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"It is difficult to tell a coherent story about an incoherent life," McGovern writes as he nears the end of his painful task. Telling Terry's life became part of McGovern's healing process. Poring over journals, letters, memorabilia, writing in the dark night hours after her death, McGovern has fashioned the portrait of a gentle, happy, creative girl who grows into a woman cursed with the disease of alcoholism. He records her perpetual struggle to beat the disease, even to the threshold of her death.
So much of the McGovern family story-a busy professional father, a mother committed to raising the five children who came along just after World War II-describes the ideal '50s family. Professor father succeeds in politics, family goes to Washington, children grow up in a cosmopolitan suburb surrounded by security and love.
Then come the '60s. In an era of three-martini business lunches, Terry's drinking begins in junior high school. She and her friends sneak booze from family liquor cabinets. Of five McGovern children, Terry and Steven succumb to alcoholism.
Steven wins his battle. Terry fights and wins, loses, wins, fights again. For an eight-year period in her thirties she stays sober long enough to give birth to two daughters. Then the battle recommences.
The painful cycle repeats. Sobriety, drunkenness, resolve, drying-out periods, stability, collapse, failure, and new resolve. The day before her death, Terry called home asking for help in financing yet another apartment, another fresh start. McGovern agreed. But one last time Terry's determination dissolved in vodka-or beer-or was it vanilla extract?
Terry creates a moving, complex portrait of a bright, attractive, flawed human being who happens to be an alcoholic. Resisting the temptation to self-justification and self-accusation, McGovern reconstructs his daughter through documents public and private. Her siblings share their understandings of a loved and broken litter mate. Terry, dynamic campaigner for her father in 1972, kept journals and diaries for years. Madison police reports record amazing compassion for "McGovern," the habitual drunk they hauled to detox time and time again.
These documents support a mounting crescendo of tension between hope and pain, aspiration and failure. In obligato runs a father's regret, guilt, resignation, understanding, and terrible sense of loss. Analysis cannot solve the puzzles, cannot fill the void. An incoherent life, perhaps. But Terry's father George makes of these broken records of her days on earth something loving and useful for the living.
Joanne Sears is a writer in Montecito, California.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.