Reading Local Review: "Dead End Gene Pool" by Wendy Burden

I was interested in reading Dead End Gene Pool (Gotham), both because I enjoy the genre of memoir, and because I have quite a bit of curiosity about the Vanderbilts, from whom Wendy Burden is descended. (The Prolog lists her as a great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Cornelius “the Commodore” Vanderbilt.) Vanderbilt was a big name on Long Island, where I grew up, synonymous with wealth and privilege.

Wendy is an engaging writer, whose wit and humor make this an engrossing read, albeit a darkly humorous one. Yet underneath the humor is the wrenching story of a girl whose father committed suicide when she was just six years old, and whose alcoholic and distant mother was frequently absent from her life. Wendy is forced to rely on her own devices, finding solace as a child in playing pranks on the servants, guillotining Barbie dolls, and maintaining a morgue for dead birds behind the English cucumbers.

Wendy spends much of her childhood being cared for by the servants, and in what she refers to as “Burdenland” with her grandparents, also alcoholics. Eventually her mother remarries a man Wendy does not care much for, to say the least. She consoles herself by writing obits for him. In 1967, when she is coming of age, the family unit of Wendy, her younger brother (her older brother having been sent to a boarding school), her mother and her stepfather move to England. Wendy falls in love for the first time, tries to fit into English society, and is forced to cope with a now always present, critical and self-absorbed mother.

Eventually her mother gets a divorce and remarries again, Wendy and her younger brother are packed off to boarding school, and her grandparents start on a downward spiral. As their health declines, their drinking increases, as does their addiction to prescription drugs. Her grandfather’s ego-maniacal imperiousness comes off as somewhat pathetic, and at times, I felt uncomfortably like a voyeur as she spared no details describing their decline, and that of her mother and two brothers.

At the end of the novel, even though Wendy shares what she discovered about her father’s suicide after her mother’s death, I was left without a feeling of resolution, wondering if beneath the conflicted feelings for her self-described dysfunctional family, there was some underlying compassion in there as well. But maybe this memoir was simply intended as a cautionary tale: that being rich as Croesus doesn’t necessarily make a person happy, and showing what can go wrong when people with too much time and money on their hands, and an exalted sense of self-worth discover alcohol and prescription drugs. If so, then I register the message, loud and clear!

Wendy Burden will read from “Dead End Gene Pool” at Powell’s City of Books on April 15th at 7:30pm.

Image credit IndieBound.