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Robert Leiter
ACCORDING TO LITERARY trend spotters, we are now in the age of the memoir.
Everyone seems to want to try his hand at it, and publishers have responded
in the way they usually respond to such developments - they have flooded
the market with titles, hoping to strike gold. The results have not been
felicitous.
In this mass of titles, we have heard about every type of parental abuse
and sexual kinkiness known to the human race, and though some critics have
praised these works as courageous and groundbreaking, others believe they
have cheapened the genre and fear that the trend will continue indefinitely.
That is why the publication of City of One by Francine Cournos seems such a
high point in recent publishing. Though it tells a sad, sad tale, it is
truly a story of triumph, executed with a level of artistry that seems to
have escaped so many other recent memoirists.
In its barest outline, City of One, recently published by Norton, tells of
how the author, born in the 1940s in the South Bronx, first lost her father
from a cerebral hemorrhage when she was 3 years old, and then her mother,
after a long battle with breast cancer, when Cournos was just 11.
For two years after her mother's death, she and her sister continued to
live with their grandmother, who, approaching senility, took care of them
until she could manage it no longer.
"Then my mother's siblings placed my younger sister and me together in
foster care," the author writes. "I was 13, my sister was 9."
The emotional power of the story Cournos tells is evident from this brief
synopsis, but the author never lets the tale tip into bathos. Aside from
the quality of Cournos' prose, which is very high, the author's depiction
of the world of childhood reasoning about the tragic events of her life is
also filled with startling insights.
A typical example of her method comes when Cournos tells about being sent
away to camp at a time when her mother was still alive. The child
flourishes during the experience. She learns to laugh and sing and put on
shows, just like all the other kids, and even learns to enjoy being away
from her mother, to whom she feels forever bound. But towards the end of
the three-week period, she begins to worry about whether her mother will
meet her at the bus stop or whether she'll be too ill.
"And still later," she writes, "I'd wonder if it was during some moment in
the summer when I allowed time to pass without thinking about Mom, let my
need for her lapse, that I created the opening through which she slipped
and forever disappeared."
Cournos tells us that she was driven all her life by "a powerful delusion."
She believed that she had caused all the terrible things that had happened
in her family - that she was somehow a damaged individual who no one could
love - and that her mission was to set things right again. She eventually
entered medical school, she tells us, not because the degree would
transform her from "an indigent foster child into a respectable member of
the upper middle class." Nor was she motivated over concerns about how she
would make a living. Rather she was "absorbed in a fight against death, and
especially against the death of [her] mother."
But even when Cournos gained the mastery she sought through medicine, she
soon discovered that her competency held nothing against the force of
death. One day, she is faced with a woman exactly her mother's age who is
dying of the same disease, and she realizes that she can do nothing to stop
it.
"No patient came closer than this one: dying just like my mother. Breast
cancer diffusely metastatic to her lungs, leaving behind a 15-year-old son.
My sister will take care of my son, my patient told me. I'd been giving
her intravenous Demerol - too much and too often, I feared - but that was
the only thing that calmed her. She was suffocating to death - just like my
mother. The cancer was everywhere in her lungs."
Cournos stays with her for 48 hours but when it is time to be relieved she
hesitates, thinking she should stay till the end and ease this woman's
passage, but instead she leaves, realizing that there was no chance to save
her, only the chance to help her die.
The experience throws her into a crisis, making her believe that she has
nothing to offer the medical profession.
"It was confusing to try to save people who wanted to die," she writes,
"and distressing to fail to save people who wanted to live. And with
patients in the chronic stages of illness, when living and dying were not
at stake, I found myself more strongly drawn to their unique stories than
to the repetitive patterns of their disease."
This comes as a discovery for her, a glimpse of some new way to handle her
troubling past: the possibility of discussing the frightening feelings her
mother and she had so willfully avoided. That is when Cournos decides to
switch to psychiatry, and in doing so her professional life takes on
purpose again.
Cournos eventually marries a wonderful, trusting man, and they have a child
together, a daughter. But the author, feeling damaged still, is unable to
accept plain, everyday happiness. After her daughter's birth she falls into
a deep depression. It lifts at last, without the use of medication, and
though she counts it as a life-changing experience, she still has trouble
believing that she deserves happiness. She goes into therapy, struggles
with her miseries, and somehow this time -- to her immense surprise -- she
wins.
City of One may be a book about triumph but it isn't one of those
saccharine tales we've grown used to in this age of feel good literature.
Cournos looks deeply into herself, confronts her demons and comes out the
better for it. She still considers life a struggle, but the rewards are
plentiful and she can now accept them without guilt.
"I once imagined that the ordinary would be boring," the author writes, "or
at least a kind of defeat, a failure to reclaim the most desirable but now
lost original, a second-best alternative accepted only because it is
realistic and possible.
But the ordinary turns out to be wonderful, even
magical. It is integrating the past, the pain and losses of childhood,
with a present marked by the successes of adult life. It is living in a
world that is solid, and not about to fall apart. It is a feeling of repair
and inner peace, the end of a tortuous route from the comfort of my first
home as a small child, through the years of unraveling and destruction, to
the creation of a second secure base, established after great effort and
with considerable help from others. Although it once seemed unlikely, it
has happened. I have found my way
A memoir to remember
JWR contributor Robert Leiter is Literary Editor of the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent.