Julian Barnes, in his Introduction to The Redstone Diary 2024: The Family Diary (excerpted recently in Harper’s), doesn’t have many good things to say about family. He cites Czeslaw Milosz, who said that “when a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” That presumably is because the writer will eventually write about that family, and all hell will break loose. Families fall apart, Barnes goes on to say, for a number of reasons, not all of them having to do with raising a writer. “A father doesn’t have to be tyrannical, or a mother overprotective, for them to want things to stay the same, and for the child not to grow up…in such a way that he or she becomes a writer.”
What way would that be, I can’t help wondering? Is there a way to grow up so as to become a writer, and other ways to grow up so as not to become a writer? If that were so, then Czeslaw Milosz, Julian Barnes, and I must have grown up under similar circumstances, since we all became writers. A quick check assures me that I was not brought up in war-torn Wilno, Lithuania, like Milosz. Nor was I born in Leicester, England, to a pair of high-school French teachers, as was Barnes. My father was in the military, as was Milosz’s, and we did move around a lot, as did Barnes. But the most striking common element in our families is that they did not fall apart, despite the fact that all three had writers in them.
It is true, however, that there are more writers around now than there were, and that families are falling apart more rapidly than ever. Two years ago, surveys in the U.S. showed that 27 percent of U.S. families had at least one member who was estranged, and 40 percent had experienced estrangement. Estrangement is on the rise in Canada, as well: current estimates are that there are 250,000 grandparents in Ontario alone who are being denied access to their grandchildren. Quebec has had to pass legislation prohibiting parents from denying their parents access to their grandchildren. There is no data to suggest that the estranged family members are writers. Information elicited by questionnaires indicates that there are four main reasons given by estranged members for their estrangement: harsh parenting; favouritism; divorce; and poor communication. This last reason suggests that the estranged member is probably not a writer.
An estranged family member often claims that they were abused by other members of the family, which also suggests that the estranged family member isn’t a writer; otherwise, the estranged family member would be writing about the family, and it would be the family complaining that about being abused.
Neither does David Brooks, in a New York Times article entitled “What’s Ripping American Families Apart?”, mention writers as significant factors in estrangement. He does, however, note a change in family dynamics over the past few decades. For example, he detects a new definition of the term “abuse.” Claims of physical abuse that were lodged in previous generations have given way in recent years, he writes, to claims of psychological abuse, and that this has to do with a change in the way family members view the purpose of the family. Whereas the family was once seen as a place of safety, or refuge, where members felt supported and protected by other family members from buffets in the outside world, the family is now seen more often as “a launchpad for personal fulfilment.” In other words, the family exists not as a place of comfort for all family members, including parents, but as a training ground where children are to be prepared to take their successful places in the outside world.
The problem is that opportunities for personal fulfilment in the outside world are rapidly diminishing. There are fewer jobs, and those that exist are deemed to be personally unfulfilling. Fewer young people can afford to rent, let alone buy, accommodation in which they feel fulfilled. The outside world is perceived more and more as a chaotic maelstrom from which there is sanctuary for only 1 percent of the population (the rich). The blame for this is being laid at the feet of parents, who represent the last generation that could find fulfilling employment and earn enough to own a home and a car and to have kids.
In his 2003 book Enough, Bill McKibben advocates calling a halt to uncontrolled technological advancement, to the idea that “progress” simply means doing more things faster. He particularly worried about the likelihood that genetic manipulation would allow future parents to select which features their children will have “to make them better in some way”: “Taller and more muscular, or smarter and less aggressive, maybe handsome and possibly straight.” He suggests that parents will even be able to determine their children’s IQs, and that they will be pressured into doing so by the fact that every other parent will be. In a world where, through geneline manipulation, every child can have an IQ of 130, the temptation to give your child an IQ of 150 will be irresistible. Deciding not to “soup them up,” he writes, “could come to seem like child abuse.” Parents who give their children a less-than-surpassing IQ may be sued in later life by those children for not preparing them adequately to take their places in the outside world.
If there were a way to bring up a child so as to make him or her a writer, as Julian Barnes suggests, then my parents must have stumbled upon it. I’m pretty sure they didn’t do it consciously, given the risks of having a writer in the family. I can’t ask them, because they’re both in that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns. But if they did raise me to be a writer, I wonder if I could have sued them for not making me a better one?
Great cartoon! And a writerly punchline... :D
My son says I gave him ADHD. He gave me Covid, so I guess we’re even. He's the better writer. We’re still on speaking terms.