I've been watching with some interest the case of 'Clark Rockefeller' and his abduction of his child, Reigh Mills 'Snooks' Boss following a court-supervised custody visit last week.
Obviously kidnapping children and lying to your wife about your identity for 12 years is, well, a trifle naughty. But I am fascinated by people who are able to make up their own past. On one level it is so bizarre but on another perfectly logical: don't like who you are? Why not pretend you are a scion of one America's richest oil and bank families?
In a way, it must be oh so liberating, to cast away whatever the accident of birth made you and remake yourself in your own image. I takes a bit of gallus as well, but it must be exhausting. Remembering your stories and keeping them straight must be exhausting (various reports say Rockefeller said he was an economist, physicist, mathematician and 'working top secret for the Pentagon'; police say he had at least 4 aliases).
One of my favourite novelists, Patrick O'Brian, writer of the Aubrey/Maturin stories, reinvented himself. He was born in England as Richard Russ, yet after WWII rid himself of his first wife and a dying spina bifida plagued child, concocting a phony patrician Irish-Catholic lineage, then married Countess Mary Tolstoy. The Maturin character in the books is a spy, and there are a number of passages about how he finds it difficult to constantly lie to everyone. Re-reading these bits with the knowledge of O'Brian's life adds a bit of poignancy.
I wonder how common this is? Obviously in today's retina scanning, ID card culture, it is far more difficult, but Mr Rockefeller shows that it isn't impossible. But how much do you have to hate your life, and yourself, to do it?
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