David Baxter PhD
Late Founder
One Family and Its Legacy of Pain
By LISA BELKIN, New York Times
August 11, 2010
THE paved road has given way to dirt. At its narrowest stretches, with trees all around and hints of the craggy Maine shoreline ahead, it most likely looks the way it did when Millicent Monks’s great-grandfather first bought the entire island, in the 1890s.
Branches brush against the Lexus SUV, and its driver, Ms. Monks’s husband, Bobby, slows to make way for a woman, dressed for the summer rain, who appears on the path.
“That’s my ex-stepbrother’s ex-wife,” Ms. Monks, 75, says as she and the woman exchange waves. “That’s what it’s like around here.”
Indeed. There are 42 families, all loosely related, on this private island in southern Maine, one of the trio Ms. Monks refers to in her memoir, Songs of Three Islands, a Story of Mental Illness in an Iconic American Family, recently published by Atlas & Company.
The family of the subtitle is the Carnegies; Millicent’s great-grandfather on her mother’s side was Thomas, brother to Andrew. The first of the islands, Cumberland, off the coast of Georgia, is where generations of Carnegies (and a few of the Rockefellers they married) enjoyed the luxuries of the Gilded Age. It has since become a national park, and was where John F. Kennedy Jr. married Carolyn Bessette.
This second, near Portland, Me., is the one Ms. Monks named Crescent Island in her book, to protect its residents’ privacy. It belonged to her father’s side of the family and is where she now lives.
The third is Northern Island, near the Canadian border, rustic and isolated. Owned by her husband’s family, it is where the couple plan to be buried. Her original house on Crescent Island burned down years ago; it was replaced by an exquisite cottage, regal and homey at the same time.
Determined to maintain their privacy, they joke that it is the “world’s largest one-bedroom house” — with no room for overnight guests or live-in staff. Mr. Monks has learned to cook, so there is no need for a chef. Most of their time is spent on the window-walled second floor, almost Caribbean in its peach and yellow d?cor, giving it a perpetually sunlit feeling, even on a gray Maine day.
Chasing away the gray is the reason Ms. Monks wrote her slim, lyrical memoir, which tells the physical journey of a family from one island to the next. It also explores, for the first time publicly, the thread of mental illness woven through the seemingly glittering tapestry. Her family, as she tells it, is like any family struggling with a genetic shadow. Hers is also unlike any other family you might know.
It all seems to have begun with Ms. Monks’s great-grandmother, the one known as Mama Negie, left with nine children when Thomas died at the age of 42. She was a powerful matriarch, but she had “spells” of illness over the years, her granddaughter remembered, disappearing into the tower at her grand Cumberland home and not coming out for meals. She spent time at McLean Hospital, a psychiatric institution outside Boston. Her illness was not spoken of by the family, Ms. Monks’s mother told her. “You simply did not talk about such things in those days,” she says.
It’s not hard to glimpse her mother’s regal bearing as she says this, though the daughter, with sad eyes and a warm smile, seems both more fragile and more approachable than portraits of her mother seem to be. Silence was the expectation when Mama Negie’s granddaughter Lucy — Ms. Monks’s mother — began to have “spells,” too. Today, Lucy would have been known as “an unstable or troubled child,” her daughter says, but life on an island helped to “contain” her.
Lucy could be wild and dramatic and impetuous in that untamed space. But when she married and moved to the “real world” — specifically, Boston — and then when her husband left her for what ultimately would be three more marriages (and 11 children), Lucy “broke.” And Ms. Monks was trapped alone with her.
Her earliest memories are of nannies and chauffeurs, of summers on Crescent Island and Easter vacations on Cumberland. But then her mother became fearful, certain that Ms. Monks was filled with poison from the unpasteurized milk her husband insisted the family drink. Her parents began having screaming arguments, complete with shattering glassware.
In the years after her husband left, Lucy became a spectral shut-in, hiding behind curtains or sitting motionless for hours in oversized chairs, leaving the house only to find the company of nameless men. For a time she had Ms. Monks hospitalized, begging doctors to clear the poison from her daughter’s blood. The nannies and maids and cooks all quit, saying, Ms. Monks writes, “it’s your mother, I can’t be around her.”
During an afternoon of conversation earlier this summer, Ms. Monks spoke matter-of-factly about her macabre childhood, describing an escape into music and writing and fantasy. With no adult in her life to consistently provide food, clothing or love, she began to fail in school, steal candy bars from newsstands and wear dresses that were several sizes too small. In her dust-covered house she developed odd fears of her own.
“Gradually I became afraid of looking in the mirror,” she writes, “terrified as the years went on that if I looked in the mirror, I wouldn’t see my reflection, but my mother’s face staring back at me ... Even more frightening, though, was my fear that I would look in the mirror and see no one at all.”
Her escape was her marriage to Robert Monks, Bobby to all, a 6-foot-6 member of Harvard’s varsity crew team. He still towers over his wife, and gives the feeling that he is protecting her.
His old Boston family had its own fortune, which, while somewhat modest if your yardstick is the Carnegies, was substantial enough that “when I graduated from law school I became the first member of my family to actually earn a living in 100 years,” he jokes. And, natch, his family owned an island, too.
The couple married in 1954, five months after they met, when they were each 20. Ms. Monks saw marriage as a new start, a chance to leave her mother’s secrets and sorrows behind. Their daughter, whom Ms. Monks calls Sandra in her book, was born two years later, and their son, whom she calls Angus, arrived 18 months after that. The girl was a difficult baby and a troubled adolescent. The only person who could calm her, or who seemed to understand her, was her grandmother Lucy.
It was a call from Sandra’s first-grade teacher that Ms. Monks remembers as the crystallizing moment. “We can’t control her,” the teacher said, suggesting a meeting with the school psychiatrist. It was the first time Ms. Monks remembers thinking, “What if my daughter was ill like Lucy?”
The years that followed were filled with Sandra’s rages, Ms. Monks’s depression, Sandra’s hospitalizations at McLean (where Mama Negie had spent time) and Ms. Monks’s feelings that she was the reason for her daughter’s troubles.
The diagnosis, at first, was paranoid schizophrenia, the same one given to Lucy. Psychiatry in the 1950s placed blame squarely with a patient’s mother. Years of Lucy telling her she was filled with poison left Ms. Monks thinking that she had somehow, psychically, poisoned her daughter, and she wondered if the doctors were right to blame her.
Over the years, Ms. Monks developed breast cancer, and she now believes that the trigger was a lifetime of stress. She founded a dance company, then disbanded it when caring for her daughter became too overwhelming.
She discovered Jungian analysis and Transcendental Meditation and stopped speaking to her own father, though he lived, until his death, in a house within view of hers. He was, she has come to believe, as ill in his own way as Lucy, who was as ill as Sandra. In time, Sandra married, had two children and then divorced. Now 55, she has a house on Crescent Island, and the company of a companion hired by her parents.
Not until 1978, when Sandra was an adult, did her doctors propose a different diagnosis: borderline personality disorder, a condition that was new to the field. Along with its description — a high suicide rate, a tendency toward uncontrolled rage, an inability to regulate one’s impulses, no known effective treatment — there was other news.
“Some in the profession no longer believe a dysfunctional family is the only cause,” Ms. Monks recalls being told, and all these years later her voice still breaks slightly with relief.
The glimmer of absolution in the diagnosis didn’t change life completely, Ms. Monks says in her study in the turret overlooking her father’s old house. But it was the start of a realization that her Carnegie inheritance was more than just a name or an island, but also a legacy of pain.
“Five of the young people” among the family members now living on the island “have been institutionalized,” Ms. Monks said, sweeping her hand across the magnificent view. “So sad.”
Her daughter’s home, though nearby, is not visible from here. According to Ms. Monks, Sandra does not agree that she has borderline personality disorder, but believes she was traumatized by unloving parents. She speaks to them sporadically.
Sandra declined to be interviewed, but sent an e-mail via her lawyer. Noting that her mother quotes directly from Sandra’s journals in her book, which Sandra allowed her to use, she wrote, “my poor mother has taken some of my stories and writings and mixed them all up and put them out of context and sadly created a fantasy of me that she wants others and herself to believe. That people do things like this to each other feels tragic; certainly not in accord with those of us who are trying really hard to bring Light, Love, forgiveness and PEACE into this world.”
She is working on her own book, she continued, “which I believe will shine a tremendous beacon of truth on my actual life.”
Though estranged, mother and daughter run into each other somewhat regularly — in the grocery store, or at the meetings of the family board that owns and runs the island. To live here you must be a relative or a relative of a relative. When children marry and start their own families, they are given land on which to build a house.
Eventually that process “will reach its Darwinian limits,” Mr. Monks explains, over a lunch of lobster chowder he cooked. As happened years ago with Cumberland Island, “sooner or later you have a divide between those who want to sell and take the money and those who see this as a refuge and don’t want to sell.”
When that happens, he predicts “the ones who have some money will buy out the others” and a last vestige of a once powerful family will end.
Ms. Monks seems of two minds about that inevitable moment. On the one hand, she says she feels disconnected from her family tree. When asked whether the moral of her tale is that even the Carnegie name and money could not buy real treatment for generations, she looks confused.
“I don’t think of myself like that,” she says. “I know how na?ve I must sound, but I didn’t know, for most of my life, that this was anything special.”
True, the storied name can bring moments of pleasure, like “when Isaac Stern sat next to me at dinner and told me ‘I love Carnegie Hall, it’s the most wonderful place in the world to play.’ ” But more often she wonders “Where were all the Carnegies when I was sitting alone and miserable in my room all those years, hiding from my mother?”
On the other hand, she knows that her lineage gives her visibility, which she needs to spread the word. She certainly didn’t write this book for the royalties. In part she aired family secrets “because by writing about yourself you learn something about yourself,” and she had a lot to learn.
And in part she made this choice because she does not want to be another in a long line of relatives who have coasted on the success of long-dead ancestors, rather than building her own.
“If I can do something worthwhile to help people with children who are mentally ill,” she says, “I would think that was something worth accomplishing in my life.”
By LISA BELKIN, New York Times
August 11, 2010
THE paved road has given way to dirt. At its narrowest stretches, with trees all around and hints of the craggy Maine shoreline ahead, it most likely looks the way it did when Millicent Monks’s great-grandfather first bought the entire island, in the 1890s.
Branches brush against the Lexus SUV, and its driver, Ms. Monks’s husband, Bobby, slows to make way for a woman, dressed for the summer rain, who appears on the path.
“That’s my ex-stepbrother’s ex-wife,” Ms. Monks, 75, says as she and the woman exchange waves. “That’s what it’s like around here.”
Indeed. There are 42 families, all loosely related, on this private island in southern Maine, one of the trio Ms. Monks refers to in her memoir, Songs of Three Islands, a Story of Mental Illness in an Iconic American Family, recently published by Atlas & Company.
The family of the subtitle is the Carnegies; Millicent’s great-grandfather on her mother’s side was Thomas, brother to Andrew. The first of the islands, Cumberland, off the coast of Georgia, is where generations of Carnegies (and a few of the Rockefellers they married) enjoyed the luxuries of the Gilded Age. It has since become a national park, and was where John F. Kennedy Jr. married Carolyn Bessette.
This second, near Portland, Me., is the one Ms. Monks named Crescent Island in her book, to protect its residents’ privacy. It belonged to her father’s side of the family and is where she now lives.
The third is Northern Island, near the Canadian border, rustic and isolated. Owned by her husband’s family, it is where the couple plan to be buried. Her original house on Crescent Island burned down years ago; it was replaced by an exquisite cottage, regal and homey at the same time.
Determined to maintain their privacy, they joke that it is the “world’s largest one-bedroom house” — with no room for overnight guests or live-in staff. Mr. Monks has learned to cook, so there is no need for a chef. Most of their time is spent on the window-walled second floor, almost Caribbean in its peach and yellow d?cor, giving it a perpetually sunlit feeling, even on a gray Maine day.
Chasing away the gray is the reason Ms. Monks wrote her slim, lyrical memoir, which tells the physical journey of a family from one island to the next. It also explores, for the first time publicly, the thread of mental illness woven through the seemingly glittering tapestry. Her family, as she tells it, is like any family struggling with a genetic shadow. Hers is also unlike any other family you might know.
It all seems to have begun with Ms. Monks’s great-grandmother, the one known as Mama Negie, left with nine children when Thomas died at the age of 42. She was a powerful matriarch, but she had “spells” of illness over the years, her granddaughter remembered, disappearing into the tower at her grand Cumberland home and not coming out for meals. She spent time at McLean Hospital, a psychiatric institution outside Boston. Her illness was not spoken of by the family, Ms. Monks’s mother told her. “You simply did not talk about such things in those days,” she says.
It’s not hard to glimpse her mother’s regal bearing as she says this, though the daughter, with sad eyes and a warm smile, seems both more fragile and more approachable than portraits of her mother seem to be. Silence was the expectation when Mama Negie’s granddaughter Lucy — Ms. Monks’s mother — began to have “spells,” too. Today, Lucy would have been known as “an unstable or troubled child,” her daughter says, but life on an island helped to “contain” her.
Lucy could be wild and dramatic and impetuous in that untamed space. But when she married and moved to the “real world” — specifically, Boston — and then when her husband left her for what ultimately would be three more marriages (and 11 children), Lucy “broke.” And Ms. Monks was trapped alone with her.
Her earliest memories are of nannies and chauffeurs, of summers on Crescent Island and Easter vacations on Cumberland. But then her mother became fearful, certain that Ms. Monks was filled with poison from the unpasteurized milk her husband insisted the family drink. Her parents began having screaming arguments, complete with shattering glassware.
In the years after her husband left, Lucy became a spectral shut-in, hiding behind curtains or sitting motionless for hours in oversized chairs, leaving the house only to find the company of nameless men. For a time she had Ms. Monks hospitalized, begging doctors to clear the poison from her daughter’s blood. The nannies and maids and cooks all quit, saying, Ms. Monks writes, “it’s your mother, I can’t be around her.”
During an afternoon of conversation earlier this summer, Ms. Monks spoke matter-of-factly about her macabre childhood, describing an escape into music and writing and fantasy. With no adult in her life to consistently provide food, clothing or love, she began to fail in school, steal candy bars from newsstands and wear dresses that were several sizes too small. In her dust-covered house she developed odd fears of her own.
“Gradually I became afraid of looking in the mirror,” she writes, “terrified as the years went on that if I looked in the mirror, I wouldn’t see my reflection, but my mother’s face staring back at me ... Even more frightening, though, was my fear that I would look in the mirror and see no one at all.”
Her escape was her marriage to Robert Monks, Bobby to all, a 6-foot-6 member of Harvard’s varsity crew team. He still towers over his wife, and gives the feeling that he is protecting her.
His old Boston family had its own fortune, which, while somewhat modest if your yardstick is the Carnegies, was substantial enough that “when I graduated from law school I became the first member of my family to actually earn a living in 100 years,” he jokes. And, natch, his family owned an island, too.
The couple married in 1954, five months after they met, when they were each 20. Ms. Monks saw marriage as a new start, a chance to leave her mother’s secrets and sorrows behind. Their daughter, whom Ms. Monks calls Sandra in her book, was born two years later, and their son, whom she calls Angus, arrived 18 months after that. The girl was a difficult baby and a troubled adolescent. The only person who could calm her, or who seemed to understand her, was her grandmother Lucy.
It was a call from Sandra’s first-grade teacher that Ms. Monks remembers as the crystallizing moment. “We can’t control her,” the teacher said, suggesting a meeting with the school psychiatrist. It was the first time Ms. Monks remembers thinking, “What if my daughter was ill like Lucy?”
The years that followed were filled with Sandra’s rages, Ms. Monks’s depression, Sandra’s hospitalizations at McLean (where Mama Negie had spent time) and Ms. Monks’s feelings that she was the reason for her daughter’s troubles.
The diagnosis, at first, was paranoid schizophrenia, the same one given to Lucy. Psychiatry in the 1950s placed blame squarely with a patient’s mother. Years of Lucy telling her she was filled with poison left Ms. Monks thinking that she had somehow, psychically, poisoned her daughter, and she wondered if the doctors were right to blame her.
Over the years, Ms. Monks developed breast cancer, and she now believes that the trigger was a lifetime of stress. She founded a dance company, then disbanded it when caring for her daughter became too overwhelming.
She discovered Jungian analysis and Transcendental Meditation and stopped speaking to her own father, though he lived, until his death, in a house within view of hers. He was, she has come to believe, as ill in his own way as Lucy, who was as ill as Sandra. In time, Sandra married, had two children and then divorced. Now 55, she has a house on Crescent Island, and the company of a companion hired by her parents.
Not until 1978, when Sandra was an adult, did her doctors propose a different diagnosis: borderline personality disorder, a condition that was new to the field. Along with its description — a high suicide rate, a tendency toward uncontrolled rage, an inability to regulate one’s impulses, no known effective treatment — there was other news.
“Some in the profession no longer believe a dysfunctional family is the only cause,” Ms. Monks recalls being told, and all these years later her voice still breaks slightly with relief.
The glimmer of absolution in the diagnosis didn’t change life completely, Ms. Monks says in her study in the turret overlooking her father’s old house. But it was the start of a realization that her Carnegie inheritance was more than just a name or an island, but also a legacy of pain.
“Five of the young people” among the family members now living on the island “have been institutionalized,” Ms. Monks said, sweeping her hand across the magnificent view. “So sad.”
Her daughter’s home, though nearby, is not visible from here. According to Ms. Monks, Sandra does not agree that she has borderline personality disorder, but believes she was traumatized by unloving parents. She speaks to them sporadically.
Sandra declined to be interviewed, but sent an e-mail via her lawyer. Noting that her mother quotes directly from Sandra’s journals in her book, which Sandra allowed her to use, she wrote, “my poor mother has taken some of my stories and writings and mixed them all up and put them out of context and sadly created a fantasy of me that she wants others and herself to believe. That people do things like this to each other feels tragic; certainly not in accord with those of us who are trying really hard to bring Light, Love, forgiveness and PEACE into this world.”
She is working on her own book, she continued, “which I believe will shine a tremendous beacon of truth on my actual life.”
Though estranged, mother and daughter run into each other somewhat regularly — in the grocery store, or at the meetings of the family board that owns and runs the island. To live here you must be a relative or a relative of a relative. When children marry and start their own families, they are given land on which to build a house.
Eventually that process “will reach its Darwinian limits,” Mr. Monks explains, over a lunch of lobster chowder he cooked. As happened years ago with Cumberland Island, “sooner or later you have a divide between those who want to sell and take the money and those who see this as a refuge and don’t want to sell.”
When that happens, he predicts “the ones who have some money will buy out the others” and a last vestige of a once powerful family will end.
Ms. Monks seems of two minds about that inevitable moment. On the one hand, she says she feels disconnected from her family tree. When asked whether the moral of her tale is that even the Carnegie name and money could not buy real treatment for generations, she looks confused.
“I don’t think of myself like that,” she says. “I know how na?ve I must sound, but I didn’t know, for most of my life, that this was anything special.”
True, the storied name can bring moments of pleasure, like “when Isaac Stern sat next to me at dinner and told me ‘I love Carnegie Hall, it’s the most wonderful place in the world to play.’ ” But more often she wonders “Where were all the Carnegies when I was sitting alone and miserable in my room all those years, hiding from my mother?”
On the other hand, she knows that her lineage gives her visibility, which she needs to spread the word. She certainly didn’t write this book for the royalties. In part she aired family secrets “because by writing about yourself you learn something about yourself,” and she had a lot to learn.
And in part she made this choice because she does not want to be another in a long line of relatives who have coasted on the success of long-dead ancestors, rather than building her own.
“If I can do something worthwhile to help people with children who are mentally ill,” she says, “I would think that was something worth accomplishing in my life.”
