NONFICTION
“Bettyville”
George Hodgman
Viking, $27.95, 288 pages
“Turns out I am a person who needs people,” writes George Hodgman, of his decision to move in with his elderly mother after losing his job. “I hate that.”
The Streisand reference is just a hint of the sly fun to come in Hodgman’s new memoir, “Bettyville,” which begins when he trades his adopted home, Manhattan, for rinky-dink Paris, Missouri (“population 1,246 and falling”), in order to care for 90-year-old Betty.
Hodgman’s original plan is to return to NYC as soon as his mother’s caregiver recovers from surgery. But Betty — the kind of rebel mom who once gunned her blue Impala to breakneck speed, blared pop songs and called her son “little demon” — doesn’t want to be alone either.
Despite warnings from friends that a prolonged absence could jeopardize his future in publishing, the former Vanity Fair/Simon & Schuster editor settles in, reluctant but determined: He’s going to take care of Betty whether she likes it or not.
“She has been my rock, and I am convinced that, at some level, she had survived to give me — a gay man whose life she has never understood — a place to call home.”
The two of them turn out to be surprisingly ideal roommates — after all, he is “Betty’s boy.” They are both moody, “nervous characters.” He learned his snappy wit, sarcasm and love of gossip at her knee. They watch “Wheel of Fortune” together, “a show we despise so avidly we cannot ever miss it.” Neither of them ever feel they got it right, as mother or son.
But trouble looms. For one, Betty has never accepted the fact that Hodgman is gay and is in no hurry to start now. Two, despite increasing dementia, her fiercely independent spirit is at odds with her need to have her son close at hand.
Deeply attuned to the way his mother’s memory is disappearing piece by piece — “I am a loner but I hate to lose people. I can only imagine how scary it is to know that the person one is losing is oneself” — Hodgman practices a saintly patience.
In fact, Hodgman soon reveals that he knows quite a bit about losing himself. A recovering addict, he patches together a jagged past in which the necessity of concealing his homosexuality became the gateway to his dependence on drugs, and recalls, in frank and often painful flashbacks, his early sexual awakenings and his parents’ determined efforts to ignore his difference.
He remembers the day his mother found copies of The Advocate, San Francisco’s gay newspaper, under his mattress; instead of asking him about them, “it was the beginning of many silences to follow.” Some of the most moving passages in the book recall Hodgman’s big-hearted, doting father, who resolutely joined his wife in refusing to speak to their son about his secrets.
Looking back, Hodgman cites a pivotal incident of bullying in high school as the source of the lasting split within himself: “I disappeared, just went away … something shut down, something went into hiding.” Years later, in rehab, he’s told that “when people get sober … they have to make their insides match their outsides,” but admits he has yet to get the hang of it.
Betty’s memory loss becomes a vivid counterpoint to his drive to rebuild his own identity: While Betty struggles to remember basic words and the songs she has always played at church, he tries to recover the feelings he buried with silences, one-liners, perfectionism.
The conversational, chatty tone belies the scope of “Bettyville,” which covers 50 years of Hodgman’s life, including his estimable editing career in NYC and his experiences during the beginning of the AIDs epidemic, marked by another kind of secrecy. While his friends and partner succumbed, Hodgson imagined his own death and kept a running goodbye letter to his parents in his bureau drawer just in case.
Now, watching his mother falter, he sees her standing on the same precipice. “She is under siege, from scary thoughts,” he writes, “from a son who does not understand, from a world that cannot comprehend the confusion and pain of the secret battle she does not acknowledge to anyone, maybe not even herself.”
Hodgman can be very entertaining, but, as he reminds us, he sometimes tries a little too hard: “I tell too many jokes.” He’s a vulnerable, compassionate man, very concerned with hurt — with the harm dealt to gay children, with how prejudice and hostility leave scars that never heal, cause suicides, loss of self — because he’s been through all of it. His humor can be brittle at times. You laugh anyway.
Eventually, in the course of this brave, tender story of finding and forgetting, the author becomes whole again through his mother’s losses: “There are so many things I will carry when I leave Bettyville.” Through caring for her, he develops the courage to be honest with himself and with Betty, and she, in turn, acknowledges her son for who he really is.
In the end, we can thank Hodgman for reminding us that human kindness can survive almost anything. Among the wide audience that his memoir deserves, I find myself hoping that it reaches those kids still in hiding who, after reading it, may find their own Bettyvilles much easier to bear.
