The Hidden Stories That Tell Us Who We Are

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I could have felt hurt or offended. A very close friend admitted to me that he couldn’t bring himself to finish my recently published book, a seriocomic memoir called Don’t Say a Word!: A Daughter’s Two Cents. The book is about my parents’ bizarre unraveling at the end of their lives and their refusal to listen to me about that—or anything else. Silenced, I became speechless. My friend, who knows me to be particularly outspoken, literally could not stand to read about my non-response to my parents’ outrageous antics. I wasn’t insulted because I realized that, rather than judging my book, he was revealing something about himself.

There may have been an element of empathy in his reaction to my being ignored, but I know that wasn’t the driving force. You see, my friend is an extraordinary talker, a characteristic for which he is celebrated and which he attributes to his own early experience of being shut out of his family’s intense gabfests and of feeling invisible as a consequence. His identification with me made him feel as though he was the one being gagged, and it was unbearable to him because—as a reader—he was unable to enact the defense he’d developed of aggressively speaking out.

Don’t we all just have different tastes?

A reaction driven by a traumatic childhood experience may be more common than we think. The usual explanation for our diverse responses to stories, whether in books, movies, or TV series, is: “Taste is personal.” But this often just means that we find different things funny or distasteful or anxiety-provoking in the same way that we like different flavors of ice cream, i.e., that what drives the preference is unimportant. And it is true that we are born with a wide range of temperaments, which accounts for our many various personality styles. But when a reaction is so intense as to approach being an aversion (or its opposite, a passion), underneath it often lies a meaningful history.

I began to get this idea many years ago, when I was boarding a plane, carrying Frank McCourt’s memoir, Angela’s Ashes, a searing account of McCourt’s growing up poor in Ireland with an alcoholic father. As we walked along to the gateway, two women who’d noticed the book mentioned how hilarious they’d thought it was. I was mind-boggled. How could anyone laugh at the story’s grueling poverty and heart-rending suffering? When I got to my seat, I read the back cover, where there were many blurbs that also admired the humor. What was I missing?

And then I saw it. All the blurb writers who’d mentioned comedy were Irish. To them, a father’s drinking away his wages was once so common as to be part of their cultural identity, and casting the details in a comic light demonstrates a triumph over a historic, community trauma. But I am Jewish, and in my culture, in which alcoholism is rare, and “father” is almost synonymous with “provider,” a father who drinks his family into starvation is unthinkable, and there can be nothing funny about it. It’s similar to the way most Jews respond to humor extracted from the Holocaust.

My own book casts my parents’ steam-rolling me, their only child, as comedy. It’s my way of seizing control of a situation that was once beyond my control and of cutting the two steam-rollers down to size. Getting readers to laugh with me is also a way of reminding them that I survived. My friend noted the humor, but his version of what I had experienced still rankled and was thus too close to laugh off.

How the process works in the brain.

The frightening and painful events of childhood can stay with us for life, especially if they are repeated. Our defense against trauma becomes a learned response, operating almost like a reflex, and we continue to experience any situation that evokes the original misery just as we did when we lived it in the past.

For example, I hate thrillers. They make me so anxious that if a frightening scene comes on the screen, I immediately cover my eyes and then, if it continues, have to flee the room—or movie theater. And yet thrillers are a hugely popular genre. Many, perhaps most, people love being safely scared. They shriek with delight on a roller-coaster. I can’t begin to imagine what their pleasure is.

Today, I trace this reaction to my childhood terror that my beloved nanny, my safe harbor, would at any moment be fired. My frightening mother worked longer hours than my father, and I grew up in the 1950s when a Macy’s dress-buyer and a dentist could afford live-in help, so we also had a cook. The cooks, however, came and went; I remember none of them.

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But their disturbing impermanence made clear that my nanny could have the same fate. Every time my mother’s withering criticism was directed at her, I held my breath as though we stood at the edge of a precipice that could crumble at any moment. Now, as a result, any image I encounter of sadism or threatened cruelty, of an impending avalanche or imminent bomb explosion, triggers an adrenaline rush—and one that is not fun.

Yes, taste is personal. Absolutely. But what does “personal” mean? The source of all our deepest aversions—and even perhaps our most intense pleasures—lies in our pasts. Our histories explain us.