"To cope, in childhood, was to be on guard at all times. Sentiment was not to be trusted. Hope would be met with disappointment. This was an operating system that allowed me to function, and it carried over into adulthood. The result was to live a life within brackets. An abbreviated life."
The language of this memoir is spare but impactful. There is lots of breath around the words. The space is necessary to digest and take it all in. There are a lot of revelations. This is the story of a life that was disheveled, unreliable, chaotic, erratic. This is the author's search for reprieve.
Ariel Leve grew up under the reign of an imbalanced mother. Abandoned herself at age seven (literally left behind at boarding school), her mother was in a state of arrested development. After a brief marriage, Ariel's father moved to Thailand when she was a young girl. While they remained in touch and very close via regular letters and visits with him over summer breaks, for the majority of her childhood, Ariel was forced into the role of the mother figure (it was she who would be screaming for everyone to stop the constant partying past midnight so she could get some sleep on a school night) while her mother was the child - selfish, blameful and churlish.
Her mother was a successful poet and they lived in a penthouse apartment on the Upper West Side. The address was mentioned so many times throughout the book that I googled it. Looking at the exterior of 180 E 79th Street in New York, you see a typical Manhattan apartment building. It's located in an affluent area, there's a doorman, it's a prime piece of real estate. However, if you just look at the facade, you don't get the whole story. You hear penthouse apartment, you think rich. You hear private school, you know there's privilege. You discover her mother was a poet, you think fantastically eccentric. And while it's true that Ariel grew up with all of these outward advantages, her life is concrete proof of the old adage that money doesn't buy happiness. According to her mother, she was given the best of everything and therefore she should be forever indebted to her for providing them. She was expected to feel grateful and beholden to her simply because she hadn't been abandoned like her mother even though she was given nothing in terms of appropriate attention or emotions in return. Yes, Ariel had every material want at her fingertips, but the only thing she truly longed for was time alone with her mother. She wanted her undivided attention. She wanted routine and convention and unconditional love. All she wanted was a normal life. Instead, her mother was controlling, manipulative and overbearing to everyone around her. She could convince anyone of anything and turned every situation and relationship to her own advantage until one by one, they would figure out her ulterior motives and disappear. She truly thought only of herself and her own needs, never once considering how her behaviour was affecting others. She was lost in her own mixed up world and her jumbled mind. Whether or not she was actually conscious of her behaviour and just didn't care or if she was so mentally ill that she didn't know right from wrong, it was Ariel that bore the worst brunt of her behaviour. While she thought she was smothering Ariel with motherly love, she was in fact just smothering her.
Ariel was so manipulated as a child that as an adult, she is working her way through her life, trying to pick up the pieces of her fractured childhood to build a cohesive, calm existence. She literally moves to the other side of the world to Bali in order to extract herself from her mother's neediness. It's a move of desperation, but the only solution she can find. The current life Ariel Leve has created for herself is the exact inverse of her childhood. Her life in Bali is stripped down to the bare basics. Her peaceful home is minimalist and only holds the essentials. She has chosen a partner who is quiet, thoughtful and caring. She provides stability, attention and love to their young twin daughters. She becomes the calm, attentive mother she so desperately needed herself.
It's by practicing the exact opposite of everything her life was composed of that she finally finds her peace.
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