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Wait a sec, Hanna, you're not a conservative because the Buckleys were self-absorbed, screwy parents? What does that have to do with Pat Buckley's "appalling scenes," as her son Christopher put it? I can think of plenty of liberals who are equally appalling in their dealings with their children. This one is about fame and notoriety and narcissism I think, not politics.
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Emily, I am reluctant to excuse Pat Buckley's behavior as a mother on the grounds of her generation. If she'd been a writer, or actress or astronaut, instead of the devoted wife of William Buckley, she likely would have tortured her colleagues instead of her family. She certainly would have been less famous than she was. I found the excerpt of Christopher Buckley's memoir such an interesting psychological portrait of family, more so for being only partially digested. Christopher Buckley wanted so much to eulogize her as a great woman, and was almost apologetic about condemning her. But the condemnations overshadow. A young friend of her granddaughter's, a Kennedy relative, comes over for dinner, and Pat Buckley tortures her at the table with made-up stories about Michael Skakel, the murderer in the Kennedy family. The good news for feminists is, dad doesn't sound come off all that much better, failing to visit his 11-year-old son in the hospital, skipping out of his son's graduation because he was bored. My takeaway from the story: this is why I'm not a conservative.
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In the excerpt of his memoir that ran in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday, Christopher Buckley says of his mother:
She would have made a fantastic spy. Really, she would have made a fantastic
anything. She was beautiful, theatrical, bright as a diamond, the wittiest woman
I have ever known...She could have done anything; instead, she devoted herself,
heart, soul and body, to being Mrs. William F. Buckley Jr. (A full-time job.)
Christopher the son doesn't link his mother's roads not taken to her "serial misbehavior," as he calls her bitter upbraiding of dinner guests and anyone else who stumbled into her lair at the wrong moment. But to me, the connection makes itself. We all know women of Pat Buckley's generation—she had Christopher in the 1950s—who poured themselves into their marriages instead of their careers. And who were ever frustrated, on some level, as a result. Because despite that reassuring "A full-time job," was it really, in a satisfying way?
And does that whole debate belong to the past, or will we see a similar pattern, in decades to come, from educated women my age (thirtysomethings) who opt out of work to raise their kids? (Without entering into the fight about whether their numbers are growing or shrinking or in any way represent a revolution, I'm stipulating that there are some.) If you're a full-time Mrs. today, you are choosing from among a set of alternatives that Pat Buckley didn't really have? Maybe that changes the calculus in the future as well as the present. Or maybe not. Thoughts?
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