Ianthe Brautigan

You can’t catch death, or, more to the point, you can’t catch wanting to kill yourself. Ianthe Brautigan worries she will or has after her father, the troubled, cult, beat novelist Richard Brautigan, took his own life. She writes this memoir as somewhat of a coming-to-terms-with-it, healing process and acceptance of his death but we are also witness to the lingering effects on a daughter of her father’s struggle to live.

What comes first the chicken or the egg? The sensitive disposition or the suicidal father? And where does the buck stop? Does neglect and a traumatic childhood breed neglect and bad parentage?

Thankfully, in this case no, as the book itself is evidence to the thought and awareness Ianthe Brautigan gives to the fears and other destructive emotions that she has been left with, after the neglect and emotional rollercoaster of her childhood. Her own daughter, Elizabeth, is regularly mentioned in the book and we see tacitly how the author is both determined and successful not to (as far as she is able) pass on these effects.

At first, I was ready to lose faith in an author I love (her father), allow him to fall in my estimations and let my appreciation of his art be tainted due to faults in his humanity. I was due to launch into a discussion on whether art and the morality/humanity of an artist were mutually exclusive or, whether they are inherently linked (think Weinstein, and whether any of his ‘works’ could ever be looked at objectively again).

But in my initial haste I lost sight that this is different. By all accounts of his daughter, Richard Brautigan was an authentically troubled man. He committed no crime, he loved his daughter to the best of his ability but yes, he neglected her; he inverted the traditional role of parent child; he wasn’t the selfless parent she needed, rather it was his daughter who was worrying after him, keeping him safe and more pertinently, trying to keep him alive.

Yet through his daughter‘s vignettes we learn about his own childhood of malnourishment, neglect, witnessing abuse of his mother, not truly knowing who his father was and, at the age of 21, getting committed to a mental institute after throwing a stone at the window of a police station in the hope he would be arrested and get a regular meal. Here he received 12 ‘treatments’ of electric shock therapy and a resultant aversion to electricity.

So again I ask - where does the buck stop? Did he try hard enough? Does his own traumatic childhood excuse his falling short?

Ianthe holds nothing against her father, she loves him dearly and to the day of writing, still keeps his urn and ashes in a drawer of her house, reluctant to bury him and fully let him go. It is deducible in her accounts that she is overly fearful and cautious with and almost obsessive inability to let go, but also that she is an aware and reflective person who attends counselling and tries to be ‘better’.

As for me? Well first and foremost it’s none of my business, but I guess on a personal level a little tainting of one of my favourite novelists has come to pass. Ultimately (I believe) the crosses we bear must be or attempted to be overcome - must in the sense that if they are not, what quality of existence are we providing for others and ourselves? Additionally, the teacher in me is sensitive to parents neglecting children. My stance: if you can’t give everything, don’t have them.

A particularly poignant line in the book was this: ‘When my father did finally comeback, I knew the truth: he couldn’t take care of me.’

No child should have to face this truth yet it should also never be a reason to make your own child feel it either. Neglect breeding neglect is a viscous, dangerous cycle which we must avoid; it is probably at the heart of a lot of humanity’s problems - neglected children are certainly the hardest to teach and the lowest attainers.

That being said, I now want to read another of her father’s books; the added understanding of his circumstances in which he was creating novels will undoubtedly add further layers of meaning to them.

Finally, I want to talk about the end of the book, where Ianthe travels to meet her father’s mother - a mother he had little to do with after leaving at the age of 21. I found the meeting quite powerful in the sense that these two females, two direct relations to a man who essentially had given up, seemed to glow in their resilience. It powerfully illustrated the strength of womankind - both had or had had their own issues but both were battling on. It makes me think suicide seems a man thing. After a quick google, it seems that in both the UK and US, men kill themselves 3 times more often than women. Wow - what an insight. In fact, apparently women can recover a lot quicker from exercise too even though men are faster and quicker on the whole. It seems that as a gender, we men must be steelier in our suffering and take example from women kind and their strength.

Anyway, I digress. This is a great read, especially if you are a fan of Richard Brautigan. The insight it gives into his troubled genius is a welcome addition to his own great writing. I’m grateful for all Ianthe Brautigan has shared with us and hope the writing of this book went some way to getting some closure over the loss of her father.… (altro)

The title of this book comes from something that IB's mother said to her shortly after they had found out about the suicide of her father, Richard Brautigan. The book is a memoir, largely made up of snippets of her memories of her father, interleaved with her own story as she comes to terms with the fact that he killed himself. The reminiscences of her father will be of interest to fans - I haven't read much of his stuff but even so there were a couple of occasions when I recognised something which must have made its way from real life into his books. But the parts about her own reactions are curiously unrevealing. I don't know if this was because she didn't want to reveal too much about herself, or she just wasn't very self-aware, or she was striving for the deadpan Brautigan style - but it doesn't make for very interesting reading, mean though it seems to say this about such a terrible story (you certainly get the impression that Brautigan found the writing, or at least the process that she went through while writing, very therapeutic).… (altro)