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NOTE: Today's post is about abuse, murder, and severe psychological problems. Please skip it if those subjects may harm your mental health.
Rachel Aviv of The New Yorker has a new, very good, heartwrenching, thorough feature about the child abuses of an influential researcher. I also followed a shared link to a 2024 feature she wrote about Alice Munro, who ignored or even implicitly endorsed the childhood sexual abuse of her daughter Andrea by Munro's second husband Gerry.
As an adult, Andrea presented a certain way, like she was okay:
Jenny thought that Andrea was finding her own way and thriving. “I couldn’t hold it in my mind that you could reveal something like that, which would absolutely ruin a person, and yet there was Andrea, healthy and glowing,” she said. Andrea recognized that her affect was confusing. “I could see how, if you wanted that for me, it would look like I’d moved past it,” she told me. By keeping her feelings to herself, she thought she was “contributing to the greatest good for the greatest number.”
This struck me like lightning, because it's very close to something I just learned from a video about Lindsay Clancy, who is on trial now for the infanticides she committed in 2023. Mama Doctor Jones, herself a mother and ob/gyn, goes through Clancy's long history of seeking help.
In court documents, Clancy described giving up on the possibility of getting better, after being dismissed, handed around, overprescribed, and ignored:
I was just in the best hospital in the country, so there was not much hope.
I really recommend MDJ's whole video, but here is her response in particular:
So, she leaves feeling very despondent. I was in the best psychiatric hospital in the country, and even they can't help me. I'm a lost cause. I don't need to be here. She decided she must appear like she was okay and had to do her best. All right, so now she's given up [on] begging for help. That didn't help. She's telling everybody, "Help me. Help me. Help me." Nobody's helping. And she gives up. She's like, "Fine, I'll fake it then, because telling you how bad I am isn't getting me anywhere."
MDJ is careful to reiterate that nothing about Clancy's story excuses her actions. She also explains that postpartum psychosis is not something that you can ignore or cope with until it resolves itself. It's a very serious mental illness with an extremely high risk of suicide and of harm to others.
Andrea, whom I hesitate to call "lucky" in any sense because of what she went through, has healed to some extent, including with support from the siblings she once thought didn't believe her or understand.
I'm surprised to see crossover between Nobel Prize-winning writer Alice Munro and deranged, maudlin TikTok estranged parent influencers. Andrea finally cut off her mother in the '90s, after Munro was offended that Andrea wouldn't allow the pedophile Gerry around Andrea's own children. Rest in piss, both of them.
I will also suggest this amazing 2019 documentary by Louis Theroux, about psychiatric facilities in the U.K. where new mothers are treated for postpartum mental illness, but stay together with their babies in the monitored and safe environment. The stories are very, very moving.