Thirty Rooms to Hide In: Insanity, Addiction, and Rock ‘n Roll in the Shadow of the Mayo Clinic [Book Review]

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

There’s a reason Tolstoy’s famous first line is so memorable— it rings true. However, unhappy alcoholic families have a lot in common. There are the textbook incidents— late night black outs, physical violence, the eventual rock bottom— and the same fears— of embarrassment, of harm. And there’s the usual cast of characters: the guilt-ridden enabler, the scapegoat, the clown.

Thirty Rooms to Hide In: Insanity, Addiction, and Rock ‘n Roll in the Shadow of the Mayo Clinic is Luke Longstreet Sullivan’s memoir about growing up with his alcoholic father. Set against a 1950’s backdrop of “boredom, paranoia, racism and sexual repression,” what differentiates this tale from other alcoholic memoirs is that Luke Sullivan’s father was not your typical street wino. He was Dr. Roger Sullivan, Mayo Clinic’s famous orthopedic surgeon. Of course, the devastation left in the alcoholic’s wake is no less severe the more money you’ve got, and Sullivan is honest in his portrayal of the day-to-day dramas. His residual pain is evident, in spite of being masked by humor, especially in throwaway lines like “That Roger could sleep at night while exiling his wife and six children to a tiny house is testimony to the miracles of fine charcoal mellowing in the sugar-maple barrels of Kentucky distilleries.”

The book begins with his father’s funeral where we find Dr. Sullivan’s six sons trying to hold back peals of laughter, and not tears— a scene that sets the tone for the dysfunction to follow. Sullivan writes, “In 1958, the term ‘chemical dependency’ didn’t exist...you could smack the wife, wreck the car, take a shit in the neighbor’s bird bath, and as long as you showed up for work on time all anybody did was roll his eyes.”

The title refers to the family’s house The Millstone, located on “Pill Hill” an affluent suburb in Rochester Minnesota near the Mayo Clinic. “There were thirty rooms to hide in but most were too scary to be in all alone.”While Luke, the fifth in a family of six boys, is the protagonist of his own memoir, the real star is his mother Myra whose patience and grace under such horrific abuse (being shot at by her drunk husband, for one), is astonishing.

An avid reader and writer herself, Myra wrote letters daily to her father, RJL, and these letters give the most accurate account of what was happening in the Sullivan household. “The two of them filled the Blue Books with such detail about their daily lives that even if long-distance telephone had been affordable, the sheer volume of information they exchanged would have moved through the wire like a goat through a python.” It’s also through these letters that we are given glimpses of Roger in a sympathetic light, which helps to undercut Sullivan’s often (and understandably) bitter tone.

While Sullivan’s transitions can be clunky at times (photographs and old home movies often spur the exposition, a literary device that’s not so graceful when employed more than a few times in 310 pages), the story is best paced when he is paying attention to the heart of the narrative: his father’s disease and the effects on the family, and not the boys’ goings on at the Millstone. Much like a child wanting to run away from drunk Daddy’s chaos, Sullivan often leaves us hanging at key moments (for example, the father returns home after a dramatic leave) in order to tell us about inside jokes or make believe games or the band his brothers used to play in - a strategy that seems more like flinching than moving the plot forward. Meanwhile the reader is left wondering: But what about Roger?

Sullivan was twelve when his father died, so he presents several points of view and various documents in order to piece together the full story. He does not skimp on research. We are given clips from present-day interviews with his mother, brothers, and his father’s old boss at the Mayo clinic. Sullivan also recreates dreams, daydreams and memories set in scene from a young Luke’s point of view. Documents range from snippets from personal diaries, to medical papers, psychiatric records and autopsy reports. This pastiche-like approach is appropriate in that it nicely mirrors the way memory works, a hodgepodge of eye witness, recollection and hearsay.

In the end, the effect of Sullivan's eclectic manner of storytelling might also be similar to the feeling he must have had when piecing together the details. When several perspectives of the same story are presented, what’s often left to discern from the pile of evidence is what can’t be found at all— the emotional truth or, in the case of this particular family, the “sadness in the detritus of a separated household.”