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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. 

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There was once a fantasy man, silent, slightly dangerous, tall, handsome, frequently masked. Yes, I was in love with the Phantom from the comics, the the Phantom who lived in a place called Bengalla, in the Skull Cave, with Hero the white horse and his wolf, Devil. Unfortunately, he had a sexy, adult girlfriend named Diane Palmer whom I ignored. After all, as a nine-year-old girl whose mother cut her crooked bangs, I could not compete with the large-bosomed Diane. But then there was The Highway Man who in the poem, loved Bess, the landlord’s daughter. Bess warns the highway man away from an ambush by shooting herself with a musket but then he returns to the inn and is shot. His ghost still rides the road to the inn. I used to read this poem aloud to our cleaning ladies who found my obsession with love and death odd in someone so young and seemingly safe in a New Jersey farmhouse. And don’t get me started on vampires!

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In 1969, I was twelve and when my father said he was going to drive to Washington to protest the Vietnam War, I asked if I could go with him. The year before had been marked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, the Chicago Democratic Convention which was televised live, and violent antiwar demonstrations on college campuses. My oldest sister was attending Radcliffe, and I was terrified that she was going to be killed.

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