Alan Cumming on Dealing With a Traumatic Childhood
Alan Cumming introduces Masterpiece Mystery! for PBS; acts in many TV and film projects; is a producer, screenwriter, composer, social activist and more.
He commented in an interview about pursuing multiple creative interests:
Interviewer: You sing, you write books, you’re a photographer. What inspires you to do so many things?
Alan Cumming: Because I’m allowed to. I feel, “Why not?” I get bored quite easily, but you don’t get bored when you have so many options.
From article Multitalented Creative People (on the site of my main book).
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In his book Not My Father’s Son: A Memoir, he details his early life with an abusive father, and its consequences.
An article about his memoir notes his father Alex “told Cumming’s brother, Tom, that Alan was not his son, but rather the product of an affair Cumming’s mother had.
“That was shocking enough; then Cumming took a DNA test, and discovered his father was his father after all, and that his mother had never had an affair. For 45 years, his father had created a fiction in his head—all this on top of being a “monster,” as Cumming calls him, abusive and terrifying.
“The childhood Cumming sketches in this compellingly written memoir was one freighted with fear, the two boys never sure how or when their father’s rage would flare.
“Typically, Cumming says, the boys would be set an impossible task, or one whose completion would never satisfy their father. Then he would lose his temper and strike out. On one occasion, asked to sort good and bad saplings, his father inspected Cumming’s work and without warning, “he backhanded me across the face. I flew through the air and landed in a heap against the stone wall of the shed.” …
Cumming adds, “His psyche was not the psyche of a well man. He could not process the truth. He was a monster. I think he was mentally ill, I’m not sure with exactly what. Aside from his violence and irrational rage, there was his utter inability for empathy or to understand anyone’s feelings, the brazenness of his behavior, the fact that he couldn’t compute that anyone was affected or offended or upset by him. That’s a personality disorder. That’s not somebody who is functioning properly in the world.”
From Alan Cumming: The Truth About My Father by Tim Teeman, The Daily Beast, 10.14.14.
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In another article, Cumming comments about writing his memoir:
“In the course of documenting it all and writing it down, I realized that what is really weird about abuse in any form is that for the abuser and the person who is abused, the more it goes on–the more it goes unchecked and is not commented on or dealt with–it becomes regular. It becomes normal. It becomes acceptable.
“So what I am doing with my story is that by putting it out into the world, it will never be acceptable. People will be reading it and going, “My God,” and maybe some people will realize that their own abuse in their own lives is not acceptable either.” …
Interviewer Kevin Sessums: “Speaking of God, I was struck in the book when your mother decides to drive you through a snowstorm to see the movie Jaws, and you write about how free you felt in that moment alone with her. How you sensed God for the first time. And how God to you was the absence of your father. Was writing this book freeing yourself of your father, or did he take even greater possession of you in the writing of it?”
Alan Cumming: “It’s a combo. He did possess me even more for a while. And I was kind of infused with him. But by the end of it, it was gone.
“Well, not gone, exactly. He will, in a way, be part of my life forever. And he will become a presence once more, and it will all become churned up again, because people will talk about it once the book is out.
“But I don’t know why my mother and brother and I have to continue to protect him, which is what I discovered we were doing as I was writing the book. It was such a huge thing that happened to us. We should acknowledge it.
Kevin Sessums: “Do you think the “protection” to which you refer is another way of saying you felt complicit in your own abuse in some way? That if you told on him, that you would be telling on yourself?”
Alan Cumming: “Yes. That’s why you don’t talk about it as it’s going on. That’s why you’re ashamed of it. That’s why you can protect such a person.
“And also there’s the feeling that it’s the only time you have any contact with the person. When he was abusing me, it was the only time he really noticed me.
“So there’s that whole weirdness that was going on. My whole life has been imbued with the fact that my father didn’t love me. It’s a huge thing in my life.”
From “Alan Cumming talks about his abusive father, bisexuality, monogamy, and why he doesn’t want children” by Kevin Sessums, FourTwoNine magazine.
Alan Cumming is also the author of Tommy’s Tale: A Novel of Sex, Confusion, and Happy Endings.
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Trauma takes many forms, and has different sources and levels of impact for each of us.
See quotes by and about many artists who have experienced rape, physical abuse and other experiences, including Alice Sebold, Allison Anders, SARK (Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy), Halle Berry, Lady Gaga, will.i.am, Jennifer Lawrence, Jonathan Safran Foer and many others, in my article Creative People, Trauma and Mental Health.
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