Book Review/The Sky Isn’t Visible From Here
The Sky Isn’t Visible From Here
Scenes from a Life
By Felicia C. Sullivan
Algonquin of Chapel Hill
Hardcover $23.95
By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review
Not since I read Jeannette Walls "The Glass Castle: A Memoir," have I read such a deep, meaningful memoir of a toubled childhood that led a strong individual to succeed beyond her wildest dreams. "The Sky Isn’t Visible From Here," is just such a memoir of the life struggle of Felicia C. Sullivan. The book itself won’t be published until February 2008, however I received an advance copy to allow this review and to interview the author.
In most of our lives, motherly love is an emotion taken for granted, but in Sullivan’s case, her mother chose cocaine over her daughter and seven years ago on the eve of Sullivan’s college graduation, her mother disappeared and hasn’t been seen or heard from in the ten years since. Sullivan had lived through a nightmare of her mother’s drug induced scenes, living in seedy apartments, scary men knocking on the door late at night demanding money and a series of substitute fathers.
Sullivan would escape this horror by reading. She was a dutiful daughter, who as a young child would make emergency cab runs to the hospital when her mother overdosed. When her mother vanished, Sullivan vowed not to look for her, but to invent a new life to hide her past. She became an asscoiate in an investment bank and told friends her mother had died.
This hidden life worked well until Sullivan herself began drinking and using drugs and her real life was unraveling. She saw herself becoming her mother, whose ghost was always lurking nearby.
She knew all the warning signs of addiction and because both her mother and her aunt, who died from an overdose of heroin, were addicts she was genetically predisposed to addiction.
When asked why she would begin that slippery slope, she said the short answer is she thought she was stronger. She finally admits that it was easier to deal with the pain. "I never adequately mourned the loss of my mother," she said. "For years I denied my upbringing and my life because I was ashamed."
She said as she grew older she would get a twinge of sadness when she heard friends talk about their meddling, overprotective mothers, "stalwart, loveable women who are now their very best friends. I would ache for that maternal figure."
She said her mother would never tell her who her biological father was and she would "always twist the truth in cruel ways." In the book she writes lovingly about Gus, one of the many men her mother lived with during Sullivan’s growing up years, so many that she said "I don’t even remember many of their last names."
Gus was very special to her as the man "I would come to call my father. He has been in my life since I was 12." In one part of the book she quotes him as saying this about her mother: "I loved her once, when she was normal. Or maybe she was never normal. Maybe I didn’t even know her. All I ever wanted was to live in a nice house. I wanted a family of my own."
Sullivan said writing the book was frustrating because "I was trying to render the most accurate portrayal of a life with my mother. I was constantly confused — caught between the memories my mother created and what actually happened. My mother was the ultimate liar, always manipulating the truth. I wrote the book and the events in my life as I remembered them."
The book, despite its horror story of a child literally abandoned, is beautifully written and Sullivan said "in one way or another, I’ve always written about my mother. When I was eight I published a haiku that likened my mother’s voice to thunder." Sullivan is a graduate of Columbia University and has stacks of credits for her writings and in 2001 she founded the critically acclaimed literary journal, "Small Spiral Notebook." She was born in Brooklyn, New York and still maintains her home there.
Sullivan said that through this painful memoir she feels she has finally let her mother go. "I wrote this book as a testament to my strength, as a celebration of my survival and recovery and to demonstrate that love — the most sacred of emotions — is not unconditional. I don’t forgive my mother for the choices she made but I now understand why she made them. As an addict your choice will always be the drug."
This memoir, as was Jeannette Wall’s memoir, is important to share because it is a story of survival and tells the reader that nightmare upbringings can sometimes make the individual stronger.
(Bill Duncan is the editor of The Senior Times. He also writes a weekly column on Opinion Page of The News-Review every Thursday.)