First there was Angela's Ashes. Then The Glass Castle, and Hillbilly Elegy. Now on the best seller list is Educated by Tara Westover, which I just finished reading. What is there about these narratives of messed up families that draw us in? Are they just train wrecks that we can't look away from? Or are there things to be learned from them, to stretch one's consciousness out of the familiar comfort zone? I'm going to go with that thought.
Educated is the story of Tara Westover's upbringing in her family, which was its own survivalist fundamentalist Mormon cult. She eloquently describes the beauty of their rural Idaho setting; the mountain they called "the Indian Princess". Her parents didn't believe in modern medicine, or public education. Particularly they believed that the government was evil, and out to take their children away. The children were born at home, Tara didn't have a birth certificate until she was nine years old. She was the youngest of seven children. Ostensibly they were home schooled, but by the time her mother got to Tara she had lost motivation for it, and Tara was mainly self-schooled.
The patriarch of the family was her father, who comes across as a paranoid schizophrenic. Her mother is rather passive, reluctant to cross her husband. She is a self-taught midwife and herbal therapist to other families like the Westovers who lived off the grid of society. The father runs a metal salvage business, aka a junkyard. He makes the children work in the junkyard, reclaiming scrap metal. The work is dirty, dangerous, and difficult. They sustain many serious injuries, which the mother treats with herbal medicine. Their life is chaotic and violent; particularly since Tara's older brother Shawn is given to vicious rages. He stuffed Tara's head in the toilet on a regular basis. He choked her and body slammed her against a brick wall more than once. He treated his girlfriends, and then his wife, the same way. He killed the family dog with a knife in front of Tara and his own toddler son, to "teach her a lesson." About what, I'm not sure.
The book is also the story about Tara's escape from her chaotic family life by means of education. She studies from old textbooks and manages to get a high enough ACT score to be admitted to Brigham Young University, against the wishes of her parents. Once there, life is a struggle, socially and scholastically. But eventually she is admitted to a summer program at Cambridge University in England. She returns to BYU and completes her undergraduate degree, and then is admitted to Cambridge for a Master's program. She ends up eventually getting her PhD at Harvard. There are stops and starts, and at one point she had to drop out of this program and restart it later, due to more family interference.
Three of Tara's brothers support her efforts, and have managed to extract themselves from the family chaos to some extent. One of her brothers also earns a PhD.
This book is an eye opener for anyone who thinks, "Why doesn't she just leave?" about people in abusive situations. It's not that simple. And there is love in the family, although the love her mother and father have for the children never translates itself into even minimally responsible parenting.
Tara and her older sister Audrey attempt an intervention about Shawn's violence, because they were worried about his young children and his wife. It ends very badly, and Tara and Audrey end up estranged from each other. And Shawn's behavior is not changed at all. The parents make excuses for him, and he is never made accountable.
Tara has had to separate herself from the family for her own sanity; though she remains in touch with the three brothers who were supportive of her. She has made a decent life for herself, and I admire her for that. But she has done it at a cost. I wondered when I read the book if she should have waited longer to write it. The pain is still pretty raw, and she is only 32. But maybe writing it was a kind of therapy. And it isn't a bad thing to shine light on the strange and dark family, particularly since there are young children involved, and adults who apparently don't think they can leave.
I agree that "The Glass Castle" would have been a better book if the author had waited until her mother was dead and the "lessons learned" had had time to percolate.
ReplyDeleteMostly I don't read these books--have never read the McCourts, and read Walls only because the NYT told me to--but I think those of us who grow up in dysfunctional families understand why people write them. You get sick of carrying around the family secrets. It's not that you want sympathy. It goes deeper than that. You kind of want to send up a flare in hopes someone will recognize your story and tell you it will all be OK.
And most of us, at some dim level, still feel we let our families down. There is not a little of confession and penance going on, mixed in with the self-justification and happy ending for the writer.
There is also a real desire to avoid what's staring these authors in the face: People do evil things, and evil can't be explained. I think that's Why the phrase, "I don't know," shows up so many times in Nuala O'Faolain's "Are You Somebody?" She knows, but the enormity of setting down in black and white that your parents did evil things is too much.
Why people would willingly read these books is beyond me. Maybe in the best instances it builds empathy?
Yes, I think empathy is one reason to read these books. Another (for this book) is that the author is a talented writer. She draws you in and keeps you there. I hope that having written this book, more or less for self therapy, that she goes on to write a different type of book, because she can.
DeleteYes, I think the typical response is: Why doesn't she use her talents to write something nicer?
DeleteIt is hard for a reader to know what they're supposed to do with that much pain and trauma.
And yet when Dickens fictionalized some pretty horrific childhoods that reflected real conditions, people ate them right up, and they put him on college "classics" lists.
I find the two responses interesting.
Good point about Dickens. I think some of his novels were a necessary counterweight to an overly idealized and sentimentalized view of Victorian life. It wasn't the "good old days" for a lot of people.
DeleteThese books aren't my genre. I never did get to McCourt despite a lot of pressure from someone who wanted to talk about it with me. Probably a failure of evangelization on my part, but I am always behind on books I choose to read and can't keep up with other people's lists. But didn't Tolstoy explain these books with his famous quote: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"? (Full disclosure: I still haven't gotten to Anna Karenina. Which should I take up first -- Anna or Angela's Ashes? See what I mean?)
ReplyDeleteAnna Karenina is excruciating and beautiful. I read it twice in my 20s. But I never felt the need to go back to it. I don't think, at 60, I would see Anna the same way, and I don't want to sully my memory of it by reading it as a jaded crone.
DeleteI guess the appeal is, "Wow, and to think I consider *my* family dysfunctional ..."
ReplyDeleteI don't mean to trivialize the works of these authors, but it seems to me that a large chunk of reality TV is built on the same edifice.
Without the artifice of fiction and/or an element of commentary on the larger social milieu, I think you are right. As honest and sad as these things are, they don't pull people together or raise awareness about a social problem.
DeleteThey're pulling in people who feed on drama or grief porn, the people most unable to really empathize with anyone.
I did like "Orange Is the New Black" (book) because it focused so much on what it is like for women in prison--who they are and how the whole system is rigged against any real rehabilitation. There were helpful resources in the back of the book.
Angela's Ashes!!! As it happens I wrote a "Notebook" at Commonweal about Angela...I post it here in serial form because it gets everything that's problematic about the problematic genre form.
ReplyDeleteMargaret O'Brien Steinfels
I KNEW ANGELA
Did Frank McCourt?
Distance from our families often leads us to make friends, neighbors, and coworkers, into "fictive kin"-- honorary sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, sometimes even surrogate mothers and fathers. This notion of "fictive kin" leapt to mind as I was reading Angela's Ashes (Scribner), Frank McCourt's Pulitzer prize-winning memoir. As of October 26 it has been fifty- eight weeks on the New York Times's best-seller list--the nonfiction list, that is. As I finished the book, I wondered what McCourt was up to, replacing his real mother with a fictive one.
The tenor of McCourt's story of growing up poor first in Brooklyn, New York, and then in Limerick, Ireland, is foretold in his opening lines: "It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." Delicious!
The sobering cast of characters immediately follows: "the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years." This sardonic wit held the promise of facts to come.
And "the facts" is why I bought the book, hoping to learn more about Angela, the eponymous matriarch.
Part 2.
ReplyDeleteThe reason I hoped to learn more was that I knew Angela McCourt. In one of those difficult periods of young motherhood, with a child energetic enough for four adults, I rejoiced when Mrs. McCourt, as she was called in our household, appeared at our apartment door two or three afternoons a week to give mother and child a reprieve. She was formidable; her mere physical and psychological presence said, "No nonsense." As I left the house, her young charge would follow me to the door screaming of abandonment, etc. She'd turn to me and say, "Don't worry." To him she'd give a look: This was not the sort of behavior that she'd put up with once this weak-Nelly mother was out of the house. She'd seen worse, she seemed to signal. And evidently she had.
Those who have read Angela's Ashes can imagine my surprise as the story unfolds. The take-charge woman of my memory turns out to be a weak-Nelly herself: weepy and fatalistic, she sits a passive witness to her fate, beginning with the choice of Malachy McCourt as a husband and moving on to the deaths of three of her seven children. While Malachy, as many reviewers have pointed out, occupies the emotional center of the story with his engaging tales of the Uprising and drunken marches and songs urging his children to die for Ireland, Angela is on the periphery, drawn to her hearth wreathed in clouds of cigarette smoke, seemingly as much a victim as her children of this feckless man who spends his pay on drink.
Who then is the real Angela McCourt? The passive mother of Angela's Ashes or Mrs. McCourt, the formidable life- saver who tussled with a lively two-year old while I took refuge at the New York Public Library? Have I created a fictive grandmother?
Or has McCourt created a fictive mother? Is Angela's Ashes another example of the now-permeable border that allows fiction and nonfiction to cross over into the other's territory? The Kiss, Kathryn Harrison's scandalous memoir of father-daughter incest, appeared previously as a novel; and Sue Halper reports in the New York Review of Books(September 25, 1997) that she first read the opening chapters of the novel The Story of Junk by Linda Yablonsky as a twenty-page chapter in a nonfiction work.
Part 3:
ReplyDeleteCan memoirs truly be nonfiction? In what sense can these ego-generated stories be true? or factual? Autobiographies and biographies we expect to be grounded in fact, with dates, letters, and corroborating evidence. But the current spate of memoirs seems to call forth more story-telling than fact-checking. Since the author so often turns out to be the story's long-suffering hero or heroine (witness Mary Gordon's The Shadow Man), perhaps everyone else in the memoir is destined to end as "fictive kin."
In fact, Frank McCourt is a superb storyteller. He and his younger brother, also called Malachy, have toured with "A Couple of Blackguards," a dialogue about their childhoods in Limerick and Brooklyn. Brother Malachy is the most sharply drawn character in Angela's Ashes, the pearly-toothed, curly haired little fellow inching Frank from the spotlight with his sunny smile and sweet disposition. He himself is now working on a memoir, working title: "Monks Swimming." Perhaps yet another McCourt family and another Angela will emerge in his memoir. Or perhaps not.
For finally, it is possible that the Angela of Angela's Ashes and Mrs. McCourt are one and the same person, nothing fictive about her--simply a new woman once she got Frank out of the house. Indeed, my children's clearest memory of Mrs. McCourt is seeing the formidable woman wreathed in a cloud of cigarette smoke. The ashes are nonfiction--or so it seems.
Commonweal 7
November 7, 1997
Margaret, Thanks for posting (reprinting?) that. I remembered it when I read Katherine's post. I was going to mention it, but I wasn't sure about the headline. McCourt seems to have written a second book titled " " 'Tis " upon a review of which copydesk genius had put the headline " 'Tisn't. " I wasn't sure your piece wasn't where I saw the head which, of course, I couldn't have let go unmentioned. I'm glad you weighed in with your shot at McCourt's "memory."
DeleteTom: not reprinted, copied and pasted..a new technology.
DeleteMcCourt taught at Stuyvesant, one of NYC's premier high schools. Has been said that his students loved him. And you can see why...such a fabulist.
Margaret, thanks for sharing your "notebook". I'm glad to hear that there was another side to Mrs. McCourt. In the book she came across as rather pathetic. I think it is entirely possible for different people to experience a person in different ways. Especially when they occupy a different place in the family birth order. There is an 18 year difference between me and my youngest sister. And there is a marked difference in our perceptions of certain relatives. Sometimes I wonder if we are talking about the same person.
ReplyDeleteGeez, I wonder how many times I could use the word "difference" in one paragraph!
DeleteI would never have called Mrs. McCourt pathetic...
DeleteInteresting story from the Irish Times about McCourt and the critics. One thread of the article is about whether McCourt's "misery memoir" is worth Literary Attention. Another thread traces how McCourt establishes a recognizable Irish (or Irish-American) identity in line with other Irish memoirs.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/frank-mccourt-and-the-pitfalls-of-popularity-1.3000060
I never felt any kinship with the Irish (pace, Mom), and never less so than around Irish people. Margaret, you've been there. Is there such a thing as an Irish identity? And does McCourt manage to convey it? Do you feel Ireland when you read "Angela"?
I'm hardly an expert. You all heard about my one trip to Ireland two years ago. I'm a fourth generation Irish-German-American. My father, the third generation, met the immigrant Chicago Irish as a blarney-skeptic. I inherited the view. But I did love being In Ireland; it was a great place...for a tourist.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of blarney-skepticism, I have been amused all this past week by the NYTime's coverage of the abortion vote...which comes down to this: 'At last these people have rid themselves of their papist religion and joined the modern world.'
I especially enjoyed this last line of one story (5/28/18): “Ireland had a culture of silence and that’s broken now,” Mr. Tyrrell said. “To be Irish now means to be open,” he said. “We’re sick of being quiet.”
If there's one identity the Irish and Irish-Americans seem to share...is that there never, ever quiet... Blarney lives. And sometimes it's the truth.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/27/world/europe/ireland-abortion-refendum.html
Yes, I was struck similarly by the abortion vote coverage. Reporters claimed that the priest abuse scandal had shaken the faith of the Irish, but that seems awfully glib.
DeleteOne report on the radio was a bit less triumphal, putting the measure in the context of Ireland's--and Europe's--increasing secularism. But there did seem to be a snide comparison between Irish abortion law formerly being in line with Malta's and Poland's (implication that Ireland has extracted itself from association with these backwaters).
As the Irish media presumably is mostly staffed with Irish persons, I guess I should give them some credit for understanding what makes people tick in Ireland, but if they are much like their counterparts in the US, they tend to be drawn from a fairly narrow demographic segment; I'm among those who think that vast sections of America are a puzzle to reporters and editors in the mainstream American media. But as I say, I don't pretend to know whether similar things prevail in Ireland.
DeleteThe abuse scandals are a story that the Irish media has covered pretty extensively, so not surprising that they would look to that story to explain what happened at the polls a few days ago - it's what the reporters know. And I'm sure it really is part of the explanation.
On the abortion vote, there's the secular media congratulating the Irish on freeing themselves from the papist yoke. And then there's the religious media saying that the Irish have lost their souls. I see it in part as pushback from a couple of tragedies which were basically cases of medical malpractice, and also some outside organizations stirring the waters.
Delete"... but if they [Irish reporters] are much like their counterparts in the US, they tend to be drawn from a fairly narrow demographic segment ..."
DeleteWhat segment is that?
College educated. A wish to make the world a better place.
DeleteAnd some with a major debunking gene...
DeleteI also found the return of the expats to vote in the referendum food for thought. As someone here has written (who?) getting a passport/citizenship in the land from which your ancestors came is possible. I assume most expats came to vote "yes"; would be interesting to know how that vote compares to the Irish vote on the subject. Anyone see a story?
... and a willingness to write for a living. I'd think that narrows the field considerably. I'm always amazed when I see that a sports writer has written three different pieces, all of which appear in the same sports section of the newspaper. All clear and readable.
DeleteI read once that a newspaper reporter might write six or seven stories in a typical day - of which one or two might make it into the newspaper. It sounds like really hard work to me.
Six or seven stories is about right for a smaller community newspaper. Forty years ago, I wrote obits, wedding announcements, covered the city and cop beats, and did a sporadic editorial. We also had one person each on "lifestyle," county and state, and sports. One photog, and if she was busy? They handed you a camera and you learned to take a decent picture. Everybody wrote cutlines and took turns doing the weather and covering the Canadian news just across the border (I got to meet Margaret Atwood and Phil and Tony Esposito's mom!) I usually supervised the interns. Then there were the composition guys, and the guys who ran the ancient press. I remember covering something sad and upsetting once, and the sports guy took me downstairs to watch the press run because he thought it would cheer me up. Good times.
DeleteGeez, Jim, I hope wanting to make the world a better place isn't limited to college graduates. Or to college graduates who are willing to take the long hours and low pay of entry-level journalism jobs (like being a medical intern) in order to eventually make a middle class income (unlike interns). Of course, when people say The Media, they are thinking of Wolf Blitzer. Which is like saying "basketball" and picturing LeBron James
DeleteRight - I am sure that there are people of all different education levels who'd like to make the world a better place. Maybe it's just a reflection of my particular experience, as I've spent my career in corporate America, but my observation is that those folks are far outnumbered by the people who don't particularly care about the world outside their cubicle or their SUV.
DeleteI think it's pretty standard for a newspaper or another media org to expect their new hires to have college degrees? My understanding is that in the era of "The Front Page" that wasn't the case.
I can tell you -- having played Krueger of the Journal of Commerce, pork pie hat, "By the Light of the Silvery Moon" on the banjo -- kept getting interrupted after two bars -- in the fantastic Front Page staged by Bill Flynn at Mercer County Community College in 1980 with an all-star cast of real journalists offset mercifully (for the audience) by real actors... that, yeah, in the '30s, almost all reporters knew about college was how well the football team was doing. When I started in journalism there were still plenty of them around. Now college is usually required.
DeleteNevertheless, there is one successful scribe around for nearly 40 years now who was first hired for his resume, which included no college but a line "marmelade purveyor to the Queen of England." It was he, in fact, who reviewed the legendary production of The Front Page ("perfect insouciance," he said of me), since I, obviously, would have had a conflict.
The older group was much more inclined to do things the Bar Association would regard with raised eyebrows (like swiping photos of mantles and pretending to be the coroner)(although I once passed myself off... well, let that go) than the collegians. The collegians also have the fault of always wanting to turn two-car accidents into paradigms of what society is coming to.
At one point in The Front Page, Bensinger of the Tribune talks about a psychiatrist hired by "the United Federation of World Betterment."
Delete"I'm for that," replies Kruger (me). So, see, even non-collegians could be for world betterment.
"The collegians also have the fault of always wanting to turn two-car accidents into paradigms of what society is coming to."
DeleteYes, that gets old.
What you're describing about the old journalists was sort of a thing (maybe more rumor than reality, I was never close enough to the pits to really absorb the booze-fueled manic energy) about the old traders at the commodities exchanges, too. The college boys (purportedly it wasn't a girl's world) were analytical and good wit charts, but the high school drop-outs knew how to hustle and knew where to apply the thumb pressure on the scales of commerce.
This may be urban legend: People I know who know the commodities' markets tell me that those traders are straight out of high school: high energy, intuitive, and good at whatever kind of math you need to make quick decisions. Good at horse racing? Poker? Anyone know?
DeleteI went to college and still had to continue studying. Guess I could have learned physics without college but it helps to have outside sources of criticism and challenge. But college is only a boot up program
ReplyDeleteYes. And most of us don't find out what we learned in college until we've been out for awhile.
DeleteI didn't know I knew how to do ratios until I had to resize pictures as a magazine editor. I think we were taught this in fourth? grade, but it went deep into the well until I needed it.
DeleteI have often wished I could go back and do it all again. I was very focused on having fun and social activities when I was in college, and so bored with some of the required core courses, that I simply skated through the classes, forgetting everything after the semester was over. How I wish I could go back and take some of those classes again - more history, the philosophy courses I found so incredibly boring, theology - ditto. I even wasted a lot of the required courses in grad school, focusing only on my main interest - international and development economics - bored by the fundamental courses (micro, macro, calculus, econometrics etc).
ReplyDeleteEvery now and then I meet a young person who is truly getting a lot from college and/or grad school, and wish I had had their maturity when I was a student. I started college a couple of months after my 17th birthday - I would have been better off waiting a couple of years - doing Peace Corps or something.
As far as my career went, I learned a whole lot more about real world international and development economics during my first year on the job (at the World Bank) than I did from my classes, even though they were a good foundation.
I had planned to fill my retirement time with going back to school. But, until I find a workable hearing solution, that is on hold. I like to follow class discussions, and it's hard with my hearing loss. I started a couple of classes and dropped them when it was brought home to me that I don't hear well, even with hearing aids.
The other day someone at work was talking to his "smart watch". I expressed amazement that one could talk on one of those. He said, "I'm not talking, I'm texting." The device converts the spoken words to a written message. There ought to be a way for technology to convert a class lecture to a written text on a phone or tablet. Sort of real time sub-titling. I don t know, maybe that capability exists already.
DeleteI have heard tell, or read, about someone who was reading text on a tablet appearing as someone in the same room was speaking int a (something) that translated talk into text..
DeleteAlso...text of live TV when available must have something of the same technology...though the text is always behind the talk.
Apple? Can't our Macs translate our talk into text on our machines. Never done it..
Anyone know?
This discussion reminded me of another usage of "translation". When I was taking a night class, the class sessions were sufficiently long that the instructor gave us a 10 minute break halfway through each session. He was not born in the USA - he was from somewhere in the Middle East. There was a student in the class who was from somewhere in Asia - I think China but am not certain. His English wasn't very good. Not unusual in this school (University of Illinois at Chicago). Anyway, he had a particularly difficult time understanding this professor's lectures. So during breaks, when the rest of us had left the room, leaving our notebooks and other items at our desks, he would sit down at the desks of other students and copy their notes. When my classmates discovered that was going on, they were really angry at the student. I felt a good deal more sympathetic.
DeleteSo: how about technology that would translate a lecture in English into Chinese, on the fly?
All this stuff has gotta exist already. I have one in college and two others who are fresh-ish out. I'll ask them tomorrow - they're all out living young adult lifestyles this evening.
Fifteen years ago, students from Japan and China had little dictionary things that would translate words and phrases for them. I often saw them frantically typing things in. Not voice activated then, but maybe now. They would not like to bother me for help, and if I asked them after class how things were going, they always said fine, fine.
DeleteAfter analyzing your article you have to recognize what I surely have written here what is a rhinoplasty. This one is being written after you have a proposal from you.
ReplyDelete