More Than a Review Welcomes Ronald C. Wendling, author of Unsuitable Treasure: An Ex-Jesuit Makes Peace with the Past.
Today he discusses his Memoir and the Effects of Self-Disclosure:
There is a moment in my recently published memoir when I am at a party wearing the white collar that was then the standard outfit for young Jesuits studying to be Roman Catholic priests. As I stood there chatting it up with other invited guests, I was suddenly struck by the enormity of the distance between the person I was presenting to the world and the quite different one that returned to me as soon as I twisted off that collar, relaxed, and put my feet up. The voice I heard jabbering on at the party felt more and more like someone else’s, as if it had originated in some far off land that for all its attractions was no longer a place where I felt at home.
The sense of some gap between our public and private selves is a daily occurrence for most of us, I imagine, but at that particular time in my life (I was in my mid-twenties and trying to settle on my future) it was making me increasingly tense. I tried confiding how I felt to some trusted older Jesuits, but they either brushed it off as normal or suspected some secret (probably sexual) I was as yet unable to confront. I soon left the Jesuits, married and took up a career teaching literature—all decisive actions that eased the conflict between the mild mannered “nice guy” the world observed in me and that other fellow, the disgruntled one chafing against the restrictions of his social and ecclesiastical role and feeling fundamentally homeless.
It was not until I had spent significant time drafting my memoir that the full burden of this conflict began to lift. I had to keep re-imagining the important people in my early life, and I found that I could not write convincingly about any of them without listening to the insistently disruptive side of me—the “bad guy” who had for so long threatened my outward nonchalance. In my first efforts not to force that guy away I began taking a second look at my “bad guy” father, that charming but rowdy, hard drinking chain smoker in whom my own chronic discontent seemed to have originated. “You’re just like your father,” my mother used to tell me in her angrier moods, so it was no wonder I spent so much of my life trying to push down my youthful attraction to him, indeed my deep love for him.
What made matters worse was that most who knew dad, including his family of origin, had consistently sided with mom, portraying her as the longsuffering victim of his brutal neglect. They were partially right about that, to be sure. But what they forgot about dad, and occasionally even denied, was that a little over five years before his death of esophageal cancer at the age of forty-six, he recovered from his alcoholism and delighted me with his company at more baseball, basketball and hockey games, more boxing and wrestling matches, and more steak cookouts on the grill than you can imagine.
Such was the essence of my effort to explain myself in my finished memoir. Writing it made me suspicious of any of us who condemn addicts while ignoring the less obvious but equally destructive patterns of thinking and behaving to which we ourselves are addicted, like the contemporary habit of railing at people we disagree with instead of talking to them. I hope to continue blogging on this site, however, not about the effects of my memoir’s self-disclosures on me, but on my readers. Published eight months ago, the book has by now been read by a fair number of my family members, friends, neighbors, high school classmates, former students, academic colleagues, Jesuits, former Jesuits and others. Their reactions have been mostly positive, but I will not trouble you with those that are merely polite, only with the stronger, more thoughtful ones.
Ronald C. Wendling is the author of Unsuitable Treasure: An Ex-Jesuit Makes Peace with the Past (Oak Tree Press, April, 2015). More information about him and his memoir is available at the following sites:
www.oaktreebooks.com/AuthorRoster/wendlingronald.html
www.oaktreebooks.com/Bookstore/UnsuitableTreasure.html
http://www.facebook.com/UnsuitableTreasureBook?ref=ts&fref=ts
and Amazon.com