The Priest - to do

Watching The Squid and the Whale this weekend (also watched West Wing election final, the horrific opening of Saving Private Ryan, about 20 minutes of the first Spiderman, and baseball...it's back), I started to think about the way Noah Baumbach presented his parents, or the fictive versions of same. It's so hard to get a complex relationship down without either muddying it or oversimplifying. And then unpacking the copmlete Francis Parkman onto the shelves in my office, I thought about how I discovered this whole other side of dad, his entry into the professorial world, such a departure from what his parents expected of him, and then the world itself changed so much. He started out collecting bound completes of canon writers, and ended up reading only the paperbacks that were sent to him for free. It was like he did this whole self conscious professor identity thing to help him transition into an unknown world, and then rejected it in favor of a more authentic experience of reading, just as academia was shifting into territories where everything that had been accepted was now coming into question, particularly the authoritarian white male professor paradigm that dad had somewhat falsely bought into.

(Mom - are you enjoying this?)

I think that that is what is missing from the family I'm building for The Priest. I have this late 50s priest die of cancer and his daughter come home to take care of him and stay. I want her to be working through defining herself against parents, whose identities were often in flux. I want who they are to be real, but to do that I think it has to be pretty confusing...