I can’t tell truth about my father unless I dig for truth about myself

By David McElroy · June 5, 2020

I was trying to tell a friend about my film idea when I stumbled upon the right title. I casually said something about attempting to tell “the truth about my father” when it struck both of us that I had just spoken the right title.

“The Truth About My Father”

That would be the name of the non-fiction book I would write and then it would be the name of a very fictionalized comedy version that I would make afterward. Why did such a strange tale need to be told as a comedy? I didn’t know then and I still don’t know, but I know it’s a dark comedy.

That was years ago. Ever since then, I’ve struggled to figure out how to make the story work as a film script. Redrawing my father as an exaggerated form of his eccentric self was easy, but the story centered around a son learning the hidden truth about his father. And I figured something out this week.

The story is boring — and it doesn’t work — unless I dig into my own flaws and trace where the worst part of me came from. To tell the truth about my father, I have to dig into — and expose — the worst parts of myself.

And that’s scary.

Have you seen Wes Anderson’s 2001 film, “The Royal Tenenbaums”? I don’t have Anderson’s talent or experience — and my style would be different than his — but that movie is an example of a horrible family drama being told as a dark comedy. And it works.

As I pulled out of the theater parking lot after watching that movie 19 years ago, I called one of my sisters and said, “You have to see this. The facts aren’t even vaguely the same as ours, but the group dynamics are just as messed up as we are.”

As I’ve tried to write a script centered around a son discovering the awful truth about his father — “Hey, my father is an embezzler who stole millions of dollars!” — I realized that the protagonist was almost a passive victim. Some bad things had happened to this character — based on bad things that happened to me — but he didn’t have any interesting flaws. He certainly didn’t seem like a man who had been raised by a narcissist. He wasn’t messed up enough.

And that’s when I realized that the story has to be just as much about the son’s story arc as it is about the father. In fact, since the father pretty much can’t change, the son is the only one for whom there can be any redemption. The comedy comes from the dysfunctional actions of the narcissistic father and the drama comes from the son discovering his own flaws — and what he’s done to others — as he understands what his father has done to him.

I’ve told you before that it was very painful for me about 10 or 12 years ago when I started learning about narcissism. Not only did I finally understand what my father had done — and my childhood suddenly made sense — but I started seeing my own dark side.

I wasn’t a terrible person. I don’t have deep secrets that you don’t yet know about. But I can see some arrogance and selfishness in what I was then — in a couple of romantic relationships in particular — that I was completely unaware of at the time.

It wasn’t until I understood my father’s selfishness and arrogance that I started seeing the same traits in myself. The difference between us is that I learned about this early enough in life — and I was willing to make changes — and my father never did learn these lessons. He didn’t want to. He wouldn’t even discuss the issues.

I understand now that this son character has to have my flaws when the story starts. I have to write about him being arrogant and selfish in ways that I acted years ago. I have to show it causing trouble for him. And as the story progresses — and he learns about himself by learning who his father really is — I’ll give him the chance to grow.

As he grows, I’m going to give him a chance to repair relationships — including a primary romantic relationship — and give him a chance to find redemption for his life.

This story is the story of my father — about how dysfunctional he was and how his crazy actions hurt a lot of people — but it’s also my story.

It’s a story about having to change. About having to dig deep and look at ugly parts of myself. It’s a story about having to experience shame at what I’d been. It’s a story about wanting to be worthy of being loved — and of wanting to be able to love someone in honest and whole-hearted ways.

It’s still my father’s story, but I understand now that it’s also the story of my own redemption. And that makes it even more important for me to tell.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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