Unforgettable Jane Dutton

I went to my friend Jane Dutton’s memorial service today to say goodbye. But somehow, I don’t think she is really gone from my life. Jane enabled me to talk with my children. I’ve had a different – and better – and happier life because of that. And for at least one of my kids, it probably saved her life. Thank you, Jane.

It all had to do with reading aloud to my children – even after they were old enough to read on their own – something Jane taught me was possible – even though not enough parents continue to do so. After reading tens of thousands of pages and hundreds of books together, once you’ve read the Funeral Oration of Pericles out loud to your eight-year-old, you can talk about anything – even the kinds of things no one wants to discuss.

I’m so happy for Jane and the courageous decision she had to make to move to the Netherlands a few years ago. But in doing so, Jane also pulled off something incredible: and that was that she didn’t abandon us – she was still here – and in many ways closer – from her new home so many miles away. And I was blessed to have a front row seat witnessing her having that same kind of different – and better – and happier life. I miss my friend: Unforgettable Jane.

Bob

Jane Dutton

My friend Jane Dutton died on April 17, 2014. I will miss her.

Jane was Director of the Gale Free Library in my hometown, Holden, Massachusetts, before she up-and-retired early and moved to The Netherlands—of all places—for love—of all things. It took me a long time to forgive her … because it took me a long time to realize she had made the right decision rather than some colossal, adolescent blunder.

My first real notice of Jane was in 1996 when she spoke at a parent event about family read-aloud at my daughter’s soon-to-be elementary school. Years later, that encounter made its way into a book I was writing, Witness to the Dark, the story of that same daughter’s struggle to survive her teenage years.

Here’s that snippet:

Reading to the children was my one true passion. We’d been doing it for years. Nearly every night. When Patricia was little, I would read her Goodnight Moon, or A Pocket for Corduroy, or The Poky Little Puppy. Over and over. Night after night. For hundreds of nights. I always assumed that once Patricia learned to read, my job would be over. Patricia was pretty smart, so I was beginning to dread the day.

When Patricia was in nursery school, I went to a parent program at the local elementary school about family reading. Even though we already knew how to read, I decided to go anyway. And sit in the back. And listen. Just to make sure I hadn’t been screwing up my kid. It turns out that reading aloud to your children is OK. Good to know.

I learned two more things that night: The first is that children’s literature had changed since I was a kid. I sat there and listened to our town librarian talk passionately about books. Librarians are supposed to do that; it’s their job. But what I was experiencing was more than that. This lady actually believed that books were interesting. And she gave us some examples: Hatchet, the story of another Brian’s survival despite acts of unspeakable cruelty rained down on him by Mother Nature, and Holes, a new book about digging for clues to your own history. I had to read them.

The second thing I learned that night is you are allowed to continue to read to your child even after they’ve learned to read for themselves. No one does it, but it’s allowed. The next day, I went to the bookstore, snuck into the children’s section—a place where I had never been and where I thought fathers weren’t even allowed—found the books I was looking for, brought them home, went into my closet, turned on my flashlight, and read them all. They were amazing. Things had changed since I was a kid. These books were actually interesting. They talked about real problems. Real issues. Uh oh. Patricia was four.

That’s when I really started on my first Quest. I spent years searching for the perfect books to read to Patricia. We started with books that were a little calmer. Books I could read to her as we got ready to read the books I really wanted her to experience. And during that time, we found lots of great books. Books for younger kids. Books that dealt with younger kid issues. Eventually, I overcame my fear of bookstore clerks. And librarians. Since then, they have been a great source for ideas on important books to read to my children. I didn’t realize until years later that, like firefighters, librarians and bookstore clerks have a passion in life: To help fathers find the next perfect book to read to their kid. Or at least the good ones do.

As we read, I overcame another fear: The idea that a book, particularly a chapter book, is just too big to read aloud to a kid. It turns out that if you read nearly every night, for years, you end up reading tens of thousands of pages. That’s hundreds of books. The other thing reading did was put us together. I got to spend time—about 40 minutes each day—one on one—reading to each kid. I was never a good conversationalist, and I certainly didn’t know how to talk with children, but reading passed the time, and for a few minutes each day, at the beginning or the end of our story, we’d talk. About little things. About problems and worries. It made it so I really did know about some of the things going on in my children’s lives. And it made me accessible. I could talk to them. And they could talk to me.

—Pages 29-31, Witness to the Dark by Bob Larsted

A few years later, and again a few years after that, as each of my children had learned to read on their own, and it remained clear that I was still nearly the only parent in town who read to his elementary-school-aged kids, I helped organize another couple of these family read-aloud events. Our guest speaker? Jane, of course. She was only too pleased to spread her message to new generations of parents. And it gave me a chance to spend time talking with Jane about something she clearly still cherished—even after her promotion from Children’s Librarian to Library Director—her love of children’s books.

As my book began to make it way onto paper, as I began to read what I was writing about my own hometown, and, even worse, as I came to realize that I had managed to write more than ten thousand words without writing even one properly-punctuated sentence, I knew I needed some real help. So I walked into Jane’s office, sat myself down in her side chair, a place I’d visit many times over the next couple of years, and asked Jane if part of her job was to help budding authors in her community try to understand how to navigate a journey begun more out of need than of desire. Actually, what I really asked was, “Do librarians like you get stuck reading and commenting on every wannabe author’s great American novel?” She said yes.

Jane became one of my first, actual, early readers. And because she wasn’t family or a close friend (yet), she was able to tell me what she really thought. She started by asking two questions: 1) Why are you writing this? and 2) How can you tell an honest story if you leave out your wife and other daughter? And then she made two suggestions: 1) Cut the oil-burner story in half, and 2) Lose most of the drug details. Those were the first four of a whole gaggle of my most precious darlings laid waste by Jane and her sawed-off shotgun over the next couple of years. I appreciated every one of her comments. My book improved every time I managed to take a bit of her wisdom to heart.

As the book progressed, Jane helped me answer some of those questions. And she helped me find the balance between writing the book I needed to write, writing the book I was willing to write, and writing the book that my intended audience would find some solace in. For some reason, she let me get away with my self-invented grammar without a fight, and, as the book got longer and longer and kept referring back to that oil-burner story in more and different ways, she let me get away with cutting it by only a quarter, provided, of course, that I trimmed the rest of the book by that same amount.

Jane’s exit from Holden came as a big surprise to me and to others in town. She had become such an important pillar in our community we didn’t know what we would do without her. But a strange thing happened: as she moved away physically, she grew closer by way of her occasional emails and her more-regular, new blog. And we all managed to find ways to survive with and without her in new ways. Over time, it became clear that Jane had found true happiness in her new family, something that could only have come by taking a tremendous risk. I hope they found that same connection with her, and if the smiles in the Facebook postings are any indication, it seems they did.

On March 16, 2013, barely two months after my book was published, I got an email from Jane saying that she had written a blog mentioning my book and hoped it was OK because she was posting it later that day. OK? Jane’s blog was famous. Of course it was OK. (But only if she had something nice to say?) I spent several time zones holding my breath waiting for her to press the go button. Ultimately, I was so pleased with her comments that I asked if I could quote her. Months later, at an author talk, someone looked at Jane’s quote—right up there next to the Kirkus review on my little display stand—and said, “Is that by the famous Jane Dutton?” Of course it was.

How could there be more than one famous Jane Dutton?

I will miss her.

Bob

Judge’s Commentary

I entered the Writer’s Digest 21st Annual Self-Published Book Awards Competition. Apparently I didn’t win, but I did get this nice commentary out of it:

Bob

Entry Title: Witness to the Dark: My Daughter’s Troubled Times. A Comedy of Emotions.
Author: Bob Larsted
Judge Number: 88
Entry Category: Life Stories

This is a very candid and carefully crafted look at the author’s young daughter as she struggles with a number of mental challenges. The author’s background as an engineer is both an asset and a parallel here; his skills at problem-solving as an engineer act as a mirror of his attempts to find professional help for his daughter as she struggles with suicidal impulses, depression, and other phobias. It is a no-holds-barred narrative without being overly dramatic. In addition, the volume carefully documents (as an engineer would do) the discovery process of finding the right help as the daughter’s needs change and as she ages. There are sample questionnaires, checklists, prompts, and questions that the author encountered as the guardi[an] and parent. Thus the volume proves instructive as well as informative all while sharing very candid and honest details about one family’s journey with mental illness. The author uses a clear writing style (again, as one might expect from an engineer’s orderly mind), but he also uses repetition and short, dramatic sentences as a way of building tension, releasing tension and pacing the work. For traditionalists, this abundant use of sentence fragments might seem too bumpy; others will find it effective. The cover is eye-catching but not clearly connected. The subhead, “My Daughter’s Troubled Times. A Comedy of Emotions,” seems off kilter in that there is very little humor attempted here. In fact, the earnest tone is one of the volume’s assets. If that is meant as a satirical statement, it’s not clear.

— Judge, Writer’s Digest 21st Annual Self-Published Book Awards

How Many Diagnoses?

All throughout high school, I thought one diagnosis was enough. We had a “good” one, one that opened the doors for services. Schools said yes. Doctors would treat. State agencies would try to help.

But recently, I’m beginning to wonder about all those other diagnoses — the ones we stopped talking about when something better came along. Maybe they matter too. Because when there is more than one thing going on, maybe it’s important to be working on all of those things and not just the main “issue.”

Because maybe the main “issue” is really just a collection of a bunch of other issues, all of which have names, and all of which need some attention.

Bob

Second Book Review

The second review is in for my book, Witness to the Dark: My Daughter’s Troubled Times. A Comedy of Emotions. I’m pleased. I’ve excerpted it here.

Bob

KIRKUS REVIEWS

TITLE INFORMATION

WITNESS TO THE DARK
My Daughter’s Troubled Times. A Comedy of Emotions.
Larsted, Bob
CreateSpace (262 pp.)
ISBN: 9781468150131; January 11, 2013

BOOK REVIEW

In this accessible, chatty memoir about his daughter’s struggles with mental illness, first-time writer Larsted narrates, in exhaustive detail, his rocky four-year journey navigating the perilous mental-health system, his daughter’s shape-shifting symptoms, intermittent hospital stays and behavioral therapy.

Larsted’s book is a labor of love addressed to a parent like him—one not well versed in the mental health field or particularly aware of the psychological sphere of the human condition—and yet thrown into the dark, deep end of it. The alarm first sounded when his 14-year-old daughter, Patricia, reported, two months after the fact, that she took 14 Tylenol. Larsted, starting from ground zero, had to find the guidance and treatment his daughter required. Because of his wife’s recent stroke, it was left to him to handle. Although the author considers this Patricia’s story, it’s Larsted who goes from being a self-described “aloof” old-school father to a nurturing, articulate advocate and near expert on coping with a child’s severe, undiagnosed mental illness. He emerges on the other side having kept Patricia safe through her precarious adolescence and having evolved into a wise and soulful man. Larsted’s prose is admirable in many ways: He writes with emotional honesty, deftly uses metaphor and analogy, balances the specifics of both the trial and error of medication and sympathetically details his often frustrating experiences dealing with psychiatrists. …

A heartfelt, valuable resource and source of comfort for parents of mentally ill children.

First Book Review

The first review is in for my book, Witness to the Dark: My Daughter’s Troubled Times. A Comedy of Emotions. Wow! Is that what it is about?

Bob

ForeWord Reviews
Clarion Review

FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS

Witness to the Dark: My Daughter’s Troubled Times: A Comedy of Emotions
Bob Larsted
CreateSpace
978-1-4681-5013-1
Four Stars (out of Five)

Bob Larsted isn’t the type of person who works out his problems in public. He had always made a point of “avoiding speaking in public—or to anyone for that matter.” And yet, the introverted engineer has written a moving memoir about his quest to find answers for his daughter as she struggled with serious mental illness. Witness to the Dark tells the very human story of a father who is just trying to do the right thing, even when he has no idea what that thing might be. Larsted’s self-effacing humor sets the tone for a book that easily could have become drowned in drama. The situation is undeniably dire. Larsted’s daughter Patricia has attempted suicide several times. She hears voices and has friends nobody else can see. Patricia spends her teen years cycling through hospitals and treatment programs, none of which offers a permanent cure. And yet, Larsted never resorts to a “woe is me” lament. Instead, he opts for an engineer’s problem-solving orientation: “Here’s what I did. Here’s how it went. And here’s how I screwed it up time after time and how I kept trying anyway.” Not surprisingly, sometimes it worked for him.

Larsted points fingers not just at his own frequent follies but also at the American mental health system that failed to provide consistent, competent treatment. Each chapter is headed with a simple illustration of Patricia’s ever-changing medication regimen—cut the round one in half, take two of the diamonds, and add one of the oblong—that calls vivid attention to the fact that her doctors are scrambling for a solution rather than planning a considered course of treatment. In all of this, Larsted is pretty much on his own. His wife, Kate, is recovering from a stroke, and his younger daughter, Beth, is busy being a normal teenager. Whatever role they played in Patricia’s treatment is minimized; Larsted chooses to leave them out of the narrative to honor their privacy, a move that may have been unnecessary given that “Bob Larsted” is itself a pen name, and all of the family names are invented as well.

Poems and e-mails from Patricia, notes to and from doctors, and some spot-on analogies about handling emergencies round out Larsted’s tendency to make a lot of lists. There are lists of Patricia’s dreams, lists of medications, lists of the dreaded phone calls to therapists (and the inevitable failure of the therapists to call back). Larsted acknowledges his own compulsive tendencies, though, with self-deprecating comments and gentle humor.

Parents will identify with Larsted’s tenacity in getting treatment for his troubled daughter, as well as the missteps he makes along the way. While he honestly recounts the enormous struggles he has faced, his story also offers hope that even the most ordinary parents can rise to the challenge and find help for their child.

Sheila M. Trask

Anthony Rapp in “Without You”

I went to see Anthony Rapp tonight in Boston at his one-man show, “Without You,” at the Modern Theatre at Suffolk University. It was incredible. I’m going back on Sunday to experience it again.

The timing of this is a bit serendipitous. I’ve been a huge fan of “Rent” for many years, and particularly of the character played by Mr. Rapp. There is something about Mark that reminds me of my own self and the relationship I have had with my daughter Patricia as she has struggled over the years. This week, I am finishing up my book, a memoir about those difficult times. Unlike “Rent” and AIDS, mine is about mental health, another difficult, but just as taboo subject. For some reason, “Rent” and Mark have found their way into its pages. Twice.

As I was leaving for the theater tonight, the UPS guy showed up with some new uncorrected book proofs. I thought for a second about bringing one and trying to figure out how to give it to Anthony — maybe he’d like to read it — to see how his story fits into ours. But I quickly dismissed it — he’s just an actor. He’s not Mark.

But as I sat there tonight, it occurred to me that Anthony, in telling his story, was doing the same thing that Mark had done in “Rent.” He helped us live as he watched others live. And in doing so, Mark (and Anthony) got to live, too.

Anthony was alive on stage tonight. In his music and stories, he brought with him those same feelings I’m drawn to in the “Rent” experience. Thank you, Anthony, for letting me live tonight, too.

Go. Live.

Bob

The First Draft

I finished the first draft of my book today. It’s been in the works for quite some time. It was only recently that we made it to an appropriate place to give it a hopeful ending.

This means that I’m no longer a pseudonym, but a pen name.

Bob

I’m Bob

Hi. I’m Bob. I’m the proud father of Patricia, my no longer quite so suicidal daughter who still isn’t dead. Bob isn’t my real name, but then again, neither is Patricia’s. For those of you who know us, we ask that you respect our privacy. Please don’t post our true identities on the Internet. It’s not like we are superheros — we’re more like pack mules with some extra baggage that doesn’t need to be shared with everybody.