Books About Ourselves

Kerry Washington is all over the place.

The morning talk shows, NPR, The New York Times—interviews with Kerry Washington and reviews of her memoir “Thicker Than Water” are everywhere. Her story is, of course, familiar. DNA test, sperm donor, parents not planning to tell her. Even the detail of her mom’s intent to leave the truth in a safety deposit box to be found upon her death. (That was one of my mother’s plans. The other was to give my brother a letter and tell him not to read it—but to give it to me if he determined I needed it. No idea how that was supposed to play out.)

There’s no way my mom hasn’t come across Kerry’s story. They often have the morning shows on and listen to NPR, and her husband’s daughter passes along her People magazines.

Interestingly, my mom has warmed up to me in the last month. I had another theory about the reason for this (for another post), but now I wonder if it’s hearing this other person’s DNA story. Maybe she can understand a bit of what I’ve felt. Or at least know that there is someone else who felt equally destabilized and disoriented by finding out. It’s not just hypersensitive anxious me (as I have been seen) who had a strong reaction. And like my mom, Kerry’s parents thought there was never a good time to tell her for reasons having to do with Kerry’s mental health and life circumstances.

Of course mental health issues (and hypersensitivity and anxiety) could be at least partially attributed to a sense of not quite belonging, as Kerry puts it. I have felt similarly and think it’s part of my lifelong desire to find a family that I do fit into, getting deeply attached to so many people and experiences yet sort of unable to really connect in some ways.

She uses books as a metaphor to describe her experience:

from The New York Times:

Her empathy came with a side of resentment. “I was birthed into a lie,” she said. “I was playing a supporting character in my parents’ story.”

Washington added: “It felt like I’d been wandering through a library my whole life, looking for a specific book about myself. My mom and dad were these librarians who said, ‘There’s a room we haven’t shown you.’”

This, this, this. Except my librarians never came, scared or reluctantly, to their tasks as information specialists. They never showed me the room that held my story. Let’s stick with the metaphor: I instead wandered among the stacks, checking out every book on the shelves. That last sentence feels overwrought, but I like it because it also works without being a metaphor. I was that kid, that teen, reading insatiably, not always or necessarily for pleasure. Phone books and sports recaps—anything with words. I read and reread everything in our house. (More on that later, if I remember to write about it.) And then in my twenties, the wandering became a bit more like careening and the stacks did become metaphors. There was drunken staggering, bumping into shelves and relentlessly messing with the microfiches.

I’ll end with another quote from the NYT piece. This one really hits. She articulates, in a way I hadn’t been able to, what is probably the most damaging aspect of our experience:

“…But that dissonance thing is something I want us to be aware of. To know that when we cause a person not to trust their instincts, we take away some major tools they have to operate in the world as confident people.”