"Marion Zimmer Bradley: It’s Worse Than I Knew"

[james_davis_nicoll]

memetic prophylactic recommended

Comments

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

His love of science fiction and the bottle are the things which define him.

Well, there was the little matter of his entire life being run by witches.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

That doesn't help matters. His love of science fiction is due to witch influence? Is this supposed to be a good thing?

Maybe all of science fiction in that fictional universe is a construction of witch powers to entrap magical practitioners into worlds of delusion and emotional failure. And maybe we're all Starfleet officers who have been deluded by Q.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

No, but his being a distant, abusive, alcoholic weak dude is either a) partially because of the abusive family dynamics, or b) because of abusive family dynamics plus magic, depending if you want to take it as a fantasy or not.

(I think it's reasonable to look at it either way, personally.)

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

I haven't read the book, but this exchange is giving me the impression that her dad is a drunken abuser because it's her mom's fault and she drove him to it, which on the face of it is not a healthy narrative construction. I hope this is not in fact the case.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

It's really not clear why he's a drunken abuser. It's clear that the mother is an emotional abuser and manipulator (I think there's enough objective evidence to conclude that that's not all in the narrator's head), and that the narrator vastly prefers the father although she sees some of his faults (and his other faults are clear to the reader despite the narrator's passing over them). Perhaps his faults are caused by the situation he's in, or perhaps his faults lead him into that situation - the text doesn't take a stand on that.