LIT FOR LIVING: Girlhood, Interrupted

While one of the pleasures of the reading life is to discover worlds we’ll never, ever experience, much pleasure can also be found in books that thoroughly investigate the familiar. Two exquisite memoirs by Emily Fox Gordon manage to do just that, both set, more or less, in our very own Berkshires. Mockingbird Years: A Life In and Out of Therapy, is located mostly at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where  Gordon spent much time after dropping out of school and becoming pregnant by a boyfriend she had no intention of marrying; the memoir was a New York Times notable book when it first came out in 2000. (“Mockingbird,” by the way, refers to the ubiquitous Carly Simon song popular at the time Gordon was at Austen Riggs and not the Harper Lee novel.) A prequel, Are You Happy? A Childhood Remembered (2006), spends even more time in the Berkshires, recalling an earlier portion of the author’s life, mostly from birth to age twelve, when Gordon was growing up in Williamstown, Massachusetts—as a faculty brat at Williams College, where her father was an economics professor and her mother was the quintessential faculty wife:
   
In the Williamstown of those days, “faculty wife” was more than a descriptive designation; it was a calling, and implied membership in a society of likeminded and often rivalrous women. Faculty wives baked their own bread, grew their own produce in the backyard garden during the short Berkshire summers, sent their children to school with wholesome lunches packed in brown paper bags. They understood the importance of vitamins and “roughage.” They drank wine with dinner.

Whereas Mockingbird Years deals with a decidedly unhappy time in the author’s life—time spent at Austen Riggs and her subsequent difficult transition to living and working in New York City as a young adult—Are You Happy? contends that, despite having to deal with many challenges that would later shadow her adolescence and young adulthood (her trouble in school, her social awkwardness, her rocky relationship with both parents, especially her father) she was, in spite of all this, a very happy child. Either that or she looks back at growing up in Williamstown through rose-colored glasses:
   
I look back at those times, even the painful ones, with longing. How lucky I was, even in my misery, and how unlucky children are today! It seems terrible to me that they have so little freedom, so little privacy, so few means of escape.… When I was small I was wildly, unconditionally happy.
   
Interestingly, long after the family had left Williamstown, she would return—“sent home” to a school in Williamstown—for a rather unsuccessful and bleak stint boarding at the Flagstone School, and later would get married in Williamstown at a house her parents purchased as a second home long after the family had left the one she grew up in on what was then called College Place.   

Given that both memoirs have a loose, similar structure (both slim volumes of related, longish essays), reading the two together is almost like reading a longer, singular one. While Mockingbird Years made more of a critical splash, both memoirs are informed with a detailed specificity of observation and recollection coupled with a melancholy sense of loss that pack a subtle punch. Each essay manages to creep up on you, landing its blows more effectively with understatement and the seemingly un-dramatic—so different from more recent, hysterically pitched memoirs intent on shocking readers with childhood horror stories rather than just a sad one like  Gordon’s. What’s also fascinating, of course, is to see Williamstown in the 1950s so carefully rendered here by Gordon—a bit like coming upon old postcards of a place you know well and that make it look both the same and not the same at all. Time passes. Life, as we know it, will someday be no more. Places may remain, but even less changeable ones such as Williamstown are utterly transformed with time.

Here we see a childhood that includes all of the familiar streets and neighboring towns and many of the same buildings of present-day Williamstown, but as it was then, not now: a Spring Street, for example, that includes the erstwhile House of Walsh, where, writes Gordon, “my popular classmates bought their cashmere-blend sweaters and cabled kneesocks. Somewhere I had picked up the idea that it was enemy territory; I think my parents considered it a bastion of anti-Semitism.” Instead of Images Cinema, there is the Walden Theatre. The Pine Cobble School that Gordon attended is today home to the town library—a new Pine Cobble School is now on Gale Road. And the Williams Inn of Gordon’s childhood is now a college dormitory called Dodd House.

In summer, children wandered where they pleased, with barely any supervision other than from the villagers themselves, who looked out for others only on those rare occasions when they needed looking after. Gordon often fell asleep at friends’ houses—usually boys’—and frequently stayed for days. She and her pals would wander on foot north across the Vermont border into Pownal, often through wooded trails rather than well-traveled roads. During the school year, they would spy on Williams students, using the college’s many buildings as their indoor playground, and during football games they would hide beneath the bleachers, collecting what was dropped, including a photograph of a naked woman’s torso.

All of this, however, comes to an abrupt end around the time Gordon turns twelve, when her father is offered a high-powered job in finance in New York City. Neither she nor her mother will thrive outside the friendly confines of Williamstown; her mother’s long descent into alcoholism and depression, already begun in Williamstown, soon picks up speed, while Gordon’s academic and social challenges also grow more problematic in a new, less forgiving, environment. By the time Gordon’s father is offered an even more prestigious position in the presidential administration of Lyndon B. Johnson, leading to another family move to Washington, D.C., Gordon is all but orphaned by her mother’s complete devastation and her father’s ongoing neglect.

Still, there’s very little of Gordon feeling sorry for herself in these pages—in fact, quite the opposite. While one could hardly call these memoirs uplifting or optimistic, she seems to be drawing an understated line between her happy, more carefree, though certainly not entirely untroubled childhood and her ultimately happy ending; as wife in a long-enduring marriage to an academic, as a mother less elusive and more present than her own, and as a successful writer at last. If asked the question, are you happy, Gordon seems to be offering quiet, not entirely overwhelming evidence—but evidence all the same—that, in fact, she is. A different sort of happiness than the one she lived in Williamstown all those years ago, but a true happiness all the same, and one that relies, even now, upon those long-vanished, but most memorable, early years. (MAY 2009)

Managing editor Chris Newbound has been happy, too, living in Williamstown, Mass., since 1999.

 

THE GOODS

Mockingbird Years: A Life In and Out of Therapy
by Emily Fox Gordon
Basic Books
www.basicbooks.com

Are You Happy? A Childhood Remembered
by Emily Fox Gordon Riverhead Books
www.riverheadbooks.com