His unreliability was its own established fact. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when we were in elementary school. He continued using drugs until 1999, when we were 15 and 10. His gambling addiction came to a head in 2011. In 2014, our parents sold the house we grew up in to pay off his horse racing debt and back taxes. Our father’s demons were a part of our childhood, and our adulthood too. For better or worse, at every turn, we were privy to the truth of “life on life’s terms” (one of his favorite phrases).
In that sense, there were no secrets to unearth as we worked with our dad, but there were variations, like the streetlamp stories. Versions of his time in Mexico working on an acid farm, of what happened to his first unpublished novel, of just how much money he lost at the racetrack (somewhere between $17 million and $100 million).
And there are different versions of our dad in the book. In 1966, a drunk college student finds a mentor in Robert Penn Warren and sees in Warren’s discipline and enthusiasm for art a chance for another kind of life. In the summer of 1997, he claims to be sober when he isn’t, pays for 30 college students to live in apartments for the summer because he misses teaching, shows them episodes of “N.Y.P.D. Blue” and explains what he was doing line by line. In 2017, at home with Olivia and our mom, he speaks into the air, as he always would, the words that would be the prologue to his memoir. In 2021, from the memory care unit where he now lives, narrating the words that would be its final pages.
It’s an odd thing to encounter so many different versions of a person simultaneously. Sometimes it would hit hard and we would be flooded with memories: Oh, wow, haven’t heard that guy in a while. We remembered him and our feelings toward him at each of those different moments in his life and in our lives. We experienced a kind of mourning, too, as we said goodbye to different versions of him, imagining them gone forever, even while he was right there.
One of the strangest parts of this disease in our case has been associating a certain increasing sweetness with a sense of our father’s decline. Now, when he isn’t sure what else to say, he tells us he loves us.
We sometimes find ourselves missing the roughness and wildness of mind and speech that felt so core to his vitality. That was the part of him that could cause pain, but it also taught us there was no experience or feeling beyond comprehension, or beyond loving, which is another way of saying there’s no experience or feeling that can’t be made into art.