The Impostor's Daughter

Among other things, The Impostor’s Daughter is a story about identity, family, betrayal, and the acts we take to survive things that we cannot comprehend; the inheritances we bear. It is a story about a woman excavating the truth of her father’s life, unweaving her family’s creation narrative, and in so doing, unweaving and reconstructing herself.

I am glad to have read it. These are some of my reflections.

“I wondered what made him guard the mail so jealously. His explanations didn’t make sense,” writes Sandell of the way in which her father stopped mail delivery to their family’s home each time he went out town. In these introductory words on the first page of Secrets, the first chapter of The Impostor’s Daughter, Sandell begins to draw for the reader a map of the relational dynamic that exists/ed between herself and her father, her father, and their family as a whole; a relational dynamic of painful and damaging cognitive dissonance. She establishes immediately (some of) the compelling central questions that this memoir grapples with: What happens when we learn to live in and accept a state of discomfort with the truths we structure our lives by? What is the truth? How do we find it? What costs is the truth worth? 

This active cognitive dissonance presents itself repeatedly throughout the story. Some examples include:

1) The drawings that Sandell produced of and for her father as a child wherein he is represented in a deeply unflattering manner. These drawings represented a mechanism through which Sandell communicated her pent up awareness of the disconnects that existed between how reality was framed by her father and what she felt internally to be truth, while simultaneously holding him as a larger than life, super heroic figure.

2) The way in which she is instructed by her father, multiple times throughout the, to construct her identity separate of her actual events and/or accomplishments (as he did). For example the incident where Sandell’s father applies a series of badges that she has not earned to her brownie sash replies, “Ay hija, you did earn them” (17) when she questions her legitimate right to wear them. Adopting against her internal compass the possibility that “Perhaps I had earned them.” (17)

I want to take a moment to explore this moment in particular as it stands out as perhaps the first time she Sandell is perfectly conscious of the way in which her father constructs alternate realities, and simultaneously illuminates the way in which she did not know how to fight back against this act. This moment begins to heighten narrative tension and a sense of what is at stake for Sandell in her own self-creation and sense of truth.

This incident is gestured to later in the story (and given deeper meaning) when Sandell talks about her father’s “green barn jacked decorated with a constellation of pins and medals: an American flag, a Purple Heart, the skull and crossbones of the Special Forces” on page 65. This moment happens during the months of interviews that she conducts with her father about his life and based on the reveals provides a powerful punctuation to the lies upon which his stories are founded, and also the depth of his shame.

3) Sandell’s mother instructing her father to take his verbal and physical assaults of Sandell to the basement. This is powerfully demonstrated through the panels on page 32 where Sandell’s mother is depicted as contentedly connecting with closed eyes to the music while her daughter simultaneous experiences abuse immediately below her.

This seems to be an eerie revelation about the ways in which the truth lurked always just below the surface of this family’s narrative. And the ways in which business carried on as usual in its midst.

4) When depicted beside her father, or in reference to him, Sandell’s face often communicates uncertainty, fear, nervousness and discomfort. Yet this is couched beside statements like, “As long as he was there, I felt safe.” (28)

5) As Sandell gets starts to get closer to the truth of her father’s lies her insomnia begins. If I am to psychologize this for a moment, this was perhaps her body’s way of saying “wake up and stay awake to the truth!” And it works successfully as a narrative tool to demonstrate the way that she could not. Her sleeping pill addiction then becomes another attempt to stay that feeling – of engaging in cognitive dissonance “I secretly believed there was a possibility he was telling the truth. Really I didn’t want to know. The stories kept our relationship intact. To be honest they were keeping me intact.” (71-72)

6) And then there are the reflective statements that pound the fact home: “All of the women in my father’s life seemed to close their eyes.” (160)

7) I had a recurring feeling of emptiness each time Sandell made a revelation to her family regarding their father’s lies. The empty feeling was a reaction to the deflated responses that these revelations seemed to engender. With this rendering (whether or not exaggerated) Sandell successfully underlines again her family’s adherence to a status quo that they would not disrupt.

There are many strategies that Sandell uses effectively to transmit to the reader her original lived experience of her father’s grandiosity, domination, and bizarre behaviour. Humor and exaggeration are two of these strategies. For example: “He maintained a library of 11,000 books. He’d read them all. Anything I wanted to know about, he simply walked over to a shelf, pulled a book down, then flipped it open to the exact page that showed his point.” He could “Identify every piece of classical music that ever existed.” And t he appearance of a mouse wearing gas mask in reference to her father’s home improvement projects, page 34.

Her use of humor in images and text serves to also break up the weight of the reveals of information she makes.

In terms of structure, the story remains for the first ¾ locked on the relationship between father and daughter. Even seeming sojourns away from that narrative arrive us back to another unfolding of the dynamic, another discovery, another shift in the poles of the relationship, and eventually a greater and greater commitment to an unraveling of the untruths that structure her family’s life. The relative quiet of other members of Sandell’s family within this text are a repeated and intentional gesture to emphasize how all consuming the relationship between father and daughter truly was. Heightening the reader’s sense of incredible effort Sandell required to break herself away from that relationship and those stories.

Like a quintessential “Who Done It” mystery, Sandell keeps us in the action of investigation from the very beginning of the piece. She keeps the camera zoomed always on her, and all events take place through her eyes. This is illuminated by the fact that she shows up in nearly every panel, and the way in which the telling of the story rests largely in past tense recounting. In this way Sandell is asserting ultimate control over the act of narrating the story, which is in part I believe what she required for catharsis. This also keeps the narrative tight and the reader drawn closely into the story. There are so many opportunities for digression and exploration of the experiences of others within this piece, but the true power in her storytelling strategy – which I think allows for the central questions to be asked most closely – is Sandell’s commitment to holding the story to her, and through her experience. One of the key ways in which this subtly happens is through Sandell’s use of maps and explanatory labeling. ie. the map on the first page identifying who is who, repeated again at the rehab centre on page 211. Tools like this reinforce Sandell as the expert. They serve to invite us into her world – us as the tourists her as the tour guide. Cementing authorial control.

There is an organic irony that emerges in this story that also has symbolic value. A great deal of the dialogue that happens are transactions that take place over the phone. This is a (perhaps unintentional) gesture towards the game of telephone, which models the way in which distortion of stories takes place from teller to teller. The ironic reversal that happens in this story is that the telephone becomes in many ways the tool of discovery and unpacking of distorted truths.

Despite her pain and her need to hold a tight narrative in this piece, Sandell allows her father to have complication as a character. We are given the opportunity to witness him as a man so emasculated by his impoverished upbringing, neglectful parents, his sense of failure, that he felt compelled to construct false identities in order to live up to a dominant construction of masculinity. This is at least one possible reading that can be applied. When read in this way there is an interesting underlying (perhaps unintentional) commentary on class as it intersects with patriarchy and the impact on women – what women are asked/forced to hold as a result of these interlocking systems of oppression.

There is one image in particular that remains with me strongly and I want to close my reflection by examining it. On page 185, post Sandell’s first conversation with her father in more than 2 years, she crosses from her mother’s car into a train. This moment is a pivotal turning point in the story. Sandell’s mother has just told her, “I’m glad you outed him, Laurie. Because I don’t care who he is. I still love him.” This “proof positive” that her family was not going to change, and demand and live by the truth in a sense frees Sandell in this moment to finally come to terms with the fact that they were no longer the ones who needed to change. That she was not dependent on them to live by the truth. This crossing over into the train symbolizes that shifting of Sandell’s narrative, the separating of her identity from that of her father, of walking into her self, of taking responsibility for what narratives structured her self-knowing, and how these narratives arranged her life. The pages preceding in this chapter provide an heightened visible wrestling with questions of familial loyalty, betrayal, self-determination, honesty, and the act of fighting for the truth, which raises the stakes in relationship to the choice that Sandell makes at the end of the chapter.

The rest of the book is a continual unfolding towards that.

In many ways this story leaves us with a question to ask ourselves, personally, and as a society. If in the small complex of a family structure like that of the Sandells, such untruths can serve as the foundation upon which one’s framework of seeing oneself and the world, then: what are the lies that we have based our own identities and beliefs upon, and what are the costs of allegiance to these lies? In what ways do we numb ourselves to the irritating scratches that enter our psyches, and stomachs, our hearts, and our spirits, suggesting that perhaps the world in which we live is not quite what we believe it to be? And are we willing to invest in the courageous costs of shaking off that dissonance loose?

So much more to say, but I’ll leave it here.