Tom Lake – Ann Patchett’s Imagined Oral Memoir

 Tom Lake, Ann Patchett, Fiction, Memoir, Truth, Psychology, Psychoanalysis

My Aunt Julie and I have an ongoing debate – one that is resolved by each of us pursuing our own path while respecting the other’s.  She claims that nonfiction books are the way to learn about the world, and she doesn’t like fiction because it is just made up.  I think that that fiction tells us a lot about how human beings function.  I find pleasure in reading because I am learning something about humans – about characters and how they are imagined by people who are close examiners of others – and of themselves.

In a sort of compromise with my Aunt, I have considered writing a memoir – which would be nonfiction in so far as such things can be, dimmed by time and reconstructed by the forces that shape our memories into approximations of what actually occurred.  But I would intersperse it with the paths not taken – the person I might have become had various alternate routes been taken through my life.  Somehow these alternate versions and I would be having a conversation about the various routes taken, and one of the questions would be, what is it that is essential in a character and what is shaped by the events that a person encounters.

Ann Patchett’s latest novel, an easy read, approaches this question in a more linear manner.  She tells the story of a critical moment in her life, a moment when she was a dating a man who would become a movie star, to her now grown daughters, who are sequestered with her on the family cherry farm in Northern Michigan during the pandemic with their father - not the movie star.  

The central premise of the book, that her children are interested enough to hear her tell the story of her early life over the course of weeks, even to hang on to her words, is hard to believe.  When I asked the reluctant son about his thoughts on the manner, he acknowledged that the fact that the story involves a celebrity – one of his favorite stories of my youth involves my running into Brooke Shields at the gym when I was living in a small town and she was there shooting a movie – but he acknowledged that it is a brief story and anything longer would have been as uninteresting as the rest of my stories.  So, chalk one up for the Aunt Julie on that score…

The other problem with the story is that the narrator supposes that the spot that was chosen for the family cemetery, a spot on top a hill, would have been the place that the farmhouse should have been as it is the loveliest spot on the land – but the original family reserved it for the cemetery so the dead could enjoy the beauty in perpetuity.

A nice thought, but a spot on top of a hill in Northern Michigan would not have been a place to put a house when a farmhouse was being built five generations ago.  First, there would be no water on top of hill.  Carrying water up the hill, or even pumping it up there, would have been an unnecessary luxury.  Second, there would have been no protection from the wind in winter – and conserving heat was much more important than the views.

So, once my gripes were out of the way, I was drawn in by the story and also by the quality of the writing.  It really is a lovely piece about the connections – and disconnections – between a mother and her daughters.  There is enough gritty reality – the mother felt, but has never told the children this – consumed by them when they were little.  The eldest daughter, as a rebellious adolescent, aware that her mother had dated a movie star, was convinced that she was his child and became obsessed with him and his way of life which was so different from the simplicity of their life on the farm.

And what child isn’t convinced that they would not have sprung from their quotidian parents?  Why are so many fictional protagonists orphans?  And don’t we all imagine that we are highborn?  Since this is a truth that is buried in fiction, I will chalk this one up for the Reluctant Psychoanalyst in his debate with his Aunt Julie… (impartial judge that I am).

The characters that come to life in this book – unlike in many memoirs – are the players around the narrator – though there ends up being more than a bit about the narrator herself, we do get to know her.  And this is a lovely mirroring of the plot.  The narrator realizes her limits, something that is very hard for us to do, and chooses a path through life that suits her, even though she is offered a path that she might have desired not because of who she is, but because of what she would have been led to believe that she, like everyone around her, must desire.  But I am getting a bit ahead of myself.

The narrator is careful to bring to life her three daughters, and to distinguish between them, giving them each to us as a precious, cared for, and unique individual who cares for the others, for her mother and for her father, and who has unique experiences of having her life interrupted to hang out on the family farm during the pandemic doing the labor that is needed (picking the sweet cherries) to keep it afloat when the seasonal workers are not migrating with the crops because of the pandemic.

She also brings to life – slowly and carefully – the characters she knew back when.  As she tells the story of the summer at Tom Lake to her daughters – with asides to us about the parts that her daughters don’t need to know about.  These individuals have convened to put on a play – several of them, actually, at Tom Lake, a vacation spot in Northern Michigan.  Yes, in the vicinity of the farm she would someday call home, but it is not at all clear, for a very long time, how that connection will be made.

But the play she is called to be the lead in is Our Town by Thornton Wilder.  A play that was produced at my High School when I was a student there – though I did not see it then nor have I seen it since.  The central premise of the play seems to be that life in a small town is not just good, but unbelievably good; so good that those who experience it don't appreciate just how wonderful it is. It is a play about life and death in a small town.  It is central to the repertory of the American Theater, and the mother/oral memoirist is playing Emily – the lead in the play.

She had played the role before, and her Uncle, a movie producer, saw her in it, took her to Hollywood, and she acted in a movie he produced.  While that movie is awaiting release, she auditioned to play the part in a revival of Our Town on Broadway, wasn’t taken, but when there was need for her in a Summer Stock production in Northern Michigan, she was available and was flown in.

 There she becomes a part of troope of players including the future film star, the director of the show, and the understudy for the role of Emily; the part she plays.  The movie star’s nobler and more stable older brother rounds out this group, and the group together spontaneously make a pilgrimage to her future home, and they all, each in their own way, fall in love with it.  

As the two stories unfold – the romantic and professional entanglements at Tom Lake and the development of the family connections through the telling of the story of Tom Lake and the ways that each of the children, and the mother, experience the story – a deeper story is being told.  It is the story of finding a path in life that allows one to become the person they were intended to be.  The children are convinced that their mother should have become a movie star – not been just a one hit wonder.  They are asking “What if?”. 

We, too, are asking “What if?”  Their father, mostly off stage, is aware of the story, which we are not, and we are impressed with his willingness to have her tell it.  He appears not to be threatened by what is to come.  The children and their mother settle on the word trustworthy to describe him.  I think reliable is, perhaps, a more apt description.  He turns out to be a rock.  The mother, who might have floated along in life, reconnects with him, and that allows things to settle into place.  She withholds part of the story from her husband and children, but tells it to us so that we can see that she is not quite as stable, this life was not quite as inevitable, as she wants them to believe.  This is not a criticism of the mother’s character, but an acknowledgement in what is, I think, a powerful reversal of the usual experience of a memoir.

To recap:

This fictional memoir is, I think, more realistic than many because:

1.    1.  It does not assume that the end is inevitable – especially as the mother/narrator acknowledges that she was more star struck and more adrift than she would be comfortable with her family knowing.  We are let in on an aspect of the human condition that might actually be hidden by the kind of memoir that is presented to the “public”: in this case her family.  Instead, we are given an opportunity to see into a part of the memoirist’s mind that perhaps even she would not let herself see.  When the author is creating an alter ego she can have a different relationship with her than she might have if she were the memoirist herself.

2.   2.    It does not assume that the end is inevitable – there is lots of room for chance here – and for other outcomes.  Her children are lovely – each of them – as well as brutal and limited.  And other children, with other partners, in other corners of the world, would also have been lovely, and brutal and limited.  She ends up in this spot largely by chance.  That is the way of the world.

3.    3.   The memoirist does not strain to justify herself.  She acknowledges her limitations – and, in doing this, she is able to choose a path that suits her, not one that she has to make suit her.  She is a character actress who can play one leading role well.  She was not cut out to be a leading lady – and the role of being a leading man is not all that it may be cut out to be – it may require a certain instability of character to convincingly take on a rainbow of roles.  The movie star literally turned himself upside down before every performance in order to prepare for his roles.

Of course, on the other hand, this memoir falls short of reality because:

1.    1.   It is a crafted novel.  The parts fit together all too smoothly.  The central character’s lack of regrets and certainty of place – especially being on a farm that is marginally able to financially survive from year to year while being simultaneously threatened by climate change – is unrealistically serene.  It is written to help us, the reader, feel good about the path that we have chosen.  We are all but made to identify with the memoirist.  We woulda, coulda, shoulda – and instead we landed in paradise.  When Freud said that he cured people of neurosis so that they could experience ordinary unhappiness, he did not envision a cherry farm in the middle of summer in Michigan with three grown children hanging on their mother’s every word…

2.    2.   The loose threads in this story are few.  Despite the numbers of characters that are included in the story, we feel settled about the vast majority of them by the end of the story, and have relatively little empathy for those who have been discarded along the way.  There is a neatness here that I don’t think is realistic.  The sense of closure, while it brought tears to my eyes, is inconsistent with the observation of the memoirist that her greatest moments of joy lose their sparkle over the years.  Of course this book will fade, but it is tied up with a bow and at the moment of its completion there is an unrealistic sense of all things being right in a world that is grittier and more complicated than that – including as it is being described here.

3.     3.  Finally, any book, whether fiction or non-fiction, about a life, is constrained by the particular path that life follows.  We cannot live those multiple lives that I would like to construct in my memoir…  We cannot know what the road untravelled actually looks like.

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Succession: Why am I obsessed with a show that has no likeable characters?

 Succession, Logan, Kendall, Shiv, Roman Roy, Family Psychology, Psychoanalysis

Succession has been an obsession for the past few weeks.  Four seasons of intense drama – 38 or so episodes in all – each episode an hour or more filled with, as everyone I have talked with about it says; a cast of characters not one of whom is likeable, and yet, like the proverbial car wreck, we can’t turn away from looking at it.  What is the draw?

We watched the penultimate episode last night and I awoke a tad early this morning, as I often do after watching an episode, from a dream about the episode.  I cannot capture the dream itself, but could capture the feeling of it and I was finally able to articulate, as I lay waiting for it to be time to get out of bed, some of the draw to a show that has been this toxic for me.

The penultimate episode centers around the long delayed funeral for Logan Roy (Brian Cox), the media mogul, king maker, billionaire toxic patriarch of the clan of misfits that would fill his shoes.  In this episode, we finally get the backstory on this man at the center of the drama, and various rage storms, that have filled our screen for many weeks.  The four eulogies, one from his brother, Ewan Roy (James Cromwell), an aborted one from his youngest son, Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin), a stolid one from the oldest son of his second marriage, Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong), and childhood memories from Siobhan “Shiv” Roy (Sarah Snook), the middle child of this group and his only daughter, paint an interesting picture against the background that we have come to know.  (Logan also has an only child - his eldest son from his first marriage, Connor Roy (Alan Ruck), a kind of laughable, delusional son whose wholly apparent ineptitude allows the other children, whose ineptitude is more subtle, to shine in comparison, especially in their own minds.)  It also allows the family members to parade across the screen one final time before the series ending showdown where the successor will be named…

Logan Roy built his empire from scratch (or close to it – Ewan clarifies that after they made the terrifying crossing of the Atlantic in the 2^nd World War, in the hold of a ship that lost its power and where the 5 year old Ewan and the 2 and ½ year old Logan, alone on the ship without parents, were told not to make a sound lest the UBoats would blast a hole in the hull; they arrived in the States to stay with an unspecified relative who had some unspecified amount of money), and Logan’s fondest wish (and seemingly greatest fear) was to leave the empire that he had created to his children – while he simultaneously did everything in his power to undermine them, seemingly to ensure that they were unable to take the reins when his rule came to an end, or, perhaps in his conscious mind, to avoid their stealing the kingdom from him before his time was up.

In this reversal of King Lear, Logan hangs onto power too long, and he sees everyone, especially those who most love and care for him, as threats – and because he treats them as competitors who would take away what he has, they become every bit as threatening as he fears they might be, but because he is prepared for that, he can thwart them at every turn and no one is able to trust anyone.  Unfortunately for them, his suspicions and criticisms and brutal attacks have crippled them so that they are not effective threats to him – nor, then, can they be legitimate candidates to run the company in his absence, but none of them can see that, except, ironically, Roman – the initially most unaware character who, across the course of the series, actually grows into an admirable human being. 

In one scene in the second or third season, Logan, who supposedly does not know how to swim, is swimming in Connor’s pool – ironically in New Mexico, one of the driest states in the nation – and we see his back – and it is covered in the scars from what must have been brutal beatings – probably when he was a child.  This hint at childhood trauma, and the ways that he is enacting that trauma on his children including, at one point, hitting Roman hard enough to dislodge a tooth, we can imagine that he is justifying his treatment of them by saying something to himself like, “beatings made me stronger – they need to regularly be beaten in order to have the strength to head this company.”

Logan Roy is, then, like Stalin, or any other despotic ruler of an empire, someone who is paranoid that those around him are as ruthless as he.  And his paranoia, his projection of his own internal world onto those around him, poisons them; turning them into crippled, angry broken versions of himself.  But where he was focused on proving to the world that he is a powerful person who needs to be recognized and dealt with, his children become focused on getting him to recognize that they are a force to be dealt with by him; but since he has all the power, they fail, time after time.

The humane thing to do would be to leave them by the road.  To let them know that they are inadequate, to provide for them, but to leave them, but he is not able to do that.  He is forever stirring them up, appointing a new favorite, drawing attention to what this new one has to offer, apparently because, if he doesn’t keep them interested, who will be interested in him?  Who or what does he legitimately have to offer the world that will result in the world loving him?  Logan Roy is a deeply cynical man who sees through everyone's efforts to curry favor with him - what is it that he is looking for?

And why am I drawn to watch this super slow-motion series of car wrecks?  Why can’t I look away when looking at it makes my own dreams toxic, disturbing my sleep at a time when I am too busy to devote one or even two hours a day to something that is not just disruptive, but unpleasant?  What must this be mirroring in my own life that makes this so enthralling?

I think I am drawn in by a nearly universal thread about fathers and their children that I didn’t get until the Eulogies.  Logan Roy is a despicable man.  He doesn’t like to receive gifts.  He is not motivated by acquiring the tremendous wealth that he has generated, though his children are addicted to the trappings of wealth and he despises them for that.  "You don't know the price of milk," berates them during one of the really crazy and dehumanizing episodes where every member of the family and the executive board is demeaned.  Logan wants power, and no amount of power is enough for him.  He is the personification of the toxic, narcissistic psychopath who is so vilified in our society.  He is the toxic patriarchy writ large, with the ex-wives and mistresses to prove it.

This extended portrayal of the family and the business allows us to see – often in broad daylight – the malicious cruelty that emerges out of his personal cauldron of hate and bile.  Because of the harm and the damage this causes to the psyches of those around him, the psychopath is rightly feared and avoided.  And yet, the psychopaths in our society do not just fill our prisons, but they often turn up, as Logan does, as leaders of our corporations and other entities.  I would also propose that though we have called them a class of people, segregating them, as it were, from ourselves, they are also, to some degree, perhaps, present in each of us.  Haven't we had a moment where we have taken pleasure in causing another pain?  

Those who fit the category of psychopath of become leaders in part due to their single-minded pursuit of goals and objectives.  Famously unhindered by guilt, their path is not impeded by the social concerns that would prevent others from rising.  But this does not explain their charismatic pull – their ability to suck us into caring about them despite ample evidence of their lack of caring for us.  What they care about is the attention that we focus on them – and it is important that we be clear that we are talking, then, about the narcissistic psychopath.

As one such psychopath clarified, it is not that the psychopath does not know the rules, it is that they are not bound by them except as it serves them to observe them.  Rather than simply doing things because they are the right thing to do, as most of us do – we have internalized the rules and the threat of punishment is essentially unnecessary to sustain our inhibitions (though getting a speeding ticket now and then does curb my speeding for a while) - they are consciously choosing to follow the rules or the laws because it is strategic to do so – not because they have to.  If it is advantageous to them not to follow the law and when the risk of doing that is calculated to be low, they will do what is expedient.

So why are we drawn to such people?  First, and most importantly, because they are alive.  Their drives – their desires – their feelings – are present to them.  They don’t defend against them, they manage them, or fail to manage them (Logan’s rages are volcanic), and they are real.  When we are confronted by them, we don’t just deal with them.  We need to think about them, plot against them, and weigh whether confronting them is worth it to us.  Do we really want to invest that much in this interaction?  Are we up for going toe to toe at the drop of a hat?

A friend of mine who was bipolar talked about his experience when he was manic.  He felt so alive, so aware, so awake.  And he particularly felt sexually alive and awake.  And women would respond to this.  They would frequently have sex with him after spending very little time with him.  It was a combination of his losing his inhibitions, feeling more powerfully sexual, and of being able to concentrate all of the energy he was feeling on a single person at this moment that, at least as he reported it, led to a very different sex life than he experienced when not under the influence of mania.  I am suggesting that narcissistic psychopaths have access to similar life juices on a pretty regular basis.

But, while this accounts for our attraction in the flesh – and perhaps to our enthrallment with them as objects of interest, Succession got under my skin for more personal reasons – reasons that I wasn’t aware of until this episode.  In this episode, where the loss of the father was expressed and felt by each of these damaged and largely unaware children, I think it came to me that all fathers have a kind of low level narcissistic psychopathy on a relatively normal basis.  Freud focused his interest in the Oedipal situation on the child’s experience and acted as if it were the child's attraction to the father and the mother that is driver of the whole drama.  I don’t buy that.  So I will tell a slightly different fable:

Fathers, in our industrial society, traditionally left the home to do work “on the children’s behalf”.  They were expected to be selfless providers.  But, of course, they resented this.  Instead of respect at work, they had to compete with others on a consistent basis.  And then, when they got home, they frequently found that their spouse was more interested in the children and what was going on domestically than they were with what was going on in the world of the father.  Now they had to compete with the children for what should have been coming to them.

Heinz Kohut clarified for us that our narcissistic needs are not somehow met and then they disappear was we become capable of working from our full tank of self-esteem and self-confidence.  In fact, he said, we continue to need validation to maintain a sense of competence and worth.  Some of this, under the best of circumstances, gets accorded to us at work – sometimes more than at home, so we often spend more and more time at work, justifying it as somehow being for the good of the family while using it as the replenishment of our tank.

Of course, in a post-industrial world, the need to be validated by the world is compounded as two spouses are returning home to a place that should be a refuge, but is frequently chaotic and where, instead of a caring presence, additional demands are placed on each of them.  We are in the middle of figuring out this shift and, to this point, we have blamed the patriarchy for the ills that are so manifest in Logan, but we will see if, as things evolve, our challenges continue to be gendered or if we find new ways to manage them as the workplace becomes feminized and men influence the domestic sphere.

In any case, I think that the plaintive cries of Logan’s children – Roman’s inability to deliver the speech that he had been practicing with ease all morning when he was confronted with the actuality of his father’s death; Kendall’s putting together what needed to be said – pretending to be the grown-up in the room in the face of the loss of the true adult; and Shiv’s vulnerability as she recalled being a child playing outside their father’s office and his rage at being interrupted by the sounds of their play, somehow brought home to me that part of what drew me to the show is that this is a version – a distorted, larger than life, twisted version – of the family that I grew up in.

We did not have multiple marriages in my family.  We did not have inestimable wealth – quite the contrary.  But we did have a complicated inter-generational family where, I think, there was a tremendous desire to be loved on the part of each of the members – and, at moments, a tragic inability for any of us to see the needs of the others for validation and loving because of the momentary strength of our own needs.  And then, when this is a more or less constant state, it is only in the moment of loss – only when the contact that is so desperately sought is no longer possible - that a new kind of reckoning has the possibility of occurring.

Would that it had been possible for each of these characters to see themselves as a result of the “gift” of the loss of the mirror through which each was seeing a distorted vision of him or herself.  As I have mentioned before, Roman, once freed from this mirror, is able to observe himself and to know that he is incapable of performing the functions of the leader, something that has been painfully obvious to us from the very start of the series.  Roman is a glib, endearing fellow who appeared to be tremendously shallow and petty and his failure to be able to have a mature sexual relationship with a woman predicted his likely business impotence as well.  As the series progressed and it became apparent that he was the most emotionally available of the three children – that his shallowness may have been a cover for evolving emotional depth – it was also clear that sensitivity is not an asset in this family – quite the contrary, it leaves you open to ridicule and, indeed, destruction. 

Shiv is finally able to see, as painful as it is, that Kendall is also not able to fill that role.  It is less clear whether she can see that she is not fit for the role – she has, at moments, seemed so capable to us – and the illusion has been that it is only her gender that has blinded her father to her abilities.  If it is the case that she has been able to protect herself from the toxic burn of the family, performing this role will destroy the parts of her that she has tried to maintain by staying outside the family business to this point, but even a little reflection on the quality of her relationship with her husband Tom reveals that she has been, at least in my mind, deeply polluted by the stench of the family.

Which leaves us with Kendall.  The early money was on him.  But he has always seemed small while his father was large.  And with his father’s disappearance, one might imagine that he would grow into the role, but instead he continues to desperately aspire to it.  His failure to see himself in the absence of the distorting mirror – his inability to recognize that he is not the person that wanted his father to imagine him to be is not a tragic moment.  It is a sad and small moment.  Instead of realizing who and what he could have been – whatever that might be – he will likely always harbor resentment that his legacy was stolen from him.

When I was in college, after a summer working for my father, I wrote him a note explaining that though I understood his wish that I would take over his business at some point in my life, I did not believe that this would be a good fit for me and it would not be good for us if I were to set my sights on that goal.  This was deeply hurtful to him.  I did not know how deeply for years.  He only referenced it once.  And figuring out how to see each other outside of the narrow parameters that we had used proved to be a difficult, indeed a lifelong task.  I believe that, on some level, I regretted not having followed in his footsteps – it would have been a simpler life.  I could have been the mirror he wanted and needed me to be.  But, ironically, if we had worked together for thirty years, we never would have gotten to know each other in the ways that we did by my choosing not to follow his path.  Though I fear Kendell will never know that freedom, I think I was drawn to possibility that there would be some reconciliation - some way out of the mess that only got deeper and deeper the deeper we got into it.

 

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