“I Love You More: A Reluctant Memoir”
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By Joan Burleson; Atmosphere Press, 2023; 379 pages $25 paperback, $9.99 Kindle.
The subtitle “A Reluctant Memoir” is key to the telling of this tragic story. Joan Burleson is the daughter of Betty Jean (later Jean or Jeannie) and Boyd Burleson, an Anchorage couple in a toxic relationship that led to a horrific attack in 1973. The author, a teenager at the time, later received the police file from the retired detective who’d kept it. Her book traces family origins along with events of the time and ramifications on those who were affected.
Older Alaskans will remember the news at the time. A man broke into a home, tied up the two people inside, and poured jugs of sulfuric acid over their heads and shoulders, severely burning and nearly blinding them. They underwent long hospitalizations and numerous operations involving skin grafting and reconstructions, and they suffered for the rest of their lives from pain and disfigurement. The case was rather easily solved from purchase, airplane, and car rental records, although it took some time to conclude with prison sentences. Boyd Burleson, unhappy that his abused wife had divorced him, had hired a hitman to maim her and the man she was seeing.
Beginning with a visit to her father many years later, in which he begged her for forgiveness, Joan Burleson sets up the central question of what kind of man Boyd was and whether she could, in fact, forgive him.
After that brief first chapter, the author steps back to tell her family’s history in the hills of western North Carolina, where both sides had lived as far back as anyone could remember. Her parents married as teenagers and had three children. Each of these early chapters begins with a transcript of an interview with her mother. (This format continues throughout, with at least short statements from various family members and others.) Boyd was irresponsible and manipulative from the start, as well as an abuser of alcohol, and the household was loud with fighting. There were, however, other family members around, a refuge for the children.
When he learned of the 1964 earthquake in Anchorage, Boyd saw an opportunity to start over. The city needed workers, and he easily found employment. He soon prevailed in luring the two older children to join him, then used them to convince his wife and younger daughter, then nine years old, to make the trip. Neither Jean nor Joan took naturally to Alaska. The cold and snow, without proper clothing, were unpleasant, and their “hillbilly” accents were mocked. Boyd’s promises to be “a new man,” a kinder, gentler version of himself, weren’t realized. The author writes, “If there was ever a child who hated her life, it was me in Anchorage, Alaska in 1965.” Jean, who had always worked hard and had given up a good job in North Carolina, found a new job at a car dealership and supported the family.
The author’s descriptions of Anchorage, physically and socially, in the mid-1960s and early 1970s are vividly drawn. In 1966, the family bought the last house at the edge of the collapsed bluff, and the area (later transformed into Earthquake Park) became Joan’s playground. “I wandered among jagged concrete foundations, kicked at the battered refrigerators and sodden shoes that littered the ground. I didn’t grasp the magnitude of the wreckage back then; it was just my escape from the house.” Gradually, Joan found her way into northern life. She rode her bike at night, “breathing the outdoors right into myself.” She took dance lessons, joined a cross-country ski club, and acted in community theatre productions. As a teen, avoiding home, she hung out at the Gaslight Bar, drinking cokes and playing the jukebox (and never being carded.)
Boyd Burleson added drugs to his alcohol addiction and brought other women into their homes. Jean, a devout Christian, would not consider divorce — until she finally did. Joan was 17 and headed to college in North Carolina in 1973. Her father assaulted her mother and talked of killing her. He killed his son’s dog. Her uncle came and took Boyd away, to Texas.
Much later, the author discovered “possible sociopathic tendencies” in a psychiatric report regarding her father. An average person might well have made that same diagnosis, based on Boyd’s obsessive and dangerous behavior, which included delusions that his ex-wife would return to him and his repeated threats to kill her. Joan, at college, took psychology classes and was chilled to learn of an experiment with drowning rats — one meant to suggest the power of hope but that meant something very different to her. Her father, that same fall, prevailed upon her to meet with the “shrink” arranged by her grandfather, who presented her with Boyd’s one-sided story. “I was chilled, realizing the miscarriage of the inquiry, the immense failure of limited evidence. The power of controlling the narrative and the gross injustice of false facts.”
The second half of the book, beginning with Boyd’s plans to seriously injure his wife and the man she was seeing (and would later marry), is both harrowing as a true-crime account and introspective as a personal story that examines both the then and now. The author details the aftermath, her mother’s deep Christian faith and the pact she made with her God, and the effects on her and her siblings. She grapples with her own religious and spiritual beliefs and the meaning of forgiveness.
Joan Burleson, as reluctant as she must have been to revisit the trauma of her family’s past, has risen beyond the hurt and anger to share what it is for a child to live in fear and instability — and how generational family patterns can either continue or be broken. It’s no surprise to learn that she eventually earned a law degree and practiced law for many years. Today, living in Denver, she creates architectural glass art.
[Book review: Landscapes of family and place flourish in this Alaska memoir]
[Book review: A sibling memoir investigates a long-held family secret]