Life is just a shock to the system.
It turns out that the man I have spent 50 years believing to be my father is not my father.
It turns out that the man I have spent 50 years believing to be my father is not my father.
My mother lied to me about who my father is. My father is Bob Adelman, the photographer, who most famously caught Martin Luther King Jr. in profile having a dream on the Lincoln Memorial. You know the shot. You know many of Bob’s pictures. When they say something is iconic, they just mean everyone knows it. Bob was early for history.
I too chanced young upon the world. When my first book came out, I was 27 years old. Prozac Nation changed the way people see mental illness, and it changed the way publishers see memoirs. The New York Times Book Review called me “Sylvia Plath with the ego of Madonna.” I was a hashtag before there was Twitter.
My mother had an affair with Bob Adelman when she was working at Random House. I was born in 1967.
I knew Bob all of my life. When I was 4, Bob gave me a print of his photo of protesters being hosed down in Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. He gave the same shot to Martin Luther King, who was shocked “that beauty could come out of so much pain.”
I never found it remarkable that I had received such a sophisticated present when I was not yet in kindergarten. I got a lot of attention. My mother took me everywhere. I had table manners. I had big eyes and thick bangs. People played with my long chocolate hair. I was used to adults. I thought I was one of them.
I thought I was important. My mother says I was the center of attraction.
Bob Adelman’s adopted daughter, Samantha, was my playmate on the Upper West Side until we were 6, when she moved to Canada with her mother. There was that playground in Central Park at 97th Street with the monkey bars and chipped-paint yellow seesaw we loved.
We lived a block apart. Was that a coincidence?
Bob’s marriage split up when his wife found out he’d gotten another woman — my mother — pregnant. Did Bob’s ex-wife know I was his daughter when I went to her apartment for SpaghettiOs?
Bob was at my wedding in 2015. He gave me $5,000, which stunned me at the time, but now I see why: Bob is my father.
I reported Bob’s death to the New York Times.
It was March of 2016. Branka, his Serbian yoga-instructor girlfriend with blonde curls, called me crying right after he died. I emailed Trish Hall, op-ed editor at the paper, to make sure there would be an obituary. I told her Bob was the father of my childhood friend.
The first article I published, in Seventeen when I was 16, was about my father, Donald Wurtzel, the father I always knew.
My mother divorced him when I was 2. I saw him once a week, but eventually it was less than that.
Donald Wurtzel was not so much wrong for me as wrong for anyone. He relied on pills to get by. He was hard to reach.
He was not much of a father, and when I was 14, he disappeared — disconnected telephone.
His mother, my grandma Dorothy in Coney Island with plastic covers on the sofa and wing chairs, would not tell me where he was. She lived her life in linoleum. She was used to the brutal architecture of Trump Village, a lower-middle-class complex built by Fred Trump. Was she looking at the Cyclone when she told me he loved me?
My father and I never really reconnected. We tried, and eventually we stopped doing even that. When he died in 2014, I had not seen him since 2001.
I have been working out that relationship all of my life, in writing and therapy and conversation, with cocaine and heroin, with recovery and perseverance, and with my thoughts. I think so much. I can’t stop thinking. It’s all exposed. I don’t have a subconscious.
You can’t surprise me.
But this surprised me.
I have been working out the wrong problem.
Thousands of words on the wrong problem. I have perfected a two-handed backhand to clobber the lob that is coming at me that is: the wrong problem. I have aced the wrong problem.
I too chanced young upon the world. When my first book came out, I was 27 years old. Prozac Nation changed the way people see mental illness, and it changed the way publishers see memoirs. The New York Times Book Review called me “Sylvia Plath with the ego of Madonna.” I was a hashtag before there was Twitter.
My mother had an affair with Bob Adelman when she was working at Random House. I was born in 1967.I knew Bob all of my life. When I was 4, Bob gave me a print of his photo of protesters being hosed down in Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. He gave the same shot to Martin Luther King, who was shocked “that beauty could come out of so much pain.”
I never found it remarkable that I had received such a sophisticated present when I was not yet in kindergarten. I got a lot of attention. My mother took me everywhere. I had table manners. I had big eyes and thick bangs. People played with my long chocolate hair. I was used to adults. I thought I was one of them.
I thought I was important. My mother says I was the center of attraction.
Bob Adelman’s adopted daughter, Samantha, was my playmate on the Upper West Side until we were 6, when she moved to Canada with her mother. There was that playground in Central Park at 97th Street with the monkey bars and chipped-paint yellow seesaw we loved.
We lived a block apart. Was that a coincidence?
Bob’s marriage split up when his wife found out he’d gotten another woman — my mother — pregnant. Did Bob’s ex-wife know I was his daughter when I went to her apartment for SpaghettiOs?
Bob was at my wedding in 2015. He gave me $5,000, which stunned me at the time, but now I see why: Bob is my father.
I reported Bob’s death to the New York Times.
It was March of 2016. Branka, his Serbian yoga-instructor girlfriend with blonde curls, called me crying right after he died. I emailed Trish Hall, op-ed editor at the paper, to make sure there would be an obituary. I told her Bob was the father of my childhood friend.
The first article I published, in Seventeen when I was 16, was about my father, Donald Wurtzel, the father I always knew.
My mother divorced him when I was 2. I saw him once a week, but eventually it was less than that.
Donald Wurtzel was not so much wrong for me as wrong for anyone. He relied on pills to get by. He was hard to reach.
He was not much of a father, and when I was 14, he disappeared — disconnected telephone.
His mother, my grandma Dorothy in Coney Island with plastic covers on the sofa and wing chairs, would not tell me where he was. She lived her life in linoleum. She was used to the brutal architecture of Trump Village, a lower-middle-class complex built by Fred Trump. Was she looking at the Cyclone when she told me he loved me?
My father and I never really reconnected. We tried, and eventually we stopped doing even that. When he died in 2014, I had not seen him since 2001.
I have been working out that relationship all of my life, in writing and therapy and conversation, with cocaine and heroin, with recovery and perseverance, and with my thoughts. I think so much. I can’t stop thinking. It’s all exposed. I don’t have a subconscious.
You can’t surprise me.
But this surprised me.
I have been working out the wrong problem.
Thousands of words on the wrong problem. I have perfected a two-handed backhand to clobber the lob that is coming at me that is: the wrong problem. I have aced the wrong problem.
by Elizabeth Wurtzel, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Elizabeth Wurtzel
