Book Review: White Matter: A Memoir of Family and Medicine Memoir by Janet Sternburg

White Matter: A Memoir of Family and Medicine
Memoir by Janet Sternburg
Hawthorne Books, September 2015
ISBN-13: 978-0989360494
$18.95; 238 pp.
Reviewed by Rhonda Lancaster

White Matter, which refers to the part of the brain responsible for emotions that is removed during a lobotomy, is a fitting title for the story of Janet Sternburg wrestling with the question of why her family chose the procedure for two siblings, an aunt and uncle. But it is also fitting because the author walks a careful line between the emotional and the dispassionate in understanding these decisions.

Sternburg immediately informs her audience of the judgment she has passed on her own family when she opens with: “This is the story of a family who made mistakes. Who made choices based on imperfect knowledge…and had to live with their consequences.” She doesn’t shy away from the turmoil within the family—petty squabbles, sibling rivalry, affairs, gambling—her own turbulent relationship with her mother’s siblings, or her own self-doubts and questioning of her own mental health. It is Bennie, the uncle who was lobotomized first, who seems to have left the stronger impression on Sternburg. She describes how he would greet her and her mother with “a small upturning of lips…with eyes averted” and how he would reach “out his hand and touch [her] behind [her] ear.” No one can touch that spot without causing the author to flinch.

The memoir’s subtitle, A Memoir of Family and Medicine, is an accurate description of the unique approach Sternburg takes in telling this story. She doesn’t adhere to a strict linear progression of events within her family. Rather, she places her family’s private history in the context of the wider historical implications of a world questioning the place of new medical breakthroughs, including eugenics. She also places family history within historical events, such as the rise of fascism, and even pop culture, including Disney movies, stage plays, and musicals. She recognizes the place lobotomy played in society’s understanding of mental illness while allowing for the clarity of hindsight: “surmising that it was a problem with communication between areas of the brain. Lobotomy itself, however, was a premature and crude application of a brilliant insight that had become corrupted by the pursuit of personal glory.” When focusing on the personal story, Sternburg’s prose is beautifully descriptive. She describes popping peas with her mother and captures the moment she became a writer: “That pod, that canoe of greenness in my mother’s palm…” These poetic interludes punctuate otherwise straightforward prose.

While it is well-known that lobotomies were a popular treatment for mental illness, “petty criminals, misfits, the retarded, homosexuals, people who didn’t fit in” during the 1940s and 50s, Sternburg’s book captures not only how widespread the practice was, but how casually it was accepted. A primary example of this is her discussion of Walter Freeman’s Lobotomobile, which traveled the country brandishing the slogan, “Lobotomy sends them home.” Perhaps the most important reminder that the book highlights is the fact that it wasn’t only the poor, uneducated, or criminal classes who chose or were forced to undergo lobotomies. For example, there was Rosemary Kennedy, who tarnished the famous family, or Tennessee Williams and Allen Ginsberg, who wrestled in their writings with their choices to lobotomize a sister and mother, respectively. A picture of the Sternberg’s aunts dressed impeccably flanking their brother Bennie shows that they were an upper middle class family. The book illustrates the dangers of trusting medical professionals who may be acting with “imperfect knowledge.” The family was both fortunate and unfortunate enough to be friends with Dr. Abraham Myerson, a preeminent psychiatrist who discovered the first antidepressant. After diagnosing Bennie with what would come to be known as schizophrenia, he was finally able to offer them a “cure” in the form of a lobotomy. This advice, and that given to the sisters when their youngest, Francie, had an emotional breakdown a decade later, was given with the utmost care. The family followed this advice in order to provide a last chance for each sibling.

The importance of White Matter cannot be removed from its contemporary context. Society still wrestles with how to handle the mentally ill. Perhaps we are less quick to react “without regard for persons,” but we are no more sure what to do with “people considered not good enough to live as complex human beings.” White Matter leaves an impression like the haunting image of Bennie’s touch behind the author’s childhood ear.

 
A former journalist and public relations manager, Rhonda Lancaster holds an MA in creative writing and literature. She currently teaches dual enrollment English and creative writing in Winchester, Va. A certified Teacher Consultant for the National Writing Project, she teaches young writers’ workshops with Project Write, Inc. She is a member of WV Writers Inc. Her writing has appeared in several volumes of The Anthology of Appalachian Writers. She lives with her husband, three dogs, and a school of fish in Capon Bridge, W.Va.