From an email Lyndie sent me on 1/1/25:
Regarding my parents: They were married on Bastille Day (14 July) 1939, neither of them intending to become parents (they both had passionate vocations– my mother in ballet and art, my father in journalism) Ten months later, I arrived, and seven months later my parents divorced after a marriage that seemed doomed from the start.
My father joined the Army (where, in being introduced to the use of weaponry he quickly proved to be a danger to himself and others, so ended up as aide to a crazy general, his typing skills deemed less potentially lethal). I did not know he was my father– assuming he was simply a close friend of my mother and journalist stepfather– until 1950 when was 10. It was a great shock to me but no one seemed to realise how upset and confused I was. There was no discussion about it.
My mother had fallen in with another man–writer and columnist for the S.F. Chronicle– shortly after my dad left, and they had a son together, and were married when he was 3 months old, so he could claim his father’s name, being a SON, after all!
In those days it was still unfashionable to be a bastard (smile….) Said stepfather adopted me when I was four, confusing me by completely changing my name from Linda Anne Wallace to Lyndon O’Brien: my father had given up parental rights to me. I have always hated the name Lyndon; when I was NOT in for a whipping I was called Lyndie!
… and from an email sent two weeks later, on 1/13/25:
In fact I recall very few interactions with him [her biological father, John. T Wallace] as a young child. There is a single photo of him and me, alongside his 3rd wife, in S.F. during the war, standing in our yard on 26th St.
It was as I entered my teens, following my mother’s second divorce, that he generously befriended me, sending me Thomas Merton’s book on monasticism to acknowledge my eccentric passion.
My mom was not a bad person! Just terribly lonely and frustrated at seeing her dreams go up in smoke …