Filed under: Abandonment, Addiction - Parents, Alcoholism, College Drop Out, creativity, Exemplary Children of Divorce, Homelessness, Living with Aunts and Uncles, Living with Grandparents, Long Term Fallout, poverty, Relationship with Father, relationship with Mother
Raymond Chandler is a 20th Century detective novel writer written in a “hard-boiled style.” Some of the titles were The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, and The Long Good-Bye. One might expect that a writer would discuss his childhood a bit but in the book Raymond Chandler Speaking (Gardner and Walker, p.20) he gives two liners to each parent.
His father: “My father was a graduate of Penn, a civil engineer. Divorced when I was seven…Never saw my father again.”
His Mother: “My Mother soon after returned to England to live with her mother and manage the house, and of course I went with her.”
Chandler grew up in Chicago until he was 7 years old. His Father worked for the railroads and was drunk most of the time. Chandler wrote that he was “found drunk if he was found at all.” (Hiney, Tom. Raymond Chandler: A Biography, p. 4).
Chandler’s Mother was born in Ireland and they moved to Ireland to live with family after his Father disappeared for the last time. They had lost their house and were living in a hotel where the boy caught Scarlett Fever. Chandler’s Mother never talked about his Father again.
Chandler said that he had wished his Mother had remarried in London. “I know that my mother had affairs — she wa a very beautiful woman– and the only thing that I felt to be wrong was that she refused to marry again for fear a step-father would not treat me kindly, since my father was such a swine.” (Honey, Tom. Raymond Chandler: A Biography, p. 10)
Chandler had generous relatives and grew up in Britain. He and his Mother returned to the United States. He worked at several professions, getting fired for drinking himself. He didn’t write his first story until 1933 at Age 45. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published when he was 51.
Chandler fell in love with the step-mother of a friend who was 18 years his senior. His Mother forbade the relationship so Chandler didn’t marry Cissy until after her death. When his wife died in 1954 Chandler attempted suicide.
Chandler died in 1959 of pneumonia which was brought on by alcoholism.
Filed under: Blame, Denial, Exemplary Children of Divorce, feeling victimized, Healing, Homelessness, indifferent parents, Long Term Fallout, Possible Personality Traits of Children of D., Trauma | Tags: Dealing with the Trauma
Here’s an except blogger Mark Manson wrote about his parents’ divorce in The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. Completely different from my own experience. Manson writes a blog giving dating advice and has published an article called “It’s not our parents’ fault” which doesn’t discuss Divorce at all.
from pp. 52-55
“And just when I had finally cleaned up my act and turned in my assignments and learned the value of good clerical responsibility, my parents decided to get divorced.
“I tell you all of this only to point out that my adolescence sucked donkey balls. I lost all of my friends, my community, my legal rights, and my family within the span of about nine months. My Therapist in my twenties would later call this ‘some real traumatic shit,’ and I would spend the next decade-and- change working on unraveling it and becoming less of a self-absorbed, entitled little prick.
“The problem with my home life back then was not all of the horrible things that were said or done; rather, it was all of the horrible things that needed to be said and done but weren’t. My family stonewalls the way Warren Buffet makes money or Janna Jameson fucks: we’re champions at it. The house could have been burning down around us and it would have been met with, ‘Oh no, everything’s fine. A tad warm in here, perhaps–but really, everything’s fine.’
“When my parents got divorced, there were no broken dishes, no slammed doors, no screaming arguments about who fucked whom. Once they had reassured my brother and me that it wasn’t our fault, we had a Q&A session — yes you read that right — about the logistics of the new living arrangement. Not a tear was shed. Not a voice was raised. The closest peek my brother and I got into our parents’ unraveling emotional lives was hearing, ‘Nobody cheated on anybody.’ Oh, that’s nice. It was a tad warm in the room, but really, everything was fine.
….
“When ‘real traumatic shit’ like this happens in our lives, we begin to unconsciously feel as though we have problems that we’re incapable of ever solving. And this assume inability to solve our problems causes us to feel miserable and helpless.
“But it also causes something else to happen. If we have problems that are unsolvable, our unconscious figures that we’re either uniquely special or uniquely defective in some way. That we’re somehow unlike everyone else and that the rules must be different for us.
“Put simply: we become entitled.
“The pain from my adolescence led me down a road of entitlement that lasted through much of my early adulthood.
….
“My trauma had revolved around intimacy and acceptance, so I felt a constant need to overcompensate, to proe to myself that I was loved and accepted at all times. And as a result, I soon took to chasing women the same way a cocaine addict takes to a snowman made out of cocaine: I made sweet love to it, and then promptly suffocated myself in it.
“I became a player–an immature, selfish, albeit sometimes charming player. And I strung up a long series of superficial and unhealthy relationships for the better part of a decade.
…
“I was often unemployed, living on friends’ couches or with my mom, drinking way more than I should have been, alienating a number of friends–and when I did meet a woman I really like, my self-absorption quickly torpedoed everything.
Filed under: Abandonment, Addiction - Children, Addiction - Parents, Books, Child of Divorce as Parent, creativity, Exemplary Children of Divorce, Homelessness, Homelessness of Parent, Long Term Fallout, Mentally Ill parents, Movies About Growing Up in Divorce, Suicide
A couple of months ago I saw a really incredible but disturbing movie called Being Flynn. It’s based on the real life story of a son who works in a homeless shelter and reconnects with his Father who comes in for help. Robert DeNiro plays the Father and Julianne Moore plays the Mother. Paul Dano plays the son. Don’t know what he looks like in other roles but here he actually looks like someone who comes from divorce. His posture, his attitude. I stated before that I think that people from divorce generally have much different personalities from people who aren’t from divorce but never really thought that I attribute a certain type of physical look.
The original book on which the movie based is written by Nick Flynn and was originally titled Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. Sorry, I’m very behind on my reading. Flynn’s Mother committed suicide so his early life was extremely difficult. Did I find his birth date? Probably. The astrology will be pretty interesting, if not beyond understanding.
Interesting website for the movie here. Although this is a great movie I don’t recommend seeing it if you’re going through a difficult phase and especially if you’ve ever had to deal with suicide or homelessness or have known anyone who has.
Oh yeah, although I haven’t finished it, I really like the style of Flynn’s writing.
Spoiled Children of Divorce 