Beowulf Sheehan
Peterson writes candidly about her emotional pain and her parents’ struggles.
Memoirs can be tricky to write. If an author isn’t careful, she can end up telling a very different story from the one she set out to tell. In White Dresses: A Memoir of Love and Secrets, Mothers and Daughters, Beaver Dam native Mary Pflum Peterson has written the tragic story of her parents — a mentally ill mother and a closeted gay father — and the disaster that was their marriage. But it’s hard to know if this is the story she meant to tell, because it comes wrapped in a sugary cover and is organized in a way that trivializes the raw, painful material.
Pflum Peterson’s mother, Anne, suffered from depression from a young age. In 1950s Indiana, before the days of SSRIs and supportive therapists, she would spend weeks at a time debilitated by endless crying jags. Finding some solace in the routine of prayer and
meditation, Anne joined a convent after college, but this seems to have only made things worse. Isolated from family, bullied by other nuns and subject to the identity-robbing strictures that were common in 1950s convents, her mental and physical health deteriorated, and she eventually left the convent.
Meanwhile, the author’s father, Dale, was growing up on a farm in southern Indiana, where Catholic values and traditional gender roles ensured that he was running as fast as possible from his homosexuality. Deeply closeted, in a time and place where he had no positive gay role models, Dale clung desperately to the idea that marriage to a nice Catholic girl would “fix” him.
What sort of cosmic bad luck brought these two unhappy people together? They met through mutual friends and married after a brief courtship, but their marriage was doomed from the start. Dale became emotionally abusive and self-destructive. Anne blamed herself and cycled in and out of deeper depressions. Yet somehow they managed to have two children together, the author and her older brother, Anthony, and eventually moved to Beaver Dam.
Mary overcompensated (as smart girls do) by maintaining stellar grades and test scores. She eventually won a full scholarship to Columbia University and forged a successful career as a TV journalist and producer. She’s won numerous awards, including four Emmy Awards, two Edward R. Murrows and a Peabody. Yet those accolades are not enough to erase her sense of abandonment.
Although the last third of the book details Mary’s life as a reporter in far-flung locales, her relationship with her parents is never far offstage. Dale finally embraced his identity, but Anne was defeated by hers. In later years her uncontrolled anxiety and depression manifested themselves in compulsive hoarding. Mary’s attempts to get her mother to leave the garbage-filled house in Beaver Dam were futile, and eventually Anne passed away.
Mary writes candidly and bravely about her emotional pain and her parents’ struggles; it’s terribly sad. It’s also sad that potential readers might miss this book because it’s not what it appears to be from the outside.
The author, who now lives in Manhattan, returns to Wisconsin for a book tour, which will bring her to A Room of One’s Own Bookstore at 6 p.m. on March 30.
