Copyright © 2010 by Meredith Maran. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Maran, Meredith.

ISBN 978-0-470-50214-3 (hardback)

1. Maran, Meredith-Mental health. 2. False memory syndrome-Patients-California- Biography. 3. False memory syndrome-Patients-Family relationships- California. 4. Recovered memory. 5. Fathers and daughters. I. Title.

RC455.2.F35M34 2010

362.196’8583690092-dc22

[B]

2010013843

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.

—Adolph Hitler

Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie and one to listen.

—Homer Simpson

For my family, with love and gratitude. Finally.

Author’s Note

This book is a work of nonfiction: my version of the truth. I’ve attempted to verify the statistics I cite, but for reasons that should be obvious, I regard all “facts” with skepticism, and recommend that you do the same.

Dialogue has been reconstructed based on my memories and notes. Names and details have been altered to protect the privacy of those who populate these pages. Some might have different memories or interpretations of this story. Their versions, of course, could also be true.

Prologue

The Same Thing Happened to Me

December 2007

At 7 A.M. the Oakland hills were shrouded in fog, the steep trail carpeted with silvery eucalyptus leaves, damp and fragrant beneath my feet. My hiking buddy Joanne and I plodded silently past glistening ferns, granite outcroppings, waterfalls swollen with winter rain. As we neared Redwood Peak, we stumbled into a conversation well suited to the cover of the misty morning, the meditative mood.

“Have you ever done anything really awful?” Joanne asked me. “Something you’ll always regret?”

At fifty-six I’d accrued an age-appropriate assortment of woulda-shoulda-couldas. But only one rose to the level of aching remorse.

“When I was in my thirties,” I answered, “I accused my father of molesting me. I didn’t see him or talk to him for eight years. I didn’t let my kids see him for eight years, either. And then I realized that it wasn’t true.”

Joanne stared at me, her face a mask of disbelief. She said, “The same thing happened to me.”

Standing sentry around us, ancient redwoods shuddered and dripped.

“Let me guess,” I said. “It was the late eighties, early nineties. Someone gave you a copy of The Courage to Heal.

“You started having strange dreams, crying jags, trouble with sex,” I went on. “You were seeing a therapist two or three times a week. Finally you remembered that your father had molested you.”

“How did you know that?” Joanne asked. “I haven’t talked about it for fifteen years.”

“The Courage to Heal sold almost two million copies,” I said. “It must have happened to a whole lot of us.”

“My dad died before I could apologize,” Joanne said. She inhaled a ragged breath. “Is your dad still alive?”

I nodded. In the past few years my eighty-year-old father had been diagnosed with atherosclerosis, diabetes, depression, and Alzheimer’s disease. With the possible exception of the diabetes, I blamed myself for all of it. Of course his heart was damaged. Of course he was depressed and wanted to forget. His daughter had been a difficult child and a raging teenager who’d grown into a family-wrecking adult.

“Are you and your dad speaking?” Joanne asked.

I nodded again. “We get along better now than we did ... before.”

Before, alternating currents of attachment and anger had arced and hissed between us. But now my dad was too addled by Alzheimer’s and too wise to go on judging me. I was too mortified by the wrong I’d done, too aware of the ticking clock of the time we had left, too humbled by my own foibles as a parent to go on judging him.

“He forgave you?”

I considered Joanne’s question. Above our heads, birds chirped and called, trilling a cheery cacophony. “It seems that way,” I answered.

My father had spent a decade brushing off my attempts to apologize, just as he’d brushed off so many things that mattered to me long before we were estranged. His emotional detachment was the provenance of my lifelong longing; the trait that had made my accusation credible to me, to my lover, my brother, my friends and therapists. Now, that same detachment had made it easy for him to forgive me. Or appear to have forgiven me.

Since he and I had reconciled, no one else in my family had mentioned my accusation, either. Had the rift I’d caused—the not-so-grand canyon I’d carved between those who believed me and those who didn’t—really healed? Or had the memory of my false memory become one of those scarred-over but still-festering family wounds?

“My brother and sisters have never forgiven me,” Joanne said, her eyes deer-in-the-headlights on mine. “I don’t know how I’ll ever forgive myself.”

As Joanne’s eyes welled with tears, I asked myself the same question. And suddenly, pretending it hadn’t happened wasn’t an option anymore.

Introduction

One in Three

We are currently living in dangerous times, similar to Nazi Germany. Sexual abuse hysteria is omnipresent.

—Richard Gardner, professor of psychiatry,
Columbia University, True and False Accusations of Child Sex Abuse, 1992

In the late 1970s, a handful of feminist scholars did some groundbreaking research and delivered some distressing news. One in three American women and one in ten American men, they reported, had been victims of childhood sexual abuse.

Their studies proved that incest wasn’t the rare anomaly it had long been believed to be. Incest happened often. It happened in normal families—in the house down the street, in the bedroom down the hall.

A psychological phenomenon called repressed memory had allowed this outrage to go unacknowledged, even unknown. As Freud had first asserted a century earlier, the impact of child sexual abuse on young psyches was so profound that victims often lost their memories for years or decades. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were walking around with the time bomb of untreated childhood sexual abuse ticking inside of them.

For better and for worse, these findings transformed incest from a dirty little secret of American family life into an American obsession. During the 1980s and early 1990s, several cultural icons, including Susanne Somers, former Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur, Roseanne Barr, and Oprah Winfrey went public as incest survivors. Incest memoirs hit best-seller lists. The Color Purple, whose protagonist had borne two of her father’s babies, won the Pulitzer Prize. Sympathetic and sensational incest stories proliferated on TV news shows and after-school specials and in newspapers and magazines.

Between 1983 and 1995, hundreds of parents and day-care workers were tried for sexually abusing and ritually torturing the children in their care. Children were removed from their parents’ homes. Preschools were shut down. Hundreds of perpetrators and innocents went to jail.

Reported cases of child abuse and neglect surged from 669,000 in 1976 to 2.9 million in 1993. During those years, according to Victims of Memory author Mark Pendergrast, up to one million families were torn apart by false accusations of sexual abuse.

Mine was one of them.

Many of these accusations were made by adult daughters who claimed to have repressed and then recovered memories of childhood molestation by their fathers.

I was one of them.

In courtrooms around the country, daughters sat sobbing on witness stands, pointing across the room at their fathers, listing the atrocities their fathers had committed against their bodies and their souls.

If I’d been just a bit more suggestible (more impulsive, more vindictive), I might have been one of them.

Here’s how I became convinced that this lie was true.

In 1982, I edited a book by one of those pioneering feminist researchers. I was shocked and moved by what I learned, working on a book I’ll call The Incest Secret. With missionary zeal—and without considering the tunnel vision, good guy-bad guy polarization, and dangerous excesses that often accompany that sort of heart-thumping fervor—I spent the next few years writing exposés of child sexual abuse for local and national newspapers and magazines.

As a journalist doing what journalists do, slouching toward objectivity, stumbling over my preexisting prejudices and proclivities, I helped to spread the panic: basing conclusions on skewed studies I believed to be accurate, citing manipulated statistics I trusted, quoting experts who proved more loyal to their points of view than they were to the facts.

Along with other writers on both sides of the issue, I avoided using quotation marks to declare my allegiance, calling it recovered memory, not “recovered memory”; incest survivor, not “incest survivor”; “false memory syndrome,” not False Memory Syndrome.

I didn’t just hand out the Kool-Aid. I drank it. I didn’t just write about recovered memories; I spent a decade trying to recover my own. Shortly after the 1988 publication of the Bible of the recovered-memory movement, The Courage to Heal, I joined the ranks of self-identified incest survivors and accused my father of molesting me.

Early in the 1990s, the backlash began.

In March 1992, accused parents banded together to form the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF). “When the memory is distorted, or confabulated,” the FMSF newsletter opined, “the result can be what has been called the False Memory Syndrome; a condition in which a person’s identity and interpersonal relationships are centered around a memory of traumatic experience which is objectively false but in which the person strongly believes.”

Although false memory syndrome was the invention of laypeople, the phrase took on the luster of a medical diagnosis and burned its way across the country, setting off the firestorm that would come to be known as “the memory war.” Even characterizing the conflict was cause for controversy. Was the “outing” of child sexual abuse a brave crusade to save children’s lives, or a witch hunt reminiscent of others in the American hall of shame?

Nearly overnight, “false memory” replaced “recovered memory” on the American tongue. Therapists were sued for implanting false memories, stripped of their licenses, and ordered to pay six-figure settlements to clients who’d once credited them with saving their incest-ravaged lives. Accused molesters’ convictions were overturned. Many but not all of the accused were set free.

Families already devastated by incest accusations were bifurcated by warring beliefs about truth and memory. If the outraged parents—my outraged parents—were right, they were the victims, their daughters the perpetrators. If the daughters were right, they—we—were the victims, our parents the perpetrators, denying the trauma they’d inflicted upon us. Each side enlisted a phalanx of opposing experts who built constituencies and careers on unproved certainties.

When the culture tilted toward disbelief, I leaned that way too. In 1996, I faced the truth that my accusation was false. I apologized to my father and my family, quit incest therapy, and broke up with—truth be told, was dumped by—my incest survivor lover.

A few years later, just when I’d fully regained my mind and my memories, my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and began to lose his.

Redemption-wise, my father’s diagnosis left me two options.

I could hope he’d forget the wrong I’d done him, along with the other bits and bytes that were slipping through the fissures in his brain. Or I could convince him to have a conversation with me about what I’d done and why I’d done it and how sorry I was.

A girl can dream: maybe he’d even forgive me, so I might step into that shaft of light and begin to forgive myself. But first I needed to understand. How had I—more neurotic than some, but surely less neurotic than many—come to believe that my father, a man lacking the cruelty to squash a spider, had sexually abused me throughout my childhood and spent the next twenty years covering it up?

How had so many other people come to believe the same thing at the same time?

In Creating Hysteria, Joan Acocella’s 1999 exposé of the sex-abuse panic of the 1980s, she wrote, “One of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of psychotherapy seems to be coming to an end.”

Acocella’s prediction was true, and false. The sex-abuse panic did recede. But it still hasn’t come to an end.

“When you once believed something that now strikes you as absurd, even unhinged, it can be almost impossible to summon that feeling of credulity again,” Margaret Talbot wrote in The New York Times Magazine on January 7, 2001. “Maybe that is why it is easier for most of us to forget, rather than to try and explain, the Satanic-abuse scare that gripped this country in the early 80s—the myth that Devil-worshipers had set up shop in our day-care centers, where their clever adepts were raping and sodomizing children, practicing ritual sacrifice, shedding their clothes, drinking blood and eating feces, all unnoticed by parents, neighbors and the authorities.

“Of course, if you were one of the dozens of people prosecuted in these cases, one of those who spent years in jails and prisons on wildly implausible charges, one of those separated from your own children, forgetting would not be an option. You would spend the rest of your life wondering what hit you, what cleaved your life into the before and the after, the daylight and the nightmare.”

As Talbot says, the panic hasn’t ended for the preschool teachers and fathers and uncles who were convicted of child sexual abuse twenty years ago and remain incarcerated today.

It hasn’t ended for the children, now adults, who testified against those prisoners at age four or ten or thirty, some of whom have since acknowledged that their accusations were false.

I’m guessing it hasn’t ended for the 1.8 million people who have bought copies of The Courage to Heal. Or for the book’s coauthor, Laura Davis, whose books and workshops are focused, now, on forgiveness and reconciliation.

It hasn’t ended for the tens of thousands of families still struggling to recover from false accusations made decades ago.

Most important, it hasn’t ended for a society that decries the mass hysteria of Salem and McCarthyism while continuing to elect presidents, wage wars, and deny its citizens health care and civil rights based on confabulations presented as facts.

Recent American history is rife with examples of the damage done when millions of people become convinced of the same lie at the same time. Choose your favorite fiction from this list, or add your own.

The George W. Bush “victory” in the 2000 election. The list of books that Sarah Palin allegedly banned from the Wasilla Public Library. The persistent rumor that Palin’s youngest son was actually her daughter’s child. The allegations of Barack Obama’s foreign birth, terrorist associations, reverse racism, and socialist tendencies—first promulgated to prevent his presidency, later used to attempt to derail it.

How many and how much have we lost in the seemingly endless War on Terror, triggered by the fictional connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks? The phrase “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” invented as a cry for war, has become shorthand for cynical political manipulation and the mass, willful suspension of disbelief.

President Obama’s efforts to provide Americans with health care were nearly defeated by the myth that if the program were enacted, “death panels” run by government bureaucrats would decide whether Granny lives or dies.

Gay people’s right to marry (my right to marry) is still being denied in most of the “united” states, ostensibly to protect the heterosexual nuclear family from destruction, and—wait, it gets better—to keep American children from being recruited to homosexuality in their grade-school classrooms.

In November 2008, the The Wall Street Journal predicted, “In 300 years’ time, our descendants—who will, of course, pride themselves on their superior rationality—will read of the recovered-memory-driven prosecutions of parents (usually fathers) as we now read of the Salem witch trials.

“. . . We may expect further such episodes of popular delusion and the madness of crowds,” the article warned, “unless we straighten out our thoughts about the way our minds work—or, if that is not possible, at least about how they don’t work.”

Hence this inquiry: an intimate look back, twenty years later, at one episode of popular delusion—mine, ours. This painful, public exposé of the way my mind worked and the way it didn’t is offered up with remorse, yes, but also with a pulse of hope that I, and we, will learn from this history so we’re not destined to repeat it.

Meredith Maran
Oakland, California
June 2010

part one

1576-1982

It isn’t so astonishing, the number of things I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren’t so.

—Mark Twain (true name: Samuel Clemens)

one

Desperate Housewife

Oedipal tendencies are not abandoned during the infantile Oedipal period; they are abandoned at puberty and then only if the mechanism of displacement works successfully. . . . Removal is the process by which interest is removed from incestuous objects and attached to outside objects.

—Sidney Tarachow, International Journal of Psychoanalysis

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