Synopsis:

Gayle Brandeis’s mother disappeared just after Gayle gave birth to her youngest child. Several days later, her body was found: she had hanged herself in the utility closet of a Pasadena parking garage. In this searing, formally inventive memoir, Gayle describes the dissonance between being a new mother, a sweet-smelling infant at her chest, and a grieving daughter trying to piece together what happened, who her mother was, and all she had and hadn’t understood about her.

Around the time of her suicide, Gayle’s mother had been working on a documentary about the rare illnesses she thought ravaged her family: porphyria and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. In The Art of Misdiagnosis, taking its title from her mother’s documentary, Gayle braids together her own narration of the charged weeks surrounding her mother’s suicide, transcripts of her mother’s documentary, research into delusional and factitious disorders, and Gayle’s own experience with misdiagnosis and illness (both fabricated and real). Slowly and expertly, The Art of Misdiagnosis peels back the complicated layers of deception and complicity, of physical and mental illness in Gayle’s family, to show how she and her mother had misdiagnosed one another.

Gayle’s memoir is both a compelling search into the mystery of one’s own family and a life-affirming story of the relief discovered through breaking familial and personal silences. Written by a gifted stylist, The Art of Misdiagnosis delves into the tangled mysteries of disease, mental illness, and suicide and comes out the other side with grace.

 

Excerpt from The Art of Misdiagnosis

November 16, 2009

Thirty-seven weeks pregnant and I can’t seem to stop crying. This is unusual for me. I tend to be an optimistic person. Relentlessly so. Probably obnoxiously so. I tend to be not just a glass half full kind of person, but a person who may just point out that the rest of the glass is filled with sunlight; an everything’s going to be okay, go with the flow, isn’t life amazing type of person. In the world, at least, if not always in my own head.

Part of the reason my first marriage fell apart two years ago was because I didn’t know how to let my husband know when I was upset. I spent way too much time smiling when I should have been honest with him. I kept so much frustration and anger pent up inside, so many silent things accumulating until they turned toxic under my skin. I’ve told myself I won’t make the same mistake with my new marriage, and it appears my body is holding me to that, at least for now. My habitual smile is starting to fracture; whatever has been hiding behind it is seeping out.

Half the time, I have no idea why I’m crying. I cry at the midwife’s office; I cry at our childbirth class. I cry when I learn on Facebook that my nineteen year old son, who lives with his dad, was hit by a car as he was riding his bike—he’s okay, it seems, just banged up a bit, but not the kind of news a mom likes to stumble upon on social media, even when she isn’t deeply hormonal.

I cry when I get scared I’ve forgotten how to be a mother—it was so easy and joyful when my kids were babies, when they were young, when I created creativity festivals for their preschools; when we made “color meals” together—red bread with green butter, pasta with creamy blue sauce; when we curled up together with books and crayons and silly songs; when we crawled on the grass together to peer at ladybugs and worms. Now my kids are both teenagers—my daughter is almost 16—and parental instincts seem to have fled my body. I always told myself I would be a mom whose kids could tell her anything, but I fear my kids have as much trouble talking to me as I do with my own mom. I love them both with all my heart and worry I’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere, maybe by smiling too much, by not acknowledging hard things enough, by not modeling how to be real.

I get another voicemail from my mom, this one saying she is driving to my house, saying she is going to spend the night. I leave a panicked voicemail on her phone, telling her it isn’t the right time; I have grading to do—my Antioch MFA students have just turned in their work and I want to get to it before my UCLA Writers’ Program students turn in their work, want to get to it before the baby comes, which feels like it could be any minute now.

“There’s no place for you to sleep,” I tell her voice mail, belly contracting again. Hannah’s been using her bed as a desk and has been sleeping on the couch.

My mom calls back. She’s turned around; she’s on her way home. I am flooded with relief. Relief tinged with guilt, but relief all the same. There’s no way I could have gotten work done with her there, wanting my attention. She gets offended if I so much as glance at a newspaper when she’s in the same room; if I read my students’ fiction in her presence, she’ll find some way to make me feel horrible about it. Likely by inventing some medical emergency. Or telling me about my father’s latest supposed acts of betrayal.

The doorbell rings around 10pm. Hannah, camped out on the vintage leopard print sofa, answers it. “Oh, hi, Nana,” I hear her say, and my heart drops to the floor. I walk out of the office, bleary eyed from critiquing fiction. One of my students is writing a novel where a woman and baby die in childbirth and hang around their apartment as ghosts; another student is writing a novel in which a woman suffers horrific pregnancy complications during the Holocaust. Amazing novels, but not the most uplifting of pregnancy reading. This is reality, I tell myself as I read scenes of blood and rot, the baby twisting inside me—it’s good to be in touch with every aspect of reality. When I was pregnant with Arin, I avoided all the pages about C-section in my childbirth preparation book, and I ended up getting sliced open. Sometimes we’re thrown face to face with the very things we’re trying to avoid. Like my mom, here in my living room. She has a long cushion from an outdoor chaise lounge tucked under her arm. A few ties dangle down from the sides, like tiny insect legs on a huge thorax.

“I can sleep on this.” She pushes past me and lays the cushion on the floor of my office, right behind my desk chair. When she looks up at me, she says “You look awful.”

“Thanks,” I tell her. “I was just about to head to bed.”

“Okay,” she says, disappointed. There’s clearly so much she wants to tell me, epic tales of her latest persecution. She’s probably been repeating them to herself the whole 75-mile drive from Oceanside. All she can get in, though, is “There’s something wrong with my furnace” before I give her a cursory hug and close myself up in my bedroom. I hate to leave my husband and daughter to deal with my mom, but I am in no state to handle her. I may be able to face painful realities in my students’ novels—in my own novels, even—but my own life is another story entirely.

I lie down and my belly collects itself into a tight knot and the tears stream freely yet again.

When I get up in the morning, as late as I possibly can, my mom is calmer; I am less afraid of her. Michael has already left for work. Two mugs sit on the kitchen counter, encrusted with remnants of hot cereal; my mom’s clearly held grits, Michael’s cream of wheat. It touches me to think of them sharing this simple, pale breakfast. My mom has loved grits ever since we had them for the first time in Colonial Williamsburg when I was eight. She always buys boxes full of the instant packets to give to my sister, who can’t get them in Canada. She buys them for me, too, even though I can find them at any grocery store.

“We didn’t have a meal together,” she says, almost mournfully, as if this had been our last chance to break bread. “It feels funny to be here and not have a meal together.”

“Yeah,” I agree, hesitant to say anything else. When I get near her, words harden in my throat, get stuck there, like the grits I’ll have to clean out of the mug later, stubborn as crystals in a geode.

Her face is softer this morning, more open. In fact, she seems to be pouring love and compassion toward me out of her eyes. It makes me flinch.

“I really have a lot of work to do today,” I tell her and she looks predictably betrayed.

“I was thinking of going to my spiritual class, anyway,” she says, her features closing themselves off again. She attends classes given by Nancy Tappe, a woman who developed the concept of “Indigo Children” and has written such books as Understanding Your Life Through Color and Get the Message: What Your Car is Trying to Tell You. The latter talks about how cars are mirrors of our own “internal warning system”, what happens in our Hondas supposedly a metaphor for what’s happening in our souls. My own internal warning system is beeping now, red lights clanging inside me. Get her out, get her out, get her out now.

I call Michael as soon as my mom and her cushion leave. Hannah’s still asleep on the couch; once again, I haven’t been able to get her up for school. A truancy officer who goes by Sergeant Hammer came to the house a couple of weeks ago and threatened her with “Hammer Time”; she was freaked out when he was standing in our living room, but now she sees him as a joke. (And, really, how could she not?) She’s gone to class maybe a dozen times this semester; most of the time she’s here, sleeping during the day, on her computer all night. I console myself by telling myself it could be a lot worse: she could be running away, shooting up, getting pregnant. At least I know where she is.

“What happened after I went to bed?” I whisper into the phone.

I can hear him sigh. “She had me check her laptop for bugs,” he says.

This doesn’t seem so unusual at first. Part of his job is to check the computer system at UC Riverside for bugs; friends and family often use him as a free IT guy. But it soon becomes clear he means microphones, tracking devices, not computer viruses. “She keeps seeing pop.sbcglobal.yahoo.com inside her email, and she thinks it’s your dad hacking in. Pop, Papa.” Papa is what my dad’s grandkids call him, what I’ve taken to calling him, too, although my sister still calls him Daddy. “She didn’t believe me when I said it was the name of the server.”

She had other complaints: the computer in the clubhouse of her complex was not secure; my dad somehow got his name onto her internet account (Cox Communications denied this when she called); the producers she had hired from the local public television station were dropping The Art of Misdiagnosis from their slate. She showed Michael the email in question; all he saw was an exchange where she had accused them of dropping the project and they had replied by saying they had no idea what she was talking about.

In the morning, her accusations had become worse. She told Michael she was being drugged in her house, that she would fall asleep in weird places and wake up feeling disoriented and dizzy. She told him that she saw someone in the house next door walking around a dark room with a flashlight, sure he was spying on her. When she called the neighbor, he told her he was looking for a cricket, but she didn’t believe him. She thought her neighbor on the other side had been drilling through her floor to pump gas into her home. She thought the furnace was spewing gas. No wonder she didn’t want to sleep there.

“What should we do?” I ask, queasy. Her delusions hadn’t been this bad in years, if ever.

“The main thing you need to do right now is take care of yourself,” he says. “You’re sure she’s gone?”

“She went to her class in Carlsbad.” I try to take a deep breath, but my lungs are squashed by my enormous belly.

“Good,” he says. “Don’t let her come back.”