My Trauma

“It wasn’t even traumatic for you! It was only traumatic for me!”

“When I was going on the Bachelor I was always like, ‘I don’t have a sob story! I have no idea what I’m gonna talk about!’” Ashley Iaconetti said, weeping.

An audio version!

At a dinner party recently, my sister turned to the host.

“So!” she said. “What was your most traumatic moment?”

We were talking about a quality the three of us share, which is parents who are rabbis. Our host, who is my sister’s close friend, has a dad who is a rabbi. My parents are both rabbis. My sister wasn’t asking about our host’s most traumatic moment in his entire life, just his most traumatic moment as a rabbi’s kid. Still, I was surprised by her question. We were only on the soup course.

“Um,” said the host. “I don’t know.” He had just gotten up to bring the main dish to the table. He seemed thrown by the question about the most traumatic childhood moment, as impacted by his dad’s role as the leader of a large suburban synagogue on the east coast.

“Okay—” my sister said, so excited that she didn’t even stop to probe the host in case he just wanted to be asked three times, convert-style, before confessing his trauma, “because our most traumatic rabbis’ kid moment was the one with the congregant who had the gun collection!”

She had piqued the attention of the people around the table. “Gun collection!” people said in surprise.

As kids, my sister and brother and I wandered our parents’ synagogue like young, feeble royals, fending off compliments, confessions, and sly insults from congregants. In line for kiddush lunch after Saturday morning services, a woman would start a conversation with the words, “Your dad was at my husband’s death bed, you know.” I cream cheesed many bagels while listening to people describe the worst moments of their lives.

Mostly, congregants lavished us with attention and praise. They were generous and kind. Of course, those interactions are not the memorable ones. We remember best the times when adults acted inappropriate, or rude, or when we feared they were planning to kill us, as in the story my sister was about to tell.

I was especially surprised that my sister wanted to tell this story, since she wasn’t even there when it happened.

“You weren’t even there when that happened,” I said to my sister, in an accusatory hiss that was not perfectly matched to the dinner party setting.

“Yes I was,” she said. “What are you talking about?”

“You were in college!” I said. “Only I was there!” Actually our brother was there too, but I had always felt he was too young to understand what was going on.

We narrowed our eyes at each other over our soup.

“It wasn’t even traumatic for you!” I said, hoping that the other people at the table had become magically deaf. “It was only traumatic for me!”

Well, we told the story. I interrupted my sister every few lines to say that she was in college and could have no memory of this, and she said no I was there I wasn’t in college, and I said well maybe the situation stretched on longer than we both remember, and she said yes, maybe.

The group was amused and horrified by the story, which I do consider to be the lone traumatic episode of my very good childhood, transformed into dinner party fodder on a Sunday night.

“We didn’t even tell the part about the police escorting us home from school,” I lamented silently, as the conversation moved on and everyone started eating the bean-based vegetarian main.

“The thing is,” my sister broke in again. “The reason our parents were so easily convinced that someone was coming to kill us is because—”

And then off she went again, telling the history of our family anxiety, how it was passed down from generation to generation, until the version you see here, manifesting in this digital newsletter.

What the hell, I thought. This is my story of family anxiety that I am going to roll out at some point with a lot of flair and literary styling as a beautiful essay or minorly notable book! And she is telling it as a little crumb of amusement between people’s reports of their recent trips to Japan!

I love to know people’s childhood traumas. I’m sure you do, too. I’m also thrilled to hear about any that happened in adulthood. When I got into essay writing as a teenager, my parents—in a very loving way, you have to believe me—would joke, “Oh no, what are you going to do? You’ll never be a great writer because we gave you such a happy childhood!” There was Nora Ephron with her alcoholic mother and David Sedaris with his cruel father and there was me with endless bedtime stories and pasta dinners and steady reassurances that I was loved and would be loved forever.

Then when I was 17 the gun scare situation happened. And around that same time, a worse thing happened to me. Aha! I thought. My childhood trauma has arrived! And just under the wire.

This week I watched a clip from the new Bravo reality show The Real Housewives of Rhode Island. In it Ashley Iaconetti, a star in the constellation of the Bachelor franchise, makes a tearful confession.

“When I was going on the Bachelor I was always like, ‘I don’t have a sob story! I have no idea what I’m gonna talk about!’” she says, weeping.

The camera pans to other women who sit conspicuously rigid, so as not to be mistaken as nodding sympathetically.

“...kay,” one says.

“Ashley is crying that she has nothing to cry about,” the other woman translates.

I relate to Iaconetti, who accidentally laid bare the way traumatic stories are a form of currency in the arts and entertainment industry, and within interpersonal relationships. When I write, I find myself hoarding these few traumas, as I am now, if saving them for a rainy day. My puny little traumas! My precious, terrible, brushes with horror that made me who I am! I hold on to my threadbare memories in the hopes of arranging them later in a way that will make me legible to other people, and will also be moving, and timely. Unlike Iaconetti, I fear that these are single-use tokens, and so I guard them, waiting for precisely the right moment to deploy them.

The dinner party conversation offered another theory: that traumatic stories are not precious or profitable. They do not have to live in a box at the back of the mind, waiting to be taken out and displayed with breathless importance.

Critics revolt against the use of trauma as the engine of every fictional character because it reduces people to clichés. But the worst moments of our lives really do belong on a list of clichés—they boil down to, as Iaconetti said, “sob stories.” People and life are cruel to each other in just a few predictable ways. Still, I always like hearing people’s traumatic stories. It’s satisfying to get one more piece of evidence about Why They Are Like That.

Anyway, I appreciated what Ashley Iaconetti said. She didn’t want to have a “sob story” to be likable, or to get screen time. She said she just wanted something to talk about.