Reviews and Comments

This book was self-congruent: it was a passionate account of human's passion for creation -- art, science, and the self as a person. May wrote about the mind's sense of beauty. Out of many possible forms, dimly seen and partially explored unconsciously, people in creative activity tend to select the one that may not be the most useful or correct, but the most beautiful. This heightened sense of beauty is associated with anxiety, a shaking-up of memories and thought patterns. We can certainly feel that May, while composing the essays in this book, surely was gripped by this beauty and anxiety. He didn't claim that his narrative or "theory" was the closest to a "correct" one. All he said was that it was the one that completed the puzzle beautifully.

As is with all works of creation, the book reflected the limitations of its time and also the tendency to seek breakthrough from them. At the same time, we visit obsolete phrasings and conceptions (e.g. "Lesbian phase" as a label for gender and sexual exploration, Rorschach test perceived as a valid tool, etc.), while encountering timeless insights.

We may as well re-title this compilation using May's own favourite wording: "The Myth of Creating".

On a personal level, this book rings too true for me, and I'm mindful that my opinion could be biased towards stressing its merits while remaining blind to the shortfalls.

I believe that the strength of the book is derived from Miller's keen and compassionate observation of her clients ("patients" in the old terminology), as well as the attention devoted to the literature of both psychological studies and biographical materials. While the word "Gifted" may preclude potential readers from identifying with the narratives of childhood, what Miller meant really was the "Desirable, but Uncared for" -- children who were desired for their attributes that satisfy the craving of the parents, but who weren't respected as individual human beings, whose right to be valued as such comes with no conditions attached. Their "gift" is their vulnerability.

A unifying theme of the three essays is the concept of mourning. Unmourned loss seems to compel parents to fulfil their early unsatisfied (but then legitimate) needs in their own children (which is now by no means legitimate, or even possible any more). They thereby perpetrate toxic parenting upon the next generation, rob the children of their childhood, and the vicious cycle repeats. Only profound mourning can break this cycle. To mourn is to bury the axe that grinds in the heart, to say farewell the impossible paradise that never was, and to see world, life, and other people as they are after penetrating the veil of longing.

Of course, merely knowing this isn't enough. Many of the parents "know", but the knowledge is not embodied. The conflicted parents may not have done harm by active malice, but by ignorance and negligence about their own inner conflict and outward contradictory behaviours.

No parent is perfect, but more need to be good enough.

My only complaint is not directed towards the author herself, but to the unfortunate compromises she had to make. In order to get published and taken seriously by the old boys' club, Miller had to resort to shoehorning in those references to the old, and now increasingly obsolete, theories and terminologies, which she acknowledged in the preface to a later edition. One can read the book without loss of vital information if one ignores the references to "Œdipal", "drive theory", "orality", "anality", or "perversion", etc.

I guess in the time of the book, the word "neurodiversity" hadn't been coined yet. But this book, with its experimental form and somewhat taboo topic, reads like a compassionate but tragic apology for neurodiversity. It's tragic, for as we follow the hero's journey we see the Normal as it is: a kind of censor that compels us to discard the spontaneous emergence of values rooted from exactly the Normalcy itself, and the hero is at odds with this compulsion. It shows the inherent oddity of the Normal: that it is a double bind, forbidden to contravene but at the same time impossible to comply with. We survive, when we accept it as our own; but we grow, when we see it as the double bind it is.

In the former case, it means surrendering; and in the latter, evolving. And in either case, we suffer the loss of what we construct as the "identity", perhaps followed by mourning. This is the price that must be paid no matter what.

Perhaps, if we read it this way, the ending may not seem that tragic. There is some ambiguity about how the hero ultimately turns out. The text doesn't rule out a subversive reading and extrapolation.

The style is sort of close to James Joyce's Ulysses or John Gardner's Grendel. It shifts between various "genres" such as stream-of-consciousness, magic realism, play, epistolary novel, tacky Eastern-bloc propaganda war-time romance, contemplative essay, and conventional fiction with a third-person omnipresent reliable narrator. And it's not divided into chapters. I guess this is part of the amorphous metafiction parallel to the text (if you read the book you'll see what I mean by "parallel") -- to heck with the walls that divide genres, whether they're genres of literature or of humans.