Hilton Als, At the Jewish Beach; Elizabeth Wurtzel, Bastard: Neither of My Parents Was Exactly Who I Thought They Were

Hilton Als, At the Jewish Beach, 
Elizabeth Wurtzel, Bastard: Neither of My Parents Was Exactly Who I Thought They Were

What do these two personal essays have to do with each other? Strong, first person narrators, writing about unsettling experiences with their parents, experiences that helped define and inform them. 

We'll start with Hilton Als:

This is a short piece, told through exposition and no dialogue, but with great, detailed descriptions told through memorable, unnerving images—of kids pooping in pool, of mother and son eating mussels and feeling like criminals while eating them, of father scattering racing form all over the beach.

What is this story about?

Page 1: Story is about one Saturday afternoon

-       Story is about family going to Manhattan beach, spending time together, and feeling "other," on one singular, defining afternoon. Writers, take note: You can explode the moment of that single afternoon. An afternoon can speak volumes about a lifetime. 
 Page 1 : Story is about a journey, literally: One Saturday afternoon, however, he decided to take my mother, my little brother, and me on a journey a long way from home—on the IND train and by bus—to the place where the Jews went swimming and sunning: Manhattan Beach. 

Page 1: Story is about being different, about operating at a deficit and wanting more from life--great plots for essays:

-       Story is also about father’s desire for Judaism to rub off on his family.

Page 1: Strange, compelling detail on narrator's father's perception of what it is to be Jewish, and as always, God is in the details: “Daddy hoped that the Jews, whom he revered, would rub off on us there. He ate Jewish food—tongue and cheesecake—over on Delancey Street, in “the city,” whenever he could, though not before shopping for bargains and complaining about how cheap the Jews were, but how smart they were, too—with a beach of their own. Daddy knew where the Jews bathed, because our mother worked nearby, cleaning their houses.

Page 1: Stakes raised: Both parent are vulnerable, narrator's home life is not conventional and it is this vulnerable home life that compels him to seek his safer place in the world. (Narrator's father lives with his own mother, narrator's mother cleans houses). Seeking our place in the world is great material for an essay:

 In 1971, my father was a Negro statistic familiar to welfare workers all over New York: not married to my mother, he was the father of four of her six children, but he still lived at home with his own mother, in Crown Heights, far from our apartment in East New York.Daddy knew where the Jews bathed, because our mother worked nearby, cleaning their houses.

Page 1 Story is also about being different, and how Jewish Beach/Manhattan Beach, is different than Coney Island. Great, unnerving, specific detail about differences between races and religions:  

“No family as dark as ours had been to Manhattan Beach before. The sand there was cleaner than we had ever seen it at the beach in Coney Island, where the colored people went. Also, it was not as crowded. The Jews never brought pans to fry chicken, or loud radios to play salsa; they read books and newspapers instead. I was curious to see whether the Jews would use their wigs and yarmulkes as swimwear. They did not, but they did put on the bridges of their large noses a white substance that we didn’t need.

Page 1: Stakes raised: Narrator feels racially different. Inciting event: Father's newspaper blows all over the place:

We sat together quietly and with great trepidation—my parents, my little brother, and I—trying not to behave “colored.” Then Daddy, whose feet were reddish brown, dropped the pages of his Racing Form all over the sand. They blew away from us, and we felt like all the loud and disadvantaged niggers the Jews had left East New York to avoid and whose robberies they read about every Sunday in the Brooklyn pages of the Times.

Pages 1-2: Specific, unnerving details about where narrator perceives he is from:

Though some of the kids in East New York had skin the color of cheetahs’ spots, and others were the color of coconuts, the high-contrast black-and-white photographs in the Times made the city’s young colored underclass look plain “black,” and most of the photographers seemed to view Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx as a collective dump, where dead-end kids dived into crowded pools and stoned junkies on bumpy concrete stoops plunged endlessly in and out of the depthless blue of narcotics.

Page 2: Stakes raised: narrator wears lace trimmed shorts and reads A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The story also subtly reveals how narrator reads to become a writer:
I’d end up on one of those stoops, too, if I didn’t get smart, like the Jews, and get out of East New York, where there was only one large, overcrowded public pool that nasty boys or girls sometimes shit in. While those boys and girls put conditioner in their damp hair and displayed their bodies to one another, I sat in my mother’s house in my lace-trimmed calico shorts (unaware that such apparel was strictly for girls), reading, over and over again, Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” the story of a girl who yearned to be a writer and to write about Brooklyn in her own way.

Page 2: Story ends with narrator and his mother eating mussels. Note how the mussels are an elevated object. We have the deliciously satisfying details of eating food made by narrator's mother: The Jews’ skin was so white that the water at their beach had to be clean, and we were afraid to swim, for fear of polluting it. But my mother and I did leave our nubby peach beach blanket for one small expedition: we went to pull mussels off the rocks—out of sight, so that no one would think we were stealing. Later that day, after Daddy had gone to his home and we had gone to ours, she put those mussels in a sauce she had made out of onions, garlic, and olive oil, and we ate the briny stew with the relish of criminals who think they have got away with something.

Elizabeth Wurtzel, Bastard: Neither of My Parents was exactly who I thought they were.

This story is told in what I call "animated first person," i.e. narrator is passionately telling us a story about herself. 

Page 1: Elevated objects are the photo of Martin Luther King having a dream on the Lincoln Memorial and prints of photos of protesters being hosed down in Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963

Page 3: Stakes raised right away. Narrator tells us her father is not her father and her biological father is a celebrity photographer:

It turns out that the man I have spent 50 years believing to be my father is not my father.

My mother lied to me about who my father is. My father is Bob Adelman, the photographer, who most famously caught Martin Luther King Jr. in profile having a dream on the Lincoln Memorial. You know the shot. You know many of Bob’s pictures. When they say something is iconic, they just mean everyone knows it. Bob was early for history. 

Page 3 Note the use of voice. The  narrator is self absorbed and self aggrandizing but provides lovely details and memories of herself as a child, and is she is frequently funny and self-aware and ultimately, in a great deal of pain, which saves this story from becoming a boastful rant:

When my first book came out, I was 27 years old. Prozac Nation changed the way people see mental illness, and it changed the way publishers see memoirs. The New York Times Book Review called me “Sylvia Plath with the ego of Madonna.” I was a hashtag before there was Twitter.

Page 3 Lovely memorable details of narrator as child and of her childhood:

 “I had big eyes and thick bangs. People played with my long chocolate hair.”

“There was that playground in Central Park at 97^th Street with the money bars and chipped-paint yellow sees we loved.”

 Page 3: Narrator asks reader questions, engages reader, draws us into her story. Great idea to pose questions to reader:

We lived a block apart. Was that a coincidence?

Bob’s marriage split up when his wife found out he’d gotten another woman — my mother — pregnant. Did Bob’s ex-wife know I was his daughter when I went to her apartment for SpaghettiOs?

Page 4: Stakes raised: Narrator’s father. Donald Wurtzel, is pill addict who disappeared. Brief brutal summary of  narrator's history with her father and she continues to ask reader questions:

My mother divorced him when I was 2. I saw him once a week, but eventually it was less than that.

Donald Wurtzel was not so much wrong for me as wrong for anyone. He relied on pills to get by. He was hard to reach.

He was not much of a father, and when I was 14, he disappeared — disconnected telephone.

His mother, my grandma Dorothy in Coney Island with plastic covers on the sofa and wing chairs, would not tell me where he was. She lived her life in linoleum. She was used to the brutal architecture of Trump Village, a lower-middle-class complex built by Fred Trump. Was she looking at the Cyclone when she told me he loved me?

My father and I never really reconnected. We tried, and eventually we stopped doing even that. When he died in 2014, I had not seen him since 2001.

Pages 4-5: Beautiful writing about writer’s struggle to figure out her relationship with her father (and herself):

I have been working out that relationship all of my life, in writing and therapy and conversation, with cocaine and heroin, with recovery and perseverance, and with my thoughts. I think so much. I can’t stop thinking. It’s all exposed. I don’t have a subconscious.

You can’t surprise me.

But this surprised me.

I have been working out the wrong problem.

Thousands of words on the wrong problem. I have perfected a two-handed backhand to clobber the lob that is coming at me that is: the wrong problem. I have aced the wrong problem.

Page 6/18 (end of Act 1) Narrator learns from Bob’s girlfriend that she is his daughter: This is life changing news that takes place at the end of the first third of the story. Narrator mentions her own pain/life-threatening illness, reader begins to feel real sympathy/empathy for her:

Branka, his girlfriend, called me: Bob is your father. I was in a car on the way to Mount Sinai Hospital for physical therapy after breast-cancer treatment in 2015. I probably should have taken the subway, the 5 to the 6, those few dreary blocks of walking on the upper Upper East Side, tenements on Park Avenue, projects on Madison.

I could have been out of reach.

Instead, I was in traffic on the FDR. Branka told me more than once: Bob is your father. He talked about it every day.

I thought she was crazy. I laughed. I told her I was flattered that Bob believed that. But no, not true. I look like the man whom I have always believed to be my father.

Of course, I also look like Bob.

My mother has a type.

I was still in the car, heading for the exit, when my mom called. It’s true, she said. Bob is your father. He is the only one who could be your father.

Page 7:  Tension continues to rise, narrator has advanced breast cancer, discovers she has inherited the BRCA gene from her biological father. New information late in life is great material to write about, even (and especially) if it is unnerving.

I got breast cancer as a result of the BRCA gene.

My mother does not have the BRCA mutation. She was tested. My first cousin, my mother’s sister’s daughter, got breast cancer at age 47 just like me, but she does not have the BRCA gene. I inherited BRCA from my father.

It was a surprise to find I had the BRCA gene when I was diagnosed.

I now have advanced breast cancer.

People see me now, I look the same, there I am with the same artificial blonde hair I’ve always had, and they think cancer was a phase. Aren’t you done with cancer? Isn’t that what happened in 2015? I think in this age of immunotherapy-IPO mania, it’s hard to remember that cancer mostly can’t be cured.

Page 8 Parents’ back story involves detailed description of father’s vices and bad behavior. Vices and bad behavior are great material for stories. Also note elevated objects of furniture and strange detail of mother and chimpanzee:

On days off, my father would sleep. My mother would go out to run errands and come home to find him passed out on the living-room couch, the ashtrays overwhelmed with Vantage butts running onto the coffee table.

It was a Paul McCobb mid-century-modern piece with long, sexy angular legs, and his cigarettes were blotching it with burn marks. My father was torturing the furniture.

My mother fretted. She got a chimpanzee named Percy for company. I know, unbelievable: a chimpanzee. But it was common enough at the time that their neighbors had one too. The two of them would roam around and climb in windows. They stole the guy upstairs’ pipes and pretended to be smoking them. When my mother realized Percy was a mistake, she gave him to the people next door, who were happy to take in their chimp’s playmate.

Page 8 Great detailed description of how parents met at Macy’s and history of father’s parents . Father's family history includes sugar addiction and depression:

Donald Wurtzel was from postwar Brooklyn. He grew up in the Brownsville section, the son of German Jews. My grandfather Saul was a diabetic who worked on an assembly line in a baby-carriage factory and could not stay away from quart-size bottles of sugary soda. Saul loved Canada Dry ginger ale. He loved Dr. Brown’s cream soda. He killed himself with sweet stuff. By the time the Wurtzel family moved into Trump Village, the household was grim. It was the Brooklyn you escaped from. My grandmother was hospitalized for her despair.

Donald Wurtzel met my mother on an escalator at Macy’s in Herald Square — she was going up and he was coming down. She was in the executive-training program, and he was a buyer in the boys’ department. She was working in the books section of the store. In the old Broadway building, the ancient escalator has wood slats. My mother was still living with her parents in Hewlett, on Long Island, in the house she grew up in.

Their first date was at Pete’s Tavern on Irving Place, which seems perfect: an old favorite that serves mussels and pasta and beer on tap. My mother married my father because he was the first one who asked. He was handsome. She was 23.

Page 10: Secret revealed (secret are great material for stories, see more about shame and secrets below):

Once a week, my mother and Bob would go together to a different school and talk to kids and get them to pose. They would take taxis because Random House was paying for it.

Ah, the delicious delights of the expense account. Oh, to be young in the city and burning up a tab on someone else.

On the rides to and from the schools, they would talk about their crummy marriages. Nothing like the common bond of common bondage to get things going.

So it was a yellow-cab romance.

Bob had a studio and darkroom in the Photo District, that stretch of 18th Street full of camera stores and image labs. They would look at the day’s work as it developed, the pictures hanging from clips on a line to dry.

And, of course, my mother was alone in her apartment on East 84th Street.

My mother was afraid of getting caught.

It was an affair.

And so my mother got pregnant, which is what happens when you are 25 and not using birth control.

She knew it was Bob.

It could only be him.

She never saw her husband.

She only told Bob. Bob knew. And she asked him not to tell.

She was old fashioned. Is.

My mother was ashamed that she had an affair, so she hid it and made her husband think he was my father.

Page 11 Shame/secrets make for great material for stories and essays.

Shame is powerful.

She kept this secret for half a century.

She considered telling me when I was 12.

Page 12:  Interesting observations about motherhood, patriarchy, shame and secrets

I went to yeshiva on the Upper West Side. The principal was also the rabbi of our shul and has since moved on to founding one of the largest settlements on the West Bank. My mother went to him for advice. He told her that discovering such a truth about oneself often leads the person to suicide. This was the thinking at the time, which is why they did not always tell children of adoption that their birth parents were different from the ones they lived with. It was a world coated in the slime of shame, it was a muck of lies men told women for their convenience.

My mother asked my psychiatrist what to do. He counseled her to tell me the truth with both Bob and Donald present. My mother could not figure out how to work the geometry of that four-way.

None of the men my mother turned to for advice in the very patriarchal culture that we lived in told her to do the right thing and be truthful.

Patriarchy is a negotiation. Motherhood should be honest.

Because my mother is human and it was easier not to, she did not tell me.

Instead, she let me struggle with my father. She let me work — she let me build pyramids in Mizraim — with the man I always believed was my father.

Page 13: Lovely, specific sad details about visits with father. Note memorable details of Windex streaks on mirror. This kind of "telling detail" makes the story memorable and brings the reader into the scene.

When I was little, on our Saturday visits, my father would pick me up, take me back to his walk-up studio apartment on East 88th Street, put on the small black-and-white television with a rabbit-ear antenna, and fall asleep until it was time to return me to my mother.

I remember Star Trek reruns and NCAA basketball. Did they call it March Madness in 1971?

I learned to raise one eyebrow like Spock. I practiced in the bathroom mirror, the one on the medicine cabinet over the sink that glowed gray with dust and turquoise with Windex streaks, standing on the stepladder to see, while my father lay with the TV on, not moving.

Most of what I remember about him is how he diminished in my life over time, the Rorschach’s blots of orange and yellow and pink at sunset going gradually black.

There are years of nothing between us.

Pages 14-15 Beautiful sad writing about father. Note the use of cigarette smoke and sound effects:

Life was smoky. I remember a constant miasma. There was shouting. Phones slammed. Back then you could get angry and smash the receiver. I heard clangs all the time.

My mother would sit on the sofa in the dark, stare into space, dragging on yet another Gauloises Bleu.

I avoided my father because I did not want to hear his side. I learned young about alternate facts. Children of divorce have a high threshold for multiple realities. But I could only handle one extreme parent. And my father was useless, unless it was about how much he hated my mother.

His anger at my mother gave him purpose. He was the Russian Army at Stalingrad when it came to hating my mother.

I was in pain.

My parents were pain.

When I called my father and the phone was off, and the recording said there was no further information, I was relieved.

The long emergency that was my childhood was over.

Surely at that point, my mother should have told me.

Instead, she left me to figure out my missing father.

I am a redeemed person because I worked out that relationship.

Page 15: Narrator voices her anger at biological father Bob Adelman but she also forgives him, which is crucial. Personal essay cannot land on anger. Author must find some way in his/her heart to find forgiveness for target of anger. Otherwise, reader becomes fatigued by story. Reader needs that relief, the catharsis, of author's forgiveness. Forgiveness propels writer forward into peace/acceptance.

And then there is Bob Adelman.

He should have told me.

I visited him at home in Miami a month before he died. Alistair, my husky mix with a feather-boa tail, knocked coffee all over the glass table and drenched some prints Bob said were nothing important.

But Bob is human and he is lousy, so he did the easy thing and did not tell me.

Bob has often done the difficult thing, in Montgomery and Selma. Bob was brave so that the world could see what was going on.

But photojournalism is a sneaky art. Bob ducked behind grand old oak trees. He hid away from nightsticks. He felt only the precipitation from fire hoses. He was behind the lens of his Nikon.

He did not confront me.

Bob died without telling me who he was, who I am.

I love Bob. He knew intimate details about the slave trade in America, the difference between Tobacco Virginia and Cotton Arkansas. His undergraduate thesis was about the market for human beings from the Middle South to the Deep South, from Tara country to the Mississippi Delta. Bob taught me that there has never been a legitimate election in Georgia.

Bob was a radical. Like me. We sat around agreeing.

Pages 16- 18 Lovely ending. Narrator comes full circle to herself, a little boastful but still self aware, reaches broad conclusion about forgiveness,  DNA testing, mystery of missing half sister, possibility of half sister having BRCA gene, ends with another question:

The best people are the ones you have to forgive for everything. You have no choice; it would be worse to live without them.

So I have to forgive my mother. Of course I do. She is the only parent I have. She wanted to be a single mother. She did not want men to tell her what to do. “I wanted to be independent,” she recently told me. “I wanted to make my own way.” She was a woman in a man’s world. She did not know how to have what she wanted without being duplicitous. In 1967, the year I was born, a woman

That is the corruption of sexism: My mother lied to me too.

Because I am a feminist, I have to forgive her.

My mother is the author of this story.

She made me who I am.

Who else is like this? Fifty years is a long lie.

I have always valued the truth so deeply. I felt like we had a relationship. Maybe we were even co-dependent. I understand that this is only my version of events, that the truth comes in multitudes. Shock of shocks, we often cannot even agree on the facts. My mother is a private person. She wants no part of this. She has never read any of what I have written about her. But she respects what I do. She believes it’s possible to reach people with words.
And she knows that the truth will set you free.

I did not believe that narrative, the one where you get information about the person who you are and — eureka! Voilà! — it all makes sense.

I believed the story that I had to reckon with my whole life, the one where I made peace with my parents, who are not right for me, which makes me — which makes me just like everyone else.

I came to terms with having the wrong parents by becoming myself anyway.

I was a miracle. I was unlikely. I was inexplicable. I came from out of nowhere. No one in my family was anything like me.

Everyone is out there with their adoption fantasies, doing AncestryDNA and 23andMe, because they have a funny feeling that there is something they don’t know.

In 2007, I did a DNA test through National Geographic and opted into a database of matched kits called FamilyTreeDNA. I recently got an email from a woman in Las Vegas who is Bob Adelman’s first cousin. She got an alert that we are first cousins once removed.

So I would have figured out that Bob is my father even if Branka had not told me, even if my mother had not told me. A consumer DNA test would have led me to it, just as police solved the Golden State Killer case through GEDmatch. It would have been another remarkable discovery enabled by pop science.

Page 18 Final page reveals another shocking secret:  A half sister who may be at risk for breast cancer.

Bob was so promiscuous that I am not even his only biological child — he has at least one other daughter, my half-sister, whom he never met.

I have to find her. She, too, may have the BRCA gene and not know it.

Also: I have to find her. She is my sister.

And perhaps there are others Bob did not know about.

I found the Rosebud in my garage. Yes, of course: What else did I miss?