Montana, and madness
I'd never heard of Maile Meloy before picking up her short story collection, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, and I bought the book based on the title alone. I mean, seriously, how can I resist that title? Unfortunately the title was one of the best things about this collection for me. For the most part I found the stories plodding and depressing. I'd hate to think this is meant to be a representation of Montana, where most of the stories take place and which is almost a shadow character in many of the stories.
There were a couple of stories I enjoyed, and it's interesting that the liveliest characters in both were from out-of-state. The Girlfriend deals with a man who came to Montana to attend the trial of the man who raped and killed his daughter. Finding the killer's conviction unfulfilling, he looks up and talks to the killer's current girlfriend in an attempt to answer all the remaining unanswered questions. It's an unsatisfying fool's errand, of course, but the story itself is gripping.
The other enjoyable story was Liliana, about an Auntie Mame type who returns from the apparent dead to frustrate her grandson and unwittingly torment her great-grandchildren before flitting off again. While it was the children I identified with, I have to admit the Mame-character was amusing.
I'm about half-way thru Norah Vincent's Voluntary Madness: my year lost and found in the loony bin, her "immersion journalism" examination of mental health care in American today. Starting at the bottom by checking herself in as a patient in a city-run dump ("Bedlam"), she moves up to a comfortable private facility ("Asylum") and finally a truly ritzy self-actualizing spa-type joint ("Sanctum"). Vincent is not my favorite author, in fact she has a rather fingernails-on-the-chalkboard effect on me, but she is a thoughtful and honest writer. Which is way I'm quoting this excerpt about Vincent's, and society's, interaction with the mad at length:
The worst of it is that they came for me in other ways too. As soon as I extended my rubber-gloved helping hand to them, they grabbed hold. They latched on. They wanted to keep in touch on the outside. They wanted to be my friend. But I just wanted to help them from a safe distance and be rid of them. I didn't want their company. I was posing, or passing, but I didn't really want to know them. They were my subjects and if I cared about them at all it was out of authorial self-interest and pity and moral vanity. Moral vanity being that great middle-class indulgence that makes us write checks to charities and do the right thing for the less fortunate, because doing so reinforces our fiercely guarded belief that we are good people. But when the less fortunate come banging on your door and your heart in real time, up close, blowing their not so fresh breath in your face, wanting to be a person instead of a project or a write-off, then your cherished little antibacterial ideals turn all squeamish and stuttery, saying "Well, but, . . . " "Yeah, but, . . . " and finally show themselves outright to be as vaporous and self-serving as they always were.
Where are the boundaries? What can help really mean? And isn't that why we leave it to the professionals, who, in turn, leave it to a lost cause, or to the pharmaceutical path of least resistance? Nobody wants to do the personal work. It's disgusting. What's more, it challenges -- no, rakes up and scarecrows -- every humanitarian illusion you have about yourself. It makes you know that at heart you are a little bit of a fascist like everybody else, thinking in the way, way back of your mind that wouldn't it really just be cheaper and better and utilitarian -- now there's a word we can work with -- to be rid of these people?
Yes, this is all very ugly -- but so true. I don't want to know what's in your soul. Not really. And you don't want to know what's in mine. Keep back, we tell each other. Those are your problems, which is really just a polite way of saying, "Go starve somewhere else. You're ruining the view."
I couldn't do well by these people. Not that it was my job to do so, but it felt like my obligation somehow. And maybe, for some of the same reasons, nobody else could do very well by them either. It was just too much. Too hard. Too late. The question is there all the time. What to do? I can denigrate the system, impugn it with all the progressive zeal that makes my brain twitter with self-satisfaction, and I might actually be right. The psychiatric emperor has no clothes. But I would be lying, or pruning the full picture, if I said I didn't see why that system fails the chronics and admit that I abandoned them myself.
You got tired of their ceaseless intrusions after a while, and in order to draw boundaries that they would respect, you had to be a little mean.