My Lie: A True Story of False Memory by Meredith Maran
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010
Book Review by Columbia Jones [Editor of MKzine]
I was always your favorite, I thought, and we all paid the price.
Journalist Meredith Maran’s book My Lie would be more truthfully entitled if it said what she said it is: her “version of the truth” about her life during the mysterious “Satanic panic” years from 1983 to 1995.
She begins by referring to feminist scholars in the late 1970s who announced that one in three American women and one in ten American men are victims of childhood sexual abuse, primarily incest. She then introduces the problem of repressed memory and how, with media attention throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, hundreds of thousands were suddenly remembering abuse and talking about it. In 1976, reported cases of abuse and neglect were 669,000; in 1993, they had skyrocketed to 2.9 million. A million families were torn in two. Hundreds of alleged perpetrators went to jail.
Then came the national backlash that Maran rightly personifies as the well-funded False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), made up of accused parents and laypeople who coined the term “false memory syndrome” still misconstrued as a medical term. False memory versus recovered repressed memory: the memory wars in the courts and therapy sessions and media made a lot of people a lot of money (insurance settlements, therapists, expert witnesses, lawyers) and cast the nation into a cauldron of confusion, fear, anger, and grief. A Satanic fire swept the nation, but when it came to wondering who were the arsonists behind it, only children and therapists were blamed.
Maran is so caught up in justifying her personal story in terms of the out-of-control “Satanic panic” and incest of the era that she never pauses to probe deep recesses of a possible agenda. The closest she gets to wondering about the powers behind the newsprint is quoting feminist Katha Pollitt who said, “The media that ran with sensational stories is run by men who are hardly feminist”; and then “But if you look at who gets convicted, it’s mostly not people with a lot of social standing, sophistication or money for lawyers.” So why does Maran choose exactly those media as sources for headlines about the sensationalist Manhattan Beach preschool trial, or the Massachusetts couple kissing their toddler’s bottom? New York Times (17 references), Time magazine (8), New Yorker (1), Miami Herald (4), Los Angeles Times (2), Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, People, Mother Jones, ABCNews.com, MSNBC.com, etc. And as for the alleged perpetrators who were convicted, why isn’t she interested in probing their affiliations with people of higher social standing? I can only guess that Maran the journalist is either blinded by her own story or is working for FMSF types whose agenda she never questions. Indeed, it is odd that she knows so little about questions surrounding FMSF’s Jennifer and Peter Freyd, Richard Ofshe, and Elizabeth Loftus.
Throughout the book, she is confused regarding her memories of being sexually abused by her father. After the very first pages about her childhood in the 1950s, I wasn’t at all confused; it was obvious to me that her father at the very least had emotionally incested her.
During the workweek my father was the Invisible Man. But on weekends he was my companion and coconspirator, sneaking me milkshakes behind my mother’s back, rolling his eyes at me over her head when she protested…My father and I had everything in common, including this: we liked each other more than either of us liked my mother. She didn’t understand us. We only understood each other… (15-16)
It was the Elektra complex to the nth degree. More of an erotic playmate than a father, he turned into a jilted lover when Maran began dating. He never approved of the men she chose and “ignored, mocked, or scorned everyone I’d loved” (95). She was afraid of the dark. Throughout adulthood, the sound of his voice “made my pulse race and my heart pound with anticipation and fear” (93).
My father was doing what he’d always done. Punishing me for loving someone else. Claiming me and rejecting me. Forcing me to choose between pleasing him and being who I was. (95)
Eight years apart, ten minutes together, and already I could taste the ambrosia and the poison of our relationship. He knows me; he knows me too well. (180)
And the final Elektra moment is when her Alzheimer’s dad calls Meredith by her mother’s name: “You remember, Shirley, I got the job when you were pregnant with Meredith” (186). But even by page 199, Meredith still doesn’t get it: “Emotional incest: debatable.” Was there physical as well as emotional incest? Perhaps, but isn’t emotional incest devastating enough?
Who decided on the terrible title of the book that is a lie? Did Maran lie? Not at all. First, she didn’t believe that all recovered memories are false memories, fantasies, or lies, and as she said on page 167:
Whatever my accusation had been when I’d made it—a statement of truth, a statement of truth as I’d seen it at the time, a statement of solidarity with wounded girls and women everywhere, a crowbar I used to pry my father out of my head—it was something else now.
And while talking with her friend Catherine:
Honesty. Authenticity. Story. Lie. Truth. The words swam in my head, arranging and rearranging themselves like the poetry word-magnets on my fridge.
“But we lied,” I said.
“I didn’t lie,” Catherine said. “I said what I believed to be true at the time.”
She peered at me. “So did you,” she said. “You were tortured about your estrangement from your dad. You wouldn’t have gone through all that if you hadn’t believed your father molested you. You can’t tell me otherwise. I was there, remember?” (192)
What I come away asking is not was Meredith incested—she was; using a child for one’s emotional or sexual needs is incest—but is My Lie serving as a petard for the false memory phalanx in the child memories war? Something verging on cognitive dissonance has been cobbled together. Those of us who research the no man’s land of pedophilia and incest know that when things feel crazy or a little off, it’s time to pay attention.
No wonder we’d all gone nuts on Planet Incest, trying to distinguish memories from imaginings, truth from lies. Incest is the perfect false accusation for the victimhood seeker, just as it’s the perpetrator’s perfect crime. Beatings leave bruises. Neglect sends kids to school with tattered clothes. But I couldn’t have proved that my father had molested me, just as he couldn’t have proved that he hadn’t. (200)
Do I recommend the book? Not really. For those crazy “Satanic panic” years, John DeCamp’s 1992 book The Franklin Cover-up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska is a much more objective case study.
On we go, looking for truth where angels fear to tread. Mistakes will be made, misleading books will be written, families will fall apart, but in the end, always, lost children within and without may be saved.
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