Instead, I found a "must read" and life-changing book. Ms. Miller writes in a straightforward prose without pretention, refreshing after the overly self-conscious styles that too often find their way into novels or memoirs. She leads the reader through the "unpeeling of the onion," as it's called in recovery circles, where layer after layer of the past are pulled off, only to reveal another.
Skillfully, Ms. Miller lets the reader participate in this process as the horrors progress. She is never self-pitying. One senses that her recovery will continue for the rest of her life, and she offers a snapshot of half of that life, the rest, one hopes, to be lived in a grander richer way. For example, she seems unaware that although her father stopped using heroin when she was thirteen, he continued to use addictive drugs up until his death (the morphine to quell the pain of dying not included.) She also seems unaware that all addicts are completely self-involved, her father no different, thus rendering more sad her longing at his deathbed for a little more than "no lo contendere." Addicts tend to see and treat the world as an extension of themselves, and to treat their children as if the child is the parent and must care for the addicted adult. As one addict told me, "Heroin is my mother, my father, my child, my God." The addict never really change. It is refreshing to hear Ms. Miller's honesty that she does not regret her father's death. By the time one has been ripped into shreds by an addict parent, death is a relief.
Ms. Miller spares herself no step in mourning. She gazes steadfastly at the ruins and horror of her childhood, and she heals. Subtle as this memoir is, I would rather recommend this book to adult children of addicts than chirpy and cliche-filled self-help guidebooks (although they too have their place.) In Miller's memoir, I finally understood the effect of addiction on children.
Relating the secrets in her life very much as she must have unearthed them, the author cuts back and forth between childhood experiences and the agonizingly earned knowledge of adulthood - the awareness that her father was a 15-year heroin addict unable to love, and her mother, a withdrawn woman, was afraid to see the rage-driven brutality of her older brother, Aaron.
Raised in an ever changing yet congruent series of oppressive New York City apartments during the 1950's, the youngest child of a window dresser whose friends were Birdland musicians - Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Al Cohn and George Handy, all junkies, Ms. Miller suspected nothing. She writes, "It wasn't until I was twenty-one, a college senior, that my father told me he had been a heroin addict, casually slipping that information into some otherwise unremarkable conversation." And then she knew that his addiction explained their acrid family relationships, their penuriousness, and their many moves.
That knowledge, she remembers, "...not only brought uncertainty to every memory but was also the key to my past." Thus, with the aid of therapy, she begins to explore the murky labyrinth of her youth, reliving the gradual escalation of her brother's persecution from pokes to arm-twisting torture to throttling to sexual abuse. As an adult she tries to convince Aaron to see a therapist, insisting that he can find help but he refuses. "That was how it was," she writes, "He couldn't imagine himself as anything but lost, and I always saw myself as on the way to being found." That may have been her life raft.
Nonetheless, for Ms. Miller "being found" was an arduous journey. She learned that dysfunction in her family had spanned three generations. Her father's mother, Esther, hated men. This grandmother so detested her own son that she never displayed a photo of him in her home, she ignored him in her will, saying he was no good, yet lavished affection on Sarah, his sister. Sarah learned her lesson well, boasting that she could get her husband to do what she wanted by refusing to sleep with him. Ms. Miller recalls, "Her husband, the manager of an A&P, could not afford the fancy dresses and shoes that were stuffed into my aunt's closet, but each visit, newly acquired items were brought out for display. You could have such treasures, too, Sarah advised my mother, if you just played your cards right."
A victim, too, Ms. Miller's father lay on his death bed and admitted that he did not know how to love. To a degree, that may have explained his treatment of her but there was more pain to come: when a social worker asked him what he would miss most when he died. His reply was, "...yeah, sure, I'll miss my wife and kids, but what I'll miss most is the music. The music is the only thing that's never let me down." A callous blow to Ms. Miller, an even crueler barb for his wife who had stood by him.
Eventually, there is the recognition that father and daughter are bound together by shared pasts, histories that neither has wished to acknowledge. Perhaps that explains but does it excuse?
Today Ms. Miller is married and the mother of two children. She takes medication to assuage her panic attacks, and lives in a house, a real house, an old wooden one "with white curtains blowing at the windows." There is a garden, enough money, and she cooks dinner every night. She has survived.
Never Let Me Down is a complex intimate memoir. It is a sad yet triumphant story. Even sadder and more triumphant because it is true.