It is unsparing, this baring of a woman's, and a family's soul. This is an actress. She is well known. I suspect there is a part of the rest of us, though we know better intellectually, that assumes her fame has, or will, spare her the crucible of life and its many sufferings. After all, if you have followed her career, it took off early, in Ryan's Hope, a popular soap opera, a mini-series, The Mannions of America and more, and to the eye of the entertainment consumer, it soared, literally, into outer space with Star Trek Voyager. Of late she has returned to a harsh fictional life in Orange is the New Black. I didn't know of her when she was in Ryan's Hope. I haven't been intrigued enough to watch Orange is the New Black. I was an admirer of her characterization of the first female Captain in the science fiction of Star Trek. I was working as a prosecutor of other lawyers then, and I wished I had the calm command of my earthbound duties that her character managed lost in a far flung universe. It is easy, watching reruns these days, to imagine that the actress composing the role of beauty, strength and command, was unencumbered in reality by the troubles the rest of us endure. Or maybe it is merely, to quote another famous person, "a consummation devoutly to be wished". But, of course, the truth is, and we have always known, that being an actor, having fame, having money, these are not talismans which protect from the human condition. Life itself is unsparing, to all of us, whether it is public or not.
What I felt mostly in reading Ms. Mulgrew's book, though naturally my particular experiences have differed enormously from hers (not the least of which because I am an only child and she had and has many siblings) was kinship. There were so many common touch points of emotion, of frustration, of doubt, of being misunderstood, of being too much relied on and too little appreciated, of obligation, of love expressed, and too often unexpressed, of reliving times and places long gone, but having nonetheless the effects of them, good and bad.
Toward the end of her run in Star Trek Voyager, in 2000, Ms. Mulgrew was called home to her family to face that too often diagnosis of the 21st century, the Alzheimer's of her mother, the devolution of which would occur over the next nine years. For much of that time, travelling to and from her work to the place and people that had formed her, she was the health care proxy, the main decision maker. regarding her mother's care. During that slow death would come the far quicker death of her father, in 2004, while she was performing a one woman show about Katherine Hepburn.
The flow of memories wends its way between the most recent reality of lives upended, to the past realities of sadness and fondness. It is the story of gains and losses, of joys promised and the nature of powerful but imperfect love between spouses and among children. I read somewhere that Ms. Mulgrew was concerned about how her siblings would receive her unvarnished rendition of their various relationships, and of her own part in handling the affairs of her mother, and father. I have also heard an interview or two. Ms. Mulgrew (who my contemporary) is articulate and blunt. I am guessing that she doesn't suffer fools lightly. I found myself wondering whether, if we knew each other, we would get along. I think I am pretty direct, and people either like me or dislike me, but are rarely indifferent. She candidly says about her siblings that she wrote (and they were aware she was going to write of them) that it is how she saw it, nothing more. Still, this is a writer who takes risks, in my view. And I guess I like her all the more for it.
Joan Keirnan was an East Coast girl, born in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, a denizen during and after college in New York, Boston and Chicago. She was a girl going places, from my sense of the tale. She had two best girlfriends, one of whom was a Kennedy. She worked for John Kennedy. She was passionate, mentally agile, and creative. Thomas Mulgrew was an Dubuque, Iowa boy, rough hewn handsome and charming. He met Joan, in Chicago. She talked deep, this good Catholic girl, of philosophy and religion and she mesmerized him. He said that she ran out of options as her two friends got married. So she and the Midwestern Catholic boy got together. I suppose he promised her everything, as far as that is possible to any young man for his young woman. But what had begun magically between them was eroded by raising eight children, two of whom died, one at three months, and the other of a brain tumor at 14, and many miscarriages. In so many ways, they came to be at cross purposes. She became less lively, more silent. He withdrew to alcohol and cross word puzzles and kept a careful distance from his children, whom he loved dearly, but for whom such expression was rare.
I wrote, earlier, that there were things that resonated particularly for me, as an only daughter, who always wondered why my own parents ever married and whether my mother ever wanted me.--born nearly nine years after their marriage, about which they told no one for one year.
Ms. Mulgrew writes of her own mother, "She was a strangely formal woman who had made up a set of rules for herself that allowed her to persevere within the confines of her circumstances. This formality was in itself unusual, because my mother was a lively, intelligent creature who could conduct herself with confidence in any situation. She was not afraid of life, she traveled widely, her curiosity was insatiable, but she was not a conventional mother."
My mother was born in the Bronx, with three siblings, all girls, to two Irish immigrants. She wanted to escape the Bronx, and she wanted to be a model. She was beautiful enough to be one, though probably too short at five foot five. She saw my father, 9 years her senior, a World War Two Veteran, who was mostly self-educated (although she compelled him to go to college on the GI Bill), handsome, charming Greek-Italian American, as something special. He was, but he couldn't provide her need for something she couldn't articulate, perhaps it was the very fame that Ms. Mulgrew found. The difference is that my mother seemed to want her success to come from outside, through her husband. He tried to please her, but she was never happy. And when I came along, though she did all that was required of a mother, and more, in terms of my education and appearance and morality (my mother was Catholic, but I never recall her practicing, and only once do I recall her attending Mass with me, whom she sent to private Catholic school, no easy thing with a limited budget, even then), but I always felt that I was on probation for having done something wrong, and I knew not what. She was also not conventional in dress or manner. And whatever rules she had, you did not necessarily know one until you violated it. And like Ms. Mulgrew's father, she died of an aggressive cancer, though she took the treatment offered her, without ever acknowledging, or perhaps even knowing, what was going to take her life. These were days when doctors did not tell women they were terminal, because they felt they might not fight. I was 20. I had no idea who the woman who bore me was, and I will never know.
Although not with a relative, but with a long time elderly friend, I have also seen the ravages of dementia. Although she is in a nursing home, I am the one charged with decisions about her welfare. After four years, she has forgotten all of us, family and friends. She cannot find words, some days, not at all. Other days, prodded, she notes her trust in God. Other days, she nods her head side to side, in a way that indicates a disapproval of something--I always think it is that her searching of her diminishing mind and the nodding is a sign of the inability to reach what it is to name it-but when I ask about it, there is nothing she can offer.
So, as you can see, I hope, as I read How to Forget, all sorts of things stirred in me about my life, and my relationships and my losses. And and it was almost as if this stranger writing was talking directly to me and in so doing, we were no longer strangers.
Every life is extraordinary. And now we know the the ordinary extraordinary lives of Thomas and Joan Mulgrew and the Mulgrew family. It was the right book at the right time for me.
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