In the review were sentences that raised a red flag: "Many years afterward, this memory came to me" (Bettina Aptheker, qtd in Phelps, "Herbert Aptheker: the Contradictions of History," The Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 October 2006, <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20061002/019243.html>); and "She [Bettina Aptheker] pushed her memories of childhood sexual abuse deep into the recesses of her mind and forgot them until she began to write her memoir" (Phelps, "Herbert Aptheker: the Contradictions of History," The Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 October 2006, <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20061002/019243.html>).
Is this another case of "recovered memory," which sent many innocent people to prison in the 1980s, I asked myself.
Today I came upon Bettina Aptheker's op-ed that explains the circumstances of "recovery.'
Bettina Aptheker writes:
<blockquote>It was when I began writing the memoir in the mid-1990s, and especially its childhood section, that I had my first memories of sexual abuse by my father, which I had entirely suppressed until then. I was mucking around in my childhood because my daughter and my partner, reading early drafts, kept saying that the narrative was emotionally flat. "Where are you?" they wanted to know. "What were you feeling?" I was the narrator, but the story read as though I was floating around on the ceiling of my childhood, watching it unfold. ("My Father the Icon; My Father the Molester," 15 October 2006, <http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-aptheker15oct15,1,2000947.story?ctrack=1&cset=true>)</blockquote>
That sounds very much like inventing sex to make a memoir more interesting than it is, especially to tailor it to the expectation of (too many of) today's feminists and mass media consumers (many of whom get disappointed if they can't find any sexual abuse in a family history).
In her op-ed, Bettina Aptheker denies that her case is a false memory syndrome and offers an anecdote by way of amplifying it:
<blockquote>A little over two weeks after my mother's death in June 1999, my father and I talked about the sexual abuse. He initiated the conversation, asking as we were driving home from a Vietnamese restaurant. "Did I ever hurt you when you were a child?" was how he started. I had been furious with him for about five years, carrying around the memories like a truncheon and yet unable to confront him. But I said yes, and once we talked, his anguish was so great, his apology so heartfelt, that all the anger left me in a great whoosh of an out breath, and then I felt nothing but great waves of compassion for him.</blockquote>
But did they really talk about sexual abuse? Or excruciatingly mundane torments that parents inflict on children in nuclear families, compounded by political tensions of the times of the Red Purge? Herbert Aptheker is no longer here to answer that question. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>