potrero view

Potrero Hill activist, author and Jungian psychotherapist’s poignant memoir offers an intimate portrait of three generations of San Francisco women

October 2009

Molly’s Daughter Explores What Women Really Want

By Lori Higa

Providing historical context and details she researched over nine years, the just turned 80-year-old Margaret Frings Keyes, a Wisconsin Street resident, takes readers on a gripping journey that traces her life from Butte, Montana to San Francisco.  In spare, Hemingwayesque prose Keyes recounts the lives of her grandmother, mother and self as if they’re vivid characters in a page-turning thriller, with a skillful fiction writer’s voice that belies her credentials as author of numerous psychology books on subjects ranging from enneagrams to art therapy.

The memoir begins in the turn-of-the-century mines of Butte, Montana, where her maternal grandfather fights a union battle against Anaconda Copper, and loses his life. Keyes then treats us to a tour of Depression- and Prohibition-era San Francisco:  the 1934 labor union strike, in which her father was a participant; growing up working class in the Irish-Catholic Sunset district; getting accepted to the exclusive Notre Dame des Victoires high school; family members who participated in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish civil war; marriage, divorce; her involvement in the personal empowerment movement; and eventual landings in Potrero Hill and Muir Beach.    

Along the way, Keyes – the only person in the memoir with an alias, “Lizby,” short for Elizabeth, after her maternal grandmother – grows up, the sole daughter to two younger brothers in a working class family, filled with a nagging sense that something’s not right; a feeling exacerbated by an emotionally volatile mother, Molly, who kept a secret.  It was only after her mother’s death that Lizby learned from her grandmother that she was the child of her mother’s affair with a charismatic young Jewish doctor who offered abortion rather than marriage on learning of Molly’s pregnancy.

Molly was a complex cauldron of emotion, swinging from feelings of love and pride to rage.  She eventually married Hans Frings, a bright and hardworking, but unaffectionate, German International Longshore and Warehouse Union member, around whom Lizby always felt a sense of tension.    

The most shocking revelation of Keyes’ memoir is what Lizby learns much later in life:  that her biological father committed suicide in a downtown San Francisco hotel room, years after his proper society marriage to a Jewess concert musician.  There’s sense of sadness that imbues this segment of the memoir.  As readers, we’re allowed the luxury of mourning those losses with hindsight that Keyes herself could not.

The last quarter of the memoir goes by swiftly, as Keyes describes several decades of her life via poetic flashbacks.  We learn about her development and life work as a psychotherapist; her involvement in early LSD experimentation and with the giants of the new psychology movement, including Synanon, Eric Berne of transactional analysis fame, Fritz Perls and other psychiatrist-mentors based in Big Sur’s Esalen; her love affairs with a gay man and a vibrant, handsome mathematician, who tragically died of heart surgery in the prime of his life.  Lizby chooses to end her loveless marriage to a tax attorney, ironically after publishing a popular book called Staying Married, for which she endured a high exposure, emotionally wrenching publicity tour.

Perhaps the most affecting aspect of Molly's Daughter is Keyes' courage in embarking on what for many would be the hardest journey of their lives:  delving deeply into self, facing personal demons, achieving growth and understanding in the process.  In the act of writing her life story, Keyes is able to heal, and create the person she aspires to be, rather than existing as a prisoner of suffocating family secrets.  Not only has Keyes written a rich, insightful book, she does a yeoman’s job mining her own working-class genealogy, connecting the dots to our nation’s current plunge into economic chaos, anti-union politics, joblessness, corporate greed and the need for universal health care. 

Today, Keyes is focused on two qualities that are her signposts to living life authentically, and transformatively.  “For me, the essential aspects of human consciousness are humor – the creativity of seeing wild interconnections – and empathy –our sense of caring for each other and our experiences.”

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