Abstract
Laurie Sandell’s colorful and deceptively delicate watercolors paint harsh truths about her father’s long history of deceiving his family, his theatrical larger-than-life persona, as well as his quick temper. At some point during her adulthood, Sandell, now a successful journalist, discovers that her father is a fraud who fabricated most of his past, forged his academic credentials, and made such poor investments that he nearly bankrupted the entire family. The shock of this realization not only unveils the fragility of the family’s stability, which had always been threatened by the father’s frequent outbursts, but also destabilizes Sandell’s own sense of self. In this chapter, I examine how the disintegration of the father as a trustworthy and reliable figure may negatively impact his children’s own sense of ethics, their ability to forge stable relationships, as well as their mental health.
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- 1.
Throughout this chapter, I use “Laurie” to refer to the autobiographical persona created in the comic, and “(Laurie) Sandell” to refer to the author of the book.
- 2.
By the end of the book, the narrator ceases to rely on her father as a source of self-definition and is attempting to forge her own path, partly inspired by advice she receives during her stay at Shades of Hope, a recovery center recommended to her by actress Ashley Judd. There are subjects the memoir does not approach, such as the financial side of the narrator’s recovery and spiritual enlightenment, or the matter of her father’s many business casualties. While it is clear that the narrator is financially comfortable because she has a well-paying profession, the memoir does not mention the state of her parents’ finances after the bank forecloses on their home or, in fact, what William Sandell may have done with the impressive amounts of money that he received from well-meaning investors. It is suggested that he lost it on imprudent schemes and that some people received financial compensation.
- 3.
In a YouTube presentation of the memoir, a short audio clip plays her father’s voice, a fragment from a series of recordings of his (false) life story. William Sandell sounds a lot like the bombastic and riveting storyteller pictured in The Impostor’s Daughter. In the same clip, Sandell also describes her creative process: she first wrote a traditional book, but decided to give it up, realizing that she needed “the buffer of cartooning” instead of “just this naked prose on the page.” She does not think of herself as a cartoonist, but as “a writer who happens to be able to draw”; however, she feels that, “in this case, the story dictated the form” (Sandell 2009b).
- 4.
In an interview, Sandell likens them to the caricatures one would get at Bar Mitzvahs as party favors (Sandell 2011b), but throughout the book she does not embed them—or any other elements from her past—in the way her family may have practiced Judaism. Sandell does mention that her family belongs to Reform Judaism, but that her father seems to know “next to nothing” about his faith (Sandell 2011b).
- 5.
- 6.
The extent of William Sandell’s emotional abuse becomes evident as the narrator shows that he is unwilling to apologize after such scenes, and instead manipulates his daughter to apologize to him. In one such scene of tearful reconciliation, the daughter apologizes because she guesses she may have provoked her father in some manner and because she “didn’t have his stamina for holding a grudge” (Sandell 2009a, 33), while the father provides the confusing explanation that the reason he is verbally abusive of Laurie in particular is because they are “so alike” (Sandell 2009a, 33). It appears to be more likely that, as his eldest child grows older, he feels threatened and fearful of the moment when his answers to her questions might prove insufficient.
- 7.
For more information on the definition of psychopathy, see Hare (1993) and Kiehl (2014). Although William Sandell’s conduct as it emerges from her daughter’s memoir appears to check many elements off the list used to diagnose psychopathy, outside of the frame of a professional assessment, it is impossible to assess this with any degree of certainty.
- 8.
Even though Esquire is not named in the book, and neither are other magazines she worked for, presumably for legal reasons, the list of publications from Sandell’s website, lauriesandell.com, lists her anonymous article about her father as having been published in Esquire.
- 9.
As the children grow up, the father simply stops asking for permission and places his entire family in situations that can and do have long-standing effects on their future: he takes out multiple credit cards in all of his immediate family members’ names, something that negatively affects their credit score and places them in unpleasant situations.
- 10.
In the introduction to their collection of essays about chick lit, editors Suzanne Ferris and Mallory Young provide a link to a checklist that can help readers assess whether they have purchased chick lit or not. The first element is the book cover: “1) Does the book’s cover: a) feature a shot of a woman’s legs or torso, b) present the book’s title in a loopy script, c) contain bright, appealing, Easter-egg-like pastels or d) otherwise appear an irresistibly delicious confection?” (qtd. in Skurnick 2003).
- 11.
- 12.
Based on Laurie Sandell’s discoveries, her father broke the law on more than one occasion; even though he was not arrested, there is evidence that his behavior was unlawful and hurtful to many. Even though by the end of the book we do not find out the outcome of several lawsuits against him and even his wife, these are some of the actions that the daughter’s investigation reveals: one family gives him 340,000 dollars for investments (Sandell 2009a, 87), a family friend gives him 13,000 dollars (Sandell 2009a, 143), and there is evidence that various other people Laurie approaches have been tricked into giving her father money but refuse to provide details about the outcome of their investments.
- 13.
The resolution to write and publish the memoir appears on the very last page of The Impostor’s Daughter, not as a means of liberating herself from any expectations that her family might embrace her ethical perspective, but as a result of the fact that her expectations for positive change simply expire.
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Precup, M. (2020). “As long as he was there, I felt safe”: Fatherhood, Deception, and Detective Work in Laurie Sandell’s The Impostor’s Daughter. In: The Graphic Lives of Fathers. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36218-8_4
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