Tammy: A Biography of a Young Girl

Rating:
Summary: Powerful and heartbreaking account of a teenage suicide.
Review: Caught in a dilemma between two ideals, Tammmy took a tragic way out. Far away at the time, the family learned too late, from adults who should have told them, about their daughter's trouble. This is a coming-of-age story with sign posts which might help others. "I couldn't put it down," "Thank you for writing it," "It made her live," readers' letters to the author have said.

Rating:
Summary: A FRAGILE LIFE CAUGHT IN A TURBULENT TIME.
Review: I NEVER read biography. As a philosopher I generally keep my nose buried in metaphysical and ontological tomes. It was only through a fluke that I discovered and bought Melanie Bellah's Tammy. If I had paid more attention to the physical description of the book I might have hesitated. It is a BIG book. In paperback it is larger, heavier and contains more pages than Barrow and Tipler's The Cosmic Anthropic Principle. Yet Tammy does not contain one equation, no mention of the quantum wave function, and nothing about the past and future universe. It is simply the story of an attractive, intelligent and highly expressive teenage girl who grew up in the midst of the social turmoil of the sixties and earlier seventies but never made it past 1974 when she committed suicide at the age of eighteen. Although Melanie Bellah, Tammy's mother, wrote the book, which she subtitles "A Biography of a Young Girl," it is virtually an autobiography. Tammy's story is most compelling when it is told in the words of her own journals and letters which are themselves voluminous. In my own book, Beyond Civilization, (Amazon.com) I identified the sixties as a critical period not only for Western Civilization but for the very structure of what we called civilization itself, but Melanie Bellah has shown how the instability and fragmentation of that decade wreaked its destructive influence on one fragile human life as well as disrupting the delicate connections between the other members of her family. Twenty-five years after Tammy's death the questions still remain: Why? Why suicide? What went wrong? With the advantage of the almost inevitably wrong hindsight, the answers may appear obvious. But they are not. Despite my aversion to biography, I read every single sometimes delightful, often painful page and highly recommend it. You can't read this book critically or analytically. You have to LIVE it and FEEL with the people in it. It is all too easy to be judgmental and think you know better than those who were in the heart of a life trauma in which things went terribly wrong. But you don't and you can't.

Rating:
Summary: A FRAGILE LIFE CAUGHT IN A TURBULENT TIME.
Review: I NEVER read biography. As a philosopher I generally keep my nose buried in metaphysical and ontological tomes. It was only through a fluke that I discovered and bought Melanie Bellah's Tammy. If I had paid more attention to the physical description of the book I might have hesitated. It is a BIG book. In paperback it is larger, heavier and contains more pages than Barrow and Tipler's The Cosmic Anthropic Principle. Yet Tammy does not contain one equation, no mention of the quantum wave function, and nothing about the past and future universe. It is simply the story of an attractive, intelligent and highly expressive teenage girl who grew up in the midst of the social turmoil of the sixties and earlier seventies but never made it past 1974 when she committed suicide at the age of eighteen. Although Melanie Bellah, Tammy's mother, wrote the book, which she subtitles "A Biography of a Young Girl," it is virtually an autobiography. Tammy's story is most compelling when it is told in the words of her own journals and letters which are themselves voluminous. In my own book, Beyond Civilization, (Amazon.com) I identified the sixties as a critical period not only for Western Civilization but for the very structure of what we called civilization itself, but Melanie Bellah has shown how the instability and fragmentation of that decade wreaked its destructive influence on one fragile human life as well as disrupting the delicate connections between the other members of her family. Twenty-five years after Tammy's death the questions still remain: Why? Why suicide? What went wrong? With the advantage of the almost inevitably wrong hindsight, the answers may appear obvious. But they are not. Despite my aversion to biography, I read every single sometimes delightful, often painful page and highly recommend it. You can't read this book critically or analytically. You have to LIVE it and FEEL with the people in it. It is all too easy to be judgmental and think you know better than those who were in the heart of a life trauma in which things went terribly wrong. But you don't and you can't.

Rating:
Summary: A puzzling and sad portrait of a confused era
Review: Melanie Bellah's story of her daughter Tammy's life and death is moving but tragic, not least because Bellah seems unaware of the role her ectraordinarily permissive parenting seems to have played in her sensitive daughter's suicide. The author writes with enormous depth and compassion about her daughter's struggles, but at no point during Tammy's teenage years does it appear that firm boundaries were set or that Bellah and her husband attempted to intervene on their daughter's behalf.

Sexually active with a multplicity of partners by the time she was 14, by 16 Tammy was involved in an intense relationship with a twice divorced teacher twice her age. Her mother reacts to this news by philosophising that at least Tammy seems happy, although perhaps her man has a character flaw. Metaphorically shrugging her shoulders at the impossibility of stopping this child from a sexual relationship which is astoundingly inappropriate at best, Bellah blathers on about how she wants her daughters to be "free" and "without guilt" about sex instead. There are suicide attempts, an intense friendship with a heroin addict who steals from everyone and finally, Tammy falls hopelessly in love with a black heroin addict twice her age with a prison record, who has been separated from his wife for a week. She is 18. Her parents express cautious disapproval. As a mother, at this point I had a strong desire to shake Melanie Bellah extremely hard and point out a few things about protecting children. Bellah is confounded and dazed by her daughter's tragic end. She cannot fathom it at all - she muses that Tammy was "too beautiful" and "too sensitive" or "too loving" and that the whole problem lies with the way that the world treats women. Globally, perhaps that's so. But instead, I saw the story of an intelligent, confused and sad child trying to live an adult life for which she was ill-prepared and far too young. The photographs are heart-breaking - an innocent young child's face stares out. The thought that at the time this photograph was taken, she was sleeping with a couple of adult teachers with her mother's knowledge, is sickening. Add to that a pharmacy's worth of Valium and other drugs (at one point Tammy is taking up to 17 pills a day for her tension headaches) and her family's failure to effectively support Tammy or intervene on her behalf seems utterly incomprehensible. Viewed through hindsight, perhaps this book is nothing more than a mirror of the times. If nothing else, however, it shows how senseless and unfair it is to inflict "complete freedom" on children. At the book's end, Bellah and her husband are convinced that Tammy's associates are murderers for the manner in which they have manipulated her towards suicide. Their lack of insight into their own culpability is astounding. It is this attitude that finally, despite some beautiful and loving passages, makes this book profoundly unsatisfying and depressing reading.

Rating:
Summary: Frustrating, poorly written, and mildly interesting
Review: This is a frustrating book, which is only augmented by the fact that it is poorly and inconsistent in its' writing. The author, who is Tammy's mom, pleads ignorance thoughout of her daughter's troubles. Come on...the girl tries to commit suicide once, she's screwing everyone in Berkeley including teachers from her school and man after man who verbally abuses her. Her feeling of self-worth is tied to whatever man she is dating... she careens into love within a week of meeting someone. I know times were different then, but any parent should be able to tell that their daughter sleeping with drug addicts and teachers 20 years their senior isn't all right in the world. Additionally, the girl was taking 10-12 valium and 10-12 darvon a day. Even if they didn't know the ill effects of these drugs yet, they HAD to know that this wasn't right. I find it hard to believe that Tammy showed no outward signs of problems...just her mental state with regard to men should have been a clue. I'm sorry to say, but I think that Melanie and Bob were poor parents who ran a too permissive house and their unstable daughter didn't get the discipline and structure she so desperately needed. They never pushed her to do anything (they didn't want her to fail...what's that telling her?)and never really laid down rules (Yes, you may not be able to stop your daughter from sleeping with the school administrator, but you don't have to condone it by letting her sleep over all the time!).

Besides the frustrating story, this book is basically poorly written. Most of it consists of reading Tammy's journal and short stories and poetry which, of course, isn't written very well(why do they choose to BOLD some of her writings and not others? Very bizarre.) Also, the author refers to herself in the third person throughout the whole book, which is really annoying and makes it read very awkwardly. It would have been more powerful for her to say "I was devastated" rather than "Melanie felt extremely devastated." All in all, it was tough to get through. Yes, a tragic story, but I feel it could have been written much better.