oldest first cousin, Betsy, married a black man, only the adults knew. We kids were told Betsy had done something wrong and went away. I figured she’d had an illegitimate baby, as it was called then, but after three beautiful legitimate kids with him, a nice guy, nicer than Betsy, her bigoted father relented, so she was back in the fold, times had changed—look who came to dinner in the movies and lived in big houses on TV. Her kids have refused to have anything to do with us. I don’t blame them.
In the 1970s, the Loud family fascinated Americans with its psychological honesty, so compared with it, today’s reality TV is a joke; it trivializes whatever reality you’re invested in. The Louds fell apart afterward. TV’s exhibitionists challenge credulity, sanity, yet people humiliate and shame themselves daily. Americans can’t shake their Puritan past, so everyone’s hoping to confess their sins and find God’s grace. Still, it’s hard to understand Judge Judy’s appeal to the characters who want to be judged on TV, and those who watch manifest people’s perverse, insatiable curiosity and schadenfreude. Also, some people miss being yelled at as they were in their families. I’m one of them.
Shame is different from thirty years ago, it doesn’t last as long—Pee-Wee Herman, Martha Stewart, Richard Nixon—they bounced back, and, like history, Americans forget their pasts and sins quickly. Americans have several acts, with shame’s mutation, and if they’re televisual, it helps; if they’re not, some can escape the stigma of being “ugly as sin” with plastic surgery—see Paula Jones and Linda Tripp. “Ugly” is bad, it’s evil—remember what the bad guys in movies look like.
Great Uncle Charley lived with a secret, and there are more in my family: my brother discovered he’d been born an androgyne, changed to a boy surgically, a fact hidden from him by my parents, until he began to date and felt weird emotions; the twins had abortions when they were fourteen, and apart from that “sin,” they had sex with the same man, maybe at the same time; and my father hit my mother. Mom was frightened of him when he drank, she cowered, I remember her crouched, it’s an image gelled in memory. We kids didn’t need to be told, Keep your damn mouth shut, we knew. If I ratted, a term I learned from cop shows, I knew I was betraying Us, and I’d go to hell. So you’re implicated in your family, always.
Mostly, my mother took the pictures. My father thought it was beneath him, he felt superior to us. My brother and I stood next to each other in many photos; he loomed over me until I turned fourteen and shot up ten inches. I became taller. He hated that, you can see it, I can, because I know his expressions. You can see, I can, the power balance shift: in later photos, then no photos, except at weddings, when we stood far apart, especially at his wedding. To my father’s disgust, he married Claudia, born Claude, a male-to-female trannie; only close friends and family knew. My sisters loved being photographed together, they still do. The twins are identical, both pretty, one has fuller lips, the other a wider nose; you can tell them apart easily if you know them. Their entire lives they’ve looked at each other, images of each other, maybe wondering who’s prettier, and whether she loves herself and image more or less than the other twin does.
The concept of family resemblance is reasonable, given genetics, but it’s peculiar, because what makes a resemblance isn’t clear, there’s no feature-by-feature similarity. Most of us in families share a resemblance. Fascination with the “family other”—a neologism I used in my first book, You’re a Picture, You’re Not a Picture —is dulled by the other’s being related by blood; yet what’s near can be farther (what’s in the mirror is farther than you think), because up close, we’re less able to see each other. I don’t look like my brother, but
In the 1970s, the Loud family fascinated Americans with its psychological honesty, so compared with it, today’s reality TV is a joke; it trivializes whatever reality you’re invested in. The Louds fell apart afterward. TV’s exhibitionists challenge credulity, sanity, yet people humiliate and shame themselves daily. Americans can’t shake their Puritan past, so everyone’s hoping to confess their sins and find God’s grace. Still, it’s hard to understand Judge Judy’s appeal to the characters who want to be judged on TV, and those who watch manifest people’s perverse, insatiable curiosity and schadenfreude. Also, some people miss being yelled at as they were in their families. I’m one of them.
Shame is different from thirty years ago, it doesn’t last as long—Pee-Wee Herman, Martha Stewart, Richard Nixon—they bounced back, and, like history, Americans forget their pasts and sins quickly. Americans have several acts, with shame’s mutation, and if they’re televisual, it helps; if they’re not, some can escape the stigma of being “ugly as sin” with plastic surgery—see Paula Jones and Linda Tripp. “Ugly” is bad, it’s evil—remember what the bad guys in movies look like.
Great Uncle Charley lived with a secret, and there are more in my family: my brother discovered he’d been born an androgyne, changed to a boy surgically, a fact hidden from him by my parents, until he began to date and felt weird emotions; the twins had abortions when they were fourteen, and apart from that “sin,” they had sex with the same man, maybe at the same time; and my father hit my mother. Mom was frightened of him when he drank, she cowered, I remember her crouched, it’s an image gelled in memory. We kids didn’t need to be told, Keep your damn mouth shut, we knew. If I ratted, a term I learned from cop shows, I knew I was betraying Us, and I’d go to hell. So you’re implicated in your family, always.
Mostly, my mother took the pictures. My father thought it was beneath him, he felt superior to us. My brother and I stood next to each other in many photos; he loomed over me until I turned fourteen and shot up ten inches. I became taller. He hated that, you can see it, I can, because I know his expressions. You can see, I can, the power balance shift: in later photos, then no photos, except at weddings, when we stood far apart, especially at his wedding. To my father’s disgust, he married Claudia, born Claude, a male-to-female trannie; only close friends and family knew. My sisters loved being photographed together, they still do. The twins are identical, both pretty, one has fuller lips, the other a wider nose; you can tell them apart easily if you know them. Their entire lives they’ve looked at each other, images of each other, maybe wondering who’s prettier, and whether she loves herself and image more or less than the other twin does.
The concept of family resemblance is reasonable, given genetics, but it’s peculiar, because what makes a resemblance isn’t clear, there’s no feature-by-feature similarity. Most of us in families share a resemblance. Fascination with the “family other”—a neologism I used in my first book, You’re a Picture, You’re Not a Picture —is dulled by the other’s being related by blood; yet what’s near can be farther (what’s in the mirror is farther than you think), because up close, we’re less able to see each other. I don’t look like my brother, but
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