Sticking Around

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 my parents in a harsh light. 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.

Life batters and shapes us in all sorts of ways before it’s done, but those original selves which we were born with and which I believe we continue in some measure to be no matter what are selves which still echo with the holiness of their origin… . I think that among other things all real art comes from that deepest self—painting, writing, music, dance, all of it that in some way nourishes the spirit and enriches the understanding. I think that our truest prayers come from there too, the often unspoken, unbidden prayers that can rise out of the lives of unbelievers as well as believers whether they recognize them as prayers or not. And I think that from there also come our best dreams and our times of gladdest playing and taking it easy and all those moments when we find ourselves being better or stronger or braver or wiser than we are.

This is the self we are born with, and then of course the world does its work. Starting with the rather too pretty young woman, say, and the charming but rather unstable young man who together know no more about being parents than they do about the far side of the moon, the world sets in to making us into what the world would like us to be, and because we have to survive after all, we try to make ourselves into something that we hope the world will like better than it aparently did the selves we originally were. This is the story of all our lives, needless to say, and in the process of living out that story, the original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead we live out all the other selves which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather.

— from Telling Secrets: A Memoir

The idea that I caused [my father’s] death by telling my parents I was a lesbian is perhaps illogical. Causality implies connection, contact of some kind. And however convincing they might be, you can’t lay hands on a fictional character. [ … ]

There’s a scene in The Great Gatsby where a drunken party guest is carried away by the discovery that the volumes in Gatsby’s library are not cardboard fakes. [ … ] My father’s books—the hardbound ones with their ragged dust jackets, the paperbacks with their creased spines—had clearly been read. But in a way Gatsby’s pristine books and my father’s worn ones signify the same thing—the preference of fiction to reality. If Fitzgerald’s own life hadn’t turned from fairy tale to tragedy, would his stories of disenchantment have resonated deeply with my father? [ … ]

Gatsby in the pool. Zelda in the asylum. Scott in Hollywood, an alcoholic, dying of a heart attack at forty-four. [ … ] My father was forty-four when he died, too. Struck by the coincidence, I counted out their lifespans. The same number of months, the same number of weeks … But Fitzgerald lived three days longer. [ … ]

For a wild moment I entertained the idea that my father had timed his death with this in mind, as some sort of deranged tribute. But that would only confirm that his death was not my fault. That, in fact, it had nothing to do with me at all. And I’m reluctant to let go of that last, tenuous bond.

— from Fun Home

(Illustration: Alison Bechdel. Thank you, satisfactorycomics.)

“How do you pronounce his name?” It’s 1999. I’m 36 years old. I’m in the library of a Benedictine monastery where I’m living as a postulant, a monk in training. The wise and kind novice master, Father S., comes up to me and asks how “Andre Dubus” is pronounced. He read about the man’s death a few days ago. I want to be helpful, so I say, “Perhaps Duh-boo (silent S)? Perhaps Doo-bus?” The monk/priest and I smile at each other. We both know, of course, that my answer takes us nowhere near enlightenment. And I also want to be honest, so I say, “Who is Andre Dubus?”

Fourteen years later, I no longer recall how Father S. replied to that. In March 2000, five months after leaving the monastery, I bought a copy of Meditations from a Movable Chair, a collection of essays by Andre Dubus. These are his reflections on faith, literature, and survival as a man bound in a wheelchair. In 1986, after a car accident, one of his legs was amputated and the other eventually became useless. He endured painful therapies, battled clinical depression, but continued to write exceptional short stories and personal essays until his death of a heart attack in 1999. He was 62.

This morning, I was lazy enough to rely on Wikipedia for the info that had eluded me for 14 years. Wiki says: “[The] surname is pronounced ‘Duh-BYOOSE’, with the accent on the second syllable to rhyme with ‘goose.’” Is that accurate? Can Wiki be trusted on pronunciations? I don’t know. For now, that answer seems enough. I might verify it against other sources later. Or I might just leave it at that. Who knows? How do I know what happens until it happens?

Some years after I left the monastery, Father S. was so deservingly elected as abbot of his religious community. Three months ago, I got an invitation from him. This August he will celebrate the silver jubilee of his monastic profession. That will coincide with the monastery’s foundation anniversary. I don’t know if I’ll go. I haven’t been to the place since I left in October 1999. I haven’t seen him for 14 years. And I haven’t been inside a church or heard Mass for who knows how long. But he and I exchange e-mails once or twice a year. And I might mention my Wiki findings in my next e-mail. (I haven’t told him I’m on Tumblr. Yes, let’s spare him that.)

Also this morning, I read an interview with James Franco at the ongoing Cannes film festival, where his adaptation of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is being shown. Okay, calm down, people. I know we all have opinions about Mr. Franco. I understand why some find him annoying or pretentious. But I like something he said in a New York Times interview in 2010. The reporter had quoted to him a lukewarm review of his painting exhibit. Instead of being offended or defensive, he kept his cool: “Mr. Franco was pleased with this critique. He is open about still developing his ideas, even if they sometimes appear before a skeptical public. ‘All I can do,’ he said, ‘is put the work in.’”

Last year, I bought a copy of As I Lay Dying, yet another one of those books I had been dying to read since college. I look forward to finally reading it one of these days. As a Lit major, I read The Sound and the Fury in 1981 for a course titled “American Masterpieces.” That novel blew me away. I still have my mottled brittle copy (Penguin Modern Classics, 1964), including the notes I scribbled in the margins when I was a teenager. In midlife, I still haven’t given up on the idea that one day, in the maze of all my digressions and distractions, I shall read more Faulkner.

Meanwhile, I won’t mind watching more Franco. He has done Allen Ginsberg (Howl) and Hart Crane (The Broken Tower). He has completed his Faulkner and he’s already set to direct his next literary adaptation—The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III. And that’s how this morning’s meandering got me back on the Dubus track. I haven’t read the younger Dubus’ House of Sand and Fog, but the movie version (with an impeccable cast led by Ben Kingsley, Jennifer Connelly, and Shohreh Aghdashloo) has given me a good idea of how this acclaimed writer can transform family values and racial tensions into riveting tragedy.

So I began searching Andre Dubus III posts on Tumblr and found more reasons to get me interested in his books, including Townie, his memoir that provides an intimate, if not always flattering, portrait of his father. I kept scrolling down the Tumblr frames of Dubus pics and quotes till I found this stunning black-and-white photograph by Michele McDonald. This almost biblical, mythical portrait of masculine serenity and familial bond. Andre Dubus and Andre Dubus III. Father and son, each man buttressed against the other’s strength.

I think I’ll go out now and get myself a copy of Townie. I might also go for one of those long walks—the kind that puts me in the mood to just let the air out there slide into my lungs, and to put one foot in front of the other, and to breathe, and to know that sometimes all I can do is put the work in and then breathe some more. But before I go, I just want to read again my favorite passage in Meditations from a Movable Chair. It’s from the essay “A Hemingway Story,” in which the older Dubus tells us what he thinks Hemingway’s story “In Another Country” is really all about:

Then, because of my own five years of agony, of sleeping at night and in my dreams walking on two legs, then waking each morning to being crippled, of praying and willing myself out of bed to confront the day, of having to learn a new way to live after living nearly fifty years with a whole body—then, because of all this, I saw something I had never seen in the story, and I do not know whether Hemingway saw it when he wrote it or later or never, but there it was, there it is, and with passion and joy I looked up from the book, looked at [my students’] faces, and said: “This story is about healing too. The major keeps going to the machines. And he doesn’t believe in them. But he gets out of his bed in the morning. He brushes his teeth. He shaves. He combs his hair. He puts on his uniform. He leaves the place where he lives. He walks to the hospital, and sits at the machines. Every one of those actions is a movement away from suicide. Away from despair. Look at him. Three days after his wife has died, he is in motion. He is sad. He will not get over this. And he will get over this. His hand won’t be cured, but someday he will meet another woman. And he will love her. Because he is alive.”

About a year after I discovered Dancing After Hours, I sleuthed out a mailing address for [Andre] Dubus and wrote him a letter of gratitude. A few weeks later I learned that, at the age of sixty-two, Dubus had died of heart failure. The date was February 24, 1999. A month or so passed, and then a letter with the return address “Dubus” eerily appeared in my mailbox. I nervously opened it and found that it was from Andre Dubus III. He had written to say he had found my letter, and then he did a beautiful thing: He thanked me for thanking his dad.

The first time I met Dubus III in person, he told me about the unexpected way his father had influenced his art. “It’s not his fine work,” he told me, “but seeing him walk daily into his downstairs study in our tiny rented house and try to write something beautiful for someone he would probably never even meet. It’s that image that gave me permission as a young man to view writing as a legitimate line of work to devote one’s life to.”

Andre Dubus cared a great deal for people. There is no better evidence than the words he put to paper. The best of his work leaves us feeling uneasy and vulnerable from the shock of recognition—nervous that this man not only knows our secrets, but that he might understand them better than we do. Though Dubus himself may have been as complex as the characters he created, his stories offer what only great art can: They provide counsel for the heart.

— from “The Art of Reading Andre Dubus: We Don’t Have to Live Great Lives” by Joshua Bodwell (Poets & Writers)