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| Edward Albee |
Everything in this post comes from a
September 27th 2010, New
Yorker article called Me and My
Shadow by John Lahr. As with the previous post, this article is about a
vastly more famous creative writer who endured a past similar to mine: Another
misery memoirist.
Edward Albee described his family as
“adoptive—we never got along.” Of his parents, he has said: “I was not what
they bargained for, what they thought they had bought” and that there were “no
touchies, no feelies.”
One of Albee’s headmasters supported
Albee’s application to Choate, saying: “Very confidentially, he dislikes his
mother with a cordial and eloquent dislike which I consider entirely
justifiable. I can think of no other boy who, I believe, has been so fully the
victim of an unsympathetic home background or who has exhibited so fully the
psychological effects of feeling that he is not wanted.”
Check. Check.
John Lahr’s article is a review of Albee’s
play: Me, Myself and I. It concerns
identical twins both named Otto (a palindrome), one of whom is loved by his
mother, the other neglected. This conceit captures the horror I felt in the
betrayal of my parents.
The horror is not simply the betrayal. It
also lies in the realization that if you “do something” to reveal it you will
wind up with nothing. I, and others children like me, get trapped in the
psychology of bad parents being better than no parents. We feel we will be the
bigger losers if we tell anyone in a position to help if we are taken from our
homes.
John Lahr: “Albee once
said of his double parental abandonment, “I used to care about it, but then I discovered
that I was a writer…. I found out who I was through my plays.”
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