50 pages • 1 hour read
Reality Boy
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Surviving Abusive Family Dynamics
The novel captures Gerald’s journey from his childhood experience with abuse to his present-day coping strategies in a household that continues to excuse abusive behavior and exercise codependent dynamics. The chief antagonist is Tasha, who has been “drowning [Gerald and Lisi] in plain view” (125) since they were young. She has also suffocated her siblings using the “pillow trick” (247), where she would take couch pillows and press them over her siblings’ faces until they nearly lose consciousness. While everyone in the household witnesses this, Gerald’s mother refuses to punish Tasha and blames Gerald. This creates longstanding doubt and resentment for Gerald about his own experiences. His anger as a teenager becomes a way of coping with having to still encounter this dynamic in his household.
Gerald’s family is a model of different ways in which family members cope with proximity to abuse. Lisi, who is also a victim of Tasha’s abuse and is Gerald’s one ally in the house, decided to leave as soon as she was able. Witnessing his mother’s disapproval of Lisi’s plans to go to college, Gerald realizes that his mother wants to keep his sister at home so that she will not be more successful than Tasha. Gerald concludes, “She wanted Lisi to not go to college so Tasha would be happy” (194). This realization informs his mother’s treatment of him; she codes his mental condition as a cognitive limitation so that he will not aspire to go to college. The manipulation on his mother’s part is part of an enmeshed dynamic fostered through abusive patterning, centered around keeping Tasha content. Yet these actions only create further harm for the victims.
The novel explores the challenges of overcoming toxic family dynamics through Gerald’s recovery of his sense of agency in his life. While his family has squashed any motivation for demands, he realizes that for him to aspire to want more beyond what his family wants for him, he must have desires. By the novel’s end, he is open to the uncertainty of the future but feels “better equipped because I have demands” (353). This is a major transformation for him, one that allows him to transcend the narrative of trauma and abuse that he has suffered for so much of his life. He gets to change his circumstances and find peace.
The Stigma of Mental Illness
As a survivor of childhood trauma who continues to share a home with his abusive sibling, Gerald suffers from deep shame about his past and feels stuck in his present. His symptoms include self-loathing, escapism, violent outbursts, and intense emotional dysregulation. Tortured by his sister whose abuse is enabled by his mother, Gerald’s trauma is repeatedly ignored by those around him. When it manifests as rebellious behavior, including defecation, his family’s excuse is that he is “retarded” (131). By ascribing a cognitive disability to Gerald’s condition, Gerald’s mother and Tasha ignore the suffering they play a part in causing. However, the false diagnosis of a cognitive limitation to Gerald’s emotional state not only perpetuates ableist beliefs about mental handicaps but also erases Gerald’s experiences of trauma.
The false equivalence of Gerald’s mental condition to a learning disability is part of Gerald’s mother’s attempt to control the narrative around his behavior so that Tasha’s abuse does not go detected. Gerald recalls his mother’s attempts to bring him to various psychologists, and she forced medication after the reality television show was over “as if little pills could make the past go away” (150). Gerald’s mother focuses simultaneously on fashioning a narrative of Gerald as the problem child while also doing the most to control his condition as if to make it go away. Yet with every mental illness, especially trauma caused by familial abuse, the forced erasure of this experience only causes further issues for Gerald.
The Unreliability of Reality Television Narratives
Network Nanny, the reality television show where Gerald appears, models itself after a popular reality television concept where a childcare expert comes into a family’s life to install order and discipline. While it has the appearance of performing a social good for troubled families, the show has a detrimental impact on Gerald and his family. For Gerald, the camera captured his difficult childhood, particularly his most embarrassing moments, causing him to declare that “every kid in my class has seen forty different angles of me crapping in various places when I was little” (2). Some of these moments include Tasha’s abuse towards him and his retaliatory response, the context of which is nonexistent to viewers due to reality television editing.
Rather than show the abuse that Gerald was suffering and intervene for better treatment, the show only captured the most sensationalized moments of Gerald’s rebellion. It has deeply skewed Gerald’s sense of reality such that when he finally brings himself to talk about his experiences on the show, he becomes paranoid about his representation. He asks Hannah if she senses Tasha’s abuse when she first saw the show, “Like—you could tell in the show that something was wrong?” (294). However, Hannah responds that she does not sense Tasha’s abuse, though she knows through context that something is off. It’s only after hearing Gerald’s truth—the truth with the cameras turned off—that she knows the real story.
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