My Writer's Compulsion Toward Dysfunction
A profile in the June 2 New Yorker, of English novelist Edward St. Aubyn, set me thinking about my own preoccupation with dysfunctional families. I always read everything I can get my hands on about them.
Case in point: St. Aubyn has written five autobiographical novels about growing up in a household with a pedophile for a father and a narcissistic mother who swears she never realized what was going on right under her nose and who competes with her son about which of them -- mother or child -- had the toughest time of it. His parents divorced when St. Aubyn was eight, whereupon he called a halt to the rapes, which had been occurring with some regularity since he was three and a half. Soon after, the father became reclusive and suicidal, almost as if to punish his son for having finally summoned the courage to say the game was up. “Look what you’ve reduced me to -- from being this master sadist I’m now this ruin.”
St. Aubyn's true story has inspired my own thinking about a future novel.
Sometimes I wonder: What is the fascination with these subjects for me? I come from a long line of relatively sane and civil people, and yet I write novels about the deaths of children and youth suicide and child abuse and the many sad and unpredictable cruelties that abound in this nutty world of ours.
My novel Tarnished Eye was inspired by the true unsolved murder of an entire family I read about in my local Michigan newspaper decades earlier. I now have a sequel waiting in the wings -- White of the Moon -- about one of the characters in that novel who wouldn't leave me.
Similarly, I read an article in the Detroit News decades ago about a kid who was beaten and persecuted all through childhood and yet was still trying to figure out how he could be good enough to meet his father’s harsh standards. In combination with reading Russell Banks’ novel, Affliction, it got me wondering how some characters survive, while others are so damaged they are unable to live in the world.
So, my novel Second Heaven concerns Gale, a sixteen-year-old boy, tortured and humiliated by a brutal father, who manages to escape with the aid of a stranger -- a newly divorced woman emotionally abused by her husband throughout her marriage. I spent some 300 pages largely trying to discover the answer to how people survive abuse without becoming abusers themselves.
There too, the characters would not leave me. What fascinates me is the question of how two people experiencing similar damage can respond to it in very different ways -- what impact does that have on them? So I needed to return to brothers Kevin and Gale to find out. I have written a sequel, coming out soon -- A Different Life -- that takes place seven years later. Gale has graduated from college and is reunited with Kevin, who ran away to join the Navy when he was 18.
To answer my own lifelong questioning about what makes the difference when some people survive tragic situations, and others do not, I think what I am exploring as I write is that turning one’s back doesn’t solve the problem; that, somehow these experiences need to be integrated into the whole of one’s life in order to outlive them and break their spell of shame and rage.
I have this need to understand the power of such dysfunction and its extraordinary reach into the future of its victims.
And, to be honest, I personally believe that writers don’t write to impart information to others -- they write to inform themselves.
Why the need?, however... as Tolstoy once said... is a tune from another opera.
And the subject for another day.
