TURNING THE PAGE

Former Winnetka resident Michael Zimmerman’s debut book, Suburban Bigamy, recounts his father’s egregious decision that shattered two families. Today the author is married and revitalized—and cherishing every moment of fatherhood.

BY BILL MCLEAN ILLUSTRATION BY BARRY BLITT

Nothing warmed Michael Zimmerman’s heart more than the time he spent watching the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field with his father, Norman.

His best friend was his dad. His role model was his dad. His hero was his dad.

Young son bites into a hot dog. Baseball soars off the bat of a Cub. Fans in the Friendly Confines rise and watch the baseball, which eventually dents Waveland Avenue.

Young son, his face now adorned with a blot of mustard, looks up at his dad and flashes a foulpole-to-foul-pole-wide smile after wiping his face clean with the back of his oversized glove.

“The Cubs cemented the bond between my dad and me; they gave us a unique kinship and common language that made me feel special,” Zimmerman, a former Winnetka resident and a New Trier High School graduate, writes in his debut book, Suburban Bigamy: Six Miles Between Truth and Deceit (Conversation Publishing, 2023, 187 pages).

Norman Zimmerman, it turned out, struck out as a father.

And as a husband.

In 2013, then-42-year-old Michael Zimmerman, his mother, Ann, and the married couple’s youngest child, Alan, discovered that Norman Zimmerman had been living a secret life—with another woman and their two children (a daughter and a son)—for more than 40 years.

Michael’s family lived in Winnetka.

The other family lived in Glenview, only 6.3 miles away, in the 1970s.

Nearly seven miles separated Mr. Zimmerman’s houses in the 1980s and 1990s. He built a house in Lake Forest for the other woman about 20 years ago.

Norman was a busy owner of the Schaumburg Lincoln-Mercury dealership to one family (Michael’s) and a busy Chicago attorney to the other.

“It’s a story of two families built on one lie, forever linked through betrayal, infidelity, and bigamy,” writes Zimmerman, who works in the fintech industry and has lived in Pennsylvania since 1995.

“It’s also a story,” he adds, “of resilience, recovery, and hope.”

Zimmerman, 51, slowly let his circle of friends know what his father was able to pull off for decades after the villages of cats were let out of the bag. His friends’ reactions ranged from disbelief to stunned silence to, “Sure sounds like a Lifetime movie.”

“My first response to the movie comment was, ‘Uh, I guess,’” Zimmerman recalls. “The details … they’re remarkable. They’re truly shocking. People are blown away when I share the many layers of my dad’s double life.

“I then thought it might be a story worth telling. I utilized the writing of the book to help me make sense of what had happened to my family. Writing it was cathartic.”

Zimmerman’s book is sad, heartbreakingly so at times, and confounding, in part because the son gave his best friend/role model/ hero opportunities to admit his staggering wrongdoings and maybe—just maybe—reveal a decent side, a caring side, a loving side.

Dad went 0-for-3.

“He had to face the fact that his biggest fan knew he was a fraud, a liar, an adulterer, and a bigamist by most standards,” Zimmerman writes. “I think that deep down, he was embarrassed. He got himself into a situation and got stuck.

“In the end,” he continues, “what I thought and felt just didn’t matter to him at all.”

Norman’s other family, meanwhile, erected figurative, fortress-thick walls around the former head of two households after Ann—a business owner, socialite, community organizer, and Winnetka’s Woman of the Year in 1994—divorced Norman. She moved to Arizona.

“They did all they could, especially Margaret (not the other woman’s real name), to keep me from seeing my dad,” Zimmerman says. “I was destroyed, emotionally, after finding out the truth about my dad. Margaret knew about my mom but never told her kids about our family. All four children involved were equal victims in this, but that sentiment wasn’t shared by Margaret’s children, either because of denial or brainwashing.

“I had a level of curiosity about my dad, about his behavior, that my half-siblings never had. He turned out to be an enigma. The man I thought I had known did not exist. I had been so close to him, but I didn’t know him at all. That was alarming and unsettling.”

Norman Zimmerman died of COVID-19 in 2020 at age 84.

But Zimmerman’s book elicits more than sadness and rounds of head-scratching. It chronicles a major triumph, too. Michael’s. Zimmerman overcame depression, grief, isolation, and addictions by veering off, for good, the “self-destructive path of selfish indulgence and emotional avoidance” with the help of therapy and his future wife, Beth.

Michael and Beth had first met in 2012.

“I believed instantly that I did not deserve such a woman,” he writes. “She was too nice for me.”

They got married and then welcomed son Weston into the world in December 2019.

The new dad was 48.

“My son,” Zimmerman writes, “was an opportunity for me to be that man my father never was—to do fatherhood right. Fatherhood has had such a huge part in healing me and putting me back together.

“I say without hesitation that my son saved my life.”

Weston’s laughter melts his father’s heart daily. The boy smiles almost as often as he breathes. If he’s not the happiest 3-year-old in the Keystone State, he’s in the top three.

“The love and peace my family gives me are like nothing else I have experienced,” Zimmerman writes. “(Being a husband and a father) has given me meaning and purpose and filled my days with joy. That is how I know that through my father’s cheating—his cheating on my mother and his cheating on us—he cheated himself the most. He deprived himself of the greatest joy there is on this planet.”

Michael and Weston haven’t attended a Chicago Cubs home game.

Yet.

It’ll happen, and when it does there will be more joy in Wrigleyville.

Visit michaelszimmerman.com for more information and to order the book Suburban Bigamy: Six Miles Between Truth and Deceit. The book is a memoir. It reflects the author’s recollections of past experiences over time. Some names and identifying characteristics of real individuals have been changed to protect their privacy interests.