The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 16 March 2008
by Clane Hayward
"That which does not kill me, makes me stronger," is famously paraphrased at the opening of Conan, the Barbarian, and quoted and misquoted and parodied. It might make a fair epigraph for this memoir. There are people who believe that being tough on their kids better prepares the kids for life in a tough world. People who are abusive or just neglectful end up feeling a perverse satisfaction and misplaced pride in their kids when they grow up tough in a tough world. They think they've done a great job. If the kids survive, that is. It is a pretty hard world for a child to grow up in, even in America, where childhood is culturally prized but poorly nurtured. During the late sixties, young people experimented with alternative lifestyles and often tried to bring up their kids in a way that suited their ideals of absolute freedom. They might have decided that kids were better prepared to look after their own needs than has ever been the case. Rebelling against the strictures of their upbringing in the 50s and early 60s, many hippies ended up on the other extreme and were outright neglectful of their children.
You can read anything you want into this disastrous trend, but child neglect is certainly not exclusive to hippie rebels and certainly hasn't gone away since the end of the 60s, or the 70s, or the 80s. Clane Hayward, the resilient author of this bitter memoir, is just such a survivor. The book opens when she is living with her mother in a ragged shack along California's Russian River. It is a stunningly beautiful place to grow up, but that's not the memory Hayward shares with us. Mom is never referred to as Mom. She is H'lane, a woman with hippie ideals late into the 70s, when the movement itself was already shifting to something else. H'lane is extremely devoted to her version of a macrobiotic diet and while allowing her three children to do just about anything they want, she strictly controls what they eat. The kids end up becoming obsessed with food. They can probably only barely survive on groats, brown rice and tofu. We find Clane digging in garbage cans for uneaten cookies and pocketing food from her schoolmates. Clane and her siblings barely ever go to school, for that matter. They are wild children, struggling to survive while H'lane looks for spiritual fulfillment in seemingly random decisions that drag her kids through one hardship after another. Flooded out of their shack, they live in the woods, an empty field, an abandoned ranch, and beyond the end of a road in the Sierra. Clane clings to her young sister, Ki, her one deep attachment. She protects Ki from their mother's neglect. Finally, though, Clane and her brother Haud are sent to live with their father in the New Mexico desert. Dad isn't on some flaky spiritual search, but he's just as absent, allowing his friends and neighbors to raise his kids for him. They live in another filthy shack, and become more feral as time goes on. Dad's brothers finally rescue the kids and take them to grandma's house in Las Vegas. There, after years of neglect, the kids finally encounter something close to a normal life. It is hard to say what Hayward feels about this phase of her childhood. She was deeply bitter about her mother's neglect and constant appeal to weird ideals that just don't work for kids. She likes grandma Lore's sense of order and cleanliness, the access to almost any food, even the junior high school despite feeling out of place there. It is hard to say if this slice of middle America is Clane's salvation, refuge, or just another extreme of her broken existence. Hayward's story is pretty bleak in the opening chapters, kids desperate for some decent food and puzzled by H'lane's strictures. She writes, however, with a powerful immediacy. We're more in the head of a little girl than in that of an adult in the act of reflection. The story seems hopeless, and the reader finds himself looking for glimmers of hope, or at least what it was in her childhood that sparked any affection or joy. That seems to have been young Ki. Understandably, Clane is dismissive of H'lane's hippie trappings, but we get the sense that grandma's glittering house in Las Vegas isn't really home, either. Hippie kids often end up desperately seeking the order they didn't have in their childhood. Hayward isn't much different, eventually enlisting in the navy. Her memoir, bleak as it often is, is also compelling and written with grit and immediacy. She might not find an explanation for her parents' neglect, but the portraits she paints are familiar and biting. Powerful reading.