The Chicago Reader - May 7, 1999

HOT TYPE: Gaining Control

If you’ve tumbled down the well of self-loathing and crawled back up, and out of that wrung literature, why would you hand the tale to some fat Manhattan house that wishes you were Danielle Steel?

Self-publication is respectable now, and exquisite books like Lillian Moats’s Legacy of Shadows can make it seem the only honorable way to publish.

Moats is a filmmaker who lives in Downers Grove with her husband and their son, and the next big appearance on her author’s tour is May 13 at her local library.  She’s out of pocket about $7,000, which bought a trifling first printing of only 500 books.  The best place to find one is at Anderson’s Bookshop in Downers Grove–though she’s beginning to make headway with the chains, and the book can be ordered from amazon.com if you’re willing to wait four weeks for delivery.

From first word to last, from typography to publicity, Legacy is the way Moats wants it.  She also wanted a good word from Robert Coles to show to book editors, and she got that too.  Coles, author of Children of Crisis, wrote:”This book will hold its readers close and tight, will teach them its remarkable, affecting and important lesson: that experiences live and live–last over a family’s generations as memories that shape hearts and minds.”

Last autumn Moats sent Coles the manuscript.  He didn’t respond.  “From what I know of him, it didn’t seem in character to hear nothing at all,” she says.  She tried again at a different address.  This time Coles wrote back quickly, saying the first manuscript had never reached him.

“I’m seeing it now as a really liberating experience to do the book oneself,” Moats says.  “And with this particular story, which is so personal, I would have been concerned about how it was going to be sold and managed, the taste with which it was done, and wanting to be so careful that it wasn’t presented in any sort of sensational way.”

There’s nothing sensational here–no vengeance, no recovered memory of abuse, and no bathetic reconciliations either.  What she’s achieved in the form of a novel is the wildest dream of anyone who enters therapy–a view of oneself so lucid it reaches back beyond birth to the generation that bore the generation that bore you.  Misery is handed down in families like flatware, which is why Moats’s account begins in the imagined voice of her grandmother in England in 1904.

I tried to write this story a decade ago,” Moats says, “and I approached it then as nonfiction.  I wanted it to be as objective a recording of the symptoms of my illness as I could.  It got so painful I had to put it away.  When I came back to it I gave myself permission to write it as fiction, as prose poetry, and it freed me up so much not to feel absolutely locked into the accuracy of detail.

“Ironically,” she continues, “I felt much more capable of capturing the essence of truth this way than I was capturing it with the so-called objective nonfiction approach.  What I did in Legacy of Shadows was to try to convey the essence of my story without being restraned by literal facts.”

The broad strokes of Legacy describe “Anna,” a young woman who adored her father but sided with the needy mother who felt betrayed by him.  The mother, in turn, regarded herself as the unworthy surrogate of a favored older sister who’d died as an infant of whooping cough.  Moats writes about a first marriage that’s a brief, furtive disaster and a second that suffocates in its intimacy.  “I was just living in terror of myself,” she remembers, “just not able to function in a normal way, and my days and nights were spent basically trying to convict myself, trying to find the evidence that would indicate where my enormous sense of guilt had originated.  It was so white-hot that it must have come from something I had done.  I never completely lost the thread that connected me to reality, but it grew so attenuated that–well, my therapist said the reason I couldn’t get help for so long was that I was just too good at therapy.  Because I didn’t feel I deserved help I could go into this intellectual mode and talk about it dispassionately.  In some ways it was comforting that I could pass for normal.  In other ways it was very disturbing to realize how unobservant people are, and how isolated we all are in our own skins, and how little we can really grasp what the inner life of another person is like.”

Close to the heart of the story is her second husband–in the book Jean-Paul, in life JP Somersaulter, her collaborator in making animated movies and still her best friend.  Putting it mildly, it’s helpful to a writer telling all when the person there’s most to tell about not only doesn’t stand in your way but eggs you on.  Somersaulter acted as Moats’s editor.  “I’d read something and say, ‘If this is painful I’ll think again,’ but there never was a point at which he didn’t want something in,” Moats says.  “He said, ‘If the first time you read it to me I don’t cry, it’s not there yet.'”

And so the book was written.  She chose the name Three Arts Press for an imprint because her first choice, Artisans Press, had been claimed by a brewery in England.  “My mother had lived at the Three Arts Club in New York, and I thought of three arts as applied to me–film, writing, and graphic arts.”

Anna’s mother is a gifted artist and teacher who puts aside a career to have a baby, and raises a daughter whose loyalty she’s never sure of.  Finally, late in life, she has it out.  “I’m not going to let you do this to me any longer, Anna.  I’ve been afraid of you–all your life!”

“You’ve been afraid of me … all my life?” says Anna in horror.  And she discovers she’s grateful to have been told something she now realizes she always knew.

“That was a real turning point,” Moats remembers, “because It finally enabled me to gain a little sympathy for myself as a child even though I couldn’t sympathize with myself as an adult.  A lot of things came together right then.”

Michael Miner

Senior Editor

CHICAGO READER

May 7, 1999