Itinerantdaughter's Blog

“Nelle [Harper Lee] told me about the time a young Truman took off on an adventure.  It was 1936.  Truman was twelve and Nelle was ten.  A girl named Martha was visiting the Rawls family across the street.  She was from Milton, Florida, and four years old than Truman.  Nelle said she noticed that the girl would sit out on the steps in her bathing costume.  ‘I was jealous,’ Nelle told me, ‘of all the time Truman was spending with Martha––the exotic older woman.’

“Nelle told me to ask Alice about the details of what came next.  I did.

“‘Truman and Martha got it into their heads that they would run away,’ Alice told me.  ‘So they hitchhiked to Evergreen and created a story about why they were traveling by themselves.  The clerk at the hotel realized that something was not right and called back here to have someone retrieve them.  It didn’t create that much attention around here.  It was two little kids up to mischief.  It was no big thing.  The only big thing about it came later when both of ’em became well-known, but not for the same reason.

“‘It turns out that years later she had been corresponding through one of those lonely hearts kind of things in a magazine and that was how she met this husband who ended up being her partner in crime.’

“In an uncanny twist of Nelle’s and Truman’s history, Martha turned out to be a murderer.  She was Martha Beck, who, with her husband, lured and robbed women who had placed personal ads in newspapers.  Posing as brother and sister in the late forties, they befriended the unsuspecting victims before killing them.  Known as the Lonely Hearts Killers, their crimes were sensationalized in the popular detective magazines of the day.

~The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee by Marja Mills

Not that anyone particularly cares at this point, but there was a bit of an oh-how-brave reaction when Christine Quinn, who was then running for mayor, released a memoir about her various obstacles: homosexuality, bulimia, and alcoholism (wow, what a trio!)  But if you think carefully, it’s not brave at all, but rather incredibly safe, because it’s following the clear cultural trajectory toward an end where strife is the only worthwhile currency.  I will bet anyone who is willing that it’s not long before a disgraced Republican, who was fervently anti-marriage equality but then was caught tapping his foot in a bathroom, comes out with a memoir, goes on Oprah and cries, and uses it all to launch a new campaign.  (Oh wait… Anthony Weiner kind of did that already, minus the gay part.)

“What makes us authentic, then, as Jews, homosexuals, Hindus, or Chinese, is our sense of trauma, and thus our status as victims, which cannot be questioned.  The vulgar Freudianism of the view is remarkable in an age of debunking Freud.  In fact, Freud’s endeavors were themselves a brilliant product of late-nineteenth century identity politics.  To secular, bourgeois, assimilated German and Austrian Jews, psychoanalysis was a logical route to self discovery.  What Freud did for his Viennese patients is in a way what Edmund White and other identity politicians are now doing for their various ‘communities,’ and real politicians are borrowing their language.”

~Ian Buruma, “The Joys and Perils of Victimhood,” from the New York Review of Books

“On February 14, I received a telegram from Buenos Aires telling me to return immediately, for my father was ‘in no way well.’  God forgive me, but the prestige of being the recipient of an urgent telegram, the desire to point out to all of Fray Bentos the contradiction between the negative form of the news and the positive adverb, the temptations to dramatize my sorrow as a feigned a virile stoicism, all distracted me from the possibility of anguish.”  ~Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes the Memorius”