Reviewed by Jane Ward
Posted on: April 17, 2024
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“At the age of seven in the summer of 1965, I lived on an island in Galway, Ireland with my mother Deborah Love, father Peter Matthiessen, and my twelve-year-old stepbrother Luke from my father’s first marriage. . . . Across the waterway from our island in Ireland that summer was Annaghkeen Castle, erected by the de Burgh family in the 1300s. For our purposes, it lent a magical air to all that it surveyed….”(1)
So begins the prologue to the memoir Castles & Ruins by Rue Matthiessen.
Rue is a memoirist, essayist, and novelist, and the grown child of poet and writer Deborah Love and the writer Peter Matthiessen. Matthiessen is perhaps best known for his book The Snow Leopard; but it is Love’s 1970 book, Annaghkeen–part Ireland travelogue and part personal diary written in that summer of 1965–that captures the adult Rue’s imagination and shapes the trip to Ireland she plans with her young son and her husband to retrace the route she had made earlier with her parents. Nostalgia and a sense of idyll is strong in these opening lines, and equally sentimental is Rue’s initial desire to show her son a formative part of her life. But this memoir’s title, together with its subtitle, Unraveling Family Mysteries & Literary Legacy in the Irish Countryside, hint that her travel back into that period of her childhood will reveal a family landscape that is far from idyllic.
In fact, as Rue makes her way to Annaghkeen Castle for this second time, she is confronted by memories of a childhood that was actually quite lonely and fraught. The 1965 Ireland trip was less about a family bonding adventure than it was a desperate attempt to revive a failing marriage, a maelstrom in which the children were trapped as witnesses to dysfunction. Of her father–in reality, stepfather–Rue writes, “His relationship was closest to whatever he was writing at the time, and his family was always second to that. . . . He rigorously maintained the distance that he needed from anyone who needed something from him.”(67) Children included, and Rue, coming with her mother to this second marriage, has a harder time breaking through his walls.
Her mother she describes as a seeker, one looking for Real Life (as something opposed to a mundane real life) in external outlets such as Zen Buddhism and LSD trips. Deborah, by turns too emotionally tied to her young daughter and too distant, begins to push Rue away decisively in 1969 by telling her, “I don’t love you as much as I used to.”(141) Shortly after that cruelty, Rue is hit with a second when Deborah is diagnosed with ovarian cancer and thus leaves Rue’s life permanently, a loss that will prove to be the touchstone in Rue’s adulthood. “There is no older Deborah, calmed down Deborah,” she writes, “no grounded Deborah, no Deborah who finally found home.”(36) Neither is there a Deborah with whom to repair old wounds and forge a new mother-daughter relationship. That possibility is gone.
More than halfway through the memoir, Rue acknowledges, “I was arrogant when I began this quest. I believed that I would control the story. Nothing would go into it that I couldn’t create or re-create. But I hadn’t been prepared for what would be exposed under scrutiny.”(141) Regardless of the initial impulse to manipulate, Rue doesn’t. Instead, she delivers an unflinching, often painful account of a period in her childhood, and then contrasts this with the wife and mother she was able to become in spite of it all. The gift of herself, present and engaged, that she gives to her son, Emmett, is deeply touching and provides a much-needed counterpoint to the story of her early life.
There is a journey within the journey back to Annaghkeen: Rue’s burgeoning awareness of how all the experiences within her have formed and informed her. In one poignant moment at the end of the book, she writes, “It’s 1965, I am seven years old. I am forty-eight, it’s 1965. I am forty-eight, it is today. I am seven, it is today.”(233) Castles & Ruins is beautiful and insightful like this throughout. Rue Matthiessen’s memoir is unforgettable, a true testament to human will and the healing nature of understanding and owning one’s truth, even while wishing that things might have been different.
