Correspondence

“I’m not going to read The Sun anymore,” Eleanore said. “It’s all about death. It goes straight into the trash can.”

It had been several years since I’d read The Sun, because I didn’t have the money for a subscription. Yes, I thought, Sy Safransky uses his magazine to talk about death — and illness, and dysfunction — but he also breaks through the sad and ugly human experiences and celebrates the uplifting ones.

Since then, I’ve read several issues. Eleanore is right. The Sun seems to have accepted the perspective that life is sad, heavy, and hard, and contains little joy or laughter.

The writing in The Sun is good. The topics the magazine deals with are real. They need to be written about. But we also need celebration, especially when we are deep in consideration of the negative, the somber, the deadly serious. With each new issue, I read less of the magazine. I skim through looking for something positive. So far, I haven’t found much.

I’ll keep looking and hoping, because I know The Sun used to include celebration, humor, and joy in what it published. It could happen again. But if the magazine continues heading in its present direction, I will give up and, like my friend, consign it to the trash.

I’ve been patient with you for too long, Sy. We all have: Repeatedly being suckered into reading one long sorrowful tale after another. Hoping against hope that maybe a single ray of light will somehow squeeze through the brooding storm clouds that hang over each of The Sun’s terminally ill stories. Willingly suspending our disbelief through too many narratives by unappreciated single mothers who’ve been unfairly rejected by every wretched man they’ve ever met; whose drug-dependent adolescent sons unwittingly reincarnate the worst aspects of their absent fathers; whose eternally anorexic daughters act out the shadow side of their alcoholic grandmothers; whose thankless dying mothers lie in fetal dementia on the faded green couch as greedy cancer eats them alive and the endless traffic racket engulfs their miserable brick tenement, and the curtain comes down.

Perhaps you’ve secretly discovered a way to keep The Sun in business by fostering a co-dependent relationship with a readership of trauma survivors. But even if you rationalize your magazine as a support group for the staggeringly wounded, you are nevertheless obligated by basic human decency to offer, every once in a while, the possibility of hope. Even on the most Thorazine-soaked mental ward, the attendant occasionally pulls back the heavy canvas blinds. You’ve been inflicting your own repressed anger and sorrow on us long enough. Isn’t it time you showed us a little joy? Have you forgotten that even with the overwhelming sadness in the world, we are still the recipients of infinite blessings?

I think it’s unfortunate that because The Sun of late makes her feel depressed, Patricia Kay concludes that the magazine is inherently depressing [Correspondence, June 1999]. We all respond to literature in different ways. I’ve struggled with clinical depression for the last several years, and more often than not, literature portraying sadness, struggle, and hopelessness has brought me comfort and actually given me hope. Such literature grants me perspective on my own despair and helps me to face my demons, rather than be swallowed by them. When I refuse to let something sad reach me, it is often because I am avoiding the mire within.

I don’t mean to imply that Kay is avoiding her demons, only that her getting depressed when she reads The Sun means just one thing: that she gets depressed reading The Sun.

I think readers who complain that the stories in The Sun deal too much with the dark side of life are missing the point. For me, the important part of these stories is not the evil or the sorrow they describe, but what Ira Glass called the “transformational moment” [“Escaping the Box,” June 1999]. And these transformational moments do not involve miraculous recoveries or answers or cures. Such “inspirational” fare can ultimately be more discouraging than inspiring if it feels too removed from one’s own experience. Instead, the transformational moments in The Sun show how individuals begin to see more clearly and to recognize and accept the truth of what is happening to them.

I have had moments like that in my own life, but I find that the lessons I learn seldom retain their freshness. For those lessons to stay with me on an emotional level, I need to relearn them over and over. This is why I continue to read The Sun. Its stories help recreate the moments when we see with clarity the complicated texture of our lives. They don’t necessarily show people changing the world, or inspire me to rush out and change it myself. But they do describe people who, if nothing else, for a moment see the world clearly, and for me that makes a difference.

I have been trying for quite some time to puzzle out the melancholy soul of The Sun. I find myself equally fascinated and irritated by the continuing litany of small American lives lived in back lots and honky-tonks, dime stores and abandoned pastures. Why does Sy Safransky choose these stories of marginal Americans, often brought low by booze, or the aftermath of war, or just being the crazy kid on the block; always ducking their heads below the horizon of hope; allowed only occasional ecstasy, spurts of joy in the middle of the junkyard, angry pride, captive creativity, anesthetic sex? What is forbidden about sustained happiness? Are success stories allowed without the morbid punchline “And then you get cancer”? These painful lives are not a source of essential truth. There is no exclusive insight in the province of suffering.

Then I read the Readers Write on “Fathers and Sons” June 1999], and I got it. So many of the stories in The Sun seem to come from individuals whose early lives were stolen by their fathers. But these fathers are not just ignorant louts who can speak only with their fists. No, they are the little men with big dreams, the charmers talented at talking women who should know better into bed, the singing cowboys always on the road, the Abrahams who sacrifice their sons for the fathers they lost in the Holocaust.

I know this territory. I have lived it and have done my best to leave it behind. I’m not suggesting we forget it or ignore its harsh stories. But I have forbidden myself to live in a landscape of despair.

Every couple of years I get excited about The Sun again and subscribe . . . but I never renew. The Readers Write on “Fathers and Sons” reminded me why. The Sun is a brave, courageous, extremely well-done magazine. I can appreciate and admire its individual stories, no matter how depressing. But the overall diet is just too heavy with sorrow. Not every father is alcoholic or abusive or both, as it seemed was the case in “Fathers and Sons”: prison, drugs, broken noses, insults, neglect. Woe are we, brothers! Woe are we!

Please, lighten up. Pain is real; I’m not trying to deny it. But so are joy, contentment, amusement. Some of us even like to laugh at times. Laughter is one of the best ways to cope with the world’s — and our own — shortcomings. Maybe some humor would help balance The Sun’s perspective.

I have a friend who has a friend who knows someone who says his father was a decent fellow. After reading the Readers Write on “Fathers and Sons,” I have come to the conclusion that my friend’s information must be spurious.

What a cacophony of emotions the Readers Write on “Fathers and Sons” has evoked. As a son, I feel relief that my father never did anything nearly as harmful as what most of the writers described. As a father, I am glad that I was a better parent than my own father was. As a husband, I wonder why any woman would want to live with a man who terrorizes innocent children. As a psychologist, I still do not understand how anyone can do to another human being what so many fathers have done to their sons. And as a male, I am ashamed.

What is wrong with us that when a magazine asks people to write on the subject of fathers and sons, most of the responses reveal broken bodies, broken minds, or broken souls?

Thank you for your Readers Write on “Fathers and Sons.” It was just what I needed right now as I grapple with the question of whether and how to speak to my father about his sexual abuse of me. It seems to me that only by telling him my side of the story can there be any hope of healing the rift between us. I am waiting for the right moment, but I don’t want to wait too long: he was recently diagnosed with cancer, and time is running out.

I look to The Sun as a place where difficult issues are regularly addressed. So I was surprised and disappointed by the complete lack of stories about sexual abuse in the June Readers Write section. Is it possible that no one sent you any decent material on incest? Or is the subject taboo even for you?

It is 1:10 A.M., and I have just finished the Readers Write on “Fathers and Sons.” I feel a combination of horror, sorrow, and gratitude. I have never been so fully aware of the deep love and respect I feel for my father as I am at this moment. As I took in these stories of pain, I searched my memory for similar experiences so that I might sympathize. But all my thoughts were phantoms compared to the graphic tales I read.

I will never again think of my father in the same way. Despite his foibles, his poor choice of a wife, and his almost total disconnection from his feelings, I love him and know that he loves me. Before he got sick, he would demonstrate his love to me often. I miss the Dad I once knew and wish I could trade the shell he has become for that living man, just for one minute.