THE POWER OF PARTING: Finding Peace and Freedom Through Family Estrangement, by Eamon Dolan
It was sometime during the bottomless scroll of quarantine that I started seeing the phrase “no contact” — not referring to social-distance measures but a drastic way to end relationships with nettlesome exes or even one’s parents. I found it even more chilling than the now canonical term “ghosting.”
With ghosts at least there’s a faint outline, perhaps a Casperish friendliness, the humorous possibility that they might reappear with a “Boo!” or get busted by a proton pack.
But “no contact”? Ever again? It seemed so punitive, so final, so cold.
And yet maybe the healthiest thing you could do for yourself, urges Eamon Dolan in his persuasive new book, “The Power of Parting.” This byline piqued my interest immediately. Dolan is not your typical self-help author, a clinician or celebrity — other than in the hothouse world of Manhattan publishing, where he has edited big best sellers including “Fast Food Nation” and Mary L. Trump’s tell-all about her Uncle Donald.
Indeed, he looked for professional writers to take on this subject before deciding with trepidation to do it himself, consulting psychologists, the thin research on estrangement (most of which focuses on reconciliation) and fellow survivors of ghastly upbringings.
Dolan’s childhood in the Bronx was Dickensian. His father, the eldest of 11, worked long hours at the phone company and was hardly around. He died at 63, “from cigarettes and, I now realize, sadness,” Dolan writes.
His mother, Teresa, emerges as a classic villain. “You only have one mother,” she’d tell him, and he’d mutter, “Thank God!”
She regularly pummeled Eamon and his two siblings with a long-handled wooden spoon, sometimes announcing with delight that these “beating sticks” were on sale at Key Food. She actually fed them cold gruel.
After 9-year-old Eamon pleaded to get XLerator racing cars for Christmas, she gave him an accordion cruelly housed in an XLerator-sized box, then shamed him for not being grateful and demanded he learn to play the instrument for visitors. Heat and hot water were strictly rationed in the Dolan home; in adulthood, a proper shower is among the six pleasures he’s able to name after his therapist requests a list of 10.
Dolan grew up to be hypervigilant; when good things happen to him, he gets a kind of vertigo. Seeing a “You’ve got this!” sign when running in the park, he thinks, endearingly: “Whatever ‘this’ is, I haven’t got it.”
When he decided to major in English literature at his top-choice college, his mother scoffed that it was useless: “What are you going to do with that? Open an English store”; now he thinks, “Yeah, bitch. That’s exactly what I did.” (Making a living publishing books is absolutely a triumph, and yet I was surprised to find this deeply literate man relying so heavily on jargon du jour like “toxic,” “gaslight,” “boundaries” and “late capitalism.”)
Dolan’s beloved brother and ally, Tommy, made scapegoat of the family, died in a car crash in 1999. After Teresa succumbed to Covid in 2020, his sister, Gerry, proclaimed, “Ding, dong, the witch is dead!” and they laughed. But the matriarch had been disappeared from his life long before that, after violating his carefully set-out rules for engagement. The liberation he felt after cutting her off was — what’s the opposite of intoxicating? Purifying.
Dolan is a dad and husband himself. But he argues that Christianity has glorified the nuclear family to an unhealthy extent, given how many tormentors, statistically, are close relations, and implores for community safeguards. “None of us should be imprisoned by the cosmic lottery that placed us in an abusive home,” he writes.
He points out that “the only legal form of assault in any American state is” — incredibly — “hitting your child.” Gen Xers with their latchkeys and rusty bicycles mock today’s trend of “gentle parenting” but “The Power of Parting” reminds that the norms of yesteryear were harsh to the point of harm, ignored by institutions and normalized in pop culture. Archie Bunker nicknamed his son-in-law Meathead; the Dolan kids were regularly called Amadan — “Irish for ‘fool.’”
In the absence of sufficient atonement for such trespasses, Dolan suggests, forgiveness is overrated and in some cases “see ya wouldn’t want to be ya” is exactly what the doctor should order. One adult child, visiting her brain-dead father after 15 years of not talking to him, resumed contact with a bang. “I punched him in the arm!” she tells Dolan. “I dug my fingers into his skin at one point.”
“The Power of Parting” is an intellectually rigorous manifesto, a green light for reasonable limits that sometimes, with gleeful blunt force, flares red.
THE POWER OF PARTING: Finding Peace and Freedom Through Family Estrangement | By Eamon Dolan | Putnam | 304 pp. | $30
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010. More about Alexandra Jacobs
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