The Tragic Life as Literary Device

My Mother's birthday was last Monday. She turned 89.

On Friday she had a massive stroke. She is in a coma. We do not know exactly when she will die, but we have a sense that it will be sometime soon.

A few days before her birthday, she had a stroke. It was a small one, and she was quickly stabilized and released from the hospital. No one thought it might happen again so quickly. But it did.

My Father didn't call me to tell me about the first stroke. He was mad because I had sent some pictures of myself on skis to my godmother. I haven't seen my godmother in about 8 years, and she'd sent me a birthday present, so I thought it would be a nice gesture to send the pictures.

I see my parents at least twice a year, time permitting, but never visit with any other members of my Mother's extended family. If I were to visit with anyone outside of my immediate family, my father would be offended, and I would hear about it until kingdom come.

This time, though, I told him he was being petty about the pictures, and that even though he did not like my godmother, there was no reason for him to get all out-of-his-mind about three stupid pictures.

My Father likes to hijack conversations that I have with my mother, often for petty little things like why I didn't come down to visit on a certain day, or why I called a particular relative to say hello, or why I called on a Monday because it would bring bad luck, or something else that doesn't have anything to do with him. It upsets my Mother, and then my Mother and I fight. And we fought. But for some reason, he called and apologized for his behavior and for anything my mother might have said.

I apologized too. I told my Mother that we just see the world differently, and that if I said anything that hurt her, that was not my intention. I know there is alot of family secrets, and I don't know what they are, so her perspective is different than mine contingent on all the stuff I don't know.

So, because I had been gracious and apologized, when she had the stroke last Friday, he called and told me.

And I asked him if he told anyone else that my Mother was in the hospital, possibly dying. He said no, that my sister told him not to because "they're all a bunch of leeches."

Hrm.

This upset me, and I wasn't sure who might be able to help out with this. I called one of my cousins, who I know is fairly stable (because some aren't) and we had a very good conversation. She was baffled that my sister would want to keep all members of my Mother's family away from her and was equally as worried that she might keep a priest from giving my Mother Last Rites. I said that I really didn't know my sister's rationale for her punitive decision, but from what I know, there's alot about the family that I don't know. In an effort to try to figure out the Gordian Knot in my sister's head, my cousin and I agreed to tell each other what we knew and figured the truth was somewhere among the combined information.

Alot came out about my family and my mother. Many of the members of my family are dyslexic. My cousin, and three of her children are dyslexic, as well as my Mother and many others.

Except me.

Dyslexics not only see the world differently, but perceive the world differently than non-dyslexics. And another piece of the puzzle of me came into place.

My Mother had trouble dealing with a normal, even high achieving child, because she herself did not understand alot. She couldn't teach me much because there was much she did not understand. That went for matters scholastic and matters social.

Among the common family knowledge is that my mother was horribly abused as a child--beaten so much that she would wear two blouses to cover the bruises that were always healing and always being made. None of us cousins could quite figure out why my grandmother treated my Mother this way, but we also knew of strange stories about a woman who looks exactly like my Mother. We figured that my grandfather got around because he was "so handsome" and that my mother might be one of twins split between the other woman and my grandmother. Or there was just another child born in from the same adulterous affair and grew up in a town close to where my grandparents lived. And my grandmother knew this, and took it out on my Mother. No one really knows why, but people do strange things sometimes.

I also found out that there were many, many other relatives living within spitting distance of my family, but no one knew them. My grandmother had been ostracize for marrying someone she wasn't supposed to. There could be more to that story too, but we didn't have that information.

And there are some other dark secrets about my Mother and Father. My cousin wouldn't elaborate, and I wasn't ready to hear. We made a pact that, after my Father's death, more would be revealed.

But I figured some of it out anyway.

My Father has a textbook sex addiction. He swings between religious zelotry (the man can quote chapter and verse from the Bible like a hard-core Baptist Minister) and 24hour porn viewing. He's been this way for a long time, and my sister calls his porn problem his "hobby."

He was abused as a child, too....and the circumstances of his birth are shrouded in a very dark mystery that my cousin and I believe is something one only reads in novels....

While I lay in bed that night, I thought to myself that my family's circumstances resembled the contrivances of novels written with such lyric prose and of such emotional depth that they win prizes and make their bourgeois authors into big names.

I realized that *this* was the reason I hated so many novels that were considered "uplifting" or significant in some other way. Because I live the tragedies, I can spot phoniness with a few paragraphs, and I know that so many novels of this ilk are written by the scions of the upper bourgeoisie or the comfy middle. The lives of people like my family and myself--struggling lower classers commonly called "white trash"--are nothing more than literary devices on which are hung the hopes of grand literary careers. There is no truth to them, but the reviewers and the ones who decide what is or is not "modern literature" don't know the difference because they come from the same bastions as the ones writing the books. In their priviledged eyes, if the writing's good, the circumstances and situations and reactions of the characters must have a grain of truth and read as if they are true.

But I know when I'm reading something real and when I'm reading a literary conceit. I know when a character is having a true reaction to a tragedy like finding out her/his Mother was abused as a child and when the author is faking it contingent on something read in a psych book. I know when a character who is an abused child is having a real reaction or when she/he isn't. It's in the words, in the sentence structure, in the descriptions of the reactions and in the descriptions of the way people look at one another, and not just in the grim griminess of the surroundings or tragic nature of the circumstances or hideousness of the actions.

Now, if the person is an upper crusty writing about the traumas among upper crusties, well, I may hate the book because I can't relate to the character's life circumstances, but not necessarily because it's premise or the characters are phony. I hated The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing and Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood not because the stories seemed phony, but because there wasn't any common ground or any particular plot devices that could keep my attention.

I might, though. shy away from a novel written by someone who comes from a poor background and was abused as a child because it might ring too true and disturb me. The sense of powerless over the character's fate, as much as I have been powerless over my mother's, could only frustrate me. I might think of giving up reading all together.

Or I might read that novel and discover a phony there too.

So I stick to gritty street novels by Donald Goines, noir novels by Earle Stanley Gardner and Dash Hammett, literary classics by Joyce and Thackery, and outrageous genre novels like Chemical Pink and American Psycho. They're honest in their own ways and keep my head clear.

I am wondering about this confluence of reality and literature because I often fight a self-doubt that keeps my writing blocked. I was never able to write freely among my family--talent could be seen as a threat to family stability and a reason to be ashamed. It becomes another dirty secret. My self-doubt (and a bit of self-hatred)is borne out of family secrets, shame, and an inability to understand a talented, intelligent, normal child. I was molested because I wrote fantasy stories of sex and boys as an effort to try to figure out the family tensions brewing behind locked secret doors. I lost friends because of my story writing. I was told I was no good because I wasn't writing stories like Hemingway--but I was a 13 year old girl and didn't understand what Hemingway was about, even after I read him. I never understood I was a good writer of anything even when I was told so by a Smith prof I highly respected--I had no frame of reference because everything about my writing was a secret, even to myself.

I struggle to write, and fear every sentence on the page. Will my secrets, and my family's secrets be found out? Or am I the phony I hate so much: not a writer at all--just some chick from a troubled family who thinks she's good but doesn't have the connections to prove anything to the outside world?

I'll be leaving for Home in a couple of days, to see my Mother. I know, intuitively, that her passing will be peaceful. Something in me will pass on, too, and I'll walk thru my own particular Veil into another existence.

It is what it is. And it is real.



Life