Fiction Ruined My Family

Table of Contents

 

 

 

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Copyright © 2011 by Jeanne Darst

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Darst, Jeanne.

Fiction ruined my family / Jeanne Darst.

p. cm.

ISBN : 978-1-101-54784-7

1. Darst, Jeanne—Childhood and youth. 2. Darst, Jeanne—Homes and haunts. 3. Novelists, American—21st century—Biography. I. Title.

813'.6—dc22

 

 

 

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

 

For Liz

 

And, no bout a doubt it, for Dad

Tennessee Williams said, “Memory is seated predominantly in the heart.” What he meant by this was, fuck off. I like to think I'm considerably less testy than “the Glorious Bird,” so what I'd like to say regarding accounts and versions of the truth that may differ slightly from mine in this book is: I don't have the greatest memoiry. So, this stuff is true, but I don't claim any talent as a stenographer. I have also changed the names and identifying characteristics of some people to protect their privacy.

W
RITERS TALK A LOT about how tough they have it—what with the excessive drinking and three-hour workday and philandering and constant borrowing of money from people they're so much better than. But what about the people married to writers? Their kids? Their friends? Their labradoodles? What happens to them? I'll tell you what happens to them. They go fucking nuts. Tolstoy's wife, Sophia, after copying
War and Peac
e—1,225 pages—by hand seven times and having thirteen children by him, is rumored to have poisoned him in his eighty-second year; Viv Eliot, institutionalized after being found meandering the streets of London at five a.m. asking if T.S. had been beheaded, died in Northumberland House mental hospital, after one failed escape attempt, at age fifty-eight; William Makepeace Thackeray's wife, Isabella, threw herself out of a bathroom window on a ship at sea headed for Ireland rather than vacation with him.

One might almost judge writers not by their prose but by the people around them. How nuts are they?

My father is a writer, and so were both his parents. As a kid, I suspected writing might be what was causing my family to implode.

But beyond the actual writing there was a broader kind of storytelling that seemed to define us. The family myth—stories of who we were—informed everything. My father came from an old Missouri family that arrived in Maryland on the
Dove
in 1634. My great-great-great-grandfather John Paul Darst was the carpenter and contractor on the Old Cathedral in St. Louis in 1830. We were prominent Democrats. My great-uncle Joe Darst was mayor of St. Louis in the late 1940s. My grandmother Katharine Darst had a daily column in the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
called “Here and There” and a Sunday column called “The Back Seat Driver.” My grandfather James Darst, a dashing newspaperman whom family members called Dagwood or Dag, wrote pretty awful plays and very good short stories when he wasn't working for Fox Movietone News. And my father, a reporter, had been an alderman in St. Louis in the '60s with an eye toward being mayor before he quit politics to write.

My mother's family, on the other hand, was rich in a thing called money from her father's ophthalmology practice in St. Louis. Her childhood was one of mass before Catholic school and winning horse shows around the country on weekends, until she and her sister Ruth landed on the cover of
Sports Illustrated
at ages fourteen and seventeen, respectively, and then zoomed off in T-Birds bought by “Daddy” to debutante balls, a women's college in the East, and marriage. Wild-rich-girl stuff.

What these stories seemed to be saying to me, growing up, was: things aren't going that great now, but it's all about to change, drastically, because Dad's gonna sell this novel, this is the one, and there'll be no more scraping by, no more walking home from school in January in a thin jacket and no gloves pretending you're not cold. Mom will be restored to her former fanciness and will become undepressed and able to drink normally, as happens with literary success, and Dad will have fulfilled his lifelong dream and in doing so will stop driving everyone bananas. It seemed my parents were willing to suffer, make others suffer, and even die to maintain these impossible fantasies—even after my father eventually stopped doing any actual writing at all (not that anyone ever acknowledged this) and the fantasies were all that was left. My parents slowly lost everything and fell apart. As an adult, it's hard not to wonder how people with their kind of talent, charm, intelligence and privileged backgrounds could wind up like them.

 

 

 

And then I became a writer, too. An alcoholic, broke, occasionally irresistible, destructive, quasi-adult—one who believed that writing was at least partly what was causing my life to fall apart but also that it was what would redeem it in the end. Another generation of the stories, fantasies and delusions. Ultimately, I sobered up and began actually writing instead of just talking about it, ever so narrowly avoiding repeating the exact—and I mean exact—mistakes of my mother and father. I became very much like them without becoming exactly like them. This was possible, I believe, through no moral superiority of mine and certainly no more talent than my father, but through the odd fortune of being able to see the truth and, having done that
,
use it to move forward. I have managed to become an artist and not lose my mind or cause others to lose theirs. I work in stories but I live in reality. Or at least, that's the tale I now tell myself.

J
UNE 1976. We were moving from St. Louis to Amagansett for a year so my dad could write his novel,
Caesar's Things
, about a senator who has a nervous breakdown after being involved in a love triangle with a debutante and his own father, which comes to light years later when he is campaigning for president.

 

 

 

My mother's mother didn't want us to go and tried to haggle with my dad for my oldest sister, Eleanor, as we were leaving. The four of us girls were staking out our turf in the car, laying out candy we had just bought at the Rexall on Clayton Road to determine the order of consumption for the thousand-mile drive, when Nonnie walked over to the car, adjusted her big tortoiseshell frames as if getting ready to start a press conference, and said to my father, “Eleanor does not want to go to New York. Eleanor should stay with me. She'll have a better life here with me, food at regular hours, not at midnight and whatnot, and she'll go to mass regularly and attend the Annunziata school, and she'll be bathed properly, and she likes to watch Johnny Carson with us here on Friday nights.” I thought my dad should take her up on it, I mean, why not? Eleanor loved watching Johnny Carson with Nonnie and her sister Neallie on Nonnie's big bed and having Jell-O boats at Stix, Baer & Fuller after some shopping. This was maybe not the profile of someone who wanted to head off into a year of “getting the novel together” on some remote farm halfway across the country. Now, I was up for New York, I was up for the ocean and living on a farm, which I would quickly discover had more
New Yorker
writers on it than cows or chickens, but I was ready to go and if Eleanor couldn't cut it, well, we'd see her in a year, now let's get going. St. Louis sucks, especially in the airless, way back of our station wagon.

My dad said he was taking all his kids with him, thank you, Mrs. Gissy, and “Let's not get so damn dramatic, everybody,” we would all be back next spring. “It's one year in New York.” My mother was crying, not because she didn't want to go to New York; she did. She just had a light cry going most of the time, one that didn't require a hanky, just a smooth stroke across her cheek to keep moving through the day. Like Seattlers who as a point of pride don't use umbrellas in their eternally drippy town, my mother hissed if you offered up a Kleenex, the tool of tourists.

My grandmother walked around to the back of the car, leaned in the back window and said in full voice, “Anyone who wants to come back to St. Louis can come back and have their own room in my house, no questions asked. You've all memorized my phone number, so just call collect. Don't worry, girls.”

It was easy to tell that my grandmother didn't see this as a worthy adventure. I don't remember any books in her house at all, other than the children's books in the playroom she kept for her twelve grandchildren and the medical books my deceased grandfather left behind in the office where she paid bills and cut checks to charities like the St. Louis Society for the Blind. I never saw her read anything except
Reader's Digest
. Seeing a copy of
The Grapes of Wrath
in her living room would have been like spotting a dead falcon on her coffee table. Maybe if my father were writing a novel in Braille, Nonnie would have seen some value in it, but as it was, he was ruining my mother's life, taking her away from everything that meant anything—her. Nonnie looked at my father. She blew a kiss into the backseat.