Confessions of a Former Child: A Therapist's Memoir by Daniel Tomasulo

Product Details

The Barnes & Noble Review

Among the many pitfalls that can befall memoir, there are special classes of pitfall reserved for memoirs by therapists. Because the writers come armed with arsenals of theoretical know-how, they can be overly brooding, full of false epiphany, or highly academic. They can navel-gaze, stare into a wistful distance, or endlessly deconstruct themselves in search of object lessons. Occasionally, some of these formulas work, and sometimes they are pleasing and insightful, but what's refreshing about Daniel Tomasulo's memoir is that it celebrates emotional complexity without seeming to do any of these things. Though written by a therapist, it seems only to be recounting a life with generous humor and a gentle wisdom acquired in hindsight. Tomasulo, who lost his father to a heart attack and his mother to cancer, meditates on other losses as well: some as large as losing friends and patients to heroin, others as small as the pain of throwing away old running shoes. And as a man of Italian and Irish ancestry living in New Jersey, Tomasulo offers linked vignettes with a "regular-guy" simplicity that comes off as generous, slightly gritty, and down-to-earth. As his stories leapfrog through time, it becomes apparent that he has a simple guiding philosophy: it is possible to live in the past and present at once, and that it's possible to feel contradictory feelings at the same time. Living with complexity is his sense of resolution. The stories aren't really pat, but what Tomasulo occasionally seems to lack in theoretical depth, he makes up for in warmth. Holding his newborn daughter in his arms for the first time, he feels the wide expansion of both present and past in the miracle of her body. At once, a rueful kicker: "It was at this very moment I realized I had become a father, that Nancy and I were now part of a family, and that my keys were locked in a car outside the emergency room with the motor still running." --Tess Taylor

Synopsis

A hilarious and perceptive examination of the mysteries of childhood and the perils of parenthood

From August 1956 through April 1961 I controlled the traffic and streetlights in New York City and northern New Jersey. It was a daunting task for a five-year-old, but by the summer of ‘56 I realized I had a responsibility I could not ignore. My identity and my mission were top secret. With the exception of terse, encrypted communications to the National Security Council and the CIA, I couldn’t breathe a word.
 
In this honest and witty debut, Daniel J. Tomasulo chronicles and confesses his childhood delusions, his particularly challenging experiences as a parent, and his life as a psychologist. His memories of being a kid—controlling streetlights, avoiding any foods with seeds lest he get pregnant, enduring his mother’s cold love—are vivid, and his life as a parent is riddled with dilemmas. To start, he finds himself locked in a rubber-walled hospital room while his wife is in labor, and later he faces the necessity of giving mouth-to-mouth to his daughter’s suffocating Raggedy Ann doll. As a professional who specializes in the highly personal, he traces the unusual and illuminating connections between his own life and evocative scenes from the lives of his patients.

 
With refreshing candor and laugh-out-loud humor, Tomasulo explores the elusive magic of childhood, the complications of parent-child relationships, and the lasting significance of the everyday.

Kirkus Reviews

A practicing psychologist puts himself on the couch. In his witty debut, Tomasulo (Psychology/New Jersey City Univ.) examines episodes in his work and daily life that provoke jarring, sometimes humorous reminders of various childhood traumas. When a move to the Jersey shore prompts the purging of possessions, he comes across a box marked "Mom" and begins to reflect on his dead parents. An especially funny, discomfiting chapter describes the psychological warfare Mom and Dad waged with him one day at the amusement park when he wanted to give the timeless ping-pong ball "fish toss" a go. His mother was appalled at the thought of a "filthy" goldfish in the house, but his father cajoled her into acquiescence. "My parents were banking on me screwing up," Tomasulo writes. "They'd let me throw the balls, miss, then go home without a fuss . . . My mother wouldn't have to be the bad guy and my father would have given me the chance. It would all be on me." (He won, and Mom flushed the goldfish down the toilet.) In grad school 25 years later, the author witnessed a scene at the beach in which those same no-win dynamics were inflicted on a young boy being used as a pawn in his mother's battle with his grandmother. With characteristic candor and humor, Tomasulo writes, "So I'm on the beach, early in the morning, reading about family pathology when God figures it would be better for me to watch family pathology than read it . . . I finally recognized the family. It was mine." Much of the memoir sets up similarly neat, reflective parallels: Judging by this account, reckoning with your own traumas comes easiest when encountering those of others. Disquietingly funny, stuffed with entertaining details andpenetrating insights.

Biography

Daniel J. Tomasulo is a psychologist, psychodrama trainer, and writer on faculty at New Jersey City University.