Individuals who know me even barely are shocked after they hear me say that I actually have quite a bit in common with Kellyanne Conway. How can I, a left-wing feminist who went into 4 years of mourning at Donald Trump’s election, feel any kinship with the girl who arguably made his election possible? How can I, a one who prides myself on being dedicated to precision of language, have any reference to the creator of the phrase “alternate facts”? But my youth is eerily much like hers.
We were each raised in families presided over by a working mother, a grandmother and aunts (we each have Aunt Ritas and Aunt Maries). Our households lacked fathers. Ethnically, we’re each a mixture of Irish and Italian, although in my case, my father, a Lithuanian Jew, enriches the broth. We’re each products of Catholic education through highschool. We were each ambitious, with almost nobody around to guide us through luck or peasant wisdom to the goals we only dimly apprehended. We each got further than anyone might need predicted. We’re each unafraid of standing as much as powerful men.
Conway’s publication of her memoir, Here’s the Deal, prompted me to think about more closely our similarities and differences. I attempted to make sense of them within the only way I could make sense of anything: by forming it as a narrative (albeit one without “alternate facts”). What would the form of my narrative be? Its focus could possibly be the historical and the cultural.
How can I, a left-wing feminist who went into 4 years of mourning at Donald Trump’s election, feel any kinship with the girl who arguably made his election possible?
Growing up
Though Conway and I are each American and Catholic, we got here of age (I’m 18 years older than she) in radically different Americas and radically different Catholic Churches. The president of my adolescence was JFK; hers was Ronald Reagan. Conway traces her attraction to politics to the time Reagan made a campaign stop in her hometown. In his speech, the visiting president even sang the praises of a neighborhood hero. “‘America’s future,’ Reagan said, ‘rests within the message of hope in songs of a person so many young Americans admire, Latest Jersey’s Bruce Springsteen.’” (Did Reagan actually hearken to what Springsteen was saying about America?)
“Since I used to be co-captain of the sector hockey team and had been Latest Jersey Blueberry Princess, I used to be among the many handful of young individuals who got a probability to fulfill him,” Conway writes in Here’s the Deal. “It wasn’t any greater than a polite hello and a handshake. But I used to be hooked.”
I wasn’t Blueberry Princess—or, God knows, captain of my field hockey team—I only got to the touch Kennedy’s sleeve when he stopped at my home town. But I imagine that I discovered in him what Conway present in Reagan: “a pacesetter who was aspirational and accessible. Patriotic. Resolute.” In my case, Kennedy’s words, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you’ll be able to do in your country,” were stamped on my imagination and my soul.
Though Conway and I are each American and Catholic, we got here of age in radically different Americas and radically different Catholic Churches.
If we were raised in several Americas, we were raised in a special church as well. The pope of my young years was Pope John XXIII: the roly-poly Italian whose family brought him sausages from home, the one who opened the windows of the church. Hers was the lean and mean Pole—Pope John Paul II—a champion skier who made it his business to shut the windows tight.
At the same time as children, our way of being Catholic was very different. My way was to be insufferably pious; serious to a level that should have made people need to slap me. I used to be obsessive about virgin martyrs. At 12, I wrote a book called God’s Young Friends about saints who had died young. One in every of them was Dominic Savio, and following his example, I held a crucifix in front of boys who were using “foul language.” I repeated Dominic’s words: “Say it in front of Him.” In his hagiographies, Dominic’s Neapolitan boys fell to their knees. My neighborhood guys said it in front of Him.
Conway’s descriptions of her childhood Catholicism deal with its social and communal features: weekly novenas, Sunday Mass, youth club. Although she thinks of herself as an “outsider,” she seems rather more supported by her family and community than I used to be. Her grandmother and aunts seem nicer than mine. My grandmother was a tricky, no-nonsense Irishwoman who had come over to America by herself at age 17. My aunt Rita was the coldest person I actually have ever known, with a well-honed talent for humiliation, particularly of the kid she shared a house with.
I imagine that I discovered in Kennedy what Conway present in Reagan: “a pacesetter who was aspirational and accessible. Patriotic. Resolute.”
And since Conway enjoyed sports, she was not an outlier in her community, as I used to be. My preferred sport was turning pages. I used to be happiest in books; reading was the one time I felt really at home. That I used to be a reader and she or he was not explains one other aspect of the difference in our Catholicism: I used to be devouring Lives of the Saints in my childhood while she was working on booths for the parish fair. Her Catholicism is an outgrowth and extension of ethnic identity: to be Irish or Italian is to be Catholic. I discovered myself becoming a Catholic who wanted a world where people had never heard of Padre Pio but knew about Sartre and Matisse.
Her highschool yearbook mentions her ambitions: “kissing Rick Springfield, being the perfect lawyer, wife and mother.” Mine were to be published in The Latest Yorker, live within the Village and be fluent in French. If I had desired to kiss a singer, it will have been Leonard Cohen.
The 2 issues that estranged me from the church for greater than a decade—“Humanae Vitae” and the Vietnam War—were old news by the point Conway was in highschool. I got here of age within the Latest York of Cardinal Francis Spellman, the architect of the American church’s response to Vietnam. In those years, to be Catholic was above all to be anti-Communist.
She was thrilled to have a personal audience with Pope John Paul II. I used to be once offered the chance to fulfill him; not a fan, I refused. I said to the one that tried to facilitate that, “The pope and I actually have nothing in common but a publisher.” My husband, not drawn to the type of smart-mouthing that Conway and I each enjoy, begged me never to place those words in print. Too late.
If I didn’t have an audience with the pope, I did have an encounter with Daniel Berrigan, S.J., to whom I, a pushy 16-year-old, showed my poems at a reading of his own poetry. He wrote to me after, saying I used to be an actual poet. I knew I needed to rethink Vietnam, and there was no turning back.
She was thrilled to have a personal audience with Pope John Paul II. I used to be once offered the chance to fulfill him; not a fan, I refused.
Catholic identity
Conway is wanting to discover herself as Catholic, particularly in her position on abortion, and definitely in speaking about her wedding (not in her parish church but within the basilica in Philadelphia). It is evident that she made probably the most of her Catholic connections. But when the hierarchy says something critical of any of Donald Trump’s positions—on immigration, for instance—she dismisses them “respectfully,” principally saying (on EWTN, no less) that the bishops don’t know what they’re talking about.
Conway was comfortable within the Catholic educational system; I used to be determined to flee it. Though she was valedictorian of her highschool class, Conway was waitlisted when she applied to Georgetown. In a profile of Conway in Cosmopolitan in January 2017 by Kristen Mascia, Conway’s highschool English teacher said of her, “I didn’t think she was a deep thinker. But I do keep in mind that she would argue her point relentlessly. You’ll pray to God that the bell would ring.”
She was as an alternative accepted at Trinity College. Within the bad old days when Catholic girls were forbidden to use to non-Catholic colleges (my highschool refused to send my transcripts to Barnard. I needed to have the Barnard admissions office call and shame them into doing it), Trinity was an elite school for smart middle-class girls. By the Seventies, it had modified its mandate to be more inclusive, “less selective” in Conway’s words. She didn’t apply to George Washington or American University.
I knew I desired to be a author, and I chafed under the agenda-based approach to the humanities that appeared to me inseparable from Catholic education. I believed I couldn’t get what I needed unless I could possibly be some place with numerous Jews—preferably the Glass family from J. D. Salinger’s fiction, with whom I used to be obsessed. Due to them I made my technique to Barnard, the ladies’s college of Columbia, where Seymour Glass had gone.
I can go just to this point in being a neutral narrator. There’s nothing in me that may empathize with the streak of cruelty that’s in all places present within the pages of Here’s the Deal. This can be a one who makes a degree of being grateful for her Catholic school training. One suspects she was absent on certain days when the nuns discussed the importance of being charitable to others. Conway is consistently comfortable mocking the physical appearance of those she believes have attacked her, or writing them off for being single and childless—and subsequently unable to make judgments on her or her family.
This can be a rhetorical strategy that extends beyond Here’s the Deal. Responding to criticisms of her Inauguration Day outfit, she repeats and expands upon in Here’s the Deal an insult she first delivered in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in 2017: “Sorry to offend the black-stretch-pants-wearing women of America with slightly color. I apologize to everybody on the market who not wears anything that snaps, buttons, or zips.”
There’s nothing in me that may empathize with the streak of cruelty that’s in all places present within the pages of Here’s the Deal.
Different responses
If my narrative centered on the emotional and psychological features of my characters, I’d think about the response of Conway and myself to growing up fatherless. My father died once I was 7, and that loss greater than anything has marked my life. My “Rosebud moment” occurred when relatives said to me, “You don’t need to be sad, your father is completely satisfied in heaven.” Something in me refused to simply accept that and rebelled silently. I decided that I’d never accept anything that was clearly unfaithful. The five years after my father’s death were a fugue state of gelatinous misery.
Conway had her miseries too, but she won’t allow them to go by that name. Her treatment of them in her book is revelatory of her ability to present two contradictory versions of the identical story without batting a watch, actually without noticing the contradictions.
Arguably, the best way one begins a book is a vital move. That is how Conway begins hers:
I actually have an early memory of my father. The 2 of us are eating pancakes together, sitting on the kitchen table like normal families do, acting as if the scene was certain to repeat itself one million times over. So here’s what’s strange about that father-daughter breakfast: I’m unsure if it really happened or if it’s only wishful considering on my part. But I cling to that early, early memory of us since it’s the just one I actually have.
After that, she doesn’t see him for nine years; then he shows up at her confirmation. “Then I had to make your mind up whether to ask him into my life. I said yes, got myself a father and a half brother, and learned the worth of forgiveness, redemption, and second possibilities,” she writes. “He quickly became a cool dad, taking my friends and me to arcades, scary movies, and Phillies games.”
I believe I’m luckier than Kellyanne Conway. There is no such thing as a Donald Trump in my life.
There’s a serious gap between the pancake episode, with which she begins her book, and the “no problem” response to her cool dad. She refers to painful memories with which I could readily emphasize: the uneasiness of being the just one and not using a father in her Catholic school class, the mortification when everyone else was making Father’s Day cards and she or he needed to make hers for an uncle. But she never adds anger or sorrow to anything she says about her father.
She got the “no problem” tone not only from her mother, whose husband left her for an additional family, but additionally from her grandmother, whose husband did the identical. But in her grandfather’s case, there was greater than easy abandonment. As reported by Kevin C. Shelly in Philly Voice in 2017, a 1992 Latest Jersey Organized Crime Commission report on the hidden influence of organized crime in bars named James DiNatale, Conway’s grandfather, 26 times. He’s repeatedly identified as a mob associate, though there doesn’t seem like any record of DiNatale being charged, let alone convicted, of any crimes.
He was often called “Jimmy the Brute.” Actually, “The Brute” is engraved on his tombstone.
But Conway’s mother insists that he got the nickname because he once lifted two heavy truck engines, not due to his Mafia connections. “My father was a great man,” she told The Every day Mail in April 2017. “He helped anyone who needed help. If someone needed money he could be there—and it will all the time be on a handshake not on paper.”
Anyone wondering why Kellyanne Conway was so expert at defending Trump’s indefensible behavior and policies might note that this book portrays her as one in all the third generation of ladies who consider that “men just do those things,” and no accountability need be demanded of them; it’s a lady’s job to make them look good.
I believe I’m luckier than Kellyanne Conway. There is no such thing as a Donald Trump in my life.