Filed under: Abandonment, Alcoholism, Astrology stuff, Exemplary Children of Divorce, Immigration and Divorce, Living with Aunts and Uncles, Suicide, creativity
One of the great old time masters of detective mystery writing, Raymond Chandler, was a Child of D. Chandler’s Mother was an Irish Immigrant. His Father was a civil engineer who was alcoholic. The family moved around quite a bit because the father worked for the railroad. Dad was absent a great deal of the time and eventually abandoned the family. Chandler was raised by his Mother. His uncle supported the pair financially.
I’m not sure when the divorce actually occurred. Chandler’s Mother took him to Europe for awhile when he was around 11 or 12. Supposedly they took a boat in June, 1900. Chandler was going through his Jupiter Return at that time.
Since I’ve found multiple examples of kids who go through their parents’ split during or around the time of their Jupiter Return who tend to become successful in Jupiterian Professions like Law, Publishing, Higher Education, Religion, etc. I’m pretty excited to find this prominence in Chandler’s chart. I’m finding a lot of published writers whose parents split apart during this Return phase at any rate.
Success doesn’t guarantee happiness, of course. Chandler suffered his own struggle with alcoholism just like his Father. His Jupiter was in Scorpio (murder, crime, the dark side, detective work) opposing Neptune (escapism, addiction). The Wikipedia biography on Chandler is really interesting. He married a woman who was 18 years his senior (Venus c. Saturn-Sun-NN) and it seems that when she died he became despondent and tried to commit suicide. It sounds like he suffered from serious depression his whole life.
Filed under: Abandonment, Books, Exemplary Children of Divorce, Immigration and Divorce, creativity
Junot Diaz is an MIT professor and Pulitizer Prize Winner and Child of D. I’ve passed by his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao often in the library and in bookstores, but I didn’t know until I heard an NPR show this morning (Nov. 27 or 28, 2008? sorry I’m publishing this a few weeks behind) that Junot Diaz writes variations on memoir about his childhood which includes long separations from his Father. Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic. His Father went to America early in his life and so was absent for much of Diaz’s childhood. Later on the family joined the Father in New Jersey but his Father left them at that point. This happened in 1979 when Diaz would have been around 11 years old. In the NPR Interview Diaz says that he writes from the point of view of growing up as a poor immigrant but he also describes life with an erratic Father presence. I haven’t read his writings but it sounds like he does touch a bit on the subject of separation. Mostly he seems to speak from the point of view of immigration — there’s a bigger audience for this, a complaint that America is proud of rather than interested in sweeping under the rug, ah hem…
Divorce among Immigrants is certainly an interesting topic. Although I have no personal experience in this area, I’ve heard a couple of times that Immigrant families will stick together out of necessity because of moving to a strange place. If that tends to be true a separation connected with a move to a foreign land would make for an extra complicated childhood.
