Uncovering Silent Secrets: The Untold Conversations in “What My Father and I Don’t Talk About”
Near the end of the essay, however, Ms. Rakoff shares a conversation with her mother where, at last, she learns much more about her mother’s miserable childhood.
“All those years, a lifetime, I’d believed the stories, the mythology, had been put in place by my father to protect my mother. The silence, the omission, the reinvention.
By my mother’s account, it had been the opposite.
My father had reinvented the world to adhere to his vision, his dream, his ideas of himself.
The stories, and the silence, had ensured his survival.
