Maggie & Him, Ronnie & Me
Writer Damian Barr creates a work of singular survival
“He used to be in the movies.”
My mother—who, in 1980 was a youthful 52-year old—said this matter-of-factly, sometimes dreamily, and often with real fervor when I asked her how she “knew” Ronald Reagan.
I was well aware, even as a child, that I came from a Republican family, though I had no idea what that really meant. I did understand the concept of competition, and so clearly Americans must choose either one side or another, I thought. It seemed so cut and dried that I regarded the political process as I would a Steelers game; I didn’t really get the point of it, but you had to choose one team to support, so why not the team your parents rooted for?
“Look out! He’s right behind you!”
So went the punch line to the single-frame cartoon I’d submitted to my local newspaper’s “Kids’ Page” supplement in the summer of that same year. Rendered in unforgiving black Sharpie ink, it featured three flat men with massive gloves and strangely distorted bodies standing in a boxing ring. One boxer’s face appeared to be composed solely of teeth; his opponent sported a teetering pompadour; and the third, standing just behind them, was bland and white-haired, with the look of a televangelist.
Underneath each figure I’d written “CARTER,” “REAGAN,” and “ANDERSON,” the latter being the third-party candidate who was giving the two Presidential opponents a slight run for their money in the polls. The overall effect of the text was the equivalent of a comedian forced to explain his jokes, thus losing the laugh, but I was 11, and the cartoon was required to be drawn on the blank side of a recipe card.
Reagan won the election that year, decidedly and with what was clear to me to be overwhelming support of the country. I sat up past my bedtime to watch the returns on NBC News with my mom and dad. I was elated. “Now we’ll get somewhere,” said my father from his recliner, sitting on the old afghan placed there by my mother to protect the La-Z-Boy from tractor grease and stray bits of hay which always ended up decorating Dad’s work clothes. In the eyes of my family, Reagan’s was a victory for the country.
And on the day of his inauguration, January 20, 1981, two days after my twelfth birthday, 444 American hostages were released from captivity in Iran. Reagan, who was aware of the release, showed restraint in his inaugural address and didn’t mention it in his remarks to the nation. I watched the news of the day gathered with my classmates in the makeshift gymnasium in my elementary school—known as the “all-purpose room,” the purpose of that morning to watch a new president be sworn in and, by coincidence, the hostages freed. And until the space shuttle blew up six years later, that day was in a sense my “JFK moment,” when what was happening on the news seared itself into a collective memory of a generation born a decade too late to recall November 1963.
Throughout the next eight years, as American politics and all its auxiliaries shifted itself further to the right; as Reagan rose again after an assassination attempt; as four letters joined themselves into a new word for “gay is bad, and gay will kill you”; and as wealth became the greatest aspiration of a generation that would shift the course of the country of the next several decades, the leader of the Most Powerful Nation in the World remained at the helm. And for me—a fledgling gay boy whose sole purpose was just to get through the school day without being called faggot—Reagan was both an anchor and a guide, someone I’d expect to see at the pulpit during one of our church’s “guest minister” Sundays and a weathered but tough high school principal who knew just the right punishment to dole out to the football players who’d added Ex-Lax to the teachers’ coffee pot. We weren’t air traffic controllers; we had no claim to stake in his policies that led to the ritual dismantling of American workers’ rights. We were farmers. Independent. It seemed to us as if Reagan could do it all, play any role, because after all, “He used to be in the movies.”
Three years after that Inauguration Day, and five time zones to the future away from western Pennsylvania, eight-year old Damian Barr watches television coverage of the IRA bombing in the Grand Hotel in Brighton from his parents’ home in western Scotland. It is the same day his mother leaves his father, and that act sets into course a chain of events that informs the account of his life as told in his memoirs, the brilliant Maggie & Me (Bloomsbury, 2013). As the rubble is cleared away from around her, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher emerges with no hair out of place, with no waver in her voice, with nothing to shake the steely drive that put her where she was. Thatcher wasn’t an actor; she was a director, a producer.
And for young Damian, she was the Phoenix. She survived and so must he. At times he is torn between the justifiable anti-Thatcher sentiment that permeates much of the working class of his country, including his own family, and the elements of Thatcher’s staunch character he finds admirable. Unlike the opinion held by young Americans, many of whom looked upon their country’s leader as a friendly but tough grandfather, young Britons could not avoid the harsh assessment of the world Thatcher styled, ordered and perpetuated for them.
“You gave me choices when I needed chances,” he addresses Thatcher as the book nears its end—and throughout Maggie & Me, he prefaces each chapter with a quote from Thatcher, some of them pithy and spot-on, others more difficult to mold into the contents. Yet each one of these quotes—and its corresponding passage from a young life filled with more familial, societal and economic challenges than ever crossed the threshold of the farmhouse that I called home—presents those choices, those obstacles, those edicts which informed every aspect of life in Great Britain at the time, cleanly and honestly.
There are moments in Maggie & Me in which Barr recalls incidents in such hard, unforgiving clarity that it becomes almost impossible to linger for very long on them (descriptions of the abuse suffered under Logan, his mother’s boyfriend, are heartbreaking and somewhat nauseating to read). Yet even in the harshest moments of the book, Barr avoids being maudlin, overly sentimental, or sensationalistic. It is a difficult literary maneuver, and he pulls it off with enormous ease and intense readability.
One of the most harrowing incidents recalled in the book describes Barr’s sexual assault by a strange man in his own home. As his mother and her cohorts are partying and Crystal Gayle’s music is blasted, the man shoves Damian’s head into the freezer, nearly choking him as he thrusts against him. But instead of focusing on the violence, the violation, the brutality of the incident, Barr pulls the narrative focus in tight and recalls reading the ingredients on the frozen packages of food he can see while his head is restrained and his breathing nearly stopped. The effect is deeply unsettling, yet hypnotic and even somewhat serene.
As he grows up, Damian makes connections (most notably with his best friend/girlfriend Heather and his schoolmate/boyfriend Mark) that move him out of the sad chaos of his home life and into the wider world. A trip to Brighton—where he sees gay men queuing outside a bar and picks up Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series—is his first glimpse at a community in which the expression of his soul could find its home (and eventually, that city does become his home).
The young Damian Barr found his solace in books, in Dynasty, in a small group of confidants in which he could be himself. I found mine in music—in pop radio, in my record collection, in Sunday afternoon classic films on television, and in Dynasty (pronounced with a long, American“I”). He emerges from a raucous, dangerous and splintered home life; I emerge from a family in which we all ate dinner at the same table, at the same time, every single evening, and the biggest injustice I suffer is being forbidden to attend a roller skating party because I haven’t fed the cows on time. The realization of Barr’s sexuality is early, is clear and is fraught with threatening opposition. He emerges from the bombed hotel because he has no choice but to carry on. My realization takes me far longer than it should. I’m too focused on delivering my inauguration speech and pleasing the crowd than to mention the breaking news story of my own queerness.
Americans have never really experienced the depth of emotion associated with a political leader that Britons had, and still have, toward Maggie Thatcher. And through a compelling narrative, with Thatcher quotes to frame his story, Barr has created a unique autobiography, one of the first works of his generation that resonates universally, even outside its own geographic, cultural and political boundaries. We get it, even though we may have to Wiki a fact or two (and in my case, look up Scottish dialect).
Maggie & Me ends with a meeting between the adult Damian Barr and a retired senior civil servant, “Sir Humphrey,” in the Athenaeum, an exclusive members-only club in London. The subject of their meeting is the recently deceased Thatcher, and at one point Sir Humphrey leans in to say, “I don’t know how you’ll feel about this, but she would have liked you, you know.” Barr is taken aback, yet he’s well aware of the conflicted connection he has, and has had, to the Iron Lady.
I happened to be in London in April of 2013, ironically for a meeting of trade unionists, on the day of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral. My best friend and I walked through Trafalgar Square moments after the cortege made its way to St. Paul’s Cathedral. As we walked among the barriers set up by police for crowd control, we found a single piece of white paper on the sidewalk, dirtied by shoeprints, its singular message, scrawled in thin-lined Biro ink, all the more stark: “SMELLY CUNT.” Epithet as epitaph. And a far cry from the “Farewell to the Gipper” sentiment that accompanied the death of Reagan.
Maggie & Me challenges the reader to step inside the rubble of the Grand Hotel, look around a bit, witness some gore, and emerge from it wholly determined to survive. It is undeniably one individual’s story, but if you really look for it, you’ll see the mirror turn the other way. In that sense, this book accomplishes as much as one can expect of good writing.
Look out—he’s right behind you.
