Interview With NYT Best-Selling Author Howard Dully

I’ve read the genre of memoir since I was a child and one of my all-time faves is My Lobotomy by Howard Dully and Charles Fleming. I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Howard for this blog. My Lobotomy is now out in paperback and has been on the New York Times best-seller list for the past three weeks. If you haven’t read it yet, you have to read this book. It is definitely a one-of-a-kind reading experience.

This review from Publishers Weekly will give you some helpful background infomation: At age 12, in 1960, Dully received a transorbital or ice pick lobotomy from Dr. Walter Freeman, who invented the procedure, making Dully an unfortunate statistic in medical history—the youngest of the more than 10,000 patients who Freeman lobotomized to cure their supposed mental illness. In this brutally honest memoir, Dully, writing with Fleming (The Ivory Coast), describes how he set out 40 years later to find out why he was lobotomized, since he did not exhibit any signs of mental instability at the time, and why, postoperation, he was bounced between various institutions and then slowly fell into a life of drug and alcohol abuse. His journey—first described in a National Public Radio feature in 2005—finds Dully discovering how deeply he was the victim of an unstable stepmother who systematically abused him and who then convinced his distant father that a lobotomy was the answer to Dully's acting out against her psychic torture. He also investigates the strange career of Freeman—who wasn't a licensed psychiatrist—including early acclaim by the New York Times and cross-country trips hawking the operation from his Lobotomobile. But what is truly stunning is Dully's description of how he gained strength and a sense of self-worth by understanding how both Freeman and his stepmother were victims of their own family tragedies, and how he managed to somehow forgive them for the wreckage they caused in his life.

Here's the 22-minute-long PBS program, in Howard's own voice. It was this incredible interview that led to the eventual writing of the book My Lobotomy.

Interview, Part I

Polly Kahl: I so appreciate you talking with me. I’m a huge fan, Howard. I just think you’re a great guy and an incredible survivor, and I just can’t tell you how much I thought of your book.

HOWARD DULLY: Well, thank you, I appreciate that, although I didn’t plan it that way.

PK: Unfortunately, sometimes the best stories come out of lives that weren’t planned, right? I mean, Anne Frank never thought she’d spend two and a half years hiding in an attic, but a hell of a book came out of it, didn’t it?

HD: Yeah, it did.

PK: Do you read memoir?

HD: Actually no, I’m not much of a reader. I have eye problems. Whether it’s due to Freeman or not I don’t know. I have an eye infection right now as a matter of fact that I’ve had on and off since I was a kid. It’s just in my right eye right now but it can affect both eyes. I drive for a living but I’m not driving right now due to my infection.

PK: Have you done any TV?

HD: I did TV back when we did the radio piece, I did a lot of news programs and stuff, but they say my book is kind of hard for the couch kind of shows. They want the softer stuff. It’s kind of an emotional book.

PK: I’d love to see you on Oprah and I bet she’d love your book because she does some pretty heavy stuff. They should really do you, you’d be fantastic on Oprah.

HD: I’d love to be on Oprah. I talked to the producers over a year ago and they were booked then, but I haven’t heard anything since. I’m hoping, still.

PK: The hardcover must’ve done pretty well for it to have gone into soft.

HD: Yeah, they told me it did, and the soft cover has now gone best-seller, New York Times.

PK: That is really excellent.

HD: I’m not sure what all that means [laughs.]

PK: Well, it means people love your book, Howard!

HD: Well, that I like! I’m getting a lot of emails in response from being on the web. I have web sites all over the place and then I use Google to alert me of anything new that comes up.

PK: How did you and Charles Fleming share the writing of your book?

HD: We did a lot of interviewing. He flew up here a couple of times, I went down to Santa Barbara and we spent a weekend on the beach there talking. He had the whole file on me and we had the original CDs from [the PBS program] Sound Portraits of the hundred hours of interviews, so with all that we were able to put together this book.

PK: You know, I emailed him to find out how to contact you, and he really thinks very highly of you.

HD: Thank you. I’ll have to thank him for that.

PK: What was it like describing your experiences for the book? Because as a reader, it was excruciating reading the parts where you’re describing the surgeries. I don’t even want to call them surgeries. Where you describe the maimings.

HD: Yeah, or brain damage. I didn’t get to read it [for the audio book] so I don’t know. It was very difficult for me when I did the narration for the radio piece…I had a headache for almost every interview that we did.

PK: I can totally understand that because I wasn’t lobotomized, thank God, but I was abused as a child and I didn’t talk about it until I was twenty five, and then I’d get the worst headaches whenever I talked about it, because there was so much pent-up feelings and emotions from what had happened to me, it was like facing the reality of it was so difficult that I would get these horrible stress headaches.

HD: It was like living it again, almost, that’s what it seems like. To get down into that emotional level, you don’t realize it at first, because when you grow up with it, you know, it’s been covered up all those years. Then when you have to actually talk about it, it opens up the emotions to it.

PK: It sure makes it real on a whole new level, doesn’t it?

HD: Yeah, I actually got angry at my dad several times during the making of the PBS piece, and had to work through it again and again. That’s why the interview was so hard, because I really wanted to do it in a whole different way. I had to fight myself not to.

PK: You were extremely compassionate to him considering all that happened to you. I was really impressed. You handled it with more patience and love than most of us would have been able to.

HD: Well, I’m not sure that’s really the way I wanted to, to tell you the truth. I wanted to say, “Look it,” you know…

PK: Yeah, like “What the hell were you thinking?”

HD: Or even beyond that, but it wouldn’t be fit for the air.

PK: The impression I got from the PBS piece was that your father really had difficulty showing any emotions, except for maybe anger.

HD: Yeah. My dad passed, by the way.

PK: Oh, I didn’t know that, and I’m really sorry.

HD: Yeah, and I’m glad we had a chance to talk about it before his departure, because I didn’t want a situation where he wouldn’t be able to defend himself, you know, that kind of thing. That’s what I was afraid of. And actually I’m glad I did because in fact my dad gave me a lot of information that only he could’ve given me. Such as the fact that I didn’t hurt my brother Bruce. My step-mother would’ve never told me that.

PK: Well, I totally understand because I’ve gone back to my parents and made sure that I discussed directly with them what happened, because first of all I didn’t want to have any regrets myself. I wanted to know that I’d done everything I could to clear up the situation. Also, I wanted to give them a chance to clear up the situation, and unfortunately they haven’t been very supportive, but at least I know I’ve done everything I could.

HD: Yeah, that’s what’s important, that you handled it appropriately, your way.

PK: Ultimately, we have just ourselves to live with, you know?

HD: Yeah. It makes you wonder too, how some people live with it afterwards. I don’t know if I was like that if I could’ve lived with myself because I would’ve had that guilt myself. And I’m sure that he didn’t, because he really wasn’t too talkative in some areas. In fact, when I interviewed him for the radio piece he almost said everything I would not have said [if I didn’t want to look guilty.] I gave him every chance I could to say “I’m sorry” and he just wouldn’t do it.

PK: Yeah, it was like he just couldn’t do it. It was like feelings were too difficult for him.

HD: Yeah, and then we were asked to hug during one of the interviews, and he wouldn’t do that.

PK: Did he ever hug you?

HD: Yeah, we hugged. He just wouldn’t do it for them.

PK: Did he ever tell you that he loved you?

HD: Yeah, he did, but that came later. I remember that I told him that I loved him and you would think he’d say he loved me in return, but he said something like “What makes you think I didn’t know that.”

PK: Usually you’d say it back, especially to your own child.

HD: Well, like I said, every opportunity was afforded him. I don’t know why he did what he did. My Uncle Orville did tell me though that the man who left for war never came back. That might be where he lost his ability to feel emotions.

PK: Tell me what was it like reading your actual [medical] files, because just reading your book was very difficult reading for me, just as a normal reader.

HD: The files themselves are different. I got very angry with some of it because a lot of it wasn’t the truth, and there was no way to actually respond to the lies. I mean, how do you correct it? They were what changed my whole life. On one page Freeman actually wrote that my dad left the room and then my stepmother Lou told him about me hurting my brother. But most likely Freeman knew that was a lie, so he had to set up the situation so that it didn’t look like he was guilty of participating in it. It was really frustrating because you could really see through the whole thing. At least I could, because I lived it. Then it was whether I could get Charles or someone else to understand the full impact of what I knew. You can’t always tell your whole life and tell every detail of what you knew.

PK: You did a great job because it really does come through in the book. And it’s very clear that you were not a bad kid. You might have had ADHD or been a little hyperactive, but you were a good kid inside and you were a healthy kid who just liked to keep busy. You had an active brain and you liked to do things.

HD: I told Charles I really didn’t want to point fingers and blame in the book because I think the readers themselves could identify what was wrong.

PK: Absolutely. If you just describe what happened then the readers can figure it out for themselves, and you’re not spoon-feeding them everything.

HD: After all, it’s only my opinions about what happened, and maybe I don’t see it clearly.

PK: Well, it’s hard to imagine it any other way, quite frankly.

HD: A lot of the readers agree with it, but some don’t agree with it. Se'la'vie, they have a right to their opinions I guess.

PK: Has anybody actually thought the lobotomy was justified?

HD: Yes, people wrote that. Not completely justified, but they treated it like it was not an outrageous thing.

PK: So they minimized it.

HD: Like they mentioned a few things, like that maybe Freeman was only looking, in his own way, for some way of helping Lou with a difficult child. They felt I was difficult back in those days.

PK: Yes, but it still doesn’t justify that extreme action.

HD: Yeah, well I don’t know, I’m just saying what they thought. I didn’t subscribe to that, and I had to hold myself back from even writing stuff back to these people because I may not hold my tongue that well and I’m trying to, quote unquote, sell a book, and I don’t want to come off as “you see things my way or…”

PK: On the other hand, your anger would be justified. I just can’t think of any reason that it would be acceptable to do that to a twelve year old child, and, you know, I think maybe on some level your dad may have known that, and maybe that’s why he closed his eyes to it and didn’t take any responsibility.

HD: Yeah. I didn’t push it for him to have to take it during the PBS interview. I thought during the PBS interview it wasn’t real necessary for him to take responsibility for it, and can’t we just walk away from it as it is now? We already know, and that’s all that really matters, is that I know and he knows, and the readers and listeners will know, and we don’t need to go any farther than that.

PK: I think that’s a very evolved attitude about it.

HD: It wasn’t always my attitude about it, believe me.

Next time, Part II of my Howard Dully interview will delve deeper into recovery and forgiveness as I share with him why I personally found his book so meaningful.