Suzannah Lessard

The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family

by Suzannah Lessard

Book cover

I don't have a personal photo of the distinguished author Suzannah Lessard, who died on January 29, and the photos of her on the web are very likely copyrighted, so I am going for the cover of one of her books as the header.

I didn't know Lessard, though I am reasonably sure I was aware of the existence of The Architect of Desire; probably I read a review of it in the NY Times when it was published in the 1990s. But reading the Times obituary (gift link) for her, I was rather unnerved. Here's what got me, all quotations from the obit:

Ms. Lessard, her five sisters and their parents lived in a 19th-century farmhouse known as the Red Cottage. It had sloping floors, patched plaster walls and a fraught atmosphere, largely created by her father, who required quiet for his work as a composer, as well as other, more brutal concessions from his daughters. 

...

Ms. Lessard’s memoir was decades in the making. It was the book she could not write, and yet felt compelled to write, and the writer’s block she suffered often compromised her other work; for much of the time she was struggling with it, she was a staff writer at The New Yorker.

...

 Ms. Lessard had never previously spoken about how her father had visited her in her bedroom when she was a child. Yet on New Year’s Day in 1989, one of her sisters called a meeting of the siblings and, one by one, each sister confided that she, too, had experienced sexual encounters with their father.

Over the years, each had tried to convince herself that the encounters weren’t abuse — that their childhoods had been safe and that their father’s behavior was somehow normal. Their memories, finally voiced, gave Ms. Lessard “a sense of something like the sound barrier breaking,” she wrote, “a psychic reverberation.”

She added: “With it, the world cracked open, and inside was the world.” 

...

 After the sisters’ revelations, the family entered therapy, but their father claimed not to remember the encounters they described. (The Lessards had divorced decades earlier.) Ms. Lessard said that exposing her father in her book was not an act of revenge but of survival.

Right. He could not remember sexually abusing his six daughters over goodness knows how many years.

When I looked him up, I realized I was slightly acquainted with her father. Suzannah Lessard's composer father John Lessard was on the faculty of SUNY/Stony Brook when I was a student there from 1980 to 1982. Once I knew that, I had no trouble conjuring up an accurate picture of him.

He was by then married to his second wife, Sarah Fuller, a musicologist who was also on the faculty. He was retired from the faculty by the time The Architect of Desire was published, and died seven years later, but you bet I am now wondering about whether and what kind of discussions he might have had about the book and his past with Prof. Fuller, and how she reacted to what he said. They remained married until his death in 2003.