UNDER A DARK SKY: A FAMILY STORY
By Sharon Dunn
Texas Tech University Press
www.ttupress.org
In the late 1940s and the 1950s, Sharon Dunn grew up in an unconventional American family. At a time when women were expected to be mothers and housewives, Dunn’s psychiatrist mother, Gladys Ward-Dunn, was the clinical director of a state mental hospital, and her father, Gilbert Dunn, was home with his two young children.
As Dunn, a Leverett poet and former literary magazine editor, lays out in her family memoir and history, “Under a Dark Sky,” that setup was not a good one.
In an introduction, she writes: “I began this book wanting to find an answer to a single question: what made my father into the complex, unempathetic man I knew? He cast a deep shadow on my and my brother’s childhoods and on into our adulthood.”
Indeed, Dunn outlines a difficult youth in which she and her brother, Michael, and her mother were dominated by her bitter, acid-tongued father, who despite a promising background — he had been a social, athletic young man who served in World War II — became largely unemployed for years and took out his rage on his family.
While the family lived comfortably on the grounds of the New Hampshire State Hospital in Concord, in housing provided by the hospital, her mother’s demanding job and her father’s problems meant Dunn and her brother were often cared for during the day by unsuitable people, like some hospital patients.
“We had been looked after by mentally ill women,” Dunn writes, “by hired girls who were mean; our father whom we annoyed; and finally by Anna [a housekeeper], who spoke no English at first, and never well … what was my mother thinking?”
Well after her parents’ deaths, Dunn began researching their lives and those of her grandparents; she plumbed old letters, photographs and other family records to try to see where the young couple who had seemed happy when they first met in the late 1930s, before WWII interrupted their lives, later became so estranged.
In “Under a Dark Eye,” she also records how family strife affected her brother and her. She writes about the recurring nightmares and dark daytime visions she experienced as a girl. And she includes some original poems that recall her experiences and the people in her life.
In the end, Dunn’s memoir is about coming to terms with her past and forgiving her mother by realizing the extent of her burdens.
Understanding that, writes Dunn, “has made me forgive all her shortcomings … I find myself deeply moved by her valor, her persistence, and her compassion. I see how much love, friendship and society she had to forsake as she stayed in the marriage.”