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It was the 1950s, a time of calm, a time when all things were new and everything seemed possible. A few years before, a noble war had been won, and now life had returned to normal. For one little boy, however, life had become anything but "normal." To all appearances, he and his family lived an almost idyllic life. The father was a respected professor, the mother a witty and elegant lady, someone everyone loved. They were parents to three bright, smiling children: two boys and a girl. They lived on a sunny street in a small college town nestled neatly in a leafy valley. They gave parties, hosted picnics, went to church—just like their neighbors. To all appearances, their life seemed ideal. But it was, in fact, all appearances. Lineage, tradition, making the right impression—these were matters of great importance, especially to the mother. But behind the facade this family had created lurked secrets so dark, so painful for this one little boy, that his life would never be the same. It is through the eyes of that boy—a grown man now, revisiting that time—that we see this seemingly serene world and watch as it slowly comes completely and irrevocably undone. Beautifully written, often humorous, sometimes sweet, ultimately shocking, this is a son's story of looking back with both love and anger at the parents who gave him life and then robbed him of it, who created his world and then destroyed it. As author Lee Smith, who knew this world and this family, observed, "Alcohol may be the real villain in this pain-permeated, exquisitely written memoir of childhood—but it is also filled with absolutely dead-on social commentary of this very particular time and place. A brave, haunting, riveting book."
Robert Goolrick's memoir is heart rending, but more importantly it is so blatantly honest that it simply cannot be dismissed. After all, what makes a memoir succeed is total honesty. If the author is lucky, the unburdening of his soul will engender the passion and even the literary skills necessary to convey the truth with artistry and power. In my opinion, Goolrick wrestled hard to grasp the elusive realities of his life; once realized, those truths demanded expression. He must have known when he sat down at his computer to write a memoir, that the terror of his past would reveal itself to him incrementally. The ensuing process would explain why seemingly good people -- the people we love and need -- do bad things. In the end, he came to realize, not only how comprehensive was the damage done to him, but also how hard it is for one to acknowledge man's inhumanity, when the human psyche itself is naturally so conflicted.More than anything man wants to love and be loved, and he depends upon his parents for the satisfaction of that need. Yet man is also driven by a desire to understand the world he lives in or "truth," as most of us would label that need. An intelligent, compassionate, caring young person, Robert earnestly tried to understand what could possibly drive a human being to perversity and cruelty, but at the same time he also wanted to be loved by the perpetrators of the despicable acts he didn't understand. For most of his life, he attempted to balance his need for love from his parents with his corresponding desire for truth. Finally, for the purpose of healing or cleansing or freedom, or whatever one wants to call it, he needed to grapple with the past, for his own understanding more than anything. In the process he had to face the devastating effect of "soul murder" on the human psyche in general and on himself. This is a complex story of one man's journey to individuation and his unabashed admission that given his fate, wholeness like the entire truth, is in the final analysis elusive. All man can hope for is that the truths he uncovers in his own journey will help others and thus spare victims the anguish he was unable to overcome.Due to the complexity of his life led in a household where the truths of family life were concealed by elaborate facades so that the entire community fell prey to the fabrications of his parents for whom image was more important than understanding, young Robert was confused as to who his parents really were or what he was about. Goolrick attributes their lives of alcoholism and theatrical displays to their insecurities and personal failures. His mother was not employed, as was the pattern for young southern women of her time; the father was a mediocre professor of third rate courses. After failing at writing novels or poetry, both parents, although intelligent, possessed little in the way of inner resources to buttress the anxiety and disillusionment of their provincial lives. They simply didn't measure up to the goals they both had set and thus retreated into alcoholism and despair.Robert notes that his parents were much admired for their sophistication, beauty and intelligence. Early on, his siblings and he regarded them as admirable. However there are clues to domestic turmoil when his brother is expelled from Williams College, has a nervous breakdown at 35, and when Robert, too, has a psychotic break at 35 and attempts suicide. Goolrick describes a southern culture of the fifties and sixties that emulated the frenetic lives of Zelda and F.Scott Fizgerald. People fall down drunk; people throw up on each other and on each other's floors, people drink fashionable drinks, and good hosts know how to mix them. People dress for the cocktail hour in satin and silk, gloves and dark suits. People are elegant, turned out like debutantes for others to admire and listen to their entertaining anecdotes. This was social success, this achievement of desultory sophistication. People liked that; they sought that.As intangible as the entire truth of his personal history was to Goolrick, he strived throughout his life to understand, not only what the essence of his parents' personalities were, but also what his own deeper substance was. He fastens on a key incident in his parents' past where the mother returns home under ambiguous circumstances to change a party dress that has been destroyed by cigarette ashes. Although the boy does not understand the significance of the burned spot on his mother's dress, he intuitively knows that the truth behind the incident is dark, another clue to the depravity behind his parents' masks of dignity and grace. Thus, in writing his memoir, he recalls their emotional and verbal abuse, their cruelties of omission and commission. He recounts how he purchased the ancestral home for his parents but never received so much as an acknowledgement of his gift. He recognizes that eventually "we become the burden of ourselves." Eventually man must accept what he is, without excuses and without euphemisms. Just as his mother was never satisfied with her lot, he has his own despair to contend with on a daily basis, and there is no respite from it. After being in the "bin" (mental hospital), he recognizes, "you feel the need to justify yourself," something he has spent his life doing to no avail, but which perhaps his memoir will achieve, when he and others examine his life on a deeper level. His grasp that "life goes in bad directions when your heart is asleep" acknowledges how important love is and why betrayal by those you love renders one incapable of love. When Robert Goolrick accepts that he is so damaged he cannot love others or, more poignantly, himself, he no longer "shops to buy things that will complete him." He reveals that he has never found happiness, nor does he expect to. His life has been miserable and without fulfillment. He has figuratively "measured out his life with coffee spoons." He realizes that when he set his grandmother's curtains on fire or when he sought pleasure in one night stands or drugging or drinking, that he was just trying to divert himself from the pain of his own failure to live life with any hope of happiness.He ponders why he drinks so much, does drugs, has promiscuous sex with both genders, removes himself from opportunities at self-disclosure or intimacy or vulnerability. He undergoes therapy, he asks others about their impressions of him, he endures the advanced psychoanalysis of a mental hospital, all in an effort to understand what happened to him to make him unable to experience pleasure, to regard his body with disgust and shame, to remove himself from others and enjoy the isolation of being in a foreign place without anyone knowing where he is, and of defiling his body with a razor for the purpose of an emotional high he doesn't even understand. A pariah, he seeks to know why and how he has become the kind of man who would do the things he does. Although Goolrick knows the explicit cause of his isolation, despair and shame, he carefully maneuvers the story line by alternating past and present chronology until it is the appropriate time to reveal the cause of his alienation. This he does masterfully.The central question of the book is how does one go on and try to live when the horror of a pivotal experience derails him. How does one continue the banal steps of an ordinary life that require will and energy in the face of terrible confusion and despair? He marvels that people manage to make their lives work for them. As for him, he has no illusions. He suffers every day and goes to great efforts to calm his body into submission with a gargantuan medical cocktail to treat his various neuroses. In beautifully worded, moving passages of stream-of-consciousness, poetic, rhetorical questions, he asks what it takes to live, to go on, to survive unspeakable emotional betrayal.Goolrick claims that people are sensual, sexual; they desire pleasure. He is unable to experience those pleasures. For this deprivation, he is still angry and rightfully so. Because he can remember when he, too, had those normal yearnings and the hope that he would be able to express them, he asserts the truth of his past in the hopes that no young man of promise will ever experience the same, so that no young father will violate those for whom he is responsible. In this respect, Goolrick achieves a triumph over darkness in addressing a problem too often shrouded in secrecy. He is an advocate, and his words ring true, even if sometimes the truth is almost impossible to accept because it is so terrible.The language in this book is raw but powerful. Sometimes it is poetic. Sometimes the syntax is off a bit, almost amateurish, but not very often. Most of the time the books is original in scope, fiery in passion, solid in its observations about life, and compassionate in its descriptions of those doomed or hurt by the selfishness or depravity of others.Marjorie MeyerleColorado WriterAuthor of "Hungry Heart"
