentally unsuited to being married to the most famous actress of his generation. There were reports of a difficult, volatile household even during Bette D’s earliest years. Bette later suggested that Sherry’s departure was no great loss, though the circumstances of Bette D’s early years, with the tension and instability around her, would become a thread that ran through the rest of her life. What came next is the chapter most people know almost nothing about. And it began with an adoption that went terribly wrong. Part two, Margo, the child nobody spoke about. Bette Davis met Gary Merrill on the set of All About Eve in 1950.
He was handsome, rugged, and about 7 years younger than she was. They fell for each other fast and hard, and on July 28th, 1950, the very same day his divorce from his first wife was finalized, they got married in Mexico. It was a whirlwind, even by Hollywood standards. Merrill formally adopted Bette D, and now the family had a little girl.
But Bette wanted more children. She had grown up without a father herself and was painfully aware of what it meant for a child to be raised as an only child. So, in January 1951, she and Gary adopted a 5-day-old baby girl. They named her Margo Mosher Merrill. The name was chosen after Bette’s beloved character Margo Channing from All About Eve, one of the most celebrated roles of her career.
It was a tender gesture, a way of connecting this new life to something that had meant so much to her. For a little while, everything seemed fine. By all accounts, Margo was a happy, bright-eyed baby. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary in those first months. The family was living on an estate along the coast of Maine, and there was a kind of quiet domestic life happening behind the scenes of Bette’s still active career.
But somewhere around the time Margot turned three, things began to change. It started with small things, behaviors that didn’t match up with what the family expected. Margot seemed behind in certain ways. She had moments of being destructive. Her emotional responses were different. Bette and Gary grew concerned, and they took her to Presbyterian Hospital in New York for testing.
The diagnosis was devastating. Margot had suffered brain damage, damage that doctors believed had occurred at or very shortly after birth. By the time they found out, it had already shaped who she was and who she was going to be. The news hit the household hard. Bette Davis was not the kind of person who accepted limitations quietly, but there are limits that do not yield to determination, and Margot’s situation was one of them.
She tried, in the beginning, to keep Margot at home. She adapted routines, she sought advice, and she convinced herself that with the right environment and enough love, things might improve. But Margot’s behavior could be unpredictable and sometimes physically difficult. She could become violent toward her siblings, which put B.D.
and later Michael in situations that were genuinely frightening for children their age. Bette’s own mother, who had moved in to help support the family, reportedly blamed the adoption agency for what had happened. A cruel sentiment, but one that reflected how disoriented the whole family felt in the face of a diagnosis no one had been prepared for.
Bette Davis later described the moment she fully understood the extent of Margo’s condition in terms that made it plain how much it had shattered her. She said that at 8 years old, Margo was, in most respects, except for her physical size, functioning like a child less than half her age. She could not read.
She could not write. She struggled with authority and often became destructive when she was upset. The decision that followed was one of the hardest of Bette Davis’s life. And she said so plainly years later. She described the day she dressed 3-year-old Margo in a little sailor suit and a sailor hat and explained to her that she was going to a wonderful new school.
That image, a mother putting on a cheerful face while breaking her own heart, stayed with Bette for the rest of her life. Margo was enrolled at the Lochland School in Geneva, New York, a facility specifically designed for children with developmental disabilities. It was considered one of the better institutions of its kind at the time.
And the staff there gave Margo the kind of specialized daily care that a busy household, even a wealthy one, simply could not provide. When the school first accepted her, it was designed primarily for girls under 16. Eventually, it expanded its services to adults, which meant that Lochland became the one constant in Margo’s otherwise shifting life, the place that knew her best and served her longest.
But Bette never simply walked away. She brought Margo home during summers. She took her on vacation. There are accounts of Bette taking Margo to New York on her birthdays and making a real event of it, dinner, theater, the kinds of outings that most parents might take for granted, but that required real planning given Margo’s needs.
Bette wanted Margo to know that she was part of the family, even if the day-to-day logistics meant she could not live with them. She wanted Margo to be present for family moments, even when it was hard. And sometimes it was very hard. There were tensions between Bette and Gary over how to handle Margo’s care, particularly as their own marriage began to fall apart.
According to accounts from the time, Gary accused Bette of abandoning Margo when the situation became difficult. While Bette maintained that she was doing what was best for her daughter by ensuring she had professional support. One reported exchange between them became particularly bitter. Bette supposedly said that if Gary wanted Margo back at Lochland, he could take her there himself and pay for it.
A comment that was later cited by Gary as evidence that Bette had stepped back from her responsibilities. Gary Merrill was not a saint. The same drinking and volatility that had strained the marriage affected his relationship with all of the children. But on the specific question of Margo, he made a commitment and kept it.
Their marriage ended in 1960 and it was ugly. They had fought through much of it. There were drinking problems on both sides, volatile arguments, and a household that had never quite settled into the peace Bette had been hoping for when she took her vows. After the divorce, Gary Merrill took on financial responsibility for Margo’s care at Lochland, and he continued to pay for it until his own death in March 1990, just 5 months after Bette herself died.
He set up a trust for Margo afterward, And her brother Michael, the youngest of the three Davis Merrill children, became the person who managed it. He never abandoned her. Margot would live through several different chapters of her life after Lochland. At some point in the 1960s, Bette moved her out of the school and tried placing her with families in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, then eventually at a facility run by the Devereux Foundation in Santa Barbara, California.
That arrangement did not go well. Margot was unhappy there. And the back and forth over where she should be living became another source of friction between Bette and Gary. Eventually, Margot settled near Boston, where she was supported by Bay Cove Human Services and spent her later years as part of that community.
She participated in the Special Olympics. She was a devoted Boston sports fan. Her obituary described her laugh as contagious, her sense of humor as sharp, and said she had a love for the people around her that was fully returned. She was also, in her final years, diagnosed with breast cancer, a disease she survived.
Margot Mosher Merrill died in May 2022 at the age of 71. She was not included in Bette Davis’s will. Neither, for the record, was her older sister B.D. But the story of why B.D. was cut out, and why the last years between mother and daughter were soaked in bitterness, is a story that deserves its own chapter.
And what B.D. did is something that the rest of Hollywood could not believe when it happened. Part three. B.D., the daughter who wrote the book. Of the three Davis children, B.D. Hyman is the one who, in many ways, had the most conventional start. She grew up in a famous household, yes, but she was Bette’s biological daughter.
And for the first decade or so of her life, she seems to have occupied a central place in her mother’s world. Bette involved BD in her work from an early age. When BD was just an infant, she appeared briefly in her mother’s 1951 film, Payment on Demand. Then, in 1962, she had a small on-screen role in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, the film that became one of the greatest late-career comebacks in Hollywood history.
BD played the neighbor’s daughter, credited as BD Merrill, having taken her adoptive father’s surname. To promote the film, Bette brought BD to the Cannes Film Festival in 1963. BD was 15 years old, and it was there, at a screening of the film, that she met a British man named Jeremy Hyman. Jeremy Hyman was the nephew of Elliott Hyman, who owned Seven Arts Productions, a company with significant connections in the film industry.
Jeremy was 29 years old. BD was 15. They were introduced at a screening related to Baby Jane, and they apparently hit it off immediately. Jeremy was polished, charming, and worldly, everything a 15-year-old girl who had grown up in the orbit of Hollywood glamour might find irresistible. And BD was no ordinary teenager.
She had grown up around film sets and famous names. She was confident and striking. The age gap between them was enormous by any measure. But in the context of that world, at that time, it apparently raised fewer eyebrows than it should have. Bette later referred to taking B.D. to Cannes as one of the great mistakes of her life.
The relationship between B.D. and Jeremy moved quickly. They married the following year in 1964 when she was 16 and he was 29. Bette gave her blessing publicly and apparently at the time sincerely. She later changed her view suggesting that this marriage was the beginning of the end between her and B.D.
She came to believe that Jeremy’s influence pulled B.D. away from her and that the distance that opened up between mother and daughter over the following years had its roots in that relationship. B.D. and Jeremy went on to build a life together. They had two sons, Ashley and Justin. They became evangelical Christians, a transformation that B.D.
later described as the defining turn of her adult life. Bette had financially supported the Hyman family for years including stepping in at one point to help them avoid losing their home. Whatever tensions existed beneath the surface, the two women still had a relationship. Still visited. Still talked. But something had been curdling for a long time.
Then in 1985 B.D. Hyman published a memoir. She called it My Mother’s Keeper. The book arrived like a grenade. It described Bette Davis as a manipulative alcoholic who emotionally terrorized her children and the people around her. It portrayed a woman who was consumed by her own ego, who drank too much, who staged dramatic scenes including what appeared to be fake attempts to harm herself in order to control the people around her.
It described a mother who was jealous of B.D.’s marriage, who resented B.D.’s sons simply for being boys, and who could turn any family gathering into something everyone dreaded. B.D. wrote that her mother had taken her out of school at 11 years old to function as something closer to a personal assistant.
An accusation that, if true, speaks to a kind of boundary crossing that went well beyond the usual tensions between a famous parent and a child. She wrote that the atmosphere in the family home was one of constant unpredictability. One of the most damaging sections of the book dealt with Bette’s drinking.
B.D. painted a picture of a woman who numbed herself with alcohol and then became someone else entirely. She also described a complicated version of Gary Merrill, not as a reliable protector, but as a man with his own drinking problem and a volatile temper that affected everyone in the house. This was one of the more surprising elements of the book because it complicated the simple villain and victim narrative.
If Gary was also a problem, then B.D.’s childhood was less about one bad actor and more about a household that was, at its core, unstable for everyone in it. Gary Merrill himself responded to the book publicly. He acknowledged that there had been drinking and conflict. He didn’t deny the broad outlines of a difficult marriage, but he said that B.D.
had taken things that were real and multiplied them beyond recognition. He said it was a money grab, plain and simple. The timing made it worse. Bette Davis was 77 when the book came out. In the years just before its publication, she had undergone a mastectomy for breast cancer and suffered a stroke. She was fragile in ways she had never been fragile before, and public sympathy for her was enormous.
Many people in Hollywood looked at the book and saw not a daughter trying to reckon with her upbringing, but someone taking aim at a wounded target. Gary Merrill, who was no longer married to Bette, who had in fact had a bitter divorce from her, and who had his own complicated history with their shared family, went on record to say that B.D.
‘s motivation was nothing more than cruelty and greed. He had no sympathy for the project. Michael Merrill, Bette’s adopted son and B.D.’s brother, cut off all contact with her. He refused to speak to her again. Bette Davis never gave a formal public response to the book, but in 1987, she published her own memoir, This and That, and she ended it with a letter addressed directly to her daughter.
She did not call her B.D. She called her Hyman over and over, as if to mark the distance between them. She wrote that she was still recovering from what her daughter had done, and that between the stroke she had suffered and the book that followed it, she found the book harder to come back from. She described what B.D.
had done as a glaring failure of loyalty for a life that had been, by any reasonable measure, a privileged one. B.D. followed My Mother’s Keeper with a second book in 1987, Narrow Is the Way, which leaned more heavily into her religious conversion than it did into further accusations, but which did not soften the distance between her and her mother.
The 60 Minutes interview from around that time is a particularly strange document in this story. Mike Wallace had filmed an interview with B.D. in which she spoke warmly about her mother’s skills as a parent when B.D. was young and said she had even adopted some of Bette’s principles in raising her own children. That interview was later rebroadcast and it sat in uncomfortable contrast to everything B.D. had put in the book.
When Bette Davis died on October 6th, 1989 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, she was on her way home from a film festival in Spain where she had been honored. B.D. was not at her side. Their relationship had never repaired. Bette’s will made the estrangement official in legal terms. She explicitly named B.D.
along with Margot and B.D.’s two sons, Ashley and Justin, and stated that she had intentionally and with full knowledge excluded them from everything. Her estate, valued at between $600,000 and $1 million, went went to Michael and to her long-time personal assistant, Kathryn Sermak. B.D.
Hyman has spent the years since her mother’s death as a pastor in Charlottesville, Virginia. She leads her own ministry, runs a YouTube channel dedicated to her evangelical work, and has largely stayed away from Hollywood-related conversations. She has, at various points, made claims about her mother that are striking, including statements that Bette had practiced something like dark spiritual work that B.D.
believes had lasting effects on her family. The relationship between B.D.’s version of events and the historical record is something that people have debated for decades. What is not debatable is what it cost both of them. Bette died having never reconciled with the only child she had carried herself, and B.D.
went from being a young woman whose face appeared in her mother’s films to someone her mother struck from the record entirely. But the child who survived all of it, the one who stayed close, who stayed loyal, and who stepped up when it was over, is someone who rarely gets discussed at all. Part four, Michael, the son who stayed.
Of the three Davis Merrill children, Michael is the one who has lived most fully in the quiet. There are no dramatic memoirs, no public fallouts, no headlines trailing his name. He is, by almost every account available, a steady, private man. And that steadiness was exactly what his family needed from someone.
Michael Merrill was born on February 5th, 1952, and adopted by Bette Davis and Gary Merrill shortly afterward. He was the youngest of the three children, brought into a household that already had B.D. and the newly arrived Margo. The family was living on an estate along the coast of Cape Elizabeth in Maine, and despite the complications of that household, the volatility between his parents, the care needs of Margo, the strong-willed older sister, Michael grew up and did something his siblings, in different ways, did not manage. He built a life without the noise. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he graduated with a degree in political science in 1973. He then went to Boston University’s law school, graduating in 1977. After law school, he spent 2 years in
Germany working on military tribunals, a detail that feels somewhat incongruous with the Hollywood world he had grown up adjacent to, but which also fits the picture of someone who had chosen a deliberate, disciplined path. He came back to the United States in 1979 and established a law firm in Boston called Merrill and McGeary.
It still exists. He still works there. Boston became his home in a way that neither the glamour of Hollywood nor the family tension of his childhood ever defined. His relationship with his mother was, by most indications, genuinely warm. When Bette was once asked whether she believed she had been a good mother, she said that she thought she had been, that she had loved her children very much.
And then she said that her son agreed with her. That was the comfort she held onto. One child out of three who saw it that way. There is something poignant about that statement. Not because it was self-serving, but because it was honest. Bette Davis knew, by 1987, that her relationship with B.D.
was beyond repair. She knew that Margot’s life had taken a direction that no one had chosen. And so the confirmation from Michael, quiet, steady Michael, the lawyer in Boston, carried a weight that went beyond a simple compliment. It was the one thing she could still hold onto about herself as a parent.
When B.D.’s book came out in 1985, Michael did not stay on the fence. He ended contact with B.D. and never went back on that decision. He stood clearly in his mother’s corner, and he stayed there. He was also clear-eyed enough to understand what the book had done to Bette, not just emotionally, but practically.
She had been supporting B.D. and Jeremy’s family financially for years, stepping in to help when they were at risk of losing their home. The book had been written in a house, in part, that Bette’s money had helped save. That irony was not lost on Michael, or on many others who knew the family’s situation.
When Bette died in October 1989, Michael was named as one of the two inheritors of her estate. He and Kathryn Sermak, Bette’s assistant, received everything. In 1997, Michael co-founded the Bette Davis Foundation with Sermak, with the goal of providing financial support to promising young acting students.
The foundation was based at Boston University, the same school where Michael had earned his law degree, and it honored its recipients with a Bette Davis Lifetime Achievement Award over the years. Past recipients included names like Meryl Streep and Geena Davis. In 2008, at the centennial celebration of his mother’s birth held at Boston University, Michael Merrill spoke in her honor alongside Lauren Bacall.
He has never sought the spotlight for himself. His professional bio reads like that of any accomplished Boston attorney. A firm, a specialty, a track record. The famous name attached to his story is not something he has traded on, and that reticence itself says something about who he became. He also maintained his relationship with Margot until her death.
When Gary Merrill died in March 1990, just 5 months after Bette, the trust Gary had set up for Margot passed into Michael’s management. He made sure she was cared for. He was, in the end, the sibling who kept the family together in the only way it could be kept together, not by repairing what had broken, but by quietly honoring what remained.
There is something quietly devastating about the picture Michael Merrill presents. He was the son no one wrote the exposé about. The child who doesn’t appear in the most dramatic chapters of this story. He grew up in a household with a famous, complicated mother, an emotionally volatile father, an older sister who became a national controversy, and a younger sibling whose condition required lifelong institutional care.
And he emerged from all of it and just became a lawyer in Boston. That is not a small thing. That is, given what surrounded him, a remarkable thing. And it is a reminder that not every story about survival looks like a headline. Sometimes it looks like a man who picks up the phone, pays the bills, and shows up year after year for the people who need him.
Part five. What was left behind? Bette Davis died on October 6th, 1989. She was 81 years old. She had just been honored at a film festival in San Sebastián, Spain, and she was on her way back to the United States to the life she had always kept moving forward when her body finally stopped. She was buried at Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles in a family sarcophagus alongside her mother Ruthie and her sister Bobby.
The epitaph on her stone, the one she had chosen herself, reads, “She did it the hard way.” There is something about the fact that she chose that line that feels important here. Bette Davis was not someone who claimed things were easy. She was not someone who pretended. She had fought for every role, every recognition, every dollar she earned.
And she had also, in her private life, experienced losses that most people who only knew her from the screen could never have imagined. A daughter who spent most of her life in a care facility, separated from her family by the circumstances of a brain injury that no one chose and no one could fix. The divorce from the man she had hoped would be her last great love, with its drinking and its anger and its slow erosion.
The public humiliation of a book written by her own child while she was still alive and recovering from a stroke. The death without reconciliation. The will that became a document of exclusion. And yet the other side of it is also true. Margo was never abandoned in the way her detractors claimed. She had people who cared about her, including Gary Merrill until the end of his life, and Michael, who carried that responsibility forward.
B.D., for all the pain between them, raised two sons and built a life that was genuinely her own. A ministry, a community, a set of convictions she never wavered from. And Michael became the kind of person who builds things and honors things and keeps showing up. There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes with being the child of someone famous.
The world thinks it knows your parent before you do. You grow up in the shadow of a public image and spend years learning that the person at home is different, sometimes better, sometimes worse, sometimes both at once. B.D. and Bette Davis spent decades locked in a relationship where neither one could quite reach the other, even when they were standing in the same room.
The book that finally split them apart was B.D.’s attempt to be heard. And Bette’s response, the letter at the end of her own memoir, The Disinheritance, the cold formality of calling her daughter Hyman, was her refusal to hear it that way. There were no winners in that particular fight. There rarely are.
What the story of Bette Davis’s children really is, when you sit with all of it, is a story about the limits of even extraordinary people. Bette Davis could do almost anything on a film set. She had a will of iron and a force of personality that had taken her all the way to the top of the most competitive industry in the world.
But some things don’t respond to force of will. A child’s brain damage, a daughter’s faith, the slow drift between two stubborn people who couldn’t find a way back to each other. In 2008, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp honoring Bette Davis on what would have been the 100th anniversary of her birth.
The stamp showed her as Margo Channing in All About Eve. The first day of issue celebration was held at Boston University, the school that housed the Bette Davis archive, and the school where Michael had built part of his own legacy. Michael was there. He spoke. Lauren Bacall spoke. It was a day for celebrating everything Bette had given to film and to culture.
And Michael Merrill was the one who showed up to receive it on her behalf. Margo Mosher Merrill died in May 2022. She was 71 years old. Her obituary said that she had led a difficult and challenging life, but had found a world of happiness and joy in spite of it. It said her laugh was contagious. It said the people who knew her loved her back.
That is not a small epitaph. For a woman who spent her life in the care of others, who never had the chance at the ordinary life she sometimes dreamed about, it is actually a profound one. There is no happy ending here in the conventional sense, but there is something worth sitting with. A child who was born with every odd against her found love in her daily life.
A son who could have been consumed by everything his family went through became someone who chose care and continuity. A daughter who fought the loudest and broke the most built a faith and a community, however far from her mother’s world it was. And the woman at the center of it all, the one with the famous eyes and the famous voice and the tombstone that says she did it the hard way, she did.
She really did. All of it. There are plenty of Hollywood stories about famous children struggling under the weight of famous parents. But the story of Bette Davis and her three children is something different. It is not a cautionary tale about fame destroying a family. It is something more complicated and more human than that.
It is a story about three very different people shaped by the same difficult household who each found their own way through. And about a woman who, despite the image she projected to the world, carried private griefs that were heavier than any role she ever played. Hollywood has a way of reducing people to their most dramatic moments.
Bette Davis gets reduced to the feud with Joan Crawford, to the eyes, to the voice, to the withering one-liners. And those things are real. They are part of who she was. But she was also a woman who sat with a three-year-old in a sailor suit and tried to explain as gently as she could why the child was going away to school and not coming home.
She was a woman who wrote a letter to her daughter at the end of her last memoir and signed it not with warmth but with distance. Because that distance by then was all she had left to offer. Bette Davis’ final epitaph was a piece of self-knowledge. She knew what kind of life she had lived. She knew it had been hard.
Not just professionally but in ways no Oscar ceremony would ever acknowledge. She did it the hard way. So in their own ways did her children. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to our channel so you never miss out on more fascinating stories.
