** Stephen Eliot reads at Border's, 830 N. Michigan Ave., April 9.
Readers who were intrigued by Augusten Burroughs' memoir Running With Scissors, a seriously twisted tale of a boy whose mother abandons him into the care of a psychiatrist (and his family), will probably enjoy Stephen Eliot's memoir Not The Thing I Was (St. Martin's Press, 2003). While Eliot's therapists at the Orthogenic School on the University of Chicago campus, including the late Bruno Bettelheim, were far more competent than the one in the Burroughs book, his experiences with fellow students, teachers, and his family are impacted by his unusual living situation. I recently spoke with Eliot about Not The Thing I Was, which is his first book.
Gregg Shapiro: In the chapter 'Settling In to the Mohawks,' you write, 'writing this down can't convey the ambivalence with which I lived and the ambivalence of memories.' What was it like to approach writing a memoir with that mind set?
Stephen Eliot: The mind set in that particular area (of the book) just referred to some ambivalence about Bettelheim in particular. That he, on one hand was very empathetic and very wise and I really appreciated his wisdom. At the same time he was completely verbally brutal and one never knew, when you came around the corner, running into him, if you were going to get into trouble and be yelled at or not. That kind of tension and terror, for just trying to live your life day to day and never knowing you were going to get in trouble was very difficult, but that was one part of the experience. It was a very large part in some ways because he was such an omnipresent individual, but it was not the whole thing. I think in terms of the rest of the memoir, in terms of the other kids I lived with, in terms of the other staff, it was much less ambivalent. There were a few that I didn't like, but by far these were people that I cared very deeply about and I think that I tried to show that.
GS: Yes, you did. I only mentioned that line because it stood out for me, largely because this is a memoir, and you wrote about, as you put it 'the ambivalence of memories.'
SE: I think it's exactly the same thing as when somebody has very ambivalent feelings about parents, because Bettelheim, in many ways, was another father for me, that when it's rocky, if you grow up and reach a decent adjustment with your life and with the world, you realize that there's good and there's bad and you have both that coexist. While, in many ways, if the bad is very overwhelming at times and difficult to forgive, it doesn't negate the good things that were there. So, both of them have to live at the same time. Sometimes reconciling both sides is very tough.
GS: In The New, Improved Mohawks chapter, you said, 'Films were a big deal for us—opening a window in the prison wall.' Your story also opens a window for the reader and it has a cinematic quality to it—could you see a film version of the book?
SE: In fact, I learned how to write by writing screenplays. As I say in the forward of the book, I wrote the screenplay for this before I wrote my actual memoirs. Part of the reason was that nobody wanted to make the film. The book was written three or four years after the screenplay and it was not based on it. In other words I didn't use the screenplay at all to write my memoirs. When I write I tend to try and focus on the story because I think that's what always interests me and I think that's what interests other people is a good story.
GS: Now that the book has been published, is there renewed interest in adapting the story for the screen?
SE: There is renewed interest in fact, yes. Whether or not it gets made, as one realizes about Hollywood, is a second question. There is interest and we shall see. At the moment, the film that they are planning on making, if we can get the legal documents finished, is a documentary about the book for French TV and I think that is supposed to air on PBS some time in the next year.
GS: In the chapter titled 'Bert,' you talk about having had a crush on Mark, a member of the school's staff, and 'slowly becoming aware of the fact that' you might be gay. Do you think it was harder to develop your sexual identity in that environment?
SE: It was certainly much harder because it wasn't really discussed. In a Freudian environment, in those days, the assumption was if you dealt with your problems, it would go away. First of all, we're talking about the early '70s here. Thirty years ago the world was a much different place. I also talk about the fact that the primary person for me at that time was Margaret, who had a long-standing relationship with her (female) partner, which was unknown to me then. It was not something we talked about, but it was not something that was avoided just to avoid. In that particular instance, she wanted to keep the line of propriety where she didn't inflict upon me any of her issues and so because of that, had it just been a normal boundary, maybe we could've talked about it more. The school in general did not do well with older kids and I think the whole part of that latter part of the book is the lack of autonomy that I had and the fact that growing up in that institutional environment was very difficult to try and fight my way 'out.' I think the issue of being gay versus not gay is part of that. First of all there's little autonomy and second of all the whole issue of adolescent sexuality is very difficult to cope within that framework because it's much easier, clearly, to deal with an eight-year-old than with an 18-year-old. Then on top of that, gay versus straight, back in the early 1970s, so it was much more of a burden than it should've been, yes.
GS: With today's heightened awareness of LGBT issues, do you think, hypothetically, it would have been an easier process?
SE: The school doesn't exist now in the same way that it did. We know that the highest rate of suicide in the country is adolescents. Of that, gay and lesbian teenagers have twice the suicide attempt rate of non-gay and lesbian teenagers. Those statistics speak for themselves. We still have a very large segment of the population and the geography of this country in which it's not OK to say 'bitch' or 'nigger' or 'kike,' but it is OK to say faggot. That's a very powerful message of what discrimination is allowed and what discrimination is not.
GS: It must have been especially difficult for you because, in the same chapter, you said that you 'thought I knew what he thought about gays, which was to believe they were sick, a problem, and evil.' What impact did that have on your coming out?
SE: He also had a way of surprising me. The only quotes (of Bettelheim's) that I could find were class notes, and I quoted them in the book, (for example) about the downfall of civilization. But, when face to face with one of the people that he knew who had a problem in a particular area, he would've found some way of putting it in perspective, I think. He probably wouldn't have said something that had not been an attack had I talked to him directly. On the other hand, that was not something, in those days, I was prepared to do, and by the time I might've been able to do it, he was already so old, so frail, and so weak that it wasn't an appropriate conversation to have at that point.
GS: You mentioned the issue of teen suicide. Is that something you will be addressing during your reading?
SE: No. In my reading, I'm going to give a speech and within the speech I will read a small portion of the book. I figure most people know how to read on their own, so they're not going to want me to recite what's in the book, which most of them I assume have read, which is why they're there. My main issue, at this juncture, in terms of social policy because otherwise it gets confusing when you have too many issues at the same time, is the fact that we don't provide much treatment for kids who are in trouble. We do provide lots of drugs and I think that is a rather bad message.
