Lilly Dunn (2022) Sins of my father: a daughter, a cult, a wild unravelling.

Hurry up and die. That was my visceral response to Lilly Dunn’s dad. We’ve become over-acquainted with men like him. Narcissistic psychopaths like the American moron’s moron (unfortunately with Scottish blood in his veins) and the little Trumpet clone this side of the Atlantic, Boris Johnson. The author’s job is to make her characters human. I, for example, stayed with my mum and da for most of my young adult life, but I wouldn’t claim to have more than a nodding acquaintance with my father.  Lilly Dunn manages to crawl beneath the surface of her life in a convoluted way.

Fiction is when you write what you don’t know. I do it most days.

‘Prologue

‘I imagine that the fog had lifted, that is was a bright morning when my father finally dragged himself from his bed.’

Dunn is acknowledging she is writing fiction here with her declaration, ‘I imagine’.

Amy Liptrot is quoted on the cover. She writes, ‘I was obsessed with this book’. Outrun, Liptrot’s memoir tells of how she retreated to Orkney from London. She led a simpler and more fulfilling life on her dad’s farm beside the sea. It helped her to escape from her alcoholism and incipient madness. Dunn treads similar ground. She finds herself in a dilapidated cottage in a private estate on the coastline of Cornwall.

She lists her ‘Sources’ for her memoir.

The Kiss, Katherine Harrison’s memoir of an incestuous relationship with her father is cited by Dunn. Harrison had sex with her dad. A preteen Lilly remembers Lolita style unbuttoning her father’s shirt, while her dad shared a room with his teenage lover. She wasn’t sure she was having incestuous thoughts, but imagined she might have been (fiction).

She was sure a man the same age as her dad, perhaps a few years older, was hitting on her. She was thirteen and a virgin. Her dad had married her mum when he was 28 and her mum was 18. He’d set up home, had two kids, Lilly and her brother. He helped set up a successful publishing company. But walked away leaving them bankrupt after having affairs with just about everybody within penis distance, including her mother’s midwife and birthing friend. He followed Bhagwan Shree Rajneersh to India, then America, before setting up a branch in Tuscany with himself as head guru. Meditation was the path to enlightenment, but sprinkled with a hotchpotch of memes that sound remarkably like Aleister Crowley’s central paradigm: ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’.

Her da’s latest partner was a Dutch girl also aged 18, but by now her dad was 38.  Readers he married her. His advice to her was to go for it. Older men were better with younger girls. Her dad also warned her in a jokey way that his paedophiliac older friend, who claimed to have a slight infection, actually had gonorrhoea, but hey, what was a little clap between friends.  

I’d misread one of her ‘Sources,’ as How to Read a Fraud, but when I looked more closely, it was How to Read Freud.   We know about Freudian slips and penis envy. I’m not sure how it works in the reading world. Her dad was a fraud she refused to see through. Ironically, his downfall also involved a fraud so obvious only a fool or a madman would have fell for it.

Boarding School Syndrome, Joy Schaverien is something I’ve read about rather than the primary source. I must admit it had me feeling sorry for the rich and the upper-middle classes. This is Lilly’s alibi for her father embracing hedonism as a religion. His parents sent him, aged seven, to boarding school for which he wasn’t suited. No young boys or girls are is Schaverien’s thesis. They are taught to speak properly and be suitably dysfunctional. Feelings of empathy are neutered. All that matter is success. ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’. But if the law gets in the way that too can be changed to suit circumstances as the moron’s moron Trump and little Trumpet showed to the world. Then again, as an out and out outlier,  Bhagwan Shree Rajneersh never attended Public school, but seemed to mirror many of their public values and dictums such as no telling.

What happens inside a cult stays inside the cult.

The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma, Besssel von der Kolk’s work is another book I’ve only read about. It’s often referred to in the treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Her father being taken from a mother that loved him and sent away from home marked his body chemistry and mind. But in public school as part of the fagging system he admitted to being raped by other, older, boys, offers a way of understanding his disassociation from others, including his wives and children.

A theme that Dunn explores is shared trauma. The sins of the father filtered down seven or more generations in biblical language. His alcoholism was her alcoholism and nihilism with drugs and boyfriends that mirrored her dad’s behaviour.

The inconsistency here is her brother seems largely unaffected. Her mother, not only unaffected, but an empathetic and constant presence in her life. Her heroic stability, contrasted with her dad’s grand ideas, deceptions, self-love and no hands-on knowledge of how to be a dad or even fully human. I guess we just like reading about the bad guys. Read on.