The Fabelmans: What’s in a name?

 Fabelmans, Spielberg, Art, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, A tale 

I am not a big Spielberg fan.  His films have often felt contrived.  I leave the theater feeling manipulated rather than moved, even though feelings have, indeed, been wrenched out of me.  In The Fabelmans, a film that is also a memoir, perhaps it is no coincidence that Spielberg’s muse is a particular kind of artist – a circus performer.  Perhaps Spielberg is equating his films with The Greatest Spectacle on Earth – something not to be missed, but also something that is primarily entertaining and only incidentally edifying, even if there is great potential for that when you martial the resources needed to put together a human and animal extravaganza like a circus or a blockbuster movie.

I read somewhere that Spielberg, like Hitchcock before him, was interested in communicating a feeling state that he experienced as a child.  Hitchcock’s father had him locked up in jail by the local constable, a family friend, for a minor infraction at home to teach young Alfred a lesson.  What Alfred experienced was dread tinged with terror, and he mastered this by inducing that feeling in his audiences.  For Spielberg the Ur experience was the dissolution of his parent’s marriage.  And the feeling associated with this might best be understood as a yearning – a wish to repair something that is broken and over which you have little control – the wish to help ET phone home so that he can be reunited comes to mind.  So, I was interested to see how this film would interrogate that emotional territory not in a displaced form but when confronted directly.

Of course, when The Fabelmans was released we were still under COVID restrictions, and we weren’t in the habit of going out.  I knew that it would be streaming shortly and with the summer movie slate promising to be even more tepid than usual, the Reluctant Wife and I decided to wait to watch it at home because we were both curious about whether this very successful director can adequately capture what drew him to the medium that he has so profitably exploited.

The answer to our question is entrusted to young Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle), who, as the ersatz Steven Spielberg, ends the film spending a few moments with the person he believes to be the greatest film director of all time, John Ford, where he learns to put the horizon high on the screen or low on the screen, because those are interesting, but not in the middle of the screen, because that is not.  And in many ways this scene captures how Sammy has used film – it is a way to capture the interest of the audience – to pull them into an experience – to dazzle them even.  Film is a bright shiny object that captures an audience in ways that a geeky kid would never otherwise be able to.

That is not, however, how he uses film initially.  He is taken to his first movie – The Greatest Show on Earth (in fact- the circus theme runs through this movie) – and he is traumatized by it.  There is a scene in which a convertible full of people drives up the tracks to warn a second train that the first train has been derailed and the car is hit full on by the train and the people are thrown from the vehicle.  Spielberg asks for a toy train set for Chanukah and replays the scene to try to master it, but his father Burt Fabelman (Paul Dano), a brilliant but emotionally constricted electrical engineer, is concerned about the damage to the train set during the re-creation.  Sammy’s more sensitive mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams) suggests that he recreate the wreck once more and film it so that he can relive it endlessly by showing the film over and over.

There is a lot packed into that set of interactions and the development that film is both the inducer of trauma, but also the means of working it through.  In PTSD, one of the things that fascinated Freud and that did not fit in nicely with his theory of the mind is that traumatic events are replayed, for instance in repetitive dreams.  We keep returning to the scene of the crime, as it were, and he sees this as not fitting in with his theory that dreams are about fulfilling wishes.  I think that the PTSD dreamer is wishing that the dream would provide a different ending than the one that occurred in real life, but the reality of the loss, of the trauma, intrudes, and we wake up not having figured out how to make this thing that has happened unhappen.

But I think Sammy’s mother intuits something else.  I think she intuits that being able to create the accident will give Sammy the sense of mastery over it.  It will be he that is causing the train to strike the car, not something that is being done to him in a movie theater by another person’s film.  It is he that will be taking something that was uncontainable – his terror at the fate of these men – and containing it, making it into something that he is in control of, something that he has produced.  In the trade, we call this turning passive into active.

There are, then, two parallel incidents that describe Sammy’s adolescent trauma, the trauma that involves a greater loss of control than the death of actors on the screen.  Both of these traumas are the result of his family’s move from Arizona to California.  In this move, Sammy’s mother needs to leave behind the family friend, Benny Loewy (Seth Rogen).  Benny has been like Sammy’s father’s kid brother – another engineer that has followed the family from place to place.  As Burt Fabelman’s career has expanded, as he has been in demand, he has been able to negotiate a place for Benny to come with him each time, but the move to LA is a move to the big time and Benny doesn’t have the chops to make it there.  It is also the case that Benny and Mitzi have become lovers – and whether Burt knew that or not, Mitzi’s depression at leaving Benny makes it clear.  Unfortunately, Sammy has known about Benny and Mitzi’s trysts and he is furious with is mother about them.  His incessant filming has caught them secretly being indiscreetly affectionate with each other.  He edits a highlight reel of them so that when he mother asks what is wrong, he can show her the evidence that he has collected.

The other trauma is that Sammy moves from being firmly ensconced in a peer group in Arizona, where he had a cadre of friends to act in the movies that he created, to being the weird kid at the High School in California.  Paralleling his knowledge of his mother’s infidelity, he becomes aware of the prom king’s dalliance with someone other than his girlfriend.  When Sammy tells the girlfriend, and the prom king finds out, the prom king attacks Sammy and demands that he take back the information – to lie to the girlfriend.  Dutifully (and to avoid more bodily harm), Sammy does this, though the girlfriend sees through his meager attempt to undo his interference.

These parallels allow Sammy to use his camera to work out the complex experience of feelings of loss that his parents impending divorce visits upon him.  He does this by filming the senior class’s day at the beach and splicing the film together to portray the philandering classmate as the golden boy who is everybody’s hero.  The golden boy, knowing that Sammy knows that he is not a hero – both because he is a philanderer and because he has bullied Sammy, is ashamed of the film.  He cries that it does not represent who he truly is and demands to know why Sammy has portrayed him in this manner.  Sammy genuinely seems perplexed.  He does not know why he has done this.

I think Sammy’s perplexity is mirrors Spielberg’s.  This film, written by Spielberg about the formative moments in Spielberg’s development, is inarticulate at the central moment of explanation.  This could be a device on the writer/director’s part, but I don’t think it is.  I think he is left wondering about this and he presents this movie as art – raising the question of what occurred in his own and the viewers mind and invited the viewer to wonder.  He is, like his mother, aspires to be not just an entertainer (she is an accomplished pianist), but, as his uncle points out, an artist. 

The maternal uncle (played by Judd Hirsch in a wonderful turn as the impish and crazy family member who should not be let into the house after the death of his and Mitzi’s mother) has predicted that Spielberg’s curse is that he loves film more than he loves his family.  This is the explanation that the writer/director is offering for his tragic hero – that his love of film – his love of, and the scenes of the film emphasize this, creating scenes, filming them, splicing them together and figuring out how to have special effects – his interest (largely depicted as being in the mechanical and logistical aspects of film making) leads him to be isolated from those around him.

But this explanation does not hold water in explaining his decision to glorify the two-timing bully.  I think a more concise explanation is that he wants to restore a complicated world – one filled with philanderers – to one that is simpler; one that is filled with admirable heroes – people that he can believe in and be comforted by.  His isolation from his family is not caused by workaholism, but by the denial of the flaws that he sees in the world and the wish to portray and inhabit a world that lives up to the ideals that he expected of his parents and his workaholism is the mechanism for maintaining the denial.

Some of the irony here is that Burt, Sammy’s father, is depicted as a real mensch.  He recognizes that Mitzi, in spite of her love for him, and his love for her, is better suited to Benny.  Of course, Sammy’s father is being created now by an unreliable narrator – Spielberg has let us know that he doesn’t show things as they are (the prom king), but as he would like them to be.  Is this movie trying to repair his image not just of his mother – to idealize her desire to keep the family together despite the pain that being separated from Benny caused her, but also of his father, to see him not as the person who was not enough for his mother, but as the man who was too smart, too wonderful for any woman to be able to live with?

I have two weird and somewhat random connections with Steven Spielberg.  The first is really random.  I own the home that his cousins grew up in.  They visited the home and gave me a home video of little Steven running around in what is now my house with his camera, taking film of everything in sight.  I also have a less random connection.  A high school friend majored in film and became an editor and worked for Spielberg for years, cutting the films that we have all seen.  Perhaps my friend’s discomfort with working on those films – he did not see them as art but as popular films – is another factor leading to my wondering about denial and wishes for something better as being at the core of the ways that film has led Spielberg to produce the movies that he has.

What this film has helped me see is that the difference between art and entertainment may be that art invites us to wrestle with the unpleasant truths that are difficult aspects of life.  It encourages us to let go of what we hold dear in order to consider a world that is organized along lines that we find uncomfortable, but the artist believes that if we acknowledge them, we will be empowered to better navigate the complicated aspects of that world.  Entertainment, on the other hand, let’s us leave the spectacle essentially unchanged – or,  perhaps, changed back from our complicated selves to a simpler version of who we are and were – children who are fascinated but also bewildered by the world, and soothed by knowing that there is always a happy ending.  The moral of the Fabelmans is that our heroes are real and we can rely on them - the factures that lie beneath the service do not detract from their virtues - even though this leaves us a little mystified because we never quite come to grips with them.

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Bo Burnham’s Inside: Covid Chronicles IXX

Bo Burnham Inside Meaning, Psychology of Bo Burnham's Inside, Psychoanalysis of Bo Burnham's Inside  

 

Bo Burnham’s Inside is a Netflix special that he wrote, filmed, starred in and directed during the pandemic.  It is self-indulgent, self-obsessed, mildly and disturbingly funny, and, in many ways a tellingly interpretive first take on aspects of the shared experience that we engaged in alone or in very small groups – living under shelter in place orders during the first year and half of the pandemic.

The setting for this special is a small house that is oddly proportioned.  Spare and clean at the beginning, but increasingly cluttered as the year and the special move along (though the arc of the special is not a particularly linear one), the space is revealed in greater and greater detail.  The house, as it were, is engaged in a strip tease.

Meanwhile, Burnham did, too.  He lost more and more clothes as he grew more and more hair and we were treated to a burlesque style tease.  The irony of the title and the tease is that very little of Bo’s psychological interior is exposed.  We are more and more aware of his surface as he focuses more and more on the ways that we are engaged in looking at various surfaces while sheltering in place.

The special, then, feels like watching someone masturbate, and the object of their fantasy is, oddly, themselves.  Burnham is a very attractive man who is incredibly talented.  And he is, as he says, a white man, and white men, as he says, have been incredibly self-indulgent for a very long time.  And then he pours himself into indulging in himself.

He is a white man, looking in a mirror, finding himself erotically attractive, and masturbating as an expression of his love for himself.  It is interesting, then, that he uses only one mirror on the set.  The camera is the primary mirror – the primary lens through which he views himself – and he points out that we join him in viewing himself through our screens.  But there is a distance between him and us.  We are clearly in a different space from him and we are disconnected from him.

Burnham lampoons commentators by lampooning himself commentating on his own work.  In a very cleverly conceived and executed sketch, comments on his song, on his commentary on his song, and on his commentary on his commentary.  And despite the ways in which the commentary clarifies what is going on in the song, there is derisive tone – as if his commentary and, by extension, mine is not a way of creating a psychological space to appreciate art, but a waste of time and a further sign of our self-involvement (and my defensive tone may be an indication of how close to home this hit!).

There is a delightful song about girls on Instagram that is accompanied by Bo posing with the objects and in the scenes that depict what he is singing about being posted on Instagram and that “we” are looking at on Instagram.  And this sketch – this song – is really mean.  All the cutesy pictures feel – fake.  They depict a world that is too cute to be true.  And Burnham’s attitude towards the girls is arch and demeaning. 

But Bo has also been mean to Jeff Bezos, the internet (or more precisely our being sucked into the internet), and commentators.  We begin to realize that Burnham’s hatred it not just directed at the world, but at himself.  He is an object of desire, and he has an arch and demeaning attitude towards himself for that very thing.

So on some level, this special would feel very small and unsatisfying.  Who wants to sit and watch someone hate themselves and everything around them?  But on another level it is fascinating precisely because this is what we have all done (or at least I have done) at some point – or at many points – during the pandemic.

We have been afforded an extended period of time during which, even if we are busy doing lots of things, as Burnham is here, we are in our own company much more that we were used to being before the pandemic.  We see Burnham thinking through things and we see the product of that thought – he has been hard at work, as have we.  But we have been isolated.  We have been inside.  Inside our homes – but also inside our own minds.  And what have we found?

Burnham’s answer is that we have found surfaces rather than depth.  Rather than spending a yearlong retreat learning about the depths of our souls, we have wasted time with lots of bright and shiny objects that have been brought to us by the internet.  This may be texts from friends, it may be goodies delivered by Amazon, it may be face timing with our parents (his routine of FaceTiming with his parents is a classic adolescent/parent interaction) and it may be reading or writing, oh I don’t know, blogs.  But these things, at least as I watch Burnham, have not enriched us, but have enhanced our sense that, in our aloneness – in our isolation, we are pathetic.

Below this, as it were, when we peel back our pathetically narrow lives, we discover that we are people who have what we do because we have exploited others.  We sit safely in our homes while Jeff Bezos grows rich off of the people who sort our goods in his warehouse and deliver them to our doorstep. 

We are pathetic because, really, what do we have to complain about?  We are safe inside and everything that want or need can be brought into this space, cluttering it up.  And we are able to be safe inside because we can command others to do our dirty work for us (as Bo commands his sock to sing the words to his song even when the sock doesn’t want to).  And we should, I think, be ashamed of the privilege we enjoy.

As the stay in place orders around here come to a close – as we are reopening – there is not the burst of joy, at least for me; which many had predicted.  Instead we had vaccinated friends over – and compared notes on the year.  We had a family gathering to celebrate the reluctant son’s graduation – and, though it was the first gathering like it in over two years, it also felt like this is how things should be.  There was a kind of grudging normalcy in the quality of it rather than a joyous sense of enthusiasm about our sharing space together (though we were excited about the graduation).  And going to the local ballpark, where fans having suddenly multiplied and are parading around unmasked, is terrifying.

Burnham, as this special limps to a conclusion, seems less than excited about emerging from his refuge.  He states that he had just screwed up his courage to return to the stage – a place he had been avoiding for five years as he was attacked by panic attacks on it – when COVID hit.  He seems fearful here, though, less about performing – in fact, he seems to crave and revel in it (imagining adoring fans) – than about emerging.  From inside.  Perhaps from a place that, when it doesn’t seem empty, feels shameful.  And having the emptiness and the shame exposed to himself is something that he cannot imagine not being seen by others (it is the text of the special, after all – though there is the sense that, in making this, it was an imaginary space he inhabited – that perhaps we all did when we were inside), but now that we have been inside, we will bring what we discovered there out into the open for all to see – and to scoff at – as we have scoffed at ourselves – at our pettiness – when we were inside.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text. 

  For other posts on COVID:

I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.

II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).

III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.

IV:    Letter on the occasion of a Town Hall Meeting

V:      COVID craziness at the University continues with no end in sight.

VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.

VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument

VIII: Catholic Social Teaching Marshaled to support Rationalization...

IX:    What will school look like?

X:     Denial is not just a river in Egypt...

XI:    Back in the Classroom

XII:  Labor Day is for WORK!

XIII: Ennui

XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.

XV.  The First Complete COVID Semester is Done.

XVI.      More of the Same: The Second COVID Semester begins.

XVII.     Surviving the First Year of COVID: Will education be the same?

XVIII.    I miss my mask?

IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

XX.       The Olympics Mark the Oddness of the Time In Between.

XXI.      It's baaaack...  Joy and Horror and Maybe a Little Bit of Hope

XXII.     The Great Resignation Hits Home

XXIII.    The Great Resignation (cont.): A Family Reunion

XXIV.    COVID in the Classroom: The Great Dis-integrator

XXV.     First COVID, Now No Snow Days?

XXVI.   Not with a Bang but a Whimper: COVID is over... or is it?

XXVII.  Post COVID (we can hope) reflections on morale and morals...

XXVIII. How will we move on from our Empire of Pain? (Also in books)

XXIX.    A New Year's reminiscence.

Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School

 

This Memoir disguised as a novel – more than a Roman a Clef – a memoir that uses the novel form to clarify that it is subjective history, but one that retains history, and slightly shifts it – is weird to read as someone who has lived in and among many of the people in the book and has shared a culture – the culture of the Foundation – the Menninger Clinic – that is at the heart of this book.  And as much as I initially read this book with prurient interest – and as much as it tells truths about the people and places that author and I have in common, the center of the book is about language.

 

This book is divided into chapters that are sandwiched in between updates about the internal world of a minor character in the main story – a boy, Darren, who is the antithesis of the hero Adam.  Darren’s family are Topeka natives, unlike Adam’s family – and the families of the rest of the Foundation kids.  The distinction is a little like a college town where the townies are indigenous and the students and faculty belong to a different group.  But Darren belongs to neither group.  He has difficulties – with language and thought – that Adam indicates could be helped by the Foundation – by his father in particular – if Darren’s parents had the means or the insurance, but they don’t.  So Darren’s story is both integral and marginal to the story as a whole.

 

The main story is about Adam (clearly a version of Ben), his family, and about his coming of age.  It is a subtly brutal story – brutal in an odd way that is the mirror of the brutality in the novel by Ben’s student, Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re BrieflyGorgeous, in that the instrument of the brutality in this story is the hero himself.  Or rather both of them.  Darren is also brutal in the moment that hangs in the air throughout the story, but we understand the sources of Darren’s brutality – he, like Ocean’s alter ego, is abused by society and he reacts to that (which Ocean’s hero does not – Ocean’s hero is somehow able to understand and metabolize the brutality that is visited upon him).  Neither Darren nor Adam can contain their anger – both harm those around them, including women whom they admire and denigrate.

 

The main story is told through different lenses.  Four of the chapters are told from the perspective of Adam, though they are written in the third person.  Two of the chapters are told from the perspective of Jonathan, Adam’s father.  Interestingly, these are told in the first person.  And they are startling on target.  I happen to know Ben’s father.  The reluctant first wife and I saw him in marital therapy when I was working at the “Foundation”.  But it is not knowing him as a therapist and a person that this rings true, but from my identification with Jonathan as the father of Adam – and my fathering of my own son – who could not be more different in some ways than Adam.  This raises a question.  Is Ben more comfortable inhabiting the mind of his father than his own mind?  Does he now identify with his father more than he does with the person – or this version of the person – that he once was?  Or does he need to find some distance from himself in order to be able to identify with himself and to help us identify with him?

 

Finally, two chapters are told from the perspective of Adam’s mother.  Adam’s mother speaks for herself to Adam – or Ben.  He, Adam, goes home as an adult to get background information and Adam’s mother tells him what he wants to know, knowing that what she tells him will go in his book.  Adam’s mother – a version of Harriet Goldhor Lerner, the author who was famous for writing the Dance of Anger and then a series of additional self-help books with Dance in the title, is no stranger to the effects of having a public life.  In the novel, she talks about handling the calls of men who were angry about her book, and the sneers of men in the grocery store who were mad about the ways her books empowered their wives – or ex-wives.  Ben, through Adam, gives Harriet, in the character of Jane, the ability to tell her own story – and to clarify that she is continuing to knowingly live a very public life.

 

Language is at the heart of this book.  Ben is an accomplished poet and this is his third novel.  He has written for the New Yorker and, though he couldn’t have known this would happen when he was writing the book, this book was the runner-up for the Pullitzer Prize.  He knows how to put words down on paper.  Adam, his alter ego, becomes (spoiler alert) the National Champion in Extemporaneous Speaking.  He wields words as a debater, as an extemporaneous speaker, and in his mind as the sharpest of weapons.  He brutally demonstrates, near the end of the book, how Amber, the attractive, popular girl whom he chooses to date over his debate partner – is of no real long term interest because of the paucity of her language.  But, unlike Ocean, this is not done with charity, but with malice.  It is almost shockingly hostile – more so because his victim doesn’t know – perhaps until she reads this novel – how summarily she has been dismissed.

 

But language, for both Adam and Darren, is at best a treacherous means to an end.  Darren is all but mute because the thoughts that he has can’t be represented in language – they are too weird – he is too weird – to talk to others in anything like consensual English.  Adam is deathly afraid that his words will leave him.  He fears that he will get on stage and be unable to be articulate.  Back to that spoiler alert – I could find no record of Ben Lerner having won a National Extemporaneous speech contest, though there was a record of a boy from Topeka winning it twice – in the era when the mentor that Adam has would have won it.  Did Ben invent a different ending for himself?  One in which, unlike in real life, when his mother withheld valium from him at Nationals, she actually gave it to him and this helped him manage his fears so that he, as Adam, won?  Is Ben angry enough at Harriet over this to expose her in this book in the ways that he does?

 

But I think language unites Adam and Darren on a much deeper level.  I think that language fails both of them.  The book opens with Adam talking to Amber on a rowboat while they are on a lake at night.  Unbeknownst to Adam, Amber slips overboard and swims off while he prattles on, telling the moon and the dragonflies the deep and important ideas that he wants to convey.  This is followed by an eery, uncanny wander through a stranger’s home, thinking it is Amber’s.  Adam is lost.  His words, as much as he has control over them, do not convey what he is feeling.  They do not connect him to others, but they divide him from them.  Adam, like Ocean’s Little Dog, and his own Mother and Father, has insights onto other’s psyches.  But unlike Little Dog, Adam uses those insights to feel disdain towards those he has come to know – just as Darren does.  Adam hates where Little Dog loves.  Adam has learned from the townies how to use his elbows rather than his fists to land blows that are more powerful – that do more damage – and that are surprising because they come from closer in.

 

Ben ends this book rather abruptly and, I think, cutely.  It is heralded as a book that is about the divide that language has created in the country in the age of Trump and his cronies.  The MAGA days.  And Ben has framed this book so that it can be understood in this way.  That we have left behind reason – that the spread of point counterpoint in a debate gave way, in the Reagan – Carter debate, to taking the moral high ground – Reagan winning by saying, “There you go again…” as Carter would use a fact to demonstrate what he meant.  And, of course, the irony is delicious.  Who is the more moral ex-President? 

 

But I think this book is much more personal than universal.  Not just because I have had a little access to some of the principle characters and to the culture that is being examined here; the culture of the “Foundation”.  The culture of a community of people deeply and at times dangerously involved in each other’s lives and the lives of their patients.  A culture of people perceived as having a magic elixir that could impart to the chosen healing – something that has always been associated, in our culture, with miracles.  But I think it is also the case that these miracles are never quite enough – especially for those from whom they feel withheld.  I suppose that Darren ends up being an odd fun house mirror for Adam.  Like Darren, Adam felt shut out from something deep and mysterious – something like love.  Something like the communication that language promised.  What he saw around him felt to him, I think, tawdry and disappointing.  Cheap, like the mass produced tins that his mother was led to believe were unique works of art.  He longed for Duccio’s Madonna and Child – a personal devotional that is scarred by the heat of candles that are a measure of the love that the viewer feels for the Mother and Infant that are depicted there.

 

This, then, is a book about the anger that white men feel.  An anger that is surprising to those who, from the outside, say, “What have you got to be angry about?”  As if power were a reasonable substitute for love.  As if being in charge were the same thing as being loved.  And as if our language, with all of its fine gradations, would allow us to articulate this need in such a way that it could be met without our having to become vulnerable.  We fear, from the inside of our safe space, that vulnerability and, so, may end up being locked in a tower or, as our President is this week, cowering in a bunker…

  For the accompanying post on Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, link here.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

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On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous – Ocean Vuong and the Ephemeral Quality of a Visceral Life

 This is a book – something the author calls a novel.  But it is also poetry, a memoir, and a letter to a mother who cannot read – indeed, a mother who cannot speak English.  It is a work of art – and a tour de force by a kid who has been beaten and bullied – who is the product of a war he never knew but that lives on in him none the less.  And it is the product of a relationship with Ben Lerner – a poet, novelist, memoirist and teacher, supporter and promoter of a stunningly honest style of writing that transcends memory to become a statement – of oneself as the product of one’s history, but also of oneself as one sees himself, and as he is seen through the eyes of another – in this case, the mother to whom he is telling things that we would never tell our mothers -  but that he must tell her – and cannot, because she does not have the words to understand them.  Yet, I think it is important that he see himself through her eyes – her eyes that have seen so much that they can stand to see him in his most raw and vulnerable state, but also to see beyond what he has been through – to see who he has become, and to realize with him that they, despite the flimsy foundation they have been afforded, have built a table – a place where they can eat – together – and know each other – on a deep and visceral level because they have lived within each other’s skin.

 

So, this book is not something that I can write cogently – or certainly not encyclopedically - about.  It is, I think, intentionally confusing as it skips between times and places, lingering in one when you think you have returned to the other.  It becomes taken with itself (or Vuong becomes taken with himself - his virtuosity with language is a slap down to all those who have slapped him down in the past he is narrating) and the beauty of the language interferes with the story – or is it the other way around – this brutal story interferes with the beauty of the poetry? 

 

I guess I ought to define my terms if we are going to have a solid place from which to appreciate this work.  Poetry is, for the sake of this post, the language of dreams.  It is the language of symbols that mean multiple things – it is the visual turned into the linguistic – it is a song that can be sung many times because it will reveal new meanings each time it is sung.  It is a narrative that is held together by the survival of the author, something that we are only sure will happen because we continue to hear his voice in our ear – indeed, he needs to reassure himself on a regular basis that he is there, that he hasn’t been destroyed in this moment or that, that his heart is still beating and that his words are still potent.

 

Ocean Vuong – whose given name was Beach, but this was pronounced by his Vietnamese mother Bitch, so he changed it to Ocean; in the novel his alter ego's given name is Leader of Vietnam, but we never hear the Vietnamese pronunciation of that because he goes by the name his grandmother gave him – Little Dog.  This is the name that is given to the runt of the litter, so that the runt is not stolen by roaming evil spirits.  “To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it will be left untouched- and alive.  A name, thin as air, can be a shield.  A Little Dog shield.”

 

So I worry for Little Dog.  This is a big book - even though it is short.  As big and certainly more beautiful than the pink Schwinn Little Dog learned to ride only inside after it got the paint scratched off it by bullies who said it was a sissy color.  How was his mother to know that pink was a sissy color?  Is pink a sissy color in Vietnam?  Is my own Reluctant Son lucky that his mother and father could send him to a Hippie school where he would not be bullied because pink was his favorite color?   Was the reluctant son unlucky because he was bullied not for the pink colors of his gloves and scarf, but because he was a good kid who was loving and kind and could, therefore, be used by others?

 

Ocean has opened his heart to us in this book.  And we see how he has been brutally treated by everyone who has loved him.  He is able to see the love through the brutality.  Indeed, he is able to separate himself from those who brutalize him and to see their pain while experiencing his own.  And he can feel superior to those who have more power over him – and this gives him a special power – his own super power.  It allows him to connect with those who are themselves brutalized – to find a safe space within the blows that they rain down on him – and to love them – and, I think just as importantly, to feel loved by them.

 

So I find myself thinking about Ben Lerner – the author who is pioneering this form of novelized memoir, though he is far from inventing it.  But Ben taught Ocean.  And Ocean – whom I have come to be fond of here – exposes all of his complicated identities in this book.  He lets us know that he is gay and Vietnamese and the grandson of an unknown G.I. who had sex with his grandmother when she was a comfort woman.  More intimately, he lets us know just how hungry he is for love – so hungry that he will endure a great deal. 

 

Were I his therapist, I think I would trust myself to help him appreciate this, and therefore to be curious with him about he could protect himself in his loving.  But I fear that others, hearing this naked exposure, might not be so careful.  I have to trust that Ben, and the readers of this volume will learn from it what it means to be, as he says, briefly gorgeous – and to appreciate his beauty without exploiting him.  But I think more importantly, I have to trust that this man’s resiliency is such that he will not be destroyed in the way that I imagine him to be by exposing himself so openly.

 

Since writing this far in this post, I have finished The Topeka School, and I think now, more clearly, that the more powerful of these two writers – Ben and Ocean – is certainly Ben.  He has resources that Ocean does not.  But it is clear to me that he is not as strong a person as Ocean.  Ben’s power is brittle and there largely by dint of social class but also by virtue of, as is case for Ocean, command of the language.  But language, for Ben, is a tool – it is a weapon.  It is used to keep him safe.  For Ocean, language is a means of connecting – this book is a letter to his mother – a mother who will never read it.  So we, his readers, become his mother.

 

Both authors talk quite intimately about their mothers – as intimately, in many ways, as they talk about themselves.  I am not able to be anything close to an objective observer because Ben’s mother is someone I know, not closely, but I have worked with her and been a part of her world.  Ocean’s mother could not be more foreign to me.  She beats her child.  She is impoverished.  Her schooling ended in the second grade when her village was destroyed by the US Army.  She doesn’t speak English – except to say “Sorry” to her customers as she cares for them, and she does understand enough of what they say to empathize with their losses.  But I don’t feel sorry for her in the way that I feel for Ben’s mother.  Ben’s exposure of his mother has an edge of malice.  Despite all the complications of the relationship between Ocean/Little Dog and his mother, there is a deep sense of caring for her – of understanding her and the world she lives in.  And a need to have her understand him.  Ben needs his mother to understand him, but he doesn’t seem to know that.  Ocean/Little Dog does know that he needs his mother's understanding, and he helps us to realize that the strength of knowing the other is not to have power over them, but to realize who it is that you are in relation to the other – and to realize who it is that they are and just how important it is that they are to you.  Ben and his alter Ego Adam can inhabit his father - write in his voice, but must hear from his mother.  Ocean/Little Dog can write to his mother - can create her in the ways that he needs her to be.  I think this allows him to more fully realize himself.

 

   My post on Ben Lerner's The Topeka School can be accessed here.

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Unorthodox (the movie): Disruption Comes at a Cost.

      

Those Hats!

Unorthodox on Netflix is a very brief series – just four episodes long – that chronicles the escape of Esty Shapiro (played by Shira Haas) from the clutches of the Satmar Hasidic Ultra-Orthodox Community (or Cult) in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY.  This is a partially fictionalized and psychoanalytically interesting story based on the memoir of Deborah Feldman, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots.  The title of the memoir captures something of the tension in the series.  Unlike a memoir like Tara Westover’s Educated, where the oppressive family’s culture is idiosyncratic first and we realize only later that it reflects cultural norms, here we have a repudiation of a culture that is internally consistent, depicted with care and even reverence, while simultaneously being questioned, both by the scandalous repudiation of an individual leaving it, but also by the public depiction of the rituals in a respectful manner that exposes the cracks in a system intended to be entirely self-contained.   

As the movie explains, the Satmar group formed in Williamsburg in the wake of the Shoah.   These Jews decided, in responding to unspeakable trauma, that turning away from connecting with a world they had assimilated to and that had betrayed them was the only meaningful way to survive.  They turned back to their roots and, in the process of doing this, looked to antiquated rules of living that predated a modern world.  In this they resemble, to my mind, the Amish who live near us here in the rural parts of Midwest, but might as well be living in another era.  The Satmar, on the other hand, are living in the middle of the most densely populated part of American.  And they are living apart – as if in their own country.

I have never been to the Satmar area of Williamsburg, but I have been to Chinatown.  One time, when I visited in the mid-1980s, it was reputed to be one of the lowest crime precincts in New York, largely because it was self-policing.  As my girlfriend at the time and I were approaching a Chinese restaurant, we, along with hundreds of others on the street, watched as a man was chased  up the street being beaten with sticks by four other men.  A silence fell over the street as everyone watched them corner the man they were beating in a store front across the street from us and continued beating him.  When my girlfriend, braver than I and versed in the bystander effect, shouted “Stop” (and then stepped behind me), they did, indeed, stop.  They ran off down the street, and the beaten man hobbled up the street in the other direction.

The isolation of one group from another – something that is currently much in vogue the world over in part as a response to the neo-liberal value of diversity – has been going on by the Satmar group at least since the Hungarian core of this group immigrated in 1946.  Esty, while privy to this history, is, like her arranged marriage husband, limited in her ability to compare and contrast this world with any other.  When first introduced to her husband, she hesitantly lets him know that she is “different”.  He believes he understands her when he takes it to mean that because her father, who is a drunk (a very rare and shame filled thing in Jewish culture generally) and her mother, who left the community, were unavailable to raise her and she was raised by her aunt and grandmother that she is – as her aunt and mother characterize her – an orphan.  This, in turn, implies that she is grateful to her future husband because she is damaged goods.

In fact, what Esty means is much more complicated and becomes clearer to us (and, I think, to Esty, as the series unfolds).  It means, I think, that Esty finds it, as she puts it, difficult for her to live up to what God has in mind for her.  She is aware of the constrictions that the Hasidic life is putting upon her in a way that she does not yet know is a life destroying constraint.  She is alive and capable in ways that her husband cannot know and does not see until the penultimate scene in the series.

This film, then, documents the cultural repression of women in a culture that is intentionally repressing all spontaneous engagement with the world as suspect and dangerous – so that the repression of women does not stand out, from within the culture, as particularly remarkable.  It is part of the package deal of repression.  The culture is, I think, bound by rules that prevent intimate relationships between that culture and the outside world, but therefore (and I'm not sure that it follows, but it is certainly also the case) between the members of that world, especially the men and women; the husbands and wives.  

As I learned this week from my reluctant co-teacher in a class on Freud, Eve Sedgwick had a lot to say about the repression of difference in the broader culture 30 years ago in a paper on masturbation and Jane Austen that she published in 1980.   In the paper, she proposed that masturbation was the first “queer” identity – and masturbators were universally vilified by all kinds of people – including Freud – for causing their own pathologies, by which Freud meant that broad and poorly defined pathology neurasthenia. 

Esty is then, in this reading, telling her husband, when she says that she is different, that she is queer.  And two distinct ironies grow from this as the series develops.  Esty is queer not because she is resistant to orthodoxy, but because she is so deeply invested in it that she enacts it in her symptoms.  She is not able to have sex with her husband – her basic and necessary duty as a wife that is needed to repopulate the world with the six million that were killed in the holocaust – because of vaginismus.   She cannot allow herself to open herself up enough to admit her husband just as the Hasidim will not open themselves up to let other cultures in.  She is rigidly and perfectly pure.

She and her husband successfully copulate only once – when, after a year of failure, she encourages him to press ahead no matter how much it hurts her.  He does – and experiences so much pleasure at his first climax that he is blind to the pain and isolation that she feels at having been violated.  But this is not new – it mirrors his failure to understand the pain she has felt as he has violated her confidence by continually informing his mother of their marital difficulties – and not working them out directly with her.

The tragic loss of intimacy between them gets finally enacted when Esty races home early from a Seder dinner to test her pregnancy, discovers joyously that they have been able to meet the dictates of the community, only to have her husband preempt her telling him that they are pregnant by announcing to her that he intends to divorce her because they have so consistently failed to be sexually intimate.  The psychological gulf of intimacy between them at this moment could not be greater, and this propels her to enact her scandalous separation from the community.  Though she does this (as the reluctant co-teacher pointed out) at a moment that is culturally significant - she is escaping from her own Egypt as her people are celebrating escaping slavery at the hands of Pharoah.

Now, I have to admit to no small sense of empathy for her husband.  He really is, I think, a nice and humble guy – sensitive to many things – everything it seems but Esty.  He is, I think, blinded to her by a culture that disregards the value of the subjective being of women, though also I think of men – and instead would dominate and control the subjectivities of all of the members of the group.  Ritual is used to contain and direct libido into serving the rules of God.  The little irony contained here is that the husband turns to his mother for guidance.  But my personal theory – not unrelated to others’ theories – is that it is the power of the maternal connection – the power of women to procreate – the power of women to decide whether they will let the man in or not – and our relative powerlessness in the face of all this power that has led us to dominate them.  To constrain and define women's power as subservient to our aims and to focus on helping them limit their field of operations to areas that are in our interest.  It is only recently, as we have felt less at the mercy of the natural world, that we have felt we don't need to control women as well as nature.  It would fit with this narrative that the Hasidim's fear of the greater culture, grounded as it is in trauma, leads them to revert to a greater need for control, which includes controlling women - and controlling our wish to connect with the world more generally rather than to do what we are driven by our libido to do - to connect indiscriminately.

The second big irony, of course, is that the Hasidim are the queers in the mainstream culture.  They, with their funny side curls and crazy black hats – and $6,000 mink hats on Sabbath (see the wedding picture of the groom) – are the bizarre ones who are aberrant and unnatural.  And I think that this represents an extreme version of Freud’s observations in Civilization and Its Discontents, outlined a bit in the paragraph above, that we need to limit our libidinal wishes in order to enjoy the advantages of being a member of civilization.  In the case of the Hasidim, we need to do that so severely that we become constricted, not only in terms of our relations with the outside world, but also in terms of our relationships with each other.  So the Hasidim become a queer mirror of the culture as a whole – or a looking glass into our past that may allow us to see the versions of our selves that persist into the present.

But the present that Esty discovers in Berlin couldn’t appear more different, on the surface, than the Williamsburg community that she left behind.  Welcoming and warm, embracing queerness of sexual orientation, and the queerness of Jews in Berlin, it is also hostile – warning Esty that she does not belong among the elites because her sheltered/repressive existence has prevented her from exploiting her natural talents to the extent that she has not practiced what it takes to belong with this exclusive group that is explicitly inclusive of queers.  Of course, because she is also different in yet another way, we see that this may not quite be the case – that this woman, this excluded and queer member of a queer culture has a voice that needs to be heard – thus creating a parallel between the imagined Esty and the actual Deborah Feldman, whose voice was her writing.

When the class was discussing the masturbation paper, it became clear to us that the transition from masturbation – from Freud’s narcissistic love to the love of objects – from, in this case, the cloistered and smothering love of Esty’s husband, with her (and their child, when he discovers that) as a narcissistic object – one who would fulfill his purpose of repopulating the world with people like him, to the love of Esty for a world that includes her queer mother, who turns out to be more whole than she or we could have imagined – is a transition that involves both opening up – allowing others in – but also narrowing our focus, not, in fact being in love with everything that crosses our horizon, because this is too distracting.  We need to focus – as the musicians do – to create the kind of beauty that humans are capable of producing both in art but also in relationships.  Freud’s acknowledgement of the tragic constraints that are part and parcel of being a member of civilization hold true.  And, while we cheer the choices that Esty makes, we also recognize that they are, indeed, scandalous.  They break the bonds that allow us to do as we were intended to do – so that we can, we hope, better serve a higher purpose and, in Esty's case, connect, on a deeper level, with her Jewish heritage of breaking free - living with self defined rather than other defined constraints.

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84 Charing Cross Road – Love sometimes comes in tiny packages

The other day, I was trying to figure out how to avoid the big project I have been working on this summer and I picked up a slender little book that it looked like I could read in about an hour.  It wasn’t until I was finished with it (I didn’t time it, but it couldn’t have taken more than two hours at most), that I discovered that my reluctant sister had given it to me on my birthday more than thirty years ago.  In her inscription, in addition to sending her love, she also warned me away from the movie starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins (something the book cover trumpets).  I have no problem sending along her advice – I’m sure it is wise counsel, but I must admit that I am so taken with the book that I may be tempted, next time I need a diversion, to see if it is available.

84 Charing Cross is the address of a bookseller in London that, sadly, my quick google search informs me, is now at least partly a McDonald’s restaurant.  It was the place, in the days before Amazon, when Helene Hanff, the (partial) author of the book ordered her books.  One could say it was the precursor of Amazon, but that would be a grave injustice. 

I was introduced to Amazon in 2008 or so by a fellow academic who assured me that it was a tremendously easy and wonderful way to get books quickly and efficiently.  Who knew what it would become? 

Marks & Co., the bookseller at 84 Charing Cross Road, London, was hardly quick but it was efficient in its own quirky manner.  Miss Hanff did not communicate with them via email, but by post from the upper west side of Manhattan, typing her missives not into a screen, but through a manual typewriter onto sheets of, I’m sure, quite thin paper that was sent in the mail, sometimes along with a few dollar bills to cover the costs of the books.

And the books.  Unlike the book that I was holding in my hand – with a very light poster board cover and thick pages of newsprint quality paper glued into a functional if not elegant package – the books she ordered were lovely.  They were on the thinnest of paper and bound by the finest leather with true art work adorning the inside covers and gilt lining the page edges.  They were used – with marginalia from previous owners and they opened to the places that the last owner most visited, something that Miss Hanff treasured.  She liked being guided by an unknown guide to the best spots.

The cover of my clunky paperback promises a “transatlantic love affair by mail”.  Well, that seems to me to hint at a bodice ripping romance, even if the bodice is ripped only in fantasy.  This is no bodice ripper, but the teaser is an apt description.  Miss Hanff does fall in love with Frank Doel (rhymes with the Christmas Noel), her primary correspondent at Marks & Co., but also with his wife and children and with the other staff at the booksellers.  And the center piece of all of that love is the love of books – and with the real lived experiences that those books bring.

A cursory read of the book titles I have reviewed in these posts will clarify that I am in love with fiction.  Not so Ms. Hanff.  She is invested in history.  She wants to hear from those who have lived that history- she loves diaries and memoirs.  Non-fiction is the stuff of her reading life – and her writing life – she was an author who wrote for stage and screen – especially for The Hallmark Hall of Fame.  And this book is, then, appropriately the actual correspondence between herself and her fellow lover of books, Frank Doel (who, I believe, should be credited, along with a few others, as co-author).

And what an interesting and intimate love affair it is.  She idealizes him and the place that he works and lives in – so much so that she never quite makes the trek, even though you expect her to at any moment.  Instead she preserves it as a place she can visit in her mind – keeping it whole and untrammeled.  And we visit it with her.  I could smell the mustiness of the book store that neither of us will ever visit as I read the letters that were written there. 

But the intriguing thing to me is not Miss Hanff's idealization of Mr. Doel and the bookstore, but the remonstrating that she engages in – the good spirited, clearly loving, but also clearly critical tone she takes with him.  He is someone whom she idealizes but also comes ever so close to treating as her personal lackey.  He is in her employ – and he is rigidly and consistently proper in the best British manner – and this allows Miss Hanff, I think, to take liberties. 

Those liberties are invariably in the form of demanding from him the level of service that she believes him capable of delivering.  As caustic as her notes get, they are leavened both by the quality of Miss Hanff’s writing and by the affection that her criticism exudes.  It has the tone of chiding rather than scolding.  She is railing at him for being the very person that she loves.  And he, in his formal English manner, seems to take it in the spirit that it is given.  He is always working to provide the best possible service.

Now it helps that she is also sending gifts – and emissaries – friends who carry her good wishes across the seas.  She is on the side of these people who have been left bereft by the war.  She is embarrassed by the largesse that the Americans are bestowing on the Germans while our English allies can’t, for the life of them, find a decent ham for Christmas.  So when she sends a ham it demonstrates her love.  But the gifts are not intended to balance out her bullying – for her criticism is not bullying – it is a very deep form of affection.  It is the calling forth of the best that one can get from another person – and an appreciation of who it is that they are.

So this correspondence is a lived record of a love – the kind of love that the efficiencies of Amazon will never replace.  For we love people, with all of their quirks and all of the ways that their interacting irritate us.  We love it that we can’t count on a used bookseller to provide exactly what we want, but that what shows up sometimes turns out to be better than what we would have ordered.  The universe sometimes knows what we want more than we ourselves do.  

And perfection is not what we want in a partner – six sigma be damned.  It is clearly what we expect from Amazon, but from the people we love, we want responsiveness – we want someone who thinks about us and knows us and gets who it is that we are – and who cares enough to stay in touch both with who we are and with who we could be.  And that allows us to muddle through – to bump along – enjoying the bumps – while others speed past us on the smooth superhighway of perfection. And it is an illusion - to those on that highway, including ourselves when we are there - that perfection will be a substitute for love.  It isn't.

In closing, I would like to take this idealized relationship into my own sphere and hold it as an example of how the analyst and the analysand should, under the best of circumstances, interact.  Who is whom?  Is it Frank or Helen that is the analyst?  The funny thing is that both are each.  For analysis mirrors life and we both expect the best out of each other and work hard to provide it and at times we may be Frank – whether analyst or analysand – and at times we may be Miss Hanff, but when things are going well, we are thinking of each other, and giving and receiving that greatest gift of all, an unexpected and novel way of looking at the world – just as my sister did some thirty plus years ago.

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Educated – Tara Westover’s account of growing up traumatized.

Psychology of Educated.  Psychoanalysis of Educated.  Tara Westover, Educated, Trauma.

Educated is a memoir about trauma.  It was recommended by a friend and, if it had been described in that way, I don’t think I would have read it.  Reading about trauma is enough to make me blanch because, for a psychoanalyst, reading about trauma is a busman’s holiday.  Though we are drawn to the work in this field because of our interest in the human condition in its manifold forms, our work involves helping people make sense out of aspects of their lives that don’t make sense – and the experience of being traumatized is disruptive of everything sensible, especially when you are traumatized by people you love.  And a lot of what we work with intimately is the downstream effects of trauma, especially intimate, family based trauma.

Because the book was described as an incredibly well written memoir that speaks to the power of education (which it is); without quite knowing what we were getting into, the reluctant wife and I agreed to read this book together – actually I read it out loud to her at night as we were preparing to sleep.  We both recoiled from the story that is told – and sometimes we took a break for a while to let the last bit subside before we picked up the next harrowing chapter.  I kept asking her if we should stop (though we have both worked with traumatized folks, we have a low tolerance for traumatic literature and film and hers is a bit lower than mine), but her response was that “it is like watching a car wreck – I can’t bear to watch it, but somehow I also can’t look away.”

We couldn’t look away because Tara Westover is, indeed, a tremendous writer.  And how this came to be is a little hard to understand – she had no formal education to speak of until she went off to college – more about that later.  She is the seventh of seven children – the second girl - who grew up on the Westover’s family home on the side of a mountain - Buck’s Peak - in the middle of nowhere Idaho.  Because the family is living largely off the grid (so much so that Tara does not have a birth certificate and does not know her actual birthday), the mountain itself is a character, looming over her family, watching out for them, providing space for them to work in and to retreat into.  Yes, they live on the side of a paved highway.  Yes, there is a nearby town.  Yes, they shop there and one set of her grandparents live there and Tara even, against her father’s wishes, works at the grocery store for a while, but I think her pull is towards the mountain, away from civilization – as her true home.

The Westovers are a strict Mormon family.  They are also preparing for the “end of days” by stockpiling necessary supplies and they believe that the government – indeed all institutions of modern America, especially medicine – are the enemy and that the outside world should be avoided as much as possible so that the family can live a self-sufficient life and live by the Mormon code as they interpret it.  And they interpret it in idiosyncratic ways.

I don’t know the relationship between how the family practices Mormonism and Mormonism in general.  Westover could help us with that – she ends up being a scholar of Mormonism – but that would break the thread of the story.  This book is not about the practice of Mormonism – it is about a particular family functioning in a particular way.  And it is about Tara’s place in that family with the rules that are defined by the family – and by her father as the leader of that family.  I think it is important that the rules bear some relationship to an extant set of rules governing family relations- and Tara ends up studying the ways that the rules of Mormonism are tied into other nineteenth century doctrines of the family, but as a child, she has so little contact with the outside world that she (and we, as we hear her working to remember the world through the eyes of the child she was) conceptualize the world as defined by her family and their rules.  We see, pretty quickly, that her Dad is crazy, and we wonder how much of what he is saying is consistent with organized religion and how much is an expression of his craziness.  This is because we cannot only look through Tara’s eyes (which very dimly and over a long period of time recognize his craziness) any more than we can only see the world through our patient’s eyes – we necessarily see what she is seeing by passing that through our own conception of it as well.  Indeed, the author herself, while trying to remember what it looked like as a child is also necessarily seeing what she is seeing from her position as the adult author who has her own perspective on what she was seeing – and she wants us to see what she has seen in ways that are different from what she was seeing – she wants us to know both that she didn’t know that it was crazy, and she wants us to recoil from the craziness of it all.

There are two villains in this story whose sins are acts of commission and two whose acts are those of omission – or perhaps acts of aiding and abetting.  The primary villain is Westover’s father.  His malice is largely based, at least initially, on a complete and utter lack of empathy for others and a subsequent disregard for even the slightest of safety measures.  His Mormonism is a very egocentric view of a God that is looking out for him as a saved individual, so he, weirdly, does not have to look out for himself or his children.  He is scratching out a living by salvaging metal from old cars and other scrap but also by building barns and other outbuildings on the cheap, and this means cutting corners and using child labor.  All of this is dangerous work – it involves working with huge machinery that tears metal apart, working with volatile chemicals like the gasoline left in the tanks of the cars that are being dismembered, and, in the case of the construction, working on roofs and lifting heavy objects into the sky with a rickety old forklift rather than by using a people lifter.  And children are doing work that grown men would not do without basic safety equipment like hard hats and automatic shut offs.  This means that there are a lot of injuries – most of which – all but the most severe – are treated with disdain or, at most, an herbal tincture made by Tara's mother because of a basic mistrust of the governmental and medical establishment and a deep faith in the direct impact of God and his creations - the tinctures - on the individuals in the family.

The primary way in which her father is a villain is more insidious though.  He is misogynistic – but this is articulated as a defense against the overwhelming power of female sexuality that must be, literally, covered up and prevented from being expressed at all costs.  This results in a code that seems crazy to a reader outside of the culture, but also to other Mormons when Tara finally makes it out of her family and into BYU.  But within the family, all sin emanates from women.  This means that the true villain, Tara’s brother, who consistently berates her, beats her, chokes her and leaves her fearing for her life on multiple occasions is exonerated from all wrong doing – indeed, her father blames Tara when she calls the issue, and her father bans her from the family when she refuses an exorcism that he offers her to free her of the devil that is leading her to accuse her brother.

Her brother Shawn, then, is the perpetrator of most of the intentional horrific threats that Tara and her sister and later Shawn’s wife survive.   When the family is in not one but two car wrecks that almost kill them because they are driving in unsafe conditions without seat belts because, according to her father, the protective angels can outrun any harm that might befall them – the danger seems chaotic and awful, but not primarily malicious, simply crazy.  When her brother, whom Tara regards initially with devotion, twists her wrist so hard that she passes out from the pain ostensibly because she is using make up and talking to a boy and is therefore a whore, but more immediately to demonstrate his dominance over her and others and as a channel for an otherworldly rage, and when he berates and demeans his girlfriend in High School, we are confronted by a particular kind of cruelty – the cruelty of a bully who is intentionally making others subservient to him and who is doing this to consolidate his apparent power and might.  He apparently thrives in a family system that exonerates him, but that also, through failing to confront these behaviors, leads him deeper and deeper into fits of rage that he cannot control. 

When Tara calls him on his behavior as an adult and he threatens to kill her or to hire someone to do that, we fear for her life – but we also see that he is exposed as a weakling who cannot tolerate being questioned.  In one of the many many brutal moments in this book, but one that feels all the more brutal because Tara has all but gotten herself out of the system only to reenter it – when Tara asks her father to rein Shawn in, Shawn arrives for a meeting (in the presence of her mother and father) that Tara did not want and is not prepared for and hands her a knife covered in blood and encourages her to use it on herself so that he doesn’t have to.  What she doesn’t know until later is that the blood comes from Shawn's favorite dog whom he has just killed with the knife in a fit of rage when he is called to the meeting by his father.  What is implicit but never stated is that killing Tara would lead him to lose the support of their father – this would not be forgiven – so he must vent his rage elsewhere and use intimidation to try to get her back in line – something that she is finally unwilling to do.  Meanwhile her mother and father engage in more and more convoluted logic and rewriting of history to change what they observed happening between the two of them.

So, the sins of omission are committed by Tara’s mother, but also by her sister.  They both collude with her father, pretending when talking with Tara that they will stand up to him and demand that he put a stop to Shawn’s behavior, but when push comes to shove, they cave, and join with their father in repudiating Tara.  This failure to support her leaves Tara teetering on the edge of madness.  Unable to accept her father’s reality, and feeling betrayed by her attempts to assert her own, she retreats into a world of binge watching terrible television.  But I am getting ahead of the story.

The hero of this story is clearly Tara.  Despite living in her father’s world and following his code in large measure without question, she senses a broader world and seeks it out.  When she is a teenager, she discovers that she has a good singing voice and performs against her father’s prohibition to publicly display herself – confident that he will both come to her performances and be proud of her – which he does and is.  She also seeks out other opportunities to connect with people in town – and then, eventually, she applies to BYU.  She does this without a lick of schooling.  As one of her brothers who has gotten out says - tell them you've been home-schooled, they won't know better.  And, later, when she is given the grant to study overseas, her father is puzzled that she doesn't credit her homeschooling as the foundation that got her there.

Tara has been taught at home how to midwife and mix herbal tinctures by following her mother around and “learning” from her, though Tara’s description of her mother’s wisdom is jaded – she describes her mother making decisions about what treatment to prescribe – indeed what ails people – based on "muscle testing" which involves asking a question and seeing how her body responds to it.  She has learned to walk on tall structures without fear from her father, and she has learned from her older brother how to study like mad on his own to be able to apply to school.  She follows his lead, takes the ACT and is admitted to BYU, where she is a fish out of water.  Despite not having the first notion of how to study or having a context in which to put information, she is able to build a network of knowledge and move from barely hanging on to functioning reasonably well in a college setting – and writing well enough to get the attention of and be accepted into a fellowship at Oxford college.  This, in turn, leads to a Gates scholarship to Cambridge and then admission into a PhD program at Harvard in history, though she earned her Ph.D. from Cambridge.

Her memoir, then, is the product of a classically trained historian.  A historian who is aware of the pitfalls of constructing a history.  It is a history with central elements that are remembered very differently by the key players who were part of them (and she footnotes some of these incidents, noting the differing memories of each participant).  Tara does, I think, a masterful job of describing her lived experience, and working to articulate what happened in her life in as balanced a manner as I can imagine such a thing being done.  She does this with the help of numerous heroes.  The first of these is John Stuart Mill – a proto feminist whom she reads when she still thinks of feminist as the worst kind of insult.  She also reads Mary Wallstonecraft, and then numerous more modern feminists and begins to identify with them.

On the home front, the older brother whom she watched study and get out of the house refuses to repudiate her – and so does an even older brother who also left the family to pursue an education.  So the family ends up split between the three children who have “escaped” through education, and the four who are still dependent on the family business, which has morphed through an interesting, and typically horrific twist.  Her father, working to dismantle one of the cars in the salvage yard, did not take account of the gasoline left in the tank and ignited it with the acetylene torch he was using.  The ensuing explosion severely burns his face, hands and lungs.  He hangs barely balanced between life and death for months – and he is never hospitalized.  Instead, he is treated with his wife’s tinctures and salves.  His survival is seen as a miracle – literally – one that propels her business into a new level.  Her medicines – and her books about them – are now in wide demand, and the family employs not only their children – they have become the largest employer in the valley since the economic downturn – and Tara finds it hard to muster allies even outside the family, except among those who have, for instance, been fired by her father in one of his fits of rage.

Westover is a good writer, but it is still a bit of a mystery how she can write well about trauma.  Freud remarked early in his career that when you take a case history from a “neurotic” you should expect to find gaps in that history.  I believe that Trauma has a toxic effect on people’s ability to remember and articulate their experience.  When this is combined with living in a closed culture, where people are not supposed to tell others about that culture, “tell-alls” frequently become enthralling because of the content of the story, not the way they are told.  In Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir about a closed culture– the Scots Irish Appalachian culture – the author, despite being very bright (a Yale Law graduate and successful ex-Marine), tells the story of his culture somewhat flat footedly – I think partly because of unprocessed trauma.  James Cone, an African American theologian, who has deep insights into the American culture, uses the sing song preacher tone – an almost hypnotic – but also hard outer coat approach – to articulating his ideas about the lynching of his people.  Min Jin Lee, a Korean American writing about the suppressed Korean-Japanese in Pachinko, uses the third person omniscient to avoid articulating the thoughts of her heroes – and captures something of their shame at articulating who it is that they are by doing that.  Ta Nehisi Coates, in contrast to these other voices, speaks in a comfortable tone and uses mainstream language to paint a picture of his internal experience that is resonant and full.  But he has been raised with a supportive marginalized family that has facilitated his ability to talk about the trauma that has been done to his people – he does not talk about the toxic effects of trauma felt first hand without a sympathetic ear to help him process it.

While Tara takes the position that she is able to free herself from her family and to write about them in the ways that she does because of her education (and also, a bit, because of helpful psychotherapy), I don’t disagree, but I think that, ironically, it may be that she is able to speak with a voice of calm authority that is closer to Coates' partly because of having been raised within the family that she was.  As crazy as this sounds, I think that Tara’s mother and father loved her.  And I think that she knew this in a very deep and intimate way.  She knew and could count on her father’s love.  She therefore feels deeply betrayed by him when he casts her as the source of evil that she knows she is not, but she also gets (after a great deal of psychology - though she might say historical - work) that this is not the result of the crazy malice that drives her brother, but the crazy organization of the world that drives her father’s view of the world – one that keeps him at the center of that world and blinds him to other viewpoints.  Her mother, despite knowing of Shawn’s behavior towards Tara over the years and being deeply disturbed by it, is caught in the vortex of her husband’s world view – a version of which she came to the marriage pre-steeped in – and one that she chooses over the view that Tara doesn’t have the resources of time and volition to win her over to.  Again, Tara feels betrayed – but, when she has worked hard and long enough to articulate fully her experience – she is also able to experience the range of her parent’s experiences – she is able to remember their humor and their love as well as their failings – as a result of the work that she does to remember all of who it is that they are – and the work that she does to live outside her dependence on them – and through the capacity to reconnect with functional parts of her family – not just her brothers, but also her mother’s brothers and sisters.  Tara is able to come home again.

I can’t stress enough, that part of Tara’s ability to become educated – to think through, reflect on, and move away from her family is because Tara had a home that had certain qualities – a certain rationale - to begin with.  The rationale for what happened to her was crazy, but it was a rationale.  And it was a rationale that had a basis, no matter how tenuous that basis was once it was filtered through her father’s paranoia, in providing a foundation that helped her rebel against the very forces that built that foundation and also trapped her in a body killing, but also a soul killing space.  Her mother is remembered as privately supporting her going to college, “you were the one I thought would burst out of here in a blaze.”  But her mother also did not directly disagree or cross her father.  Her mother’s failure to support her was consistent with the woman that Tara knew her to be – as disappointing as that was.  These people who were here family were complicated, tangled, but reliable people that had her best interests, as best they were able to express them, in mind. 

I think it would be possible to take from this story that the process of creating a narrative is an essential part of healing from trauma.  Again, I don't disagree with that.  In fact, I think that is an important and relevant conclusion.  But I think there is more to this story.  I think that this is also a story about what it takes to develop the capacity to articulate a narrative like this one.  And I think that, as much as we may be troubled by this, it takes not just a strong constitution and brains, but also the good intent of a loving, if misguided, family and/or culture.  Mahatma Gandhi was able to free the state of India because he was able to use the English sense of morality to highlight their immoral actions.  Tara does not accomplish what he does - she does something harder.  She uses the sensible parts of what she learned to distance herself from those that are insensible, and to see them as that, while retaining a sense of who her family was and who it is that she is becoming.  And she knows, as feminists have been knowing for centuries, that the person she is becoming, though unapproved of by the family or the culture represent what is best about the family and the culture - that our goal is to support the kind of becoming that occurs in this book so that our children, whom we may not even recognize, are living out who it is that we could only hope that they will become.

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