Tag: fathers

Quest for Truth

Playing with Dynamite: A Memoir by Sharon Harrigan
Truman State University Press, 2017
Paperback and ebook, 239 pages, $16.95 and $9.99

 

Cover of Sharon Harrigan's Playing with Dynamite

 

It is a very democratic notion, I suppose, that everyone has a story to tell. The ascendancy of social media certainly capitalizes on the idea that anyone and everyone can have a soapbox, but, as tweets, blogs, and online posts proliferate, the difficulty is that much of what is said is not worth reading, even if it is valuable to the writer. The ongoing boom in memoir publishing also points to a kind of populism. Readers who go to memoir looking for stories of great accomplishment, intrigue, or proximity to world-historical events will not always find it in memoirs being published today: The genre is no longer reserved for lives of eminence. But if readers are lucky, they will find in a memoir, such as Sharon Harrigan’s Playing with Dynamite, a story that demonstrates that even an ordinary life proves interesting when assessed by an intelligent and skillful writer.

 

Harrigan’s book was inspired by her quest to discover the truth about her father, who died in a car accident when she was a young child. Following the accident, her family, sealed in the reticence of grief, was reluctant to speak of her father, creating an aura of mystery around him. The mystery was enhanced by the fact that her father had lost his right hand “playing with dynamite” years before his fatal accident. Vague rumblings about the FBI’s interest in her father added to the sense that there might be a dark family secret lurking. Harrigan was reluctant to break the seal of silence wrapped around her family, fearful of what she might discover or what feelings she might dislodge in others. Harrigan sees how curiosity is stifled by the dread of unsettling relationships as well as by the shame of ignorance. “[E]ven as a little girl,” she writes, “I sensed that others carried questions in their heads they wouldn’t dare ask, things they never said so no one would know they didn’t already know.”

 

In the eyes of a young child, the two prominent facts about her father (the two accidents) amplified the typical, childish notion that one’s father is a larger-than-life figure, a man whose significance must be plain to all. As an adult and a parent observing her son’s reckoning with his relationship with his own absentee father, Harrigan realized she must finally come to terms with the lifelong puzzle of her father—of who he was, how he died, and what he meant to the rest of the family. To undertake this emotional journey, she has to break the long-held silences of her mother, brother, sister, and uncle. She has to overcome her own queasy, anxious concern that she will not be quite the same person she thought she was once the family history is more clearly disclosed.

 

Although there are no startling revelations for the reader—if anything, the surprise for Harrigan is that the circumstances of her father’s two accidents turn out not to be especially important—Harrigan’s reflections on her past are rewarding because of the tenor with which they are told. Reading Dynamite is like listening to a good friend tell you about her life over a long coffee or a couple of drinks. Harrigan’s prose is inviting and familiar. And, though the ostensible focus of the book is on her father, the real story is to be found in the appropriately inconclusive self-searching Harrigan undertakes as she attempts to connect with her relations and to review her identity in light of her new understanding of her family.

 

Two features of Dynamite give added depth and interest to this memoir of life in urban Detroit and rural upstate Michigan (with layovers in Paris, New York, and Virginia). First, Harrigan is unusually sensitive to the ways in which stories of self are shaped by the stories of others. She understands that one’s sense of one’s place in the world is formed in relation to how others are positioned. At a very young age, we receive our parents’ stories of who they are and of who we are, and these ideas have powerful and lasting effects on our understanding of our lives. We are not usually aware of just how much these ideas have infiltrated our thinking. For example, Harrigan comes to realize that what she took to be her memories of her father may actually have been ideas of him that came from her uncle’s stories about him, not her own experience of him. Further, as she undertakes to interview her family members, she sees that there are many variations of the same central narrative. As she says, “Stories change, of course, when different people tell them.” Thus, Dynamite is presented as a kind of collage, with pieces taken from Harrigan’s memory as well as from the memories of others.

 

In fact, Harrigan may be too sensitive to the responsibility of creating a nonfiction narrative. She bends over backward to label the passages of her text according to their source: her imagination, her memory, the memory of a relative, a recorded conversation. The fear that loved ones will resent what one writes, claiming it is untrue, inaccurate, or radically incomplete, plagues many writers and would-be writers. Even in fiction writing, authors may be concerned lest their words be taken as transparently autobiographical, offending the real persons who have been turned into characters or caricatures. In a memoir that takes family history as its subject, this worry can, understandably, run deep. Yet, I can’t help but think that Harrigan’s concern with accurate representation has the paradoxical effect of making her narrative seem less reliable. The caveats about the precise source of each passage come to seem intrusive, like someone trustworthy whose repeated urging, “You can trust me,” functions to undercut rather than to bolster her listener’s confidence. At least for readers outside her family, the caveats may feel like unnecessary interruptions. After all, it is at the end of the day, her memoir, and she is entitled to tell it any way she likes.

 

Even so, Harrigan’s sensitivity to the ways in which her narrative is partial surely contributed to her ability to achieve interesting moments of personal growth, culminating in the claim that “[A]ll my life I had been telling myself the story of my father’s death all wrong.” A memoir writer who can admit that she’s gotten it all wrong is one whose writing has had a large transformative effect on her life. And it is the courage of this transformation that makes Harrigan’s book a friendly read—it is the kind of personal story we can learn from because we can translate Harrigan’s self-exploration into our own lives. I was all wrong is not the kind of thing you are likely to see on Facebook. But it is the kind of hard-won admission that can inspire readers to broach their own family secrets and unlock their own personal histories.

 

A second admirable feature of Harrigan’s book is the directness with which she thinks through the generational shift in attitudes about gender. Reflecting on her father’s sour moods, his cruel remarks, and the control he exerted over her mother, she wonders whether he was simply “a man of his time,” as her mother says with resignation, or whether his sexism was more grievous and culpable than that suggests. Harrigan works to put her family history into a larger social context, considering the prevalence of baldly sexist advertisements and other media in the 1970s. Her aim is not to pass judgment, not to decide ultimately whether he was or wasn’t a male chauvinist, or how to categorize his brutal and reckless personality, but simply to understand it better. She takes the lesson to heart, asking, “Will my children look back, decades from now, and try to forgive my anachronisms by telling themselves I came of age in another era? Will they explain away my insecurity and overeagerness to please by saying, ‘What do you expect? Hers was the first generation after women’s emancipation?’ There are always growing pains. Learning curves.” Such lines reveal Harrigan’s central strength: the ability to probe uncomfortable family issues, apply the scrutiny to herself, and treat all with compassion.

 

If social media’s popularity is partly a response to the need to be visible, to be remembered, memoirs are—as the name clearly indicates—dedicated to remembering and being remembered. Like social media posts, they are liable to the pitfalls of self-promotion, distortion, and an excess of self-concern or narcissism. However, simply in virtue of being longer and more complex, they offer their writers the potential for a more subtle and meaningful kind of self-representation. Such memoirs can provide something of an antidote to the present culture of click-bait headlines, mudslinging tweets, and drive-by Facebook posts that reduce public discourse too often to fear, anger, unearned righteousness, and rash judgment. The American appetite for memoir must reflect, then, a desire on the part of both writers and readers to engage in a deeper, more sustained form of self-reflection. Harrigan invites us to that kind of deeper reflection as we share in the experience of living with the complexity and uncertainty of family relationships. She invites us to risk finding the unspoken or hidden truths that have had a part in shaping who we are. In Harrigan’s hands, Dynamite may not be explosive, but it is a model for how everyday questions of identity, family, and the past may be addressed thoughtfully.

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Levitations

My father dies in the morning

& a candy jar

 

in the middle of the house

wants also to be empty

 

objects in our living room

float like hot flies,

blue couches clutch the ceiling

& the coffee table whispers into the wall

 

The people, the fallen people,

the loved ones, my loved ones

sitting in the patio

we still laugh at the joke

about the giraffe.

 

We may cry in our fluorescent rooms,

when no one is looking.

 

We may be strong, we may, we may

but first we will tear our own

skin from our own skin

first can we go find

the other side where he went

find that place is not empty too.

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Sunday

A long car trip to the desert in the outskirts of Juarez. A Tecate in a coozie between my dad’s legs and my mom’s arm outstretched, her hand caressing his neck.

 

Loud Mexican music plays on the car radio, either Pedro Infante or Luis Miguel. Depends on their mood.

 

My brother and I look out the window at the cotton fields and abandoned farmhouses.

 

My dad turns on to an unpaved road and keeps driving. Dirt hits our face in the back seat.

 

The car stops. The dust settles and reveals we are on the edge of a mesa. He gets out of the car and we follow.

 

As far as the eye can see: coarse sand, spirited tumbleweeds, a sunset like an erupting volcano.

 

My dad takes one last sip of beer and looks down at me. With one swift move, he launches the bottle into the virgin desert.

 

“Don’t litter, kids,” he says dryly.

 

I roll my eyes, and he erupts in laughter, loud and piercing in the open space.

 

It was the decade AquaNet was eating away the ozone layer and I, an impressionable pre-teen, had been very vocal about recycling. I thought he hadn’t been listening.

 

“Vamonos,” he says but I stand on the precipice a bit longer, the humiliation cementing itself into my consciousness.

 

In the car, he snaps open a fresh bottle of beer and my mom resumes her pose in the passenger side, playing with his hair. The drive back home is darker. Not even Luis Miguel can break the silence.

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My Father’s Monsters

1. Here’s how it started: my father, for reasons unknown to me at the time, would periodically come home, loudly insisting, Jeremiah, I saw a monster, and although he was never drunk, and it never seemed malicious—I never thought he was making fun of me—I never believed him, even at a young age, when he would crow about monsters that were very much in my orbit (he pivoted early on from Frankensteins or Mummies or Creatures from Various-Colored Lagoons and started conjuring up hair-raising encounters with beasts from Gremlins or An American Werewolf in London, stopping thankfully short of meeting Freddy Krueger or anything from Alien or The Thing).[note]The strange thing was, he wasn’t even a huge monster movie fan; he eschewed normal ‘dad’ taste, had no patience for Westerns or war movies, and oddly enough preferred staid dramas like Gentleman’s Agreement, and in the 1980s he acquired a low-grade obsession with My Dinner with Andre.[/note]

 

2. This continued unabated until it became a source of concern, and then, more powerfully, more keenly, embarrassment, as an assortment of friends would come by to pretend to do homework, only to find themselves in the inquisitorial hands of Alec Sutton, who would casually ask, as one would the weather, which frightful creation of George A. Romero or John Carpenter or Wes Craven or Roger Corman or Rick Baker or Stan Winston or Ray Harryhausen or Stephen King or H. P. Lovecraft or Horace Walpole (as if any of us had read Walpole!) or Clive Barker or Ray Bradbury (now he was reaching) or Edgar Allan Poe really gave my friend the heebie-jeebies, the screaming mimis, the willies, and whatever answer my father received from his poor subject would (almost) invariably produce a reaction somewhere along the lines of Well, funny you should say that, because the other night at a stop sign and off he would go, in an admittedly impressive display of extemporizing the chilling proximity in which he had found himself to something from an altogether more ghoulish version of our own world.[note]My father didn’t do this more than once, and most of my friends found it either endearing or just the cost of hanging out with me, but poor Freddy Mackenzie told my father that the car in Christine had given him nightmares, and after hearing that my father had seen a ’58 Plymouth Fury driving by our school with no one behind the wheel, Freddy turned as white as if he’d been blood-let, and both Sutton men got a stern dressing-down from Freddy’s mother.[/note]

 

3. Once I found my father casually flipping through an issue of Fangoria—on the cover was a Sasquatch, which I never found frightening and therefore never made it into my father’s bestiary—and this I took to be his admission that the jig was up, that he knew that I knew the monsters weren’t real; he didn’t try to hide the magazine, just continued flipping through pages of creature features while asking me in a disinterested tone how my day was going, and it’s not until writing this that I realized reading Fangoria and Eerie and For Monsters Only was his way of centering himself.[note]I’d like to tell you that my father died and willed me a box of musty, dog-eared penny dreadfuls, but like I said, the man was never one for horror, and I’m fairly certain that most of those magazines wound up in the trash.[/note]

 

4. One time, when I was nine or ten, my father roped his friend Lee in on the act, and Lee told me: “You know, Jem”—he was the only one who called me that, and I always hated it, but it wasn’t for many years that I realized I hated it because I am not and was not a character from Flannery O’Connor or Harper Lee—”all that stuff your dad says, well, it’s not bullshit”—and here my father winced, for he did not swear around me back then, but he did not interrupt—”it’s all true; why, once he and I were on our way to the b—to church”—I knew he was going to say “bar,” but he felt the need to cover himself after his bullshit gaffe, and my suspicions were confirmed when I saw his furtive glance at my father, as if for approval and permission, and in that glance I saw just how much my father meant to Lee Hayward—”and we saw an honest-to-goodness vampire, with the cape, the fangs, the amulet, the whole nine yards”—and here he just kind of trailed off, and while his effort was a weak one, I could see that it meant a lot to my father that Lee had made an effort at all, and I understood then, or at least I thought I understood, the strange nature of male friendship, which sometimes requires you to lie to your friend’s son.[note]One of the only truly nice things I ever did (everyone thinks of themselves as nice, I believe, but few people take the time to quantify it) was to visit Lee Hayward in the hospital after he had nearly blinded himself at work; he couldn’t see very well and was muted by painkillers and therefore couldn’t recognize my voice, so I told him, “It’s Jem Sutton.”[/note]

 

5. When I was in college, my father told me that he had seen the Headless Horseman—which I think was meant to appeal to my newfound sensibilities (I had recently declared myself a Classics major[note]I know, I know, shut up.[/note]), but instead of meeting him halfway and asking about the Jack-o’-lantern head, I tore into him, telling him that first of all, Irving wasn’t what anyone would exactly call a Classics author, I was reading shit like Virgil and Sophocles and Euripides and Chaucer, and I didn’t appreciate being made fun of . . . okay, yes, this was probably the meanest thing I ever said to Alec Sutton, but I never told him I didn’t believe him, that he never saw the Headless Horseman and I was sick of the bullshit with the monsters (my father and I swore around each other by now), so, mean though I was, I never, even then, broke his heart.

 

6. When Shea and I had kids—Murphy and Connor—they were a little more circumspect around Grampy Alec, not as believing of his tall tales, a trait for which I blame their mother, who was always analytical and practical in a way that, for some reason, deeply turned me on (in hindsight, Grampy Alec might have blown his cover early on when he insisted that he saw “a few Pokémons”[note]The conversation afterwards, in which I explained the taxonomy of Pokémon to my father, is and was the most uncomfortable experience of my life, but I had to admire the nearly anthropological curiosity with which he approached the subject.[/note] by the corner store; the eye-rolls produced, in unison, by Murph and Con are still the greatest insults I’ve ever seen).

 

7. This put me in a bit of a bind: you don’t want your kids to think that their old man’s old man is a liar, but you also don’t want to lie to the kids, so you go along with it, much to your wife’s consternation (which later, to her credit, becomes bemusement), but everyone has fun with it, and no one gets too scared.[note]Con was spared the sight of Pennywise the Clown, thanks to his mother’s intervention; she (correctly) pointed out that it would “scare the everloving shit out of him.”[/note]

 

8. I should clarify the word scared: my father’s intention was never to scare me (I never found any rubber snakes or spiders in my bed), and I never was scared (okay, maybe a few times when I was very young, but what child wouldn’t be frightened by the most trustworthy person in their life saying that he had just come from a meeting with the Swamp Thing?)—I think, ultimately, he was just trying to be my friend, to swap stories, to bullshit the way he must have done with Lee Hayward.[note]I should clarify further, because I feel like I’m digging myself a hole: these stories never made me distrust my father.[/note]

 

9. Only once did an actual monster make an appearance, and here’s how it happened: my mother asked if I wanted to take a walk (Red Flag #1: my mother, although a fit woman, never spontaneously took walks) while my father was conspicuously absent (Red Flag #2: my father was never one to leave the house after he had returned to it), so out we went, down Larkspur Court, to the east, and out from the alleyway, why, look what it is, some Monster from Planet X, plainly a hazmat suit from a costume shop accompanied by a latex alien mask (most likely purchased from the selfsame costume shop [Red Flag #3: my father worked around the corner from Herb Crowne’s year-round costume shop]), replete with bulging, purple eyes and mottled gray skin.[note]My father never liked sci-fi, so I’m not sure why he went with this particular outfit as his first; there must have been a sale.[/note]

 

10. My mother mock-screamed and ran away at a pace quick enough for me to catch up to her, which I did as well, once I realized that it was what I was expected to do; I don’t remember my own reaction beyond that, but I really, really hope I played along.[note]My father would never break character and address it, nor would I bring it up, so all I have in this instance is hope that I made him happy.[/note]

 

11. Later, my father’s monsters became upsettingly real, and they announced their presence with beeps and hoarse exhales and the rasp of my mother’s voice, like sandpaper grinding a pearl to dust.[note]Rachel Holcomb Sutton died at the age of 51, and it hurts like a motherfucker to this day.[/note]

 

12. Monsters stopped seeking my father out after that.[note]Truthfully, I started to miss the monsters, and a few weeks after the funeral, I tried telling him I’d seen Pinhead in the frozen food aisle of Kroger’s, but he must have not have heard me because he said nothing.[/note]

 

13. Kids are harder to scare these days, or maybe just harder to impress. Shea and I—she’s gotten in on the act too—have taken to watching DIY tutorials on YouTube, in an attempt to make our own prostheses, or makeup convincing enough to make Murph and Con think that one of us is the real deal.[note]Shea and I never got great at fabricating masks, but I turned out to be something of a wunderkind with the makeup brush, and turned her into a pretty eerie facsimile of the Babadook.[/note] They’re too old to believe us, if they ever did, but that never stopped my father. He came to help us once and was almost immediately flummoxed. He dropped some mask-making impedimenta and looked at me, saying plainly, “Jesus, Jeremiah, I just told you stories.” He shook his head and laughed.

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Watching You Sleep on the 5th Day of Your Life

The truth of some promises is not as important as whether or not you can believe in them, with all your heart.

                                                ~Michael Chabon, Summerland

 

 

1.
Son, fathers fuck up. Fucking up is what fathers do. I’ve spent my adult life trying not to be my father—a man who loves quickly and leaves even quicker. But I see him in me—his chin, his nose, his long dangling earlobes. You have his chin, his nose, his long dangling earlobes. My hair is thick and black, like his. Your hair, even when you emerged into the world, is thick and black, like fine spun silk. I see my father. In me. In you. One day you will look at me and think, My father is a fuck-up, like how I looked at my father five years ago, waiting for me in the lobby of a Bangkok hotel after a two-year absence. I stayed hidden, spying him from behind a column, noticing how age had had its way with his body that sags and slouches, and thinking, I love you, but you have fucked me up. At that moment, anger turned into pity. “Let pity, then, be a kind of pain…,” Aristotle wrote, which makes me think his father fucked up, too. When the time comes, son, do not pity me. Let me apologize now, when you are asleep and dreaming, I hope, of whatever makes you love. And forgive.

 

2.
Son, you came into being like a Florida thunderstorm—quick and hard. Elephant rain, your Thai grandmother likes to call it. You announced your arrival through your mother’s screams. The commotion out of her mouth was your commotion. Her anguished face was your face. The midwife and nurses could not find your heartbeat, that rapid little sound I loved to listen to during prenatal check-ups. It vanished. I knew something was the matter. I knew by the organized chaos in the room—the fifteen or so nurses buzzing around, everyone doing something. And then, in the midst of this hectic-ness, you came out. “He’s arrived,” the midwife said. Arrived with the umbilical cord wrapped twice around your neck. There was a forever second of silence until you cried. And then I cried. That night, at the hospital, I could not sleep. I hovered over you, as I do now, checking the rise and fall of your chest, the twitch of your tiny fingers, making sure you were breathing and alive.

 

3.
Son, when you become a father, time will lose meaning. Your mind will propel you into the future, your child grown and happy. You hope you are responsible for that happiness. Or, you will imagine the unimaginable, and it will knot your jaw, and it will fist your hands. Time for a father is not linear. I have seen you through college, seen you married, seen all your successes and regrets. I have gone backwards, too, when you did not exist, when I did not exist, witnessing this lineage of fathers, who strayed. My past is your past, son. Time intertwines like a suffocating weed. It is not measured by light, but memory, which is timeless and unpredictable. Where, I wonder, will this memory of your sleep be thirty years from now? What will harken it? At my death, it is this memory I want to slip into and carry with me into the next life.

 

4.
Son, a few days before your arrival, a man entered a nightclub and extinguished forty-nine lives. When news broke, I shut out the world. I wanted you to enter a happy world, in a happy family, in the arms of a happy father. Happiness, however, is illusory. The truth: the world hurts. Six hours before your arrival, I finished Ta-Nehisi Coates’s memoir, Between the World and Me. In it he writes to his son: “I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.” There is so much that I want to shield you from, so much I do not want you to witness. But I wonder if you already know the world is broken. Sometimes you furrow your brow in your sleep, like you do now, a look of someone betrayed, and I think we all begin our lives with a cry, our first breath the beginning of suffering.

 

5.
Son, your mother worries people will not know you are hers. You have inherited all that is Thai in me. She fears, when you look at her, you will not see a mother but a simple white woman. But she wanted this. “I hope he looks like you,” she said. “I hope he looks like you,” I said. You look like this country. You were born from a yellow man and white woman, who wakes you with kisses, who holds you so tight fearing you might evaporate. Son, love your mother. Son, love her more than you love me. See yourself mirrored in her eyes. But do not forget your father. He will be there. He promises. He promises so many things.

 

 

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