A Review of David Salner's A Place to Hide

“Tsedekah…It is an old Jewish term. It refers to our obligation to right the injustice of society. I feel that obligation but don’t always know how to let it guide me.” These words are spoken by Virgil Pushkin Shulman, a resident, along with his wife Rosie and daughter Sylvie, of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, to his new friend Bill. Virgil and Bill have been recruited to work as “sandhogs” in the construction of the Holland Tunnel under the Hudson River. The work is grueling and dangerous, but the pay is good. Bill is new to the city, and Virgil makes it his mission to help him out by offering him a place to stay. Bill is a man with a past which he must keep hidden because he is a fugitive from the law. In fact, Bill is not even his real name. Bill is Jimmy Little, the younger brother of Frank Little, a man students of history may recognize as the labor organizer for the IWW who was lynched in Butte, Montana in 1917.

How Jimmy/Bill winds up in New York City after running from the law in Montana is the subject of a stirring first novel A Place to Hide by David Salner. Not only does one man from one side of the continent become close friends with a man with an entirely different background from the other side of the continent, but they each have vivid and horrible memories which they share with each other, the one intimately involved with the Speculator Mine Disaster in Butte, Montana, which killed 168 miners, and in it’s wake resulted in the death of his brother Frank, the other intimately involved in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in Greenwich Village, in which his mother died along with 145 workers, most of whom were women and children. Both historically true disasters occurred only a few years apart, and a reader might do well to scan youtube and other sources for detailed descriptions of the disasters, as well as the construction of the Holland Tunnel. Through their shared sorrows and bitterness, Bill and Virgil find an unshakable bond centered on what it means to be a laborer in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Salner knows of what he writes. Like his main character Bill, he has traversed the continent working at a great variety of jobs, most of them as back-breaking and perilous as those of his characters. He has been a steel worker, miner, garment worker, and longshoreman, among others. His experiences are evident in his descriptions of the work environments in the novel, in which, detail upon detail, the reader is invited to experience the sweat, grime and near suffocation of working underground, be it under a river or under a mountain. Take, for example, the following description of the work of “sandhogs” on the Holland Tunnel.

“Together they began filling a cart from the dirt piled by the bulkhead. It was loamy and damp and had a brackish stink., which was unpleasantly multiplied by the high-pressure atmosphere…When the cart was full, they pushed it down the tracks to the other end of their giant work chamber, to a door where a man waved, shaping the words, “Hurry, push, push!’…it was heavy with sodden earth and the weight of the air…They turned back toward their bulkhead, where another man had positioned a new cart just in time to catch rocks and mud deluging down the chute.”

Add Salner’s many work skills and experiences to his skills as a writer, and the result is a winning combination of verisimilitude and lyricism. Because David Salner, as many readers might recognize, is an accomplished and widely-published poet and has put his experiences in four books of poetry, among them Blue Morning Light and his latest, The Stillness of Certain Valleys, which describe the hardships, frustrations, and camaraderie among workers. A reading of any of his poems quickly demonstrates an acute attention to the details of the world of work, whether it is underground or above. But, more to the point, the reader is witness to the great heart Salner has for the men and women he describes. That same devotion to detail and affection is present in A Place to Hide. In addition to Bill and the Shulmans, there is a cast of characters, fellow workers in the Holland Tunnel and the mines of Pennsylvania, as well as the inhabitants of the roach-infested tenement building where Bill and the Shulmans live, one of whom, a woman with an illegitimate child, becomes Bill’s lover. And, of course, there are villains, most notably a man named Arnoldson, who is constantly on Bill’s trail, eager to return him to a Montana prison. Some villains go unnamed, the vigilantes, gangsters, and the police used to suppress and round up strikers, who have earned the distrust of working stiffs throughout the broad landscape of the novel. Others have names writ large in history: John D. Rockefeller, John D. Ryan, the chief executive of the Anaconda Copper Company, Max Blank and Isaac Harris, the owners of the Asch Building that housed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

It should not be surprising if even a quick look at A Place to Hide reminds a reader of such classic works of labor fiction as those of Sinclair Lewis, Jack London, or John Steinbeck. The history of labor is in large part a history of struggle and repression. Pressed between the bookends of the Speculator Mine Disaster and the opening of the Holland Tunnel, Salner makes us acutely aware of how difficult and arduous has the push in the arc of Justice been in the struggle for workers’ rights. It is Bill/Jimmy’s crime, for which he was handed a life sentence, to have led strikers, as did his murdered brother before him. What moves a man to take the giant step from grief to action is poignantly underlined in Salner’s descriptions of the aftermath of mine disasters, euphemistically called accidents by the powers in control.

“They found some bodies perfectly intact, huddled against those concrete bulkheads, intact except for fingers that were worn down to bone scrapping against the barrier as lungs filled with smoke. Bill had worked for days laying out what was left of the bodies… They carried stretchers…Some were as light as feathers even with the remnants of more than one man. They couldn’t tell how many were jumbled together.”

This is a story not only about the few characters who weave through the pages of A Place to Hide, but of every man and woman who has played a part in the advance of humane working conditions and freedom from preventable work disaster in America.

A Conversation Between Kelly J. Beard and Adrian Koesters: Part One

Authors Kelly J. Beard and Adrian Koesters got together for a conversation on their new works, and talk about poverty, violence, faith, and coming to literature a bit later in life. Here is Part One of their conversation.

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AEK: I thought I would begin by saying that in my novel, Union Square, my main intention, other than to tell a good story the best way that I could, was to describe this place that was such a mixture of so many realities, people, skin color, religious belief. I wanted to set up the story so that that they all could (in theory) find each other in this small neighborhood, relate to each other, and within the strict confines of the time, not see each other as particularly unique or exotic. In part, I was trying to both address identity and provide a foil for some of the more excessive expressions of identity politics, which in my view, at least in literature, has something of a short shelf life. I also wanted to show how important the veneer of respectability is for the people of such a place, that has to do with race, but I would say much more with class and poverty.

KJB: That’s such an interesting observation about the shelf-life of identity politics in literature. I hadn’t thought of that with particularity when writing An Imperfect Rapture, but I have been chaffing at the narrowness of our individual (and collective) apertures for some time.

AEK: In terms of family violence, I guess the advantage I have in this conversation with you is that I’m discussing a work of fiction, while you are talking about your life, your relationships and family. So while the themes are certainly in accord, I can kind of side-step some things if I wish, at least as regards the novel. Someone asked me, “So, you are Catherine, right?” No, I’m not Catherine—I wish I had been Catherine. As a matter of fact, in this novel, there are only a small handful of instances drawn directly from my life experience. For example, for the novel’s denouement, I put together eating a cracker I found on the floor of my babysitter’s house when I was seven years old with waking up at a party when I was fourteen or fifteen, where I didn’t know anybody, sick from having taken God knows what, placing the party of the novel in a house on Charles Street I always wanted to go into but never had the chance.

Having said that, the greatest fear for me has been in people reading the book and saying, it was never like that, these people are not like that, she got it all wrong, who does she think she is—and these would be fears or questions that relate to memoir and non-fiction rather than fiction, but that was and is still hard to grapple with. So that gives an idea of the weight of writing the book, with the last question obviously the most crippling. I think if we heard as kids, Who do you think you are? once in a week, we heard it a hundred times.

The other difference in terms of the violence experienced in my own life is that there was not a person, as with your father, who believed he had the right to punish the members of his household. Though you and I both lived in a certain kind of very familiar poverty, and the massive disruptions that come with it, the only real continuity of family I had was with my two sisters and in my grandmother’s house. So a lot of my memory is very disturbed and discontinuous, and the terrible episodes of violence were less predictable and were not only from one or two other people. The violence and viciousness between me and my siblings was also less predictable and more explosive than what you describe. But I feel that the hallmarks of both our situations come directly out of poverty and the particular violence that goes with it, because I think that violence is so often fueled by shame and a desire for some kind of power, however meager. I suppose not everyone would agree that poverty violence is any different from violence engendered elsewhere, but I think it is.

KJB: I don’t think I fully grasped the connection between violence and poverty or violence and religious fundamentalism until writing this memoir. Even more importantly, perhaps, I hadn’t made the connection between my experience growing up in that particular American shadowland with some of my own rage and inability to navigate the world with any measure of equanimity or inner calm. I practiced employment discrimination law for a lot of years, and have a near-pathological commitment to justice and fairness, and yet the legal system is singularly unfair and unjust to the poorest members of society. One of the things I hoped to do with my writing was to show the rest of the world what it means to be ignored or abused because of one’s class, and to try to open the eyes and minds of readers to how impermeable the barriers to class mobility (at least from poor to middle or upper class) are in this country. It’s a fallacy to think that without intentional, guided assistance people born into poverty – especially generational poverty – have any real chance of getting out of it.

And I do think poverty violence is more pervasive and relentless than what the middle or upper classes choose to believe. I also think you’re right about it being fueled in part by shame and the desire for what one is excluded from – any sense of power or true autonomy — and the rage this fuels is something few writers explore. One of the first (and only) contemporary memoirs that really puts this on the page (in my opinion) is Townie by Andre Dubus III. He does a brilliant job of showing the continual micro- and macro-levels of violence inextricably bound up in the experience of being poor in this country. In truth, poor kids are far more likely to be raped, sexually abused, physically assaulted -to be targets – and perpetrators – of all kinds of violence. Middle and upper class folks are able to ignore or discount this fact by telling themselves, “Well, they’re doing it to themselves. We’re not driving down from our estates to beat up some poor kid.” That’s a subterfuge. Cause and effect aren’t that linear. Every time the wealthy classes choose to ignore or discount the truth of those living in poverty, they are affirmatively reinforcing the oppression of the poor.

I had a girlfriend in law school who came from the wealthy classes – huge money – but she competed with me for a $5,000 scholarship intended for law students with financial need. She knew the judge. She had connections. She won the scholarship. I was already $65,000 in student loan debt – a debt that felt so burdensome as to be almost unbearable – while her family traveled the world and spent summers sailing around the Maldives. How does someone like that justify applying for (let alone taking) a scholarship intended to help the truly disadvantaged? That’s just one small example of the kind of behavior I’m talking about when I say that too often those with means fail to see (or don’t care) how their conduct oppresses, damages, and degrades the poor.

Almost every time I give a reading or talk to folks about my book, I get asked about one of two recent memoirs: J.B. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” or Tara Westbrook’s “Educated.” With respect to both of these writers and the difficult circumstances they surmounted through ivy league educations (Yale and Harvard, respectively) the truth is that this isn’t a realistic formula for more than the teensiest percentage of kids born into poverty. The message strikes me as not only unrealistic but actually damaging because it allows the middle and wealthy classes to (continue to) remain willfully ignorant of the prison generational poverty creates for most people born into it. I didn’t even know what an ivy league was when I was in high school, let alone have the slightest notion of how to get into one (or the slightest chance of getting into one).

That’s not to say I think education isn’t – or can’t be – part of the path out of poverty, and it certainly affected my life and world view, but it doesn’t address the ways in which our culture condones and even encourages the emotional trauma and psychic stunting of the poor. I’m probably misquoting my own work, but at one point I’m writing about the experience of discovering classical piano in college – and how, ultimately, I realized that no matter how much I loved it, how much talent I may have had, how many hours I practiced, or how much I longed to be a classical pianist, I could never make up for the years I’d lost. I quote Yeats’ comment about Keats growing up looking through the window of a “Sweet Shop.” Some of us grow up not even knowing a Sweet Shop exists. And, not to be cynical, but I often wonder if the greater culture prefers it that way.

AEK: This gives me so much to think about! And is perfectly expressed. You could describe the “emotional trauma and psychic stunting of the poor” to those who have no idea first-hand what it means until the cows come home (presuming you even knew when that was), but I don’t think there any way to let them know. For me, there is no very good way to understand why they don’t know, or can’t, whichever it is. There was a wonderful penny-candy store on the way home from one school I attended in 4th and 5th grade, just a little thing run by a little old lady, but the view of the potential world from that “Sweet Shop” where I spent a penny on the afternoons I had one (mostly during the milk surplus when milk cartons were less than a penny each at lunch time) was the first place of longing I can remember fully–and it was in part because I had read “The All-of-a-Kind Family” books in second grade, that had a memorable scene of two little poor girls and their wild indulgence in penny-candy store wares.

Beyond that, I was really lucky–a relative plucked me out of Baltimore to Washington State, just at the moment in junior high when I was about to succumb to drugs and promiscuity. Whatever else that experience was about, there is no doubt that it saved my life. Had I not left, if I were still alive it’s doubtful I would have the tools or the psychic energy to reflect on these matters, much less to have this conversation. What I find with Mr. Emerson, for example, is that readers either get him immediately, or don’t really understand his place in the book. He represents that psychic and intellectual stunting, which he overcomes for a brief period in his life, until the entirety of his circumstances overwhelm him again, and finally.

KJB: Well, that’s one of the aspects of your novel I loved so. You didn’t over-tell or over-explain the characters, which I suppose will leave some readers thinking they don’t get Mr. Emerson or some other character, but really it’s brilliant to leave that measure of mystery. You offer the reader the best gift a writer can, I think. It’s so much more interesting to read work by a writer who trusts the reader’s intelligence and imagination.

AEK: Thank you so much for that—I feel the same about your memoir, that even when you write about getting older and more able to articulate your ideas and beliefs, you don’t insist that the reader accept them or be converted by them.

We also talked a little bit before about both of us coming, if not to writing, to publication pretty late in life. That in my case was fueled by the twin sisters of fear and recrimination, what someone I know calls the very real consequences of breaking the family rules. For twenty years, I didn’t write anything, and just thought, well, you know, I guess I’m not going to be a writer after all. Every time I took up the pen, I thought I was going to die of terror. I suppose that’s not something everyone can related to, even if you have a massive case of writer’s block, but for me it was the thought that someone was going to show up at my door with a shotgun and that would be the end of that.

Slowly, though, and by grace is how I would put it, since I love to write, I began to write poetry, not just because it’s a quick in-and-out (which I think is why a lot of people start with poetry), but because the sheer pleasure of making that music had always been what I loved more than anything. And then I wrote a small book about how praying the Rosary helped in healing post-traumatic stress disorder. From there, I started taking classes in creative writing at the university where I was working, and had some idea that telling stories was pretty great, too, and here I was with this monumentally hilarious and tragic and fascinating backdrop from which to tell a good story. The fear is far from gone and in many ways hardly subsided, but I have learned some tricks and strategies to jump the fence. Teaching for a few years also helped enormously, because I could see that the strategies I had developed for myself as a student were also helping blocked student writers in my classes. Not much has been as professionally rewarding as that, so I thank those students from the bottom of my heart.

KJB: We’re so alike in this! I started writing poetry in high school (actually I plagiarized the hell out of Rod McKuen when I was in grammar school trying to impress my childhood sweetheart) because I loved the feel and sound of language, and the way I thought poetry let me write truths that I didn’t have the courage to admit otherwise. But as you know from the book, I got derailed from that path pretty early on. I actually married a poet the year after graduating from law school – and I think part of me had a fantasy of being in this romantic relationship with a poet who would love and encourage my work until I could find a way to make a living writing poetry, so, you can see I’ve always had a pretty rich fantasy life. Once we were married and I started practicing law full-time, I stopped writing anything but legal briefs. For over two decades. In my early 50s I experienced a major depressive episode, and started seeing a Jungian therapist. He was the first person to help me realize that much of the depression stemmed from the way I’d compartmentalized my life, and how I’d hidden so much of myself and my past from everyone in my life. It was literally killing me.

Now I see that long hiatus as necessary to writing An Imperfect Rapture. I wouldn’t have had the courage or insight to write this book in my 30s or 40s. At some point, it meant more to me to leave this message – the best way I knew how – my particular imprint. Not to get all maudlin, but I recently had a health scare. Thankfully it turned out to be nothing, but when I got the call to come back for additional tests, I remember thinking if it turned out to be bad news, I was grateful I’d written this book.

AEK: That makes perfect sense—and though I’m sorry you had the scare, so glad it meant you put the book out into the world. For me, the starting place was learning about haiku and Biblical literature in 6th grade—I thought, MAN! This is amazing, I didn’t even know you could do this yourself! And then high school, too, I tried to impress a number of young gentlemen with my chops, not to much avail, but still. And I don’t think you can come from anywhere and succeed with words without that rich fantasy life (especially if the fantasy is making some money!). I mean, I still have imaginary friends, so.

Click Here for Part Two of this Conversation

A Conversation Between Kelly J. Beard and Adrian Koesters: Part Two

Kelly J. Beard and Adrian Koesters continue their conversation about the writing life, their experiences of faith, and the legacies of poverty and violence in this conclusion. Click Here for Part One of this conversation.

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AEK: And of course, as you so movingly and astonishingly describe in your book, you take all the rules you learned as a child with you into adulthood, and continue to play by them, consciously or unconsciously. The main reason I created Carmen as a mixed race person, other than to represent the real mix of black and white in that neighborhood, was because, first, I needed a renegade who was a woman; and I needed a woman who would have very good reasons not to care about anything. Carmen turns not-caring into an art form from a very early age, and part of that for her is passing “as white,” though in fact her mother is White. In Carmen’s mind, race is something that, at least consciously, she doesn’t think about as applying to her. But again, I think in that location, this is something that would be possible where it would not someplace else.

The rage and inability to navigate the world you identify I also understand well, even though, like you, it took a lifetime to recognize and understand how directly these came from being poor. It is a very long time since I have not had enough to eat or enough money to buy shoes, and beyond that, I have a Master’s degree and a doctorate, though both were achieved pretty late in my life. For that reason alone, I will never not be a privileged person again, no matter what my material resources. But as author Ruby Payne would say, I have those resources but still lack understanding of social rules. Among my so-called “peers,” I still never really know what the rules are, and see how I still break them all the time. I have lost friends and relationships this way, and experienced a great deal of social isolation. In that respect, I would say that most places at most times of my life, I have been passing as a middle-class person.

For the story of Union Square itself, I also chose to use the Rashomon technique for the first four days of the narrative to replicate the fracturing and isolation I wanted to convey, that as far as I can see is not a part of middle class culture as a rule, while exploring this place and the kind of people who lived in it. Young Emerson represents both the neighborhood and the social isolation that comes with not having been taught how to take on an adult set of rules. Catherine likely represents the more healthy, though immature side of myself, or as I say, who I wished I had been. Petie is the solid guy who is provoked to violence as nearly his default response to every situation—he’s the kind of hot-head who populates such places, though he’s a good person. He’s also the one who really belongs to and understands the environment as such. And Paddy and Carmen, of course, represent the sum of what it means to be broken by such experiences, and how they break everyone else in their turn.

KJB: One of the most compelling and risky aspects of your nonfiction work, I think, is how you directly embrace your faith. Your novel does so as well, albeit more obliquely. I wonder if you get asked about this when you’re reading or talking with folks about your work. How (or why) does one retain her faith despite having witnessed or experienced deeply wounding betrayals by the human representatives of that faith?

AEK: Yes, that is definitely one of the hardest parts of all of this. Mostly, people don’t ask that question directly. I get the feeling they sort of put up with that part of me because they respect me as an artist, for which I’m grateful, but I do find it amusing and yet often frustrating.

The early days of my childhood in the Catholic Church were mixed of fear, awe, and love, and there’s no other way to say that. I have very hazy memories of incidents that seem to have involved clergy members. I can’t say more than that, because I don’t really remember, but the feelings about it are both strong and often debilitating. But I have always had a feeling of “knowing” the presence of God, even in my nominally atheist teen years—and in fact, they were not atheist years, but anti-religion years. I had a hatred of fundamentalist Christians that would have burned your eyebrows off—but that was the embedded rage against all things religious.

The change for me came when I (against all expectation) decided to go to Creighton University here in Omaha for my undergraduate degree. At the time you had to take what now would be considered a dual minor in theology and philosophy, and I ultimately majored in theology. We thought we had discovered the Holy Grail of Catholic truth, Vatican II, and we were taught by lay professors and Jesuits, many of whom I owe a great debt of gratitude to, for their intellectual honesty as well as their care and kindness for me as a young person. In those years, I had a conversion experience, came to understand Jesus as a person, and I’ve never deviated from that since. I went on after graduation to work as a volunteer for a year, and taught high school religion for three years after that. Our family, my husband and daughter and myself, are not what I would call deeply religious, but thoroughly religious. This is simply a matter of fact, not of any kind of superior stance or any assumption.

But having faith and hope in the reforms of Vatican II have obviously been no sinecures for the terrible abuses that came to light over the past four or more decades. As an adult, college and beyond, I have known some truly horrible clergy members. A handful tried to seduce me, or I knew of them seducing or attempting to seduce other young men or women. A priest I held in the highest esteem turned out to be a child molester, maybe a child rapist, I don’t know. Any number of them had adult relationships which, had they been married, would have made them adulterers, and as I understand it, that’s actually one of the commandments you’re not supposed to break. The scope of the revelations of 2002 that were followed by the film Spotlight were shattering, and at one point I was not sure I would survive them.

So, it’s a complicated situation to say the least. Like A. Richard Sipe, I consider myself Catholic, and though I try to be part of a faith community, that is not always possible. Many of the poems I have written are essentially “problem of evil” questions, as Union Square is in many ways a problem of evil novel. No one can get to the bottom of such matter—I certainly don’t pretend to. On the other hand, I also believe that no one has the right to rob you of how you express your truth and belief. So much of the Church right now is bad, but I still think that its core is the revelation of God that I am meant to follow. Though I have tried, I’ve never been able to completely deviate from that stance.

I wonder how your answer will differ from mine, as clearly you were equally part and parcel of your faith and that world as a child. Have you had to reconcile how that influenced you, and have you made a new choice or a different one?

KJB: I have so much trouble with that question. In part because I can’t say I’m Catholic or I’m Jewish, or otherwise claim some presumably concrete theology. When people ask (as they do) “What do you believe now?”) I’m stumped. I spent years dragging my husband and daughter to every church within a ten-mile radius of our home, trying to find a church I felt comfortable in, but after weeks or months, or sometimes years, I’d walk away feeling disillusioned, and often angry. It was usually a tithing sermon that sent me over the edge. I grew up in a church that prioritized tithing over everything – including buying decent food or clothes – and I can’t stand to hear sermons on tithing. In any event, every church experience was ultimately a let-down. I stopped attended services three or four years ago.

And yet, I have never lost my faith. When I try to answer that question about faith – what and why I believe – I am reminded of Jung’s late-in-life answer to that question. He declined to reveal or write about his own faith until he was in his 80s, fearing that to do so would marginalize his work. But in his posthumously published Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he writes that he never lost his faith. His faith came to him experientially, he wrote, and thus he could never lose it. It’s precisely what you said earlier. You can’t lose faith you gain through experience, that is, you can’t un-know the experience of knowing.

And, like you, in the midst of all the pain and craziness, there were moments of knowing and transcendence. I include a few of those moments in the memoir. The times when, inexplicably, I experienced moments of grace – miracles, if you will – that I can’t discount. I suppose that’s the best explanation I can give for why, despite everything, I have never lost my own faith. Sometimes I’ve felt the door closing between me and that knowing, and I work at faith then, because I don’t want to lose it, I don’t want to bear the darkness alone.

AEK: “You can’t un-know the experience of knowing”—wow, that is exactly how I was wanting to say that, thank you.

I guess I would end with the question of culpability and forgiveness, which in a novel is really not the same kind of issue, as long as you don’t condescend to any of your characters by making them holier than everybody else, or more evil than they are. Paddy was the best exercise in this for me, and my aim was to get as close inside the head of such a person as I could, so as to (at least for a while) deliver him as a person and not a cipher or a cartoon. But in memoir, you also have the choice about whom to picture as the enemy and whom the beloved, and you have the duty to take responsibility for your own sins. I believe the accuser and the accused can be unjustly conflated far too easily, that we can put ourselves to blame and shame far more readily than those who hurt us. And I suppose you have already gotten comments from readers who wonder how you could forgive especially your father, and how you could write about that. But that is where I would really appreciate hearing your thoughts, as you must have wrestled with them greatly.

KJB: I have had a few readers ask some iteration of “I hate your dad, why don’t you?”  That just makes me think I didn’t do what I set out to do, which was to work against stereotypes and caricatures with intentionality – to write difficult characters with enough of their experiences and contradictions and complications on the page to make the reader empathize with them – even when the reader may not want to. I feel most heartened by responses like one I received in an email the other day, where a woman said she felt like she should hate my dad but she ended up loving him instead.

It’s deeply complicated, of course, and it brings to mind the Watson research from the ‘60s (studying, among other things, the effect of maternal negligence and abuse on chimpanzee babies, and how the babies kept trying every strategy imaginable to evoke love or tenderness from the parent, no matter how many times the mother ignored or abused the baby – it’s really heartbreaking, but pretty eye-opening, too) concluding that babies and children are so hard-wired to love their parents it’s almost (almost, but not completely) impossible for a child not to love her parent.

Also, I believe that with very few exceptions, if we really get inside the skin of another person, if we can move around in that person’s interiority long enough, we will find empathy and compassion – and love – for that person. I think I spent my whole life prior to writing this memoir trying to figure out the why of my parents’ abuse, the why of what prompts someone who loves you (and who you love with the wide-open heart of a child) to also hurt you. My dad died in 1996, long before it occurred to me to ask that question directly. My mom is still alive, though, and I recently asked her some version of that question. It wasn’t a very satisfying answer. She’s in her 90s now, and has some cognitive challenges, so I didn’t think anything would be served by pressing it, even though her answer was to blame my dad.

AEK: I have pretty well spent my lifetime trying to extinguish my need to walk around in those people’s shoes, but the difference is likely that your father and mother clearly loved all of you. But there is a point at which I just have to say, forgiveness is God’s job, not mine. As one pastor said to me a long time ago, if one of those people showed up at my door and was truly contrite and asked for my forgiveness (and, when your father, Kelly, does that, it changes everything about him for the reader), then I would have a choice to make. I never had to make that choice.

My private feeling is that the betrayal of the mother is worse for most of us. Whether she is the abuser or complicit in abuse by father, sibling, whoever it is, she is the one who is supposed to not be that person. And I would think someone like your mother would have to blame someone else. I agree with you that there is a point at which hammering out the truth despite the expense just isn’t worth it. It doesn’t make us less authentic, I think, but really more so.

And I have to compliment you in turn: what you achieved was obviously a breath-takingly delicate balance of what is, in your life, the truth, the authentic. It is an incredible accomplishment. I love your book and hope there is another one to come, and that we can meet again.

KJB: Thank you so much, Adrian. I was already a huge fan of your work before we had this chance to chat, but getting a peek at the person behind the work has been a thrill. I hope our paths cross again.