In Honor of Loretta Lynn

Here’s a Tale of a Woman I’d Like to send to Fist City

There’s a new book out about Tony Bourdain and I took the time to be amused by the outraged comments that accompanied the NYT IG post announcing it. Commenter after commenter insisted the biographer was a loser and the book must never be read. LET HIM REST IN PEACE they ironically e-shouted.

Watching this debate launched me back to the publication of my first book, All the Wrong Men and One Perfect Boy (Simon & Schuster 1999). As I understand it, though the popularity of the internet was quite new, and there was no Google, supposedly my brother read an online interview with me in 1995, the year I got the contract, before I even typed the first word. Anticipating correctly that the book would be about our wildly abusive sick fuck “father,” my brother supposedly spread the word among the rest of the clan.

I was summarily ex-communicated.

I have since published a dozen more books, many of them memoirs, most of them wrestling with the profound childhood abuse from which I will never fully recover. My family remains infuriated. I understand. I think they think that some reader somewhere might hyper-focus on the actual characters in the book, my specific family members, and feel disgust. That is, they take it personally.

I will never get them to see the truth of the matter, which is that reading a memoir is for most people, I think, sort of like flipping the transparencies in a medical textbook—the way you can add or subtract layers of organs and veins and other squishy goo. If someone is reading about my wounds and my attempts to navigate life, they are layering their own story on top of mine, looking for the commonalities. They don’t give a rat’s ass about my real life siblings beyond the fact that they might feel relief in seeing they are not alone, that all of us have crazy families.

I don’t have hard data to prove this, other than my own voracious reading life and the thousands of conversations I’ve had with my readers over the past forty years. Most of us our looking for relatability. Though I have, after years of personal research, decided I think that AA is an evil cult, I did get some great tools there and one was the reminder that we look for the commonalities, this is how we survive as humans.

Anthony Bourdain was a calculated and calculating charismatic white guy narcissist and drug addict. That sentence might sound negative. It is simply a series of facts, facts the man himself did not try to hide or dispute. Although he and his team apparently did a pretty good job of keeping up a facade of All Fabulous All the Time until they couldn’t anymore.

When I hear people bellyaching about the new book being full of lies and things that should stay private, I shake my head. Humans are so stupid. What they really mean, like a child who cannot tap into the agonizing truth of abuse, is that they do not want a warts and all version of the guy. They want the pedestal to remain intact.

I love warts and all. In fact, warts are so much more fascinating than the “and all.” I haven’t read the book yet but I will. Because I already found tremendous resonance in a brief excerpt. Reading the excerpt reminded me that I have some warts I very badly want to show you all, and also that, despite being called a brave and fearless writer, even I have topics I hesitate to visit. This is another great thing memoirs do for me. They push me to keep telling my truth. They say, “Look, I did it, now you do it.”

And, cliche as it may be, every single time I release a truth into the world, it really does set me free.

In the excerpt I read, there were details about how Tony’s girlfriend, Asia, with whom he was as obsessed as ever any man chasing any dragon ever was, became infuriated when she learned he was spending time with his wife and daughter. To clarify, by all accounts the marriage was over, but the co-parents remained close. How wonderful for their daughter.

Then comes the command from on high— the girlfriend—that remaining friends with his ex was “forbidden.” And it wasn’t long after that Tony stepped off. (To be clear, I am not blaming Asia for Tony’s death. I am saying he had tremendous conflict at the end, and some of this was related to being forced to “choose” between one situation and another, when really co-existence was quite possible.)

This is actually the main reason I will read the book. Because I have endured a similar situation, and it totally gutted me. I have wanted to write about it for a very long time. I have addressed it in the book I just wrote, although for some reason I feel a strong need to sit on that book for a while before releasing it. But I have never said it in public. And before I tell you the “it” I will tell you the why.

I don’t want to tell the thing that gutted me because I myself do not want it to be true. I want to live in denial forever. The truth is too excruciatingly painful for me to accept. As a Buddhist, I understand acceptance is the only way. And yet I struggle.

Here it is. In 1990 I found myself to be pregnant. I explained to Baby Daddy that because I had a choice to abort or not, and because I was choosing to carry the pregnancy, he should have some sort of choice. I offered him a chance to cut bait, scram, a geographical abortion. He chose to stay. Less than three years in, he split. By then his drinking was causing grand mal seizures.

I howled when he left, sat in a rocking chair and held our baby, on the cusp of 3, and wailed like a banshee. Then I carried on. I raised our child for the next 13 years with no child support. I never spoke ill of his father— I read that once in Dear Abby when I was around seven, that one should never ever trash your child’s other parent because the child is half that parent. I scraped together money and drove my son in beater cars to see his far away father, mostly because death by alcohol seemed imminent and I did not want my son’s only memory of his father to be in a coffin.

These trips were not easy. Once loved by Baby Daddy’s family, now I was the outsider. But I am a stubborn motherfucker. I kept going.

When my son was 16, his father—by then with a miraculous six years of sobriety—asked to return to our lives. Not romantically. Just could he come be around us, Henry in particular. I agreed. I was going through a divorce at the time and I had a spare room. Baby Daddy moved in and took care of me so lovingly. I was so sick. I was so broken. He healed me so much.

Our friendship strengthened. He found a place to live. I helped him find a job. All of my friends adored him. So did I. We actively participated in each other’s lives, going to punk shows and plays. I typically do most everything alone. It was so nice to have a safe companion to do things with once in awhile.

Whenever I had a significant other, it was unspoken that Baby Daddy was part of the package, to be considered like a brother. Even the shittiest of these men understood and welcomed him. And when that shittiest guy hit me in the face, it was Baby Daddy who finally got through to me and helped me to escape.

Ten years into our renewed and deepened friendship, he began dating. I could tell, because I’m not a fucking idiot, his girlfriend was insecure and jumpy around me, no matter how inclusive and welcoming I was. So I backed off. I missed my companion but I understood that some couples just hunker down and cut people out.

We saw each other fleetingly after that. Then, Easter Sunday 2019, Baby Daddy had a widow maker heart attack. He was dead for five minutes and, in perhaps the only kindness she ever did me (though of course it wasn’t for me) the girlfriend revived him. Rather than call me, whom she knows, she opted to call my son in New York, whom she barely knows. This was a calculated move and forced my son to call me to explain that the doctors were giving his father about a zero percent chance of surviving the week.

I raced up to Fort Worth, to the hospital he’d been helicoptered to, and if I ever publish this new book, you will delight in extended details of the tales of how, in my haste, I packed only about three articles of clothing— a micro mini-skirt, an inappropriate t-shirt, and vintage Old Gringo boots. So yeah, that combined with the tattoos made every trip through the hospital lobby like an E. F. Hutton commercial where the whole room drops silent and I start humming the theme song to Harper Valley PTA.

Today I will just fast forward and say that woman made my life a living hell that week. For starters, her mother—whom I had never met—confronted me in the ICU waiting room and told me my son was a piece of shit for not being at the hospital. Have you ever been in a small space with someone who trash talks your kid? It’s amazing I didn’t go to jail for assault. And I knew, too, that this woman had never met my son, did not know he has PTSD from all the times I took him to see his father, and each time his father tried to quit drinking, had a seizure, and wound up in a hospital. OF FUCKING COURSE HE DIDN’T WANT TO BE AT A HOSPITAL. Chapping my ass redder still? Her only source of false information had to be her daughter.

Believe it or not, outwardly I held my shit together that whole week. I stayed focused on what mattered. My son’s father—who did go on to have a miraculous recovery—was, as best as I knew, about to flatline. He was on life support. Faraway family members had flown in to say goodbye.

The girlfriend sent me a series of text messages telling me I must stop coming to the hospital, she was the only one who could help him, that I was a problem. I told her to fuck off and went to the hospital. She had the staff run interference. They posted a huge note on Baby Daddy’s door saying ALL VISITORS MUST CHECK IN. At that point, I was the only visitor left besides the bitch and her mother. I spoke to a nurse to ask how I could receive updates once I returned to the ranch.

I will never ever ever forget that nurse. She put her hand on my arm (without asking) and condescendingly announced, “Oh, hon, we all know what it’s like to be the ex.”

Once again, kudos to me for not going to jail for assault.

He survived. That’s all that matters as far as I’m concerned. Because any time he is further allotted on this earth is time that perhaps he might use to try to repair the damage his absence did to our son. And boy does he have his work cut out for him.

The Bourdain excerpt stirred all this back up for me. For this I am grateful. I can already observe through Tony’s story—in a way I cannot yet observe of my own—that any girlfriend who demands a man stop speaking to his child’s mother is a dangerous woman. Dangerous because she puts herself above all others and has no qualms about destroying a family to soothe her ego.

From time to time I tried to talk to Baby Daddy about this problem. About how when he got back from the hospital I was never invited to see him. About how it was clear he was cutting me off and, since he’s a grown man, even if his girlfriend is instigating, ultimately it lands on him, this willingness to go along, to dump me from his life for a second time. After I waited for thirteen years, kept our child safe and healthy, kept the door wide open for a reunion, did not try to stop him from coming back, wanted only the best for him and our son.

One tremendous gift of PTSD is dissociation. I can now dissociate on command. When I finally told Baby Daddy to piss off, that I was over his girlfriend being like a goddammed hawk on a motherfucking chihuahua, I knew I was permanently closing a door. And it hurt deeply. Then I shut the windows and the blinds and the room blackening curtains around the part of my mind where I had, for so long, felt so good about the fact that my son’s parents, who had fucked up in so many areas, had at least got the part right where they still loved and respected each other.

It was gone in an instant. Thoughts pop in now. What if our son gets married? Will I punch his father’s girlfriend in the face at the reception? Then I remind myself. My son’s never getting married. And besides, there’s no situation I can’t handle when it comes to dealing with insecure women (or men for that matter).

Reading the Bourdain excerpt, I could clearly see how shitty his wife was treated after a long time of not being treated that way all because of some other woman’s insecurities. For the record, his wife is one of the few people close to Tony who has made not a single peep of complaint against the book and who, quite likely, supplied the author with his deeply sourced material. Maybe that’s her fuck you message to the woman who would try to hurt her child so cruelly.

And maybe this is mine.

PS I know the photo has nothing to do with this piece but isn’t it grand? I had the best time at Nathaniel Rateliff’s ACL taping last night and I got to wear my new-to-me forty-two-year-old Willie t-shirt!