TRAUMA FAMILY

A MEMOIR OF PTSD’S COLLATERAL DAMAGE

by Bill McBean ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 2, 2020

In this memoir, a man recounts a troubled youth under the mercurial tyranny of his father, who suffered from PTSD as a consequence of his experiences serving in World War II.

McBean’s father, Peter, governed his family with an erratic style that “fused sadism and satire,” an amalgam of vituperative anger, violence, and capricious despotism that weighed heavily on the author as the oldest of four children and the only son. His father’s approach seemed guided by the urgent need to prepare the family for an inevitable tragedy of the kind he encountered as a lieutenant commanding a cannon company during World War II. Despite the “terrarium of wealth” McBean enjoyed as a child—Peter was a successful lawyer—his home life seemed intolerable, and he sought ways to lash out against his father’s prohibitive rule, a rebellion he lucidly and powerfully chronicles. Years later as an adult, the author’s life became a “persistent game of hopscotch on land mines, such an unconscious exercise in self-destruction,” and he followed in his father’s footsteps and was overcome by alcoholism. In order to repair his own life, McBean turned to a rigorous scrutiny of his father’s past, a project that included reading more than 100 letters the soldier sent to the author’s mother, Mary, between 1944 and 1945: “Even as I struggled to understand life as a child, I never dreamed the questions about my youth would deepen as I grew older. I never imagined I’d need to understand my father, and most of all, I never suspected examining these questions in my old age would threaten my emotional stability.” McBean finally understood the horror of what his father experienced overseas during the war and the suffering those events saddled him with as well as the ways that emotional pain was bequeathed to the author as a matter of a “transgenerational transmission,” a “secondary trauma.”

McBean’s remarkably forthcoming memoir mixes personal insights with psychological science—he provides an accessible picture of the nature of secondary trauma, the study of which remains in its infancy. In addition, he furnishes a poignantly thoughtful meditation on the havoc such trauma wrought on his life as well as his painful path to recovery. Still, at the core of the book is a memorably sensitive portrait of his father as someone brave and intellectually astute, if also cruel and capable of a “perverse levity.” After the war, Peter returned to the United States with a bevy of problems he could neither adequately manage nor communicate: “He came out of World War II with his ideals pulverized, and that made him angry—ferociously angry. He couldn’t talk about it with anyone, because no one understood what he’d been through, even my mother.” McBean’s remembrance concludes with illuminating advice regarding how one can identify the signs of such trauma in others as well as the resources available to those in need of help. The author’s recollection can lose its direction, meandering into the kind of granular autobiographical details that are more minute than necessary, but nonetheless remains as moving as it is gripping.

A deeply intelligent personal account, both dramatically captivating and scientifically edifying.

Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-63684-819-8

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Climacteric

Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2022

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | PSYCHOLOGY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR