Articles

She'd keep her eyes mostly averted as though she didn't know you until you started talking to her, and then she'd blurt out something friendly but nervous.

We admired her for two reasons: the power of her writing, which combined a Beat-like expressive energy with courageous, uncompromising frankness; and her extreme commitment to her art. As a woman in her fifties and beyond, she lived in her van in order to keep expenses down and be a full-time writer. We'd say, Sharon means it. Sharon's serious.

Most of Doubiago's published work is poetry, but I had been particularly moved by her early collection of autobiographical stories, The Book of Seeing with One's Own Eyes. When her new memoir, My Father's Love: Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl, Volume I came out late last year, I was quick to acquire a copy, although I braced myself for the unpleasant topic. It tells the story of how, "When I was seven I was raped by my father, climaxing the sexual relationship he'd had with me from birth."

**
My Father's Love is, Doubiago says, a "Proustian expansion" of a sixteen-page story she wrote at the beginning of her career, forty years ago, to complete a Master's Degree in English. The story was "about the anguished love between a father and a daughter, who, inexplicably, could not, for all the longing in both, communicate." It revolved around the haunting image of a daughter who keeps her tearful father locked outside a glass door, although she does not understand why.

For years, she was unable to finish the story, until two days before the degree deadline "the mysterious glass shattered." She suddenly found language for memories that had been inaccessible, but now exploded into articulation. "I put into words for the first time what those sickening, harrowing years . . . had been . . . My father's hands at my girl breasts, my father making me look at his penis . . ."

She called it "California Daughter/1950." Doubiago had "never heard or read such a thing. No one was writing or telling this kind of story then." Her professor called it brilliant, passed it around, and she was offered full scholarships to the Ph.D. programs at the University of Iowa and the University of California at Irvine. She was soon offered a residency at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. But, she writes, "I was certain the brilliance of my story was its sensational subject matter, not my writing; I was certain they were just interested in working with a girl who'd had sex with her father and dared to write about it." She turned them all down. She vowed never to be a creative writer, and instead wrote a critical book about the Molly Bloom soliloquy in James Joyce's Ulysses.

Someone at Provincetown told the New York feminist magazine Aphra about Doubiago's story, and, under pressure "to do this for my sisters," she allowed them to publish the story under a pseudonym. It was subsequently reprinted in Martha Foley's Best American Short Stories of 1976. Doubiago decided to be a creative writer after all.

My Father's Love, Volume I is about Doubiago ages zero to eighteen, in the years before she found the words to express what happened to her. It is also about the travails of her mother and her father and their parents and grandparents, and all their relatives; and Doubiago's girlfriend Gae, raped by her own father; and to a lesser degree, about the geopolitical context of World War II, the atomic bomb, and the Korean War. This book reaches far and wide, and at 448 pages, is only Volume I: a Volume II will follow. Some people will object that, even as a Proustian expansion, it is too long.

To employ a mining metaphor (Doubiago's paternal lineage is of Tennessee copper miners), Doubiago has dug deep into a vast mountain, and found complex veins of ore; but sometimes it's not yet clear to the reader what's a precious metal and what's plain rock. In places, the ore needs to be refined; the book could use editing.

In the first section of My Father's Love, we meet Doubiago's family: her father is terribly jealous of his wife's attentions to their children, and he flirts with young Sharon to make his wife jealous in turn. Mom's sister Mozelle and Dad's parents come from Tennessee to live with them in Los Angeles, and we gradually gather that incest is common in the family history, on both sides.

One hundred and fifty pages in, the story comes into focus. Mom falls ill with tuberculosis and enters a sanitarium. Dad enters the children's room at night and rapes seven-year-old Sharon, in front of her little sister Bridget and her little brother Clarke. He returns later in the night weeping, and carries Sharon to the bath, where he cleans her up and then pushes her under the water, warning, "This is what will happen if you ever tell!" before he lets her up to breathe.

The scene is horrifying, and the ensuing pages are just as awful as we watch little Sharon bury her bloody pajamas under the house in shame, and go to school dizzy, and develop a stutter, and stop eating, and stuff toilet paper into her underwear to hide the bleeding that goes on for days, and lie awake all night long every night in terror that he will return.

Then, the horror grows more subtle. Mom returns. Dad never forces intercourse again, but he does grope Sharon's breasts when he can corner her in the garage, and he wages an emotional battle against her: he regularly accuses her of making up ailments to gain attention, and of not loving him. When, at age twelve, Sharon finally tells her mother that her father touches her breasts (omitting the rape), her mother promises to make it stop, and it does; but then her mom grows more acutely cold, as though she perceives her daughter to be a sexual threat.

Doubiago calls this the insidious ecology of abuse, and it sadly is common: when women are victims of sexual violence, they are often blamed, or disbelieved. When Doubiago told about the rape years later, her mother and sister accused her of either lying or delusion. When Doubiago's niece Chelli later said that she, too, had been molested by Doubiago's dad, Doubiago's mother and sister suggested that Chelli had been brainwashed by her aunt.

Doubiago recovered these suppressed memories years later, and she acknowledges that there is much of which she is unsure. There has been controversy over whether recovered memories of childhood abuse are reliable, and with this in mind, Doubiago rejects the notion that one's emotional truth is enough for a memoir. Although Doubiago tells us that her father confessed on his deathbed, she still documents her story thoroughly, "never telling anything I was unsure of, unless apparent or stated in that context, and verifying as much as I could--with family albums and other photographs, baby books, diaries, journals, testimonies, interviews, letters, films, tapes, history dates, formal research."

But then, she uses documents not just to verify memories, but to prompt them:

There's a photo . . . My head hanging like a sunflower on its stalk. I was in the garage with Daddy again. I had to show him again. Hard to get my Easter dress down off my shoulders. Here let me help you Sharon Lura. With his giant fingers he undid the mother-of-pearl buttons Mama sewed down the back, pulled down the slip strap. They are so beautiful he said. He said you want to see something as beautiful? His skin was electric silver like the knife he was sharpening. They just think I'm an introvert, that that's why I am the way I am. But I'm coming apart, dust particles floating in space. Every breath, every move is to keep the spider from crawling up my insides.

She tells us, "I want to write like I dream, how the mind puts things together it won't awake," and indeed the narrative grows nightmarish: Everywhere she goes, men expose themselves to her. She gets out of the bath and sees a grizzled mug leering in the window, muttering "fuck!" Two men in a faded green car follow her for a week. Girls are murdered and fall down wells and otherwise disappear in the surrounding city. At times, it becomes impossible to tell what is supposed to be true, and what is fantasy, or whether Doubiago knows the difference. The dreaminess functions not as an admission of uncertainty, but rather as a depiction of consciousness, of what it is like to be a daughter who loves her father and is terrorized by him, and has no language by which to understand what is happening.

Doubiago's great achievement with this book is toward giving language to an experience that lies beyond language; for this reader, at least, she has expanded the limits of expression and comprehensibility. Often, an author will compensate for an uncomfortable topic by writing in a form and a style that are conventional and comforting. Doubiago has not done this. Instead, she has taken a more ambitious and difficult approach, writing in a way that is disconcerting but beautiful, vexing but illuminating. A Proustian expansion it may be, but next to Proust's sugar-on-your-tongue prose Doubiago's is artfully savage, artistically obscene. In its unpolished state it is heartbreaking, enlightening, and, I daresay, groundbreaking.

***
Comment on this book review at Tumblr.