“Sometimes”: An Honest Reflection
Emotions
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When I was molested by my dad’s work colleague’s son when I was nine in my own room while his and my parents continued to eat dinner, I felt trapped and abandoned and, when I told my mom years later what happened she told me I had made it up and refused to talk about it. I could go on and on. Life was not easy, not emotionally anyway, even if it was easy externally (sort of). I was a rich kid who went to private schools and had all the stuff so generally no one took me seriously or cared if I seemed off or complained. I learned to do what Mom and Dad did: Shove the emotions down, push it all under the rug, deny it existed, pretend it was not happening.
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Sometimes I want to write fiction and I just don’t have the energy, emotional bandwidth or concentration to do it. Sometimes I feel too captured by “Harm OCD” or else The Past, particularly my pre-sober past (before September 24th, 2010). The things I did, the women I treated horribly, the anger and rage, the resentment, the feelings of emotional abandonment.
I want to start a new novel but I just don’t have the energy for that right now. Once that train gets going it’s very hard to stop and I usually ride it straight across the American landscape of my mind without pausing, crossing all kinds of geographical and geological fantasies stretching over the course of months and months and months until finally the train pulls slowly into the station somewhere in Manhattan (Hell’s Kitchen? The Bowery? Tribecca?) and I get off, confused, delighted and exhausted, feeling at once as if I emotionally climaxed and yet also as if I am dead to the world.
Writing a novel, for me, is not exactly a “fun” experience; I’d call it more a feeling of urgency, necessity and importance. It’s my main form of communication which is unfortunate because not that many people read my five published books. (Up top of essay for link)
Or I feel like compiling a collection of my diaries which I studiously kept during the 23 months my mom and I cared for my father as he was dying of cancer from 2021 to 2023 (he died June 2, 2023, which means insanely it’s been three years early next month). But that, too, I can’t seem to dredge up the energy for. All told I compiled the equivalent of 750 full standard manuscript pages’ worth of diaries during that intense, exhausting two-year period. (A year ago I added all the diaries together into a Word.doc and counted.)
Every time I think about doing it I feel heavy and scared, as if I’m still not ready to face those emotions and fears, not ready to fully psychologically dive back into that morass of manic misery. (The experience was an interesting mixture of beauty and misery for all three of us, me, my mom and my father.)
On top of all of this I recently went back and reworked an autobiographical novel which I have worked on since around 2017 and I still think is likely my strongest work. It’s easily the most raw, honest, dark, deep, hardcore and revelatory writing I’ve ever done. It centers around my first American hitchhiking adventure when I was 23 years old, circa 2006, and also includes my first experience in New York City.
These were still very much The Drinking Years and much of the novel is not pretty. It’s interspersed with backstory action scenes (whole chapters) showing the narrator’s childhood which is equally not pretty. Much of the conflict centers around the narrator and his complex, rugged relationship with his mother. And since the novel is perhaps 80% autobiography, perhaps 15% made up whole cloth and say 5% who the fuck knows…my mom of course feels accused, implicated, almost literarily assaulted.
I made the mistake (maybe?) of emailing my mom about the novel (which she has not read and probably never will) and this led predictably and inevitably to conflict between me and mom. The old tried and true: Where do you draw the line between art, memoir, truth, fact, fiction, memory, My Story vs Her Story, Morality, ethics, etc. For many writers this can be a very fine line to walk. I have gotten my hands burned at the fire in this regard more than once, with an ex-girlfriend, a former friend, and my mom. (Read my essay on that at top of essay.)
My mom and I have since worked things out and she has agreed to let me publish the novel which I am deeply thankful for because, as I said, I think it’s some of my best writing. When originally composing the first draft—while visiting NYC in 2017, two years before I actually moved there, when I was still with my ex—I’d been reading Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 epic, Freedom.
Franzen loves deep backstory and thorough characterization and he teases out the complexity of relationships and he loves going on long tangents with inner monologues and he tends to explain people on the page in terms of where they came from. And so this approach bled into my novel, which is part of the reason the structure is the way it is: Twining alternate chapters of backstory with the current story (which is informed by the backstory).
As readers learn more about the narrator’s childhood, they understand more and more why he behaves the way he does as an adult in the current story. History. Context. The past explaining the present. The Backstory Wound.
Here’s the fundamental problem with me and my mom. It’s this simple: She lives in her own fantasy world and I live (often unfortunately) in Reality.
Let me explain.
My mom’s childhood was awful. That’s actually a generous understatement. Long story very short: Her older sister got pregnant in high school and left; her older brother took off thumbing up to San Francisco at age 14; her mom had a sexual affair with a local priest (this was in Pacific Palisades in the 1960s, where the LA fires recently happened); her mom left; her dad had a nervous breakdown; my mom, age 15, ended up in a psych ward for two whole years before becoming an emancipated minor at 17 and being released with no family, totally on her own in the big bad scary adult world she wasn’t prepared for and didn’t understand.
Mom predictably got married at 18, had my older half-sister at 19, was divorced by 21. There had been multiple suicide attempts both before, during and after her two-year psych ward stay. She later married a man—my father—who was both brilliant and initially suicidal and alcoholic and had zero connection to emotions.
Thus I was born (1982) into a wealthy, privileged family who looked perfect on paper and was a disaster in reality, rotten to the core. Dad was barely a dad, totally detached most of my life. Mom’s one major goal: To not be her mother. To do things differently. To be Mom of the Fucking Year. The classic parental overcorrection.
But it wasn’t overcorrection in a cute way.
When I was molested by my dad’s work colleague’s son when I was nine in my own room while his and my parents continued to eat dinner, I felt trapped and abandoned and, when I told my mom years later what happened she told me I had made it up and refused to talk about it. I could go on and on. Life was not easy, not emotionally anyway, even if it was easy externally (sort of). I was a rich kid who went to private schools and had all the stuff so generally no one took me seriously or cared if I seemed off or complained. I learned to do what Mom and Dad did: Shove the emotions down, push it all under the rug, deny it existed, pretend it was not happening.
The issue was that Mom needed me to be a certain way so that she could feel like she’d been A Good Mother otherwise she’d explode because if there was anything she could not be it was anything like her mother or her own family. Ergo she denied my true existence. Who I was organically didn’t work for her so she denied it. And part of who I was had become reacting to her denial and control.
She wanted me to like my fellow rich kids: I hated them and made friends with the blue-collar kids from the nearby lower-income town. She preferred I listen to pop music or classical: I got into hardcore punk rock from the 1970s and 80s. She preferred I try something like sports: I hated sports and got into surfing and skateboarding. In short, I became one of those cliché teen rebel males: Defiant, angry, harsh. (Read the book HERE.)
We fought, Mom and I. Dad dissolved into the background. I basically was raised by a single mom. I felt completely misunderstood. Already in high school I was getting into fights, drinking and driving, getting tattoos and getting arrested. (The tats I paid for by stealing twenties slowly over months from my dad’s thick black leather wallet.) By 17 I was out of control. It didn’t’ get better from there. Three weeks before senior year graduation I was caught with booze and drugs and was expelled from my expensive college-prep school. (This is all in the book, btw.)
The drinking probably (ironically) saved my life back then. It was either drugs and alcohol or suicide. I chose the former, thankfully. But it was a really bumpy fucking ride until I finally hit bottom and got sober in 2010 at the age of 27. Nearly 16 years ago now.
My mom has matured, grown and changed in some small ways but in the end she is still fundamentally the same person she was back then: She lives in a fantasy world of her own creation which no one but her can see. The problem with us is that all the things she has spent her life denying, rejecting, looking away from, shoving under the rug: Those are all the exact things that I, of course, want desperately to pull out, dust off, clean and polish and actually analyze.
Ergo: As much as my mom loves me—and I know that she genuinely does—she has never been able to actually SEE me, because seeing me would require the one thing she cannot do: Face reality. Because reality has always been cruel to my mom. From the start. Her reality didn’t make sense and so my mom did what many people with serious trauma do: She created an alternate reality.
She doesn’t understand why I am not close with my tiny, segregated, fractured family. She doesn’t understand why I like living abroad, far, far away from her and them. She doesn’t understand my inherently unconventional, unorthodox mind and lifestyle and choices. She has always felt that the best choices in life were the choices she made but of course I see it very differently. My father had no spine and was totally conflict-avoidant so he only buttressed my mom’s fantasy and gave her succor. Ditto my older half-sister (now 56 to my 43). Everyone in my family wields denial like a finely sharpened sword.
Except me. Which is why I am the Black Sheep, the outsider, the “identified patient.” When the whole clan is poisoned and living in non-reality the one person who isn’t is ironically going to be the freak that stands out. I have always lived in Reality and for that I have often paid a dear price.
But how could I be any different: I saw what denial did to my family, how it bent their sanity and made them emotional lepers, and I wanted to steer as far away from that as possible. I cherish things as naïve as honesty, not caring what strangers or even friends think about me if my moral compass feels right, being my own true self. I don’t give a shit about the externals and I never have. My mom has always only cared about the externals. When I was getting arrested in high school it was never, Are you OK?, but rather, Do you realize how this makes me look to the other students’ mothers???
Alcoholism, serious depression and suicide attempts run deep in my family. The most recent incident was my teenage niece in 2021. My mom literally nearly killed herself multiple times over the years due to her own stubborn denial. Ditto my sister. And my niece. My father. My uncle. For years my mom told her friends that I was doing “well” and was “well-adjusted,” a phrase she oddly used often and unprompted (a dead giveaway that it’s bullshit).
And so then you have me and my writing which has always been a thorn in my mother’s side because much of it is autobiographical, detailed and very honest. Where my mom chose revisionist history I chose reality. This created the glass wall between us which has always been there. And look: I love my mom. Deeply. We are close in a certain way, but that closeness will always be limited. She still errs on the side of denial and control. And I understand that this all comes from her defense mechanisms which clearly stem from her fucked-up and wrong childhood which no kid should ever have to experience. And I feel genuine, deep empathy for her. But I also recognize the need for boundaries.
This novel of mine, then, the one that made her react, I understand why: She doesn’t want the truth to be known. I explained that it is a novel, fiction, and that the book isn’t “about” the mom character (which is true) and that it’s my story, not hers, and that I have every right to tell it. I feel this way 90%. But 10% of me feels ashamed and afraid. But then I ask myself: Why should I feel that way? My mom has been doing this to me all my life. Isn’t it time to stand up and proclaim, loud and proud, THIS IS MY ACTUAL LIVED EXPERIENCE?
Mom of course worries her friends will read it. I told her she and they didn’t have to read it. We argued and eventually found some common ground, a sort of temporary bridge back to each other. This novel isn’t about sticking it to my mom. It’s not about my mom at all, actually. It’s about ME. It’s my story. My life. My wounds.
And those I am not willing to deny, ignore or shove under the rug. Mom has done that all her life. My nature is to open up to the son, bloom like a vulnerable flower. Hers is to hide in the mud and the muck and the bottom of the pond. But I can’t live that way. I won’t live that way.
Is it selfish of me? Maybe. Probably, even. But it’s my choice. It’s not a tell-all story. It’s not 100% thinly-veiled memoir. There’s no cruelty; it’s simply laying down my true raw inner emotional experience in the form of prose. Literature. I want that bleeding wound to be published, so that others who’ve been through what I’ve been through might see a glimmer of hope.
A glimmer I never had until I discovered alcohol.