Anonymity
by Susan Bergman
Interweaving
childhood reminiscences with poignant meditations on the impact of
grief and tragedy, a daughter details her father's 1983 death from
AIDS and her family's struggle to cope with his death and his
heretofore unrevealed homosexual life.
Bergman's
self-revelatory journey to understanding combines memoir and
mystery. She weaves a tale of lies and intrigue revealed,
intermixing past and present as she reconciles recent images of
her impoverished, AIDS-ridden father--inviting her to lunch and
pretending to have lost his wallet when the bill arrived--with the
grandiose visions and purchases, power plays and business deals of
his past, when nothing was too good for his wife and four
daughters. For "it was not until my father died that we found
out about his other life. Then our other lives began."
Relentlessly, she tracks down the hidden side of this family man
and church music director apparently ruled by strict, conservative
religious beliefs. She writes with bewilderment, rage, and
compassion as she relates a sister's eating disorder and her own
secret infidelity to her dying father's double life and wonders
whether closeted gays, "their immune systems already
overtaxed by the exertion of living two lives in a single
body," are more susceptible to AIDS. In writing of this
"Mystery Man"--her father--she has reconstructed her
family history in a brutal, provocative book. Whitney Scott
