Like Family (39 page)

How did your skills as a poet play into your use of language in the memoir?

I love language, the sounds of words and what words can do. This served me in a surprising way as I was writing the memoir.
Because I was very focused on and attentive to language and to building the book with one good, tight sentence at a time,
one striking or lyrical image at a time, I could forget that I was writing about my life and revealing sensitive material.
If I had been less aware of the art of writing, I might very well have shut down and not been able to finish the project.

Considering your difficult and at times painful personal history, why did you choose to write a memoir instead of finding
solace in a novel? Did you have reservations about writing about the abuse that you and your sisters experienced?

I did try to write my story as fiction very early on, years ago, when I was still in graduate school, but it just wasn’t coming
together that way. I kept running into dead ends. I didn’t know why then, but now I think that even though I was terrified
(am terrified still) of exposing many of these memories and exposing myself at large, I wanted to own my experience. Claim
it. Fiction would have provided a nice, safe out, but I believe I was ready to stop hiding from and denying the facts of my
life.

When you were younger, it seemed that you had a strong bond with your foster father Bub. How did his betrayal affect you?

Out of all the foster fathers, Bub left the strongest impression, and not only because we were with the Lindberghs the longest.
He was such a puzzle, a dreamer, a big talker, and full of a strange poetry, actually. He stole my heart, and, frankly, I
didn’t know I still had one to steal. When I was a teenager and saw his flaws fully, I was devastated. I thought finally I
had found a father, the real thing, someone I could trust and be safe with. When he betrayed me, a door slammed shut. I realize
now that he was doing the best he could, that he loved me as much as he was capable of under the circumstances. But I’m still
having trouble budging that door.

It is clear in
Like Family
that your relationship with your sisters was impenetrable. Can you speak directly to what your sisters meant to you as you
were growing up together, and what your relationship with them is like now?

I think children are islands. I felt very alone in my childhood and shared my feelings about what was happening to me, to
us, with no one. But my sisters never left me. This meant everything then and means everything now. They’re my family. Things
and people come and go, terrible things happen, but what I have with my sisters is, yes, impenetrable. We have this shared
history, which we do talk about now. And when we do, I understand that, although I felt alone as a child, I wasn’t.

How do your sisters feel about
Like Family?
How were your personal experiences different from those of your sisters?

My sisters have been very supportive of the book all the way along, and proud of me for undertaking the project. I’m deeply
grateful for this, particularly since I know they would never have elected to be revealed in such a way. Both of them have
said that reading certain passages — even from the distance of twenty-some years, and with the additional buffer that the
telling was
my
version of events, not their own — was like reliving memories, experiencing them and the attendant pain and disappointment
afresh. Being aware of their feelings has caused me some unease. My sisters have their own versions of our childhood, as well
as their own strategies for dealing with the fallout. My sense is that they both feel more comfortable with the past behind
them, or at least at a manageable distance from themselves. While I respect this, I’m more inclined to agree with Faulkner,
who said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

What is your relationship like with your birth parents today?

I have no relationship with my birth father. I don’t know where he is or even if he’s still living. The last time I spoke
to him was on the phone when I was fifteen. Hearing his voice was like being struck by lightning. I couldn’t handle it then;
I hung up on him. I’m not sure I’m any more ready to handle it now.

I do have a relationship with my mother and have since she came back when I was twenty. It’s a complicated relationship, as
you might imagine. I don’t know if I can trust her or even if I want to try. I don’t know that I want her to know me, because
that would make me vulnerable to her again. People often ask, “Do you forgive her?” I’m not there yet. For thirty-plus years,
I’ve blamed myself for her leaving and everything that followed. I’m still trying to forgive myself.

There are a number of instances in
Like Family
in which it appears that foster parents are exploiting the system. Do you think that this is common? Has the situation for
foster children changed since you were young? Do you have ideas about how the system could be changed to make things easier
for the children?

I don’t know how common it is for foster parents to exploit the system; I only know my experience. Right now, I’m reading
a memoir written by a longtime foster parent that presents another side. In it, the foster parent is a saintly, selfless figure,
the one safe oasis in a sea of abusive birth parents and overworked social workers. I’m sure it is this way in some cases,
but I didn’t know any oases. I knew frying pans and fires.

Since I’ve left the system, I think things have only gotten worse. There are more kids needing care and fewer parents willing
to give it, and no easy answers about how to improve the system. I do think prospective foster parents need to receive more
specific and extensive training/education (standard training is thirty hours) to prepare them for the children, often quite
troubled, entering their homes. I think there should be more extensive screening for foster parents to weed out the less-than-committed
or the possibly exploitive, but I also know how hard foster parents are to come by, and that sometimes even a family who will
take a child strictly for the money will be a safer placement for that child than an abusive situation at home. Which brings
us right back to frying pans and fires.

How do you define family?

I spent most of my childhood fantasizing about what finding the perfect family — or having them finally find me — would mean.
It seemed to me then that family meant permanence — a solid and unshakable connection. Something that couldn’t be reversed,
erased, dissolved by disappointment or betrayal or the signing away of responsibility. By that definition, I had the ideal
family all along, in the bond with my sisters. Our connection wasn’t and isn’t perfect, of course, because we’re not perfect.
But it is constant; I trust it absolutely. I have also been lucky enough to find friends along the way who are, essentially,
family — in that we love and sustain and know one another in deep and abiding ways. Robert Frost wrote, “Home is the place
where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” I think I once would have said that about family, hoping against
hope that I would finally stick somewhere and stay, and belong beyond all doubt or evidence to the contrary. Now I would say,
rather, that our real families — the people with whom we share the richest, most dynamic, most nurturing connections — we
choose for ourselves.

1. Paula and her sisters are abandoned by their parents at a very tender age, and yet their bond as sisters remains unshakable.
   In what ways is the sisters’ relationship fortified by the breakup of their family?
   
2. How does Bub’s ultimate betrayal change Paula’s perspective? Is Bub a bad man, or merely human?
   
3. Paula and her sisters are shuttled from one house to another during their formative years, each time with the hope that
   they’ll finally settle comfortably — but nearly every family they join suffers from its own problems. What does this suggest
   about the meaning or ideal of family?
   
4. Penny and Teresa are able to welcome their mother back into their lives with relative ease. Paula, by contrast, remains
   unsure. Why? Is it an issue of forgiveness or is it something else that makes Paula hold back?
   
5. When Paula hears from Hilde during her pregnancy, she’s shocked. And yet she says, “The Lindberghs weren’t our family and
   couldn’t be the parents we needed them to be, but we did
   belong
   to each other” (
   page 259
   ). What does Paula mean by this?
   
6. Each of the three McLain sisters has a strong personality. What particular traits do you attribute to each? How do you
   think their respective attitudes helped one another? Hurt one another?
   
7. There are two epigraphs at the beginning of the memoir, one from an Emily Dickinson poem and the other from a Neil Young
   song. Why do you think the author chose these quotes? What does each say about Paula’s story?
   
8. Is Like Family
   an indictment of the foster care system?
   
9. Paula’s “head clearing” trip to Michigan stretches into several years — she stays long enough to earn a degree, to marry,
   and to have a child. Then she begins to move all over the country, relocating in turn to several different states, but she
   never again returns to California. Why do you think Paula doesn’t settle in one place? Why does she avoid California?
   
10. Do Paula and her sisters merely survive their childhood, or do they thrive despite its horrors and instability?
    

This Boy’s Life
by Tobias Wolff

The Boys of My Youth
by Jo Ann Beard

Borrowed Finery
by Paula Fox

Fierce Attachments
by Vivian Gornick

Survival Stories: Memoirs of Crisis,
edited by Kathryn Rhett

The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care
by Nina Bernstein

The Heart Knows Something Different: Teenage Voices from the Foster Care System,
edited by Al Desetta

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
and
The Member of the Wedding
by Carson McCullers

My Antonia
by Willa Cather

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith

Housekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson

Cruddy
and
One Thousand Demons
by Lynda Barry

Cat’s Eye
by Margaret Atwood

The Virgin Suicides
by Jeffrey Eugenides

Sula
by Toni Morrison

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
by Lorrie Moore

Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston

Black Tickets
by Jayne Anne Phillips

They Came Like Swallows
and
So Long See You Tomorrow
by William Maxwell

The Tiny One
by Eliza Minot

Ellen Foster
by Kaye Gibbons

FASCINATING LIVES • NOW IN PAPERBACK

The Boys of My Youth
by Jo Ann Beard

“Utterly compelling … uncommonly beautiful…. Life in these pages is an astonishment.
The Boys of My Youth
speaks volumes about growing up female and struggling to remain true to yourself.”

— Dan Cryer,
Newsday

“Reading Jo Ann Beard’s prose feels as comfortable as falling into step beside an old, intimate friend…. Beard remembers (or
imagines) her childhood self with an uncanny lucidity that startles.”

— Laura Miller,
New York Times Book Review

The Black Veil
by Rick Moody

“Compulsively readable…. A profound meditation on madness, shame, and history…. One of the finest memoirs in recent years.”

—Jeffery Smith,
Washington Post Book World

“Ferociously intelligent, emotionally unsparing…. Verbal invention capers and sparkles on every page.”

— David Kipen,
San Francisco Chronicle

Back Bay Books

Available wherever books are sold

The Unwanted: A Memoir of a Childhood
by Kien Nguyen

“Vivid and compelling…. A gripping, emotionally raw story… . Kien’s story deserves a place with the best memoirs of immigration
and exile.”

— Richard C. Kagan,
Minneapolis Star Tribune

“A painfully evocative memoir…. A remarkable tale of survival at all costs.”

—Julie K. L. Dam,
People

The Hacienda
by Lisa St. Aubin de Terán

“A beautiful memoir…. Lisa St. Aubin de Terán changed from a shy girl into a strong woman from these experiences; she pays
them powerful respect, and offers a distinctive and elegant lesson to the reader.”

— Carolyn See,
Washington Post

“Seductive…. The story of a nightmare marriage, as well as a regretful evocation of a beloved lost world….
The Hacienda is
a transfixing performance.”

— Michael Upchurch,
New York Times Book Review