Randy Susan Meyers

Family

JESSE, A MOTHER’S STORY: A Ferocious and Raging Love

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I started Jesse, A Mother’s Story twice. The stark beauty of this memoir hit me the moment I began. Marianne Leone’s narrative, written with an unrelenting immediacy, yanked me into her world. Leone’s son Jesse owned me from his first moment on the page. By the end of the prologue, Leone had so engaged me … Read more

Raised by Books

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Perhaps every insatiable reader has a book so thoroughly imprinted at a vulnerable age, that they carry those characters like family of the heart forever. Some marked me for horror. IN COLD BLOOD assured I’d never stay alone in a country house. Others taught me about the awful mixes of fear, revulsion, and sadness we … Read more

Real Life: What I Keep & What I Leave Behind When I Write.

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“But it really happened.”

I was in an adult-ed writer’s group when I first heard this. I’d watched the woman speaking become tenser and grimmer as members of the group—gently and with compassion—suggested that the gruesome events on the page could be presented in a manner more conducive to engaging the reader.

She listened for only a few moments—sadly, this group did not have a ‘be silent while being critiqued’ policy—before unleashing, accusing the group of everything from indifference about sexual assault on children, to ignorance about how children really thought (this in response to our collective idea that 4-year-olds did not speak like 30-year-olds.) She shook as she lectured us on the horror of incest.

True that. Everything she said about her pain and suffering was true—but it still didn’t work on the page. My social services hat went on and I reacted to

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An Awful Lot of Women-Hating

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When I taught in a batterer intervention program—an educational, not counseling program—we’d draw a triangle on the board to help the men look at their belief system. During this lesson on the hierarchy of power, we’d use different ‘systems’ so they could identify the ways they classified people.  Schools, corporations, and prisons were just a few of the organizations we sliced and diced.

They stratified prison, showing the prisoners on the bottom, squashed under the guards, wardens, politicians, and everyone else in the world. When I asked if the guards had any chance of having an “authentic relationship” with the prisoners as they loomed over them as shown in the hierarchy triangle, their laughs were loud and derisive.

When we asked them to define the layers of family, the woman usually laid on the bottom of the heap. Some men argued that the women rated a place above the male children, but they were always wedged under the husbands and fathers. Men who’d grown up in single mother households still stuck the father figure on top.

This doesn’t come from the air.

Last July, the Boston Globe reported on a domestic homicide, the sixteenth in Massachusetts since January. Sarin Chan was murdered by an ex-boyfriend. The murder was witnessed by her 4-and 6-year-old children. (The article does not say if they are boys or girls, and it is not known if the alleged murderer is the father.)

Honestly? I feel a bit shaky writing the above. My novel, The Murderer’s Daughters, revolves around young girls witnessing their father murdering their mother, I worked with men who savagely beat (and some murdered) their partners. My father tried to kill my mother, and still I try to pretend

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