as small as a world and as large as alone, I cannot believe you are the family...

8:04am June 2, 2015

opalborn asked: I cannot believe you are the family disappointment. Are your family members actual literal miracle-performing saints? Nobel Prize winners? Semidivine children of mythical gods?

dduane:

Please let the response to this question also go to the several other people who ask-boxed me about this:
(laughter) Not at all.
The problem is that I was expected to be normal. That didn’t happen. I was also expected to be the least exceptional member of the family. That didn’t happen either.
So all through my childhood I was frequently reminded that I was not measuring up to expectations. (Or perhaps we should restate that as “not measuring down”.) If I turned out to be good at something girls weren’t usually supposed to be good at, eyes were rolled (and there were mutterings that I was doing it on purpose to show other people up, the ones who were supposed to be exceptional). When I failed at something, there were badly-suppressed sighs of relief that at least I wasn’t good at everything: and a certain smugness always came with this, as if at the sight of the universe belatedly reasserting the way things ought to be.
So you may not have too much trouble understanding why, about five minutes after I turned eighteen, I sought emancipation under New York state law. It turned out not to be necessary for me to go through the entire process, fortunately, as my father was more than willing to let me go (my mother had died two years previously and my dad was already dating again: as far as he was concerned, I was an impediment to him finding some belated happiness in a life which had, even I have to admit, in some ways been quite cruel to him).
But even after many, many years of no longer being trapped in such a situation – of (these days) being surrounded both by people who like me just fine as I am, and by other terrific people far more exceptional than I’ll ever be – the memory of the way things once were still lingers away off in the background, like the seven-centimeter “relic radiation”* left over from the Big Bang. It doesn’t necessarily illuminate my work, but more or less inevitably, it underlies it. I make no attempts to seal it over or exorcise it: it’s part of a complex system of events and conditions that made me what I am. But I am aware of it, and occasionally I mine it for use in fiction – because there’s nothing so toxic that you can’t make decent fiction out of it if you keep your wits and your composure about you.
Hope that adequately explains what underlay my response. :)
*Oh, all right, 7.35.