My life has so many experiences that are bittersweet, like a first crush gone bad.  My religion as a child is painful to recall as was my relationship with my father.  But my literary imagination from childhood includes one person with whom it seems to be heartbreaking to admit that he, too, was only a human being.  Why is it that upseting for a mere writer to be up their with your father or a God?  Well, it was. 

I suppose everyone has seen the Disney special about Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.  If you have kids (or in my case two nephews and a neice), you may also have seen the Muppet version.  I could not bring myself to see the Jim Carey version only because I have an intense hatred of Jim Carey.  But I remember watching it as a child, and it was my favorite Christmas special.  Even after converting to Judaism, I remember it with fondness. 

However, my real love of Charles Dickens began when I was in high school.  I did a lot of reading, and I soon flew through Nicholas Nickleby and Hard Times--two of Dickens very worst books.  Of course, I was also reading (in those years my senior years of high school) the works of Dostoyevsky.  (Nobody deifies Dostoyevsky.  As Freud put it, "I admire Dostoyevsky but I don't like him."  I didn't dislike Dostoyevsky but I think even I realized his personal life was not the point of his books.)  I read a lot in those years.

And yet when I read my all time favorite book-- Little Dorrit-- it sunk in deep.  You see, I imagined that I was Little Dorrit.  For one thing, my father is the spendthrift to end all spendthrifts.  Mopeds, boats, computers, the travel trailer--he was bankrupt once right after the divorce.  Mom left him carrying their collective debts and paid them off while he simply spent more money until his house of cards collapsed once more.  Although all of his money will probably go to his third wife Ching, we wonder (my sister and I) if realistically the house and his belongings will have to be sold to pay expenses on his funeral and his debts.  Without realizing why at first, I recognized in Amy Dorrit's father a kinship to my own.  I even liked Amy Dorrit's father enough to be disappointed in his lack of character even outside of money later in the book.

But there was another facit of the book that appealed to me.  Mrs. Clemans was a horrible mother because of her religious fanaticism.  Now I didn't view my own religious grandmother as mean, but her religion was hard to take.  She was one of those people who you imagine would be so much nicer if they simply gave up on their religion altogether.  She really believed that the world would end in nineteen eighty, but when it didn't happen she didn't give up hope (if that's the word for it).  Apart from that, only a small number of very devout and very mean Christians were going to heaven.  Even her own minister would be "fooled" at the end of time into falling into the trap of the anti-Christ.  She particularly hated Catholics and Jews.  I don't know what kept her going; not long before she died she explained that she had nightmares of the devil standing at her bedside.  Grandma was very afraid to die. 

Lastly, the Circumlocution Office reminded me of the turmoil that seemed to be going through my head.  Since childhood I've had Major Depression, but in College my diagnosis changed to Bipolar Schizoaffective Disorder (these illnesses change over time).  Maybe society was as corrupt as Grandma thought--at that age I didn't know what to believe-- but more to the point I really didn't enjoy my life very much.

Anyway, Dickens was a kind of lifeline for me.  Every Dickens novel promises a happy ending while in the middle of the book bad things happen to the hero or heroine that they overcome.  In this respect, reading Dickens is like reading a fairy tale (I read tons of fairy tales in childhood).  I was sad most of the time, but at my worst I was always reading.  In fact, my moods seem to lighten (in my mind at least) around the time I gave up on Christianity--only for me to develop Bipolar.  (Although despite taking my medications I've noticed that I prefer Bipolar Disorder to the first because at least you are not always but only sometimes sad.)

Sometime I read Kaplan's Dickens: A Life.  At the time it didn't bother me; despite having been in therapy I didn't really fully understand what it meant to put women on pedestals or--if I remember right-- a kindly authorian to his wife.  I'm not even sure I realized these were problems, or at least not problems that anyone might have.  There were in them some echoes of the place for mentally ill children I had been in during the thirteenth year (the worst year) of my life.  The only things I noticed were that he and his wife were separated after years of unhappiness and that he had a mistress.  My own parents were divorced; I didn't blame him much.

Anyway, I loved Dickens.  I saw him as compassionate.  I saw him as something my religion was lacking.  Although I read a lot of his novels as an adult, there is only one, Barnaby Rudge, that I have still not read.

So when did it occur to me to question Dickens?  Well, when I was in college.  I feel like maybe I should re-read the biography, because I don't know if Kaplan was right to dislike Dickens the man or not.  But how do I admit that after Kaplan I wondered if Dickens didn't sort of self-pity at times--just as I was often accused of in high school and early college.  Of course, its hard to imagine: Dickens didn't want anyone to know his father had been in debt or that as a child he'd been in the debtors prison and the horrible factory conditions he wrote about.  I was always (the reader may have noticed) the type to shout their troubles to the world.  Even his mistress became a sex scandal only as he clumsily tried to hide her existence.  Dickens probably did love her even though if Ackroyd is right he was no happier with her than his wife.

This mirrored the questioning of my father by me.  My father had embraced Grandma's religion after my mom left him.  I think he did it to get her to come back at first; he and Mom went to a therapist until it turned out Mom only wanted to find out what went wrong with their marriage so they wouldn't make the same mistake with other people.  That was not what went wrong, though.  What went wrong was how he behaved when his second wife left.  I know I've probably bored my readers (if I have any) with this story before but the synopsis is simple: first he contested the divorce (saying that Renae was 'mentally ill'), than he blamed her biological father (saying that he was going to hell for encouraging her to leave) and then telling EVERYONE.  You couldn't meat him in the grocery store without hearing the tale.  Even though he moved back to Emporia when his mother died, I always imagine complete strangers "know" me.  He behaved this way at Grandma's and my cousin's funerals.  He has, finally, given up on the subject.  But it was horrible to be around him.

I had already given up on faith in Jesus.   I was in the beginning stages of converting to Judaism.  However, I suppose I was lucky that giving up Christianity before Dad went--to use a Yiddish word--mushuga.  I was trying to rebuild my beliefs someplace else and eventually Judaism--but not Orthodoxy-- seemed right.  It was a faith that emphasized works over faith and did not insist that every person believe.

However, after leaving Christianity I began to doubt lots of things--and Dickens was one of them.  Perhaps that is not Dickens' fault.  After all, Dickens was only a human being.  Perhaps I have become to much of a perfectionist in my heroes...

I often imagine that Dickens wrote books with happy endings to reassure himself there was a happy ending at the end of his life.  I understand this; although largely cured I don't really expect to live a normal life.  I don't know if I would want to, though.  Something about having a mental illness--it sounds strange but to have depression is to have an imaginary lover calling to you.  Bipolar is a little scarier, but even with its frightening side is like I experience things ordinary people do not.  And it helps me write.  My writing is my life.  Even if I never have children, I can say, "I wrote a book."

As for my father?  The debtor's prison?  Well, they are gone now.   Bipolar teaches you that you can be free; that you are invincable.  You can easily write about that, even if it's scary.