Family, Lost and Found in Maps to Anywhere

First I’ll start with a personal and not a literary statement: frankly, after all the trouble it took for me to get a hold of a copy of Maps to Anywhere, I fully expected not to like it and went in to reading it with a little bit of annoyance. But! After the first few vignettes, I found that I was completely interested in and absorbed by the stories. And fun another side note: I wikipedia'd Bernard Cooper just for fun, and I found out that he and I share a birthday.

While I enjoyed the whole book, I felt like I connected with it most in the chapters where Cooper discusses his family. It is during these most personal parts of the book that I felt his writing really shone, using his art to create a tribute to his family and the difficulties they went through and the lingering scars they have left. The chapter “The Wind Did It” reveals so much of Cooper’s complex relationship with his father. A relationship filled with distance and a heavy past but also with love. I felt it was very fitting that the chapter opens with Cooper’s father telling him stories, tall tales, that Cooper then says are untrue, but are still a way for the two men to communicate and relate. His father replies, “I was just thinking. I was just looking back”(49). Such a statement creates a poignant parallel for what Cooper is doing himself with these memoir chapters. Telling stories ties the two men together, the idea that storytelling maybe runs in the family.

I felt a key passage in this chapter came when Cooper’s father invites him on a vacation to visit Machu Pichu. Cooper then thinks, “As tempting as his offer sounds, as much as it appeals to my desire to be, for the first time, his loyal son, I’ve never taken a trip alone with my father, and to attempt one now might jeopardize the intimacy we’ve recently achieved” (52). So much is revealed in this passage. Cooper’s reluctance winning out against the “tempting” nature of the offer shows the distance between them. It also shows how their relationship now is much different than it was previously because of the conscious effort of two adults to cultivate a relationship rather than the natural, easy bond between two family members. There is also a sense of fear of change, maybe of reverting back to a state of noncommunication if Cooper shares too much of himself too candidly. They are the last ones in their family to be alive; there is no more buffer of mother or sibling between them, and the loss of these two family members probably makes the two men want to be able to value time with each other more. While it is never stated outright, the fact that Cooper speaks of wanting to be his father’s “loyal” son implies that maybe his brother was preferred to him—or at least occupied more space in his parents’ mind and emotions—and maybe it had something to do with Cooper’s sexuality.

“The House of the Future” was the other part of the book that really spoke to me because it was so bittersweet and tragic. I thought it was so interesting that in the intersection of all of these emotions Cooper had as a boy growing up: admiration and idolization of his brother, a burgeoning homosexuality, the grief of living with a terminally ill family member where he was daily experiencing loss even while Gary was still alive—Cooper identified his feelings for his brother as bordering on desire. And this chapter seemed to be an homage to Gary as well as a way to communicate Cooper’s processing of this time in his life. I feel all the talk of the amazing convenience in the House of the Future ties in very well and creates a poignancy with the story of his dying brother. The two are intimately entwined as Cooper remembers:

“What lit our dim house was the ember of mother’s cigarette floating back and forth through space as she brooded over my brother. For a year he had languished, reading in his room, one by one his white cells snuffed…But even in the dead of night the House of the Future could simulate day with ‘floor to ceiling columns of light/Trans-ceiling polarized panels/Mobile lighting to bathe each room in a glow as warm as the sun.’” (96)    

In the House of the Future everything is convenient, possible, and at the tips of your fingers versus the slow, inevitable breaking down of Gary’s body and the hope in the family for his life. In the House of the Future, in the world of the future, you get the sense that Gary would not have to succumb to illness and death at such a young age because science would make everything possible and curable. The family could stay whole and healthy forever in the perfect environment that met and anticipated all of their needs in neat and tidy ways. None of the messiness and complexity of life where the issues of his brother’s health radiated out into fracturing all parts of the family’s life.