Can any good come from having a bad parent? This curious question was raised in the incendiary Vanity Fair profile of Susie Wiles. Among her many revelations, the one that gave me cause to pause was the White House chief of staff’s suggestion that she was well equipped to cope with Trump’s volatility because she dealt with a difficult father.
Over the course of several interviews with Chris Whipple she made a fascinating point. “Some clinical psychologist that knows one million times more than I do will dispute what I’m going to say,” she revealed. “But high-functioning alcoholics . . . their personalities are exaggerated when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.” Trump is notably teetotal, but Wiles described him as having an “alcoholic’s personality”. According to the 68-year-old official, he “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do”.
Arundhati Roy covers similar material in her sensational memoir. Mother Mary Comes to Me is dedicated to her mother, a “typically unpredictable” woman from whom Roy spent many years estranged. Mary Roy was a teacher, advocate and passionate community leader who was hailed as a feminist icon in Kerala, where she lived undaunted by chauvinistic social codes. Yet she also terrorised her family and colleagues, whom she would entrap in codependent relationships in which she would erode their sense of worth.