Meredith Maran published her first poem in Highlights For Kids at age six, her first national magazine article at age fifteen, and her first book at age eighteen. In the years that followed she built a house and raised goats outside Taos, lived with the cast of Hair in London, and installed brakes and union consciousness on the Ford assembly line in San Jose.
During the 1980s and 1990s, a sex-abuse panic spread across the country, beginning with the infamous McMartin preschool trial. Tens of thousands of Americans became convinced that they’d repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, and then recovered those memories in therapy. Maran was among them. She accused her father of sexual abuse and then eight years later she realized that he was innocent. Her new book My Lie: A True Story of False Memory is a raw and self-revealing account of the events of those years and the outcomes for her family and herself.
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The Rumpus: Firstly, I’d like to know—what do you most want to be asked about this book?
Meredith Maran: The connection between the brainwashing of Meredith Maran and the brainwashing of the American public. I started working on the book when the 2008 presidential campaign was unfolding. Even before the Birthers we were hearing about Obama being a socialist and palling around with terrorists. So the book’s greatest import, in my mind, is to examine where beliefs come from and how dangerous it is to manipulate the public consciousness for political, material or religious goals.
Rumpus: You did a good job of conveying, in My Lie, how the media hysteria ramped up and took hold of the public’s imagination. It seems clear from your book that the field of therapy and also the feminist movement of the time were driving forces behind that momentum. What are your feelings about both now?
Maran: I was a therapy consumer for the greater portion of my life. My parents took me to a psychiatrist at four or five and again at thirteen. I went against my will these first few times, then took a break until my marital, monogamy, motherhood, mortgage years. I never missed it. But then when my marriage was falling apart and I wanted to do something about it, the resources were very limited. We don’t have wise village elders or shamen—or even really good drugs. We just have one thing, and that’s therapy. Obviously, I think wounds that are drained heal better then ones that aren’t. But we have very little, as a culture, to avail ourselves of when something goes wrong.
So, that’s a way of saying that I hope never to go to therapy again. I have had personal challenges, relationship challenges since I quit therapy, but none of them has quite driven me round the therapeutic bend just yet.
Rumpus: And you also implicate the feminist movement of the day.
Maran: Definitely. But it’s not a ‘they’ I blame; it’s a ‘we’. In the early ‘80s I edited a book for a feminist researcher whose study showed that one in three American women had been sexually abused in childhood. After that, I felt like a missionary—an evangelist shining a light on the truth about incest. So, I am fully responsible for the feminist piece of it and the journalistic piece of it.
Most of the feminists had been in the anti-domestic violence and Take Back The Night movements. And where would we be without that? Well, we’d be a lot more raped on campuses and more women would be dying from domestic violence. So that was a good thing. I know very few social movements that have ever gone from A to Z without a big mess of excess in between, and I think that’s a lot of what this was. I’m very glad that my kids got, ‘if anybody does anything to you that doesn’t feel good, tell somebody’ training in school. I’m glad my sons know that it’s not ok to have orgasms and not care if the woman they are having sex with is having one (or more) also. All these things came out of the feminist movement. And I think that the net effect of the whole mass panic was that we saved a lot of lives, and a lot of kids who wouldn’t have been believed were being believed. So, it’s that messy grey area: it’s not satisfyingly right or wrong.
Rumpus: The achievements of the feminist movement of that era were incredibly important. And yet, it lost its way quite dramatically over this issue of recovered memory and child sex abuse.
Maran: I was a feminist in Berkeley in the early 70s and then became a Marxist-Leninist factory organizer in the mid 70s. I worked at the Berkeley Womens’ Health Collective and the Berkeley-Oakland Womens’ Union, and vibe was definitely ‘us against them’. In the anti child sexual abuse movement, in the beginning, I was surrounded by people who felt very isolated – the researchers, professors, therapists who were sounding a warning but no one believed us. It added fuel to the fire of our evangelism. This is the essence of fundamentalism: when you set yourself up in this dynamic—where only you and your colleagues know the ‘truth’— that is some dangerous shit.
Rumpus: On a more personal level, in the book you very publicly about-face on these very strong convictions that you had. You speak candidly about the repercussions for your family. You don’t spare yourself or your public image. I wanted to acknowledge your humility and willingness to put it all out there.
Maran: Well, before we make me a hero… I interviewed a lot of people who had been falsely accused back then and almost universally they told me that I needed to understand that I was a victim of this too and not to be so hard on myself. I appreciate the generosity in that but I reject the argument. I’m a big girl, and as an activist I can’t have it both ways. I can’t say that each of us has to make our own decisions about what we believe is right and wrong and act on them—and then say “Oh, I was a victim of mass hysteria.”
Rumpus: But you’re human, Meredith. You even mention the Salem witch hunts in the beginning of your book, so you obviously understand the power of mass hysteria.
Maran: Right, and when I ask myself ‘how did this happen to me and to so many other people?’ I have to find a balance between taking responsibility and making clear what I’ve always tried to get across in my work: that the personal is political, the political is personal and that nothing happens in a vacuum.
If there had been nothing in the news, if my friends, my lover, pretty much everyone I knew wasn’t on the same hunt, if there wasn’t a huge incest recovery industry all around me that was profiting in many ways, some of it very well intentioned; some not so much, would I have accused my father? I think the answer is no. At the same time, if I were as strong a person, as independent and critical a thinker as I’ve always liked to believe I am, could I have been convinced for eight years that something that never happened to me, happened? I don’t think so.
Rumpus: Your entire community created a structure that made it too easy for you to believe what you did.
Maran: I think it takes a perfect storm. And there were a lot of thirty-something, middle class, mostly white, well-educated women running around with a very similar perfect storm waiting to happen. They were schooled in feminism: they understood their childhoods to be steeped in misogyny and that their mothers didn’t have the lives that they wanted. They knew that their fathers had taken power from them, denied them the education their brothers got, or dismissed them or flirted with them—whatever form that misogyny took. We were psychological powder kegs waiting to explode—and feminism lit a match. But that doesn’t absolve me. I wont speak for anyone else, but for me it was a very simple diagnosis of a very complicated problem. And where human beings are concerned, unfortunately, simplicity rarely cuts it.
8 responses
The mass hysteria angle in this reminds me of the Bush campaign leading up to the current war in Iraq. Mass media and a huge majority of the U.S. population believed the li(n)es about WMD’s, uranium from Niger, mobile weapons labs, the Saddam-Osama friendship, the Saddam connection to 9/11 — all of which were fabricated by the Administration. Even when Bush finally came out and admitted that Saddam had no connect to 9/11, as I recall, 50% of those polled still believed it was true. That’s a powerful statement about media manipulation and mass hysteria.
I agree with Maran – she is responsible for her own mistakes – and now she has not just discredited her father and herself, but also given a bit more weight to the theory that women are just ‘making up’ their memories of sexual abuse. The more this theory gains ground, the more real cases of incest and abuse are questioned and the whole subject thrown into the shadows all over again. We have made a lot of progress on this issue, and the ‘false memory’ people are eroding that success. It is a classic reactionary backlash to progressive political advance. ‘False memory’ can now credibly be used as a defence by any accused molester. It is a sad twist in an already twisted plot. I hope victims of child abuse will not be intimidated by it and will continue to speak out.
The backlash had begun when I first attempted to deal with my memories of being abused and because I was so afraid of being accused of “making it up” – I didn’t deal with it. I delayed getting any therapy for ten years! I pretty much had to have a complete breakdown before I was able to admit that something had happened to me. I’d always had bits of memories, and the process of filling them in was soul-wrenching.
I may have to read this book just so I can find out how the author dealt with all this stuff.
Hey sally king, you make a valid and important point and I’d like to speak to it. One part of the interview that didn’t make it into the final edit had Meredith expressing the concern that her book might be seen to invalidate those many authentic claims of sexual abuse, so please know that she is keenly aware that her book will provoke these concerns. I felt, after reading her book, that she takes care to validate those whose abuse was real and also very much speaks for herself in the book. She revises her own history – not everybody else’s.
I’m very well acquainted with someone who was (and technically still is being) falsely accused of abusing a family member, and the real kicker is exactly what sally king brought up– that we have other family members who really WERE abused by someone ELSE in the family, and that this false accusation throws the entire issue into question in a weird way.
Being the victim of sexual abuse is hideous. Being accused of doing something horrific that you haven’t done is just as hideous. Denying that falsehoods and false memories exist, and writing off the people who have gone through that end of the process as merely reactionary is as wrongheaded as writing off victims of sexual abuse. Let’s strike a balance here.
The fact that evidence in abuse cases is usually hearsay makes the whole issue problematic for both sides. But victims struggle with some formidable disadvantages to begin with. They were children when the abuse took place, which tends to disarticulate them at the time – they must carefully find their words later in life; trauma can compartmentalize memory into accessible and inaccessible pockets which shift over time; they are emotionally wounded and therefore not as practiced in the art of presenting a coherent self as molesters; and molesters themselves are pathologically expert manipulators of the truth. All these factors feed into the counter-accusation that the victim is just ‘confused’ or making up memories. I don’t doubt that being accused wrongly is hell. But true molesters use the false memory theory to defend themselves, and convince those close to them that they are innocent. The history of this issue, such as it is, is littered with abusers’ denial. Denial might even be the cornerstone of their entire patholgy. False Memory theory dovetails so neatly with this it becomes a weapon molesters were virtually born to use.
Maran says that what happened to her happened to “tens of thousands of other people.â€
She cites that on p. 206 of her book. It’s from her interview with Pamela Freyd. Freyd says, “It was a runaway movement, and it happened to tens of thousands.†(p. 206)
Freyd’s husband, Peter, was accused by their daughter in 1990. Not mentioned in the book is that Peter was hospitalized for alcoholism in 1981. He was also molested as a child by a local artist. “He was a pedophile, I was a kept boy,†(p. 151) Peter said in a 1994 interview in “Philadelphia.â€
The Freyds co-founded the False Memory Syndrome Foundation in 1992. To date, they have presented no survey data supporting “tens of thousands.†.
The question is when did the “brainwashing” occur. In the 1980’s and early 1990’s, child abuse survivors and children that were abused were being believed and heard. Comparing this empowerment movement to the “Salem Witch Hunts” is pure propaganda.
There was no panic. Many of the child abuse cases from this era had convictions that have been upheld to this day. The jury itself believed that the McMartin children had been abused and tunnels were found that backed the children’s stories.
Maran never had any real detailed memories of abuse, like most child abuse survivors had. A fairly high percentage of child abuse recovered memories have been corroborated by evidence, court cases or others.
Maran is a retractor. How do we know she is telling the truth now if she didn’t before?
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