A Conversation with Robert Rummel-Hudson, author of Schuyler's Monster (St. Martin's Press, February 2008)
2:07 PM PST, January 2, 2008, updated at 12:27 AM PDT, July 1, 2009
"Hi, we're the Rummel-Hudsons. Nice to meet you.Don't mess with our cyborg daughter."
...is one of the great lines from the book and evidence that your memoir (and your family) is far from the norm. How would you characterize Schuyler's Monster?
It's definitely a father's story; I wouldn't presume to tell Julie's story, although she certainly has one and I'd love to read it one day. I've tried to tell this story with humor and a certain amount of irreverence, because that's who I am. Our home is a rowdy place sometimes, but someone is always laughing, it seems.
In the end, I guess I'd characterize Schuyler's Monster as a love story, one in which sometimes that love is all we had to keep us going and to take up Schuyler's fight with her and for her. In the book, I describe that struggle as "fighting monsters with rubber swords", the idea being that even when you know you're up against something bigger than yourself, you do it, out of love, because what else can you do?
Memoirs are written for a lot of different reasons. Simply put, I wrote Schuyler’s Monster for the same reason that I have done just about anything of worth over the past seven years. Schuyler deserves a voice. She deserves to be heard, and the story of her fight against her invisible monster is the most inspiring one that I have known. That it has fallen to me to be the one to share it with you is the happiest accident of my life.
This memoir exists in part so that you can know that such a little girl ever existed. When you read this book, it is my hope that perhaps, against all logic and in defiance of most parents’ secret desire for the “perfect” child, you might just envy my place in her world a little.
Most of all, Schuyler’s Monster is nothing less than the best love letter to my daughter that I knew how to write. Thank you for joining me in her inarticulate but exceptional world.
Robert Rummel-Hudson spent his early years in Texas. He grew up in the West Texas oil town of Odessa, and attended college at the University of Texas at Arlington, studying music and English. During that time, he worked as a professional freelance trombonist and music instructor.
At the age of twenty-nine, he left it all behind and moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan to marry Julie Rummel. A year later, they had a daughter, Schuyler Noelle, and moved to New Haven, Connecticut to work for Yale University.
It was at Yale that Schuyler was diagnosed with Bilateral Perisylvian Polymicrogyria, a…
