Where have all the survivors gone?

I

seem to be in some sort of book-excavation phase. Books from my past, books which had a strong effect on me one way or another, will pop back into my mind, and because this is the age of the Internet, I can easily buy them used on Amazon for maybe one cent. The rest is shipping and handling.

These include Pathfinders, Gone With the Wind, A Brilliant Madness, Bitter Fame, and others, except I can't remember them 'coz I haven't had my coffee yet.

It's surprising how much these books have changed. Formerly brilliant and impressive works have turned to dust, while others, mysteriously, hold up. My perception of Pathfinders by Gail Sheehy was colored by the fact that, after selling a gazillion copies of her books, she was touched by scandal: she was caught distorting facts, making the data fit the thesis, mainly through creating composites (a little of this person, a little of that person, all shaken and stirred together to create the perfect "character": except that this was supposed to be non-fiction!).

The one I just received from Amazon seems to have turned into a foreign body in the 25 years or so since I took it out of the library. It's a prolonged anti-psychiatric rant called Too Much Anger, Too Many Tears: A Personal Triumph over Psychiatry by Janet and Paul Gotkin.

Janet Gotkin was an unfortunate young woman whose chronic misery and instability dragged her into the labyrinth of the American psychiatric system in the 1970s, where she was institutionalized in a state hospital dredged from Ken Kesey's worst nightmare. She was given dozens and dozens of rounds of shock treatment, numerous mind-slugging drugs, and subjected to useless psychoanalysis by patronizing/patriarchal psychiatrists.

Yes, I believe all this. I can even tolerate, sort-of, the melodramatic and novelesque treatment. Opening the book at random, I find this little bit of conversation:

"Dr. Sternfeld was very busy; the trip from his office took over an hour. He called almost every day, though, the nurses told me.

"You're very lucky to have a doctor who cares so much about you," they said.

I nodded, as the lurching of anger and abandonment ballooned inside me."

This book ends in the most unlikely way: after yet another suicide attempt through swallowing pills, Janet wakes up from a coma, and her mental illness has vanished: "When I woke up from the coma, I was truly happy to find myself still alive. I felt like a person who was rising from her death bed. You can't imagine how beautiful everything looks to me. The smallest, simplest things, Even the noise and dirt of this city."

So, is a near-fatal overdose "the answer", or was Janet Gotkin truly a phoenix mysteriously rising from her own ashes and transcending the horror of years of mistreatment? It puzzles me. No one beats schizophrenia overnight, if she was schizophrenic to begin with. The book went beyond fiction: it was a movie script, with the fragile, pain-ridden heroine sitting up on her death-bed and triumphing at the end while the music swells.

OK, this is a very long and roundabout way to get to my thesis. There was an epilogue added to this "new" edition, and I was jolted, but not surprised, to find that it was an update by Janet Gotkin.

Apparently, she had never had another episode of mental illness: but, in the interim, she had made the gruesome discovery that she was an incest survivor.

In her typical purple prose, she describes the torrential return of long-repressed memory: "The memories come, and continue to come, curtains of secrecy ripped aside, decades of blindness swept away. With each new memory, with each moment in time brought an agonizing consciousness, I find myself nodding in appalled recognition. "Yes, that is how it was," I say, as tears stream across my cheeks."

I'm not saying Janet Gotkin is lying about all this. She seems to believe she has found the Rosetta stone for decoding her decades of pain through the miracle of recovered memory.

There's only one fly in the ointment. All this was written in 1991.

Ah, the early '90s, when incest memories were front-page news, when Ellen Bass and Laura Davis made millions with their incest Bible, The Courage to Heal, when scatty-looking women went on Phil Donahue to talk about "alters" and demonic cults.

From women's magazines plastered with sensational articles about sadistic Dads, Satanic ritual and multiple personality disorder, which supposedly ran rife, we now have exactly nothing. No one is writing a thing about it. Maybe that's because there were lawsuits, and a formidable juggernaut called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (suspiciously, headed up by a couple whose daughter had "falsely" accused her father of incest. The daughter, a psychologist by trade, wrote a scathing book debunking the entire false memory movement.)

Personally, I think the false memory brigade with its complete refutation of the incest canon did a lot to push this issue back into the closet. Sexual abuse, when we refer to it at all, is something that happened to altar boys 40 years ago in the Catholic church. The sanctity of the nuclear family has more or less been restored.

It's called "recanting", and an awful lot of women must have done it. As with Janet Gotkin, the whole thing looks mighty murky to me.

I've been reviewing books for 25 years, and I think I know when facts are being manipulated (see Sheehy, above). The Gotkins don't just create sympathy for poor Janet, they paint her as a sort of latter-day Joan of Arc, sacrificed on the altar of heartless and dehumanizing psychiatry. To muddy the waters even further, she sometimes begs for a form of treatment which she frankly believes is barbaric:

"I want shock treatments," she said.

"Shock treatments?"

"I've been thinking about it. I don't want to go through all those years of torture and agony again. If shock treatments can lift me out of this episode of anxiety, then. . . "

Oh brother.

But in spite of her bizarre complicity in all this torture, the author seems to need to come up with an explanation, however delayed, as to why she got so sick in the first place. In 1991, the most prevalent explanation for everything that went wrong with women was incest. From a murmuring, it gradually escalated into a monumental scream: j'accuse!

Predictably, this didn't go down so well with families. It was civil war in most cases, with lawsuits ripping the fabric apart, and survivors mostly losing. This was because it was nearly impossible to verify memories, and in most cases there was no evidence that would hold up in court. Many survivors had their victories overturned, and Daddy was let out, grinning and glad-handing, proving to the world that he "would never" do such a thing to his daughter or anyone else.

But it happened, this toxic flood. I was there, I saw it. Women with vivid imaginations, Gotkin types, were most susceptible. In her case, she already saw herself as a sacrificial lamb, nearly losing her life that others might live. So the same thing must have happened to her that nearly destroyed millions of others.

OK, then: explain this to me. Where have all the survivors gone? Why are there no more memoirs of abuse, no more articles about dark memories flooding back, or multiple personality, or Satanic ritual abuse? What the hell happened?

Maybe everyone got sick of it, sick of the impossibility of proving it in court, and decided to just pick up their lives again. I don't know. But it's interesting to me that Gotkin was one of the incest crowd. I know I sound cynical; I know I sound like I don't believe all these women (and shouldn't we always believe women, especially women wounded by the system?).

But the truth is infinitely more complicated than that. It isn't a matter of a clean polarity, of either "yes to all memories" or "no to all memories". The truth is, when it comes to the veracity of what we call recovered memory, nobody really knows.

How did I arrive at this huge and perhaps unresolvable psychological question mark? I too was one of the incest crowd, utterly convinced that I had been horribly abused by my father. I had all sorts of therapeutic support and sympathy as I moved through the excruciating ordeal of recovering traumatic memories. The main result was that my family of origin never spoke to me again.

I was never hypnotized or coerced, as some women were (some of whom sued their therapists after the fact). But like most writers, I have exceptionally long emotional antennae, and I will pick up whatever vibe is dominant at the time. This will inevitably set me vibrating like a tuning fork.

So what happened to me? I don't know. It must've been something, something awfully big. But I am convinced a lot of those specific memories were either distorted or unintentionally/unconsciously constructed by a mind desperate to make sense of a baffling, unbearable pain. Add to that the powerful template of what looked like a giant social movement, gruesome women's stories coming at me from every direction, and, well. . .

It took a long time, but eventually I got past it all and took up my life again. It hadn't been a particularly enlightening experience. I could have done without it. And the cost had been astronomical, like losing an arm. Being completely ostracized from one's family, forever, is not a pleasant experience. There is no going back. Even if I threw myself on the ground before them, which I will never do, I would always be seen as the "bad guy", the one who did irreparable damage to the family by accusing a completely innocent man of a heinous crime.

It was ugly. So ugly it nearly did me in.

"I still hurt a lot, but I know that I am healing, from the inside out, slowly but cleanly, wounds open to the light instead of festering in darkness," Gotkin writes in a style that is both eloquent and distressingly purple. What played well in the early '90s is wince-inducing 20 years on. But I remember that myth, promulgated in nearly every incest book I ever read: all this horror and pain would inevitably lead us to "healing", "wholeness", and a renewed joy in life. This would be great if it ever really happened, but I never once saw an example. Most of the survivors I knew were obsessed with their "issues" and never resolved them. They retreated into a sort of emotional twilight before disappearing altogether. The "healing" we had all sought with such desperation was as theoretical and as impossible to prove as the dusty, woman-hating theories of Sigmund Freud.

I wonder where Gotkin is now. Sometimes I wonder if she has had a relapse. When she speaks of the agony of recovering her memories, it makes your scalp crawl:

"I wanted to be crazy, to be sick, to be dead. I wanted to cut my wrists, take pills, jump off a dam, lie down on the railroad tracks as the train pulled out of Grand Central Station. Anything to blot out this knowledge. 'How could this be?' I asked myself, over and over, an incantation against evil."

Gotkin is a little vague about who in her family actually abused her, but one wonders what the fallout was. Published in a memoir as "fact", these are immensely powerful allegations, and they aren't backed up by anything solid. Back then, memories were enough: for a while. Then the whole thing went haywire. It sputtered, spun around a few times, and disappeared.

The anti-psychiatry movement has been around for a long time, and it would have us believe that there are no good psychiatrists, no good drugs, no good therapy at all. In truth, I believe that human beings grope around, sometimes (though not always) with good intention, to try to help people whose brains have sprung like a tightly-wound coil. I can't believe all psychiatrists are sadists or patriarchal misogynists. Some of them are women, for God's sake (though my own experience tells me that female psychiatrists can be the worst oppressors of all).

The truth is, we don't understand mental illness very well because the brain is an exceedingly complex organ, an organ which must try to understand itself. We use our brain to understand our brain. Luckily our spleens don't have to do that. Genetics, environment, personality, family history, and (yes!) abuse all play vital roles in how a person's brain develops.

OK, here's the theory of the day. (It's my blog, and I'll theorize if I want to.) I think some people are born with a vulnerability for mental illness entwisted into their DNA, but if they are nurtured in a home which is loving and supportive, they may just escape the horror and turn into artists or opera singers or Steven Spielberg. But here's the problem. If you're born with a genetic predisposition, it's likely that those around you (especially your parents) also have this predisposition, which may be manifested in its full-blown form. So how do they know how to love and nurture an unusually sensitive, emotionally vulnerable child? Will they have the psychological supplies, when their illness already takes up so much space that it's more like a space-and-a-half?

Mental illness is so hated, dreaded, and abhorred in this culture that it spawns considerable self-hatred in those who endure it. This doesn't help in treatment, because it leads to some pretty powerful self-defeating behaviour. Often, addictions and other compulsive behaviours get tangled into the mix, making recovery difficult, if not impossible. I'm not blaming the victim here, just stating something that somehow never gets stated. Like Janet begging for shock treatments, a person with mental illness can be her own worst enemy. To get better, significantly better, you simply have to get on your own side.

I am tired now. This post is probably not very well-organized, but it's not an essay, just some thoughts, thoughts deeply distilled over many, many years. This is a monster topic for me, because it affected me so dramatically 20 years ago. Where are all the women who told their hair-raising stories in The Courage to Heal? Whither the survivors? What are their lives like today?

I can't say. I can only put one foot in front of the other.

Up north

My mother had a funny way of saying things

she'd pronounce them a little off,

and when she'd start talking about "going up north"

we knew she meant "up at Bondy"

her name for our paradise.



I don't know if the perceptions of children are
compressed because of their short time on earth,
or infinitely vast, as yet unimpeded by "you can't" and "don't".

"Up at Bondy" meant Nancy and Brian
and a couple of weeks of unlimited freedom
and running around in our bathing suits
jumping off the dock


the magic of July nights
of bullfrogs booming like bassoons

of lying face-up on the swell of the hill
and staring at stars ripped free of all veils,
with the eerie music of loon-flutes quivering.


I can't tell you about the smell of small-mouth bass
in a pail, fishy and sandy
and fried up in butter
and heady smells of bacon
and burnt coffee
and the perpetual barbecue.
Great slabs of meat, porterhouse steaks
and kippers for breakfast
I don't remember eating anything else
but potato chips and brandy snaps.


Bondi was playing horses with Nancy
(we wanted a horse so bad we could die)
we knew it would never happen
so we would BE horses
prance like wild things on the ridge,

not knowing we'd never
be this carefree again


I can't express a summer in my mind,
the smell of lakewater, Noxzema cream
on burnt skin,
and a Camelot built from wet sand.
I can't express a memory
of a red bathing suit
and a baby kingbird
somehow, impossibly sitting
on my outstretched hand

like some Bondi falcon.

I learned lore from Nancy
whose grandfather was an opera singer
and when it rained, we'd
climb up the shelves of the linen closet
into a hole, an attic trove
of old things, dusty costumes
and dried-out makeup kits
from Gilbert and Sullivan productions


a gramophone you had to crank
and impossibly old records:
Keep the Home Fires Burning
My Little Grey Home in the West
(and our favorite)
A Cornfield Medley
which was shockingly racist:
"Some folks say dat a nigger don't steal. . . "
We saw that the record
thick like a slab of slate
had grooves on only one side
No one had thought to record on the other side
and I was later to learn it was made
in the 1800s

when sound in a bottle was still a miracle.


The two weeks "up at Bondy" blew by too fast
Nancy and Brian went back to being
the owner's kids,
and even on this day they own it,
still own Bondi:


it exists in an unchanged form
that seems like time suspended.

Humans hang on to Paradise, to a
place or state of mind eternal
as if it represents the ultimate reward,
finally, finally letting down the burden
of constant change.


I would go back to Bondi,
I will go back to Bondi,
and I know I will find it pristine,
with a few things added, a horse arena here,
an indoor swimming pool there,
so people don't need to rely on the weather;
Nancy and Brian still live there, but they
aren't the Nancy and Brian of old,

nor can they be,

any more than I am that child who dreamed
she was a ridge runner

and held a bird in her hand.

http://www.bondi-cottage-resort.com/

Rocky, run

Like almost every girl I knew, I longed for a horse of my own. I'd read all the Marguerite Henry stories, Misty of Chincoteague, King of the Wind, and Walter Farley and Black Beauty, so I knew I understood them.

But I also knew I stood a fat chance of actually getting one: they cost too much money, my Dad kept saying; we'd have to board him; I'd never really had riding lessons and couldn't handle much more than an easy tourist trail.

All true.

So what was it that changed his mind? His business rival bought a horse for HIS daughter, and suddenly the race was on to find a tonier, more expensive

one.

How I ended up with Rocky (who was neigh-ther) was this. Dad got me a very beautiful but semi-wild two-year-old palomino mare named Pot 'o Gold. I discovered the first time I tried to ride her that she hated anyone getting on her back. When I put my foot in the stirrup, she took off.

Dad thought this was my fault. He had the vendor's daughter work with me, but the thing is, she was much more experienced, practically a trick rider, able to achieve a flying vault, catching Goldie just before her hindquarters faded off into

the sunset.

Finally we had to admit defeat. I couldn't have a horse. I was desolate. I kept nagging and whining and saying we could buy a better horse, a tamer horse. A horse I could handle, a horse I knew personally! Suddenly the light bulb went off over my

head.

At the Lazy J Ranch, where I spent most of my Saturdays riding the trails and helping the staff groom and muck out, I had a favorite, a strawberry roan named Rocky. I couldn't say exactly why I liked him so much: he wasn't much to look at, a bit stocky, Shetland pony genes poking through the one-quarter Quarter Horse of his

heritage.

Maybe because he was a rent-a-horse ridden by dozens of non-riders a day, he was stubborn. He did weird things. He pawed at streams until the water flew. He also pawed at mud.

He had a ridiculous whinny, sort of a show-off whinny, and when I chased him around the pasture with a bridle, he arched his neck and did a ridiculous takeoff of a show horse high-step. Just to annoy me, he pretended to spook at harmless things like gum wrappers.

He had a rubbery pink-and-grey nose, perfect for kissing. He was a shade over 14 hands, small enough for me to just hop on.

"I want Rocky," I told my Dad.

"You want Rocky? Can't we do better than that?"

"No. I'm used to him. He knows me."

My Dad was naive enough to offer the same amount for Rocky that he had paid for

Goldie. Horses were horses, weren't they?

It was the beginning of several years of idyllic moseying along beside the railroad tracks (and I have no idea how we handled the trains). Of picnic lunches in the fragrant grass, my girlfriend Shawne sitting behind me and hanging on tight as we bumped along.

Time stopped when I was with Rocky. I groomed his white-mottled red coat until it (sort-of) shone. I cleaned his feet with a hoof pick, tenderly removing stones. I would have braided his mane, but someone at the stable kept shaving it off so he looked like a merry-go-round horse.

There were a couple of hair-raising episodes with Rocky that were at odds with his implacable reputation. Once in a while in the summer I rode him the two miles or so from the stable where we boarded him (along with a bunch of tall Standardbred race horses: he became the stable mascot) to my house on a quiet street in

Chatham.

Neighbors were a little disconcerted by the sight of a horse on their street. Silverwood Dairies had stopped delivering milk by horse and wagon several years earlier; what was this nag doing on the street, leaving great steaming deposits to step over?

It was grand to promenade the street like that. Once I even took him to my high school, and he was an instant hit. It was the one time I felt popular.

Anyway, this particular time, he seemed to be perfectly content in our back yard mowing the lawn while my dog sniffed around his heels and (disgustingly) ate some of his poo.

As we had dinner, with the usual genteel classical music playing in the background, I suddenly heard a sound like coconuts being hit together. Buddle-up, buddle-up. We saw a reddish blur out the window.

My mother exclaimed, "Oh dear Lord, it's the horse."

Rocky had somehow broken free, and was high-tailing it back to the barn. Literally! His tail was held as high as an Arabian's, his head thrown back

majestically.

We jumped in the car in a panic, trying to stop him or at least get him to slow down. He was galloping flat-out in the exact centre of the road, getting more and more lathered. My Dad tried frantically to swerve him over to the shoulder so he wouldn't be hit.

When he saw the big barn full of Standardbreds, he immediately checked his pace. Threw up his massive head and let go with one of those ridiculous whinnies. Then trotted elegantly through the gate.

The other episode is not so funny, one of those things that ended well, but only just. I had a bad habit of riding Rocky in unusual places (railroad tracks?). One afternoon we clopped our way through a cow pasture where a gorgeous Jersey named Bambi lived. The mud was maybe an inch or two deep, no

big deal.

Then - I will never forget this, a feeling like an elevator dropping away beneath me. My horse slid down into an invisible bog, and was instantly mired up to his belly. I had no idea what to do but hold on as he bucked and heaved, trying to pull himself

out.

I wondered if I should try to get off, try to get help, get a rope or something, but no, Rocky insisted on lurching ever more violently to free himself. My heart was in my throat. I was sure he'd break his leg and have to be put to sleep.

Then, with a great shuddering heave and a sucking sound such as you've never heard, he was out. We both stood there trembling. He had his head down and I gasped with fear, wondering how he could have come through such a thing

unhurt.

Then, beginning at his nose, he began to shake himself, the great wave travelling from his head to his shoulders to his whole body to his tail. He must have taken shaking lessons from a wet dog. Remarkably, he seemed to be OK, though coated with glistening brown as if he had been dipped in chocolate.

I carefully hosed him down, though it took an hour, since he stopped me several times to shake everything off. I was so proud of him, so relieved, and my, didn't he look handsome, all wet, his sorrel coat glistening in the summer

sun.

Feeling that a reward was due, I turned him loose in the pasture. He walked around with his nose to the ground until he found a suitable patch of mud.

Carefully lowered himself down.

And rolled until he was so upholstered that I could barely tell he was a horse at all.

My love, she's like some raven

When I first moved to the Vancouver area, I liked to explore the maze of trails that began right outside my door. Witnessing the salmon spawning in a creek where high school kids threw stones at them was awesome enough. But then there were those birds.

I couldn't see them at first, and to be aware of them at all, I had to go off-road, so to speak, on to a trail that wasn't very well-developed. Hell, not developed at all. After a few hundred yards of firm-packed gravel, the ground began to give way under my feet.

It was spongy, and every so often a tiny trickle crossed the path, an actual stream making its way from who-knows-where to who-knows-where.

As the forest grew more dense, it gradually got darker: Bob Dylan's "darkness at the break of noon". There were strange sounds, ominous. Creeeeeeeak, creeeeeeeak.
Creeeeeeeeak, creeeeeeeak. It took me a while to realize that some of these old trees seemed as if they were about to give way.

I felt disoriented, not sure how I had got here. I expected to see a giant bear rearing up at me, something out of an ancient fairy tale. (Since then, bears have become much more aggressive, and confronting one in the woods is common.) I realized how Hansel and Gretel must have felt, or Little Red Riding Hood, ancient stories based on one of humanity`s worst fears: getting lost in the wild.

Then I heard it, or it came to my senses: Awwwwwk. Awwwwwwk. Awwwwwwk. Awwwwwk.

AWKHH!

I saw something flash overhead, something dark, a shiny black, almost iridescent, but couldn't tell what it was. A bat? I hate bats, fear and loathe them almost more than anything. I'd rather encounter a scorpion.

AWWWWKHH!

Then a conversation. Aukkkk! Aukaukaukaukauk. AUWWKKH! Aw. Aw. Aw. Aw. Awwwwwwk.

These were not crows, or if they were, they were Supercrows. Finally I got a good look at one when it perched on a high branch for a second. I thought to myself: it's Poe's nightmare, his embodiment of evil and dread. Once upon a midnight dreary, as I pondered weak and weary. . .

This creature was nearly as big as a chicken, with a spiky-looking ruff around its neck. Its bill was very long and pointed. It had an air of owning the place, of owning the whole forest. It was almost supernaturally shiny, so black it was blue, making me think of "raven-haired beauties" with dead-white skin, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty brought back to life.

My feet were sinking,and suddenly I was surrounded by evil-looking skunk cabbage that might have hosted trolls. I backed away slowly, step by frightened step, then turned and ran, every hair on my entire body standing on end.

Since then I have come to worship the auk-aukh as a kind of holy visitation. I even bought a stuffed animal of a raven made by the Audubon Society, which when gently squeezed emits the call of a live raven. I don't squeeze it when the grandkids are around.

But soft: what's this on the news? A white raven: how can it be? I`ve heard of Spirit Bears, of weird albino speciments popping up randomly, strangely, genetic mutations that never reproduce themselves. But the white ravens spotted on Qualicum Beach, Vancouver Island, seem to be forming a sort of coven.

Like the Hapsburgs I wrote about a few posts ago, it doesn`t seem possible they could mate, could actually produce issue. Their genes would be all scrambled, and they would somehow end up genetically backwards, married to themselves. But a raven, once it gets an idea into its sly avian head, can do just about anything it wants.

I own a bird, Jasper the lovebird, sweet and dependent, but once in a while he turns feisty and furious, throws a birdie tantrum, tears his cage apart. There is a theory that the dinosaurs didn`t disappear, but instead gradually evolved into birds. In case that seems far-fetched, just look at their scaly little feet, stare into that round black reptilian eye, and the theory begins to make sense.

A black harbinger of death, an aukkh aukkh in the woods, can suddenly turn even more eerie, can scare the living shit out of us by turning pure white. Some believe this is an omen for the end of the world. Others think it will magically bring humanity together.

When I go into the woods today, I'd better not go alone. I don't want to see one of these things, their feather shafts pink, their wings transparent, their eyes an eerie shade of blue. It`s just not natural.

It makes me wonder what Poe would think of the whole thing.

What do you want, anyway?

I have a friend - OK, he's a psychiatrist and probably doesn't know anything - who keeps asking me questions about the writing biz.

"Margaret," he intones (he looks a bit like Pee Wee Herman, in a neat grey suit and with equally strange diction), "if you've been published before, twice, and had almost universally good reviews, why don't you just take your most recent novel and hand it to your publisher and say, here, publish it?"

Why? Because after a couple of years, publishers in general don't know me from Adam.

I don't know exactly how, but I realized today that it happens to the best of us. I know a writer who wrote a novel years ago that was not only good, but great. It bordered on classic, and everyone predicted a brilliant career for her. She was shortlisted for international awards, much feted and touted as a sure thing.

It didn't happen.

Why didn't it happen? Because the writing biz is the most frustrating game in town. There are no rules except "know the right people", and "don't ever say you need to know the right people because it's a LIE, dammit!" (and you shouldn't say such an uncomplimentary thing, even if it is true).

Success is flukey. Some novels do well, but I've been a reviewer for 25 years and have reviewed some 350 books, and I can tell you right now that many of them are weak, too similar to be really noteworthy. They fit the mold, for sure, but they don't turn me on.

Every once in a while, a flukey book makes it (though not necessarily the author). Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts blew me away, because it was impossible to describe, involving three-dimensional sharks made of text suspended

in mid-air in dusty old

libraries.

Then there's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. Chalk this up to impossible: it's a semi-documentary bio about the life of dictator Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, complete with tiny fly-speck footnotes (footnotes?? Who can get away with footnotes except the hopelessly backward Victorian physician Oliver Sacks, who still uses a manual

typewriter?)

Aligned with this, entwined with this, is a passionate love story about hot-blooded Latina women and the saga of Oscar Wao, a nerdy overweight teenager who carries a Planet of the Apes lunch box.

The rest of them, well. . . that's why I stopped reviewing. They seemed to be what the industry was after - or not? Will we ever hear from Junot Diaz again, or will his next book be rushed into print and fall as flat as

Forrest Gump II?

I realize I risk ostracism just by daring to say anything negative about publishing. It jabs me whenever someone says, "Well, Margaret - when's your next book coming out?"

Like a lot of writers, I believe I have lots of good material that needs to be published. I have just completed a novel about the life and hot-blooded loves of silent screen legend Harold Lloyd (the "man on the clock" hanging 20 stories above the Model Ts swarming below). This novel has legs, and I know it. It has the potential to go all the way.

But it won't, because dozens of people will brush it off before I go into a depression, a depression I shouldn't have because it looks untidy and

obviously demonstrates that I can't stand the heat.

People say to me, "It must be possible to succeed. Look at Stephen King. Look at J. K. Rowling." No one knows that most writers reside at the bottom of a vast pyramid with only one or two writers (see above) at the top.

"Why don't you just ask other writers for tips on getting published? You know, have them read your stuff and make helpful comments."

It's like a politician saying to the opposition, "Hey, listen, I have all sorts of tips on how to get elected. Here!". The idea of writers reading each other's manuscripts hangs around, ludicrous as it is: even if it made sense, which it doesn't, we don't have TIME to do that, because we are busy writing

our own.

The only thing worse is when, after a reading or other literary event, someone comes slinking up to you with a damp manuscript quivering in their hand. "Would you. . . you know. . . "

"Would I - "

"Would you mind, you know?"

They don't even have to say what they want.

I have to tell them, "Sorry, I have so many commitments right now that I just can't do it, but best of luck."

"But how will I get it published?"

Here comes the hidden agenda. They don't want you to read their manuscript - they want you to GET IT PUBLISHED FOR THEM, to hand it to your publisher and say something like, "This is the best thing I've ever read, a sure-fire best seller. Publish it instead of my book, I don't need the publicity any more."

Geez.

Why can't this business be run like a business? Why must I still print out and snail-mail a 10-lb. manuscript to publishers, spending $15 or so, instead of e-mailing it and having them print it out (as if they don't have the money or time: hey, it's their business to scout out talent, isn't it?).

If anybody's reading this, which I doubt, be aware that I'm not taking pot-shots randomly or for fun. I have some real grievances, frustrations that nearly finished me. I also have some very good material which is entirely worthy of publishing. It weighs heavily on me, like a foetus that will soon

die and turn to stone.

There's still time for a live birth. But only just.



http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

The Ballad of Murphy G.

Inspired by a friend of mine, who enjoys writing doggerel, here's some catterel about an old friend who passed at the grand age of 17.

THE BALLAD OF MURPHY G.

I sing of Murphy, glad and proud
Whose meow could be so very loud.
Who loafed and purred in majesty
And honed his claws upon a tree.
When squirrels he saw, he meowed so strong
It sounded like a tiger’s song.
And dragonflies would hurry south
When Murphy caught them in his mouth.

White bib and mitties Murphy had,
And white tufts on his tootie-pads.
His weight in pounds we will not tell,
But as time passed, his tum-tum swelled.
His pads weren’t black, nor brown, nor green,
But the nicest pink you’ve ever seen.
His claws gave him the power and might
To thrash his pig both day and night.

He hated that black cat next door,
And in the yard they had a war.
Murphy chased him for three feet,
And black cat went home in defeat.
Up walls he ran when flashlights blinked,
And on his pants the fur was kinked.
He leaped on counters of great height
For doughnuts coated all in white.

But one sad day, the angels came,
And called our kitty by his name.
“Yes! I’ll come,” brave Murphy said,
“As long as I am amply fed.
I must have tuna every day,
And salmon in the month of May.”
”Good grief,” the God of Cats replied,
“I think the food I’d better hide.”
Yes, one sad day, the angels came
And home will never be the same.
The kitty box has disappeared.
The clean floors look and smell so weird.
And though his clumps we will not miss,
Nor puddles of disgusting piss,
Our Murph on furry wings will fly
To that Great Litter-box in the sky.

Don't give me none of your lip

If this guy looks freaky enough to scare the Elephant Man, that's because he is.

He represents one of the biggest genetic train wrecks in human history.

How do I get on to these things, for heaven's sake? I saw a photo of Queen Elizabeth II on the cover of Macleans, a national newsmagazine in Canada. She's on her semi-regular Royal Tour, causing very elderly ladies wearing hats with veils to totter out to the edge of the sidewalk while Liz does her indolent royal wave.

All these people, these royals, and I mean royals all over the damn world, are interrelated. It's scary, but they were bred like horses back then, bred for stamina and aggression and militancy and all those desirable traits.

What stunned me, in looking at the rather hideous cover pic of the Queen in her typical mauve polyester suit and gigantic frothy hat, was how much she is starting to look like her husband, Prince Phillip.

It's bad enough that Prince Charles now displays all the worst attributes of both his parents: long horsey face, thin sharp nose, bad teeth, and eyes set too close together. And worse somehow, that William and Harry, who used to have so much glamour and seemed to have broken the family curse for ugliness, are already starting to look too royal for comfort. Even Harry, long rumoured to be the offspring of Diana's illicit affair with her riding instructor, has the long razor nose, the close-set eyes and the vulpine Windsor smile.

OK then, this is a very long way around my topic. In googling around to get more info on royal intermarriage, I struck pay dirt: an article in a New Zealand newspaper called "The inbreeding that ruined the Hapsburgs".

"The Hapsburg dynasty (more correctly spelled Habsburg, but that's too hard to pronounce) was one of the most important and influential royal families in Europe dating back more than 500 years and producing rulers in Austria, Hungary, Belgium, the Netherlands and the German Empire."

These people might as well have all lived in one country. They were their own brothers and sisters. Generation upon generation of harrowingly close genetic unions gradually produced a host of medical problems, but since nobody knew what the fuck was going on, the political alliances based on blood continued, until. . .

Until Charles II of Spain, a monstrous bundle of mistakes who limped through a short life, unable to reproduce because he didn't know one end from the other. Fortunately, he was the end of the line for the Hapsburgs in Spain.

This guy lived around 1700, when every malformation was seen as demonic. And boy, was this guy demonic. Even royal portaits like the one above (and remember that these portraits had to be flattering, or the artist would literally lose his head) revealed a freakish person with a huge head, jutting jaw, small insectoid eyes, and what became known in history as the "Hapsburg lip".

This has nothing to do with back-sass, or even lips, but the extreme forward set of the jaw, so bad in poor Charlie's case that he could barely talk and couldn't chew his food. His development was so retarded that he couldn't speak until he was four, couldn't walk until age 8, and remained what was then called an imbecile, barely aware of his surroundings. He was kept in a sort of pupa for a few decades in the feverish hope that he would produce an heir. The relentless and horrific centuries-long mass of genetic deformities finally collapsed like a row of dominoes. Charles turned out to be the last of the Spanish line.

Scientists have tried to figure out his "inbreeding coefficient" and all that jazz, but suffice it to say it was ten times normal. Like the song says, he was his own grandpa:

"Charles' father, Philip IV, was the uncle of his mother, Mariana of Austria; his great-grandfather, Philip II, was also the uncle of his great-grandmother, Anna of Austria; and his grandmother, Maria Anna of Austria, was simultaneously his aunt."

Whew.

It would have benefited the poisoned gene pool of this dynasty to introduce the blood of some commoners, but they wouldn't have it. Convinced that interbreeding was the road to greatness, they manipulated alliances between uncles and nieces and cousins and half-siblings and great-grandparents (who must've started reproducing at 12), ignoring the fact that all these folk were beginning to look mighty peculiar.

Jay Leno had nothing on them. One of Charles' ancestors was nicknamed Hogmouth. They were ugly. I mean uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu-gly.

All this is odd, when you think about it. Through most of human history, people lived in little villages and never went anywhere. Inbreeding was a certainty, so why didn't the race die out like poor, impotent, imbecilic, drooling Charlie?

Is this the real reason why famous explorers struck out, going to ludicrous extremes and taking risks that only a madman would take?

I have often wondered if the explorers we know about, Cortez and Champlain and all dem guys, only represent the tip of the iceberg, the more-or-less successful ones who then established colonies in the New World. How many tried and failed, and never made it into the history books?

Lots, probably. But something in their genetic code was saying, "Get out, get out! Get OUT of here before you end up with a jaw you can set your coffee cup on."

Genealogy and mitochondrial DNA testing is all the rage now, with people anxious to find out they're related to Ben Franklin and Joan of Arc and such. Nobody wants Joe Blow the average schlub as the patriarch of their lineage, but in most cases it's probably true.

We can rest easy, however, in that none of us is related to Charles II, whose DNA coils were as damaged as a Slinky that's been run over by a Mack truck.

Today I am three

Can there be anything more idyllic, more innocent, more knowing than a three-year-old girl?

How about a three-year-old who is somehow, mysteriously, tied to you through blood and bone. How she came through me is a mystery, but it's a fact that without me, she would not exist.

When life gets me down, which it often does, I ponder this mystery: we all come out of nothing. Or seemingly nothing. All of Creation started with a void - it had to - and somehow ended up this teeming mess, this singing intricacy, overrun by crass humans but somehow still spellbindingly beautiful.

Two people meet, and sometimes nothing happens. End of story. Or they meet, and in the course of things, become sexually attracted to each other.

Sometimes it ends there.

But sometimes, when the act is unimpeded, a quarter-teaspoon of fluid, innocuous as spit, finds its way to a microscopic dot.

Result: a new human being, an individual the likes of which has never been seen before (and will never be seen again) in human history.

God creates each person once, then breaks the mould.

I search in Lauren's beaming three-year-old face for some trace of me, and I can't find it. None of my four grandkids look like me (see lovely brown-eyed Caitlin, above, with Grandma).

All strongly resemble the other side of the family. Except.

Except for Lauren's intensity, the way she comes at life full-throttle, six-guns blazing. In this, she does resemble me, but puts me to shame (but if I hadn't been squashed so flat as a child, so written off as worthless, perhaps I would have been the same way).

Perhaps this is my second chance. This echo generation, saving me. And saving the world from its awful lack-of-Laurenness.

Out of nothing, or seemingly nothing, out of a single act (an odd one, when you really think about it), "someone" comes into the world. Lauren has changed the world just by being in it; her valour and rambunctious humour in the face of juvenile diabetes (diagnosed at only 15 months) has been remarkable, an example.

All hail Lauren, only three, but capable of restoring my soul.

Letting off steam

Heigh-ho! It took me 24 hours, but I just saw an example of. . . irony. Here in my very own blog.

The theme of it is supposed to be boldness, genius and power and all that etc., when the truth is, I'm about as chickenhearted as they come.

Telling everyone not to make mistakes!

And rather bitterly.

But with a certain sincerity, at least in the moment.

I don't plan on quitting, just proceeding with a hard-hat on.

I DESERVE SUCCESS. I deserve it. Ha, la!

Keep on chanting it, and, Oprah-like, it will magically appear before my eyes.

Well, maybe. I have ironing to do.

Mstakes: don't make them!

For what I am about to say, may I be truly penitent. But I just have to get this out of me.

So many well-worn phrases represent philosophies that are just plain wrong. "God never gives us more than we can handle." "Everything happens for a reason." Etc.

The Holocaust, suicide, homicide, sexual violence, catastrophic oil spills that demolish wildlife and human livelihood. . . these are all part of God's sweet plan for us.

Right.

Early on in my so-called writing career, I was told, "don't be afraid to make lots of mistakes. Mistakes are a sign you're taking risks."

Correction: mistakes are proof that you are useless and incompetent. You may get away with one, but never two. It'll be the end of you. So watch your back, and don't take risks, ever.

My dream of being published for the first time came true in 2003, and at the same time my first grandchild was born. Pictures of me then show a radiantly smiling woman who looked ten years younger than her age.

The reviews were better than I could have dreamed of: nearly all were not only positive, but glowing. My publisher called me to tell me the reviews were "a miracle" (i.e., not brought about by my own work and sweat, but some sort of weird supernatural phenomenon). Then she laid it on me: my book had had the worst sales in their entire history.

It failed.

What had I done? I was not sure, but it was surely my fault: no one else was going to shoulder the blame for this, for sure.

Though I know I am inherently unlucky, it seemed the curse might be broken when the second contract came along. But gradually, I began to realize that this whole thing was going south, and there wasn't a thing I could do about it.

There were numerous problems, all tangled together, and every move I made to try to untangle them made me feel like a horse wrapped in barbed wire. Finally I just had to lie passive and let it cut me to death.

I made some mistakes, see. I did some things wrong! I didn't kowtow to the powers that be, because they did NOT have my best interests at heart. The people whom I thought were on my side turned their backs and calmly sided with the forces that were tearing me apart.

Finally I had to let go, and watch my dream sink.

There followed years of coping with profound depression and a catastrophic sense of failure. Oh, all right, we know what's going on: she's too sensitive to handle this tough business! If you can't stand the heat, and all that.

If I sound bitter and angry and devastated, yes, I am. It doesn't matter a whit, because only one person reads this blog anyway. I was driven out of my last blog by savage remarks, made by people whom I thought had been on my side and

even praised my work.

All this happened because. . . I made a mistake! I made an assumption which the others felt was ludicrously naive, or just a bald-faced lie. It seemed I had done something unforgiveable and could no longer hold up my head, so I got out of there while some of my skin was still intact.

Mistakes are dreadful, embarrassing, destructive, and often impossible to correct. They do irreversible damage, and you don't learn anything from them at all except that the world is a harsh, unforgiving place, and that sooner or later you will be crucified by the people whom you thought were your friends.

Don't make them. Trust me. You can't afford it.

Bad magic

If this photo seems a little misty, a little unreal, well, that's 'coz it is.

It is a chunk of my history, still bleeding and sore.

This is Park Street United Church in Chatham, Ontario, now taken over by St. Andrews, no doubt for financial reasons.

I attended this church from birth to ten

years.

When I was about six, I remember a neighbor boy saying, "There's a new minister coming. His name is Horse Burg."

He was close. The Rev. Russell Horsburgh was a man for his season, in many ways embodying the growing ferment in modern religion: social issues were bubbling up to the surface, and black people were actually starting to attend (though most of the congregation was appalled).

Most of all, Rev. Horsburgh wanted to create some new programs for the young people, who up to now had sat on their hands and yawned.

Yes. 1960: the verge of an explosion, though no one knew it at the time. We were lucky to have him, apparently, because he represented the "coming thing". He was cutting edge, just what our poky old church needed to jolt it

into life.

At first, everything went well. Hmmm - fairly well. I was six, so I didn't understand a lot of the murmurings that were going on. Some of the congregation disapproved of what Rev. Horsburgh was doing with his youth group. He was actually including kids who were "underprivileged", from "broken homes" (i.e. homes where Mom worked). At one point, to everyone's horror, he gave a series of talks on teen sexuality. No one knew how to stop him.

I only remember a few things, but they really stand out: a friend of my Dad called him a "psychopath" (a word I wasn't familiar with, and only understood in retrospect). My mother once murmured to her friend, "They found empty bottles in the basement, and cigarette butts. . . and worse." Only in retrospect did I realize the reference must have been to condoms.

So the young people were having sex in the basement? Evidently.

I remember also leaving choir practice and heading for my Dad's car. I saw several very inebriated teenage boys lurching around and saying things like, "Hey, where's the booze?" "You're alreadly plastered!" "Hey, Boozy Bozo." "Where's the Rev?" "Let's have one for the Rev."

Another time, on Sunday morning, the Rev suddenly exploded and began to rant about "mechanical men". "We're all mechanical men. Who wants to be a mechanical man?" he repeated, pointing his finger around the sanctuary.

The strangest thing of all was a church bulletin, usually typed out and mimeographed by the church secretary. But this one had a whole page covered with x's, blotted out. My brother Walt, 20 years old and a total cynic, held the page up to the window and began to read what it said: a quote from Martin Luther's infamous

tirade.

"I understand that this is the week for the church collection, and many of you do not want to give a thing. You ungrateful people should be ashamed of yourselves. . . I am sorry I ever freed you from the tyrants and the papists. You ungrateful beasts, you are not worthy of the treasure of the gospel. If you don't improve, I will stop preaching rather than cast pearls before swine."

Signed: Martin Luther

Russell Horsburgh

Obviously, something bad was going on. Bad bad. Before long, the villagers with the flaming torches closed in. Horsburgh was eventually convicted of encouraging sexual activity among minors, and sentenced to a year in jail. He got out after a few months, and gradually a pro-Horsburgh faction began to grow.

By the time he died in 1971, he had become something of a hero, a misunderstood saint who was only trying to help those poor kids learn about birth control. Or something.

I remember a frightening man who became increasingly hostile and paranoid. Did he do all the things he was accused of? I don't know. I only know I didn't want to go to church any more because he scared the hell out of me.

Seeing this picture of Park Street United (I almost wrote "Untied") woke up feelings from decades back. I googled around for Chatham sites, and even the names of streets made the hair on my arms stand up. I had buried so much.

Rev. Horsburgh became a character in my second novel Mallory, only this time he was purely evil and corrupt. Perhaps something in my soul needed to see him

that way.

A few years ago, the church I was attending was ripped off by a fraud, a minister who had no real credentials and no pastor's heart. He was a travelling salesman who had already ruined other congregations: so why didn't we find out before we hired him?

It hurt me, gored me, because I had already been hurt in this vulnerable place as a young child. I was six. Why was it happening again?

Why are people so stupid about religion?

What sick needs are met, or not met, by this casual manipulation of power? For I have never known a minister who didn't need power.

Why do I still long to find a place, an oasis, a spring in the wilderness that will quench my agonizing thirst?

Ig-pay Atin-lay

Jesus, I was happy to find this:

a whole site about "Latin Phrases in Common Usage in English". Not Latin as in Latino, i.e. Desi Arnaz, Tony Orlando, Geraldo, and, well, you get my drift, but Latin Latin, the one we all sent up in school. Oot-fray Oops-lay.

I was good at Latin. I think the year I excelled at Latin was the last year it was ever taught.

It's just so cool. You can figure out root words from it, like, well. . . capybara or something.

There were a million or so phrases here, so I just took a yellow highlighter to some of the neat-o ones. So now it's time to play. . . GUESS THE LATIN PHRASE!

I'll give the real answer, then you can give your lame, inaccurate one. Does that seem fair?

OK, Phrase 1: A Posteriori. Well, what does that mean, class? Yes! That's right! Somebody's bum, probably a very fat one. Call Jenny Craig.

Annus Bisextus. This is either leap year, or the year we leap into bisexual activity and end up on Oprah pushing a scandalous memoir.

Here's one. Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus. This has something to do with Harry Potter, and we don't like mega-sellers, so we'll leave it alone.

Homo nudus cum nuda iacebat. This might be erotic without the iacebat, which is about as sexy as wombat.

I'll group the next two, even though they have nothing in common: In Nubibus, and In Pontificalibus. This may be the origin of Supercalifragilistic, etc.

Ipse Dixit. Drinking out of a Dixie cup.

Membrum Virile. Too obvious.

Mitto Tibi Navem Prora Puppique Carentem. What the hell? This qualifies as "common useage"? By whom, some sociopathic professor who never goes out of his study?

Vita Mutatur, non tollitur. This has something to do with mutation into something you can't tolerate. Or maybe it's your dog.

Add up your score, now!

Seventeen: Go to the head of the class!
Four: Good effort.

1/2: What the fuck is wrong with you?

Why I quit AA

The Tyranny of God's Will: Why I Quit AA

The other day I was lurking around in the children’s section of my favorite bookstore, trying to figure out what a four-year-old grandgirl might want for her birthday. Flipping through the $30 board books and propaganda about toilet training and environmentalism, I heard someone call my name.

I looked up. Oh, hi, Jim. Oh, I’m doing OK. Yes, really. Just doing a little shopping here. No, really, I’m OK. How are you?

It’s hard to be looked at with a mixture of embarrassment and pity, but that’s what I was seeing in Jim’s eyes. Clearly he didn’t want to run into me, as he had been making certain assumptions: that I had either “gone back out” and was drinking again, or else was in such a state of “dry drunk” rampage that I was making myself and everyone around me miserable.

Welcome to the wonderful world of an ex-AA. As with an ex-con, the sense of ensnarement never ends, at least not without a Velcro ripping-away and endless guilt.

There was a time when I needed AA like I needed to breathe. Yes, I am a real alcoholic, and I didn’t fully realize it until I crawled into a meeting on my belly in 1990. Scared sober, I became enmeshed in an organization that quickly took over my life. Moreover, the more embroiled I became, the greater the praise heaped upon me. If I went to a meeting every day, I was a “good” AA member; more than once per day, and I was a spiritual giant.

It’s often said at meetings that you never graduate. This might be OK if I at least had a sense of moving on to another level, but this is discouraged. People with 20 years sober are supposed to say at meetings (whether they feel it or not) that they are at exactly the same level as the newcomers, and are only one drink away from disaster.

I agree with this part: I’ll never be safe to drink again, and I’d better not forget it. After years and years of having this fact jackhammered into my head, I think I’ve accepted it (for after all, “acceptance is the answer to all my problems today”).

From the very beginning, I was disturbed by certain pervasive beliefs in the organization. Conformity is one. Don’t ever speak outside the pre-set AA rhetoric, or other people will assume you’re not doing it right, fighting the mighty and immutable truths of sobriety. There is such a thing as AA dogma, often promoted by what is called the elder statesmen: one elderly man, a veteran of World War II, came to the same meeting at noon every day (supplementing it with evening meetings nearly every night) and talked at length about The War. He talked about The War as it applied to AA, of course, about how he drank his way through the horrors of the battlefield (who wouldn’t?), came home to a wrecked life, and began to set himself straight on the Road of Happy Destiny.

I can’t begrudge an old man the comfort and safety of sobriety, but why do exactly the same dynamics have to apply to a 15-year-old kid? In AA, one size fits all, and if it doesn’t fit, YOU are made to fit yourself to it. If you ever hear a criticism, it’s always couched in terms of “well, I used to object to this and that” (I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind, but now I see). But glory hallelujah, now I see the light.

The 12 steps, forged in the ‘30s by a failed stockbroker and an inebriated doctor, are all about breaking the will, surrender, and absolute reliance on God “as we understood Him”. Though the founders were in some ways quite spiritually evolved, leaving the door open to diverse interpretations of the divine, the actual practice of the program involves the God of Sunday school and revival meetings and “that old-time religion”. As usual, the practice is light-years removed from the original text.

We constantly hear things like “ninety meetings in ninety days”, “it works if you work it”, and reams of other cute sayings (my favorite of many acronyms: sober stands for “son-of-a-bitch, everything’s real!”). None of these are found in the main text of Alcoholics Anonymous, usually known as the Big Book. Though many members preface everything with “the Big Book says”, their interpretations are often pretty far off the actual content.

But that’s not what made me quit.

Though there was one defining crisis that caused the actual split, there had been a steady accumulation of episodes that disturbed me. No one seemed to be willing to talk to me about any of this, as they were too busy going on and on about humility, surrender and the “incredible journey”. (Many AA members I knew literally had no friends or even business associates outside the program, and had brought their spouses and children on-board. Those who didn’t usually ended up divorced: AA widows abound, and affairs rage in spite of the organization’s unrealistically pure motives.)

Item: I was a couple of years in, doing well, stable, sober, and going to five or six meetings a week. Anything that bothered me about AA and its principles was relegated to some sort of seething pit of doubt that was without question my fault, due to my arrogance, lack of surrender and refusal to absolutely rely on God.

For you see, “everything happens for a reason”, everything happens “the way it’s supposed to happen”. (When my son’s roommate was savagely kicked to death outside a bar, an AA member I knew said it was “all part of God’s plan.”) You hear this at nearly every meeting. Though I didn’t voice my objection, because you don’t do that at meetings, this seemed like passivity to me. “Self-will run riot” was the ultimate evil, but it often seemed that having any individual will at all was somewhere between a sin and a crime.

My friend Louise told me this story: she had been horribly abused as a child, bullied by a sexual tyrant who was now beginning to abuse his grandchildren. As she sat around a campfire meeting, an exclusive club in which your deepest feelings were expected to be revealed, she finally shared the agonizing decision she had made: “I’m going to lay charges against my Dad.”

There was a brief, embarrassed silence, followed by this from the meeting’s ringleader: “Louise. . . I believe you have a resentment.”

There followed a long discussion (or rather, a series of uninterrupted soliloquys: AA doesn’t do “cross-talk”) about how Louise had to surrender, let go of her anger, forgive. This was what she “should” do. I met her several months later and asked her how she was doing. “Much better. I’ve left the program. I was tired of twisting myself into a pretzel.”

Another episode, even more harrowing, involved a young woman who had been systematically tortured by her father. Her sponsor told her she must pray for the person who abused her, and wish for him everything she would want for herself. If she forced herself to keep doing this for long enough, she would actually want these things for him and feel mercy and forgiveness towards him. She was also told during her Step 5 (the confessional step) that she must always look for her part in everything that ever happened to her. She wrenched her brain around trying to figure out what her part was in being sodomized at five.

She stood up at the meeting, looking fragile as glass, with tears running down her face. “I just don’t know how to make amends to my Dad. My sponsor says I’ll feel so much better if I do. But I feel like killing myself. I guess I’m just a lousy AA member. This is supposed to work! I’m not supposed to feel this way. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”

I would have talked to her after the meeting (God knows what I would have said) except that a phalanx of members swarmed her afterwards, eager to make her case fit the unquestioned (and unquestionable) model. I wonder what happened, if she ended up like Hannah whose background was similar. Unable to endure what had happened to her, she committed suicide. Members talked about “people with grave emotional and mental disorders”, and carried on.

If I am painting AA too darkly, if I am leaving out the tremendous compassion I found at those early meetings, then I apologize. But as time went on, I found I couldn’t keep the dogma fresh. Except for some of the stories in the back, the Big Book has not changed since its first printing 70-some years ago. What other self-help program wouldn’t update itself in so many decades?

What about all the discoveries we’ve made about family dynamics, about heredity, about mental illness? What about issues of race, of gender, of sexual orientation? (There are a few “gay AA” meetings in which members are held in quarantine. But in the general assembly they have to keep their mouths shut. I once saw a man at an open meeting refer to coming out, prompting an old geezer to literally stomp out of the meeting saying, “I didn’t know this was a meeting for fags.”) No, it’s all swept into the great gulf: obviously the program “works if you work it”, so why make any changes?

But I have come to believe that if the program works, it is because people sublimate their individuality, their power to differ, discern and object. The fact that the 12 steps have been applied to every addiction and disorder in existence alarms me, as if the steps truly are the holy grail of recovery, unassailable, irreplaceable, and beyond question.

My irritability mounting as the years went on, I finally hit a real crisis in 2005. I had suffered from some kind of psychiatric disorder all my life, and in spite of years of good remission I feared a return, but was repeatedly told in AA that it would never bother me again if I stayed sober and constantly relied on God. It was obvious to them (though not to me) that it had all been caused by the demon alcohol.

I secretly took two drugs to control my whatever-it-is (and in all that time I’d never had a correct diagnosis, because the psychiatric system is so incompetent, abusive and full of shit that it deserves to be torn down forever). Suddenly I learned over the ‘net that both these drugs had been recalled at the same time. My doctor had no idea this had happened. So I was left with a choice: try something new, as my doctor recommended, or go “drug free”, as all my AA friends had been urging me to do.

My first reaction was a huge flush of euphoria, of tremendous energy, and an eerie turning back of the clock. I had never had so many compliments about my appearance: I looked ten years younger! Looking back on photos of that time, my eyes were like pinwheels and I was constantly beaming, but apparently no one thought there was anything wrong with this.

Oh, and the compliments on finally being “clean”! “Oh, thank God you’re finally off all that stuff.” “I knew you could do it!” “See, you don’t need to lean on pills because you have God in your life.”

My sleep was whittled down slowly, but by the time I was down to two hours, strange things were starting to happen. In deep hypnosis (by a friend who didn’t know what he was doing), I had an encounter with the Divine that was completely shattering. Almost at the cost of my life, I learned that “meeting God” isn’t at all peaceful or pleasant. The ancient belief that we will die if we see God face-to-face turned out to be true.

The sickening free-fall that followed, the dive into a depression that pushed me below ground, is beyond my powers to describe. It was three years before I began to feel like a human being again. I am now on five drugs and have finally found a decent, competent psychiatrist on the recommendation of a friend. I no longer take medical advice from people who aren’t doctors or try to “heal myself” on milk thistle or coffee grounds But when I think how close I came to giving up and committing suicide, it makes me shudder.

AA did not help me during the most harrowing time of my life. All I got was more unhelpful rhetoric. I wasn’t surrendering, I wasn’t practicing the principles, I wasn’t adhering to the tenet of “no mind-altering substances” (another thing that’s not in the Big Book, but often “quoted” by members with a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other).

In other words, it was my lack of commitment that had made this happen. Almost everyone assumed I had “slipped” and was drinking again (which I wasn't – I had a healthy terror of the stuff by then). At first it was subtle, but then I felt roped off, excluded, unable to strike up a conversation with anyone. I stood in the crowd after meetings looking at a lot of turned backs. Even my sponsor always seemed to be busy.

I had been a loyal, sober member of the program for 15 years.

It didn’t really occur to me, because I had been so thoroughly indoctrinated, that there were other, equally effective ways to be peacefully sober. So I ventured out. I rediscovered a close friend who had also dropped out, and we compared notes. I began to realize that in any other case, if a human being were relentlessly exposed to the same simplistic information over and over and over again, it would be reasonable to assume they “got it” and wouldn’t need any more exposure. Do we go to Sunday school until we’re 47? Do we need to have the Golden Rule blasted into our ears by loudspeaker every morning?

OK, I realize that if AA no longer means what it used to, I don’t have to attend. But the guilt still sometimes jabs at me like pinpricks, even two years after I left. The pity in Jim’s eyes, the sense of “oh, she’s going to fly apart at any minute” was palpable. In his view, there is simply no way that an alcoholic can ever stay sober and be happy and productive (though the program is not very big on “productive” and even seems to discourage normal ambition) without relentless exposure to the principles of the program.

I hope I don’t drink again, but I know there is no guarantee I won’t. I am profoundly committed to the sober life. I do appreciate what I was able to learn from my many years in AA, but I don’t think I’ll attend meetings again unless my view changes or I find myself in a dangerously slippery place. And if I do, I will not expect “fellowship” or any kind of a welcome. I can imagine what they would think if they saw me again: some smug or even pitying version of “I told you so”.

I no longer see AA recovery as real recovery: as with “that old-time religion”, no one questions the tenets, assuming they are infallible. Longtime members creep me out. They are broken records of recovery, parrots fed on the same bland diet, grateful to be huddling together in a place where everyone accepts them and nothing ever changes.

But that’s not life. Things don’t stand still except in old Jimmy Cagney movies, forever frozen in time. Life necessitates constant adaptation to change which is often unexpected, wrenching and unwelcome. But we are not taught that in AA. We are taught to rely absolutely on God “as we understood Him”, to believe that everything happens for a reason. When adversity hits, we’re told it’s “all in God’s plan”.

If this is so, then I think I’ll make a plan of my own.