In My Shoes: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF

great option from his perspective, though, because in those days, despite my mother’s obvious shortcomings as a caretaker, custody almost certainly would have gone to her. As far as he was concerned, then, the only way it worked was for it to work, however superficially. And in his mind, I think he could rationalize the cruelties he saw visited on me as being merely verbal and emotional. As in, I wasn’t being branded with cigarettes or beaten with coat hangers. (She merely threw them at me à la
Mommie Dearest
.) In other words, I would survive.
    My father did the best he could as a typical “man’s man” of his time, someone for whom hugging and expressive conversation were simply not part of the repertoire. And that’s before we factor in the whole matter of English culture, the stiff upper lip and all that. He had his hands full, and he simply wasn’t equipped to cope with the fact that he had a severely depressed daughter.
    Only once, and long after I’d grown up, do I remember him coming clean, as least to the extent of saying, “Your mother is the most selfish and self-obsessed woman I’ve ever come across.”
    Of course, she was also one of the most beautiful. She’d been amodel when they met—the peak of her career was a print ad for Chanel—and for her, life was still all about how she looked. Her mornings were a lengthy ritual of dressing and applying makeup. Then it would be lunch with a girlfriend, then picking us up from school. She had no particular passion for gardening, or tennis, or charity fund-raisers, or any of the other things that wealthy women sometimes do. For her it was shopping, lunching, drinking. We had a pool, but she couldn’t swim. As far as enjoying the Southern California lifestyle was concerned, we might as well have lived in Glasgow.
    •  •  •  •
    MY BROTHERS WERE VERY CLOSE, and they shared a room and had the same friends. They were a team, and they used to go out in the street and play with other kids on the block. As the only girl, I inhabited a different planet, almost as if I were an only child, and definitely home alone.
    On those rare occasions when I tried to bring over friends, it was a disaster. My mother would fly off the handle and kick them out of the house for making too much noise, or for some minor infraction like leaving a candy wrapper in the sink. After a while I stopped inviting anyone over, and I retreated to my bedroom, closed the door, and watched TV. There was no one saying, “Got any homework today? Let’s sit down and maybe start into it. Are you hungry? Do you want a snack?”
    My mother’s primary form of engagement with me was an ongoing effort to humiliate. To her friends she would make cutting comments or play the victim, making the case that I was a terrible child. Then shewould get these friends to come talk to me. I remember being at home on Whittier Drive when a woman I’d never seen before came up to me and said, “Can’t you be nice to your mother?” Being older and more aware never helped me in understanding these strange psychological games. The more I thought about it, the more bewildered I became.
    When I was about thirteen, a girlfriend invited me to go with her to the movies in Westwood. She was a little older, old enough to drive, with a nice family, a nice house in Beverly Hills, and a white VW Rabbit. She drove by and picked me up, we went to the movies, and then she dropped me off back at my house. At which point my mother came out on the lawn tearing her hair in a rage, screaming about how this girl was trying to seduce me into a lesbian relationship. The exact and very charming phrase she used was, I believe, “Get off her, you cunt!”
    I never saw my friend again.
    During my brief stint at El Rodeo I met two sisters and they were my most consistent social connection. I would go to their house, rather than the other way around, but what I saw there differed very little from what I experienced at home. It