I could have felt hurt or offended. A very close friend admitted to me that he couldn’t bring himself to finish my recently published book, a seriocomic memoir called, “Don’t Say a Word!: A Daughter’s Two Cents”. The book is about my parents’ bizarre unraveling at the end of their lives and their refusal to listen to me about that—or anything else. Silenced, I became speechless. My friend, who knows me to be particularly outspoken, literally could not stand to read about my non-response to my parents’ outrageous antics. I wasn’t insulted, because I realized that, rather than judging my book, he was revealing something about himself.
There may have been an element of empathy in his reaction to my being ignored, but I know that wasn’t the driving force. You see, my friend is a passionate talker, a characteristic for which he is celebrated and that he attributes to his own early experience of being shut out of his family’s intense gabfests and of feeling invisible, as a consequence. His identification with me made him feel as though he was the one being gagged; and it was unbearable to him because—as a reader—he couldn’t enact the defense he’d developed of aggressively speaking out.
Reactions driven by traumatic childhood experiences may be more common than we realize. The usual explanation for our diverse responses to stories, whether in books, movies, or TV series, is: “taste is personal.” But this often just means that we don’t agree on what is funny or distasteful or anxiety-provoking, in the same way that we don’t all like the same ice cream flavor, i.e., that what drives the preference is unimportant. And it is true that we are born with a wide range of temperaments, which accounts for our many various personality styles. But when a reaction is so intense as to approach being an aversion (or its opposite), it is often being driven by meaningful, hidden history.
I began to get this idea many years ago, when I was boarding a plane, carrying Frank McCourt’s memoir, Angela’s Ashes, a searing account of McCourt’s growing up poor in Ireland with an alcoholic father. As we walked along the gateway, two women who’d noticed the book mentioned how hilarious they’d thought it was. I was mind-boggled. How could anyone laugh at the story’s grueling poverty and heart-rending suffering? When I got to my seat, I read the back cover, where there were many blurbs that also admired the humor. What was I missing?
And then I saw it. All the blurb writers who’d mentioned comedy were Irish. To them, a father’s drinking away his wages was once so common as to be part of their cultural identity, and casting the details in a comic light demonstrates a triumph over an historic, community trauma. But I am Jewish, and in my culture, in which alcoholism is rare and ‘father’ is almost synonymous with ‘provider’, a father who drinks his family into starvation is unthinkable, and there can be nothing funny about it. It’s similar to the way most Jews respond to humor extracted from the Holocaust. I appreciated what McCourt was doing, but I couldn’t laugh.
My own book casts my parents’ steam-rolling me, their only child, as comedy. It’s my way of seizing control of a situation that was once beyond my control and of cutting the two steam-rollers down to size. Getting readers to laugh with the me is also a way of reminding them that I survived. My friend noted the humor, but his version of what I had experienced still rankled ands was thus too close to laugh off.
The frightening and painful events of childhood, especially if they are repeated, can stay with us for life. Our defense against a trauma becomes a learned response, operating almost like a reflex, and we continue to experience any situation that evokes the original misery as we did when we lived it in the past.
For example, I hate thrillers. They make me so anxious that if a frightening scene comes on the screen, I immediately cover my eyes and then, if it continues, have to flee the room—or movie theater. And yet thrillers are a hugely popular genre. Many, perhaps most people, love being safely scared. They shriek with delight on a roller-coaster. I can’t begin to imagine what their pleasure is.
Today, I trace this reaction to my childhood terror that my beloved nanny, my safe harbor, would at any moment be fired. My frightening mother worked longer hours than my father, and I grew up in the 1950s when a Macy’s dress-buyer and a dentist could afford live-in help, so we also had a cook. The cooks, however, came and went; I remember none of them. But their disturbing impermanence made clear that my nanny could have the same fate. Every time my mother’s withering criticism was directed at her, I held my breath as though we stood at the edge of a precipice that could crumble at any moment. Now, as a result, any image I encounter of sadism or threatened cruelty, of an impending avalanche or immanent bomb explosion, triggers an adrenaline rush—and one that is NOT fun.
Yes, taste is personal. Absolutely. But what does “personal” mean? The source of our deepest aversions—and even perhaps our most intense pleasures—lies in our pasts. Our histories explain us.
And this is why “A Little Princess” and other plucky female orphan tales were my favorites as a little girl. After 6 years of only-childhood, I suddenly acquired 1 (and by 4 years later, 3) little sisters and lost my status as the “parlor boarder.”
He had three older sisters!