Meredith Maran

Walker risked banishment from home again when she wrote “Black, White and Jewish” (2001), her memoir of growing up in the joint custody of her Jewish civil rights lawyer father and African-American novelist mother. “My parents did not hold me close, but encouraged me to go,” she wrote. “They did not buffer, protect, watch out for, or look after me. I was mostly left alone to discover the world and my place in it.” Brave words for the daughter of Alice Walker to commit to print. Having published and regretted a few words about my (non-famous) mother myself, I found myself astounded as I watched Walker read passages like that from “Black, White and Jewish” at Black Oak Books in Berkeley soon after the books release, beneath a beatific photograph of her mother that hung — literally — over her head.

Rebecca Walker’s new anthology, “What Makes a Man: 22 Writers Imagine the Future,” is less personal but, in many ways, equally risky. It’s a crazy quilt of essays made vivid by its eclectic collection of contributors: writers previously published and not, many of them men of color, most of them tackling the topic from deeply personal and provocative perspectives. Jesse Green (“The Velveteen Father”) writes about the meaning of male/female, husband/wife in the life of a gay dad; National Public Radio commentator Doug Rushkoff discusses the effects, both good and bad, that Playboy had on him as a young man. Death-row inmate Jarvis Jay Masters writes excruciatingly about trying to mentor young, self-destructive fellow prisoners. Meditation teacher Caitriona Reed reflects on being Buddhist and transsexual. There are excerpts from Michael Moore’s “Stupid White Men” (“The End of Men”), Anthony Swofford’s “Jarhead,” and “I Sleep at Red Lights,” by Bruce Stockler, a new father of triplets. The net effect of the book is that of overhearing a confessional conversation among a group of thoughtful men, with a few similarly self-appraising women (Martha Southgate on her seemingly female son; Tajamika Paxton on her wounded, dying father; Ruth Bettleheim on the favorable impact of divorce on young boys) in the mix.

Now 34, Walker has once again taken a topic that seemed to have been talked to death and given us ways and means to think about it differently. Like her other books, “What Makes a Man” was born at home — in her relationship with the son, now 15, she shares with her ex, musician Meshell Ndegeocello.

Walker and I spent an afternoon at her publicist’s home in the hills of Oakland, Calif., discussing her writing and how it affects her identity as a mother.

Let’s talk about the new book first. Where’d the idea come from?

One night my son — this dynamic, interesting 11-year-old who loves chess and snowboarding and sci-fi — turned to me and said, “You think I should play sports so girls will like me?” I reacted the way I would have if I had a daughter who’d asked, “Should I pretend I’m dumb so boys will like me?”

As he and I talked, I started to understand that in his seventh-grade culture the boys either played violent video games or they played competitive sports. With all my son’s uniqueness, he had no social currency unless he did those things. That started me thinking about how our culture forces boys to deny their own complexity and pushes them into this competitive fighting model. I wanted to create a book I could give to my son, to help him navigate the making of his identity, give him more room to be who he actually is.

Identity navigation seems to be a theme of your work.

True. I always want to make more space for people who suffer because we don’t fit into some bullshit paradigm that we didn’t make. [Laughs.] Anthologies are good for when you have questions but no answers on a subject, and you need to survey a lot of people to figure out what you think.

How’d you go about asking the questions?

I started talking to all kinds of guys: 60-year-old friends of my dad’s, people I was in grad school with, my brother, random people I met on the road. I’d pull a guy aside and say, “I’m thinking about doing this book — tell me what it was like growing up. Tell me what it’s like being a man.” They had all these stories of childhood abuse and humiliation, of being brutally teased out of their emotional capacity. Listening to them heightened my sensitivity to the other half of the human race.

Now for a loaded question: Why a book about masculinity from a bisexual woman?

You’re not the first to ask. When I first proposed the book, my publisher said, “Why are you doing a book on men? You’re a woman, you’ve been with women.” In fact, I’ve actually only been with two women. For most of my life I was with men: four years with one boyfriend, five years with another, and I was going to marry a man in Africa. [Laughs.] I know a lot about men up close and personal.

I bet you couldn’t have gotten away with writing this book as a lesbian. And if you were straight no one would have questioned it.

You’re touching on something important. As a writer I’ve wanted to make it really hard for people to put me in any kind of box. I’m not comfortable with being thought of as a black writer, a Jewish writer, lesbian writer, East Coast, West Coast. I’m all of those things and I’m more.

No one likes being shoved into a box. But when you’re black, white, Jewish, and bi, there are so many boxes to avoid.

I have a personal sort of resistance to limitation. But it’s also about the realities of the marketplace. I want my work to reach as many people as possible. I’d hate to think someone would get to one of my books and say “This looks interesting but it’s not for me — she’s a black writer, she’s a bi writer.” I think a book on masculinity isn’t what readers of “Black, White and Jewish” are expecting. I like that. If I can keep putting books out there that complicate the question of an identity box, that’ll cut through the whole conundrum.

In your intro you call on women to help men reconfigure masculinity. You say, “If we want men to be different we must eroticize that difference.” What do you mean?

Women say we want these integrated, beautiful, sweet men. Then we run off with the macho guy. All these years of feminism and we’re still looking for the knight in shining armor. There’s a way in which our impulses haven’t caught up with our intellect. What I’m saying is, we know that men are often socialized in their sexuality through pornography. I can eroticize this table if I work hard enough at it. Well, women need to flex that power and begin to eroticize what’s truly healthy for us and for our partners.

Nice guys finish last — but at least they finish.

Being turned on by macho guys who aren’t good for us has to do with us wanting to be the feminine über-counterpart. I like those guys ’cause I can curl up and be little. I can be pure sensuality. But those extremes only work in the realm of sexuality. Real relationships are much more multidimensional. I want a partner, male or female, who can be the cool tough guy to my damsel in distress and who can also be the damsel in distress to my cool tough guy. I want to have the full range of my humanity in a relationship. I want to experience life fully, not just a sliver of it. That’s why I did this book — because men are being allowed just this tiny part. I was interested in the ones who are breaking out of that paradigm. I’m interested in knowing what’s that like for them.

You’ve published one memoir and two anthologies. Do you prefer working in one genre over the other?

Doing an anthology is like conducting a symphony: You’re orchestrating different ideas, different writers. It’s fairly administrative. A memoir is more like taking off all your clothes and walking down a crowded city street — all that vulnerability and adrenaline.

Is the vulnerability the good part or the bad part?

That’s the bad part. The good part is that writing a memoir is making a map of your own evolution. It’s a clearing, too. With “Black, White and Jewish,” I let all this stuff go through the writing. It was amazingly cathartic.

For me there’s always been a price to pay for the catharsis.

With a memoir it’s inevitable that you’re going to hurt some people. In the past I felt that telling my story was the most important thing. But I’m not convinced that the damage is worth it. Now I feel like telling my story and taking care of the people I love are equally important. There’s got to be a way to write honestly and meaningfully about my life and not cause anyone suffering. I’ve been thinking of it as a challenge: What does it mean to tell my truth and live authentically and also take care of people? Is that possible?

Truth-telling versus caretaking: You’re not the first artist to confront that dilemma.

It calls for a radical shift in my perspective.

From what to what?

From an idea of myself as a kind of lone artist who can just keep moving from project to project, relationship to relationship, place to place, the infinitely morph-able, infinitely changeable shifting renegade female warrior artist — that’s a trope I inherited, a real trope of the women’s movement — to someone who understands that the joy of life is not found only in self-expression but in intimacy with others.

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose…

Exactly. I’ve had a romantic idea of freedom, of following one’s muse, that hasn’t really taken other people’s feelings into account. That’s been a very difficult lesson for me to learn.

I know this is a touchy subject, but what can you say about the effects of your books on the important relationships in your life?

I can say that “To Be Real” and “Black, White and Jewish” put a lot of strain on my personal relationships. The first book was not well received by the women I grew up with. They felt like I was critiquing them, calling them narrow. That book challenged the very idea of the feminist identity they’d worked so hard to establish.

With “Black, White and Jewish” the problems were with my parents and other family members. The work I had to do to heal those relationships taught me a lot about what’s really important — as did going through a breakup with my partner of eight years. Both of us were very committed to our art. We both believed we could wantonly pursue our creative impulses without understanding how to survive that as individuals and as a family.

Art from suffering, suffering from art…

So many kids of my generation were raised with this permissive progressivism, without rules or stability. Our parents were busy doing the right thing, trying to challenge the orthodoxy of the time. We paid a pretty heavy price for that: a sense of security, a sense of limits. Many of us experimented with things we probably shouldn’t have. I know I did.

How has your own upbringing affected the kind of mother you are?

When my son was younger I could be the chummy kind of mom. But in the last few years I’ve had to become much more stern, much more the real grown-up mom. It’s challenging, but I’m enjoying it. I’m proud of my commitment to my son. It’s a big deal to take on the responsibility of a child who’s (a) not your biological child, then (b) to not flinch when the relationship with the child’s biological parent ends.

What moves you from book to book?

It’s always something in my psyche that needs to be resolved, a place where I feel a little blocked, where there’s some kind of restriction I want to work through. The energy of writing the book helps to clear it. It’s weird: My books are so thematic, but I’m not somebody who’s interested in trends or the temperature of the moment in pop culture. I’m someone who cares about where we’re going as a species in terms of human relating. I’m more emotional than I am pop psych. I’m all about, how does it feel?

Might there be a novel in your future?

I’ve been trying to write a novel since 2001. I had the idea that I did the memoir, I did the anthology, now I have to do a novel. Working on it was agony! I finally just decided to let it go. My mom’s such a novelist, I wanted to connect in that way, to share that. But we don’t. Which is fine.

So what’s next?

Another memoir, believe it or not, based on the year I spent in Africa. I fell in love with this guy, ended up leaving abruptly, and almost died of dengue fever. It’s about transcontinental romance, the indestructibility of love.

Who’s going to get mad at you about this one?

That remains to be seen. [Chuckles, then grows somber.] I just want to do my work, have people read it, and have it mean something to them. I want to feel like I can transform the difficulties of my life into something that’s helpful not just for me, but for other people. And I want to be able to do the hard work of changing myself when it’s clear that I need to.

Every once in a while Annie and I rev ourselves into a flurry of emails about what’s happening with our kids, how we’re handling it (or not), and how much it sucks to worry the way we do. On Mother’s Day, we thought it fitting to share one of those exchanges, which runs the gamut from how much to pay for your child’s shampoo to the tiny and humongous and inevitable failures that come along with parenting.

Meredith Maran: While you were pregnant, did you read one of those perennial news stories about how much it cost, then, to raise a kid from birth through age 18? And did that give you the crazy idea that you’d actually spend only that much? And, even crazier, that you’d be finished paying when your son was 18?

Anne Lamott: Luckily I never read an article before I gave birth on how much raising a child would cost. It turns out it’s more expensive than raising Arabian horses, which don’t go around for five years acting bitter and put out that you nag so much about why their cellphone batteries have always died. I feel that a well-trained horse would do better at keeping a cellphone charged than did certain people I could name.

The financial cost of having a child is extreme, even if you live pretty simply, as I do. The thought of my parents shelling out for my brothers and me, at the levels expected of modern parents, is hilarious. They would have wept with mirth at requests for money to use on paintball ammo, fancy haircuts, sushi or the latest styles. $15 for hair gel? $100+ for SNEAKERS? My mother would have begged us to stop before she wet herself; my father would have winked, thinking we were punking him, or as we used to say, “pulling his leg.”

Maran: Speaking of leg-pulling, and hair-pulling, and pulling hair out: I had my own hair-product moment ($12 for the gel, but this was Berkeley, not Marin) at a time in my freelance financial life when my foals were 16 and 17 and my own 45-year-old locks were being bathed in TWO-DOLLAR BOTTLES OF SUAVE. What is it about motherhood that makes it so hard to mention to your offspring that your hair products cost 10 percent what his do — and you’re paying for all of it? And we’re talking about SONS!

Lamott: The arena of money and your child is so fraught with your own family’s bizarre behavior around money during your childhood — and going back through the generations and across international time zones.

For me, money is the last frontier, the shadow area in us that is the very last place we begin to heal from having kept horrible family secrets about money: not having enough, or having too much, or having shopping addictions, or being cheap. Or being obsessed all the time with fear or craving.

So even though we were feminists and aging hippie Bay Area types, we have the toxin waste dumps inside us — of thinking we needed more, or didn’t deserve nearly so much. And when we brought children into the long-hidden ruins of our psyche where we were so damaged around money, where it was very hard to have health and balance, then we were exposing our cherished babies to the worst society has to offer.

It was like making them walk through the fields and streams in “Erin Brockovich.” The ruined land was school yards, and other kids’ houses, and we had such reserves of fear and shame around money that we repeated our parents’ mistakes. We overcompensated for our own gravest character shortcomings and childhoods; we lavished on the kids to make up for our inadequacies, and because we could not BEAR to see them in the pain of feeling less-than, or not part of the popular crowd, with our generally terrible self-esteem.

All mothers try to buy their kids’ affections. Remember the HIGH of taking your kids shopping, and how much they loved you for a couple of hours, and what good self-esteem they had for part of a day because of their new jeans, which cost what my mother spent on groceries to feed a family of five? (She asked bitterly.)

With my kid, I sometimes felt like any old junkie, changing my own and my son’s sense of self and worth by whipping out the credit card. It gave me a speedball — the cocaine of adrenaline, racing around with my closest person, and the narcotic of endorphins, of feeling the intimate and intense connectedness.

Buying him stuff he had his heart set on created the Trance, the merge, of being in love.

I would have used the kitty’s shampoo if it meant my kid could feel great about his hair — especially, of course, because my hair had been a nightmare for me as a child. If my child could get a great haircut, and walk onto that blacktop filled with the sense that he had value, then the benefit was incalculable. It filled me more deeply than anything I buy for myself ever could.

I wish I had done this VERY differently, although I absolutely believe I did a much better job around this than my own mother did. Whereas my own parents thought they possessed financial savvy, at least I was aware of how damaging it is to instill a kid with your family’s crazy graspy clingy beliefs about money — thinking that the holes inside you can be filled with ANYTHING outside, especially stuff you wash your hair with, thinking you can buy people’s love. That you can buy self-worth.

My mother was so sick and crazy around money because she had been born poor, in Liverpool, and because my father kept her on the ’50s leash of adhering to a monthly budget that could never stretch to include random household events. I wrote somewhere about coming home to find her in a sweaty panic because our dog had chewed up my shoes, and she would have to furtively replace them from the family budget — and you would have thought from her face that SHE had chewed up the shoes. Bad dog, bad mommy, and she was how I first learned to be a woman. And she created the same trance with my brothers and me, through shopping secrets and drama.

Maran: You wish you’d done this differently. How? How else could you have had that intimacy high, that delicious reassuring interdependent entanglement, however fleeting, however unreciprocated, however unwell?

Or, does Being The Parent mean not seeking intimacy with our progeny but rather resting confidently and authoritatively in the sheer unalterable fact of it? Like it or not, kid, designer gel or Suave: I’m your mother. As I was told by one of my teenage son’s therapists, “He has enough friends. He needs a mother.” You’re right, I wanted to say, but I’ll never have enough friends to keep me from wanting my sons to regard me as their friend.

Some parents get kids who thank them and reward them in every possible way. Some parents don’t. For those of us starving to feel that we did well, or at least OK, at the most important job of our lives — the money issue taps at the deeper one, the embarrassingly banal: Where did I go wrong?

Lamott: Where did I go wrong?

The thing is, we all — parents — went wrong so many times, in so many ways big and small. It has been important for me to understand that we are ultimately powerless over how our kids turn out — how, as adults, they choose to live, and whether they want to be close to us once they are adults.

I know parents who seemed perfect — who ARE great people, who did it right — whose kids are extremely damaged. And fantastic grown-up kids with integrity and humor whose parents were scary, abusive, nonexistent.

So for now, I am deliberately, as a radical act, remembering all the things I did so beautifully — how many hours I played on the floor with my son, all the Legos and coloring, all the endless games of catch and “dinkum” tennis in the driveway, reading to him in bed every night, the AMAZING quality of people whom I invited to help me raise him, most of whom he still has deep connections with. How I only pinched him hard once, only slapped him once, at 16 (which I know was wrong, but it wasn’t like he was 7 — and believe me, Jesus would have been tempted , too, would have at least been gritting His teeth and emitting mewling sounds). I created great vacations with little income, for 17 years.

The screwing up mostly had to do with loving him too deeply, being so afraid for him in this dark, cold, spooky world and the sometimes terrifying years of adolescence, and of having come to motherhood SO screwed up myself — by my parents, by this world, by the institutionalized contempt for mothers.

So — I kind of think it is a miracle that motherhood didn’t do even deeper damage to my life and psyche. Also, both of us are alive; many of his friends and my friends didn’t make it. Some days I think that as Dylan sang in “Idiot Wind,” it’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves. Some days just thinking of my son, I could still die of love for him.

Maran: Loving too deeply? Is such a thing possible?

Die of love for your son: This I know is possible, because I thought I would do just that during the decade of my son’s troubled adolescence — from drinking way too many bottles of red wine at bedtime when I was too anxious to sleep, to the car crash I got into, hung over, to the holes in my heart, shot through with grief.

I’m with you on the unfairness of it all. During the years I spent attempting to breathe day after day, hour after hour, breath after breath wondering if my son would live to adulthood, I was playing racquetball twice a week with my friend “Gloria.” Gloria had (still does) two sons 10 years older than mine, and I knew them, and they were precisely the kind of sons every mother wants. And throughout their childhoods, Gloria was addicted to crack, and went out nightly at 2 a.m. to score, leaving her sons sleeping in their bunk beds. “No offense,” I said to her one day when my eyes were swollen shut from a night of crying, “but your kids are supposed to be in trouble, not mine.”

Are we really powerless over how our kids turn out? When they’re adults, yes. But: From birth? Despite the example above, sometimes I think this is a happy story we tell ourselves, the way divorcing parents tell ourselves that it’s better for kids to grow up with one parent than with two who don’t love each other. Better for us, yes. Better for them, no.

Of course our screw-ups affect them — seemingly more than the multitude of things we did right. The question is, how do we learn from the screw-ups, apologize for the screw-ups, try to make up for the screw-ups — without screwing ourselves up even more than our parents did?

Lamott: Promise me you’ll let me know THE MINUTE you figure it out. Because all I know is that you start where you are; you do the best you can and you try to be nicer to yourself about the past, including that very morning; and most important, you talk as often as possible to the smartest, funniest, most REAL mothers you know. Otherwise, without other mothers, we are completely doomed.

For better and for worse, these findings transformed incest from a dirty little secret of American family life into an American obsession. During the 1980s and early 1990s, several cultural icons, including Susanne Somers, former Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur, Roseanne Barr, and Oprah Winfrey, went public as incest survivors. Incest memoirs hit best-seller lists. “The Color Purple,” whose protagonist had borne two of her father’s babies, won the Pulitzer Prize. Sympathetic and sensational incest stories proliferated on TV news shows and after-school specials and in newspapers and magazines.

Reported cases of child abuse and neglect surged from 669,000 in 1976 to 2.9 million in 1993. During those years, according to “Victims of Memory” author Mark Pendergrast, up to one million families were torn apart by false accusations of sexual abuse.

Mine was one of them.

Many of these accusations were made by adult daughters who claimed to have repressed and then recovered memories of childhood molestation by their fathers.

I was one of them.

In courtrooms around the country, daughters sat sobbing on witness stands, pointing across the room at their fathers, listing the atrocities their fathers had committed against their bodies and their souls.

If I’d been just a bit more suggestible (more impulsive, more vindictive), I might have been one of them.

Here’s how I became convinced that this lie was true.

In 1982, I edited a book by one of those pioneering feminist researchers. I was shocked and moved by what I learned, working on the book I’ll call “The Incest Secret.” With missionary zeal — and without considering the tunnel vision, good guy–bad guy polarization, and dangerous excesses that often accompany that kind of heart-thumping fervor — I spent the next few years writing exposés of child sexual abuse for local and national newspapers and magazines.

As a journalist doing what journalists do — slouching toward objectivity, stumbling over my preexisting prejudices and proclivities — I helped spread the panic: basing conclusions on skewed studies I believed to be accurate, citing manipulated statistics I trusted, quoting experts who proved more attached to their points of view than they were to the facts.

Along with other writers on both sides of the issue, I used quotation marks to declare my allegiance, calling it recovered memory, not “recovered memory”; incest survivor, not “incest survivor”; “false memory syndrome” not False Memory Syndrome.

I didn’t just hand out the Kool-Aid. I drank it. I didn’t just write about recovered memories; I spent a decade trying to recover my own. Shortly after the 1988 publication of the Bible of the recovered memory movement, “The Courage to Heal,” I joined the ranks of self-identified incest survivors and accused my father of molesting me.

The full story of how I came to that conclusion is complicated. [To read an interview with Meredith Maran, click here.] During that time, I was in love with a woman who identified strongly as an incest survivor. I was in therapy with a woman who believed in recovered memory. Many of my friends were incest survivors. I’d been plagued by strange dreams — dreams in which little girls whose fathers had raped them told me, night after night, that I was one of them. I made a list of the “evidence” and presented it to my brother over dinner one night. I’ve never seen him look so miserable.

“I’ve read your articles,” he said finally. “I know this kind of thing happens all the time. I just never thought –”

“I know,” I said. “Me neither. It took me a long time and a lot of therapy to put the clues together,” I said. “But there’s no other way it makes sense.”

“Doesn’t that seem weird to you?” he asked. “Your girlfriend was molested. Your best friend. Now you.”

Tears sprang to my eyes. “It’s shocking to me, too,” I said. “But I really need you to believe me.” 

“I do,” my brother said. “I do believe you.”

In the 1990s, the backlash began.

In March 1992, accused parents banded together to form the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF). “When the memory is distorted, or confabulated,” the FMSF newsletter declared, “the result can be what has been called the False Memory Syndrome; a condition in which a person’s identity and interpersonal relationships are centered around a memory of traumatic experience which is objectively false but in which the person strongly believes.”

Although false memory syndrome was the invention of laypeople, not a medically identified condition, the phrase burned its way across the country, setting off the firestorm that would come to be known as “the memory war.”

Even characterizing the conflict was cause for controversy. Was the “outing” of child sexual abuse a brave crusade to save children’s lives, or a witch hunt reminiscent of others in the American hall of shame?

Nearly overnight, “false memory” replaced “recovered memory” on the American tongue. Therapists were sued for implanting false memories, stripped of their licenses, ordered to pay six-figure settlements to clients who’d once credited them with saving their incest-ravaged lives. Accused molesters’ convictions were overturned. Many but not all of the accused were set free.

Families devastated by incest accusations were now bifurcated, also, by warring beliefs about truth and memory. If the outraged parents — my outraged parents — were right, they were the victims, and their daughters were — I was — the perpetrator. If the daughters were right, we were the victims, our parents the perpetrators, denying the trauma they’d inflicted upon us. Each side allied itself with a phalanx of opposing experts who built constituencies and careers on unproved certainties.

When the culture tilted toward disbelief, I leaned that way too. In 1996, I faced the truth that my accusation was false. I apologized to my father and my family, quit incest therapy, and broke up with — truth be told, was dumped by — my incest survivor lover.

A few years later, just when I’d fully regained my mind and my memories, my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and began to lose his.

Redemption-wise, my father’s diagnosis left me two options.

I could hope my father would forget the wrong I did him, along with the other bits and bytes that were slipping through the fissures in his brain. Or I could convince him to have a conversation with me about what I did and why I did it and how sorry I was.

A girl can dream: maybe he’d even forgive me, so I might step into that shaft of light and begin to forgive myself. But first I needed to understand. How had I — more neurotic than some, but surely less neurotic than many — come to believe that my father, a man lacking the cruelty to squash a spider, had sexually abused me throughout my childhood and spent the next twenty years covering it up?

How had so many other people come to believe the same thing at the same time?

In “Creating Hysteria,” Joan Acocella’s 1999 exposé of the sex-abuse panic of the 1980s, she wrote, “One of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of psychotherapy seems to be coming to an end.”

Acocella’s prediction was true, and false. The sex-abuse panic did recede. But ten years later, it still hasn’t come to an end.

“When you once believed something that now strikes you as absurd, even unhinged, it can be almost impossible to summon that feeling of credulity again,” Margaret Talbot wrote in The New York Times Magazine on January 7, 2001. “Maybe that is why it is easier for most of us to forget, rather than to try and explain, the Satanic-abuse scare that gripped this country in the early 80′s — the myth that Devil-worshipers had set up shop in our day-care centers, where their clever adepts were raping and sodomizing children, practicing ritual sacrifice, shedding their clothes, drinking blood and eating feces, all unnoticed by parents, neighbors and the authorities.

“Of course, if you were one of the dozens of people prosecuted in these cases, one of those who spent years in jails and prisons on wildly implausible charges, one of those separated from your own children, forgetting would not be an option. You would spend the rest of your life wondering what hit you, what cleaved your life into the before and the after, the daylight and the nightmare.”

As Talbot says, the panic hasn’t ended for the preschool teachers and fathers and uncles who were convicted of child sexual abuse 20 years ago and remain incarcerated today.

It hasn’t ended for the children, now adults, who testified against those prisoners at age four or 10 or 30, some of whom have since acknowledged that their accusations were false.

I’m guessing it hasn’t ended for the 1.8 million people who have bought copies of “The Courage to Heal.” Or for the book’s coauthor, Laura Davis, whose books and workshops are focused, now, on forgiveness and reconciliation.

It hasn’t ended for the tens of thousands of families still struggling to recover from false accusations made decades ago.

Most important, it hasn’t ended for a society that decries the mass hysteria of Salem and McCarthyism while continuing to elect presidents, wage wars, and deny its citizens health care and civil rights based on confabulations presented as facts.

Recent American history is rife with examples of the damage done when millions of people become convinced of the same lie at the same time. Choose your favorite fiction from this list, or add your own.

The George W. Bush “victory” in the 2000 election. The list of books that Sarah Palin allegedly banned from the Wasilla Public Library. The persistent rumor that her youngest son was actually her daughter’s child. The allegations of Barack Obama’s foreign birth, terrorist associations, reverse racism, and socialist tendencies — first promulgated to prevent his presidency, later used to derail it.

How many and how much have we lost in the seemingly endless War on Terror, triggered by the fictional connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks? The phrase “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” invented as a cry for war, has become shorthand for cynical political manipulation and the mass, willful suspension of disbelief.

President Obama’s efforts to provide Americans with health care were nearly defeated by the myth that if the program were enacted, “death panels” run by government bureaucrats would decide whether Granny lives or dies.

Gay people’s right to marry (my right to marry) is still being denied in most of the “united” states, ostensibly to protect the heterosexual nuclear family from destruction, and — wait, it gets more incredible still — to keep American children from being recruited to homosexuality in their classrooms.

In November 2008, the Wall Street Journal predicted, “In 300 years’ time, our descendants — who will, of course, pride themselves on their superior rationality — will read of the recovered-memory-driven prosecutions of parents (usually fathers) as we now read of the Salem witch trials.”

“We may expect further such episodes of popular delusion and the madness of crowds,” the article warned, “unless we straighten out our thoughts about the way our minds work — or, if that is not possible, at least about how they don’t work.”

I wanted to look back, 20 years later, at one episode of popular delusion — mine, ours. My painful, public exposé of the way my mind worked and the way it didn’t is offered up with remorse, yes, but also with a pulse of hope: that I, and we, will learn from this history so we’re not destined to repeat it.

Meredith Maran is a contributor to Salon. Her book “My Lie,” from which this is excerpted, comes out from Jossey-Bass on Sept. 14.

Trying to “follow” the “plot” of “Goon Squad” is like trying to count the pores on your arm while tripping: tempting, yes, but a distraction from all the pyrotechnical fun. With Egan you’re in the hands of a master, so relax and let it all wash over you: time folding into itself, people running into their former and future selves, and most of all, the writing, the writing, the writing. In the book’s opening scene, for example, 35-year-old Sasha steals a wallet from a hotel guest and then, rather than confess yet another transgression to her therapist, decides to return it.

“The woman opened the wallet. Her physical relief at having it back coursed through Sasha in a warm rush, as if their bodies had fused. ‘Everything’s there, I swear,’ she said. ‘I didn’t even open it. It’s this problem I have, but I’m getting help. I just — please don’t tell. I’m hanging on by a thread.’”

“Goon Squad” is packed with scenes like this one, keeping you hooked when the cacophony of times, places, points of view, and characters threatens to overwhelm. Like strands of raffia wrapped around a bursting-at-the-seams scrapbook, the novel is loosely bound by time, the dread “goon squad” of the title. Teenagers lacerate their parents’ hypocrisies (Sasha’s daughter is allotted 78 pages for her PowerPoint presentation detailing her mother’s annoying habits), then reappear as parents of their own snarling kids. Parents are exposed as graying, thickening, incurably immature iterations of their teenage selves. Young rock stars grow old and irrelevant, then hip again: “Two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the avatar of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar.” Time gets us all, Egan reminds us, tossing us into the quicksand pit of the past, hurling us over the cliff of the future, playing hard to get — and making pleasure hard to get — in the now.

Salon spoke to Egan about the dangers of making an uncommercial book, the decline of publishing, and how Obama changed the way we write about race.

“A Visit From the Goon Squad” is an idiosyncratic novel, to say the least.

I didn’t think of it as a novel, since it doesn’t fit within the commonly understood parameters of that genre. It’s obviously not a story collection, either.

Didn’t you get the memo? “Outside the genre” doesn’t sell.

It was scary, pouring time and energy into a project that didn’t have a clear genre identity and might therefore fall through the cracks. The economy had crashed since I’d published my last novel. I thought my publisher might say, “This isn’t the moment to publish an odd book.” Or that even if I sold the novel, it might come and go without a whisper.

And yet you wrote it genre-lessly.

There was a flipside to the fear. I’d never read anything quite like it, and that was exhilarating.

At first glance, I thought the 78-page PowerPoint presentation was gimmicky. But once I was immersed in the book, it worked.

I’m not an early adopter — I write by hand, for God’s sakes. But I became obsessed with PowerPoint when I realized that it had become a true narrative genre. It allowed me to represent gaps — pauses — in a tangible way that I couldn’t accomplish with a more traditional narrative. And “Goon Squad” is a story that happens in fits and starts, with a lot of the action transpiring offstage. You might say that discontinuity is the book’s organizing principle.

What were you reading while you were writing?

For mood and preoccupation, my model was Proust. “Goon Squad” is about time, and Proust is the grandmaster of that realm.

And what inspired the structure, such as it is?

“The Sopranos”! I wanted something that felt lateral and polyphonic like that show, with its multiple plotlines and drastic shifts in focus. I liked that peripheral characters suddenly become central — that shock of having their private lives suddenly open up. I wanted to encompass the whole spectrum, from tragedy to farce, in one book.

One of your characters, Bennie Salazar, is ethnically ambiguous. Despite his surname, you never make his racial background clear. Do you think the lightning rod of racial representation is less charged in the Obama era?

I hope so. I think Obama’s most helpful message on this subject is that we need to have the conversation instead of avoiding it. I’ve certainly been guilty of that avoidance, even though I’ve written about nonwhite characters before. Hell, in “The Keep,” I actually imagined a number of my characters as being black, but never said so — which of course left the impression that they were all white.

Recently I read an essay by Stanley Crouch, challenging literary writers to be less timid about crossing racial lines. I felt like he was speaking directly to me. I decided not to step around the issue again if it arose in my fiction. So I let Bennie be racially ambiguous, which seemed in keeping with his wishes. Bennie wanted to create himself anew, as so many Americans do.

You write a lot about men in “Goon Squad” and even more in “The Keep.” Do you find men more accessible than women, in literature and/or in life?

I write to escape from my life. Writing about men separates “me” from my work in a way that I find comforting.

Last I heard, you were married to a man.

[Laughs.] I guess my comfort zone as a writer is diametrically opposed to my comfort zone as a human being.

Actually, your books seem diametrically opposed to — or at least, quite disparate from — each other. And you practice journalism as well as fiction writing. Is lacking a recognizable identity as a writer on your list of authorial worries?

In a word, yes. Training readers to expect a voice or subject matter from me would interfere with the reinvention I crave. At the same time, I feel almost too able to disappear at times. It seems to be a function of my curiosity that I fade into whomever I’m listening to as a journalist, or writing about fictionally.

What does your therapist say about that?

[Laughs.] I grew up as a step-kid, always a little outside, always trying hard to follow and fit in. But over time I’ve come to feel that my tendency toward self-erasure is a deep and real part of me. I think I’d be this way no matter how I grew up.

The kind of writing I like to do involves throwing away what I’ve learned after each book and beginning something that takes place in a completely different world. I like the discomfort and excitement of having very little or no overlap between my new work and anything I’ve done before.

How much can a reader learn about the real you from reading your fiction?

I try not to think about my life as I work, but it trickles up through my fiction in ways I usually can’t see until later. I don’t want to see it. Which means that often the “me” character turns out to be the least sympathetic, because I’m fighting myself as I write.

What’s next?

I’ve been mulling over a historical novel for years. It’s about the post-World War II period, when Americans were absorbing their new status as citizens of a superpower. I’m especially fascinated by the divers who repaired ships. I love imagining what it felt like to be underwater in one of those big heavy suits.

Back to worrying — a big part of any writer’s life, especially nowadays, when rumors of the death of books might not be greatly exaggerated. Do you fret about the state of publishing while you work?

For me, writing is about maintaining the delusion that if I can nail the thing I’m working on, the world will be transformed. Obviously that’s nuts. But it’s a thrilling hallucination — and a big reason I love to write. So yes, I worry. But when I’m actually writing, I believe that all worries will be resolved.

The man put his hands on my shoulders, his tear-filled eyes gazing into mine. I felt him sizing me up, and then I felt him decide to trust me, black man deciding to trust white woman, and that’s what it was all about, wasn’t it? This triumph? All of us deciding to trust each other, starting now, on this new American day.

“You know what black folks are saying?” he confided, shouting to be heard as the crowd around us roared, “Yes! We! Can! Yes! We! Can!”

I leaned in close, keeping my eyes locked on his, not wanting to miss a word.

“Rosa sat, so Martin could walk,” the man said. “Martin walked, so Barack could run. Barack ran, so our children could fly.”

I dissolved again, and he hugged me again, and I reached out and pulled my wife, Katrine, into our embrace. “This is the best thing that’s ever happened to this country,” I sobbed.

“That’s right!” the man cried.

“This country really is changing.” Beaming at Katrine, then back at the man, I added proudly, “Just yesterday, we got married.”

I felt it in his arms. And then I saw it on his face. The snap of our bond breaking. The no.

“Uh-huh,” he mumbled. And then he slipped out of our three-way hug and disappeared into the crowd.

Around us, the ecstatic volunteers updated the chant. “Yes! We! Did! Yes! We! Did!”

When we got home from the celebration, we got the news about Proposition 8.

There was dancing in the streets — Castro Street, at least — six months ago, when the California Supreme Court overturned the ban on gay marriage. Citing a 60-year-old precedent that reversed a ban on interracial marriage, on May 15, 2008, the court ruled, “An individual’s sexual orientation –  like a person’s race or gender — does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights.”

For those of us who had been waiting a lifetime to see those dots connected (discrimination is discrimination — duh!) we barely took notice when, approximately 10 seconds after the Supreme Court’s ruling, the state’s Catholic bishops and other usual suspects started organizing a ballot measure to overturn it.

“They won’t stop us this time,” we gloated, dusting off the wedding gowns and tuxes we’d hung up when our 2004 San Francisco marriages were halted or annulled. After all, it was 2008, and the world was changing fast. A woman and a black man — with the middle name of Hussein, no less — were competing for the Democratic presidential nomination. Homophobia was going the way of the disco ball: The Supreme Court ruling had proved it. The California Supreme Court had made gay marriage constitutional.

Katrine and I revived our “discussion” of the pros and cons of taking advantage of our new legal right. As I did in 2004, the first time I wrote about gay marriage for Salon, I felt like a commitment-phobic Bad Boyfriend.

“I don’t believe in legal marriage,” I told the woman I’d loved, lived with and extralegally married three times in our 12 blissful years together. “If we were straight,” I added, “we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. We’d just live together happily ever after like the, um, rogue mavericks we are.”

“But we’re not straight,” Katrine said. “And they’re finally letting us get married, and I want to marry you.” Caving, I did a quick calculation in my head. “Let’s get married on our anniversary,” I suggested.

“Which one?” Katrine asked. Every month we celebrate the 18th (the day we met); and the 21st (the day we fell in love). On Feb. 2 each year, we also celebrate the anniversary of the public “wedding” our loved ones threw for us in 2003.

“Our February anniversary,” I said. “That’ll give us nine months to break it to everyone that they have to buy us wedding presents again.”

As the election neared, Katrine and I, like many of our once-cynical friends and family members, threw everything we had into electing Obama: phone banking in Ohio, Colorado, Nevada, Oakland; gathering food and wine and campaign speakers and wealthy friends for high-priced fundraisers, easing our political expectations out of reverse and into hope’s high gear.

On Oct. 2, we sat on our couch watching the vice-presidential debate with our friend Steve and a bottle of wine apiece. Biden was mercifully tethered to planet Earth; Palin was being Palin. What more could any Obama Mama hope for? Until … until.

GWEN IFILL [to Joe Biden]: Do you support gay marriage?

JOE BIDEN: No. Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage. We do not support that.

GWEN IFILL [to Sarah Palin]: Is that what you said?

SARAH PALIN: My answer is the same as his, and it is that I do not.

GWEN IFILL: Wonderful. You agree. On that note, let’s move to foreign policy.

The next morning, in response to my daily dose of Obama fundraising appeals, I didn’t send money. I sent a letter instead. “Hearing Joe Biden say with such certainty that he and Barack don’t support gay marriage was a knife in my heart,” it began. “Would Joe Biden have looked into the camera and said that he and Barack don’t support interracial marriage?”

It would be two weeks before I received a response from the campaign. (“Senator Obama supports full civil unions, expanding hate crimes statutes, fighting discrimination at work and in housing and other places of public accommodation, and wants to increase adoption rights. He opposes any Constitutional ban on gay marriage. Thank you again for writing.”)

In the interim, at a fundraiser, I met a staffer for the Obama campaign. A small crowd of donors, most of them heterosexual couples, gathered around as I told him about the letter I’d written, the sense of betrayal I felt.

“Barack opposes Prop. 8,” he told me.

“I didn’t know that,” I said. “And if I didn’t, who did?”

“Biden said they oppose gay marriage,” the host of the fundraiser interjected.

“Barack supports civil unions,” the staffer replied.

“Not good enough, ” I said. “I really want to believe this guy is different, but this sounds like typical politician doublespeak.”

“I give you my word,” he looked into my eyes and said. “President Barack Obama will be a friend to gay people.”

I remembered hearing those same words from David Mixner, Bill Clinton’s gay campaign advisor, at a D.C. gay rights demonstration in 1991. Don’t drink the Kool-Aid again, a voice in my head warned me. And then the staffer talked some more and the lust in my heart for hope took over, and I fell in love with Obama again.

A few weeks later, the campaign opened its Northern California headquarters — two blocks from our house. At the jubilant opening ceremony I was surprised to see a few of my old lesbian activist friends signing up for shifts on the phones. “There was a time you wouldn’t be in a room with a man, let alone campaign for one,” I teased one of them.

“This is different,” she said.

“I hope so,” I said.

Suddenly Proposition 8 supporters were everywhere. I swear it happened overnight. One day it was all about Obama, and the next day, it was all about the November ballot initiative that would overturn the Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage.

They appeared at freeway offramps, on street corners, on overpasses, most of them teenagers, most of them kids of color, many of them wearing oversize crosses on thick chains, all of them pumping their yellow and blue signs gaily, as if they were drumming up business for a high school car wash.

I had my first personal encounter with them as I was pulling up to a stop sign at a busy Oakland intersection. My jaw fell open at the sight: Five or six boys and girls on each of the four corners were holding posters featuring stick figures of one man, one woman, two children, and they were shouting, “Vote yes on eight!” I leaned my head out the window, made eye contact with a young Filipino girl and beckoned her over.

She danced up to my car. “Would you like some information?” she asked, waving a flier.

“I’m happily married,” I said. Her eyes darted across the street to her friends. Whoever planted these kids on this corner, I thought, forgot to give them a script for actual conversation. “To a woman,” I added.

The girl’s eyes narrowed. “May God forgive you,” she said. The driver behind me honked, waving at me to let him pass. “See?” the girl snapped. “He’s honking to show he’s on our side. He knows what you’re doing is a sin.”

As I drove through the intersection, I watched as one lone man injected himself into the crowd of teenagers, waving his lone “No on Prop 8″ sign. I honked to show him that I was on his side, that I didn’t think he was a sinner. He smiled at me, lifting his sign, looking determined and forlorn.

Suddenly Proposition 8 wasn’t an insignificant, sour-grapes ballot measure destined to fail. It was a bellwether campaign in a bellwether state — and the wrong side was winning. An onslaught of commercials portrayed horrified parents whose children had been or might be “taught about gay marriage” in elementary school and wide-eyed children begging, “Vote yes for me.”

The barrage seemed to go on, unabated, for weeks. Finally the pro-gay-marriage forces mounted a response. In California and across the country, activists and celebrities, already stretched thin by their contributions to the Obama campaign, diverted their attention, time and money to No on 8. A host of high-profile personalities — the California school superintendent, Ellen DeGeneres, Dianne Feinstein, the president of the California Teachers Association — appeared in an endless loop of rebuttal commercials. By Nov. 4, the Proposition 8 campaign would break the national record for money spent on a ballot initiative, with “No on 8″ spending $37.6 million and “Yes” spending $35.8 million.

A week before Election Day, Katrine and I started getting invitations to the “shotgun weddings” of our gay friends. And then, the day before Election Day — wearing our “No on 8″ T-shirts, accompanied by my happily tearful mother and our beaming friends Steve and Victor, surrounded by dozens of other gay couples, male and female, pushing strollers and dressed in drag — Katrine and I stood before a deputy marriage commissioner in the Alameda County Recorder’s Office chapel and said, “I do.”

We came home to find a few mixed-message surprises on our porch. A festively wrapped bottle of champagne from our dear friend Jane. Two bottles of Grey Goose from my dad and stepmother. Two pairs of wool socks from my mother (“To keep you from getting cold feet”). And a bunch of fliers from the Proposition 8 campaign.

“I’m not that comfortable with gay marriage,” a gray-haired white woman proclaimed on the first flier. “But I’ve asked myself the tough questions about Prop 8 — and the answers are NO.”

“You know me,” an adorable girl-next-door announced on the second. “I am the neighbor who waters your lawn when you go out of town. I am your second cousin. I am gay. People you know are asking you to VOTE NO ON PROP. 8.”

When I saw the picture of Barack Obama on the third flier, his image elicited my usual Pavlovian response. How great, I thought. He’s finally going public with his stated, but not publicized, opposition to Proposition 8.

“I’m not in favor of gay marriage — Barack Obama, MSNBC, 4-2-08,” the headline read. I rubbed my eyes, read it again, turned it over. Four African-American pastors smiled out at me, urging me and the others in my predominantly African-American neighborhood to “uphold the sacred institution of marriage by voting YES on Prop. 8.”

Katrine and I put the gifts and the fliers on the kitchen table and enjoyed a delicious, sacred marital kiss. Then we took off our “No on 8″ T-shirts, and she put on her work clothes and went to see a client. And I put on my “Yes We Can” T-shirt and went to Obama headquarters to make some calls to undecided voters in Pennsylvania.

At the table just inside the front door I found a stack of door hangers that hadn’t been there yesterday. “Should we eliminate the fundamental right to marry for our friends, family, neighbors, and coworkers?” it asked, and answered, “Barack Obama says no.”

But not so loud that anyone can hear him, I thought.

For months I’d wondered how I’d feel on Nov. 5, 2008, but still I was surprised. The pinch-me wonder of watching those words, “President-elect Obama,” appear on that Jumbotron; the “Yes-we-can-all-get-along” glow that lighted the spontaneous celebrations in the downtown Oakland streets; the high-fives we’d exchanged with people whose eyes we might have avoided the day before, who might have avoided ours — all of it paled in comparison to the passage, by a margin of about 52 percent to 48 percent, of Proposition 8.

As the day and the pundits wore on, much was made of reports that 70 percent of African-Americans had voted to end gay marriage. The faces of the Obama volunteers I’d phone-banked with and hoped with and celebrated with flashed before my eyes. Which of them had voted to protect my civil rights? Which of them had voted to protect “the sacred institution of marriage” instead?

“Am I crazy to feel so bad about Prop. 8 when something so great just happened?” I asked my dear friend “Joseph.” Like Obama, Joseph is in his 40s, was raised by a single white mother, had an absent black father and has worked all his adult life as a community organizer in the poorest of black neighborhoods. Unlike Obama, Joseph is a Christian minister. Also, Joseph is gay — and concerned enough about the consequences of that fact to be quoted here pseudonymously.

“I feel exactly the same way,” Joseph answered. “Sixty-seven percent of my state voted for a man who looks like me. Fifty-two percent of my state decided to deny me the right to live the life that’s natural to me. It’s really strange to believe that so many people could support me on the one hand and deny me on the other.”

“Including a whole lot of black people, apparently,” I said glumly. 

“And 53 percent of Latinos, and 49 percent of Asians, and almost 50 percent of whites, if you believe the pollsters,” Joseph said.  “But yes,” he added, slipping into his preacher mode. “The church, and the African-American community in general, has a very dark stain on it in terms of homophobia. It has to do with the emasculation of African-American men in this society.

“From the beginning of this country’s history, black men have been the target of white male fear. We’ve been hyper-sexualized to mythological proportions, stripped of our place as leaders of our families — starting with slavery, when our families were sold away from each other, right through Jim Crow and the welfare system.

“Black folks are afraid that homosexuality will further degrade the family, and the man’s status as the progenitor,” Joseph said with a sigh. “Everything that slavery took away from black men, they’re afraid that homosexuality will take away as well.”

“How strange,” I said. “The reason Obama grabbed me so hard was his push for compassion and understanding as a path to unity. But I’ve been  so busy feeling rejected by black voters, I haven’t even thought about where they were coming from.” 

“Obama’s election means there’s an opportunity, at least, for change,” Joseph said. “If folks can vote for someone who looks like me and comes from the same background that I do, even if they voted for Prop. 8, it opens the possibility that someday they’ll accept all of me.” There was a smile in his voice. “And all of you,” he added.

I recalled aloud the Sunday morning a few years ago when Joseph brought Katrine and me to his church and introduced us to the congregation as each other’s partners. “Everyone was so nice to us,” I said. “I wondered how they really felt.”

“I’m seeing change in the church,” he replied. “More and more ministries are starting to validate who gay people are: the United Church of Christ, the Metropolitan Community Churches, the Unitarians. The UCC congregation in San Francisco is led by Bishop Yvette Flunder, an African-American lesbian!”

“But how is the rest of the world ever going to change?” I asked.

“Slowly,” Joseph said. “Very, very slowly.”

I close my eyes and take a deep “settling breath”: in-in-in through the nose, out — whoosh! — through the mouth. I check my voice mail, in case I missed Katrine’s call. “You have no new messages,” the robo-voice says. Who needs new messages, I think. I have plenty of old ones. Whatever can go wrong, will. Good news is bad news’s way of catching you off-guard.

The phone rings in my hand. “My cell ran out of juice,” Katrine says, “and I couldn’t get to my charger.”

She waits for me to say what she, or any other normal person would say — words in a language I do not speak. Instead I burst into tears. “I thought you were dead!” I wail.

Not for nothing do I make my living writing stories. The darkest ones with the unhappiest endings — those are the ones I save for myself. As a journalist and an anxious person, I’m driven to know why. So I decide to embark on a little investigation of trepidation, agitation, consternation and palpitations.

The first thing I learn: As the New Age gurus say, I am so not alone. Misery loves company, but anxiety draws a crowd. Turns out that anxiety disorder — a spectrum that includes panic, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress, phobias and the catch-all, generalized anxiety disorder — is now the most prevalent mental health problem in the world.

Like Burger Kings and Botox clinics, A.D. is disproportionately prevalent in the U.S. According to the most recent World Mental Health Survey, Americans are the most anxious humans on earth. Forty million of us — that’s 28.8 percent — suffer from the ailment that the National Institutes of Mental Health defines as “an excessive, irrational dread of everyday situations”; William James called “a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach”; and Anaïs Nin called “love’s greatest killer.”

I call Dr. Leslie Rokoske, a psychiatrist at the Ross Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders in Washington, D.C., and ask her why. “It’s the pace of life,” she says. “Everyone’s very stressed out, trying to keep up.” Rokoske adds that she and her colleagues have noted an, um, surge in anxiety in response to 9/11 and the war in Iraq. “We had an attack on our own country, which is a collective trauma,” she says. “And now we’ve got our military coming back with head trauma and PTSD.”

But some people (me) seem unable to handle that anxiety as well as others (Katrine). “There’s a definite linkage between genetics and anxiety disorders,” Rokoske says. “Nine out of 10 of our anxious patients have a family history of anxiety.”

I’m doomed, I say, recalling the nights I fell asleep as a child, listening to my father pacing the floor.

“Anxiety is a good thing to have in a dangerous situation,” Rokoske says soothingly. “It’s the original caveman fight-or-flight response. When the adrenal gland senses danger, it sets off neurotransmitters in the brain — cortisol, norepinephrine, serotonin — to help the body cope.”

Turns out, my fellow Americans are high on cortisol. We’re nine times more likely to be anxious than the Chinese laborers who assemble our children’s toys, whose working and living conditions would make us run screaming for a Xanax IV. And 94.4 percent of Mexicans — bone-crushing poverty and barbed-wire borders notwithstanding — have never experienced a major episode of anxiety or depression. But move a Mexicano north of the border, according to a study in the December 2004 National Institutes of Health News, and his mental health will deteriorate faster than you can say “Campesinos sí, NAFTA no.”

To find out why, I call on Patricia Pearson — novelist, anxious person and author of “A Brief History of Anxiety (Yours and Mine).” The book is a genre-busting page turner: a portrait of Pearson’s lifelong struggle with anxiety, melded with a journalistic investigation of what ails her, and me and us. “Mexicans have stronger family ties, deeper connections to their community, greater involvement in collective rituals through their churches and unions and schools,” Pearson tells me. “And there’s less onus on the individual in Mexico to achieve material success.”

So, I muse aloud, if I invite my adult kids to move back into their old rooms, join my local pagan coven and take the iPhone off my must-have list, Katrine will stop calling me “psycho” and start calling me “honey” again?

Pearson laughs. “We live in one of the most anxiety-provoking cultures on the planet,” she says. “That’s why we have this neurotic need to be plugged into our iPhones all the time.”

Pearson had her first anxiety attack at age 7. Now, at 44, she’s still doing things like stocking her basement with cases of freeze-dried vegetables to prepare for the next flu pandemic. I ask what she does, besides shopping online at Survival Acres, to keep her demons at bay. Her answer is a page from my Managing Your Anxiety workbook. “I do cognitive behavioral therapy to help me recognize patterns of behavior that made my anxiety worse,” she says. “I spend time with my family and friends. And, with great reluctance, I get my butt to the gym.”

I’m on the Managing Your Anxiety drill, too, but I don’t know whether it’s my modified behavior, or the little yellow pill I take each night, that’s improved what passes for my equilibrium.

“We’ve constructed this narrative of ourselves as purely biological beings,” Pearson explains. “If we’re anxious, we have a chemical imbalance, which can be treated with chemicals. That’s a very limiting tale to tell about our lives. We need to know ourselves, rather than simply swallowing capsules of ‘Pain Begone.’”

Suddenly I’m awash in the feeling I get when one of those glowing earth mothers starts describing her transcendent home birth, and I hitch my jeans up to hide my Caesarean scar. “Pain Begone is my new best friend,” I confess.

“Drugs can be helpful,” Pearson allows. “But in my case they never resolved the underlying issues.”

How retro, I think. How quaint. Who can afford to care about underlying issues anymore? Not my $450-a-month HMO, that’s for sure.

Last winter, when I presented myself to my “caregivers” with my racing heart, dizzy head and inability to eat, sleep, work or smile, they loaded me onto the managed-care mental-health train and sent me rattling down the track.

First stop: a 20-minute audience with “Dr. Do-Little,” the psychiatrist who issued me a sheaf of prescriptions and told me to take antidepressants every day for the rest of my life — all without lifting her eyes from her computer screen. Next stop: two sessions with a behavior modification psychotherapist. The man was as bright as his scuffed, beige-on-beige institutional office décor, but he did succeed in modifying my behavior — by reminding me why I’d vowed, years ago, never to enter a therapist’s office again. Last stop: the HMO’s eight-week, $75 Managing Your Anxiety class.

I’d never met a classroom I liked (I was kicked out of high school; that’s my mother’s anxiety story), but this was my last shot. So the following Wednesday I shuffled into a hospital basement conference room. I was surprised to learn that my 19 fellow A.P.’s — young and old, straight and gay, black, Asian, Israeli, Palestinian and white — seemed neither sicker, nor healthier, than I. Despite our differences — the sallow-faced insomniacs clustered together on one side of the room, trading tips about melatonin and white noise machines; the phobics jittered in their seats on the other; the “generalized anxiety” types like me scattered ourselves indecisively in between — we bonded over what we had in common. We were the English muffins of post-millennial America, our nooks and crannies dripping with doubt and fear.

Our instructor began each session with a relaxation exercise and then asked us to rate our own anxiety levels from 1 (“Feeling slightly nervous”) to 10 (“Panic, fear of going crazy or dying”). She would rise to the whiteboard, clutching a fistful of worn dry-erase markers and pose the question of the day. Week 2, for example: “What are your anxiety triggers?”

“My divorce,” said a housewife who’d rated herself a 9.

“Taking off and landing in a plane,” an older Asian woman confessed.

The Palestinian man beside her scoffed. “You can get on a plane? I get triggered just hearing a plane in the sky.”

By Week 3 we were down to 14 people. By Week 6, we were 10. There were rumors that the man who’d rated himself a 23 each week had been hospitalized. Someone said she’d seen the guy who couldn’t stop dreaming about the World Trade Center, and he didn’t look well. But we stressed-out survivors plugged away, and after two months I was stunned to discover that I had less anxiety, and more tools in my psychological repertoire, than talk therapy had yielded in 20 years.

A few months after the class ended, though, I began to backslide. And lately, “little” stressors, like my MIA wife, started pulling my trigger again.

I decided to consult with an internationally acclaimed expert, Jerilyn Ross. Disabled by a phobia in her 20s, Ross became a therapist, underwent treatment for her anxiety (in that order) and went on to found the Ross Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders in 1997. She’s also president and CEO of the Anxiety Disorders Association of America, a 25-year-old nonprofit.

Ross listens to my story sympathetically. It’s clear she’s heard it before.

“I’ve had so many clients come in saying, ‘I’ve spent 20 years in analysis and I’m still afraid of heights,’” Ross says. “Tony Soprano notwithstanding, psychotherapy isn’t the treatment of choice for anxiety. The research shows that a combination of cognitive behavioral therapy and medication is highly effective.”

I tell Ross that as the months and the refills have gone by, I’ve felt increasingly ambivalent — personally and politically — about my little yellow pills. This wasn’t what I meant, in the ’60s, by ‘better living through chemistry.’ Plus, I can’t shake my conspiracy theory: that the popularity of the behavioral/pharmaceutical cocktail is driven more by what’s good for Big Pharma than by what’s good for semi-psychos like me.

“So what if it’s a conspiracy? It works,” the ever-pragmatic Ross replies. “The psychoanalysts say we’re putting Band-Aids on our patient’s problems. I say if it stops the bleeding, who cares?”

I was fine with the Band-Aid, I say, but lately I’ve had a little breakthrough bleeding. “Have you been doing your homework?” Ross asks. “If you had diabetes, you’d need to take your insulin every day. Anxiety is a chronic condition. You have to learn to live with it.”

Ross invites me to call her for a tune-up if I hit another “rough spot.” I hang up feeling reassured. I head to the kitchen for a celebratory cup of Calming Tea, flipping through today’s paper while I wait for the kettle to boil. “Second Freeway Shooting in Two Days.” Jesus, that’s the freeway my son takes to work, and the victim isn’t named. Maybe I should call him, just to be sure.

“Cyclist Killed at Busy Intersection.” Oh, swell. I bike every day to calm myself down, and now I have to worry about that killing me, too.

I pour my tea, take a sip, burning my tongue. It’s been hours — OK, minutes — since I got off the phone with Jerilyn Ross. I wonder if it’s too soon to call her back.