“Look, Moll, this is a hearing problem,” Ken said. I had spent so many years arguing with him about what reality was and what reality wasn’t, and each time he would tell me my reality was wrong and his was right. I hated arguing. I hated it. “She just needs hearing aids.”
“Ken,” I said. “This has nothing to do with hearing. She has dementia.”
“Ah, Moll,” he said. “You know she’s just thinking of her next book.”
But Mom hadn’t written a book in a long time. The last thing she’d published was a book of poetry with a publisher that seemed like a vanity press. They had asked her for a donation. I’m not an economist or anything, but I think the publisher is supposed to pay the author.
And suddenly I was 13 again, begging my stepfather to get my mother to stop taking diet pills, or to have her slow down on the drinking. Everyone told me I was crazy in that case too. They would tell me that my mom didn’t drink too much; she was just tired. She was just passed out on the bed, eye makeup smeared all over her face, lipstick everywhere.
She was just working on another book. She was just under a lot of pressure. Ken would inevitably declare, “Once she gets her book done, then she’ll be back to normal.” Thirty years later, and I was having the exact same conversation with him. But this time, at 44, I finally knew my reality was right and his was wrong.
There was no book. There would never be another book. Her Last Tycoon, her swan song, was to be an autobiography called Selfie. She had gotten the idea that Selfie was a good title because, at a memorial service for a friend, she had run into David Remnick, the editor in chief of The New Yorker. She had told Remnick the title, and she had decided he had liked it. It was not completely clear if this had actually happened, or happened in the way my mom was reporting it, but it didn’t matter. That was her version of the story. It was always her version of the story.
“I think she’s fine,” Ken said calmly.
One of the interesting things was that you could say anything to my mom and stepdad, like anything, and they wouldn’t get mad at you. Ken did love fighting, but part of the reason he loved it was because he never got really angry.
I told him that this was bordering on insane. I told him that everyone could see what was happening here.
“She wrote ‘neat’ on someone’s Instagram post about her dead father. Like, ‘Gee whiz, that’s so neat that your father died.’ ”
“Eh,” Ken said.
That was one of the many baffling things about both of them—when presented with evidence that perhaps they were wrong, they would just ignore the evidence and continue on their merry way. This habit of theirs always made me feel insane.
