Ethics of the Father

PW Talks with Janna Malamud Smith

by Sarah F. Gold -- Publishers Weekly, 1/23/2006

Your father, Bernard Malamud, was very protective of his privacy. How did it feel to you to reveal so much in My Father Is a Book [reviewed on p. 201]?

I felt relieved by getting to understand his past and making a coherent narrative for myself... The hard part was, I felt quite disloyal. My first book was about privacy, I'm a therapist, I respect people's privacy a lot. And even though I ended up making sure with my mother and brother that I had taken out things that were offensive to them... I worry that I'll, in some way, though she's 88, make my mother uncomfortable in a way I don't want to.

You read your father's private journals and correspondence. How did that feel?

In some ways it felt calmer than I would have anticipated. I say in the book that I had to laugh at myself, because in anticipating it, I had sensationalized it. And really, there was a lot that was mundane about it.... I think I was ready to know him as a person. I had waited long enough and had enough distance after his death that I was curious about him and [could] say, "Okay, who are you? What's your life about?"

It must have been particularly difficult to read his letters to the Bennington student who became his lover.

I had known about the affair and that the letters were there, so it wasn't a huge discovery. I think the one place I let myself be irritated was about how much less compulsive about [sharing] time he was with someone he was in love with than he was with the rest of us.

The whole question of parental sexuality is such a huge part of every adult child's life. Each of us has to make the transition somewhere between this idea of our parent as our parent and of our parent as a person who lived in the world and had feelings and conflicts and lust and all these other adult things.

There's an intriguing moment in your memoir when your father tells a sexual joke, then is mortified when he realizes you've overheard it.

I think there was a part of him that wanted to be not only perfect as a father but really wanted to cover over his sexuality as much as he could, possibly because it was preoccupying enough for him during his life that he thought that was the way to father. And I guess it is, isn't it?

Do you have any inclination to write fiction?

I don't think so. I've occasionally wondered, but I don't honestly think I could let myself into that realm without feeling like I had trod into his territory in a way I don't think I could do.