Fathers and Daughters

“She wants to flow out, and here her love lies coiled inside and choking her, because her father is her double, her shadow, and she does not know which one is real. One of them must die so that the other may find the boundaries of himself.” ― Anaïs Nin

I tried so hard to use literature to change the truth. Reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn I knew this father was portrayed as a drunk who loved his daughter, the daughter devoted and yet fully aware her father can’t protect her from the reality of his addiction, was just like my father, I was like his daughter, I did not want this. I did not want to understand why Lear grieves as Cordelia takes her own life, unable to bear her father’s mad anger, why Milton’s daughter transcribes Paradise Lost for her blind father, and why I asked him to read my work despite some of the cruelty of his feedback. 

photo by Robert Eklund

I wanted my father to be happy and safe while my own happiness didn’t matter, and my use of drugs and alcohol put my own life in danger. And I read The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead and recognized I was much luckier than those poor children, especially the oldest daughter Louisa who is marked by this monster father as something he must conquer. My father was nothing like that and yet the combination of great love and cruelty was familiar, the longing for his recognition much too close for comfort. My longing for him to tell me that even though he had disappointments in his life, we, his daughters and wife had brought him happiness. But I knew this was not completely true as I listened to him ranting after too much to drink, watched him hurt my mother and when I approached to somehow make him stop, look at me without feeling.

I never knew Bruce Springsteen had such a tortured relationship with his father, a man who drove a truck, drank too much, was violent towards his wife and son but also longed to be that father, the father who found a way to tell his precious boy how much he loved him. Watching the recent film, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, which centers on the making of one of my favorite albums of all time, Nebraska, I was sideswiped by how Springsteen’s triumph as a rock icon was so deeply shadowed by the anger and depression of his father. Despite the obvious differences, his father a truck driver, my father a PhD from Harvard, professor of English, well-known literary critic and, to the world, a great success, there was an absolute sameness to the intensity of their depressions and the effect that sadness had on their artist child. No, I am not comparing my own small career as a writer to that of the superstar that is Springsteen but when his father asks him to sit on his lap at the end of the movie and Bruce says, “I’ve never sat on your lap before,” I cried. I had spent so many years before I turned to inappropriate men attempting to be closer to my dad, trying to find a way to tell him my feelings and to hear him say, not because my mother said so, he was proud of me.

The other side of this is our alcoholism and our writing. My father and I were so alike in our reaction to drinking and in our passion for writing and teaching. He saved my life by helping me get sober and when my third novel was published, he introduced me to the crowd at Princeton University before a reading. We were in the University Store, a place located directly across the street from where I had been a baby, his baby. After that, when his depression grew to the extent that he stopped participating in life at all, I had the memory of that moment, the memory of those rare and perfect moments when we were together and I knew he loved me.

– Molly Moynahan