Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude

The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster is a deft, enigmatic memoir of his father, first published in 1982. In the course of writing it, Auster learned that his grandmother had murdered his grandfather during his father's childhood, and so his father's personality was shaped by that terrible secret. Auster's father as an adult was aloof, inaccessible to his own children and had the compartmentalized life and the seemingly soulless affect that we today associate with clinically diagnosed narcissism, believed to originate from childhood trauma.

Auster wrote:
For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no mare than this surface to others. There are few demands to be met, and no commitment is required. Marriage, on the other hand, closes the door. Your existence is confined to a narrow space in which you are constantly forced to reveal yourself -- and therefore, constantly obliged to look into yourself to examine your own depths. When the door is open there is never any problem: you can always escape. You can avoid unwanted confrontation, either with yourself or with another, simply by walking away.

My father's capacity for evasion was almost limitless. Because the domain of the other was unreal to him, his incursions into that domain were made with a part of himself he considered to be equally unreal, another self he had trained as an actor to represent him in the empty comedy of the world-at-large. This surrogate self was essentially a tease, a hyperactive child, a fabricator of tall tales. It could not take anything seriously...the principle was to say as little as possible. If people never learned the truth about him, then they couldn't turn around and use it against him later. The lie was a way of buying protection. What people saw when he appeared before them, then, was not really him but a person he had invented, an artificial creature he could manipulate in order to manipulate others. He himself remained invisible, a puppeteer working the strings of his alter-ego from a dark, solitary place behind the curtain.

For the last ten or twelve years of his life he had one steady lady friend, and this was the woman who went out with him in public, who played the role of official companion. Every now and then there was some vague talk of marriage (at her insistence), and everyone assumed that this was the only woman he had anything to do with. After his death, however, other women began to step forward. This one had loved him, that one had worshiped him, another one was going to marry him. The principal girlfriend was shocked to learn about these other women: my father had never breathed a word about them to her. Each one had been fed a different line, and each one though she had possessed him entirely. As it turned out, none of them knew the slightest things about him. He had managed to elude them all.