Tim Skinner's Blog: Asylum Chronicles

A Wild (better late than never) Truth From the Sister of Chris McCandless: Indictments and Impressions from the Post-trauma Ward

Carine McCandless, the sister and chief witness to the systematic abuse of her brother, Chris, while imprisoned under Warden Walt and Mother Billie, Captain of the Guards, has issued a scathing indictment of those parents following the death of her brother in the arctic some twenty years later. The headline: "Emotional Manslaughter, Son Exonerated!" is perhaps the most telling since Andy DuFresne rock-hammered his way out of a Maine prison and exposed "Murder, Corruption at Shawshank." Chris McCandless wasn't responsible for his early demise—and neither did Andy DuFresne kill his wife. In Chris's case, it was, as I had always reasoned, the parents—not in the library with candlesticks, but with words, belts, fists, insults and threats over the course of a life.

Since reading her 2014 tell-all expose', "The Wild Truth," I’ve been thinking about the death of Chris McCandless…again: the backpacker who disavowed his family and set off wandering into the wilds of Alaska, only to have been discovered months later rotting inside an abandoned school bus in the middle of the arctic, alone. I hadn’t thought about him for many moons. My theories, my many notebooks and my pencils, my many objects of obsession over Chris and why he did what he did have (like his reputation in a way) long since been destroyed. The walls of my den where I had for so many days and nights inked those theories have now been painted over—blood red—but the handwriting is still faintly visible beneath. It is the graphite legacy of my literary obsession with Chris and his death, brought on by the literary game his biographers seemed to have been playing with me.

Those biographers were Jon Krakauer and Chris's core family of informants: Sister Carine, and the chief puppet masters, Mother Billie and Warden Walt. They all entered into a conspiracy of silence and misinformation that became a cover-up not seen since the warden of Shawshank exploited the banking talents of his favorite con to launder millions of dollars.

The deception cost Chris his reputation in many people's eyes, a cost perpetuated for years by Jon Krakauer's fabricated story of Chris's last days wandering haplessly, a book Krakauer paraded as biography called "Into the Wild." Only years later when the sister had lost her battle at "healing" her family (code for securing a healthy inheritance from parents who cared something about the truth) are we now hearing what really went on in those last days wandering aimlessly in the arctic.

An image of my existence from those years before Carine's tell-all comes to mind. It’s Jim Carrey from Joel Schumacher’s movie, The Number 23. For many months I had ruminated over Jon Krakauer’s fairy tale. I wore out many pencils blistering the walls of my office trying to decipher his innuendo, and disprove his assumptions: that Chris was an adventurous ascetic and not running for his emotional life. I had become Walter Sparrow from Schumacher’s movie, trying to figure out the latest best-seller by organizing a written trial of its unstated villains, documented on the walls of my home. I was Fingerling, and Carine McCandless had become my Suicide Blonde. With her help, I could take Chris's captors to trial and gain the convictions I knew her brother deserved. It was all written between the lines, oblique, and the obliquity was there. But Carine wouldn't cooperate. Not for another twenty years would Suicide Blonde come forward.

What I had read from Krakauer from 1996 had bothered me in the way that being lied to might bother a person. He'd been given the holy grail of secrets from the sister come to find out: letters, dates, conversations, tales of fists in the spine and emotional abuse that would make Guard Byron Hadley cringe. But he'd been sworn to secrecy by Suicide Blonde. You can have everything there is to have, but you can't use it! You can know the truth, wild as it is, Jon, but you can never tell it! Carine had handcuffed the biographer in order to protect the Warden and the Captain of the Guards, and Krakauer couldn't print any of it.

He had to hide the details in innuendo, code, and cipher. Letters and conversations were there, but disguised, letters that would have exonerated Chris and spared his reputation; conversations he had that could have proved his sanity, his charity, and his peace—were all but excluded from evidence. The end result was a masquerade of lies and deception and a fantasy book about nomads, transcendental quests, and adventure seekers. Chris, like Andy DuFresne, had been driven into running, and Krakauer couldn't say so.

What was he to do but to create a depiction of Chris that was less than truthful? Krakauer could either sit on Suicide Blonde's secrets and wait for a change of heart (it was her letters and testimony that were being withheld) and hold off publishing until the truth could come out, or he could publish a fantasy. What emerged was a best-seller to everyone's surprise: "Into the Wild" and it became a sensation.

It was also wild lie.

Krakauer had appealed to my spiritual sensitivities in his writing like a minister might appeal to a crack addict. With the family's help, he had painted a monastic picture of wanderlust and asceticism and meditative seclusion when he wrote of Chris. He told stories of reinventing himself, and rebellion against technology. It brought to mind images of Eden and first frontiers, where things seemed noble and new, romantic really, that for a while had me looking seriously into eastern mysticism and studying the Manifesto of the Unabomber. I almost converted! Chris was a disenchanted kid who had simply run away. Children can be harsh critics of their parents sometimes! Krakauer had written. The implication: Chris was harsh and the criticism, out of proportion to the crime. Nothing could have been further from the wild truth!

Krakauer says this “off-the-record” stuff was quite normal. He decided to be coy about the information Carine shared with him to “protect” the sensitivities of a wary family, as per Carine’s wishes. To hell with any damage withholding those secrets might do to Chris’s reputation! To hell with the ethics of biography! To hell with the blithering sap writing dubious notes on the walls of his hostel in the middle of the night! No one was going to read the book anyway! So thought the conspirators.

In the sister's foreword, Krakauer writes:

“I thought…I could convey what I’d learned from the letters obliquely, between the lines, without violating Carine’s trust. I was confident I could provide enough indirect clues for readers to understand…Chris’s seemingly inexplicable behavior during the final years of his life….”

He goes on:

“Many readers did understand this, as it turned out. But many did not. A lot of people came away from reading “Into the Wild” without grasping why Chris did what he did.”

Why he ran for his emotional life! is what Krakauer meant. Many thought Chris mean; others insane. Some went so far as to say he was suicidal, just another post-adolescent, emotionally-impaired, spoiled rich kid kid who'd run off into the wild, depressed, not caring if he lived or died.

Chris deserved an apology. The inferences, the innuendo, the obliquity of writing what I had felt all along to be true, deserved to be exposed—that the parents did it! It was preposterous to think otherwise and these people were making a killing off the death of an innocent. Were they giving these profits away to Oxfam, as Chris once did with his life savings, or were these co-conspirators pocketing this unexpected windfall coming on the winds of Chris's demise? After all, there were trips to Paris to take; raw silk wedding dresses for the bride Carine to buy; automobile repair businesses to secure, and much-needed braces for the nieces to wear. Smiles are important!

Nevertheless, nineteen years later, the house of cards would crumble. Carine McCandless would experience one too many threats at the hands of the Warden and his guard and out would come the rock-hammer of truth:

“Pink is my favourite colour, do you know what pink is? Red 27, white 65. 65 plus 27, 92. 'Pink' has 4 letters, 92 divided by 4, twenty-fucking-three.”

The indictment was to be handed down by suicide blonde, herself, the last minute witness, apologetic and teary-eyed, hunkering over as if ready to vomit from the stress of it all. She was ready to wipe the slate of her older brother’s mystery spot, clean, she said, with her latest book. “The Wild [better late than never] Truth," indictments and impressions from the post-trauma ward of House McCandless. It’s selling for $15.99 digitally and it reads like a true crime novel.

Carine was sad about the misinformation that had been promulgated for the last two decades. After all, this was Chris's reputation she was now concerned with—and she was right to be! And she had an axe to grind. Disgusted at the ease at which her parents seemed to be exploiting her and Krakauer's misinformation and half-truths, Carine was demanding accountability--from everyone. Chris wasn’t the only child in McCandless Prison abused, and the corruption needed to stop. She was ready to make amends to Chris’s fans for admittedly withholding those pieces of key information that, if had been allowed to see the light of day, might have prevented her brother’s posthumous infamy and a lot of handwringing from fans like me.

Carine is to be applauded.

Perhaps I owe her a bit of sympathy. I like many suffered abuse as a child. Perhaps not to the extent she and Chris did. It's never easy to bring charges against prison officials, at any age. A lot of people might have folded under the pressure of abuse, and became, as Red explained in the movie, Shawshank Redemption, institutionalized. Look at Andy DuFresne. He could have gone the way of the librarian, Brooks Hadlin, and hanged himself once his parole came about--if it ever did. But he didn't. He waited until the time was right, crawled through a river of shit, and exposed the corruption. He swam 500 yards through the foulest smelling stuff you couldn't imagine, and came out clean on the other side.

So too is Carine!

Some might wonder, though: Where's the apology for keeping this evidence to herself for so long?

I think the answer to where is the apology is that the Wild Truth is an apology. It's also an indictment. I commiserated with Chris and Carine and I realized the cover up, and I realized why. Control is a hard thing to take.

I never quite bought into Krakauer’s fantasy. I therefore didn't consider Chris yet another greenhorn digging his grave in the soil of idealism. I sensed abuse, and I sensed emotional manslaughter in Krakauer's code. I sensed a connection with Chris in the way two camel crickets might sense each other’s presence in a wet basement. Some children can be driven to death. Let's not pretend they can't.

I just wonder how close Chris and Carine really were. Carine had little in common with her older brother, by her own admission, other than sharing a cell with him in House McCandless. And let's not forget what Billie the Captain of the Guards told Carine: "Chris left you, too!" And don't forget: You, Carine, have made a lot of money off Krakauer's book. Are those words more evidence of the abuse that brought Carine out of her cell, or are those words more pieces of a wild truth, this time coming from the mother? I guess it doesn't matter too much anymore. Carine did buy her niece some much needed braces, and smiles are important.

Carine reminds us, though, that running away (in my words—escaping) was for Chris the sanest thing he could have done. Perhaps he ran into the wrong place, but at least he ran.

The willingness to publish “Into the Wild” without fleshing out the truths that were driving him, made Krakauer’s book somewhat of a forgery. And I wonder if Krakauer will ever take some responsibility for his literary game he played with all of us, and quit blaming the little sister and her pipe dream of turning House McCandless into anything other than the emotional prison it was, for the masquerade they perpetuated.

We need to get busy living, or get busy dying. Andy DuFresne and Chris McCandless knew that truth better than anyone. With the evidence now out in the open where it should be, perhaps now we can understand why Chris did what he did and simply let him rest in peace.

A Reminder to Trauma Writers: Trauma Hurts!

If you want to tick off a reader, abuse your lead character(s) and then don't write about how that abuse might affect them. Show the abuse but don't write about how it might be wrong, immoral, or at least illegal. Just tell a reader that's what the character deserves, and leave it go at that!

See how far that gets you.

I see this from time and time --what I call the 'trivialization of abuse' in fiction writing. Rape and murder have become commonplace themes--almost so much so that writers sometimes treat them as incidental acts.

For example, it's become popular to make light of physical assault, rape, or psychological or emotional assault, by not writing follow-up scenes to describe the suffering, shock, grief and the inevitable change that abuse inevitably causes.

These drive-by "story-drivers" have become almost a thematic cliché in how they are (not) treated, meaning: they are sometimes not treated at all. Characters sometimes go on as if nothing ever happened!

It just defies logic.

This failure requires one of two things from the reader: a suspension of disbelief that borders on sheer ridiculousness, or it puts the reader into the unfortunate position of having to justify the abuse, which is typically what happens when the writer doesn't condemn things when they should.

This isn't to say that readers aren't intelligent enough to make the moral judgment themselves, or assume the suffering. Most are and most do. But some might wonder that if the author doesn't think it's important to follow up on the aftermath of abuse, then perhaps it isn't important--and furthermore, perhaps the character didn't feel anything (Weird!) or worse, perhaps they deserved it!

Ouch!

Bottom line: we risk readers justifying the abuse when we don't define things or describe the authentic suffering abuse entails. This is a psychologically and morally repugnant omission from any writer concerned with the human condition.

We've heard such justifications and lack of sympathy before, particularly when it comes to some women suffering sexual assault: 'She was dressed too provocatively!' or 'She was in the wrong place at the wrong time!' 'She was in the wrong time period!' or 'It's just the way the assailant's culture behaves!'

Bologna!

Don't put your reader in that sort of position.

When we trivialize trauma by ignoring our character's humanity, we are doing little more than exploiting that character--and equally so, our readers. This leaves them not only questioning their own motives, but the writer's, as well.

My advice to any aspiring writer, rather he be of fiction or non-fiction, is to:

1) Be authentic to the psychology of your character(s). Human beings suffer, no matter what they are wearing, or what gender they are, what they've done, or where they are.

2) Write with the reader who may have actually suffered such abuse, or loss, in mind. If the character is a sociopath who enjoys hurting others, just be fair to those who he's hurt and describe that hurt.

If your character is a masochist and loves to feel pain, fine. But

3) Don't imply abuse is a normal human behavior with no fallout. Masochism is still a deviant behavior, and so is domestic abuse: whether it's verbal, emotional, or monetary. Pain may be pleasurable, but at least have the mental diligence to ask the question: what is driving this character to cut herself, pull her own hair, or drip hot candle wax on her bosom while her lover beats her with a metal rod.

Characters who suffer such abuse (leave out the candle wax girl for a moment!) do not get over abuse in the span of a chapter or two unless there is something emotionally wrong with them. If that is the case, then be fair to the reader and go ahead and say that. Unless you are writing about alien life forms or robots,

4) Know that pain, loss, and suffering change people!

It is as simple as that. Readers expect an author to

5) Treat their characters authentically; and I would add, we, as writers, have a responsibility to do so.

6) Pay attention to the authentic ways in which human beings respond to pain, and bring those responses to your story. The reader will be glad that you did. You may actually

7) Advance the human cause. Don't take away from it.

Write authentically and even your characters will thank you. Trauma hurts. Let's not pretend it doesn't.