More on L'Engle controversy

I'm getting a variety of responses on this, not all on this page.  Some people have more sympathy for the kids than others.  One correspondent pointed out that children of celebrities pretty much inevitably suffer, but it seems to me there would be a spectrum there, too.  A really abusive, troubled or unloving parent is going to do more damage than a stable, nurturing one, regardless of fame. Still, I suppose the fishbowl component is a genuine problem.

I've had very little contact with the children and grands, just the occasional email (usually a listserve or form letter) from one of the grandchildren, who issues biannual health updates.  My impression from that is that until now the family has been protective of L'Engle, disseminating slightly rose-colored news and gradually taking over the writers' correspondence (the fan mail part of it, anyway). That makes the New Yorker gripefest all the more shocking.

For the record, I don't have much sympathy for Christopher Milne, either.

My mom write a couple of award-winning one act plays while she lived in Florida in the 1980s.  She told me outright that the characters were based on me and my best friend growing up, Joel R. One of the plays has the pair running away together and hitchhiking across the country.  I think the other one may have to characters married to each other.  Joel and I never did anything of the sort.  I've never read the plays, and never really thought much about them.  As far as I'm concerned, the characters in them are just that--characters.  They are my Mom's perspective of two real people at a certain time in their lives, filtered through my mom's own attitudes and personality, experiencing events that are mostly imaginary.  Why should it upset me that Brevard County theatergoers once saw an actress portray someone a little like me, doing things I may or may not ever have done?  Granted, that character isn't a world-famous magical child from a major literary work read by generations of children and adults, but I'm not sure that would change my response substiantially.  But who knows; maybe it would.  If I ever come across those scripts in my mom's stuff and actually read them, I may have a clearer idea how L'Engle's progeny feel.  Or not.  I suppose if the character is depicted as cruelly betraying her mother, I'm not going to be happy about that--not because someone in Satellite Beach thinks Ruth Anne's daughter was mean to her, but because it would be a reflection of my mom's distorted perspective of my stormy relationship with her right after her divorce, which was very upsetting at the time.

I have to wonder whether the family trusted the New Yorker writer with candid remarks that were never intened for print.  I also wonder, if L'Engle has read the article, what she thinks about it all.  If she isn't bothered, maybe it's not such a terrible thing for the family to unburden themselves after all these years.

Karen