One variety of child abuse name-checked in the British media right now is Munchausen's syndrome by proxy (MBP): the infliction of suffering, symptoms, and signs upon a child by its “carer,” facilitating some need that the latter may have to interact with doctors. Children may be maimed and murdered by their kith and kin, and all in the pursuit of medical interventions. Raised in Ohio, in the American Midwest, Julie Gregory survived such an upbringing as the proxy for her mother, a truly damaged woman, who put her daughter through the mill.
Figure 1.
Julie Gregory
Century, £12.99, pp 260 ISBN 1 844 13442 3
Rating: ★★★★
“The nurse at my feet says, `Now this might be a little stick, Julie. We've got to get this plastic tube into the urethra `cause Mom says you can't go.'
“My heart is pounding; what's urethra? What is she doing down there? I open my mouth to ask, but a startled scream rips out instead.”
Later, her mother will elicit the same ordeal for Julie's brother: “I heard him scream and whimper clear down the hall into the waiting room. Nobody had to tell me what was happening. He was getting a tube shoved into his urethra...”
This traipsing between credulous doctors (their notes are reproduced in the text) occurs beneath the lurking shadow of the American Gothic summoned up by Gregory: a place where fat fathers lounge in trailers, shouting for food that they may eat off their bloated bellies, while women who poison children coerce them into saying that they see Jesus, and men “do things” to children in bushes, while other adults “turn a blind eye.”
The book is compelling, not only because one wishes to see how the author will survive into adulthood, but also because the language is so often beautiful: “But the memories that hang heaviest are the easiest to recall. They hold in their creases the ability to change one's life, organically, forever. Even when you shake them out, they've left permanent wrinkles in the fabric of your soul.”
Of course, there is no easy escape. For the one who leaves such a home must worry over those who are left: younger siblings, children fostered, the vulnerable. Gregory conveys the sheer emptiness of carrying on alone, away from a place that is necessarily associated with suffering: “The more I acclimate to the normal world, the more and more surreal and unbelievable the world I came from seems.”
Eventually, she will find some release through learning of her condition, through reading works of literature, and by facing down her mother in full flight. The invocation of her inner voice may inspire the reader to stop and think: “Hey, you, with the frontal lobe, turn off the TV, stop the noise, and consider this deeply.”