Where We Going, Daddy__ Life With Two Sons Unlike Any Other - Jean-Louis Fournier [1]
Fournier, who is also a comedic writer, channels his primal pain through humor. He uses his humor as a weapon, a defense against the pity of strangers or his own frustration. How is a father of not one, but two handicapped children supposed to comport himself? Fournier acknowledges that it takes “good manners just to look gloomy.” He accepts that making fun of his own children and their severe limitations “is my privilege as their father.”
I remember the private jokes as our privilege, too. “Close your mouth, you look retarded,” Zach’s father used to say, putting a few fingers gently under our son’s chin to stop his tongue thrusts. If we don’t laugh, we cry. Sometimes, we laugh and cry in the very same moment.
There was a play in the late 1960s that had a run on Broadway and was met with great critical success. The play was called A Day in the Death of Joe Egg and featured a married couple whose life was consumed by the care of their braindamaged daughter, whom they referred to as “Joe Egg.” The actress who played the daughter sat onstage in a wheelchair throughout, making spastic movements. Her dialogue consisted of unintelligible grunts and howls.
Perhaps because their daughter’s personality was so unformed, her parents made up a capable and complicated persona for her. They might say, “Joe Egg wants to go for a walk in the park” or “Joe Egg thinks you’re being awfully rash.” They were not just speaking for someone who had no language; they were imagining their daughter into a healthy child with normal needs and desires.
A friend of mine saw this play in New York and told me that the audience response was generally shock followed by scattered, nervous laughter. Many were appalled. Except, that is, for those parents who knew, who said: oh, yes, that’s the way it is. These are the unspoken, universal experiences that Fournier understands so deeply. On a drive, he asks of his boys in the back seat: “How’s the trigonometry going?” What is a father to do but imagine, pretend, and make jokes?
Where We Going, Daddy?, which won the 2008 Prix Femina, France’s prestigious literary prize, is not the usual tale of inspiration or tell-all confessional. The third child Fournier and his wife (optimistically or recklessly—depending on how you look at it) decided to go ahead with having was born normal and healthy. That daughter, Marie, is absent from the story. Fournier’s marriage dissolves (as did mine to Zachariah’s father), but we do not learn about his married life, and almost nothing is written about the boys’ mother. All of that is, as Fournier says, “another story.” This is not Fournier’s autobiography. It’s a pastiche of emotions, memories, and anecdotes that combine to form a deep and affecting picture of this particular kind of parent/child relationship.
There is some controversy—there always is, writing about one’s life and interpreting or omitting the lives of others—following the book’s publication in France. Would my ex-husband’s account of our life together with Zachariah differ from my own? Yes, I am sure it would. In my writing classes at a university, I tell my students, this is your tale to tell. Leave out what you will. This is your life, your story. Everyone’s version of family life may be different, but you must interpret the narrative to your own truth. Fournier’s story is not every parent’s story, but it is true and authentic, focused solely on the world he alone has shared with Thomas and Mathieu. This brief book is expressed in such a spare and uncluttered way that it reads almost like a prose poem. It is not a traditional narrative, but rather a series of impressionistic images, beautifully wrought.
When I think of Mattieu and Thomas, I see them as two tousled little birds. Not eagles or peacocks, but modest birds, sparrows.
Their spindly little legs sticking out from under their short navy blue coats. I also remember, from bath time, their mauve