Call Them Crazy

I couldn't have picked a better (or worse?) time to read Anne Heche's book, Call Me Crazy (2001). Heche's mother spoke against homosexuality at a recent Focus on the Family conference! I got the book from the library because I vaguely remembered seeing Heche in a TV interview shortly after the book came out, talking about her split personality. Dissociation and multiple personality disorder are closely associated with claims of Satanic ritual abuse, so I've been reading books on these and related topics in the past couple of weeks. I didn't know quite what to expect from Heche's memoir.
It turns out that she didn't quite have a split personality. It was more like an alter ego or imaginary friend. But she did, inarguably, have a truly screwed-up family. This has been documented by her sister, Susan Bergman, as well. The Heche family was quite religious - Baptist - and also extremely secretive. Sticky issues were not discussed, and there were lots of them. Donald Heche pretended for years to be in the "gas and oil" business, but he never had a job nor any money despite his frequent and lengthy business trips to NYC. The family discovered around the time of his death from AIDS, when Anne Heche was 12 or 13, that Mr. Heche had carried on homosexual affairs. To a more worldly family this would have been obvious, as he once announced that he had contracted hepatitis from eating some bad fish, but this family was clueless. When Donald told his family he would buy them a million-dollar mansion in Scarsdale, they believed him.
To make a long story short, Anne Heche went into therapy when she was 18 and had something like a nervous breakdown after her breakup with Ellen Degeneres years later. She realized that her family life had contributed to some, if not all, of her emotional problems. In therapy she was able to piece together the details of her childhood that she had purposely suppressed for many years, and along with these memories she recalled being sexually molested by her father when she was still in diapers. She contracted herpes from him. As the family "didn't believe" in doctors, Nancy Heche simply ignored the rashes and scabs that appeared on her daughter's body thereafter.
Anne Heche told her mother of the abuse over the phone. It was such an uncomfortable topic for Nancy Heche that she hung up on the conversation without offering any insight into her daughter's memories.
After Call Me Crazy came out, Nancy Heche and Anne's two older sisters published online statements refuting the abuse allegations, statements that not-so-subtly implied that Anne was a drama queen who just wanted attention. Nancy stated the book was full of "blasphemies and lies". She disapproved of her daughter's lesbian relationship, and had no contact with Anne.

For someone who lied and obfuscated and concealed for so many years, Nancy Heche was surprisingly quick to step into the spotlight when it came to homosexuality. She crawled out of her lifelong torpor to earn a doctorate in Christian counselling and became, of all things, a therapist. Then she became an anti-gay advocate, speaking at Focus on the Family's recent Love Won Out conference about the pitfalls of homosexuality and giving numerous interviews on the topic as well.

I sympathize with Mrs. Heche for what she went through in her marriage. But how Christian is it to publicly excoriate and discredit one of your own children, when that child is clearly a mentally fragile person? Given the mistakes she has made, why does Nancy Heche feel compelled to judge her offspring? Anne Heche has no proof that her father was abusive, but Nancy Heche has no proof that her deeply disturbed husband wasn't. The fact is they were both victimized by this man in countless ways.

It's unfortunate that family issues like this have to hashed out in the public forum when, ideally, they could be resolved behind closed doors with lots of mutual understanding and support. But when people are in the public eye, and they have serious emotional problems, there isn't anyplace to hide. The invisible becomes painfully visible. It saddens me that the Heches have had to go through this, but I hope that their struggles can at least help someone out there "learn by bad example", and realize that communication and forgiveness are the only ways to heal hurts and disappointments like these. You obviously can't help your loved ones by ignoring their pain.