Spike Gillespie
interviewed by Emma Taylor on August 22, 1996
(A screwed up kid grows up to be) that redneck in the grocery store smacking his kids and saying, "Your mama is a bitch and you're stupid."
"I often hop up on any number of soapboxes," Spike explains. Every rant tells a story, or perhaps in Spike's case, every story tells a rant. (Her writing is first-person, memoir-style -- compare her to Mary Karr or Anne Lamott, but she claims she's been at it longer.) Here, she tells Tripod the story of a soapbox and arrives at her "favorite message in life."
Tripod: Tell me about the memoir you're writing.
Spike Gillespie: It's a memoir about how my father's rejection of me led me to seek approval and love elsewhere, for thirty years, often in inappropriate ways. More specifically, it deals with how I sorta drank and slept my way halfway across the States and back, how my self-esteem (what little I had) died an agonizing death, how I suffered (still do, less frequently) deep depressions, and how, through becoming a parent myself, I got my act together and am happy now.
But it's not about how we need to be mothers to feel worthwhile. In my case, as it happened, I had to have a child, and to love that child more than anything in the world, to realize I should have received that kind of love -- to realize I wasn't crazy for wishing my father had been kinder. And it's decidedly not happily ever after. I'm afraid I'll never fully escape what happened to me as a child, though I'm much, much better. Still, I sometimes bend over backwards to please the wrong people, when pushed I am wildly volatile, and I have a really, really hard time dealing with men without being suspicious of them -- without projecting my daddy-anger on them.
Tripod: What question would you most like to be asked by an interviewer? And how would you respond?
SG: [laughs] Emma, I'm going to steal that one from you. Usually, my last question for folks is: So, what else do you want to tell me? Anyway, I often hop up on any number of soapboxes, but I think I'd like to be asked by someone what my main or favorite message in life is.
I would say: Read Alice Miller, first of all. "Banished Knowledge" is the one I recommend. In that book, I learned a truth I knew but never realized I knew: Children are not born beasts that need to be broken. Children are humans -- fragile humans, but humans nonetheless. When we are short-tempered with them, when we yell at them, beat them, act smarter than them, try to control them, bully them, act like they are inferior, it really screws them up. Then, guess what? They grow up to be that asshole in the car next to you, who almost ran you off the road. Or the idiot you are in the process of divorcing. Or that redneck in the grocery store smacking his kids and saying, "Your mama is a bitch and you're stupid." Or maybe, that kid is you, and you're hurt or sad or suffer depression because someone did you wrong. What I'm getting at is, we wonder why the world is so screwed up and we purport to want to do something about it, but we are diagnostic rather than preventative. We need to really focus on children-- to not punish them because their parents are on welfare, but to make sure we do something if we are aware child abuse is going on, or, in more simple day-to-day examples, do everything we can to instill healthy self-esteem in children. Believe me, it will pay off.
