Paula Fox: Author and first mother

Lorraine

The writer Paula Fox died recently and she rated a half page obituary in the New York Times. I scanned it immediately to see if the fact of the daughter she gave up for adoption was included. I knew she had written about it in one of her memoirs.

Well, there it was: 

"At the end of Borrowed Finery: A Memoir Ms. Fox tells of being reunited with the daughter she had borne at 20, the offspring of a brief liaison after her first marriage had ended. She gave the infant up for adoption, a decision, she wrote, that pained her the rest of her life. In middle age, the daughter, Ms. Carroll-Barraud, found Ms. Fox. (One of Ms. Carroll-Barraud’s children, it transpired, is the rock singer Courtney Love.)"

Two other marriages followed that first brief one. I noted the plain English used in the obit and cheered, for there is no mention of an "adoption plan." Instead, Ms. Fox "gave the infant up for adoption." I thought of the time an adoptive mother told me I should not use those words because it sounded as if I were drowning. I was drowning. I saw no way to save my daughter from adoption. I gave up. And I've never socialized with that woman again. 

The obit also includes the observation that Ms. Fox herself, was "born to parents who did not want her," Her father was an undistinguished novelist and her mother was "young, vain, cold and 'ungovernable in her haste to have done with me,' as Ms. Fox wrote. Her parents floated through the 1920s in a haze of booze, parties and travel to Europea. Atg first, they left their infant in a foundling hospital "at her mother's insistence." Later the young girl bounced among relatives. By 16, she was more or less on her own. 

So, at her mother's insistence. When I read that, I wondered, how would Ms. Fox know that, except from old notes at the hospital written by a nurse, doctor, or nun? Was it true? We're heard about how those notes can not mean what the mother meant at the time. Maybe it was her father who insisted he didn't want to be bogged down with a child, and urged her mother to "insist" that the foundling hospital take her. Or maybe the mother really didn't get hit with the love hormone, oxytocin, that fosters bonding with the child. It happens. But since Ms. Fox apparently never lived with her parents, that stringent assessment of the facts of her life seems appropriate. 

Paula Fox wrote for both adults and young people. She wrote a couple of  highly praised adult novels, two memoirs, and twenty books for children. Her awards include the Newbury, which is akin to the Pulitzer Prize for children's literature. What she is known for is not sugar-coating reality  and showing the pain and unhappiness that is part of growing up. She certainly had her own life to use as material.

A few years ago Jane did a post--Does adoption run in families?--which discussed Paula Fox and her daughter Linda Carroll. Not happy stories. Carroll adopted a boy and later abandoned him. Her daughter Courtney's daughter was taken from her after Cobain's death by child welfare authorities. Now that does add a sad, but true, ending to the story. As we've written many times, adoption often begets another. 

Yet it is good to see that at least some birth mothers don't hide in the closet. I look forward to reading Borrowed Finery. Every bit of "coming out" that is in the media is A Good Thing. --lorraine

Correction: The early version stated that Ms. Fox had no other children. She had two with her second husband. 

SOURCE

Paula Fox, Novelist Who Chronicled Dislocation, Dies at 93

SEE ALSO

Does adoption run in families?

Cultivating a Culture of Adoption

Does one adoption spawn another? Too often for comfort.

Borrowed Finery: A Memoir

out of 5 starsextraordinary touching and full of quiet wisdom

ByA customeron February 11, 2002

Format: Hardcover|Verified Purchase
This book is one of the most moving and brilliantly written memoirs I have read in several years. Fox writes with a 
brevity that is breathtaking; this book is filled with prose, humor, truthtelling and a remarkable acceptance of the 
major life blows she was dealt.I can see why she has won so many awards with her writing and why this book was 
on the Times top ten.I have ordered copies for most of my friends and know I will read it many times over.

Desperate Characters

5.0 out of 5 starsA Masterpiece of Social Realism

ByJM Appelon September 11, 2016

Format: Paperback|Verified Purchase
If it were possible to give a book six stars, this would be the book.

Each time I reread Fox's masterpiece, which is receiving increasing yet still insufficient attention, I am 
struck by its remarkable balance of depth and breadth. On the surface, we are introduced to Sophie and 
Otto Bentwood of Brooklyn Heights, a forty-something couple in a desiccated marriage, on the day 
Sophie receives a potentially lethal cat bite. But the novel transcends this domestic pas-de-deux to 
grapple with complex, unsettling questions of social order and justice, race and religion, freedom and 
obligation. It is a book as relevant today--maybe more so--than at at the height of the social protest and 
disorder of the late 1960s, when it takes place. Not a book to be read for plot or diversion, but to be 
savored for its penetrating insights into marriage, friendship and civilization.