David Tereshchuk is the author of the new memoir A Question of Paternity: My Life as an Unaffiliated Reporter. He is a longtime journalist who is originally from Britain but is now based in New York.
Q: Why did you decide to write A Question of Paternity?
A: I was badly troubled by a paradox in my life. In my job as a journalist, I traveled the world asking people questions — often people in power who didn’t like being put on the spot — and I got answers for the public record.
But in the personal, private realm, I had never gotten an answer to something utterly fundamental: who was my father? I wanted to find the answer — and also of course to discover why my mother had kept the secret from me.
But then why turn my search for answers into a book? Though I was a repressed and incommunicative kid in the secretive atmosphere of my home, when I reached adulthood I became a highly-motivated communicator. (I went into television just as soon as I possibly could, at 19 years old, in fact!)
So after I embarked on the quest it seemed only natural, indeed very important, to tell my story openly to others. The very opposite of keeping a secret.
Q: The journalist Carl Bernstein said of the book, “Tereshchuk’s quest for truth, about both his immediate family and the stories he’s covered around the world, resonates through the pages of A Question of Paternity, an exceptional memoir at once moving, shocking, and heroic.” What do you think of that description?
A: Well first, I’m a bit stunned. We all know Carl’s work and we know he doesn’t go in for exaggeration. He has always investigated doggedly and he plainly reports things exactly as he finds them.
I’m very touched that he values my efforts at truth-seeking, in both public and personal matters. And frankly, I’m also kind-of embarrassed by who is saying this. He calls me "one of the great reporters of our era” — an extraordinary assessment by someone who is himself so unquestionably one of those great reporters.
Q: Over how long a period did you work on the book?
A: The research part of it all came first, of course. I started in earnest trying to break the silence and get answers from my mother when I was in my 40s, three decades ago now.
She was evasive for a long time, and then eventually she gave me an account of my conception which was brief, and to my mind achingly incomplete. It may even have been misleading; I cannot know for sure.
Her startling, shocking story was that she had been raped at the age of 15 by a Catholic priest, and that I was the outcome of that rape. The news thoroughly roiled me - I was horrified for my mother and what she had suffered.
I also felt furious outrage at such child sex abuse being perpetrated by a man in religious authority. As you might imagine, I threw a lot of investigative effort into finding that priest. Much of the book is about where all that effort led me.
So the short answer to how long the entire exercise took me? Very nearly 30 years.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write this book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: It gave me a whole new understanding of my mother, and what kind of a life she led, in poverty and then in scandal when she was pregnant with me and gave birth to me out of wedlock.
It’s important to understand that this took place in a rural community in the Scotland-England borderland during the late 1940s and 1950s. In that time and place, having an “illegitimate” child, a “bastard” (terms that were in common use) was an enormous social disgrace.
I feel she was terribly damaged by the whole experience, and I’m saddened that she may still have been holding back information from me right up until she died seven years ago.
As for readers of the book, I hope that they might come away from the story reflecting on the harm that is inflicted by family secrets, and by a society that encourages such secrets and such shame.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I continue with my weekly review, The Media Beat, which is a broadcast on public radio and a universally available podcast. I critique how well or otherwise journalism is covering the vital issues of our day.
I’m also writing a series of essays and short stories that have come out of my journalism work, but never found their way into my TV and radio reports, or into my print and online articles.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Simply that I have found many topics in my journalism extremely hard to write about: racist violence here in the US and in former white colonies in Africa … the treatment of women in America’s vast incarceration system … children at risk in appalling physical and emotional conditions where they live … horrifyingly bloody wars in Asia, Africa, and even in the United Kingdom.
But nothing, speaking purely personally, was as hard as writing this book.
It was for me, though, definitely worth doing.
If anyone is troubled by a deep, intolerable secret … try writing about it. I feel sure it will help.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment