The Reality of Real Life
“Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment, but that's not reality, it's just another aesthetic form of fiction.” –Steven Soderbergh
Is it shameful that I have never outgrown my tolerance for if not adoration of reality television, started in the 1970s with the people on An American Family.
Family photo of the Louds, who were the subject of a 12 part television documentary, "An American Family," that aired on PBS stations in 1973.
Lance is gay, mom wants a divorce, I was sixteen and living in a farmhouse outside of Princeton, New Jersey, while these people lived in California. My parents found my interest in witnessing the gradual destruction of this All-American family disappointing. My family was so different, an architect mother, a writer/English professor father, two sisters who left me to go to college and escape from the complicated, drama-filled, happy/sad, brilliantly intellectual life of our family.
My father called me “The Bad Seed” after our family photograph emerged, taken by a still photographer for Ingmar Bergman who told us we must not smile. Reality television no longer portrays non-celebrity families probably because they believe, as Thoreau once said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” But do they? During the time I spent at my fancy private school, a teacher shot our headmaster, the same married headmaster who was having an affair with the married secretary whose children all attended that school, a school where teachers slept with students and parents held key parties, where students openly drank at a local bar and when a local mother disappeared there were endless conversations at fancy dinner parties that focused on whether her husband killed her, wrapped her body in a rug and dumped that body in the Hudson River. It was believed he had to be the killer as it was rumored he had shot the family dog for going to the bathroom on that same rug.
The Moynahans, left to right, Catheryn, Bridget, Molly, Julian, and Elizabeth
I have been asked frequently where I find my ideas. We travelled all over Europe as a family, living for years at a time surrounded by famous writers, actors, and drunks that my parents had met and befriended, weekends we were left to run wild, feral children living on beans and toast, eavesdropping on conversations about sex, money, betrayal, class, and art. There was trauma, my father’s violent drunks, my sister’s drug taking, my own teenage drinking, but there was also an endless source of stories, examples of the best and the worst of human nature, meeting legendary writers who told my mother I talked too much when I interrupted their monologues. Marriages that included live-in lovers, nannies made pregnant by fathers, suicides, depression, and sudden fame.
After I left college I became an affirmative action hire for the telephone company, supervising twelve men who were an average of ten years older than myself, the only woman in a garage with seventy men. I was twenty-two and had no idea how to make a phone ring. After that I moved to San Francisco for two years during which I attempted to embrace the dark side that had always existed only to be told I was, at heart, a nice girl who would someday be a mother. I tried to drink and drug myself to death, failed miserably, and finally settled.
The current assortment of reality television fails to capture the real drama of life; marriage, childbirth, addiction, recovery, and the daily challenge of remaining alive, hopeful and open to the possibility that your life is meaningful despite the mundane truth, you love your husband, son, daughter-in-law, cat, friends, and wish for peace and sanctuary for those in need.
–Molly Moynahan