Little girl whose only choice was suicide or murder: How one woman survived a traumatic childhood

There are two ways the child of an unpredictable and wild parent can go: the Lindsay Lohan route or the fictional, but recognisable, way of Saffy (daughter of Ab Fab’s Edina).

An old friend of author Ariel Leve’s mother told Leve’s boss after meeting Ariel again as an adult: ‘I always wondered how that little girl would survive. I thought her only choices were suicide or murder’

Then again, there are more dramatic options, as an old friend of author Ariel Leve’s mother told Leve’s boss after meeting Ariel again as an adult: ‘I always wondered how that little girl would survive. I thought her only choices were suicide or murder.’

Fortunately, Leve’s mode of survival is to follow in the footsteps of Saffy.

Her mother’s dress sense frequently dismays her (or her complete lack of any clothes at all, around the house); she attempts to make the adult behave less like a child; she nearly always takes the moral high ground and never seems to have as much fun as her often out-of-control but nevertheless only (mostly) present parent, her beloved father having moved about as far away from his ex-wife and only child as was possible.

Ariel’s mother is never mentioned by name (a curious omission when her daughter leaves little else to the imagination, including, surely unkindly, detailing her mama’s incontinence problems), but in the age of the internet, even the most technologically challenged can find her identity, as it is listed in the author’s own Wikipedia entry.

She is Sandra Hochman: an American poet, novelist, documentary maker and beauty.

For anyone envious of the bohemian lifestyle, this memoir could well act as aversion therapy.

We are unwilling guests at the mother’s many raucous dinner parties in an Upper East Side penthouse apartment, filled with famous writers (Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth) — with belly dancers, tap dancers, magicians, musicians, orators, Andy Warhol and actors all doing turns (often on the same night) while poor Ariel — her bedroom leading on to the living room — keeps opening the door to beg them all to be quiet as she has school tomorrow.

Her mother, the victim of horrible parenting, is a narcissistic and needy nightmare — craving love, craving company, endlessly protesting her love for her child, but not capable of giving it.

There is a lot of drunkenness — including fights with the boyfriend, Donald, who later becomes sober, looks like a cowboy and is patient and wealthy.

There is a grotesque tableau that the mother likes to perform that requires Ariel — and, on one occasion, a schoolfriend — lying between a naked Ms Hochman’s legs on her bed while she relives the joy of giving birth.

Not surprisingly, the friend’s parents did not feel Being Born was a suitable game and that was the end of her play dates.

The book darts around in time — sections of Ariel’s childhood interspersed with her life as her career takes off and she is approached in the UK to work for The Sunday Times.The book darts around in time — sections of Ariel’s childhood interspersed with her life as her career takes off and she is approached in the UK to work for The Sunday Times

She is a terrific journalist and because her schtick as a columnist was the sort of appealing miserablist humour of a literate, Jewish New Yorker — think Woody Allen meets Nora Ephron — this book is very much the reverse of the coin, relentlessly downbeat without any leavening lightness or, indeed, attempt at balance. This is what makes it disappointingly dislikeable and what had me — aware this was a stretch — even slightly rooting for the mother.

It’s the mother (like all baddies) who gets the best lines. When Ariel accuses her of child abuse for letting her nanny smack her with a hairbrush, her mother retorts, ‘Forget child abuse, what about mommy abuse’ before losing her rag.

The writer is reunited with her (poignantly frail) father and lives a simple life in Bali, with an Italian man, Mario, who is calm, uncomplicated and unliterary — spending his days teaching windsurfing and underwater diving.

He is the father of the ‘mermaid twins’, adorable-sounding seven-year-olds, through whom Ariel has learned to be part of a stable family and finds herself — what an unexpected bounty at 45 — to have instinctive mothering skills.

The happy ending is that her life has been immeasurably enriched by being part of theirs.

She finds a new therapy helpful — one used for victims of post-traumatic stress syndrome — to undo the damage of a childhood spent in fear, particularly the ‘gaslighting’, where the oppressor (mother) denies her actions, making her victim question her own version of the truth.

Meanwhile, her mother is at home in New York alone, a pitiful, limping figure, having alienated her friends and family, including, of course, the author of this book.

The heroine of An Abbreviated Life is a former girlfriend of her father, Rita Waterman, co-founder of Ms Magazine with Gloria Steinem, who is a constant loving presence in Ariel’s life as a child.

Rita regularly wrote to Ariel’s father telling him everything that was going on — and so if one questioned the narrator as a possibly unreliable witness, there is evidence from a responsible adult who had the foresight to keep carbon copies of all the letters, and gave them to Ariel as an adult.

The question is, knowing all the bad things happening at home, why couldn’t the father have moved closer to the daughter?

Though the adult Leve may say that as a child she never felt abandoned, it’s hard to escape the feeling that, as a reader, that is exactly what she was. But that’s another perspective . . . and another book. ‘Daddy Dearest’?

Daily Mail