Dear Fang, With Love: A novel

“a frightening and accurate portrait of a teenager in the grip of a devastating mental illness . . .”

Against the backdrop of a history tour of Vilnius, Lithuania, Rufi Thorpe blends the story of mentally ill 17-year-old Vera and her estranged father, Lucas, with flashbacks of Lucas’s dysfunctional relationship with his only child and her mother.

Lucas and Katya, Vera’s mother, meet in their senior year at Exeter, fall in love, and with the bad judgement of 18 year olds decide to have a baby. They run away to a commune, cutting off contact with their parents. Lucas is appalled by the experience. “It took me only a few weeks to discover that I hated it.”

Katya is receiving no prenatal care, the commune is obsessed with group sex and partner swapping, and Lucas is both disgusted and panicked. “But the idea of being a father, the insane permanence of what Kat and I were doing, gave me a perpetual fever of panic, a swaying wobbly feeling that our lives were out of control.”

Lucas calls his mother who picks up the couple. Katya is returned to her parents, Russian Jewish immigrants who provide a home for their daughter and granddaughter for the next several years. Katya never forgives Lucas and does not allow him to see Vera until she is four years old.

Lucas’s first meeting with his daughter is a disaster, as are most of his parenting attempts. Badly hungover and carrying a purple teddy bear that is wet from the rain, Lucas meets Katya and Vera at an iHop, not the best venue for a meeting. “I had been living with them for so long as characters in my mind that seeing them in person was a bit grotesque.”

Katya rejects Lucas’s fumbling attempts to persuade her to let Vera stay with him on the weekends while he attends graduate school. “You show up for the first time you ever meet your daughter, and you’re still obviously drunk. And then you think that I am going to let her come live with you on weekends?”

After that first meeting Lucas does not see his daughter for seven years. He attends graduate school in New York City, but never finishes his dissertation. Like his efforts at parenting, Lucas has good intentions, but does not carry through. He does track down the father he has never met, only to discover the man has no real interest in him.

Disillusioned with his life, Lucas returns to California and becomes a weekend dad. “And from the start, Vera absolutely terrified me. She was like Katya on steroids, dark and funny and biting and capricious.”

Lucas desperately wants Vera to like him but doesn’t know how win her affection. “Vera and Kat were painted in bright acrylics, and I was in washed-out watercolor. They could barely see me. I was like a ghost wandering through their world.”

Vera’s bright acrylic world falls apart when she experiences a psychotic break at a party. Katya at first rejects the diagnosis of bipolar disorder, insisting that the proper combination of foods and supplements are all that are needed. Lucas, as usual, is a passive participant in Vera’s mental health crisis.

Katya finally reconciles herself to the fact that Vera requires medication to regain stability. When Vera’s boyfriend, Fang, shows Lucas a video taken of Vera during her psychotic episode that is posted on social media, Lucas must admit his daughter is in crisis. “And as the months passed, that video was the only proof I had that Vera actually was mentally ill.”

Vera’s medications have unpleasant side effects: weight gain, hair loss, and acne. However she is stable, though subdued and depressed. In an effort to restore some life and enthusiasm to his daughter, as well to build a closer relationship, Lucas proposes taking Vera to Lithuania, to Vilnius, the homeland of his Grandmother Sylvia.

Grandmother Sylvia, although long dead, is a constant presence in Lucas’s life. Although Catholic, Sylvia had been sent to a concentration camp when the Nazis invaded Lithuania during WWII. She avoided dying in the gas chamber with the help of a Nazi officer, who first raped her, then helped her to escape the death camp. She joined a group of resistance fighters and survived the war. Lucas always felt that Grandmother Sylvia was more of a man than he, because the idea of fighting Nazis terrified him.

Vilnius offers Vera the opportunity to explore her Jewish roots, but her obsession with the Great Synagogue, destroyed by the Soviets after the war, signals that she is spiraling out of control, although Lucas fails to see it.

In his shock at finding cousins in Vilnius, at learning that the family stories about Grandmother Sylvia are more myth than reality, Lucas misses the signs of Vera’s increasing mental instability.

Lucas’s first-person narrative is interspersed with emails from Vera to her boyfriend, Fang, and also expository Word documents in which the teenager attempts to explain her jumbled reality. The narrative structure succeeds, but there are problems with characterization. Neither Vera nor Fang are convincing as teenagers, and Lucas is a weak, vacillating personality who feels embarrassed, ashamed, or guilty much of the time.

On the plus side, Dear Fang, With Love is a frightening and accurate portrait of a teenager in the grip of a devastating mental illness, and the helplessness of her family in the face of it.