Sticking Around

Esther Satterfield, “Look to the Children” —...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 06:19:00 +0800

Esther Satterfield, “Look to the Children”

— from Once I Loved (1976)

(Thank you, K.G., for sending me the link and making my day.)

Steve McQueen kisses his daughter Terry good-night in 1963. ...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:21:00 +0800

Steve McQueen kisses his daughter Terry good-night in 1963.

(Photograph by John Dominis. Thank you, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.)

Matthew Shepard and his dad, Dennis Shepard (Photo: Thank you,...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:19:07 +0800

Matthew Shepard and his dad, Dennis Shepard

(Photo: Thank you, myspace.com.)

Kurt Cobain and daughter Frances Bean (Photo: Thank you, Gary...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:15:00 +0800

Kurt Cobain and daughter Frances Bean

(Photo: Thank you, Gary Carlson and Flickr.)

Charles M. Schulz and daughter Jill, 1967 (Photograph by Bill...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:12:00 +0800

Charles M. Schulz and daughter Jill, 1967

(Photograph by Bill Ray. Thank you, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.)

Colum McCann with his father in Dublin in the mid-1970s (Photo...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:09:05 +0800

Colum McCann with his father in Dublin in the mid-1970s

(Photo and caption: Thank you, Mr. McCann and New York Times.)

Carl Sagan and son Nick (Photo: Thank you, Nick Sagan.)

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:06:13 +0800

Carl Sagan and son Nick

(Photo: Thank you, Nick Sagan.)

I will always look up to him

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 11:03:00 +0800

I read Patrimony in 1995. I was 32. I knew even then that this would be one of the finest father-and-son memoirs I would ever read. I’m much older now, less easily amazed, less stubbornly certain about many things, and still hopelessly bookish. Now I believe this is one of the best books I’ve ever read.

There are just some books that make you feel proud to have become this person who prefers reading to almost any other joy that life has to offer. There are books that make you feel, having “known” the people in them, you are now a better person—or books that make you want to be a better person.

Philip Roth, who turned 80 last March, is a god in American literature. But I will always look up to him for the man—and the son—he is in Patrimony.

Philip Roth Of all things, [my father] smiled, a wry half-smile...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 10:57:05 +0800

Philip Roth

Of all things, [my father] smiled, a wry half-smile really, that worldly-wise, heartbroken smile that says, But of course.

He put his hand to the base of his skull [where the tumor is] and, feeling nothing unusual there, smiled again. “Well, everybody leaves this earth in a different way.”

“And,” I replied, “everybody lives on it in a different way. Everybody’s battle is different and the battle never ends. . . . ”

— from Patrimony: A True Story

(Photograph by Sara Krulwich. Thank you, New York Times.)

"But our father, being our father, couldn’t have been expected to understand that. He understood,..."

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 10:54:38 +0800

“But our father, being our father, couldn’t have been expected to understand that. He understood, like the rest of us, only what he understood, though that he understood fiercely.”

- Philip Roth, Patrimony

This photograph of Herman, Sandy, and Philip at Bradley Beach in...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 10:52:52 +0800

This photograph of Herman, Sandy, and Philip at Bradley Beach in 1937 was on the front cover of Patrimony.

(Photo and caption: Thank you, Newark Public Library. “Philip Roth: An Exhibit of Photos from a Lifetime” is ongoing at the library until August 31, 2013.)

Philip Roth: “You can try talking to the dead”

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 10:48:10 +0800

At a cemetery you are generally reminded of just how narrow and banal your thinking is on this subject. Oh, you can try talking to the dead if you feel that’ll help; you can begin, as I did that morning, by saying, “Well, Ma …” but it’s hard not to know—if you even get beyond a first sentence—that you might as well be conversing with the column of vertebrae hanging in the osteopath’s office. You can make them promises, catch them up on the news, ask for their understanding, their forgiveness, for their love—or you can take the other, the active approach, you can pull weeds, tidy the gravel, finger the letters carved in the tombstone; you can even get down and place your hands directly above their remains—touching the ground, their ground, you can shut your eyes and remember what they were like when they were still with you. But nothing is altered by these recollections, except that the dead seem even more distant and out of reach than they did when you were driving in the car ten minutes earlier. If there’s no one in the cemetery to observe you, you can do some pretty crazy things to make the dead seem something other than dead. But even if you succeed and get yourself worked up enough to feel their presence, you still walk away without them. What cemeteries prove, at least to people like me, is not that the dead are present but that they are gone. They are gone and, as yet, we aren’t. This is fundamental and, however unacceptable, grasped easily enough.

— from Patrimony: A True Story

"I tiptoed back into the bedroom where he was asleep, still breathing, still living, still with..."

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 10:41:56 +0800

“I tiptoed back into the bedroom where he was asleep, still breathing, still living, still with me—yet another setback outlasted by this man whom I had known unendingly as my father. I felt awful about his heroic, hapless struggle to cleanse himself before I had got up to the bathroom and about the shame of it, the disgrace he felt himself to be, and yet now that it was over and he was so deep in sleep, I thought I couldn’t have asked anything more for myself before he died—this, too, was right and as it should be. You clean up your father’s shit because it has to be cleaned up, but in the aftermath of cleaning it up, everything that’s there to feel is felt as it never was before. It wasn’t the first time that I’d understood this either: once you sidestep the disgust and ignore nausea and plunge past those phobias that are fortified like taboos, there’s an awful lot of life to cherish.”

- Philip Roth, Patrimony

“Dad, I’m going to have to let you go” I asked the doctor to...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 10:38:00 +0800

“Dad, I’m going to have to let you go”

I asked the doctor to leave me alone with my father, or as alone as he and I could be in the middle of the emergency room bustle. As I sat there and watched him struggle to go on living, I tried to focus on what the tumor had done with him already. This wasn’t difficult, given that he looked on that stretcher as though by then he’d been through a hundred rounds with Joe Louis. I thought about the misery that was sure to come, provided he could even be kept alive on a respirator. I saw it all, all, and yet I had to sit there for a very long time before I leaned as close to him as I could get and, with my lips to his sunken, ruined face, found it in me finally to whisper, “Dad, I’m going to have to let you go.” He’d been unconscious for several hours and couldn’t hear me, but, shocked, amazed, and weeping, I repeated it to him again and then again, until I believed it myself.

After that, all I could do was to follow his stretcher up to the room where they put him and sit by the bedside. Dying is work and he was a worker. Dying is horrible and my father was dying. I held his hand, which at least still felt like his hand; I stroked his forehead, which at least still looked like his forehead; and I said to him all sorts of things that he could no longer register. Luckily, there wasn’t anything I told him that morning that he didn’t already know.

— from Patrimony: A True Story by Philip Roth

(Photograph by dabacahin.)

Philip Roth: “To be alive is to be made of memory”

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 10:33:45 +0800

“So there it is,” I said. “Anybody’s helplessness is difficult, a child’s, a friend’s, but the helplessness of an old person who once had such vigor …”

“Especially of a father.”

“Yes. He’s fought such a long”—and the adjective that came to me was not one I’d ever thought to associate with his efforts, however much I’d always respected his gumption—“long, long distinguished battle.” The word’s aptness took me by surprise.

“What’s good,” [my friend] Joanna said, “is that he has this choice, that he is involved with the choice.”

“The choice isn’t real, however. The alternative is unacceptable. The choice would be to jump out of the window.”

“And you admire that in him, that jumping out of a window for him is an impossible act.”

“Admire it and envy it. When I was on the bottom last year, I thought about jumping every day.”

“I remember. I had my own stupid times when I thought it was a solution.”

“Not him. He doesn’t even have it as a fantasy solution. I was over there today to get him to the doctor. I had to drive him across poor, poor, poor old Newark. He knows every street corner. Where buildings are destroyed, he remembers the buildings that were there. You mustn’t forget anything—that’s the inscription on his coat of arms. To be alive, to him, is to be made of memory—to him if a man’s not made of memory, he’s made of nothing. …”

— from Patrimony: A True Story

"You must not forget anything."

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 10:30:00 +0800

“You must not forget anything.”

- Philip Roth, Patrimony

Andrew Solomon To look deep into your child’s eyes and see...

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 13:15:00 +0800

Andrew Solomon

To look deep into your child’s eyes and see in him both yourself and something utterly strange, and then to develop a zealous attachment to every aspect of him, is to achieve parenthood’s self-regarding, yet unselfish, abandon. It is astonishing how often such mutuality had been realized—how frequently parents who had supposed that they couldn’t care for an exceptional child discover that they can. The parental predisposition to love prevails in the most harrowing of circumstances. There is more imagination in the world than one might think.

— from Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

(Photograph by Gabriele Stabile: “Andrew Solomon, right, with his husband, John Habich, and their son, George, 3, at home in New York.” Thank you, Statesman.com, for the photo and caption.)

_______________________

(I’ve posted only three passages from Far from the Tree because I’ve only begun reading it. And I know that if I quote more from the pages I’ve read so far, including the final chapter, I’ll end up quoting everything there. Solomon’s earlier tome, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, is another landmark in psychology, sociology, journalism, literature, and my life. So this certainly won’t be the last time you’re hearing my hallelujahs to this man.)

"I wish I’d been accepted sooner and better. When I was younger, not being accepted made me..."

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 13:01:00 +0800

“I wish I’d been accepted sooner and better. When I was younger, not being accepted made me enraged, but now, I am not inclined to dismantle my history. If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes—and we become attached to the heroic strain in our personal history. We choose our own lives. It is not simply that we decide on the behaviors that construct our experience; when given our druthers, we elect to be ourselves. Most of us would like to be more successful or more beautiful or wealthier, and most people endure episodes of low self-esteem or even self-hatred. We despair a hundred times a day. But we retain the startling evolutionary imperative of affection for the fact of ourselves, and with that splinter of grandiosity we redeem our flaws. These parents have, by and large, chosen to love their children, and many of them have chosen to value their own lives, even though they carry what much of the world considers an intolerable burden. Children with horizontal identities alter your self painfully; they also illuminate it. They are receptacles for rage and joy—even for salvation. When we love them, we achieve above all else the rapture of privileging what exists over what we have merely imagined.”

- Andrew Solomon, from Chapter 1, “Son,” in Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

Make a life for yourself In the heat of an argument, my mother...

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 12:54:43 +0800

Make a life for yourself

In the heat of an argument, my mother once told me, “Someday you can go to a therapist and tell him all about how your terrible mother ruined your life. But it will be your ruined life you’re talking about. So make a life for yourself in which you can feel happy, and in which you can love and be loved, because that’s what’s actually important.” You can love someone but not accept him; you can accept someone but not love him. I wrongly felt the flaws in my parents’ acceptance as deficits in their love. Now, I think their primary experience was of having a child who spoke a language they’d never thought of studying.

— from Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon

(Photo: Thank you, Statesman.com.)

I really don’t see myself in you

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 14:37:00 +0800

If you think Andre Dubus III had a hard time growing up with an emotionally distant father, you haven’t met Augusten Burroughs, Alison Bechdel, David Small, or Frederick Buechner. Or you haven’t met their fathers. Or their mothers. Or the families in Andrew Solomon’s latest book, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity.

In a better world (or in the parallel universe of my addled brain), writers like these will each have a shot at the Nobel Peace Prize for illuminating the battles waged in our own homes. Their books won’t solve poverty, mitigate global warming, or prevent nuclear war. But anyone who takes to heart what they’ve said or drawn about surviving childhood and parenthood is entitled to what Buechner calls peace “beyond all understanding.”

“Son” and “Father” are the titles of the first and last chapters of Solomon’s book. Together they’re the perfect lens with which to view my parent-child preoccupations on this blog this month. These two chapters chronicle Solomon’s personal struggles in those roles amid societal hang-ups and bioethical dilemmas. Dwight Garner of the New York Times says: “Mr. Solomon’s first chapter, entitled ‘Son,’ is as masterly a piece of writing as I’ve come across all year. It combines his own story with a taut and elegant précis of this book’s arguments. It is required reading.” I have one word to describe this first chapter’s 47 pages: superb.

Solomon states: “My study is of families who accept their children, and how that relates to those children’s self-acceptance”—a disclosure that seems to forebode pat resolutions and trite parenting tips. But this author is no pedantic Pollyanna who wants to turn us all into group-hug addicts. His aim is much more realistic, complex, and daunting. He interviewed more than 300 families over 10 years and completed a book with 702 pages (plus 254 pages of Notes, Bibliography, and Index) and immeasurable reserves of candor, wisdom, and hope.

He wants to tell us what it means to be parents to children who are “different”—those who have “horizontal identities [that] reflect recessive genes, random mutations, prenatal influences, or values and preferences that a child does not share with his progenitors.” What does it mean to have a child who is gay or transgender, a child with a physical disability, or dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, or schizophrenia? What about children “conceived in rape” or those considered prodigies?

On page 1, Solomon says:

Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity. We depend on the guarantee in our children’s faces that we will not die. Children whose defining quality annihilates the fantasy of immortality are a particular insult; we must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do. Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.

That passage reminds me of a line in the movie version of Running with Scissors, Augusten Burroughs’ memoir/theater of the absurd. Alec Baldwin, who plays Augusten’s father, tells his little son: “I really don’t see myself in you at all.” Sounds familiar. Or familial. The voices of these virtual strangers in our homes. Their alienating negativity or denial. Or shock or disappointment: “How could you have turned out this way?” The same lines that children or teenagers might hurl back at their parents. Or more to the point: “I don’t ever want to grow up to be like you.” So much for Pollyanna.

What does it mean to have children like Augusten Burroughs or Alison Bechdel? What does it mean to have been “raised” by the parents of David Small or Frederick Buechner? While researching materials for this monthlong series of posts inspired by that poignant father-and-son photo of Andre Dubus and Dubus III, I often wondered: What if Dubus III had grown up in the Buechner home instead? Or what if Augusten got to hang out with Alison’s closeted gay dad? What if Alison had met David Small’s closeted lesbian mom? What if Augusten had done therapy with David’s analyst instead? (Yeah, the wise, compassionate White Rabbit in Stitches instead of the turd-reading Psychiatrist from Hell in Running with Scissors.) What if the suicides of Alison’s dad and Frederick’s dad had been prevented?

What if the dysfunctional Burroughs, Bechdel, Small, and Buechner families had met—or read about—the benevolent, though no less conflicted, parents in Solomon’s book? What if, during my childhood, my parents had read and understood all these books about different children, difficult parenthood, traumatic childhood? What if I had read and understood all these when I was much younger? Would the “whiff of negativity” have dissipated? Would loving children—or loving anyone else—be less an “exercise for the imagination” than a natural, universal effect or cause of what it means to be human and alive?

I do not indulge in all these “what ifs” to trivialize what happened to these authors or to the families in these books. And I do not mean to cast a harsh light on my parents. They did what they could, knowing what they knew. They’ve done a flawed but fabulous job of helping me become who I am, whatever that is. And I am grateful for all that. I am fully aware that, in those families and mine, what happened happened. Mind games won’t change that. The writing and reading of a thousand “misery memoirs” cannot undo a single damage. But counterfactual thinking does serve some purposes. Two years ago, I began collecting Internet sources on this coping mechanism for no particular reason except that I was (oh, here we go again) “bored, depressed, and stranded.” Here’s one from ScienceDaily.com:

According to a new study, counterfactual thinking — considering a “turning point” moment in the past and alternate universes had it not occurred — heightens one’s perception of the moment as significant, and even fated. Armed with a sense that life may not be arbitrary, counterfactual thinkers are more motivated and analytical in organizational settings….

In “Father,” the final chapter of Far from the Tree, Solomon suggests (though he doesn’t use the phrase) that counterfactual thinking can help parents realize how much they value their children. What if they were offered an alternate universe in which their children’s “defects” didn’t exist? What if they could exchange their children for “better” ones?

Most of the parents I interviewed for this book said they would never want other children than the ones they had, which at first seemed surprising given the challenges their children embody. But why does any of us prefer our own children, all of them defective in some regard, to others real or imagined? If some glorious angel descended into my living room and offered to exchange my children for other, better children—brighter, kinder, funnier, more loving, more disciplined, more accomplished—I would clutch the ones I have and, like most parents, pray away the atrocious specter.

Would Augusten, Alison, or David have made the same choice as those parents did if that glorious angel had descended into their less than glorious childhood? Would any of us have opted for “better parents” had we been visited by that atrocious specter? Or, as David Small says, would we now “acknowledge that, with all [our parents’] faults—because of them, in fact—” we are who we are, “both for good and for ill”?

Oh please, can’t you just move on already? Precisely. We look back so we can move on, as Solomon, Dubus III, Burroughs, Bechdel, Small, Buechner, Mary Karr, et al. would agree. If this Peace Prize-worthy bunch isn’t enough, then take it from Kierkegaard: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” Or heed Steve Jobs: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”

Counterfactual thinking allows us to look back or imagine better worlds so we can sort the facts from the feelings—and to accept that sometimes those feelings are the facts. Through the talking cure or the interpretation of dreams, by drawing pictures or taking notes, by turning horror into humor, or simply by refusing to shut up or give up, we make sense of what happened. Small says, “Only language brings order to the chaos of memory.” Like Bechdel, we can be the “avid archivists” of our own lives, letting others see our invisible wounds. And Buechner reassures us that there’s no need to apologize for the self-pity. He knows that “to keep track of these lives we live is not just a means of enriching our understanding … but a truly sacred work.”

In an interview, Burroughs once said: “I always win the fucked-up-childhood contest no matter who’s in the room.” It’s hard to argue with that. But, my dear Augusten, isn’t it also good to know you’re not alone in that room? With all these truth-telling, bigotry-busting books around, it won’t be too hard anymore for you to see yourself in others and for us to see ourselves in you.