My sister Mary Rose recommended “The Women” and commented,”When I chat with women who have read it, they’ve each mentioned something different that struck them deeply — none of which was the thing that struck me. Veddy interesting. Rye was the horrid bad guy in the whole story, in my opinion.
“You could be a hero,” he says to an impressionable young Frankie. Grrr. Those stupid words provoked her bravado so that she could impress her dad and have a place on his office wall.
Well, that certainly backfired.”
I agree that Rye, the lying cheat, was the horrid bad guy in the story. And the book blames Rye for Frankie’s decision to try to be a hero and get on her father’s “Wall of Honor.” I think it is interesting that the writer chose to make the father Irish-born, and wrote the mother as someone struggling with alcohol for years.
I read many first-person nurse stories when I was preparing my China Beach spec script. This book was written by a younger woman who created a composite Frankie. From my point-of-view, Frankie was already a “hero child” growing up with an incapacitated mother whom she would rescue, and an emotionally-distant father who harbored contempt for females. Frankie’s love of feeling “competent and needed” prompted her decision to re-up as her first tour was coming to an end. She had finally started to feel skillful and valued.
Part of PTSD is the loss of ability to feel connected to people who love you, well-described in Frankie’s relationship with Dr. Acevedo when she returned to Coronado. Dr. Acevedo did not need her. Rye “needed” her. That was the hook he had, that kept her coming back even when it was contrary to her values. That was the slippery slope that sent her into self-destructive addiction. Giving up herself, in order to feel needed.
The writer had to paint some reason for Frankie to want to be a hero so she pinned it on Rye, the lying cheat. But in real life, there are children who learn to survive by becoming the hero in the family. The kid who does the work that the impaired parents can’t do, the kid who gets attention only for what she does. No love for simply being a kid. To be valued, she has to turn into a little adult. A “parentalized child.” A hero, who is safe only when she is competent and needed.
In 1985 I bought my first copy of “Focusing” by Gene Gendlin, Ph.D. on the recommendation of a Buddhist nun teaching a course at Point Reyes that was part of my shift from selling TV time to writing full time. I tried to focus by myself, and I read the book many times, but I never got real traction with focusing. 
The Process Recording could take an hour or more for me to prepare even though the report itself was just a few sentences. As I approached the fifth of the 15 required sessions, I began using my phone to record the last 10 minutes of what I said out loud, as well as making hand-written notes during the session, sometimes of things I did not say out loud. I would review the recording and sometimes I would transcribe the entire 10 minutes as a way to re-experience what came up. Some of the drawings I made were images of my relationship with my bad mother, or with parts of myself, or a visualization of a transformation. 
Came home and finished Whalefall by Daniel Kraus, a very fast read because it was so absorbing. I hated Finnegan’s Wake because it was word salad, but as the main character, Jay, dissolves into nitrogen narcosis inside the diving whale, the jumbled words make sense. Whether he survives, how he survives is the “McGuffin” that drives the book. On the framework of the McGuffin that keeps us turning the pages, author Daniel Kraus hangs the story of a teen boy bedeviled by his attentive but abusive father and his loving but powerless mother and two older sisters. Jay is flashing back to when he was 15 and the pressure from his father became unbearable in the aftermath of the loss of the boat after poor-maintenance caused two paying passengers to fall overboard. The father’s descent, and his mistreatment of Jay, drive the boy to risky behavior that leads to his becoming entangled in a giant squid which is the prey of a large sperm whale hunting in the Monterey Canyon. As you can see from the Google Earth image below, Monastery Beach features ditches that slide into the depths. My PADI Open Water diving certification took place in the water off Monastery Beach. I had to enter the surf (backwards) in full wetsuit and tank gear, swim out past the surf line, sit on the bottom with my regulator in my mouth, take off my mask and my air tank and put them back on, underwater with my eyes closed. I passed and went on to dive the Great Barrier Reef off Australia.
Alex’s lexographer husband said, “I think she’s fascinating and full of excitement and love and she has a hairy joie de vivre. She is untrammeled in her enthusiasms, which is nice. Nobody’s interested in a jaded dog. She is also kind of a pain in the tuchus because of those untrammeled enthusiasms.” I looked it up and enthusiasm can be countable or uncountable. Apparently, he can count her enthusiasms, which include squirrels, tennis balls and untrammeled barking.
“In Praise of Imperfection” is the memoir of Rita Levi-Montalcini who won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering Nerve Growth Factor in cancer cells. She was the fourth woman to ever receive a Nobel prize. The book details the research, including a 1952 visit to a longtime friend’s cell culture laboratory in Rio de Janeiro. Together, they discovered critical chemical tools that the body uses to direct cell growth and worked out its biochemistry. Dr. Levi-Montalcini recalls her work in Rio as “one of the most intense periods of my life in which moments of enthusiasm and despair alternated with the regularity of a biological cycle.”
