LONG, DARK DAYS

LONG, DARK DAYS


What am I reading now that the nights close in early and all the color has
left the scene? Too warm to snow. It is Advent season and we
are told to wait, to stay alert, to keep awake. Good time to be indoors and read. For this serious season, I abandon junk for the time being.

I've been updating my long, annotated list of suggested memoir reading and realize, once again, how the examined life, the story of before and after, the escape from the bad childhood, is what I really want to know about. All families have secrets, some more than others. All families are happy and unhappy, some more than others. People leave, people are left. Things change. They always do.

"Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?" by Jeanette Winterson
(Grove, 2011), "Mrs. Winterson," as the author usually refers to her
adoptive mother, was one of those monsters you read about in fiction:
smart, Pentecostal, depressed, cruel, cold, psychotic, suffering. She kept a gun in a drawer with the dust rags and the bullets in a furniture polish can. In Manchester, in the late 1950s, without money and prospects, working class life was lived on the margins and the future, for most, was grim.

The author was adopted by a woman who then proclaimed the devil had
led her to the wrong crib. The absence of anything close to love in her life made Winterson pretty crazy, too. Like so many abandoned children, she invented a life of her own through reading although books, except religious tracts, were forbidden in the house. The local library (Prose: A-Z) was her haven and a with couple of miraculous breaks and plenty of personal velocity, she left home at 16 and wound up at Oxford. 

"Why Be Happy?" is a look back by a person who has tried desperately to learn how to love and be loved. She examines adoption and describes
a tortuous road to discovering, then meeting, her own birth mother. As a teenager, she declared love for another female, not exactly the easiest
way to get on in the world during the dark era before the 1970s liberated
women.

About writing, Winterson says,"I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.

A lot about love, adoption, the unprotected child, reading, libraries, writing, escape, forgiveness. You probably won't like the author. She is too prickly, too involved with herself, and a little too unstable for comfort. At the end, Winterson says maybe without her abusive childhood she might never have amounted to anything. If she hadn't struggled to invent herself and to pull off a great escape, maybe she would have been there on the streets of Manchester, pushing a baby coach at the age of 17 and wondering where her life had gone.

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Next up: "Family Romance: A Love Story" by John Lanchester
(Penguin, 2007).

Lanchester is a good writer whose work I've recently come to know. He
grew up in Hong Kong, the grandchild of two people who had been held in Stanley prison after the Japanese invasion during WWII. In a last-ditch move, his father had been shipped off to Australia where he went through secondary school and eventually college living with people who supported him during the long war years. His mother, ah here it gets interesting, had been a nun, although the details of this part of her life did not emerge until after her death.

Lanchester pieces together time lines and realities of these lives from scraps of writing, pictures, and documents left behind after most of the family had died. His mother was the eldest in a large Mayo County family, wracked in poverty and disease. Pre-Vatican II, the Catholic grip on young people in families like this propelled many into the convent or priesthood as a means of escaping home.  The details of this religious life and leaving it (twice!) remained another one of the family's secrets -- so many of them and so difficult to grasp. 

Lanchester goes about it calmly and the more he delves, the more he reflects on family issues such as money, freedom and truth. In a calm voice, he examines three generations and what it means to live through the romance of family life. In the end, he says, "I realized my mother was much more of a stranger than I knew."

It could be we can all say this. How well can we reconstruct just who our parents had been?

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