In Spite of Everything Read online

  Praise for In Spite of Everything

  “Raw, funny, searingly honest and electrifyingly intelligent. As a field guide to the beat-up, busted heart of Generation X, it’s damn near definitive. Thomas solves the mystery of her devastating divorce—and the emotional catastrophe that defines a generation.”

  —LEV GROSSMAN, author of The Magicians

  “This smart and emotionally mighty memoir will show you how every family of divorce is unhappy in ways we can all relate to, learn from, cry about, and (after reading such a great book) transcend. Sad and funny, In Spite of Everything is the first book to dissect, with scientific definitiveness, the Busted-Marriage Generation. It also tells a very moving personal story with real beauty.”

  —DARIN STRAUSS, author of Half a Life

  “At once a literate and poignant memoir and incisive journalistic illumination of the cult of domestic consumption, In Spite of Everything is a remarkable and moving study of an American generation’s uneasy search for home.”

  —WELLS TOWER, author of Everything Ravaged,

  Everything Burned

  “This book is brave, startling, and profoundly moving, and I could not put it down.”

  —JOANNA HERSHON, author of

  The German Bride and Swimming

  “Harrowing, hilarious, and profoundly wise, In Spite of Everything is the work of a supreme talent and an emotional daredevil, a woman courageous enough to reveal every scar that lines her heart.”

  —BRENDAN I. KOERNER, author of Now the Hell Will Start

  “Honest, riveting and illuminating.… An indelible portrait not only of a family, but of an entire generation shaped by loneliness. Breathtakingly beautiful from start to finish.”

  —LISA DIERBECK, author of One Pill Makes You Smaller

  “In In Spite of Everything, Susan Gregory Thomas goes way beyond American pop culture’s cute, run-of-the-mill bromides about marriage and parenting and gives us a work that’s shot through with a stark and clarifying light of honesty. It is an inspiring book—and often an uproariously funny one, too. In Spite of Everything establishes Thomas as one of the most important new voices in American writing.”

  —JEFF GORDINIER, author of X Saves the World

  “As a memoir, In Spite of Everything is both raw and smart; as a generational analysis, it is spot on—culturally, economically, and psychologically. This is an engaging and fast-paced memoir, and a generational portrait for those who refuse to be categorized.”

  —LISA CHAMBERLAIN, author of Slackonomics:

  Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction

  “In Spite of Everything is a profound emotional history of the last forty years. Susan Gregory Thomas is the expert on Generation X’s emotional fallout. All recovering latchkey kids should read this book.”

  —ADA CALHOUN, author of Instinctive Parenting:

  Trusting Ourselves to Raise Good Kids

  “An engrossing memoir, and a deeply moving and personal tale of divorce, love, motherhood, and what makes us who we are.”

  —MARIAN FONTANA, author of A Widow’s Walk

  ALSO BY SUSAN GREGORY THOMAS

  Buy, Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates

  Parents and Harms Young Minds

  In Spite of Everything is a work of nonfiction. Certain names have been changed in order to disguise the identities of the persons discussed. Any resulting resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

  Copyright © 2011 by Susan Gregory Thomas

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House,

  an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are

  registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Portions of this book were originally published as articles by

  Babble.com and MSNBC.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Thomas, Susan Gregory.

  In spite of everything : a memoir / by Susan Gregory Thomas.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-946-8

  1. Thomas, Susan Gregory. 2. Thomas, Susan Gregory—Marriage.

  3. Thomas, Susan Gregory—Divorce. 4. Divorced women—United States—

  Biography. I. Title.

  CT275.T5566A3 2011

  306.89’3092—dc22

  [B] 2010043104

  www.atrandom.com

  Jacket design: Gabrielle Bordwin

  Jacket photograph: Frank Schott

  v3.1

  For my family

  (and a little bit for Eminem)

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: More Than This

  1. Louder than Bombs: Childhood

  2. Kiss Them for Me: First Love

  3. Say Yes: Love and Marriage

  4. Alive and Kicking: Having Children

  5. This Must Be the Place: Making a Home

  6. Countdown to Armageddon:

  Marital Breakdown

  7. Everything Is Coming to a Grinding Halt:

  The End of the Marriage

  8. The Cutter: Separation

  9. Levitate Me: Divorce and Denouement

  Epilogue: You May Find Yourself

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE:

  MORE THAN THIS

  Every generation has its life-defining moment. If you want to find out what it was for a member of the Greatest Generation, you ask: “Where were you when Hitler invaded France?” or “Where were you on D-Day?” If you want to find out what it was for a Baby Boomer, there are three possible questions: “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” or “Where were you when you heard about Kent State?” or “Where were you when the Watergate story broke?”

  For most of my generation—Generation X—there is only one question: “When did your parents get divorced?”

  Our lives have been framed by the answer. Ask us. We remember everything.

  My dad left in the early spring of 1981, while my mother was leading a school trip to England. While she was away that week, Dad was in charge. I was twelve; my brother, Ian, was nine.

  On the first night, Dad called to say he was running late, that he might not be there by dinnertime. We’d never had to make dinner for ourselves before, but I knew that Mom had a stash of Stouffer’s French bread pizzas in the freezer. Unsettled, Ian and I were nonetheless united in one thought: unmediated access to TV. We sat on the floor of our parents’ room, watched Magnum, P.I., and ate the pizzas. We ended up falling asleep on the rug.

  When we woke up the next morning, our father was lying on top of the bed in his dark gray pinstripe Brooks Brothers suit, his standard investment management uniform. The whole room smelled of Dad: scotch, sweat, and shaving cream. His white dress shirt was pressed to his chest like wet tissue paper; his face was dusted with unfamiliar salt-white whiskers. Ian and I looked at each other, scared. Dad was a perennial early riser: up hours before anyone else, impeccably shaved and dressed—reading the paper and drinking coffee by 5:30 A.M. It was now after eight; we had to be at school, sitting at our desks, by 8:25. Ian and I swapped staccato whispers over our father’s body, when suddenly he opened his eyes, webbed with raw capillaries. “Let’s go,” Dad growled, and got up immediately. We followed, mute. He drove us to our respective schools without a word.

  The second night, no phone call. It was cold in the house; usually, it took two furnaces to heat it, and I didn’t know how to turn them on
. I called our current babysitter, a college student at Villanova University named Carol. I told her that my dad wasn’t home and asked if she could call him. There was a pause on the line. Then she said she’d be right over. She was there in fifteen minutes.

  The next afternoon, I came home from school and no one was there. My brother had been taken to Cub Scouts by someone’s mother, I think, and Carol was still in classes. I was in the kitchen prying frozen orange juice concentrate out of its canister when my dad pulled up. I looked out the kitchen window, waiting for him to get out of the car. A few minutes went by. I went outside.

  He was sitting in the driver’s seat of his sports car, a plastic tumbler of scotch in his hand. He was wearing the same clothes. He didn’t look at me. I ripped a hangnail off my thumb and chewed it. Finally, I opened the door and got in. “Hi, Dad,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything. The ashtray was open; there were three cigarette butts inside, each O’ed with pink lipstick. He tilted the tumbler back, slipped the scotch into his mouth, opened the car door, got out, and popped the trunk. My thumb had bled onto the sleeve of my white school shirt.

  When I came around to the back of the car, I saw that there was a case of scotch in the trunk. Dad was pouring from a newly opened bottle into his tumbler. He silently screwed the cap back on and clinked the bottle into the box. He chugged it back, eyes closed. He set the glass on the hood.

  “Everything okay here?” he asked.

  “Carol came,” I said, sucking at my thumb.

  “Can she stay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I have to go on a business trip,” he said. “As it turns out.” He slammed the trunk shut and finally looked at me.

  “I have to go now,” he said. “Call if you need me.” He squeezed my shoulder, got in the car, and drove out of the driveway.

  After a few moments, I sat down. I was wearing the navy blue tunic uniform of my all-girls’ school, and loose driveway pebbles stuck to my bloomer-covered bottom and the backs of my thighs. I wrapped the belt of my tunic around my wound. It was cold and wet still, early spring. The edges of the front yard were flanked by forsythia, which were just budding Crayola yellow. I’d never had his number to begin with.

  “Whatever happens, we’re never going to get divorced.”

  Over the course of sixteen years, I said that often to my husband, Cal, especially after our two daughters were born. No marital scenario would ever become so bleak or hopeless as to compel me, even for a moment, to embed my children in the torture of my own split family. After my dad left (with his secretary, who would become his second of three wives), the world as my brother and I had known it ended. Just like that. My mother, formerly a regal, erudite figure, shape-shifted into a phantom in a sweaty nightgown and matted hair, howling on the floor of our gray-carpeted playroom. Ian, a sweet, doofusy boy, grew into a sad, glowering giant, barricaded in his room with dark comic books, graphic novels, and computer games. I would spend the rest of middle and high school getting into a lot of surprisingly bad trouble in suburban Philadelphia: chain-smoking, doing drugs, getting kicked out of schools, ending my senior year in a psychiatric ward. Our dad was gone. He immediately moved five states away, with his new wife and her four kids. Whenever Ian and I saw him, which was, per his preference, rarely, he grew more and more to embody Darth Vader: a brutal machine encasing raw human guts. Growing up, Ian and I were often left to our own devices, circumstances that did not so much teach us how to take care of ourselves as simply how to survive. We dealt. We developed detached, sarcastic riffs on “our messed-up childhood.”

  We weren’t the only ones. The particular memorabilia that comprise each family’s unhappiness are always different, but a lot of our friends were going through the same basic stuff at the time—and a lot of people our age we didn’t know were, too. The divorce epidemic of the 1970s and ’80s wiped out nearly half our generation.

  According to a recent study of generational differences, Generation X—those of us born between 1965 and 1980—“went through its all-important, formative years as one of the least parented, least nurtured generations in U.S. history.” U.S. census and other data report that almost half of all Generation X children’s families split; 40 percent were latchkey kids. People my parents’ age all say things like “Of course you’d feel devastated by divorce, honey—it was a horrible, disorienting time for you as a child! Of course you wouldn’t want it for yourself and your family, but sometimes it’s better for everyone that parents part ways; everyone is happier.” Such sentiments bring to mind a set of statistics that has stuck with me: In 1962, half of all adult women believed that parents in bad marriages should stay together for the children’s sake; by 1980, only one in five felt that way. A child in the 1980s faced twice the risk of parental divorce as a Boomer child in the mid-1960s. “Four-fifths of [those] divorced adults profess to being happier afterward,” the authors write, “but a majority of their children feel otherwise.”*

  But a majority of their children feel otherwise. There is something intolerable about that clause. Because, although I realize this view is lunatic and hyperbolic, there is still something in me that feels that to get divorced is to enact Medea: the wailing, murderously bereft mother; the cold father protecting his pristine new family; the children: dead.

  Not me. I married my husband because he was the most wonderful, reliable, stable person I had ever met. When my children were born a few years later, I stopped being cool, or what I thought was cool, because I fell in love with them so completely that my cool circuit blew out on the spot. As a mother, this became my foxhole prayer: Please, please, Whatever Karmic Force There Is, do not let divorce happen to my children. Divorce didn’t just evoke a sense of a sad, disruptive period, a portrait of parents yelling, children numbly munching frozen pizzas in front of TV cartoons. It had been scorched earth. The Bomb.

  How can a person find herself doing precisely what she has built her life’s framework to avoid? As the daughter of a onetime classicist, and a former English major and theater geek myself, I knew the answer as well as anyone: Look no farther than Oedipus. But my feeling—really, my absolute certainty—was, again: not me. And yet, there I was. After sixteen years of life with Cal, I found myself without warning in the one place I had vowed never to be. Here I was sitting at a cozy-chic restaurant in Park Slope, Brooklyn, crying that I was miserable in our relationship, had been for years, and hearing Cal respond that he, too, was miserable and regretted that we hadn’t split up a decade earlier.

  It seemed that the light blew out. My field of vision narrowed to his dinner plate, blown with bits of rice and desiccated meat. There was one thought: I am here. In spite of everything.

  It is a hard truism that each generation is shaped by its war. The Greatest Generation (1929–43) was forged by World War II; Baby Boomers (1944–64) were defined by Vietnam and the civil rights and antiwar movements. Generation X’s war, I would argue, was the ultimate war at home: divorce. We didn’t get Purple Hearts or red badges of courage, nothing that could be culturally shared or healed. Our injuries were private, secret, solitary. Our generation’s drug use—unlike that of Baby Boomers, who favored the grandiose highs of psychedelics and, later, cocaine—revolved around heroin, Percocet, Oxycontin: painkillers. Outdoors, there was crack, AIDS, homelessness, racial conflict, Reaganomics. Indoors was the mall, in roving packs. Home? Alone, watching program-length commercials. “More than this,” crooned Bryan Ferry in Roxy Music’s eponymous eighties lullaby, “there is nothing.” The novel of our decade: Less Than Zero. The protagonist’s central crisis strikes when he encounters a billboard for a resort that reads DISAPPEAR HERE.

  We did not disappear; we just stuffed the void with whatever we could grab. Many of us, including me, thrashed our way out of adolescence and worked our asses off to get as far away as possible from that terroir of existential fear. We developed crusts to cover our raw centers. Sociologists have shown how the effects of the mass divorces of
the 1980s linger subtly but powerfully in our behavior as adults now, in our struggle to do everything differently.

  Without a safe home to belong to, we still see ourselves as the misfits, the outsiders, the snickering critics who see through everyone else’s pretenses. Terminal uniqueness, it turns out, is a hallmark of Generation X. The insistence that you are different, cannot be stuck with any label, are impossible to categorize, is a phenomenon that marketers, somewhat hilariously, call “focus group of one.” Try your own. Start a conversation with people our age about Generation X, and see if they don’t respond with something like “Exactly who decided that I was in ‘Generation X’ anyway?” or “I’ve never paid attention to those kinds of sociological generalizations.” But according to studies, we do conform to sociological generalizations in that we refuse to acknowledge them, even as we conform to them.

  First, market research shows that we all bristle at being called “Gen X” (funny: “I Am Not a Target Market” was a chapter in Douglas Coupland’s Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, published in 1991). Indeed, we still have a jaundiced view of authority, just as we did as adolescents. We’re still self-reliant; after all, we’ve been making our own dinner since we were six years old. We never counted on gold watches or pensions; we recalibrated ourselves and our careers as often as the economy morphed. We came to the whole idea of love after we’d been battered around like middle-aged divorcées—and when we actually found it, we cleaved to it. Love meant everything. It certainly did to me. It was my vulnerable little secret. I may have seemed jaded, but I was, after all, a kid needing love, security, and attention—the very things my parents had been too distracted and overwhelmed to offer.

  So I, like many of us, made it. But I, like, I’d bet, many of us, unconsciously banked on the fuzzy logic that arrival in adulthood would somehow summon a mystical force that would seal up that gaping hole forever, like the giant boulder rolling over the cave entrance in Aladdin. It worked, for a while. Until we became parents.