Those of you who read my TV
reviews last year know that I had a great deal of difficulty initially liking
the acclaimed FX limited series Fleishman is in Trouble. After two
episodes I thought it repugnant and it was only after the series was nominated
for multiple Emmys that I reluctantly ended up watching the entire series.
My opinion of it improved
after the final two episodes and I admitted it might have been better than I
expected but I still thought it was self-indulgent and very pretentious. I was
secretly pleased that it went home empty-handed at the Emmys last year.
Later on I managed to read
the book it was based on by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. If anything, I thought the
book was worse and I wrote a longer column about what I believed the
fundamental flaw of it was, that there was a selfishness at the center of it
that all of the grownups were living through that they seemed unable to
comprehend the damage they were doing to their children. I wondered what so
many had found universal about the book that I had missed, particularly as I
was of the generation that Brodesser-Akner is a part of.
Then this week I looked at
an issue of the New York Times Magazine for July 14th.
Brodesser-Akner has been given the cover article:
“Life After A Kidnapping.”
Fifty years ago Jack Teich was kidnapped and held for ransom. But it didn’t
seem to haunt him – and that’s what haunted me.”
For the record once I
finished reading the entirety of the article it has solidified a picture in me
of Brodesser-Akner that makes me truly loathe her as an individual, not just an
author. I’ll get to the reason why in a minute but first a little background.
If you read either the book
or saw the limited series, you will remember that at one point we learn the
story of Rachel Fleishman’s delivery of her first child. She spends nearly
forty hours in labor, is unable to dilate, is like this for two days and finally
the doctor shows up. She feels a searing kind of pain, screams out: “He’s doing
something to me!” Her husband stands frozen, the doctor tells her that her
membrane has ruptured, and then the doctor tells her there is nothing left to
do and break her water. Rachel is afraid to be alone with her baby goes to see
doctors for post-partum depression, goes to a therapy group and finally
deteriorates to a way that she can not function. Rachel then devotes her life
to her career and because of her behavior the Fleishman marriage deteriorates.
All of this, I learned in
the article, happened to Brodesser-Akner herself. She tells that for her she
didn’t feel depressed but insane. We learn everything she went through to try
and get over her trauma. She managed to function to the point of being normal,
but according to her she never got over it.
“I never stopped being
bitter about that time. I never stopped worrying about the impact it had on my
(wonderful) children. I never got over how apparently fragile I am, how un
resilient I proved to be…That was one of the worst parts for me…that I knew
something about myself, which was that I was delicate…It was that fragility I
couldn’t get over.”
Now you would think this
would make me feel sympathetic to Brodesser-Akner, especially considering some
of the traumas I’ve gone through in my own life (the most recent of which I’ve
told these readers). It doesn’t. On the contrary, I look at her behavior and
find it narcissistic and fundamentally selfish. Brodesser-Akner, as we all
know, took this story and gave it to her books most neglected and misunderstood
character. She tells every time she rereads it she sobs. She then tells us she watched the TV show she
helped make of the best-selling book she made and she sobs at every time the
birth scene takes please. She tells us she’s sobbing when she writes these
words. Apparently she wants us to feel immense amount of sympathy for the fact
that she has never been able to get over this trauma that has made her wealthy
and successful beyond her wildest dreams.
I don’t need to tell
anybody, certainly not Brodesser-Akner, that hundreds if not thousands of
Americans suffer from far worse traumas every hour in every day of their lives.
The vast majority of them do not have the array of resources available to them
that Brodesser-Akner has had and they don’t have the luxury of being able to
spend immense amount of times dealing with said trauma. And they certainly
don’t have the benefit of being able to make millions of dollars of their
trauma and continue to write about it for the most respected publication in
America. I’m sorry for what happened to Brodesser-Akner, I truly am, but as
someone who was involved in a trauma far worse then hers, who had infinitely
less resources then she did and was far more misunderstood then she will ever
be, I find her attitude borderline contemptible, if not outright offensive. Does
she really think we should feel sympathy for the fact that she still can’t get
over the worst thing that happened to her even though she’s made a fortune off
it?
The story of Jack Teich,
it’s worth noting, is one Brodesser-Akner knows personally. Teich was a friend
of her father and he was kidnapped in 1974, held for ransom and was rescued
successfully. That’s not what the article is about. It’s about how Teich went
on to live a basically normal life for the next fifty years but no one knew
about until he was about to retire. Brodesser-Akner had known the family her
whole life and after meeting with his son, Jack told Brodesser-Akner told her
he wanted to tell his own story. She helped get him in contact with a
ghostwriter and in March 2020, he wrote his own book.
When Brodesser-Akner reads
the book, Jack tells every detail of the story with warmth and makes it clear
how impossible the resolution to this one. He tells them about how it turned
out and the friendships he built. But once she hears the story, Brodesser-Akner
leaves it alone and tells us every detail of her own story and how she can’t
comprehend how Jack survived this horrible trauma and can’t understand why she
can’t be that grateful. There’s narcissism there too; that she has taken
this horrible thing that happened to someone else and made it all about her.
She has a conversation with
Jack and she asks a version of the question about her own trauma and he tells
her that he does relive it from time to time. Then he shows her the phone call
recording of the event, the transcripts of the trial, and the clear sign of
trauma. She realizes that in truth Jack is not fine that he’s been living with
this horrible event for the last fifty years. And then she makes it about her:
“How could I have missed all of this? How could I have not realized how truly
horrible things were?” Again, she takes this horrible thing that happened to
someone else and makes it about herself.
Then she tells about her
next book (which to be clear, I will not be reading) and makes it very clear
that its another way of examining trauma. Now she does acknowledge it near the
end of the article, but it’s not particularly forgivable:
“…you would understand why
it was worth the crime I myself was committing, which was forcing a man I care
about, a man who has already been through quite enough to revisit the worst
week of his life in the twilight of his years so that I could better
understand what happened to me (italics mine)
She then writes an entire
paragraph about the traumatized life. And I guess I could find that moving, you
know, if she weren’t comparing her suffering, which again has made her rich and
famous, to that of a man who was kidnapped and held prisoner for over a week
and has spent so much of his life trying to move on. In a sense she’s made
another man’s trauma another form of therapy for her (and again, putting it on
the front page of a widely-read journal.)
Brodesser-Akner has
apparently spent the last decade living a life of comfort and wealth based
almost entirely on writing and retelling the worst thing that happened to her.
That would be bad enough if it were not the fact that she somehow thinks that
she has come through some kind of an incredible insight. I guarantee you there
are hundreds of therapists, psychologists – and almost certainly millions on
bereaved loved ones left behind by those who couldn’t come to terms with it –
who reached this conclusion on so many terms and don’t get huge advances from
publishers, television studios and film options to tell that story. We all
suffer greatly in this life. None of us get to have Claire Danes get an Emmy
nomination for living through or getting nominated for Emmys for telling our
story.
The trauma plot has become
one of the most overwrought ones in all of television over the 21st
century and many observers are tired of seeing it play out. I suppose
Brodesser-Akner thinks she’s doing the world a service by telling us that these
trauma plots are real and there are consequences to them. I might be more
willing to take her seriously if she didn’t do so by going through another
person’s trauma and know all too well she’ll keep doing it.
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