Wrestling With a Violent, Traumatic Past

Susan J. Miller’s memoir, “Never Let Me Down,” focuses on the story of her relationship with her father, Sidney. A Brooklyn-born child of Jewish immigrants, a self-taught high school dropout, window-dresser and junkie, Sidney was a man consumed by his enthusiasm for literature, politics, jazz and ideas. Sifting through a lifetime of dreams, memories and unearthed secrets, Miller, a former social worker living in Cambridge, Mass., uses the key of her father’s heroin addiction not to delineate the worlds that he inhabited, but to decipher the dynamics of her family’s history.

In the opening pages, Miller describes accompanying her father from their Fort Lee, N.J., apartment into Manhattan during one of her college vacations in the early ‘70s. Over the screech of the subway, her father tells her that he is just starting to “get off” on the acid he took before they left the house.

“Watching him trip was like discovering that your father was an accomplished deep-sea diver or high-wire artist,” she writes. Exhausted and unnerved by this topsy-turvy experience, Miller is impressed that Sidney, whatever his flaws, could hold his own with the excesses of her generation.

A few years later, when she is a senior in college, she learns that her father was addicted to heroin from just before her brother’s birth in 1947 until she was 13 and her brother was 15. Their entire childhood was lived in the shadow of addiction. As a young girl, Miller was thrilled by her father’s connections to the shadowy, smoky world of New York jazz. His musician friends, with their hipster banter and battered horn cases, held a promise of excitement and adventure beyond her family’s dreary series of apartments in and around New York City. Learning that many of these men were junkies like her father took the sheen off that memory.

As a child, she never understood why her family was so miserable. Her father’s addiction becomes the key to understanding her mother’s depression, her brother’s inchoate rage and her father’s perpetual absences--both physical and mental. In the book’s most disturbing sections, she depicts her constant fear of her brother’s brutality, games of torture and physical assaults.

Her anger at her father’s reluctance to acknowledge the horror of those years was perhaps compounded by the changes in her parents’ lives. As she is trapped in unraveling the past, her parents are moving on. In this tale of generations askew, both her parents are profoundly affected by the women’s liberation movement. Her mother, after reading Betty Friedan, insists that her husband drive her to weekly meetings of a feminist consciousness-raising group in Manhattan. Convinced by her arguments, he joins a discussion group of men interested in feminism and becomes a charismatic working-class spokesman for women’s rights.

Although she appreciates his changes, Miller is unable to forgive her father for not taking responsibility for her stress-filled childhood. She feels vindicated when she learns that her father, at the age of 70, has fatal liver cancer--the direct result of his addiction--”I couldn’t believe that things had worked out so fittingly,” she writes. “My father insisted that his addiction had no serious consequences for anyone, that it was over and done with in every way. He was the only one of us who believed he had gotten off scot-free. Now the cancer had somewhat evened the score. The drug had affected us all, but it was killing him. That poetic justice was part of the thrill I kept feeling.”

In the end, his daughter’s unresolved anger reduces Sidney Miller--with all his quirks, his love of literature and jazz, and his late-blooming feminism--into just one more self-absorbed narcissistic dad. The therapeutic efforts that have enabled her to move forward enervate her prose, while her efforts at forgiveness do not convince. Her vivid re-creation of family trauma and violence flatten when she turns toward psychological explanations, and the uniqueness of her tale evaporates. But despite these shortcomings, Miller’s brave evocations of the past are bracing in their clarity, honesty and depiction of psychological terror.