‘To lie habitually, as a way of life, is to lose contact with your unconscious,’ writes Adrienne Rich in her essay ‘Women and Honor’ in which she underlines the long history of women trying to survive – to please their lying husbands by modifying their body, faking organisms, hiding abuse to avoid further abuse.’ Molly, by Blake Butler.
‘It is like taking sleeping pills, which confer sleep but blot out dreaming. The unconscious wants truth.’ Adrienne Rich, ‘Women and Honor’
I have been reading a memoir about writer and poet, Molly Brodak, called Molly, which was written by her husband Blake Butler after she died, in his attempt to better understand a woman who he discovered had a secret life that, despite their closeness, he had not known about. I am fascinated by Molly as a character having read her memoir, Bandit about her father who was living a secret life as a bank robber. I found much that was familiar about her ambivalent and confused feelings for her father and her yearning for his love, and her attempt to know a man who is unknowable. Both our fathers were sociopaths.
And this sticky web of intergenerational trauma is as complex as it sounds; how Molly is victim to it, despite her best attempts to look it in the eye through her poetry and prose. How far do we ever get from what we are marked by in birth? We see glimmers of it in her memoir, she opens the door just a tiny bit, by admitting to her compulsive shoplifting. But there is nothing of the deceits her husband discovers through her diaries. There is nothing of her habitual lies.
These Adrienne Rich quotes above, made me pause and think.
Molly Brodak’s father was a compulsive liar. Those of you who have read my memoir, SINS OF MY FATHER will know that my father was also a compulsive liar. And one of the questions I battled with in my memoir was how did a man who had so much success and power, who had lived a rich life driven by his own desire, had everything – a great job, a beautiful young wife, a home in a desirable seaside town in California, children who loved him – lose it all (drunk and homeless, he was deported back from the US and died alone on the floor of a B&B in a Devon town that meant nothing to him).
I wondered was it because he was so disconnected from himself? Sent to prep boarding school aged 7, was his chance to know himself squandered from the start? He joined a religious cult, where he could fuck freely with no accountability. Or after so many years of lying and dodging, did he begin to believe the lies – and so had no sense of his more authentic self? He did not recognise the voice, to know his true guiding light.
Or, and this is one of the most difficult questions to get my head around, are some people destined to a life on the street, to dying too young; is suicide their fate? Is suicide their particular truth?