We talk about our memories, our mother, the madness that was our childhood, and the strength her belief in the...story must have required of her; to keep going, to leave the familiar and known behind twice, and invite the condemnation and judgment of her family and friends for our disappearances. She did what she believed she had to do to protect her family. And we survived because of and in spite of that.I didn't know anything about Run Hide Repeat before picking it up, and I can't stress enough how important that was for my reading enjoyment. If someone else is thinking about reading this, I can only implore: Don't read any reviews, any summaries, not even the book flap that gives so much away (I put the ellipses in the opening quote to prevent even a whiff of spoiler.) In addition to having an incredibly interesting story to tell, author Pauline Dakin paces her memoir like a thriller; doling information out slowly and thoughtfully so that the reader's experience mirrored her own as she got older and gained more insight into the why of her crazy childhood. I was fascinated, overwhelmed, horrified: what more could I ask? Although I do have some caveats, they will necessarily be behind my spoiler tags; I still, wholeheartedly, recommend this read.
I was able to hide the following behind spoiler tags on Goodreads, don't read this if you'd like a satisfying reading experience with the book!
Dakin's parents divorced when she was five years old and her younger brother was three, and as she remembers him from then, her father was a violent alcoholic. Her mother did her best to raise two young children alone, and once she discovered comfort and counsel in the pastor at a new church they began to attend, Ruth Dakin started involving her children in trips and activities with the pastor, Stan Sears, and his wife. Pauline remembers a weird childhood – being woken up to go on day trips away from home, being told to always be secretive about the family's movements, being uprooted and quietly moved across the country, twice. Every time she protested, her mother explained that she'd be told everything when she was older. So, when Dakin was twenty-three, her mother – and Stan Sears, who was apparently now her mother's lover – explained to her that her father was actually a dangerous Mafia kingpin and that Stan was a member of a shadowy non-governmental protection agency; always a short step ahead of the goons trying to kidnap, kill, or enlist Dakin and her brother in their father's business:
It was a small, tight organization in which leaks were not tolerated. The agency comprised a cadre of undercover security people who gathered intelligence, provided protection for people under threat, including my family, and who – when necessary – would fight or even kill as part of a government-sanctioned but secret war on what was seen as the growing domestic threat posed by organized crime.Stan and Ruth told wild tales of hand-to-hand combat, drug-tipped blowdarts, and poisoned powder sprinkled on their family room carpet. Every story answered a question that Dakin had about her strange childhood, distanced her even more emotionally from the father she rarely saw, and made her begin to live in fear for her future: these mobsters were still out there, still waiting to pounce, still being combatted by those from the “Weird World”. As I was reading this, it all felt too unbelievable (this happened in Canada?), but like Dakin, I had no reason not to believe what her mother was telling her. As Stan described the communication device in his wallet (that sent him urgent warnings via Morse code to his butt), the undetectable doubles that the Mob had replaced various members of the Dakin family with, and the idyllic safe compound that he wanted to whisk Ruth and Pauline away to (with complications always preventing the move at the last minute), I started to wonder, “Is this all really supposed to be true?” And that's what's so special about Dakin's pacing: She gives just enough clues that something isn't right so that the reader has doubts just at the point that she, in the narrative, began to have doubts. As Dakin realises that Stan has been lying to and manipulating her mother for decades, the question becomes: Why?
Books, television and movies condition us to think of psychosis as expressing itself through acts of violence; through dark, disturbing behaviour; and through wild-eyed madness – not through a quest for nirvana. There had been unnerving manifestations: the organ-harvesting ship, the times Stan described discoveries of warehouses or buildings full of women and children being sold or used as sex slaves, or raids that liberated young drug-addicted Mafia soldiers. And they were incarcerated, yes, but Stan always described them as saved from a life of brutality and evil. Always these horrific scenes were in aid of positioning Stan and his made-up anti-Mafia agency as rescuers, as bringers of love and light. In Stan's case his psychosis was expressed in aspirations to do God's work in an imaginary world, but all the while he was creating chaos in the real one.And this is the part that prevented me from giving a full five stars to a book I was really enjoying. Dakin decided to start researching psychiatric disorders to find one that might fit Stan and his actions, and after many years and consultation with many experts, she came up with “primary persecutory type delusion disorder, with secondary grandiose type”; that her mother had been caught up in the delusion through the folie à deux phenomenon. The final part of Run Hide Repeat is meant to outline the effects of undiagnosed mental health issues, with a plea for more research into Stan's rare condition, but I couldn't help but wonder if Stan actually was suffering from a delusion disorder: what if he was just a sociopath who got his kicks out of pulling Ruth's strings; who says he believed all that he was saying? Per the Goldwater Rule, the psychiatrists who Dakin consulted with are ethically prevented from assigning Stan a diagnosis without having met with him, and as I only know him from the stories that Dakin had written here, she hasn't convinced me that Stan really did believe in the Weird World, and the O, and the inside. On the other hand, Dakin was wonderful at exploring the effects that Stan's behaviour (however provoked) had on her family, and the picture of her wasted and dying mother cautioning Dakin to remain vigilant because she wouldn't be around to watch over her anymore was affecting; there's no doubt that Ruth believed every word she was told and she spent her entire adult life trying to protect her family from the monsters in the shadows. And that's a great story.
Pauline and her brother were born on the west coast, in Vancouver, moved out of their father's house when she was five, and when she was nine, their mother uprooted them and moved to Winnipeg, in the center of the country. Just as Pauline was getting over being the new girl, when she was thirteen, the family moved with little warning to St. John, New Brunswick on the east coast. Eventually, Pauline's mother, and then Pauline herself, relocated to Nova Scotia; her brother to Edmonton.
By contrast, my brothers and I were born on the east coast of Canada, in Charlottetown. We moved to St. John for my Dad's job when I was three, and when I was eight, we were uprooted and moved to small town Ontario, in the center of the country. Just as I was getting over being the new girl, when I was fourteen, we were moved with a few months notice to Lethbridge, out west. Eventually, my parents moved back to Ontario, I spent the next seven years in Edmonton, and shortly after my brothers and I settled our families around them here, my parents retired down to Nova Scotia.
Dakin spends a lot of ink on the unsettled nature of her childhood - the moves and the powerlessness and unrootedness she felt - and that was my childhood, too. When she made it to St. John someone asked her what her father did for a living - assuming that it must have been a work transfer that brought the family there - and she found it awkward not to have that excuse: they were always moving and she didn't understand why. By contrast, I was told that that we were always moving for my father's work, but I still didn't understand why.
I was visiting with my seventy-six-year-old mother-in-law last week, and she was talking about some of the old friends she's still in contact with; a couple of whom she has known since kindergarten. And that's unbelievable to me: I have no old friends, no hometown, no continuity to the people in my life besides my brothers who were also dragged around. Dakin's case was obviously extreme - she wasn't allowed to have a relationship with her extended family because Stan had convinced her mother that they had all been replaced with Mafia doubles - but we were geographically isolated from our extended family, and in essence, I never had grandparents or cousins or aunts and uncles. For the past twenty years, with few phone calls, rare visits up to see us, and maybe us going down there once a year, I have essentially felt like I have no parents either. The instincts that made it so easy for them to break ties with their families and not settle us in any one place must be the same instincts that make my parents indifferent to us now: at least Dakin had a close relationship with her mother in the end; geographic isolation, by design, prevents that for me. And at its root, I know that all of the moving - the lack of old friends, a hometown, continuity and an extended family - has left me broken, too. At least Dakin can conclude that her mother, however misguided, always put her children first; I have no such comfort.