{"id":346,"date":"2009-10-27T20:59:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-27T20:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading2\/?p=346"},"modified":"2009-10-27T20:59:00","modified_gmt":"2009-10-27T20:59:00","slug":"my-lobotomy-by-howard-dully","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/2009\/10\/my-lobotomy-by-howard-dully.html","title":{"rendered":"My Lobotomy by Howard Dully"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was a little surprised by how unimportant the lobotomy in My Lobotomy<\/a> seemed to be. Howard Dully’s story is a sad one of a boy who may always have been difficult being raised by a stepmother who didn’t want a difficult stepson. So there wasn’t much sympathy for little Howard, which probably made his behavior even worse. At some point the stepmother decided that he’d best be helped by a lobotomy. At the time, lobotomies were somewhat in vogue, being trumpeted by a doctor who’d invented the procedure and traveled around the country performing them.<\/p>\n

Apparently the results were unpredictable. In Howard’s case, it’s hard to say whether or not there were results. He goes on to have an even more troubled teenage and young adult life with a lot of drugs and alcohol involved. Eventually he gets himself into recovery. Part of that is facing up to what his stepmother had done to him, which he didn’t understand at the time it happened. He becomes something of a poster boy for people who underwent unnecessary lobotomies at the hands of this doctor, having a documentary made about him and giving talks on the radio and to audiences.<\/p>\n

I can understand how cathartic both the original procedure and the later exploration of all its ramifications must have been to the author, but to the reader, it’s hard to be sure the lobotomy influenced his life that much. His story is not unlike other stories of youngsters who didn’t get much love at home (and even those who did) and discover drugs and alcohol at an early age. That doesn’t diminish the complete irresponsibility of his stepmother (and more so father) in having this procedure done on him, of course.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was a little surprised by how unimportant the lobotomy in My Lobotomy seemed to be. Howard Dully’s story is a sad one of a boy who may always have been difficult being raised by a stepmother who didn’t want a difficult stepson. So there wasn’t much sympathy for little Howard, which probably made his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biosauto-biosmemoirs","category-non-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}