By Her Own Hand: Memoirs of a Suicide's Daughter

Rating:
Summary: A familial deep map
Review: This is the memoir of the daughter of a woman who committed suicide in the late 1940s, when the author was nine. Signe's mother put Signe and her three older brothers to bed, hugging Signe a little longer than usual, went downstairs to her kitchen, set up the ironing board in front of the oven with the gas on, lay down on it, and died. When a spark from the refrigerator caused a boom in the kitchen, the kids all ran down and found their mother dead. Their father was working in New York, and living in the New Jersey house he was trying to get their mother to move to when it happened.

This event is told very objectively in the first chapter, but the book is compelling because it is a family's "deep map" tracing the psychic lines that lead to Signe's family situation, not just as the daughter of a suicidal woman, but as the daughter she is of the parents she had.

Signe's mother was quick to unpredictable rages, and her father seemed to equate love with money, both characteristics Hammer attributes to family situations and assumptions, going back to her paternal and maternal grandparents and beyond. She traces the disappointment of her mother's marriage to her father with pretty deft descriptions, writing how when her practical and ambitious father was courting her artistic and sensitive mother, he gave her beautiful art books and talked them over with her, causing her to think that she would be marrying a man with a good career and safe income, who would still be sensitive to her talents and needs. But when Hammer's father reveals himself over time as a selfish husband and father, moving the family repeatedly after jobs that forward his own career with the railroad, trying at the last to move them out of a house in Pennsylvania that Hammer's mother had made an emotional investment in (as opposed to many of the other places she'd lived).

The mistake Hammer's mother made about her father's lack of generosity are described by Hammer: "She made a mistake common to women: She believed that the lazy self-pleasuring of the table and, later, of the bed, were forms of generosity."

And so the unhappy marriage bumped along. Signe recounts the kind of constant dread she lived in when she was old enough to be conscious of the role she played in her family, the only girl, the only scapegoat for her mother's desires to be perfect and to perfect her daughter in her stead. Her brothers were in school, but Signe, home with her mother during the day, was cautious and sensitive to her mother's sudden rages and criticism. She sought to keep from bothering her mother, or needing her too much: "If I intruded, I might bring down her wrath. It was strict discipline for a toddler; I kept my eye on her, and she kept her back to me."

When her mother killed herself ("She left without leaving," Hammer writes), the family was uprooted again and again for a couple of years, until her father remarried and settled down with Signe and her new stepmother back in the house where her mother had died. (She also notes that her mother's last violence had effectively ruined her father's railroad and military career, keeping him from being promoted to general in the reserves and making vice president in his company.) She continues to tell the story of the all their relationships, and follows a short thread through her own adult years, her career, her desire not to marry, not to have children. This is the least interesting part of the book.

What I found to be the fundamental strength of this book, beyond the anger, beyond the violent central event of the narrative, was the idea that any family could write a book like this (though hopefully it wouldn't be as depressing!), because as one can trace a talent, a characteristic, a personality trait, or an eye color through geneaology, one can also trace these psychological undercurrents (or overt behaviors) to their eruption, for good or bad.

"How can we know, in the wheel of the self," Hammer writes, "what we have chosen and what is forced upon us? And why, when so much else is possible, are we doomed to live with choices made in terror and desperation, at an age so young the selves we make can never fit the fabric of a later, larger life?"

This paragraph needs to be only slightly rewritten to be considered by anyone in a family, as he or she considers the imprints of generations of choices and decisions have made on our own lives. Hammer's central event is dramatic and violent and obvious, but anyone's family characteristics and "symptoms" are much more emergent and "iterative" as my friend would say, and would fit this method of investigation. I think this book is a fascinating gateway to a deep consideration of such issues for each of us personally. I highly recommend it.