Anonymity

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

How a mother and her daughters sustained the trauma of the 1983 death of 45-year-old Don Heche, husband and father, an early victim of AIDS, and how they coped with the discovery of his long-hidden homosexuality, is arrestingly told by poet and essayist Bergman, the eldest daughter, married and a mother of four. The prose narrative, often poetic in style, slips back and forth from childhood and family memories to young adulthood, eloquently reconstructing the father's duplicity and suffering and attempting to reconcile conflicting images of the devout family man, church music director, itinerant salesman and the gay lover denying his illness. As the mother turns to other men, and each daughter in her own way seeks to go on with her life, Bergman's comment, ``Recover from the lie, and you must heal from the truth,'' presages the story's disturbing ending. (Feb.)

Library Journal

When Don Heche died of AIDS in 1983 at the age of 45, he left behind a wife and three daughters. Struggling to make sense of her father's mysterious death (just three months after her brother died in an automobile accident), Susan becomes ``a tourist of my father's secrets.'' Questioning family and investigating her father's former friends, she discovers that behind his identity as a church-going family man was a closeted homosexual. Childhood memories, her understanding the pain of his double life, and her own anger at his dishonesty are among the elements she weaves into this rewrite of her family history. While Bergman's overwritten prose occasionally threatens to undermine the power of this haunting narrative, it is still strongly recommended for all collections.-- James E. Van Buskirk, San Francisco P.L.

Whitney Scott

Bergman's self-revelatory journey to understanding combines memoir and mystery. She weaves a tale of lies and intrigue revealed, intermixing past and present as she reconciles recent images of her impoverished, AIDS-ridden father--inviting her to lunch and pretending to have lost his wallet when the bill arrived--with the grandiose visions and purchases, power plays and business deals of his past, when nothing was too good for his wife and four daughters. For "it was not until my father died that we found out about his other life. Then our other lives began." Relentlessly, she tracks down the hidden side of this family man and church music director apparently ruled by strict, conservative religious beliefs. She writes with bewilderment, rage, and compassion as she relates a sister's eating disorder and her own secret infidelity to her dying father's double life and wonders whether closeted gays, "their immune systems already overtaxed by the exertion of living two lives in a single body," are more susceptible to AIDS. In writing of this "Mystery Man"--her father--she has reconstructed her family history in a brutal, provocative book.

Kirkus Reviews

An impressionistic memoir by Bergman, a poet, in which she "outs" her secretly gay father, dead of AIDS, and makes her own brave and painful decision to stop living a lie. The author grew up as Susan "Heche," one of four children in a picture-perfect, rigidly devout family. Her mother, who'd apparently married beneath her class—for reasons of love—cherished the illusion of a happy marriage and family in the face of mounting evidence of things seriously amiss. Bergman's father, Don Heche, son of the abusive owner of a bait-and-tackle shop, was a talented musician and a dreamer so detached from reality that he bankrupted his family by chasing one scam after another. He was also homosexual—a fact that he took great trouble to conceal from his wife and children until his terminal illness forced him to reveal it. In 1983, Heche was one of the first people to die of AIDS. The effect on his survivors was devastating: His only son ran his car into a tree and died; Bergman's mother and two sisters floundered in their grief, each in her own self-destructive way. Throughout her narrative, Bergman alone appears stable: marrying a man she loves; giving birth; working as a teacher. But in order to deceive others and protect herself, she says, she enveloped herself in multiple images, one over the other. For as she gradually reveals here, she's keeping her own dangerous secret—as if the sins of the father have been visited on the next generation—a secret that, if disclosed, may well destroy her world. Nevertheless, in the end, the urgent desire to live impels her to reveal it to her husband. Written in a densely poetic style with shifting chronology, Bergman's storysometimes seems overly elliptical—but, by its stunning end, it achieves a brilliant and cutting clarity.