Review: A Way of Life, Like Any Other

A Way of Life, Like Any Other by Darcy O'Brien
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I first laid eyes on A Way of Life, Like Any Other, by Darcy O'Brien, the book was in the fifth position of a “five Hollywood lives” list compiled by author Susanna Moore for the Wall Street Journal. I was surprised to see only two familiar titles on said list in a nonfiction genre that I’m as familiar with as the back of my hand. Well! I would have to see just what this was about. Turns out, the semi-fictionalized memoir of O’Brien’s Hollywood adolescence is just a treat from first page to last—that rare combination of a subject I wanted to read about written by someone with a singular position to have witnessed and a singular talent for describing *just* that. Some of the raunchier passages aside, I was dazzled by O’Brien’s ear for dialogue and admired the dry, deadpan wit of his observations of life in the movie colony as his actor parents’ respective stars began to fade and then blink out altogether.

O’Brien’s parents were George O’Brien and Marguerite Churchill, two silent movie stars who, to put it kindly, had limited success in the talkie era. By the time the book opens, sometime in the early fifties’, the two former celebrities are navigating a messy divorce and a transition to civilian life, neither able to accomplish this pivot with any particular degree of grace. Our narrator, grade-school aged, finds himself caught in between helping his mother plan boozy dinner parties and picking her up from her occasional suicide attempts, while his father is mostly exiled from his life by his mother’s resentment over the divorce. This material, in less capable hands, would be the stuff of a Jerry-Wald-produced soap opera style tearjerker, à la I’ll Cry Tomorrow. Instead, O’Brien makes the occasionally lurid episode seem oddly mundane with his detached, trenchant insights into his mother’s behavior. Her overfrank discussions with her son about her sex life, her problems with her ex-husband, and her own disappointments in life feel as inappropriate as they do real. After Churchill’s second marriage, to a Russian sculptor, falls apart spectacularly in Rome, O’Brien is sent home to California to live with his father, whose Gary Cooper-isms  and sincere good-naturedness are a sea change from the constant hysteria of the first several chapters of the book with his mother. George O’Brien, too, is a broken character—listlessly existing from week to week in an “after the parade’s gone by” state of nostalgia for his career in westerns and burying himself in volunteer work at the local Catholic church for lack of other obligations. However, O’Brien’s father seems like a much calmer broken character, and you develop an odd affection for him and his aw shucks manners, compared to the mild antagonism I felt towards Churchill for just how little she seemed to care about anyone besides herself.  

Later, O’Brien goes to live with a schoolmate’s family at their palatial Beverly Hills estate, and sees first-hand the behind the scenes life of Sam Caliban, a B-picture mogul who seems to be an amalgam of several old Hollywood directors/producers. Caliban balances gambling debts, production overages, his son and wife, and a starlet girlfriend with a juggler’s grace, and his brief dominance of the middle third of the book makes you wish he had his own spin-off. There’s a liberated, sexy love interest in the form of Linda, O’Brien’s would-be girlfriend whose contradictory endorsement of the free love movement and the looming presence of her actual steady boyfriend keep the two at arms-length. In spite of these focus shifts and a few cameos, including a well-read if monocular John Ford, the two real stars of the book are O’Brien’s parents, who feel as flawed and realistic as if they were sitting in front of you. George O’Brien’s occasionally cowboyish dialogue in particular (“I want you to know there’s always a bunk for you here and all the chow you can eat”, he tells his son at one point) reads half-humorous, yet wholly earnest—you get a feel in some of the less folksy, more formal aspects of pater O’Brien’s speech for a lost time, of someone born at the turn of the century. A scene between father and son over a small inheritance in the book’s last scene is as strangely moving and mildly disturbing an observation of character as anything you’d read in a classic novel, it really took my breath away.

If you’re looking for a star-studded tell-all, this is definitely not the right book for you—but as a terrifically unique, brilliantly well-written period piece, A Way of Life, Like Any Other 's sense of time and place is transportive and just really a lot of mordant fun to read. O’Brien wrote several other fiction and nonfiction titles before his premature death in 1998 from cancer, and I’m so excited to discover more from this highly original voice in literature.

 

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Review: Nobody's Child: Poverty, Justice, and the Insanity Defense in America

Nobody's Child: Poverty, Justice, and the Insanity Defense in America by Susan Nordin Vinocour
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"Nobody’s Child: A Tragedy, a Trial, and a History of the Insanity Defense", by forensic psychologist Susan Nordin Vinocour, effectively covers exactly what the title implies it covers—and you, as the reader, mostly get what you were promised. Mostly. Vinocour sets out in her book to examine what exactly constitutes an insanity defense, both in legal terms and practical application, through the lens of a child abuse/murder case in which she was a key defense witness. The actual execution of the book, however, in terms of its persuasive power and writing level, is less successful than its lofty (and honestly, noble-minded) goals. I started the book riveted to the case study that makes up the bulk of the frame narrative, but gradually lost interest in the book entirely as the story was bogged down by a series of contextual history lessons that neither particularly illuminated the case at hand nor contributed greatly to my understanding of a complicated psycholegal concept.

The book opens with the story of Dorothy Dunn, an intellectually disabled black woman in her forties’ who is accused of horrific child abuse and neglect leading to the death of her grandson, Raymie. Raymie is found on the kitchen floor of his grandmother’s dilapidated home in a state of rigor mortis—he had been dead for three days when Dunn called an ambulance from a pay phone to come “fix” her predeceased grandson. When authorities arrived, the oddly distant woman had trouble answering basic questions and asked if she was “going to jail”. Indeed she was—to await trial for the second-degree murder of her young charge. Did the boy suffer a head injury following a fall (a theory supported by the crime scene), meaning the grandmother’s prolonged delay in seeking medical attention caused his death? Was he beaten by the grandmother, whose disregard for the child’s wellbeing went as far explicitly denying the child medical care, which resulted in his death? What exactly happened in that kitchen three days earlier, and what was Dorothy Dunn’s state of mind when it happened?

Enter Vinocour, contacted by Dunn’s public defender lawyer to psychologically assess Dunn’s mental state both presently and at the time of the alleged crime. Vinocour’s job was not so much to determine whether or not Dorothy Dunn had committed a crime, but to decide whether Dunn’s mental instability at the time of Raymie’s death would support an insanity plea. Though the term is bandied about often in fictional legal dramas, I’d never really considered what the actual legal definition of the term was, or how it would affect a criminal defense. The author, a former lawyer herself, attempts to interweave chapters on the history of this term and its evolution, from the middle ages to the present, with chapters of somewhat straightforward reportage of the Dunn case and its progression through the legal system. It’s in this call-and-response, history-versus-case-study approach that an otherwise engaging and affecting book loses its way.

Vinocour provides historical background in these alternating chapters in much the dry, pedantic way a poorly written literature review at the beginning of a research paper would. The information is synthesized from a variety of historical sources and cases and presented as evidence for the everchanging nature of the legal definition of insanity—from whether or not the defendant had a guilty mind to whether or not the accused party could tell right from wrong to whether the criminal could tell what they were doing while committing the crime, etcetera. All these arguments are incredible interesting—it’s just that the author seems unable to present them in a way that is interesting. The facts of each case are laid out on the table, briefly discussed, and then the tide of the text moves along, without really engaging the reader in a meaningful philosophical inquiry into the implications of the each of these different criterion for a person to be deemed legally “insane”. The cases she uses, while classic, are also ubiquitous—not being a legal scholar by any means, I was already familiar with several of her historical case studies, and as there was no insight into the cases, merely a presentation of the facts, I didn’t learn anything particularly from these portions of the book, and just had to kind of wade through to get back to the true-crime portions of the book. In more deft hands, the cases would have provided thought-provoking material for considering the change, over time, of what was considered “insane” versus simply “morally bankrupt” or “evil”, and whether or not those definitions served the process of “justice” in its many possible definitions. As is, these chapters grind the momentum of the book to a halt at times, and felt both stale and drawn-out.

Far more successful are the author’s chapters describing her participation in the pre-trial and trial aspects of the Dunn case. Vincour vividly retells the story of a woman and her family who were let down by social service safety nets again and again, forming a compelling counter-narrative to the prosecution’s accusations of Dunn’s intentionally callous disregard for her children’s safety and wellbeing. From CPS’s lack of intervention in Dorothy Dunn’s own bleak childhood (in which she was born mentally challenged, and was physically and emotionally scarred by parental abuse and neglect), to its continued disinterest in pursuing what seem in hindsight to be glaring, actionable problems within the Dunn family (children with high lead levels from lead poisoning, malnutrition, Raymie’s mother’s mental instability and drug use, Dorothy’s attempt to put one child in foster care only to have him returned, Raymie’s essentially being “left” at Dunn’s doorstep by CPS when there were no alternative arrangements available for his care), there’s a continual feeling that this family was allowed to fall through the cracks, and only the fact of a homicide case brought attention to a group of people who could have used the help and public interest well before the tragedy occurred. Vincour succeeds in painting a grim picture of a woman living on the margins of society and left with very limited intellectual and physical resources, to fend for herself “as best she could”. When her best was shown to be inadequate, even by her own standards, still Dunn was expected to just carry on somehow, caseworkers willingly turning a blind eye to the limitations of her childcare abilities because her children and grandchild didn’t fit the very narrow criteria to be removed from the home. An admittedly overworked, underfunded system that was ostensibly designed to protect children, support caregivers, and keep families together in the end did none of those things for Dorothy Dunn and her family.

Vincour takes special care to highlight the possibility of the media’s influence on the trial’s outcome, in spite of the promise of an impartial jury trial. The judge in this case declined the defense’s request to place a gag order on the media, leading to media coverage emphasizing the more salacious aspects of the crime that was fully accessible to the jury via the nightly news or their daily newspaper. It was easy for me, just an uninvolved party well after the fact, to read these headlines and the descriptions of the crime scene in the beginning of the book and have a knee-jerk reaction to Dorothy Dunn’s culpability in her grandchild’s senseless death. How much harder would it be for a jury in the courtroom, looking at autopsy photos of the child’s broken body, to NOT form an emotional rather an analytical reaction to the incredibly emotionally upsetting idea of a child dying in such circumstances? This was one of the more interesting takeaways I had from the book—that a public whose interest skews towards the ghoulish (read: yours truly) can often assume a false sense of being “certain” as to what must have happened based on media reporting that is well-aware of that taste for the Grand Guignol aspects of the case and caters to it specifically, in the interest of ratings/selling newspapers. If all you hear are the more nightmarish aspects of a crime, how can those evocative details fail to color your impartial view of a crime and the person accused of committing it? Now, sometimes a murderer is just an out and out murderer, legally caught dead to rights-- but in these more ethically murky waters, it’s interesting to consider how our own biases and the media’s support of those initial natural feelings of repulsion to horrible events that make us more likely to judge people whose shoes we’ll never have to walk in.

All in all, and in spite of its flaws, a stimulating look at an aspect of the legal system that, considering the everchanging nature of mental health issues and their public perception in America, deserves frequent revisiting.





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