Errand into his own maze
Matthew Quick’s novel ‘The Silver Linings Playbook was a bestseller and the movie adaptation with Bradley Cooper was a hit. The protagonist in the story resembling the author. Quick followed up with eight more novels, including another bestseller ‘We Are the Light.’ He and his wife Alicia Bessette Quick, herself a successful author, were happily married and things seemingly couldn’t be better.
But as he reveals in his memoir ‘Dad, Love, Me’ Matthew was struggling with a number of personal issues including alcoholism, panic-attacks, depression and bouts of writer’s block. He suspected that a root cause of his problems were his lifelong adversarial relationship with his father Michael.
Problems stemming from his encounters with his father became so hostile to them on visits, that the couple limited their visits to his parents.
As his father aged, he starting showing signs of memory loss and the onset of dementia and Quick decided to try to seek ways to repair their relationship. Quick’s father He wants to write the memoir in real time to document their final years together, encompassing the past and the present state of their relationship. Quick writes “Dad, even when parts of me hated you, I never quit studying you
First, he put his doubts about seeking solutions through therapy, but reluctantly changed his mind during the Covid-19 shut down, finding a therapist who agreed to virtual visit sessions. The memoir is told through the real-time lens of Quick going through psychoanalytic therapy sessions over the course of three years with virtual visits with the therapist he calls ‘Zeus’ in the book, who is a proponent of Carl Jung’s theories and his own treatment methods. His doubts about the therapist and his methods seemed to be confirmed at the outset, but he continued on.
The initial sessions are not encouraging, Zeus questions and comments strike him as obtuse, irrelevant and useless. Several sessions in, he can’t control his frustration and even anger with Zeus. The revelatory doors started to open.
Zeus abstractly instructs Matthew to continue to do ‘the work’ which involved dredging up and objectively evaluating his traumatic memories of his interactions with his father. As a teen he continued to try to live up to his father’s demands, the effort was never enough and even though his mother repeatedly tried to assure him that his father loved him, his lived experience convinced him otherwise. Eventually he chose to distance himself. His father was also outright rude to Alicia, ignoring her presence. That all remarkably changed as his health declined.
The portrait of his father in the throes of physical and mental decline does at some point break through to episodes of interaction where his father is for the first time expresses his bond with his son. He even has fragments of recovered memories of his son as a child, and he now is able to show his emotions that reveal his heart, humanity and love toward his son through the brutal confusion of his disease.
At one point, Quick recalls, his father even references how strict and domineering his own father was. Out of the blue, in more and more mental decline, his father started expressing deep regrets of how he raised his own son.
Throughout, his North Star is obviously Alicia. Her love is his emotional oasis and her objectivity and thoughtful advice inspires. To continue to use every opportunity to reconcile and be with his father at this critical time, Matthew and Alicia moved close to his parents to help. Once, during this iffy reunion, his father even acknowledged and expressed love toward Alicia. Quick is revelatory about his struggles with his past, and, reluctantly, the present, with his therapist’ s methods helping him work through some bitter self-truths. Quick sincerity and bluntness over his past never gets self-pitying or maudlin. In fact there is much self-effacing humor throughout the book. His honest portrayal of his father and what he does to resolve and rekindle his once shattered relationship is moving, forgiving and instructive to us all.
