The Story Behind the Story by Kaethe Cherney
Growing up, I felt as though I belonged to two families - the one I had before my father died, and the one that we became. Following my father’s death from a five-year battle with cancer, I created myths. He died when I was aged five, so I believed that my coming into the world somehow subtracted from his time on earth. That being a Cancerian meant I would contract cancer. My father was an artist, so in my mind creativity became a dangerous pursuit that if chosen, would lead to an early death.
We stumbled along for a few years after Daddy died with a sense of chaotic coherence until a young, magnetic camp counsellor befriended my two elder siblings and then started sleeping with our mother. Mom became teenage-like in lust and began staying out all night, making her children the parents who worried about her well-being.
The counsellor moving in with us became our tipping point. My brother joined the Sullivanian cult when I was ten. The Sullivanians, who lived in communal apartments on New York’s Upper West Side, viewed traditional family ties as the root cause of mental illness and advocated a non-monogamous lifestyle. Their radical views resonated with the 70s mores, and their message that mothers were corrupting agents chimed loud and clear with my siblings: they had them from there.
I can recall my brother inviting me to Central Park, where he gave me some nail polish and then told me he wouldn't be seeing me for a while. That ‘while’ turned out to be fifteen years, in which we would meet intermittently and always at my instigation. These get-togethers were difficult because I felt obliged to fly Mom’s flag, while he went to great lengths to persuade me that Mom was a psychopathic narcissistic who’d tried to kill me when I was a baby. Our encounters tied my head into pretzels.
I can remember how my sister’s aura changed during that time. She became brittle with anger and then anorexia. Her first attempt as a high school sophomore in joining the Sullivanians resulted in Mom sending the police to escort her home. And until she figured a way to move out at aged sixteen, my sister slept at our apartment but never shared a meal or spent a single waking moment there.
I didn’t have a name for what my siblings did. It took years before I could identify it as a cult. I felt ashamed of their abandonment. I felt ashamed that my mother was with a man who was young enough to be her son. I didn’t understand how those two events were related until I was eighteen and my sister, who had just left the Sullivanians, invited me to stay with her in Paris and love-bombed me from the moment she collected me at Gare du Nord. When she told me that, at age thirteen, she had made out with the counsellor, everything clicked. I understand then that my mother was the victim as well as the perpetrator, as were the four of us to lesser and greater extents.
Mom was a beautiful, wilful nonconformist. She came from Mayflower stock and her parents didn’t give my parents a wedding present for five years, such was their belief that their union would end in divorce. Marrying my father, a first generation Jewish artist, was Mom’s successful rebellion, but that formula ceased to work when she was widowed and thereafter her choices became increasingly nihilistic.
Looking back, I’m surprised that Mom didn’t became a Sullivanian. She sought therapy from dubious practitioners, was a hard-wired iconoclastic who enjoyed her sexual liberation after twenty years of celibacy and on many levels, was ambivalent about motherhood. She loved our father deeply, but resented being a single parent and wanted her taste of ‘70s freedom too.
When I was in high school, Mom was diagnosed as bi-polar. It was almost a relief to find a name for the mood patterns that coloured my home life and made her self-medicate with booze. In the years that followed, those patterns shifted. Mom would periodically attempt to go off her meds, which would start with a spark before she crashed and burned. She hated being labelled anything, so it was taboo to acknowledge her condition. We never found a comfortable dialogue about that, or about the counsellor’s creepy behaviour during my pubescence. Even after he left, she continued sending him birthday and Christmas cards and would shut down any conversation I tried to have about what happened.
Moving to London for the first time at age eighteen was my polite way of running away. I never wanted to abandon my mother, nor did I want to sacrifice my happiness for hers. Mom had a capacity to be tone-deaf to my needs, often because she was so deafened by the noise of her own mind. Granting me complete freedom was her clumsy way of giving me the life she didn’t have. Our love was deep, messy and profound. I have so much to thank her for. It’s not every mother who would allow their daughter to travel to Europe and the Soviet Union by herself or let me freely operate on a no-nightclub left behind policy during my teens.
My novel ‘Happy as Larry: A New York Story of Cults, Crushes and Quaaludes’ was inspired in part by a dream that I had in which I was pounding on the front door of our first apartment, crying that I wanted to go home. I began to ponder the impossibility of returning to a place that no longer existed, physically and psychically. The ‘home’ I carried in me was different to the home I lived in, and I see now that I needed one to manage the other. The dream awoke a desire to articulate my story, and thereafter I started sketching an outline that was a hybrid of fact and fiction.
Drawing on the experience of being a daughter, sister and mother gave me greater compassion for the difficulties our family had faced. Writing allowed me to assign feelings and heal wounds. By the time I completed the book I had lost my mother too. Although a part of her would have been furious, another part would have been flattered by the way in which I portrayed her complexities. She would have loathed being rendered in simpler terms.
I hope that my book will remind readers that hearts mend, situations change, and life gives us second chances. Our family came full circle and ended up back where we began. Together, and stronger for it.
