THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 17, 1995 TAG: 9512150684
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MARIAN COURTNEY
LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines
HAPPY DAYS
My Mother, My Father, My Sister & Me
SHANA ALEXANDER
Doubleday. 386 pp. $27.50.
Happy Days seems an ironic title for Shana Alexander's memoir. After reading it, I could count the number of happy days in her life on one hand.
The journalist's many problems stem from what she sees as her mother's inability or unwillingness to love her.
Alexander's parents, Milton and Cecelia Ager, were unconventional, to say the least. A full-time writer when most mothers were exclusively homemakers, Cecelia was a columnist for Variety, a Hollywood screenwriter and a New York movie critic. Milton, a songwriter of Tin Pan Alley fame, wrote ``Happy Days Are Here Again.''
The two led completely separate lives, getting together only for dinner, which they ate in restaurants. As if this weren't bizarre enough, when Shana was 8 years old her parents had all of their possessions and furniture packed up and put into storage. The family moved into a furnished hotel, with her parents in separate bedrooms joined by a common living area. Shana and her sister never received an explanation for the abrupt move, and their belongings stayed locked up for 43 years.
Instead of love, Shana's mother apparently dished out distance, disapproval and criticism. When she dismissed a special birthday gift that Shana had painstakingly embroidered with an indifferent ``very nice,'' before consigning it to a drawer, Shana sobbed to Milton, ``My mother doesn't love me.'' He replied, ``She loves you. She just doesn't know how to show it.''
Those words, repeated with each subsequent handmade gift Cecelia put aside, never comforted Shana. Later, the solace she found in her relationship with her father was shattered by a bitter row that took place when she turned 19.
Marrying not long afterward, without her parents' approval, Shana saw little of them for 20 years. Her big dream was to have many children and to shower them with the motherly love and warm childhood that eluded her. After her first marriage and years of fertility treatments failed, she and her second husband adopted a daughter, Kathy. They divorced when the child was in the second grade.
Alexander grappled both with the now-common dilemma of working mothers - having to balance a demanding career with the time and energy needed to raise a child - and the guilt of not having provided Kathy with a perfect family life. She managed to achieve success as a writer, with assignments at Life and Newsweek, and became the first female editor of McCall's. She also spent several years as a commentator on TV's ``60 Minutes'' and wrote several books.
Alexander's oft-repeated theme of ``poor me, my mother is so mean and doesn't love me'' becomes tiresome. Her writing is superb, however, especially in her character vignettes. Referring to an encounter with Marlon Brando, Alexander describes him as ``a leonine presence with a noble head, small broken nose, eyes like bruises in a Mayan mask, . . . '' then adds a revealing snippet about Brando and 7-year-old Kathy playing cat and lion together.
The author is much less expansive in describing her sister and says nothing about her daughter as an adult.
In the years after her second divorce, Alexander overcame her hurt and anger toward her parents enough to appreciate them. By book's end, she conveys a positive theme: the triumph of family bonds over the memories of painful and far-from-happy days. MEMO: Marian Courtney is a writer who lives in Charlottesville. by CNB