Flares from a Fallout Shelter
The year was 1962, the era of JFK’s Camelot, social conformity, and sexual repression. The bestselling novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest struck an overdue blow against stereotypical assumptions about mental illness. In spite of the novel’s popularity, however, depression and so-called “nervous breakdowns” often resulted in stigma and scandal for American families who struggled with psychological issues. The nation’s favorite television shows were “perfect family” sitcoms like Leave it to Beaver, featuring a boy whose weekly conflicts included losing a library book and accidentally breaking his father’s golf club.
1962 also brought Marilyn Monroe’s suicide, Col. John Glenn’s orbiting the earth in a space capsule, and an international threat of nuclear annihilation. In response to the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile crisis, a Cold War anxiety swept across America and into Lynette’s family home in Western Kentucky. The first time she heard the term Cold War, she believed it referred to the chill that permeated her house and refused to thaw, even in summer.
In the wake of her manic-depressive father’s get-rich schemes—from starting his own church to inventing a pill to cure women’s menstrual cramps—her home became a fallout shelter in reverse, where his drinking and delusions trapped the family inside with the bomb. This toxic environment generated enough betrayals and shifting alliances to fuel the plots of a dozen espionage movies, in which the traitor, cloaked in the trappings of respectability, remains free to carry out separate psychological tortures for every member of his family. When she realized she could no longer trust the people in her home, Lynette began to rely on Alfred Hitchcock’s spy movies to help her navigate the fluctuating borders between appearance and reality.
For Lynette’s mother, exposure of her husband’s alcoholism was a constant fear. In her determination to protect her family from gossip, she trained her children in obfuscation and deception, enlisting them to distract their drunken father in the basement while she taught piano lessons upstairs after school, and drilling them in misleading responses to questions from teachers and classmates. Ironically, as they performed their roles in their mother’s artfully constructed scripts, they shut out potential sources of intervention, including medical treatment for Lynette’s escalating depression.
Many years later, while seeking effective treatment for her son, Lynette began to connect chaotic patterns in her life with her father’s psychological instability. At the suggestion of her son’s Psychiatrist, she constructed a genetic and behavioral history of three generations of her family, in hopes of coming to terms with the legacy of her brilliant but tormented father.
Flares from a Fallout Shelter moves beyond one family’s struggle to the broader generational consequences of undiagnosed and untreated mental illness. More importantly, it illustrates the ways in which depression warps our perceptions, alters our memories, and renders us unreliable narrators of our own stories, even when we’re telling the truth.