Life Stories #102: Elizabeth W. Garber

I spoke with Elizabeth W. Garber the Monday right after Father's Day, an apt time to be discussing her memoir, Implosion. It's a story about growing up in Cincinnati in the 1960s and early '70s in a glass house designed by her architect father—years that were so unsettling to live through that when Garber began speaking to her mother and her two brothers about the abuse they all endured, they initially refused to have anything to do with the topic. Which didn't exactly surprise her, because it was the last thing she ever intended to write about, either. During our conversation, Garber and I discussed how she had mentally and emotionally blocked out her father's most invasive and abusive behavior while it was happening, and about how friends and neighbors, and even her father's therapist, turned a blind eye to the blatant signs of his mental and emotional condition. We also discussed how her father's most famous project became a landmark metaphor for all the shortcomings of modernist architecture... along with the more personal meaning it accrued within the family.