Teen Borderline Personality Disorder Signs Causes and Treatment May 25 2017 Borderline personality disorder can be challenging for everyone Teen borderline personality disorder BPD disrupts an adolescents life In addition it disrupts the family as well Widely misunderstood a borderline personality disorder diagnosis is shocking Moreover this is true for both parents and teens Marsha M Linehan is a leading worldwide authority on borderline personality disorder In addition she is a respected University of Washington psychologist In addition she was also diagnosed with BPD herself Thus she understands the struggles firsthand In a Time magazine article Linehan details borderline personality disorder She offers a powerful description of people suffering from borderline personality disorder Borderline individuals are the psychological equivalent of thirddegree burn patients They simply have so to speak no emotional skin Even the slightest touch or movement can create immense suffering What is Borderline Personality Disorder Borderline personality disorder connotes the lack of a stable sense of self Hence without a firm identity people with borderline personality disorder have extreme emotional instability As a result borderline personality disorder is like many other personality disorders Moreover it often first appears in teenagers and young adults Teens with borderline personality disorder find everyday life hard Indeed they dont know how to process emotions Thus they have unstable relationships with even the people that care for them the most Teens with borderline personality disorder are unable to connect with others Furthermore they become isolated and desperate Lacking a clear sense of self they feel chaotic and stressed Therefore encounters and scenarios that should be relatively easy to manage become difficult There are effective options for healing from teen borderline personality disorder Furthermore current research suggests this truth Consequently most people with borderline personality disorder get better with time Effective borderline personality disorder treatment combines clinical approaches and holistic strategies In addition such treatment can help to stabilize BPD behaviors and reduce daily emotional challenges In most teens BPD can be caught early and successfully treated Also in most cases early treatment of teen borderline personality disorder is recommended Therefore such early treatment leads to better longterm outcome What Does Teen Borderline Personality Disorder Look Like University of Washington psychologist Marsha M Linehan describes BPD in teens and children The child does not learn how to understand label regulate or tolerate emotional responses and instead learns to oscillate between emotional inhibition and extreme emotional lability The lack of a firm identity is a major challenge As a result teens with borderline personality disorder become incredibly dependent on others Hence they need to be seen and validated Therefore extreme narcissism is a defense mechanism Truly it covers up their profound fear of abandonment Devoid of a consistent sense of identity borderline teens become chameleonlike Hence they parrot the world around them appearing at times to be exactly what others want them to be Yet unable to process emotions their imitation act often explodes into volatile outbursts Borderline Personality Disorder Symptoms Teen borderline personality disorder signs include the following Extreme emotional reactions inappropriate and disproportional Distorted or dysfunctional selfimage a damaged identity Inability to connect or feel empathy for others intense narcissism A persistent fear of abandonment and rejection Volatile mood changes without clear cause that are lasting Substance use disorder as a coping mechanism Overwhelming anxiety and worry beyond any actual risk Impulsive and risky behaviors selfdestructive patterns Unwarranted sexuality acting out sexually Selfharm and suicidal behavior suicide attempts Suicide and Borderline Personality Disorder When it comes to BPD in teens the threat of selfharm and suicide can not be minimized In addition borderline personality disorder includes suicidal or selfinjurious behavior among its diagnostic criteria Furthermore it is the only personality disorder type that includes such criteria This is per the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM5 The DSM5 is published by the American Psychiatric Association About 70 percent of people with borderline personality disorder will make at least one suicide attempt Even worse close to 10 percent of people with BPD will commit suicide Consequently this rate of death is two to three times greater than that of schizophrenia In fact it is by far the highest suicide rate of any mental health disorder Moreover the BPD suicide rate is more than 50 times the rate of suicide in the general population of the United States In conclusion its critical to ensure the safety of the environment for teens suffering from BPD Thus restricting access to lethal means is an effective form of suicide prevention Most importantly an expert assessment is the crucial first step Therefore this leads to the right diagnosis The Misdiagnosis of Teen Borderline Personality Disorder Borderline personality disorder can be hard to diagnose Subsequently BPD is often mistaken for other personality disorder types and mental health conditions Thus teen borderline personality disorder is often misdiagnosed In addition the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder has been difficult from the beginning This difficulty is reflected in its very name In 1938 psychoanalyst Adolf Stern coined the term borderline He first described most of the symptoms They are now part of the diagnostic criteria of borderline personality disorder Dr Stern believed that his patients with borderline personality disorder were on a murky border Thus they lurked between neurosis and psychosis In fact the statistics on BPD misdiagnosis are startling In one study 40 percent of people with borderline personality disorder were misdiagnosed They were misdiagnosed as having bipolar disorder Too often borderline personality disorder symptoms are mistaken for another mental health condition BPD Misdiagnosed Mental Health Conditions Here are some of the disorders that are commonly misdiagnosed in those with BPD Bipolar Disorder The emotional instability characteristic of BPD looks like bipolar disorder It can be mistaken for cycling between mania and depression Depression BPD negative mood shifts are incorrectly identified as symptoms of teen depression Teen Anxiety Overwhelming worry produced by fear of abandonment This can be mistaken for teen anxiety Teen Substance Use Disorder The abuse of drugs andor alcohol is a BPD coping mechanism Such substance abuse often is cooccurring It is often mistaken as being only teen substance use disorder Trauma Its true that trauma often underlies and even triggers BPD in teens But borderline personality disorder is sometimes overlooked Instead a diagnosis of teen trauma or PTSD posttraumatic stress disorder is given Misdiagnosis presents problematic possibilities Is your teen displaying symptoms of borderline personality disorder They should be diagnosed by experienced professionals They need a precise assessment by a professional treatment team This assessment is essential Such a step leads directly to viable BPD recovery Questions to Help Identify Borderline Personality Disorder Are you a parent who suspects that your teen might be suffering from BPD There are questions to consider that may help illuminate the situation Does your teen see things as black and white to the extreme Do they define people as all good or all bad Is your teen dangerously impulsive Do they take senseless risks on a regular basis Does your teen lack a firm sense of identity Do they change all the time almost cycling through personality types Does your teen seem incapable of reading emotions Does your teen feel crushed when a person leaves Is their fear of abandonment not reflective of the emotional reality of a situation Does the mood of your teen change for no apparent reason Do these mood shifts seem extreme Does your teen exhaust and lose relationships Are their connections to other people more volatile than expected Are your teens angry outbursts out of proportion to external circumstances Is it hard to talk them down Many teens without borderline personality disorder can fit these descriptions This is important to recognize Yet answering yes to most these questions is a red flag Such answers indicate that proactive steps should be taken toward a professional assessment If a teen is struggling with a borderline personality disorder they are not alone Borderline personality disorder affects close to 14 million Americans For further clarity lets illuminate the causes of borderline personality disorder Understanding the Causes of Borderline Personality Disorder The causes of borderline personality disorder are not fully understood Without a doubt there is a definite mix of environmental and genetic factors Potential BPD causes include the following BPD Genetic Factors No specific BPD gene has yet to be identified Still studies in twins reveal a strong hereditary link Thus scientists conclude that genetics play a role in borderline personality disorder BPD genetic studies are gaining momentum However these preliminary findings await replication Larger sample sizes and more precise methodologies are needed Still per recent scientific models borderline traits concentrate in families Such a concentration implies a genetic predisposition for the disorder Indeed borderline personality disorder is five times more common with a previous BPD diagnosis in the family BPD Neurological Factors BPD patients lack the neural capacity needed to inhibit negative emotions Thus the part of the brain that regulates emotions and controls impulses is often damaged Hence such damage leads to the behavioral problems and personality issues Studies show the danger of abnormalities in the structure of the brain 60 percent of the borderline personality disorder risk stems from this problem Moreover the neurobiological response to chronic stress is a possible cause Chronic stress exposure potentially can change brain metabolism and structure Such changes might limit the brains abilities It might limit the processing and integration of emotion and thought This discovery underscores the importance of early intervention Indeed early intervention can relieve chronic stress Such early intervention minimizes neurological damage and improves recovery outcomes BPD and Traumatic History BPD patients often have a history of childhood trauma Often this trauma includes physical abuse extreme stress andor abandonment However the abuse trauma tends to be outside the family unit Many people with borderline personality disorder report such traumatic life events Indeed most happen during childhood Early exposure to unstable relationships and hostile conflicts also are potential factors Some people with borderline personality disorder do not have a history of trauma Moreover most people with a history of traumatic life events do not have borderline personality disorder Hence such a distinction is important to make When taken collectively the above causes highlight the need for early interventions Indeed early interventions can reduce the extent of the potential damage With teens early interventions are essential Additional Facts About Borderline Personality Disorder The additional facts listed below are important for parents to know BPD affects nearly as many people as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder combined Women account for 75 percent of diagnosed BPD cases BPD symptoms are most extreme in teens and young adults Up to 70 percent of BPD patients report having been sexually abused Such abuse is usually by noncaregivers outside the family unit BPD patients make up 20 percent of psychiatric hospitalizations Only 42 percent of BPD patients receive treatment for the condition Given the statistics the need for action is clear Research studies show longlasting periods of BPD symptom remission are possible with treatment Therapeutic Interventions for BPD In 1993 BPD psychologist Marsha Linehan chose Dialectical Behavior Therapy DBT She used DBT for patients with borderline personality disorder Linehan embraced the biggest challenge She focused on people with BPD who were prone to selfinjurious behavior Indeed Linehan worked with the hardest cases that need and request frequent hospitalizations Her results showed that borderline personality disorder can be successfully treated This outcome is particularly true when it comes to teens Heres how DBT and other forms of therapy help foster sustainable healing Dialectical Behavioral Therapy DBT provides specific skills like mindfulness and emotional regulation These skills can be used right away and become stronger with practice As noted above they work particularly well for teens with BPD Cognitive Behavioral Therapy CBT CBT brings clarity and valuable insight to a teen in crisis CBT identifies the emotions that often result in a sense of isolation It helps with the selfdefeating thoughts and assumptions that make life more difficult Motivational Enhancement Therapy MET This therapy helps teens make positive choices moving forward MET helps resolve difficulties that teens have with accepting treatment in the beginning Mentalization Based Treatment It shows them how to recognize and understand their own emotions and those of others BPD teens did not fully learn these skills in childhood Thus such therapy focuses on identifying emotions and learning appropriate responses Experiential Therapies They are particularly powerful for teens with borderline personality disorder These include art therapy music therapy Adventure Therapy and EquineAssisted Therapy Such experiencebased modalities help teens build selfesteem Mindfulness and Yoga Research shows that mindfulness meditation and yoga practice help They decrease BPDrelated insecurities and increase coping skills FamilyBased Approaches to BPD Treatment Recent research has shown a positive effect when families are included Families can aid the treatment of teen borderline personality disorder From the beginning Newport Academy has emphasized family participation This is a key part of the teen treatment process Moreover the families of teens with borderline personality disorder may also benefit from treatment Dealing day in and day out with a loved one with BPD can be very stressful Hence family participation can lead to greater healing Also family members can help a teen with borderline personality disorder Moreover participation is a demonstration of love and support With borderline personality disorder such a demonstration can truly help Consequently it addresses the abandonment and insecurity issues The Newport Academy BPD Treatment Program Can Help Newport Academy provides superior borderline personality disorder treatment for teens Our Treatment Team creates a personalized treatment plan for each teen Furthermore this plan includes a variety of modalities Moreover we focus on resolving challenging BPD behaviors and thinking patterns At Newport Academy we can use unique and cuttingedge treatment approaches that would take the state years to employ we have the ability and flexibility to tailor programs that best suit the needs of our residents Helene DJay LPC Newport Academy Clinical Director East Coast Campus Teen borderline personality disorder treatment can work Newport Academy has a track record of helping teens and families recover Do We Use Medications to Treat Borderline Personality Disorder Prescription medication is rarely the only answer for mental health concerns This includes teen borderline personality disorder Many teens with BPD are prescribed various medications with no lasting positive effects There are ways to work with borderline personality disorder symptoms that are just as successful as medication In fact they have no dangerous side effects Hence our teen BPD treatment team believes longterm mental health goes beyond any medications Rather developing new behaviors and greater selfunderstanding is key Indeed this is what fosters a stronger sense of self and increases emotional stability Teen Borderline Personality Disorder and Substance Use Disorder Teens suffering from borderline personality disorder often selfmedicate with drugs or alcohol Thus they might feel that this is the only way to numb the fear theyre experiencing Hence for BPD in teens substance use is a negative coping skill Indeed it reduces the fear of abandonment and cope with profound insecurities The Calm Sanctuary of Residential Treatment Newport Academy provides the highestquality care using evidencebased methods Indeed our staff and clinicians are among the elite in their respective fields Thus we understand the challenges of borderline personality disorder First we help teens break the cycle of BPD negative behaviors Then we treat the underlying causes of borderline personality disorder Residential treatment allows teens to heal free from distraction Therefore they discover a nourishing empathic environment Thus our approach fosters true longterm recovery from borderline personality disorder It is our mission to provide the most comprehensive impactful treatment for teens to sustain longterm recovery We enable young people to move out of the darkness and into the light into happy fulfilling lives Jamison Monroe Jr Newport Academy Founder and CEO What Makes Our Residential Treatment Program Different 1 Personalized Treatment Our priority is to offer the most effective personalized treatment available We incorporate evidencebased clinical and experiential therapeutic modalities In addition we tailor an integrated and comprehensive care plan Thus the goal of the plan is to meet each teens needs strengths and challenges Upon admission residents are assigned an eightperson treatment team This team develops a customized program to promote growth and sustainable healing Always in close contact the treatment team includes the following professionals Psychiatrist Individual Therapist Family Therapist Medical DoctorPediatrician Registered Nurse Registered DieticianNutritionist Recovery Counselor Clinical Director oversees and manages the treatment team Take a moment to meet our team Newport Academy is built around honesty integrity and courageous teamwork Its a privilege and honor to work with caring individuals who put their heart and soul into what they do Newport Academy provides an approach that is experiential creative loving and dynamic It is an honor to witness adolescents and families change as they get the help they need Marcie Beasley MA LMFT Newport Academy Clinical Director West Coast Campus 2 Our Philosophy Is Love We help teens by providing a safe accepting and nurturing environment We pride ourselves on providing unconditional love and support every adolescent who comes through our doors Thus teens feel safe enough to explore and resolve underlying issues The Newport Academy staffs clinical expertise is matched only by their compassion Hence we provide the care that supports each teens selfworth and selfacceptance 3 We Achieve Results We have achieved an unparalleled success rate since our founding Thus 85 percent of our teens complete the Newport Academy program Please learn how we treat BPD in teens Indeed browse our website or call us at 8779590904 We are open 24 hours a day seven days a week Moreover Newport Academy has a 41 stafftoclient ratio If Newport Academy is not the right fit then we will help you find a solution that works for you Mental Health Teen Anxiety Teen Depression Teen Emotions Teen Mental Health Share this Article

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No account National World Lifestyle Entertainment Technology Finance Sport real life news life How are Aussie accents really formed EVER wondered why some of us say arvey and servo while others sound borderline British Theres a lot more to the Aussie accent than you think Gavin Fernando gavindfernando newscomau June 10 2018 1233pm Americans have a go at the Aussie accent THERES more to sounding like an Aussie than abbreviations and friendly cbombs In some circles saying afternoon instead of arvo is a cardinal sin In others youd be considered lowbrow if you didnt pronounce every single syllable and a rogue youse would have you socially ostracised for life fack em We also know different states use different words Sydneysiders wear swimmers Queenslanders wear togs East coast residents eat potato scallops while Victorians enjoy potato cakes Thirsty Head to your nearest bubbler or is it a drinking fountain Its as if the Cword is the only thing we can all agree on But what about the way we actually speak Why is it that we change the way we speak over time or dont automatically inherit our parents accents Theres more to linguistics than opining on what it means to sound Australian Experts analyse acoustic characteristics of the sounds using ultrasounds and highlevel audio recordings to literally study how peoples mouths move as they speak Heres what a couple of them had to say HOW AUSTRALIAN ACCENTS HAVE CHANGED Youve probably heard of three basic categories of Australian accent Broad Steve Irwin General Chris Hemsworth and Cultivated Cate Blanchett But according to linguistic experts this is an outdated model of looking at the way Aussies speak In the 1960s it was probably quite accurate to think about the Australian accent as being on a continuum from broad to Britishbased like Malcolm Fraser explained Linguistics Associate Professor Felicity Cox from Macquarie University But after the 60s the social or economic advantage of using the Britishtype form was lost Australian English came into its own so that now we have our own internal language standards without having to look outwards across the globe We used to think of Australian English as varying from broad to cultivated or somewhere inbetween but now there are many other types of Australian English There are multicultural varieties and of course many Indigenous varieties of English so its much more nuanced she told newscomau You just have to travel around Sydney to hear all different kinds of AustralianEnglish varieties Australian actress Cate Blanchett has what youd call a cultivated accent But this is an outdated way of looking at Australian accents SourceAFP The way we speak is an expression of who we are and three neat boxes arent enough to accommodate that diversity in todays Australia An accent is quite a personal thing it can carry a lot of subtle information about who we are and the life weve lived Dr Rosey Billington a postgraduate researcher in linguistics at the University of Melbourne told newscomau A lot of it comes down to the individual level who we feel we are in essence and which groups we want to show were part of or not part of consciously or otherwise HOW OUR ACCENTS ARE SHAPED Theres all sorts of generalisations about where our speech comes from Does pronouncing water with a strong T rather than a D suggest your upbringing was more affluent than someone who says Sundee and Mondee Not necessarily Its less tied to wealth and education and more to the people you grew up with and the social groups you wanted to fit into Friends play a large part particularly with children said associate professor Cox As children we use the accents that our friends use and as we move through our childhood and teenage years our accent changes along with the people we spend time with Yes your accent can change as you age particularly as you move through work and develop new social groups As your friendship groups change theres the potential for accent variations to emerge she said Once you reach your 20s your accent doesnt change nearly as much as it did when you were younger Why is it that some Aussies sound almost like British royalty SourceMega This explains how two people can grow up in the same neighbourhood or even be members of the same family and develop different ways of speaking Theyd probably have had different friendship groups and aspirations and maybe now as adults theyve moved into different spheres of work life and location Dr Billington noted that people can almost immediately change the way they speak without even realising it One really important thing to understand is that noone has just one way of speaking people are very good at adjusting the way they speak depending on the social context the particular people theyre speaking to and the extent to which they do or dont want to fit in with some particular group ARE WE GUILTY OF FAKING OUR ACCENTS Weve all been there Youre making smalltalk with some holierthanthou stranger who sounds like Queen Lizzy herself When you ask where they were born they trill Just in Sydneys Eastern Suburbs ahaha For real The truth is most of us dont consciously change how we speak on a daytoday basis For most people I dont think its particularly conscious said associate professor Cox But the way we speak can change depending on who were talking to This can be quite an automatic process Travel is an exception for this where one might emphasise their Australian accent as an assertion of identity or even overarticulate in a country where English is not the native language If you travel overseas you might find yourself sounding even more Australian if you want to express that part of your identity said Prof Cox Or else you might take on some of the characteristics of the people that youre speaking with even if theyre not necessarily Australian WHAT ABOUT CELEBRITIES In general many celebrities who travel overseas retain their native accents give or take a cringeworthy Madonna interview But you may have noticed Australian celebrities occasionally tend to sound not all that Aussie Portia de Rossi for example has lost her native accent entirely Singer Sia and 13 Reasons Why actress Katherine Langford have this kind of halfway sound Australianish with the occasional drawledout R thrown in Rebel Wilson and Rose Byrne have retained their Aussie tone while Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman sound relatively posh Aussie actress Portia de Rossi moved to the United States in her 20s Today she sounds completely American SourceAFP Rebel Wilson who tends to play an Australian in her most highprofile movie roles has retained a standard Aussie accent SourceAFP There are unconfirmed reports of aspiring Australian actors changing their accents to sound more American solely for the purpose of employment But Prof Cox notes this would be unlikely nowadays with the Aussie accent increasingly sought after for roles Dr Billington suggested some celebrities may simply be more attached to their Australian identity and accent than others The amount of time makes a difference and so does the people you spend time with if youve been living in a different country for a long time and mostly speaking to people who dont share your accent you may have moved further away from the accent you had before she said But its very individual ARE WE ALL A BUNCH OF LINGUISTS We all have that mate who cringes when you drop a youse into conversation But jokes aside accent snobbery and lingual discrimination in Australia isnt as pronounced as you might think Id say it used to apply more in the 50s and 60s than it does today said Prof Cox Sixty years ago you might have expected a barrister for example to have a more cultivated type of accent There was an expectation that people from certain professions would have a more British manner of speaking and so there was possibly some social and economic advantage to it Thats definitely not the case today It may even be a social disadvantage for Australians who are not British to use the Britishbased variety today because it may be considered pretentious But because our accent is an expression of our identity it could be used to justify other forms of discrimination A lot of the time linguistic discrimination is actually a proxy for discrimination on the basis of some other characteristic said Dr Billington For example in Australia it is no longer socially acceptable or legal to discriminate against people on the basis of things like race or gender However often you will find that there are particular groups of people who are disproportionately subject to linguistic criticism these include minority groups women and people on lower incomes When someone criticises the accent or speech style of people who are different to them in some way its often a tactic for disparaging them on the basis of something thats not linguistic at all gavindfernando gavinfernandonewscomau Leave a comment Add your comment to this 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Newsarama Comics The Top 10 MustRead JUSTICE LEAGUE Stories of All Time By Pierce Lydon Newsarama Contributor August 14 2018 0600pm ET AND JUSTICE FOR ALL 1 of 12 The Justice League are the forebearers of the superhero team as we know it If were being honest superhero comic books in general are indebted to the League more than people realize along with many DC heroes they predate the entirety of the Marvel Universe With Justice League about to cross over with Aquaman for the story Drowned Earth we decided to run down the top ten Justice League stories of all time Will Drowned Earth or the current New Justice make the list someday Time will tell There are no crises here no new frontiers and or kingdoms to come in this countdown as were drawing a line between overall DCU stories and then JLspecific If you want the greatest DC stories of all time you can find those right here 1 of 12 Twitter activity Tweets by Newsarama

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Delusions of Candor He needs to conquer to shine to dominate Vidals friend Anaïs Nin noted Photograph by Steve Schapiro Corbis In October of 1975 dining in Rome Gore Vidal told his new friend the novelist Michael Mewshaw that Françoise Sagan was a magnum of pure ether He didnt stop to clarify but rigor was beside the point the Vidalian bon mot was about the speaker not about the subject In the course of more than half a century his quips aphorisms insults and punch lines amounted to a selfportrait airbrushed so as to highlight his favorite warts Olympian detachment patrician hauteur It was an act a putonperhaps the most effective double bluff in the history of literary PR In 1977 after visiting Vidal at his cliffperched villa on the Amalfi Coast Martin Amis observed that he has little of the paranoia worryingly frequent among wellknown writers Norman Mailer had been onto something Amis concluded when he said that Vidal lacks the wound My God Vidal told Amis what a lucky life The official story as set down in Vidals memoirs and essays and in hundreds of reviews profiles and finally in his obituarieshe died in 2012went like this grandson of Thomas P Gore the blind senator from Oklahoma son of Gene Vidal a highschool football star whose exploits as an aviation pioneer landed him on the cover of Time he was born in 1925 at West Point grew up in Washington DC and studied at Exeter If asked about his mother Nina Gore who had swapped family life for a succession of boyfriends and husbands Vidal would explain that her desertionand her alcoholism and her sexual confessionshadnt really bothered him A reporter bold enough to press the subject would be silenced with a reference to Freudian quackery At seventeen Vidal would explain he quit schooling for good and enlisted in the Army served as first mate on a supply ship in the Aleutian Islands and thenalmost by accident virtually without sweat and for the simple reason that he couldbecame a novelist Julian Myra Breckinridge Burr Creation essayist Homage to Daniel Shays The Hacks of Academe playwright Visit to a Small Planet The Best Man screenwriter BenHur politician valiant failed campaigns for Congress in New York and for the Senate in California actor Bob Roberts Gattaca Igby Goes Down steelchinned primetime brawler points victories over Buckley in 1968 And while his contemporariesas speared in his essay American Plastic The Matter of Fictionnervously tracked their positions on the New York literary stock exchange Vidal lived in regal exile with his partner Howard Austen quite impervious to what anyone thought about his writing his quoted comments or his sexual proclivities The one sign of human frailty was his insistence that the hordes of visiting photographers favor his good side the left This was the figure known to most but not to all At the end of the war Warrant Officer Vidal was stationed at Mitchel Field on Long Island and working part time for the publisher E P Dutton He came into the city whenever he could On a Sunday in November of 1945 he attended a lecture on love at the Ninetysecond Street Y It was here that he met Anaïs Nin Born in France to Cuban parents Nin who was fortytwo was writing fiction alongside a diary that she would one day publish He has great assurance in the world talks easily is a public figure shines Nin wrote after Vidal paid a visit to her studio He can do clever takeoffs imitate public figures He is also lonely hypersensitive insecure When Vidal opened up to herHe dropped his armor his defensesit was not to talk about his grandfather the senator or his father the aviator but his mother the deserter Psychologically Nin wrote he knows the meaning of his mother At first Vidal was thrilled by the connection Returning from a trip to Washington DC he told her You have cast a spell on me What I once accepted I now do not like I found my grandfather the senator boring But the spell soon wore off In March of 1946 Vidal invited Nin to a dinner at the PEN Club Was shocked by the mediocrity of the talks she wrote A literary world so thoroughly political intriguing and commercial but a world Gore intends to conquer The next month she writes Gore in the world is another Gore He is insatiable for power He needs to conquer to shine to dominate In November she notes that Vidals lettershe had then retreated to write in a Guatemalan monastery that he had acquired for a pittancesound attenuated diminished dulled Lack of faith of responsiveness to surroundings and people A blight By December she admits defeat Whatever Gore was with me whatever side he showed me was not the one he was to show in his life and in his work The Diary of Anaïs Nin Volume Four 19441947 was published in 1971 and Nins use of the past tense carries a hint of retrospect as if she were taking account of later developments In 1970 the composer Ned Rorem another diarist friend described the cynical stance that Vidal had perfected over the previous quarter century Those steely epigrams summing up all subjects resemble the bars of a cage through which he peers defensively Its not that loves a farceit doesnt exist Rather than risk being called a softy he affects a pose of weariness Jay Parini in his authorized biography Empire of Self A Life of Gore Vidal Doubleday wants to give us the real Gore but he keeps on falling for the pose Although Parini exhibits some skepticism toward his subject and notices that Vidals claim of indifference to the worlds opinion was at odds with the many framed magazine covers and threats of libel suits he begins each chapter with an epigraph culled from Vidals table talk and publicity spiel When it comes to telling the story of the life Parini proves content to deliver the strapping selfassured untouchable Vidal the builder As Parini approaches Vidals later years his defensive instincts go into overdrive He praises an essay on John Updiketen thousand words of illargued bileas a kind of cultural service and declares Vidal more relevant than ever in the years after 911 when he was in the habit of writing things like The unlovely Osama was chosen on aesthetic grounds to be the frightening logo for our longcontemplated invasion and conquest of Afghanistan Vidal is the books leading witness though not a reliable one his testimony is undermined by what the novelist Adam MarsJones called delusions of candour and possibly by delusions of a different sort Though Parini believes that Vidal gave more interviews than any writer in the history of literature his notes which are far from comprehensive contain thirty references to interviews conducted when his subject was in his eighties Five of the conversations took place in 2010 the year that Vidal began to suffer the effects of WernickeKorsakoff syndrome or wet brain which Parini calls a stage in alcoholism when The underlying problem is a lack of distance Parini met Vidal in the midnineteeneighties and the two became great friends They spoke on the phone every weekfor periods on a daily basisand spent time together in a dozen cities Parini can not resist playing Boswell any more than he can resist making the Boswell comparison and it has a damaging effect on his role as biographer A sentence from a passage ostensibly dealing with the early days of Vidals relationship with Austen whom he met in 1950 begins A key memory of their relationship for me dates to the late Yet it would be hard to imagine a less intimate biography Parini loved spending time with the worldly woundless Vidal and he seems eager to perpetuate Vidals myths about himself In a letter from the late forties Vidal wrote that psychoanalysis is quite a frightening experience and that its not a pleasant thing to see oneself But when Vidal tells Parini that his experience of therapy failed because I have no unconscious the biographer doesnt pause to comment The books use of Anaïs Nin is particularly disappointing Parini quotes Nins initial description of Vidal clear and bright and luminous and manly but little else and his account of their relationship reveals limited acquaintance with what she wrote Parini says that Vidal tried to interest Dutton in Nins fiction but failed because Duttona manly houseshied away from anyone like Nin who exuded both femininity and exoticism But any reader of Nins diaries would know that in December of 1945 Vidal offered her a thousanddollar advance for her novels and that Dutton published Ladders to Fire the following year Parini justifies his brisk treatment of Nin by saying that the published version of her diaries tells only a bit of the story This is no doubt true But given that Parini did not visit Nins archive he might have spent more time with them not only because of their tender closeup portrait of Vidal in his early twenties but because they help to solve the central problem of any literary biography how to connect the life and the work Considering Vidals failure to become a poet Parini accepts his subjects glib explanation The Muse passed over my doorstep Nin offers another perspective In her account all Vidals shortcomings were rooted in the refusal of feeling After reading Williwaw his first novel about his Navy experiences she wrote I am startled by the muted tone the cool detached words In the following weeks she was given reason to believe that Vidal shared her assessment Ive never written this way impulsively directly and without plan he tells her about a play he is working on and explains that he is in Nins recounting aware of the conventional mask of his first novel The culmination of this process should have been Vidals third novel The City and the Pillar 1948 about a homosexual relationship that ends in murder At the time of its publication the novel was both admired and disparaged for its frankness Nins response foreshadowed its later reputation as selfloathing After reading the manuscript she wrote him I am going to try and tell you what was destroyed by your novel She called The City and the Pillar a book without illusion without feeling and without poetry Jim in your story kills Bob because Bob has not romanticized the sexual relationship they once had has looked upon it flatly as a mere sexual incident of no importance So he kills him Jim kills the legend in himself but actually there was no legend just Jims need of idealizing reality She presented the books shortcomings as human failures Everything in your eyes is diminished and uglified You always focus on the faults on what can be satirized To see only the ugliness that is what people do when they do not love You are not aware that when you paint only cruelly underlining only faults or weaknesses you are the loser Vidal continued to write about his own experience among his novels in the years after The City and the Pillar are The Season of Comfort 1949 in which a young man struggles with his alcoholic mother and The Judgment of Paris 1952 about a young American on a makeshift Grand Tour But these efforts were also considered shallow Norman Mailer in his essay EvaluationsQuick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room written in 1959 argued that Vidals narcissistic explorations do not go deep enough into himself and so end as gestures and postures At the time of Mailers essay Vidal hadnt published a novel in five years Strapped for cash he spent much of the fifties writing for television and the movies filling weekly slots on General Electric Theater and Studio One adapting Tennessee Williamss loopy play Suddenly Last Summer sprinkling homoeroticism over BenHur But in 1964 the year his play The Best Man became a film with Henry Fonda as a Presidential candidateVidal said that an agents suggestion that Ronald Reagan play the part had been laughingly rejectedVidal published Julian a vast finegrained portrait of the apostate Roman emperor which marked Vidals Times bestseller list It also marked his longawaited breakthrough The failed reckoning with painful feelings was over Vidal had found a form that exploited the virtues he was comfortable displaying in public notably worldliness erudition and cynicism The first official to greet me was Arbetio who had been consul in the year I was made Caesar He is a vigorous hardfaced man of forty born a peasant he became a soldier rising to commander of cavalry and the consulship He wants my place just as he wanted Constantiuss place Now there are two ways to handle such a man One is to kill him The other is to keep him near one safely employed always watched I chose the latter for I have found that if someone is reasonably honest and wellmeaningthough he has treated one badlyhe This is not what Anaïs Nin meant by literatureit is not poetic or psychoanalytic or Lawrentian But it suited Vidal In trading halfhearted gestural posturing novels about love and pain for fullbodied novels about diplomacy and power Vidal realized Mailers professed hope that he would turn the prides of his detachment into new perception In 1967 he followed Julian with Washington DC the opening volume of a sequence of novels variously known as American Chronicles or Narratives of Empire which he pursued intermittently and in strange order over the next three decades Then came Myra Breckinridge a comic splurge about a moviebesotted transsexual whom no man will ever possess It took a month to writeand a month to sell two million paperbacks Vidal henceforth divided his energies between historical reflections and satirical inventions between Founding Fathers and violent sex fiends between the worlds of Aaron Burr the hero of the second and juiciest American If the history novels on the whole work better than the satires it is partly because Vidal gravitated toward historical subjects that came readyladen with themes he wanted to explore and partly because an amuseddetached perspective is better suited to the Machiavellian than to the libertine Even in a book as outwardly impulsive as Myra Breckinridge Vidal found opportunities for cool analysis It is the wisdom of the male swinger to know what he is a man who is socially and economically weak as much put upon by women as by society Accepting his situation he is able to assert himself through a polymorphic sexual abandon in which the lines between the sexes dissolve to the delight of all Parini admires Vidals novels from the sixties and seventies especially the historical ones but he can not decide how to praise them At first he says that the radical subjectivity of Julian anticipates the postmodern turn in fiction in its very implicit skepticism about the idea of history and truth Later we meet the writer who kept faith with the socalled historical novel the novel that believed in history at a time when the postmodern novel the novel that didnt had rendered it in many eyes a déclassé genre Both impulses were present As a character puts it in Washington DC History is gossip but the trick is determining which gossip is historya line that accommodates postmodern skepticism and traditional empiricism The appeal of a novel like Julian which is presented as the Emperors diary is that its narration has the status of both personal testimony and official record And his portrayal of historical figures throughout the American Chronicles shows a similar struggle between impious mischief and trembling reverence What balances him is the power to rebel against authority Anaïs Nin wrote Emotional rebellions offset the powerloving side The You will continue to perform the same repetitive tasks that you have always performed Parini gives a better account of Vidals nonfiction writing which started by chance but soon became a fullblown subcareer As he worked on Julian Vidal also wrote most of the reviews essays and profiles that appeared in his first collection Rocking the Boat Gore Vidal is now a critic which means he is cremating people Nin wrote Starting in 1963 Vidal was a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books which published about three of his reviewessays every year and rejected as too boring or too contentious some of his most substantial work in this formFrench Letters Theories of the New Novel The Holy Family about the Kennedys and Pink Triangle and Yellow Star originally called Some Gays and the Jews The beneficiaries were Encounter Esquire and The Nation the magazine where much of Vidals later political writing appeared Parini nicely describes the lofty intimacy of Vidals style and makes a strong case for Vidal as one of the critics who helped to enlarge and redefine the bookreview essay But in calling Vidals book reviews his very own Harvard Parini misses both their strength and their weakness Apart from a few exercises in selfeducationsuch as French Letters American Plastic and a review of the Times bestseller listVidal tended to write on subjects in which he was already expert The virtue of his best essaysthe source of their fluent authority and zesty phrasing along with the frequently heavy provision of gossipis that he knew the subjects backward and forward either as a reader Tarzan Revisited On Rereading the Oz Books The Golden Bowl of Henry James or as an acquaintance Remembering Orson Welles or both in the case of Christopher Isherwood whose I am a camera conceit Vidal scrutinized in an essay from 1976 Because of those four words he has been written of and sometimes written off as a naturalistic writer a recorder of surfaces a film director manqué Although it is true that up to a point Isherwood often appears to be recording perhaps too impartially the lights the shadows the lions that come within the area of his vision he is never without surprises in the course of what looks to be an undemanding narrative the author will suddenly produce a Polaroid shot of the reader reading an alarming effect achieved by the sly use of the second person pronoun You never know quite where you stand in relation to an Isherwood work Like many before him Parini says that Vidal is a better essayist than he is a novelist Its a position that tends to emphasize the shortcomings of Vidals fictionall the things he didnt try to dowhile overlooking the vices of his essays Martin Amis writing as he later admitted from scant familiarity with Vidals fiction said that Vidal was too clever to write novels but not too clever to write essays because you cant be too clever for them But you can be too angry and too anxious too cut off from the taproot of your own strong opinions Every essayist is a product of his own hobbyhorses but few claim as vehemently as Vidal to be offering not a view but the Truth If his novels turned his public persona into an aesthetic his essays tried to turn his private anxieties into points of intellectual integrity Sometimes he succeeded In an exchange of letters in The New York Review of Books he advised John Bayley that The Golden Bowl is about force not about love invoking a reading of Jamesian irony and making it work just about At other times his arguments look merely like animus Parini says that Vidal worried that being exclusively gay interfered with his theories about sexuality But the reason Vidal came up with those pansexual theories was so that he could tell the world he was not exclusively gay It may be true as Vidal frequently maintained that gay and straight are nonexistent categories but the point was to establish that although he lived with a man and had sex only with men he was not and never could be merely a homosexual Vidal told Amis that he had been reading D H Lawrence Every page I think Jesus what a fag Jesus what a faggot this guy sounds A general distaste for authority underpinned a number of Vidals positions For years he slammed practical criticism for what he called its slow killing of the work through a close textual analysis Yet in 1979 in an attack on another bugbearthe emphasis beyond academe on a writers personalityhe enlisted the New Critics to his cause and regretted that these paladins of the word have long since faded away And his writing on America the national security state at home the empire abroad was beholden to a dark declinist view In the age of the Pentagon Papers Watergate and the IranContra Times he reviewed a new book that he had known about for more than twenty years If there is one theme to Volume Four it is Anaïss formidable will to power Vidal wrote and though he referred in passing to Nins inaccurate portrait of young Lieutenant Vidal he used the occasion to establish once again what he believed were their differences in philosophy knocking her contempt for intellect her mystical belief in Loveas if slamming an old friends book in her hometown newspaper Nin had lived in LA for years did anything but show that love might be a useful thing The Nin review was a classic instance of what Michael Mewshaw in his recent memoir Sympathy for the Devil Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal Farrar Straus Giroux calls the chilly uncaring misanthrope portrayed by the press The man he knew was eager to please and sensitive to slightsand not always happy to show it His late memoirs Palimpsest 1995 and Point to Point Navigation 2006 Mewshaw writes contained strikingly little introspection few truly intimate revelations almost nothing about the people he mixed with on a daily basisand no hints that Vidal was generous hospitable loyal to friends Reprising Nins response to The City and the Pillar half a century earlier Mewshaw spends a few pages scratching his head over Palimpsest an account of Vidals first four decades He grew bored by Vidals presentation of himself as the yoga master of worldweariness and expressed bafflement as to why so many of the emotions I had witnessed in him over the years had been deleted from this draft of his life Writing about Point to Point Navigation Parini admires the way Vidal restrains his emotions Mewshaw recalls reading Palimpsest when he was living in London and Vidal was in In the opening pages of Sympathy for the Devil Mewshaw expresses the hope that the noise around Vidal has died down enough to allow for an alternative assessment So far the evidence seems mixed In a fivehundredword lightning raid that appeared on the Vanity Fair Web site James Wolcottthe author of The Gore Supremacy a Kindle Single published after Vidals deathobjected to the offscreen lifesize figure in Mewshaws book especially his glassyeyed fallingdown senior moments Vidal shouldnt be remembered that way Wolcott said He was suave and smooth He amused without effort He didnt care what people thoughtand he didnt care who knew that he didnt care what people thought Wolcott consoled himself with picking out the hilarious aperçus and asides recounted in the book as when Vidal challenged Mewshaw to name the three saddest words in the English language and supplied the answer Joyce Leo Robson is a freelance writer based in London

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O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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