Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury

Faust’s mother, Catharine Ginna Mellick, passed away suddenly on Christmas Eve of 1966. When Faust returned home from college for the winter holiday, her mother was already ill in bed. They never settled the argument from her previous visit, nor the broader tensions in their relationship. At Catharine’s funeral, an attendee accused Faust of killing her mother. However, Faust argues that she “had to fight with [her] mother [to] survive” (12) and remarks that her mother’s “failure to fight for herself—for a self—had contributed to the tragedy that was her life” (12).

Faust’s family hid and ignored “anything difficult or unpleasant” (12), including her mother’s illness and eventual death. For years, Catharine’s disordered eating was taken for granted, as was her chain smoking. Born in 1918, Catharine was a product of the social mores of her time. She grew up in New Jersey, where she “enjoyed […] ponies, dogs, excursions to New York City, summers by the sea, and not much education” (16). In 1931, despite barely passing the entrance exam, she was admitted to a girls’ school where a family friend was headmistress. After three years, she enrolled at Villa Collina Ridente in Florence, a kind of European “finishing school.”

When Catharine returned to the United States, she “[searched] for something meaningful to do” (18). Faust notes that many of her mother’s letters from this period hold a “forced and hollow gaiety” (18)—in the face of growing international conflict and the threat of war, young women like Catharine “had never been asked or expected to be serious” (18). During the years before Catharine met her husband, she briefly found fulfillment and purpose as a courier for the Frontier Nursing Service, which provided medical care for isolated families in the rural Appalachian Mountains of Eastern Kentucky. Catharine was entirely absorbed by the work, describing it as unlike anything she’d “ever seen or done anywhere before” (20).

However, when she met Tyson Gilpin, Catharine gave up her work. Faust’s father was a Princeton student and the son of a Virginian Thoroughbred breeder. The coming war added pressure on his courtship with Catharine, and they hurriedly planned the wedding before Tyson went overseas. In 1944, Tyson was sent to England and then to France, where he served for a year and earned a Purple Heart and a Croix de Guerre. When he returned, Faust was born in 1947, and the newly reunited family moved to Virginia, where Tyson had grown up.

Faust’s mother was “deeply unhappy” among Virginia’s “revered traditions and rigid expectations” (25). Although it was not geographically far from her home in New Jersey, it was “a world apart” (25). Virginia mandated segregation, and Catharine had to learn to navigate “the unfamiliar details of racial etiquette and hierarchy” (25). She also had to adjust to financial resources that were more limited than she was accustomed to, leading to frequent arguments between her and Tyson. Faust quotes Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique to describe her mother’s “sense of dissatisfaction” and “yearning for something beyond the era’s ideals of domestic bliss” (26). However, Catharine also imposed these conservative ideals upon her daughter. Faust did not conform to her mother’s expectations and they fought from the time Faust was a toddler, when she rebelled against the girlish clothes her mother tried to dress her in. She was unladylike, being stubborn and more interested in raising steers than sewing or cooking.

Faust’s academic excellence became apparent at a young age, creating more distance between her and her less academically-inclined mother. Conventions at the time viewed female intelligence as “dangerous” and “unnecessary—even wasteful” (30). The unfairness of the different expectations for boys and girls made Faust furious. Her mother encouraged her to accept living in a patriarchal world and to learn her place, but as Faust got older, “the gap between boys’ freedoms and girls’ rules became even more stark” (31). Faust’s developing sexuality presented a new onslaught of perceived dangers; she resented “the regime of oversight and control” (32) she endured while her brothers were allowed to roam freely.

While Faust’s mother had a privileged background, the 1940s and 50s were “a time of gradually diminishing wealth for […] the financial elite” (34). Families like Faust’s were not as well-off as they used to be but continued to live affluent lifestyles. Due to Catharine’s lack of education, she remained “[imprisoned] within a set of expectations that she could neither change nor realize” (36) and could not adapt to the changing world. Even though she was privileged in many ways, she faced many constraints on account of her gender.

Three generations of men in Faust’s family served in the military, driven by “deeply held convictions about who they must be as men and about the existential link between manhood and war” (37). Their decades of conflict and military service had far-reaching consequences for everyone in Faust’s family and society more broadly.

Faust’s grandmother, Isabella, was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1894, where she and her brother, Charles McGhee, grew up as part of the gentry. The siblings were sent north for their education, where Isabella excelled in school. Her teachers recommended her for college, but Isabella refused. She disapproved of the three percent of women who graduated from college in the 1910s. Instead, she attended university dances and socials, reportedly receiving 40 marriage proposals. In 1913, Isabella met Kenneth Gilpin. He fell in love, but Isabella did not agree to marry him until 1917. By then, the war was already underway, and Isabella insisted that “marriage and military service had to go hand in hand” (50). Her father and brother had already volunteered for military service, and Isabella wanted her husband-to-be to do the same.

Kenneth enlisted as a naval flyer in 1918, and the couple married before his deployment. However, the war that Isabella had romanticized soon proved to be “hell—for men and women alike” (53). Her brother was killed later in 1918, leaving Isabella’s father devastated but forced to bear his loss with stoicism. Although Isabella lived on and had children and grandchildren, Charles’s death was the loss of the family name and “the end of everything” (43). Isabella’s mother wore mourning black for the rest of her life, and her father “never escaped his sense of depression and futility” (53).

Isabella quickly started her own family when Kenneth returned from war. However, the outbreak of World War II forced Isabella to confront the possibility of losing her sons to a new war. Widowed at 53, Isabella developed arthritis that forced her to use crutches and, finally, a wheelchair, but she continued to maintain authority and influence over her family while simultaneously maintaining “a formality and distance” (54) from those around her. Into her old age, “her performance as belle, as queen, as grande dame persisted” (59) even as she forgot key facts like family members’ names. The societal expectations that Isabella internalized “outlasted rational thought of self-conscious intention” (59).

When Faust was in college, her brother called to tell her that their father had shot his dog, Teddy, who was dying of cancer. Earlier in her childhood, he had also put another pet out of its misery, a duck that a possum brutally attacked. In that instance, he also sought revenge, hunting down the possum. Guns, Faust reflects, represent “the privilege and the burden of being a man” (60).

Growing up, Faust was afraid of the power and implications of guns. She had toy guns but wasn’t expected to handle a real weapon like her brothers, for whom learning to shoot was linked to ideals of masculinity. They began receiving rifles as gifts as early as 11 and were taught all the “serious work of guns” (63). This was one privilege that Faust did not envy her brothers. Lingering “ideas about white southern womanhood” proclaimed the “female right to protection” (64). While this idea assumed female “frailty and incapacity,” it was also “alluring” (64), and Faust was proud of her father and the power he confidently wielded. Photographs of her uniformed father and male relatives adorned their home as reminders of male bravery and chivalry. However, her father never discussed his experiences in the war, and Faust wonders how these unspoken memories affected her family.

McGhee Tyson Gilpin was deployed to Britain in 1944 and arrived in France in July. In early August, Tyson was injured badly enough to earn a Purple Heart, but he recovered quickly and returned to combat. His letters home lacked details due to military censorship and his own reticence. Faust reflects on her father’s letters from the war, noting that they were “always cheerful, always controlled and contained” and “consistently emphasized the aspects of his experience most like life at home” (72) rather than the realities of the war. He was also “curiously disengaged from what was happening at home” (72), taking little interest, for example, in updates about his baby son. Faust wonders if he hid his emotions from himself the same way he hid them from his family.

In the aftermath of the war, the journalist Ernie Pyle warned that men would need time to adjust back home and to process their experiences. Back home, Tyson was adrift. Although he “had means, talent, and connections” (74), he dabbled in different business ventures until his father passed away in 1947, when he took over the family Thoroughbred breeding operation. The business “performed only moderately well” (75); Tyson became a respected member of the racing community but never trained a champion horse or made enough money to support his family’s affluent lifestyle. His privileged upbringing had led him to take money for granted, but the changing economic makeup of the 1950s and Tyson's growing family meant this was no longer possible.

Tyson “scramble[d] against downward mobility” (81), jumping from one failed business venture to another. His inability to get ahead financially created a tense “backdrop for [Faust’s] childhood” (81), but she remembers her father as even-tempered, contrasting against the constant fights she endured with her mother. Faust explains that her father believed that a man must “bury [his] true feelings, show no weakness, be unflappable and, on some fundamental level, disengaged, distant” (83).