In the Shade of Arrows: A Memoir

Throughout the memoir, Mudd continues to relate to a birth family that is infected by what his psychoanalyst brother called “real psychopathologies.” We encounter betrayals, incest, sexual excesses, AIDS, and disinheritance. Told without either self-pity or condemnation, even with some humor, the story reveals a successful father whose last years were consumed by sexual obsession, and a beautiful, outwardly “perfect” mother who had subjected him as a child to subtle and not-so-subtle abuses.

Mudd’s memoir also traces his interactions with American history. We see the effects of World War II on the child and on his parents, effects that changed the course of all their lives. We see the effects of the Holocaust, of earthquakes, the war in Vietnam, the assassination of President Kennedy, the hippie movement of the sixties, the birth of environmentalism, and America’s relationships with the rest of the world. The gradual decay of civic responsibility and principles in American politics and society round out the picture of Mudd’s concerns.

The two stories, the author’s and America’s, come together in the last chapters as he comes to a greater understanding of his unhappy mother and flawed father, as well as of himself and of an individual’s relationship with the idea of “one’s country.” In the end, from the vantage of self-imposed exile, he sees the possibility of emotional peace, spiritual maturity and a new sort of freedom for himself.

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