Gaining Control
If you’ve tumbled down the well of self-loathing and crawled back up, and out of that wrung literature, why would you hand the tale to some fat Manhattan house that wishes you were Danielle Steel?
Last autumn Moats sent Coles the manuscript. He didn’t respond. “From what I know of him, it didn’t seem in character to hear nothing at all,” she says. She tried again at a different address. This time Coles wrote back quickly, saying the first manuscript had never reached him.
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“I tried to write this story a decade ago,” Moats says, “and I approached it then as nonfiction. I wanted it to be as objective a recording of the symptoms of my illness as I could. It got so painful I had to put it away. When I came back to it I gave myself permission to write it as fiction, as prose poetry, and it freed me up so much not to feel absolutely locked into the accuracy of detail.
The broad strokes of Legacy describe “Anna,” a young woman who adored her father but sided with the needy mother who felt betrayed by him. The mother, in turn, regarded herself as the unworthy surrogate of a favored older sister who’d died as an infant of whooping cough. Moats writes about a first marriage that’s a brief, furtive disaster and a second that suffocates in its intimacy. “I was just living in terror of myself,” she remembers, “just not able to function in a normal way, and my days and nights were spent basically trying to convict myself, trying to find the evidence that would indicate where my enormous sense of guilt had originated. It was so white-hot that it must have come from something I had done. I never completely lost the thread that connected me to reality, but it grew so attenuated that–well, my therapist said the reason I couldn’t get help for so long was that I was just too good at therapy. Because I didn’t feel I deserved help I could go into this intellectual mode and talk about it dispassionately. In some ways it was comforting that I could pass for normal. In other ways it was very disturbing to realize how unobservant people are, and how isolated we all are in our own skins, and how little we can really grasp what the inner life of another person is like.”
“That was a real turning point,” Moats remembers, “because it finally enabled me to gain a little sympathy for myself as a child even though I couldn’t sympathize with myself as an adult. A lot of things came together right then.”
Americans who pray each morning that the Second Amendment was last night’s bad dream don’t dare to suggest rewriting the Bill of Rights. If the Second, why not the First? After two centuries of living with the First’s literal absolutism, isn’t it time to make it conform with common sense? Shouldn’t we put in a good word for God while we’re at it? And what’s that business in the Fifth about self-incrimination? It’s of no earthly use to anyone but the guilty. The trouble with the Bill of Rights is that it’s soft on damn fools and snakes in the grass. Perhaps it’s time to give the whole list more spine.
News Bites
As Lillian Moats put it, “How little we can really grasp what the inner life of another person is like.” But that doesn’t keep anyone from trying, and the slaughter at Columbine High School quickly yielded motivation and story line. There’s not much evidence that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were carrying out an agenda when they killed, but in the popular narrative they’re derided outsiders settling scores. The New York Times in particular has responded by examining the cliquishness and cruelties of high school. The Littleton murders stirred a deep, visceral empathy. I observed a third-grade teacher trying to hold a discussion with her class, and when she said that what had been done to innocent kids was terrible, the class replied, But they weren’t innocent–the killers had been picked on first. That’s what registered with eight-year-olds, and the lesson shifted to how important it is to tell a grown-up whenever someone’s mean to you.
