Anonymity - Hardcover

Bergman, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374254079 ISBN 13: 9780374254070

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1994

Synopsis

Interweaving childhood reminiscences with poignant meditations on the impact of grief and tragedy, a daughter details her father's 1983 death from AIDS and her family's struggle to cope with his death and his heretofore unrevealed homosexual life.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

An impressionistic memoir by Bergman, a poet, in which she ``outs'' her secretly gay father, dead of AIDS, and makes her own brave and painful decision to stop living a lie. The author grew up as Susan ``Heche,'' one of four children in a picture-perfect, rigidly devout family. Her mother, who'd apparently married beneath her class--for reasons of love-- cherished the illusion of a happy marriage and family in the face of mounting evidence of things seriously amiss. Bergman's father, Don Heche, son of the abusive owner of a bait-and-tackle shop, was a talented musician and a dreamer so detached from reality that he bankrupted his family by chasing one scam after another. He was also homosexual--a fact that he took great trouble to conceal from his wife and children until his terminal illness forced him to reveal it. In 1983, Heche was one of the first people to die of AIDS. The effect on his survivors was devastating: His only son ran his car into a tree and died; Bergman's mother and two sisters floundered in their grief, each in her own self-destructive way. Throughout her narrative, Bergman alone appears stable: marrying a man she loves; giving birth; working as a teacher. But in order to deceive others and protect herself, she says, she enveloped herself in multiple images, one over the other. For as she gradually reveals here, she's keeping her own dangerous secret--as if the sins of the father have been visited on the next generation--a secret that, if disclosed, may well destroy her world. Nevertheless, in the end, the urgent desire to live impels her to reveal it to her husband. Written in a densely poetic style with shifting chronology, Bergman's story sometimes seems overly elliptical--but, by its stunning end, it achieves a brilliant and cutting clarity. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Bergman's self-revelatory journey to understanding combines memoir and mystery. She weaves a tale of lies and intrigue revealed, intermixing past and present as she reconciles recent images of her impoverished, AIDS-ridden father--inviting her to lunch and pretending to have lost his wallet when the bill arrived--with the grandiose visions and purchases, power plays and business deals of his past, when nothing was too good for his wife and four daughters. For "it was not until my father died that we found out about his other life. Then our other lives began." Relentlessly, she tracks down the hidden side of this family man and church music director apparently ruled by strict, conservative religious beliefs. She writes with bewilderment, rage, and compassion as she relates a sister's eating disorder and her own secret infidelity to her dying father's double life and wonders whether closeted gays, "their immune systems already overtaxed by the exertion of living two lives in a single body," are more susceptible to AIDS. In writing of this "Mystery Man"--her father--she has reconstructed her family history in a brutal, provocative book. Whitney Scott

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0374254079
• ISBN 13: 9780374254070
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 198