The Known, The Secret, The Forgotten: A Memoir

As the (outgoing) Book Review Editor of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, I received an advance copy of this book. Although others generously offered to review it, despite my being engaged in an energy-draining struggle with a potentially life-threatening illness, I was so taken with it that I chose to review it myself.

Joan Wheelis painfully informs us in her touching and moving Memoir that she intensely misses her psychiatrist-psychoanalyst parents, who have shed their mortal coil and gone to that bourne from which no traveler has returned. They remain with her only as prized tendrils of symbolic linkage with them. One is a battered, old linen doily reading “Daisies Don’t tell,” the name of a song to which Joan imagines her paternal grandparents danced at their wedding. The framed doily was lovingly made by her grandmother and passed on down. Significantly, her father, with whom she had been extremely close, had given it to her. Another is the house on Puget Sound where she and her parents had summered during her childhood and adolescence.

But wait! Another tendril takes the form of a recurrent nightmare in which a flash fire has burnt down the house. In the dream, Joan searches desperately for the two boxes containing her parents’ ashes, all she has left of them, which had been in the house. Miraculously, she finds them lying on the ground outside of the charred remains of the shore house which she had loved so much. In reality, she has the house—but not the parents she had loved so much. Yet another is a little poem her father had written about time gradually whittling away life’s precious dreams.

Joan loved her father fiercely, although he could be brusque and even harsh. For example, he swept away the romantic, spiritual dreams she shared with him of endless, life-after-death togetherness with him

that would transcend our human mortality, by giving her a hard-headed, scientific lecture about death as a final and inexorable ending. In an early chapter of the Memoir