Karen Fowler - Black Glass

I was raised by professionals. My father was a behavioral psychologist and my mother was a highly educated nursery school teacher. Already, I know how you expect this story to end, with my confessing that, despite their education and qualifications, or better yet, because of all that, they made quite a hash of being parents.

Nothing could be further from the truth. They were pretty wonderful. The household ran on the scientifically supported principle of positive reinforcement. I was loved, admired, encouraged, disciplined gently, and listened to seriously. All this will be confirmed by my older brother, who had much the same experience and remembers it better. Those mistakes we have gone on to make are entirely our own.

Recently, I did an event with another writer who said, in answer to a question, that he had become resigned to his material. “We all had the childhoods we had,” he said. “Nothing can be done about that.” I might change that to “We all think we had the childhoods we think we had,” if it weren’t, in addition to being true, also nonsensical. We’ll stick with his configuration, but asterisk it.

I’m far from the only writer to have had a happy childhood. But I think we writers who did share a nagging sense of it not being very writerly, all that early happiness. We suspect, as Maeve Binchy once said, that a happy childhood is an unsuitable beginning for a writer. (She said “Irish writer,” but why quibble?) We wonder why, reared in relative contentment, we became writers in the first place. What is our material?

For many years I never asked myself those questions, as I could see no way in which the answer would be helpful to me. I like to think of myself as wide-ranging, no book much like the last. I like to think I follow whatever obsession has its current hold on me. I like to think my material changes. But when, as in this book, I’m confronted with a collection of my stories written over a number of years, certain themes become impossible to ignore.

My father is a clear obsession — I sometimes wonder if I write about anything else. We fell out when I was an adolescent and he died before our relationship could right itself. I am always trying to fix that.

As an adjunct, the scientific study, particularly when focused on human behavior, seems to come up often in my writing. Scientists appear frequently as extraterrestrials. I imagine that not only speaks for itself, but also demands an apology.

I have always suffered from the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern syndrome — an excessive concern with peripheral characters. This first manifested when my ninth-grade English class was taken to see Prometheus Bound . My idea of great storytelling at that time was The Man from U.N.C.L.E . There were no sexy Russians, no triumph of good over evil, no action, no ending of any kind in Prometheus Bound . There was, however, a strange tormented cow that caught my interest. I asked my teacher about her and was given some extra reading to do as a consequence. This is how I learned that most of the male gods were horrible rapists and most of the females, jealous harpies. (For the record, I have never minded being asked to do additional reading. It is a privilege.)

At its core, this focus on the peripheral is a struggle against literature’s ubiquitous suggestion that some people are more important than others. This is a deeply outrageous, globally damaging thing to believe. But I haven’t yet found a way to write that doesn’t inevitably partake of it.

And finally there is also this recurring theme: Eden lost. This popular plot was standard in many of the stories I loved as a child— A Little Princess, The Hobbit, The Wizard of Oz, The Once and Future King, Cinderella, Snow White, Black Beauty . My own first stories, written when I was about five years old, never deviated from it. But at five, while I understood that happiness could be lost, I expected it would also return. A return home was not only possible; it was the way stories ended.

• • •

THIS IS THE THING about a happy childhood — it ends, and not in the way of those stories. “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in” (Graham Greene).

For me, that door into the future was, of course, a book. One day, when I was maybe eight or nine years old, I was looking through the case in the hall and I pulled something off a shelf for no other reason than this: I had never seen a book that tried less hard to get someone to read it.

The spine was a plain black with a barely discernible title: The Black Book of Polish Jewry . There were photos inside, so I turned at once to those. What I saw made no sense to me: pictures of beings who mostly looked human, but not completely — their bones too prominent, their heads, their eyes, too big. My first thought was that I was looking at some alien life-form I had never been told existed. I called on my mother to explain.

Her explanation was the worst thing I had ever heard. It is no exaggeration to say that I lived in one world before my mother began to speak and a completely different one when she was done. Why didn’t everybody stop it? I asked, and my mother had no good answer.

I was surprisingly angry with my parents about this.

As was quite common in the time and place of my childhood though quite rare today, I had enormous freedom, both in space and time. I wandered at will, unsupervised and unscheduled, having my own adventures, making my own plans. There was a lot of room in my childhood.

In their actions, in letting me roam as I had roamed, my parents had as much as said that the world was a safe place, that people could be trusted. I felt in some indirect and unclear way that they had lied to me, that my whole life had been a lie.

My school was about four blocks from my house. I usually walked there. One day, a woman I often stopped to chat with as she worked in her yard asked for my phone number. That night my mother told me that she’d invited me to lunch. By myself. I was nervous about this, because I was extremely fussy about food back then, not liking most of it. Being asked to eat something I didn’t like was the greatest horror I was capable of imagining. Not to worry, my mother told me. It had all been covered in the phone call.

Sure enough, my hostess was ready with my favorites. We ate off china plates and she told me stories about her own childhood. Before the lunch was over, she’d promised me a kitten from her cat’s next litter and she was as good as her word. It turned out that she wrote a gardening column for the local paper. A few days later, I was in print, being publicly celebrated for my sweetness and sunshine.

This was how strangers treated you: they brought out the good china and made your favorite foods; they entertained you with stories; they gave you kittens; and they wrote laudatory newspaper columns about you.

They didn’t snatch you from your mother and father, then beat and starve and gas you.

More revelations followed. Life magazine did an article on abused children that included a pair of siblings raised in a basement. Once again, there were pictures. Once again, I was looking at an image of something dreadfully wrong written on someone’s body. The children were stunted. They were bonsai children. And the people who had done this to them were their very own parents.

• • •

I’VE LIVED MY ADULT LIFE at the exact halfway point between joy and rage, gratitude and dismay. There is surely no need to say that, at sixty-five, I’ve had a great many disappointments and suffered some agonizing losses. No one gets through unscathed. Still, by any reasonable reckoning, life has treated me gently.