• Half the House
• Love & Fury
Inside Changsho Restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the lunchtime din of voices and the clamor of utensils and dishes reverberate through the space. I’m wishing now that I’d spoken up and asked for a more secluded seat when the host guided poet and author Richard Hoffman and me to this table less than ten feet from the bustling, all-you-can-eat buffet filled with steaming bins of wonton soup, crab Rangoon, spring rolls, dumplings, fried rice, General Gau’s chicken, and bowls of fresh fruit and varied desserts.
Hoffman seems unfazed by the decibel level, made even louder by a boisterous table of business-attired professionals next to us. He orders a bowl of hot and sour soup, and I decide to let my anxiety about the distractions go. Within minutes of beginning our conversation about his memoir, Half the House, I am so immersed in his story that the surrounding ruckus fades into a distant hum of white noise.
This distinguished man sitting across from me wearing a tweed jacket and raising a spoonful of steaming liquid toward his whiskered face—senior writer in residence at Emerson College, author of three collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, numerous essays, and about to launch his new memoir, Love & Fury, when we meet in June 2014—is no stranger to the struggle of telling a hard story. His first memoir, Half the House, is a courageous and beautifully written account of the darkness and light of his blue-collar upbringing in 1950s Allentown, Pennsylvania. He grew up in a family of four boys, two of whom were terminally ill with muscular dystrophy. Hoffman’s is a story of grief, of silence, of shame, of endurance, of resilience, of understanding, of redemption. And, after its publication, it became an extraordinary story of justice.
As many memoirists do for the sake of clarity, Hoffman begins his book with a simple statement about the veracity of the facts and events he portrays. He then writes, “I have, in most instances, altered the names of persons outside my family. In one instance, on principle, I have not.”
The man Hoffman names directly is Tom Feifel, Hoffman’s former football and baseball coach, a man who inflicted brutal sexual abuse on Hoffman, including raping him, when he was ten years old. For Hoffman, writing about this trauma was necessary to portraying his authentic life on the page. It was an important part of his story and a secret he’d carried into adulthood. In an afterward included in a republished edition of the memoir, Hoffman writes, “It was the decision, on principle, not to change the name Tom Feifel that proved to be fateful. There was simply no reason to protect him. I did not foresee anything like what happened. I had no incendiary intentions. I pictured him, if indeed he was still alive, as old and pathetic, living alone, surrounded by stacks of porn magazines.”
Indeed, Feifel was still alive. He was still coaching. And he was still abusing young boys. In Allentown, no less, where he’d brutalized Hoffman more than thirty-five years earlier. Soon after its publication, a copy of Half the House landed in the hands of a mother whose son was playing on a team coached by Tom Feifel and who, she discovered, was Feifel’s latest victim. Thus began a chain reaction that led to Feifel’s arrest and imprisonment. He died in prison seven days after Dateline NBC aired a segment featuring Hoffman and his father speaking about the impact of Half the House on this criminal case. Investigators, who found what they called a “museum of pornography” in Tom Feifel’s home after his arrest, believe that Feifel sexually abused more than 450 boys in his lifetime.
Richard Hoffman’s courageous decision to write his memoir, and to name his abuser, made the abuse stop.
Though I can’t deny being intrigued by the true-crime nature of the drama that played out because of Hoffman’s memoir, it’s the story of his journey to write it in the first place that keeps my attention long after the lunch rush clears out and we are the only two diners left amidst the empty tables scattered throughout the restaurant.
Hoffman describes the path to tell his story as “completely an accident” that curved into “a nineteen-year arc” beginning in 1976 and progressing until Half the House was published, in 1995. Hoffman was a poet by inclination and training, but he came to a point where he wasn’t really able to write. “I didn’t understand why because I had the usual macho ‘I can just ride over everything’ ambition,” he tells me. Looking back now, he can laugh and say, “Well, duh, within a three-year period I had lost two of my brothers and my grandmother, who was beloved, and also a favorite teacher, a mentor of mine who I was very close to. It was like a dark star where it implodes. I was just imploded with grief.”
Back then, that implosion often took the form of self-destructive behavior. Hoffman talks candidly about his alcoholism. “I was in the habit of abandoning myself,” he recalls. “Here there’s psychic pain or there’s oblivion. Ah, I’ll take the oblivion please. Let’s just get hammered. Let’s have a good time. And like many in the culture, I called it pleasure.”
He enrolled in graduate school at Goddard College hoping the instruction there might put him back on track with his writing. He confesses, “I really needed somebody to take me by the hand and lead me back to my life which I had abandoned.”
A mentor, the poet Stephen Tapscott, turned out to be that somebody. Hoffman laughs. “He suggested that my poems were about nothing, and they amounted to nothing, and he didn’t understand why. He said, ‘Look, I have met you, you feel things deeply, you can be very funny, but none of that is in the poems. What’s up with that? Why are you writing these denatured kinds of little verbal machines to show off your dexterity when you’re not saying anything?’”
Hoping to help Hoffman break open his work, Tapscott assigned him a task that connected to Hoffman’s Catholic upbringing: write about the fourteen Stations of the Cross. “I thought, This is stupid,” Hoffman admits. “But he said, ‘If you want to work with me, you have to do this.’” So, Hoffman agreed, hoping to get it over with quickly and get back to what he thought he was really supposed to be doing.
Over a period of two weeks, he had to write about each station three times without looking back at what he’d written. As a result of this seemingly tedious exercise, two things happened. The first was that Hoffman began to see pages piling up beside his typewriter in a way that never happened when he was writing poetry. “The second thing that happened,” he says, “is that those iconic images, which are in every Catholic church in the world, began to suggest things to me about my own life.”
Somewhere around the second or third time writing about Jesus being taken down from the cross, Hoffman was reminded of his father propping his brother up in the bed when he was dying. “And the next thing you know, I’m writing about that,” he says, “and all of these other things that I had never thought to write about that I had decided weren’t real writing.”
“You hadn’t written about your brothers’ deaths before?” I ask.
“Never, never. I’d written a poem or two, but they weren’t exploring the thing. They were sort of markers or monuments. Elegies.”
The idea of the Stations of the Cross exercise, Hoffman thought, was to open up things so that he could write poems about them. “Turns out, the prose itself became the thing.” Despite the breakthrough, Hoffman felt extremely vulnerable embracing this unfamiliar writing territory and exposing portions of his family story—his story. He describes a graduate class where he first read some of these pieces. “People started weeping, and I started shaking, and the feel of the room was so different from ‘Let me read you my poem and you’ll be impressed.’ I didn’t know what to do with it—to the point where at the end of it, when people applauded, I bolted.” He says it felt like he’d just stripped naked in front of the crowd. “I felt like, ‘What have I done? Oh, my God! Can I put the genie back in the bottle?’ I was terrified.”
The valve had been released on something that felt frighteningly out of Hoffman’s control, and he didn’t know where to put it. “This was 1977, and there was no memoir then, no such animal. There was St. Augustine; there was Jean Jacques-Rousseau. But people weren’t writing memoirs, and so I didn’t know what I had done.”
It wasn’t until seven or eight years later, that Hoffman actually recognized he was writing a book. “I must have had some idea that I was trying to make something coherent out of it,” he muses. “But I thought it would be a big essay. And then it got to be a bigger essay.”
Hoffman says the same experience of not knowing he was writing a book was true for his second memoir, Love & Fury, in which he excavates the artifacts of his past, particularly his complicated relationship with his father, to try to understand who he is in the present. “After my father died, I realized that I had unwittingly and unintentionally declared a moratorium on writing about him anymore after Half the House. I felt like I’d put him through a lot with that book, and even though I didn’t intentionally consider him off limits, I just didn’t write about him anymore. I thought that was over. Done with. Then, when he died, a whole lot of stuff started percolating to the surface, and I realized I had to write about him again.”
When the percolating continued, Hoffman went on a two-week writing retreat thinking he would come back with the draft of an essay about his father. “I had all my notes lying around on the floor of this house where I was staying alone, and I had other things tacked on the wall. I had things on the counter in the kitchen. I kept trying to make it cohere, but there would be so many different branches of it that wouldn’t.” He remembers the moment, when sitting on the rug with all the stuff around him, he realized what he was writing was more than an essay. “I sort of rocked back on my heels and said, ‘Oh, fuck. It’s a memoir.” The trials of the memoir-writing process with Half the House were not something he was sure he could endure again. “I thought, I don’t have nineteen more years!” Fortunately, writing Love & Fury only took him five. “This time, I knew what it was and what I was trying to give birth to.”
On his first memoir foray, though, Hoffman felt lost. He had no map for where the writing was leading him. And, for a long time, he fought to keep all the things he was trying to express neatly contained. “I was writing two books,” he explains. His memoir was the sad story of a working class family with two terminally ill kids. But he was also writing a novel in which a kid gets abused by his coach. “As I imagined the plot of that novel, it turned out that the protagonist, who is now grown, is going back to confront the abuser.” He waves his fork toward one side of our table. “See, I was going to keep that over there in the fiction department.” Even when a writer friend, Bill Patrick, read a draft of the novel and told him that it was part of the story taking shape in the memoir, Hoffman resisted. “Psychically, I was not ready to bring the two together. I was not ready to let my peas touch my mashed potatoes.”
“So how did you know when you were ready?” I ask.
“The unlocking of it is something that happens to you,” he replies. “I don’t think you decide to tell it or not to tell it.” He’s thoughtful for a minute and then says, “I tried very hard not to write about it. Maybe putting the abuse in a novel and keeping the memoir separate was a way for me to get it written. I hadn’t thought about that until just now,” he reflects.
It took years of trial and error to collapse the two stories together in a way that felt truthful. “Because the process had gone on so long, I got to the point where I thought, the only honest way to tell this story is to incorporate my resistance as part of the story.” So, he tried writing it from three different views: how he looked at things at twenty-five, how he looked at things at thirty-five, how he looked at things at forty.” He says the editors at Harcourt Brace wanted the book, but found that structure too cumbersome. They wanted him to tell it in a more straightforward way.
“I had to find that shape,” Hoffman explains. But he admits that after the initial meeting with the editors, whom he recognizes now as being absolutely right in their criticism, it took him six months to stop being angry before he could bring himself back to the project. “But after six months, I thought, Okay, let me go back at this. I started cutting it up and laying it on the floor, and once I had that opening [the book’s first chapter], then it all started to fall into place.”
Despite the freedom he felt in finding the right structure, Hoffman still had other battles to fight. “The arc of the classic coming–of-age story is a story of coming to terms with the past, and it ends at the point where you know that the narrator has somehow surmounted this obstacle and is going to make it. And so many people kept trying to advise me to stick to that.”
That advice included leaving out one of the most poignant moments in the memoir—a pivotal chapter where Hoffman, now a father himself, confronts his father. In the chapter, Hoffman expresses his anger about the physical beatings his father inflicted on him when he was a child. That abuse created a barrier that made it impossible for him to tell his parents about Feifel’s abuse, even though he suspected his father might have known about it. Hoffman also reveals to his father the long-term damage of alcoholism and drug abuse that nearly killed him. “So many people kept trying to advise me to stick to the classic narrative arc. They advised me not to put that abuse stuff in there saying, ‘Oh the sad stuff is so beautiful, but nobody wants to read about that.”
Hoffman took a defiant stand and vowed to keep all of that material despite trusted readers telling him it didn’t fit, but he also recognized that if people were not getting its connection, then he hadn’t sufficiently made it part of the story. So he kept rewriting until both he and those trusted readers were satisfied with how those pieces fell into place. “I feel now that it is as integral to the book as it is to the life.”
“Did you intentionally leave things out of the book?” I ask.
“Oh, sure. You can’t put your whole life in the book. You have to find the story and then decide what serves that story—which is why people can write second and third and fourth memoirs.” This reality was clear to Hoffman when Half the House was published and he found there was still plenty of life material left for him to write about. Some of that has emerged as his new memoir, Love & Fury.
Though the trail to his first memoir was rutted and long, Hoffman didn’t find the writing process to be all heartache, defiance, and despair. He had the gift of support from his wife, Kathleen Aguero, also an acclaimed poet. “To be wrestling with childhood trauma with the person that you are in love with and making a life with now is already a kind of healing, even if you are not a writer. But the fact that we’re both writers was really important.”
And Hoffman says that as the project gained momentum, the poet in him came back to life. “I do write for the ear,” he says. Enthusiasm animates his face. “And I absolutely love that part of the process. So as difficult as some of these memories were to wrestle into clarity, there’s a pleasure in doing that. There’s a pleasure in making sentences. It’s not telling the story. It’s as if you are painting it a brush stroke at a time.”
“Did recognizing that artistic side, releasing the poet in you, help you to work to the end?” I ask.
“Yes,” Hoffman replies. “There’s a poem by Bruce Weigl called ‘The Impossible,’ and he’s very explicit about what happened to him—he was forced to give a man a blow job in a railroad yard when he was ten. He talks about it throughout the poem in very explicit terms and very clear terms. Then, the poem makes a turn and the last line is: ‘Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what.’ And I look at the title of the poem—‘The Impossible.’ You can never entirely redeem the experience. You can’t make it not hurt anymore. But you can make it beautiful enough so that there’s something to balance it in the other scale. And if you understand that word beautiful as not necessarily pretty, then you’re getting close to recognizing the integrative power of restoring the balance, which is restoring the truth.”
“What did it feel like to finish?”
“I felt elation,” Hoffman says. “To borrow a phrase from the Dylan song, I felt like I made it into heaven before they shut the door.” Without any notes of arrogance spilling into his words, Hoffman says of the finished book, “I understood that what I had made was a work of art. I had spent all of these years fashioning this into what I hoped was going to appeal to more than people’s interest in what happened, but that would move people in ways that poems move people, that the best fiction moves people. I felt pride about that. I was able to say to myself that I had done something that I thought was extraordinary. I had taken the thing that was the deepest, darkest, foulest thing that was a part of me and turned it into art.”
Then he adds with a chuckle, “But then I was worried immediately that people were going to read it!”
This quandary strikes a familiar chord. I’ll finish a scene and a ripple of satisfaction will flow through me because the words have fallen into place and it just feels right. Then, almost simultaneously, I’m flooded with anxiety at the thought of showing it to anyone. I share these concerns with Hoffman. He tells me he often hears the same thing in the writing workshops he teaches.
“I remind my students this same thing: writing and publishing are two different things. Don’t confuse them,” he cautions. “As soon as you start thinking, Well, I could never publish that, then the censor is right in the room with you with a pencil crossing stuff out as fast as you can write it. You can’t work that way.”
He’s not the first of these writers to give me some variation of this warning. “You’ve come this far, so you don’t have a choice,” Hoffman says. “So don’t think about ‘Oh, can I do this? Should I do this?’ You don’t have a choice anymore. That train left the station a long time ago. Any thoughts that are turning around that question, just get them out of here.”
Hoffman could never have expected the far-reaching effects of his memoir. I ask him what it was like to know that the person who had hurt him, traumatized him, was convicted as a direct result of Half the House, that his words were the catalyst.
“It felt like a deep resolution,” he replies, and then hesitates, searching for the best way to articulate those emotions. “The right definition of justice. Not vengeance, not punishment, but rebalancing. He ran from the truth; the truth is here.” Hoffman’s voice trembles a little. “It was extremely gratifying because when I went to the trial, there were two boys who were prepared to testify against him—his two most recent victims—one was exactly my son’s age at the time, and the younger boy was exactly my daughter’s age. So, on a really deep level, in my gut, I got it. It wasn’t about healing some long-ago wound of mine or any of those metaphors. It was about the fact that these kids were telling the truth now. They might not have to spend the next thirty years in the darkness denying what happened to them.”
Hoffman does admit to being surprised and, at first, disappointed that the seventeen pages that have anything to do with abuse—“I counted,” he tells me—turned out to be the way the public defined and continue to define his story. “I felt like, wait, wait, I’m a poet; this is a literary book. But then I began to see what a little fishbowl I was living in, in the creative writing world.” He recognized how creative writers, himself included, can become insular and mistakenly believe that the only reason other people read our work is for the craft. “Writers need to think about connecting to the community, to write about things that are important in their lives that are important to the health of the community and to do it in a way that will be taken up by the community. That’s why other people read,” he says. “They read to connect.”
Hoffman’s connection with readers has been remarkable. And he’s come to deeply value his role as unintended spokesperson for so many others who’ve endured similar experiences of abuse. In the nineteen years since Half the House was first published, Hoffman has received countless letters and calls and e-mails from men all over the world. “That continues,” he tells me. “It’s a trickle, but it’s a steady trickle now, all these years later. I still get three or four letters a month.” He’s part of an international network working with men all across the globe—Uganda, Cambodia, New Zealand, England, Australia—who were abused as kids.
“Tomorrow, I’m speaking at Harvard Medical School’s conference on child psychotherapy and trauma,” he reveals. “What I want to say to clinicians is don’t try to sew up the wound and send the kid back into the status quo. The child already knows, as I did, but had no way to articulate it or express it because I had no help, already knows a whole lot about the world than he did the day before the trauma happened. And you need to help that child or that person whenever they come to you to unwrite the story that’s been inscribed on them by the abuse and become the protagonist of their own narrative once again.”
At times, Hoffman has felt that having his story out in the world makes it harder to negotiate intimacy with strangers. “People see that as a slice of your life. They don’t see it as a work of art, as a piece of something you’ve made. But at the same time, what I think is most wonderful about that sort of response is that instead of encouraging people’s inner voyeur, what you get is people who come up to you after a reading and want to tell you their story—whether it has abuse in it or not.” He tells me that it’s not uncommon for him to do a half-hour reading and then still be there three hours later listening to the stories of the people who’ve come to hear him. “You’ve given them permission; you’ve opened a door,” he explains.
Hoffman doesn’t deny that ongoing turmoil simmers for him just below the surface. Despite his extensive teaching and speaking experience, when he tells me about the impending talk at Harvard, he confesses, “I’m scared to death. Once we get back into that area, all of that stuff has been seared into my psyche, all of the fear and shame that comes along with trauma. It’s still there. When you call that up, you go through it again. And it can be paralyzing. I think I’m better at managing it so that I can say the things that I believe must be said. And that’s where the motivation comes from. It isn’t about ‘I need to tell my story.’ It’s about ‘I know what must be said. And that’s not about me. It’s about what I’m able to see because of what I have been through.’”
Hoffman and I finally vacate the restaurant, suddenly conscious that the waitstaff is hovering close by, wanting to clear our table and prepare for the dinner rush. We leave and stand for a while on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant continuing to chat. Afternoon traffic moves along Massachusetts Avenue. Like so many of the conversations I’ve had on this journey, I don’t want this one to end.
Hoffman begins a story about how the previous September—a few months short of his sixty-fifth birthday—he and his son went skydiving. I know the spot he references—Pepperell, Massachusetts, not far from my home in Nashua. From the soccer field where my kids play in the fall, I can see the skydiving school’s colorful parachutes dotting the sky. I’m not certain how this anecdote connects to the rest of the conversation we’ve been having, but I’m intrigued nonetheless.
He describes the moment of standing on the ledge of the plane’s open doorway waiting to jump as the instructor started the countdown: “One. Two.” Hoffman laughs and pantomimes falling off the ledge as he says, “Three.” The instructor had pushed him out the door. “He knew that if he waited for the full count and didn’t give that nudge,” he explains, “I wouldn’t have jumped.”
Then Hoffman puts both hands squarely on my shoulders and meets my eyes. “Three.” He says and gives me a gentle push. “Consider this your nudge forward, Melanie.”