Review: In ‘An Abbreviated Life,’ Ariel Leve Escapes Her Mommie Dearest

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There comes a moment in young adulthood when many of us decide that one or both of our parents are crazy. But then we compare notes with friends, share stories with colleagues and discover, much to our astonishment, that crazy is relative, and the bell curve in this case is plump, and that our mothers or fathers, whom we once considered uniquely deranged, are really only averagely so.

Especially after we encounter someone with a parent who is truly disturbed.

In her painful, strangely mesmerizing memoir, “An Abbreviated Life,” Ariel Leve tells the story of her childhood. It had all the trappings of privilege. She lived in a penthouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, attended private school and had “a closet full of shoes.” There was just one problem, and it trumped all else: Her mother was a colossus of melodrama. She had a towering need for attention and affirmation; she had zero impulse control. Her moods were unpredictable, terrifying. She was as stable as an airplane with one wing.

“I hate you. I love you. You’re a moron. I never said that. You’re the most important person in the world to me. I wish you were never born,” Ms. Leve writes in a sample litany, all of which could have been uttered by her mother in a single afternoon.

With minimal Googling, you can figure out just who Ms. Leve’s mother is, though the author throws a feint to disguise her. She was a poet, a novelist and the maker of a cult feminist documentary. She had outrageous parties and kept glamorous company — Andy Warhol came to her wedding reception, Robert Lowell scribbled notes on her poems, James Earl Jones came by for dinner.

Ultimately, she repelled almost everyone she attracted, including Ms. Leve’s father, who moved to Thailand for work when his daughter, an only child, was 5. (He provided sanctuary for the author during the summers, but it was hardly enough.) Most intriguing to me, though, aren’t the friends and companions her mother couldn’t retain. It’s that she’s still alive. (Ms. Leve, a former columnist for The Sunday Times Magazine in London, just talked about her mother in an interview on NPR.)

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You could therefore view “An Abbreviated Life” as an act of supreme vengeance. But I have a different theory: After living through so many years of uncontrolled hysteria and histrionics, Ms. Leve badly pines for witnesses. No matter how many times she was told, or tried to tell herself, that what she experienced was profoundly abnormal, some part of Ms. Leve still wonders if she made too much of it. Or thinks it was her fault.

It wasn’t her fault. And it was abnormal.

Her mother lived in her sheer nightgowns, thinking nothing of wearing them in the street. She’d often linger on the phone so long that she would wet herself. One of the games she played with her 5-year-old daughter (or perhaps she was 6? Or 7? The author can’t remember) was “Being Born”: She’d lie naked in her bed, invite Ms. Leve to wedge herself between her legs and then pretend to give birth all over again. “I want to relive the happiest day of my life!” she’d exclaim.

This woman is naked a lot in this book, even when dialing for groceries. It’s a metaphor made literal: She exposes far too much of herself.

The horrors accumulate. Ms. Leve’s mother may have been a feminist, but she had a terror of being single, collecting cruel, abusive boyfriends. If she sensed she was being rejected, she’d be the one to get physical. “Clumps of his white hair,” Ms. Leve writes of one, “would be on the floor.”

The same was true if her mother sensed her housekeeper was leaving or her daughter was withdrawing. “You know I don’t want to be alone,” she’d wail whenever Ms. Leve asked to go to a slumber party. (Never mind that she never ate meals with her daughter, that she outsourced all affection, that she frequently stayed out all night herself.) She tussled with both of them, though she seemed to reserve the worst of it — the slapping, the pinching, the punching — for Ms. Leve alone.

I read “An Abbreviated Life” with the same interest I associate with staring at someone’s horrible plastic surgery. The book is a portrait of something familiar gone wildly, tragically awry.

Ms. Leve doesn’t play her story for laughs, as Augusten Burroughs did in “Running With Scissors.” She tells it earnestly, as both a healing and problem-solving exercise. She comes to us skinless, an open wound. If she spent her entire childhood cowering like a frightened animal, her threat detection systems on permanent high alert, how, in adulthood, was she supposed to trust, to feel joy, to plan for the future?

Working out how to become a functional adult — which means unlearning the siege mentality Ms. Leve acquired as a child — is almost as significant a part of this book as the author’s traumatic recollections. Her staccato, diarylike entries surf between the past and present.

At times Ms. Leve goes overboard when she gets into the clinical aspects of what she suffered. She delves into the neuroscience of child abuse and brain damage, which hardly seems necessary to make her point; the many passages about her attempts to overcome the traumas of her youth can sound canned and overprocessed, as if they’d been run through a therapy software program.

Yet I forgave her for them. It was hard not to. For Ms. Leve, the simple act of growing up was exhausting.

“An Abbreviated Life” is not just a story about mending, but also escape. Whatever Ms. Leve’s mother is — borderline? Narcissistic? Bipolar? All three? The author doesn’t say — she certainly never shows an awareness of other minds over the course of the book, and her needs never abate. When Ms. Leve was 9, she wrote a note to her mother from Bangkok, begging her to relinquish custody and let Ms. Leve live with her father. Her mother’s response was to fly out immediately and collect her. (She took along her tennis pro, fearing she couldn’t handle the crisis on her own.) Ms. Leve eventually realized, “I will never be free from her.”

But by slow turns she does pry herself loose and rebuild her life. She undergoes various forms of therapy. She moves to London in her late 30s and refuses to give her mother her number. In her mid-40s, she moves to Bali, where her father has relocated, and falls in love with an Italian man who luxuriates in silence. She helps him raise his twin daughters. Nurturing comes naturally to her.

Her mother has no idea where she is. The number on their house is not detectable. And the road has no name.