Fame in the House of Seven

In the afterglow and after-burn of Thanksgiving, I am taking this means of notifying my family that I am launching legal action against them for the way they wrecked my life.

It is only recently that I came to realize how deprived my childhood was. I read “Angela’s Ashes,” and met its author, Frank McCourt, a fine broth of a writer whose memoir details a harrowing Irish childhood during the Depression, when hunger had the best seat at the hearth and little Frankie, who lost three siblings to sickness and starvation, had a father who sat in the pub with a mug of Guinness resting on the lid of a small white coffin.

Tolstoy wrote that every unhappy family is uniquely unhappy but happy families are alike in their happiness. One makes good storytelling; the other is boring. Boring means no bestsellers, no movie options.

Frank McCourt’s horrible childhood, brilliantly recounted, has won a National Book Prize, a Pulitzer and a cool million in paperback rights. My pleasant childhood--working-class yet happy, simple yet loving--condemns me to literary obscurity.

And that, my dear family, is why I am suing.

God knows I have labored to unearth some childhood torment. They say of repressed memory that the less you remember, the more there is in there to be found. There had to be something, some horror I could excavate and smelt into literary gold. Maybe my sexuality was affected by having a Barbie but no Ken. Maybe my spirit was broken by playing baseball when I really longed to be inside, practicing the piano.

Again and again, I have dredged my psyche for trauma, depravity, alien abduction--anything. But my childhood is a played-out mine. My lawyer will be in touch.

*

In our record-setting-besotted culture, the quality of childhood has of late been eclipsed by the quantity of it. Seven-at-once newborns have come to an Iowa couple modestly blessed until now with one daughter and a two-bedroom house.

If they were christened with the name of a sponsor or godparent, all seven would bear the middle name Perganol, after the fertility drug that begat them. The public’s uncritical awe of what medical science can do, never mind what it should do, has already made these births like some game show: “How many years of free diapers do they win, Bob?” “And behind door number three . . . seven free college educations!”

Between diapers and college, some long years wait.

Of all the cautions offered the Iowans by multiple-birth families, the most poignant came from a trio of 63-year-old Canadian sisters I wrote about some years ago, the three survivors of a still-unmatched occurrence that took place in the spring of 1934 in a Canadian farmhouse. Five identical girls, conceived naturally, were born from a single fertilized egg, and lived: the Dionne Quintuplets.

They were instantly and unimaginably famous, the first living children in the Encyclopedia Britannica. They were made wards of the state by a government that feared their parents would have to exploit them to feed them. They lived like captive princesses in “Quintland,” a theme-park compound where millions--including Clark Gable and Amelia Earhart--came to gape. Every tantrum and bowel movement was recorded and analyzed. Two quints died in adulthood; none had a happy life. They were spared the circus midway only to become another kind of sideshow.

Instead of intimate and vital one-to-one bonding, parents of multiples recall assembly-line feedings and diaperings. Nature, it turns out, had sound reasons for limiting humans to two breasts.

*

The Iowa Seven appear as we enter the season of fellow-feeling. Stories of holiday loss and redemption will ornament the news like tinsel. Every house fire that burns up a stock of gifts will bring an outpouring of generosity, every poor mom who gets mugged on her way home with her pathetic stock of dime-store presents will be surprised to tears by a cornucopia far more lavish than what she lost.

I know. I’ve written these stories, more than once. And I know, too, that some small fraction of the largess comes from people seeking a link to celebrity, however fleeting. Look, I have told them, the gifts have been replaced 10 times over. Why not go choose one of the Dear Santa letters that ends up at the post office and gratify that kid’s Christmas? No, no, they would tell me. I want the one in the newspaper.

Everyone wants to look out for “the one in the newspaper,” the Iowa Septuplets or Tamika Triggs, a 3-year-old child of a drug addict whose squalid life was portrayed in The Times and who was whisked into safety and comfort within hours of the newspaper landing on important doorsteps.

Fame is an unreliable and capricious parent. All its laurels cannot alter Frankie McCourt’s demon-haunted memory, and there are not enough forests between here and Iowa to turn every child who needs it into “the one in the newspaper.”