A tale of two families
Mary Williams recounts a remarkable story in The Lost Daughter. An AfricanAmerican, she lived with violence and low expectations in Oakland until, at 14, Jane Fonda adopted her. It’s a made-in-Hollywood storyline but her writing isn’t simplistic. Her birth family’s Oakland isn’t all bad and Fonda’s Santa Monica isn’t all good. Instead, Williams offers a nuanced portrait of her two families — four counting the children and other relatives of Fonda ex-husbands Tom Hayden and Ted Turner — and she shows us a growing sophistication in her understanding of people and their reasons.
It’s undeniable, though, she’s working with the material of a Proust or Dickens — a writer’s dream.
But first, she had to live through the brutish years. Her mother Mary Kennedy and father Louis Williams were members of the Black Panthers, an organization Williams describes as “trying to stop police brutality towards African-Americans” and find people jobs and healthcare. The FBI didn’t see such benevolence, calling them a radical threat to the country’s security. Her father went to jail, leaving her mother with five children, a heavy booze habit and short attention span for her kids.
Like most momentous change, hers came by coincidence. She was raped and confided in camp counsellors at a children’s camp run by Fonda and Hayden and, within a year, had moved into Fonda’s hacienda. She would graduate from college, take a master’s degree in public health, travel extensively and increasingly dedicate her life to politically aware causes. She went to Africa to help the Lost Boys of Sudan, kidnapped by northern mujahideen warriors and turned into child soldiers. Their stories of seeing their villages burned and families slaughtered inspired her to create her own Lost Boys Foundation and write Brothers in Hope.
Hers is a book of sorrow and redemption, of seeing the gulf between families and the reconciliation that too often fails and sometimes succeeds. She brings the reader to the funeral of her sister who’d turned to prostitution as a teenager and was brutally murdered. Her heart held a hard stone of resentment against her mother. She coolly observed her wailing and thought: “My sister was dead because my mother, my grieving mother, gave up on her.”
It would take until 2011 when Williams was 43 to speak frankly with her mother. “You talked about us like we were dogs,” her mother cried over the phone, accusing Williams of lying to the media. Through recriminations on both sides, she listened long enough to hear her mother. Kennedy described having been constantly beaten by Williams’ father and denied she whipped her children with electrical cable. “That’s how I got whipped when I was little, I never did that to y’all.”
Her mother talked about her own longgone aspirations and, before they hung up, Williams’ heart was breaking for the girl her mother had been before life beat her down.
There are fascinating insights into the Fonda clan as well. Williams takes her to Oakland to meet Kennedy. “I knew she’d cry,” writes Williams of Fonda. When Kennedy asked her why she was crying, Fonda replied: “I thought you’d be mad at me for taking her away.” It’s a lovely moment, hardly the portrait of a diva.
This memoir seems destined for film. Any ideas for the role of adoptive mother? Linda Diebel is a Star journalist and author.