On Not Writing About My Father, an Actual Mad Scientist

I take perverse pleasure in telling people I was raised by a mad scientist. I was. To chronicle my father is to chronicle madness, his and mine. I’ve never really written about him in fiction or otherwise. In fiction, I take bits and pieces of everything I’ve ever seen or read, everyone I’ve ever known, and from those snippets form something new, something I can understand.

I cannot do this with my father. Yes, I’ve borrowed his shirts, his car, and some of the science projects we did. But I could not dream up so complex a man, and I find it impossible to steal him for the page. I need to know the characters I write almost better than I know myself. I’ll never fully understand my father or the way his mind worked, nor can I through fiction absolve him. Or myself.

I know my father’s ankles. He’s been dead nearly twenty years, and I still remember the exact shape of a brown stain on his left ankle and the punch scars where it was biopsied. It was how I recognized him when he was hospitalized after an unsuccessful suicide attempt.

He’d overdosed, intentionally. The night I found out, I took a train home from college and walked in darkness from the station to the hospital. Visiting hours were over, but I persuaded a nurse to take me to his room. I was young enough, pitiable enough, to warrant rule-bending. I wish I could remember the nurse’s face, but I only remember the hospital room, the teal green accents and the white paint that was both dingy and glaring, and in the middle of it, my father.

Bodies display internal brokenness more clearly than words, and suicide remodels us. Swelling, tubes and hoses rendered him unrecognizable. His nose was broken, sharp angles where it had been straight, and he was on a ventilator. Were it not for the brown patch on his ankle, I would not have known him. It was a stain three inches across, the color of weak coffee and dotted by two darker scars—an incomplete ellipsis. In his unconscious state, he was empty, a shed cicada skin. There was a stench, sour alcohol leeching from his skin, the smell of a lung infection. He had pneumonia caused by aspirating dirty water. A neighbor found him unconscious, face-down in a puddle. As little as a teaspoon of water can cause the lungs to drown. I didn’t entertain the thought that I could wake him. The place he’d gone was one a person crawls out of alone.

Many mistake fiction for autobiography, and I suppose I invite this mistake by writing about fathers, daughters, and science. Plenty of novelists enjoy blurring the lines, but I’m not one. I’m often asked about my upbringing, and about my father specifically. Because he is dead, what’s left behind is both absolute and fluid. There are facts—the spots on his skin, the space he took in the science world—but the things I remember shape-shift and are poor fodder for story. Memory is too fragile, too partisan for me to assert as truth.

My father isn’t on the page.

Once, a male bookseller asked me when I’d stop writing about my parents and my childhood. He was filling time, oblivious to the question’s offensiveness. But that’s me making excuses for the inexcusable, which as a woman I’ve been socialized to do. It is also the result of being a child of my father, and learning how to do anything to avoid a fight. I digress. That sort of question is often asked of women writers, as though our work is nascent. People love to think that a woman who imagines things for a living lacks imagination. It makes what we do seem like so much less work, or that is isn’t a job.

The bookseller’s question failed to recognize that all writing, yes, even men’s, is rooted in childhood and parents, or the absence of them. The way we write and the way we speak about our writing starts in childhood. To my father’s mind, hard work spoke for itself. We were not to brag. If someone cannot recognize good work when presented with it, they are not worth our time. That my ego is both enormous and nonexistent is a mark my father made on me.

A workshopper once said to me, “I wish your writing was more about you.” He was an older man with no tolerance for magical realism. He’d come up in advertising in the 1960s, and had the cleverest turns of phrase that delighted and gutted. But he didn’t see what to me was so obvious. My route to understanding is to invent, to construct a problem to be studied from all angles in a way reality does not permit. Fiction allows us autobiography of emotion without forced adherence to a specific real experience, or any single view of it. The way I find the heart of something is by fabricating a story which I can then dissect. Part of me was the house I’d written, falling off a cliff, its family leaving, one by one. The temptation is always to look for an author in a protagonist. Don’t look for me in my characters and their fathers. Ours was too complex a relationship, too slippery, and he was impossible to understand.

*

My father was a genius, an actual genius, and not just a very smart man. His intellect made him frightening, humbled those around him, and was a key factor in his loneliness. Possessing a certain level of intellect drastically reduces the number of people in the world who can understand you, and to whom you can relate. These are broad strokes. Broad strokes are often true. Nuance is where the person lives, but nuance is where differences in perception arise. Every person who met him processed his idiosyncrasies through the lenses of their lives and their individual degrees of affection. My mother knew him differently. My sister knew him differently. His friends and co-workers each knew a different man. He was a thousand people. I knew one.

He could pass a nickel through the space between his front teeth.

He played the banjo and had no sense of rhythm.

He hand-wrote directions for my college computer—about everything involving its operation—in greater detail than the manual it had come with. He’d individually labeled program diskettes.

He wrote a satirical letter to the Guggenheim after my mother’s work was rejected. It was damning of the institution, hilarious, and kind to her in a way that only the loving and brilliant can be.

He once refused to speak to me for months.

He shoved me against a wall.

These things are true.

True things also shift. Were I to write memoir it would be filled with misremembrances. The wall he smashed that vase against was blue, I’m sure of it. How old was I when that wall was blue? Was it ever? That recollection is why he stopped speaking to me for three months. Or it may have been eight weeks. I am certain now the wall was blue. But everything else? Ask me again tomorrow.

The truth is that my father was difficult. He was mentally ill, an alcoholic, a man who abused psychiatric medications, and someone who died by suicide. As with every co-morbidity, it’s impossible to say what caused what. He was angry, sometimes violent, and the loneliest person I’ve ever known. He held a patent for a xerographic apparatus, researched elasticity in microcrystals, taught teachers how to teach science, wrote computer programs to teach me math, drew comics on my lunch bags, and asked every boyfriend I ever had if his intentions were honorable. He told stories about animals living in our backyard. He designed the deck he once pushed my mother off, a deck which I’ve only just had removed, though I’ve been living in my childhood home for four years. He was wonderful and terrible and his mind consumed him.

But this is an imperfect portrait. That is not all of him, only my perspective, one heavily colored by my own flaws. This is not how anyone else knew him. It is not how he knew himself. To someone else he was a mentor, a brilliant wit, the kindest man they ever met, and a man who changed lives.

It would be easy to think I loathed him. Easy is not a way my family has ever been. He was more complex than my feelings or thoughts about him. At this point in my life I feel mostly love and pity, neither enough to write a book, neither enough to write a character that would only be a crude and disappointing representation of him. I am alive; none of the damage done was irreparable. His interests and intellect endure. Every now and again, I find his notes and equations stuffed in odd places in the house. Finding one feels like discovering a hidden doorway.

*

Will you ever stop writing about your childhood?

I wish your writing was more about you.

To write about myself honestly is to never suffer the delusion that I am a great intellect. I’m smart, but no brilliant light. I’m keenly aware of my shortcomings, and the ways in which I function better for not being a genius. I am less alone, my mind more easily understood. I am not as frustrated with communication. I am terrified of drugs and addiction. I’m not much of a drinker. But despite all these ways in which we are different, I am afraid that I inherited the thing that kept growing in my father, the thing that led to me identifying him by his ankles, the thing that, less than a year later, led to two detectives knocking on the door and informing my mother that he’d shot himself and someone had found his body.

I am fresh from a bath when the detectives come to the house, and my then long hair is wrapped in a towel. The towel pulls my hair at the roots, and it’s a settling kind of pain. It’s late in summer and dark outside. It’s been raining for two straight weeks and the air is drowning. I am in my red bathrobe and I’m not crying. It’s some time before I do. In my memory one detective wears a long gray trench coat and looks like Jerry Orbach. He likely did not, but I imagine any bad news might be made bearable if delivered by Jerry Orbach. I give you this moment to illustrate that the truth feels like a lie, it’s a moment that an editor would strike for being either too over-the-top or too cliché. And still, even the things I am most sure of—his death, the aftermath—are misremembered and missing pieces. I don’t remember my mother’s reaction. I don’t know what she felt. I know nothing of the person who found his body.

*

If you have survived suicide loss and are honest about it, eventually you will say a version of, “It’s okay. It’s been a long time.” I dread the point in making new friends when the subject of parents comes up. It means I will have to comfort someone. There are always shocked expressions and awkward silences. The difficult part is what I don’t say—how some aspects of life became easier after he was gone because illness of any variety is insidious, and mental illness with suicidality is particularly cruel. Grief got warped, twisted between guilt, sadness, and relief.

I write about my father and myself by writing fiction about failing minds.

I did inherit the thing that kept growing in my father. Recognizing it in myself means seeing him anew. I don’t miss or wish to write that shadow, though I suppose I cannot help but want to use bits of it to build something new so I can take it apart and pick at it until I understand.

But I don’t. Part of me lives with a small itch of fear that I, in my teenage despair, taught him how to attempt suicide. And that he, with all his genius, was better at it than I was. That fear isn’t the truth, but it’s real. Narratives are fractals; they connect, repeat, and expand. Inevitably there is symmetry.

I possess the same isolating moods he did, the chemical imbalances. Like him, I do not dream in the normal sense, but in technicolor nightmares. Like him, I compulsively view the world in metaphor. And I once dabbled in death, albeit ineffectively. But unlike him, I treat my illness. I take care of myself.

Every piece of writing owes a debt to childhood. Every piece of fiction, while practicing invention as rebellion, is a product of those who wrote on us. I don’t write him; I am him, fractally.

I wish your writing was more about you.

Every piece of writing is both my father and me, in that I am the writer and he was my best teacher. Yet every piece of writing is fiction.

Is this book about you and your dad? Is this character your father? He was a scientist, yes, and insatiably curious, but my father is ash and scattered and I could never remake him. My father isn’t in my books, he is in me asking my spouse if my moods are ever too much for him to bear. My father is in my vigilance, and my fear. I loved him fiercely. I still do. It’s love that stings like a skinned knee, or a burn you forget you have until it brushes up against something. You get to know him not by fiction but by a funny-colored patch of skin.

I could tell a thousand safer stories. I’m tempted to when people mistake my fiction for memoir. I could write that he died of a heart attack. I could write that ours was an idyllic relationship, the kind which you’d want to memorialize in a book. I could write that the first man I ever feared was someone other than my dad.

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Erika Swyler’s Light From Other Stars is out May 7, 2019 via Bloomsbury Publishing.