Blue Genes: A Memoir of Loss and Survival by Christopher Lukas

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Two suicides frame the life of Christopher "Kit" Lukas. The first was that of his mother, who ended her life when he was just six years old. The second was that of his older brother Tony, a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, when both men were in their 60s. In between these seminal events, Kit's grandmother Missy swallowed a fatal overdose. In his pellucid memoir, Lukas retraces the vein of mental illness that ran through his family like a toxic river, exploring what enabled him, unlike the others, to swim rather than sink, despite the times he could barely keep his head above water.

It takes courage to reveal one's psyche on paper, for public consumption. To paraphrase Tony Lukas, Blue Genes achieves "what all true artists do with the pain of living -- [transform] it into something purging and redemptive." Kit does so with the intent of helping others who have suffered in families devastated by mental illness. Throughout the Lukas brothers' parallel yet lonely childhoods, their teen years fraught with jealousy and competition, and their adulthood -- characterized by professional success amid private estrangement that pointed to inner realities far more disparate than Kit imagined -- a mutual need and dependence struggled to reveal itself. In Blue Genes, Kit paints a portrait of two men who tried to reach for each other across those tainted waters, but only one made it to shore. (Holiday 2008 Selection)

From the Publisher

Tony and I are brothers across the stroboscopic echoes of the past: dissolving across black interludes into the next image, and the next, and the next, until all vestige of pure vision is destroyed. All that is left is memory, and we know how faulty that can be. Who Tony was is forever blurred by who I was and how I remember who I thought Tony was . . . He is dead, and I am alive—left to dwell on questions, and to seek the answers . . .
Would I, too, end up killing myself? Was the legacy of self-destruction I would discover in my family too great for me to survive? If so, when would the pendulum swing? And, if it never did, why not? How could I—almost alone among my family—escape?
—From Blue Genes

This courageous, engrossing memoir explores the complex and shattering effects of a family legacy of depression and suicide on the author and his brother, the award-winning journalist, J. Anthony Lukas.

Christopher (Kit) Lukas’s mother committed suicide when he was a boy. He and his brother, Tony, were not told how she died. No one spoke of the family’s history of depression and bipolar disorder. The legacy of guilt and grief haunted Kit and Tony throughout their lives.
Both brothers achieved remarkable success, Tony as a gifted journalist, Kit as an accomplished television producer and director. After suffering bouts of depression, Kit was able to confront his family’s troubled past, drawing on his experience to write Silent Grief, an invaluable guide to surviving a loved one’s suicide. Tony forged a sterling career, eventually winning two Pulitzer Prizes, including one for the now-classicbook Common Ground. But he never seemed to find the contentment Kit had attained; he remained creative, but depressed. In 1997, shortly before the publication of his acclaimed book, Big Trouble, Tony Lukas committed suicide.
Blue Genes portrays the lives of two brothers who alternately locked horns and found solace in each other. Written with heartrending candor, it captures the devastation of this family legacy of depression, but it is also surprisingly uplifting, as it details the strength and hope that can provide a way of escaping its grasp.

The Washington Post - Reeve Lindbergh

…a compassionate but clear-eyed view of his family history…With candor and courage Lukas writes that even now—10 years after his brother's death and more than 60 years after his mother's—he still has more questions than answers…But he speaks powerfully to survivors anyway

The New York Times - Roy Blount Jr.

I have never thought much of Holden Caulfield's notion that a good book makes you want to call the author on the phone, but this is a book that makes you feel you should call the author and ask him to reassure you that he is O.K. It is with great relief, then, that I can in all candor recommend Blue Genes (its title aside), on its merits. Its unusual merits. In a memoir these days we have come to expect a great read, a gripping yarn and profound doubt (sometimes even on the memoirist's part) as to how much of it is true. ("True" being defined as what the memoirist genuinely believes did happen.) Blue Genes, on the contrary, is oddly jointed and frequently goofy, and I believed every word of it.

Publishers Weekly

In a supremely brave effort literally to save his own life, Lukas shatters the silence surrounding the long history of suicide in his Hungarian-German-Jewish family, especially that of his older brother, J. Anthony Lukas ("Tony"). Depression and what is now diagnosed as bipolar disorder hounded various family members, most notably the brothers' beautiful college-educated actress mother, Elizabeth, whose deepening depression, exacerbated no doubt by the sense of guilt and inadequacy in her marriage, led her to cut her own throat in 1941, when the boys were just six and eight. Lukas writes with the reassuring sagacity of hindsight, knowing the negative long-term effects of his mother's mental illness on his brother especially, but at the time her death was mysterious and devastating, and the brothers' relationship grew mutually needy and protective, on the one hand, and fractious and competitive, on the other. Feelings of betrayal, guilt and rage erupted at points during the successful careers for both brothers-Tony as a driven journalist with the New York Times and author (Common Ground) who won two Pulitzer prizes; and Christopher ("Kit"), an Emmy Award-winning TV producer, author and actor. For Tony, however, who married late, remained childless and took antidepressants, his illness was debilitating, leading him to suicide in 1997. In clear, forceful prose, the author attempts to make sense of these calamities and assert a life-affirming purpose. (Sept.)

Library Journal

Christopher and Tony Lukas's mother committed suicide when they were very young, but the boys were never told how she died-silence was the family's policy on its legacy of mental illness. Regardless, both brothers achieved great success in their fields (the author is a TV producer and director), and their bond was loving but fraught. Sadly, Tony, who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his journalism, committed suicide in 1997. Those interested in how mental illness afflicts generations and how to find strength and hope in the face of it will find this remarkably honest memoir resonant. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/08.]-Elizabeth Brinkley

Kirkus Reviews

Elegant account of a family's persistent melancholy and the damage it wrought. When Lukas (Silent Grief, 1988) was six, his brilliant, mercurial and horribly depressed mother Elizabeth killed herself. When he was 62, his older brother, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony, committed suicide on the eve of the publication of his second book (Big Trouble, 1997). The author's uncle killed himself in his early 70s; Lukas's grandmother did the same in her 80s. After years of trying to make sense of his mother's death, which her sons didn't know was a suicide until years later, the author was faced with another mystery to unravel. In their childhood, he and his brother had never been close, or even similar. Tony took after their mother in temperament and coloring, inheriting the "blue genes"; Christopher (Kit) was known as "Master Sunshine." After Elizabeth's death, the boys were raised by their domineering but adoring grandmother and their elegant, but largely absent father Edwin. As they aged, Kit and Tony grew farther apart, until at times the damage to their relationship seemed irreparable. Lukas's recital of the family's depressed history includes an account of his mother's affair with an older, married man, which began when she was 13 and ended just before her marriage to Edwin. It provides a child's-eye view of Elizabeth's death and moves into the brothers' adulthood, when Tony became increasingly successful and unmoored. The more celebrated he was, his brother writes, the greater his need for admiration: "Tony's prizes and the thousands of plaudits for his work didn't fill up the hole in his soul." As Kit achieved his own success, he too realized how ultimately unsatisfying itcould be. Lukas movingly chronicles his own struggle to understand the darkness he suspects inside himself as well as the suicides of loved ones unable to cope with that darkness. Sweet, sad and sobering. Agent: Christine Tomasino/The Tomasino Agency

Product Details

• ISBN: 0385525206
  
• ISBN-13: 9780385525206
• Format: Hardcover, 272pp
• Publisher: Bantam Books
• Pub. Date: September 2008
• Sales Rank: 13,798

• Interviews & Essays
• Read an Excerpt

Interviews & Essays

Can you sum up BLUE GENES for me in a few words?
It’s about a talented family - my own - plagued by poisonous genes; how that talent continued to function, despite generations of depression and bipolar disorder. How my mother and four other family members killed themselves during my lifetime.

It’s about the relationship between my brother and myself - a complicated on-again-off-again tangle of feelings. And it’s also about looking back with sadness, but living with as much zest as possible. In others words, trying to keep going. Trying to find hope in the middle of disaster.

Why did you feel you had to write it?
Deep feelings - like loss and abandonment - often don’t go away; they bedevil people. Many years ago, when my mother killed herself and I was, in essence, abandoned. I didn’t know I could write to exorcise or even talk to explore the feelings of loss until I was in my 40’s. My brother was a writer; my wife was a writer. I wasn’t a writer. Then I started feeling I had to write whenever depression got to me (and there was a lot of depression.)

When my brother killed himself 11 years ago, I immediately knew I had to write about it. It took me years to see what the whole picture was. But I had to write, or I wouldn’t have survived.

You say in this book, and in a previous one you wrote for survivors left behind by suicide, that no one was honest with you when your mother killed herself; not for ten years. What do you think your reaction would have been if they had been? And do you think it ever makes sense not to be honest with children about suicide?
I was six. With small children, less is more. But something should have been said. Each parent has to figure that out for him or herself, and it depends on the child. But here’s the main point: Since they were so frightened of dealing with the facts, my father and grandmother ignored the immense imagination of small children. Why weren’t they open with me, I thought? Aha, it’s because I caused my mother’s death. Had they said something - anything - such as “You are a good boy. Little boys sometimes think their behavior causes bad things to happen, but your mother’s death was not your fault,” and left it there until I asked for more information, that would be fine.

You ask what my reaction would have been if my elders had been open and honest. For one thing, since they didn’t talk about my mother or her death, I thought they didn’t care! And I would have thought “hey, I’m allowed to ask about this precious mother whom I lost.”

With so much sadness around you and with your own issues with depression, how did you make it through the tough times in your life?
The short answer is: very good luck.

Here’s how I look at it. The genes we inherit help determine our character. Some children are born happy: they smile, the respond to their environment. Some seem less so. How their environment then treats them helps govern how they grow and change. Sometimes traumatic things happen and the “happy” child - through the luck of good genetic loading - survives better than the “gloomy” child. Sometimes, persistence, talent and survival skills are in the character a child is born with.

And, as in my case, even when there are skills you can learn, luck plays a huge role. I was lucky to find good psychotherapist. I was lucky to find a woman to spend my life with who had strength and vibrancy and the ability to withstand all my depressions. And that isn’t easy - to put up with years of depression in your husband. I was lucky that the bipolar “genes” weren’t passed to me. I was unlucky to have so many people in my life kill themselves. I was unlucky to be depressed off and on most of my life. But the good luck outpaced the bad luck.

What do you hope people will learn from your story?
It’s funny. I’ve never thought anyone would learn anything. It was simply a story I had to tell. But, I hope they’ll learn that some of the bad things that happen in a person’s life are not their fault. That bad things happen to people. I’m talking about things that happen to us outside of our ability to control. I hope they come away with some hope.

Also: I am a big pusher for talking about grief and other things that frighten or sadden us. Keep the dialogue open, whether with adults or children. Finally, I want people to know that survival in the middle of trauma or grief or war often seems impossible, but that - with luck, support, and good will - it’s actually often possible to come out the other side.

If your brother were alive, what stories would you and he be writing about today?
Tony would be on the campaign trail, I think, but not the same tack that everyone else is taking. He’d want to go into deep background about some aspect that no one else is covering: maybe a town in the middle of the country where people have needs that no one is addressing. I don’t really know, because his talent was finding stories that no one else could find.

And you? What will you write about next?
I’m not sure. I have a play about my 16 years of dealing with cancer - radiation, chemotherapy, the whole shebang - that got a good workshop performance some months back and I want to expand that and get it produced. It has only one actor in it - me. But now, after my wife’s sudden and unexpected death last April, and the profound loss that inflicted on my daughters, my wife’s friends and family, and myself, I think I have to write about her. What form that will take, I don’t know. But I don’t think I’ll be satisfied until I’ve done that.

You already have something about her at the end of Blue Genes…
Yes, but that’s short. Kind of a eulogy. I want to try to write to purge my grief. To honor her. To come to terms with the pain of grief. If I’m going to continue to live a life that’s meaningful and supportive of my two grown daughters, of my grandchildren, I have to do what I’ve always done: express my pain in the open.

Read an Excerpt

Susan and I return home from a party. In an unusual show of activity, our answering machine has had eleven hang-ups and one message-from Linda, my sister-in-law.

"Christopher," she says, "can you call me, please."

Usually, no one calls me Christopher except strangers, but maybe Linda is echoing my brother, who sometimes calls me by my full name as a joke.

I make a mental note to call her tomorrow; it's too late tonight. I figure that she 's probably planning a publication party for Tony, who has just finished his latest book, nine years in the writing. The book before this one-Common Ground-resulted in his second Pulitzer Prize and dozens of other awards. One reporter called my brother "the best journalist of our generation." Another said he was "the patron saint of contemporary reporters." He has won numerous accolades for his reporting for the New York Times, has received honorary degrees for his deep analysis of crucial episodes in recent American history, and has been wined and dined by literati and academics alike. He is, in short, one of those remarkable men whose work received enormous respect and attention.

But Tony is not sure that the new book, a huge volume called Big Trouble, is up to his previous works. It's due out in a month or so, and we 'll all have to wait.

While I'm at the closet, taking off my shoes, the phone rings again. Susan is near and she answers.

"Hello." A pause. "How?" Her voice is electric, alarmed. I recognize a disaster in the making.

I come around the corner of the closet, a shoe in one hand, the other still on my foot.

She looks at me, the phone to her ear, shaking her head, a look of terror on her face.

"What is it?" I ask, already feeling the pain begin.

"Tony killed himself," she says.

I scream and throw the undropped shoe at the far wall. most brothers have sibling-rivalry problems, interrupted by close bonding, but Tony and I always seemed to have great difficulty in finding common ground. The history of our family is partly responsible, a history full of self-destructive events. In the wake of a family suicide, there is sorrow, guilt, despair- and anger. My reaction to my brother's death was no different; in fact, because of the difficult relationship we had had, it may have been worse.

During the first months after Tony's death, I viewed my life with him through the prism of anger. Why did he do this to me and to his family? If there had been good times in our years together, I didn't allow myself to remember them.

But gradually the truth seeped in: there was a whole store of other memories that I was hiding. I needed to make an effort to dredge up those experiences-the ones that had provided pleasure and comfort. To put a picture of our relationship in some kind of balance, if I could.

So, what would happen if I stopped thinking about all the rage I had for the way Tony had died and for the slights I had felt? What might occur if I recalled how much we had shared, what burdens we had lifted together, how we had supported each other? What then? I began writing about my family two weeks after my brother's death. At first, I could put down only a few thoughts about him, mostly about my anger and sorrow, but as the weeks and months went by, memories came-long-ago events that had been forgotten. Time passed; I would come back to the computer, put down new recollections. About us. About our relationship. I found memories of other family members, of the distant past, of things I thought had been obliterated forever. The mind is tricky: it brings back even the most distant feelings and events just when you think they have left you alone, left you in peace.

Today, more than a decade after Tony's death, I am still writing. But my idea of who my family and my brother were has changed over these years. The perception of who I was-and who I am-has also changed. So I keep writing. Trying to get it right.

A week after the suicide, when Susan, our daughters, Megan and Gabriela, and I attended a memorial gathering, Linda gave me a copy of Big Trouble, fresh off the presses. I turned the first few pages. In the dedication Tony had written, "To Christopher William Lukas. My brother, my friend."

That was an extraordinarily moving moment. I turned from the group around me and shielded my eyes, in tears. I had not had the slightest inkling Tony was dedicating the book to me. Nor could I have guessed that he would add "friend" to such a line. We were brothers-no doubt. But when all was said and done, were we really friends?

I decided I would start from there, from that emotional moment when it occurred to me that he really did care about me, that all the battles and absences and slights did not, in the end, seem to be as important as the fact that we were brothers-and friends. He had thought about me when he wrote that dedication. And perhaps he had thought about me even as he ended his own life.

Conflating the present with the past is an old theme of philosophers. The idea of all chairs, said the philosopher William James, is present in the image of any particular chair. So any particular friend's essence is distilled by all the friends one has had. And so it is with brothers. They are never what they appear to be to others, or even to oneself. Tony is a combination of past and present, of what he was and how I see him today.

But that is true of me as well. I am not merely the bald head in the mirror, the tired knees, and the naps in the afternoon. I am the sixteen-year-old with an enormous appetite, the twenty-two-year-old having his first real love affair, the thirty-three-year-old looking down at his first child.

Sister to sister, brother to brother, siblings can never be 100 percent fair about love and parental sharing and other sharp facets of the bright and painful lives they have together-even when much of that time is spent apart, even when they can communicate well and take the burdens of their relationship with good grace. I could not pretend that my brother and I were pals. Friends, perhaps, but not buddies.

Tony and I are brothers across the stroboscopic echoes of the past: dissolving across black interludes into the next image, and the next, and the next, until all vestige of pure vision is destroyed. All that is left is memory, and we know how faulty that can be. Who Tony was is forever blurred by who I was and how I remember who I thought Tony was. Yes, we are brothers in fact, in memory, and in wish, but he is dead, and I am alive-left to dwell on the questions, and to seek the answers.

There were questions of great importance to me: Would I, too, end up killing myself? Was the legacy of self-destruction I would discover in my family too great for me to survive? If so, when would the pendulum swing? And if it never did, why not? How could I-almost alone among my family-escape?

To answer these questions, I needed to go back and delve more deeply into my family and explore my relationship with Tony. This is a story of two brothers in a particular family at a particular time in the history of that family. If the tale often appears to be as much about my parents and grandparents-and my emotions, my life, and my memories-as it is about my brother, it is because it is very much a story about relationships. The relationship my father had with my mother, the relationship of my mother to her parents. Mine with Tony, Tony's with those other people. Beyond that, it is also a book about coming to terms with the suicide of a brother-an event I had written about previously when it happened to other people, but never before experienced for myself.

The letters, autobiographies, and other written notes have lain for decades in cubbyholes in an old rolltop desk that Susan and I bought on a trip to my uncle Ira's house near Philadelphia. The desk cost $40. At the time, I thought it was too much money to pay for an "old piece of furniture," but as usual Susan was right: you can always use a schoolmaster's rolltop.

Today, I love that desk. This is where the detritus of our lives lies. With nineteenth-century wisdom, its makers built it with myriad slots in which to stow important pieces of their complex lives. Into those compartments I have put the passports used for various family trips-their photographs attesting to the passage of time, change of hairstyles, even emotional states. I see Susan in early years, with downcast aspect, her hair tightly wrapped around her slender head, a strained smile on her face. I see her later, lovely brown tresses surrounding a confident, smiling countenance. And later still, the strands and flecks of gray shining in the sunlight of a photo I took myself. My own visages: young and shaven, a boy on the go; leather shirt from the 1960s; sideburns in the 1970s; finally, balding pate-"aging criminal on the go," the family said, jokingly. Here in this desk went the birth certificates of our daughters, Megan and Gabriela, audiotapes of graduations and memorial services. Old keys. Legal documents. Currency from trips abroad. Broken pens. Broken promises.

It is through that desk, and from long-hidden events, that my memory is awakened. I take comfort that I can substantiate there the fact that Tony was not just a brother worth thinking about and arguing over on a personal basis but a complex, world-class character whose contributions to journalism and to his friends were valuable and whose death by his own hand is made all the more heartbreaking because it was not preordained.

Or was it?

What do I really know about the past? What do any of us know? Who were these characters? What led up to the deaths in my family? In truth, I was woefully ignorant-and, to be honest, fearful of finding out.