My mom may want to write a Mary Sue multi-season TV epic abo

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I know this kind of sounds like a personal issue for non-entertainment boards, but I’m not asking whether it’s wise to air my life out in the open. I have 20 years of Internet experience on her and know the base for every work is going to be sleuthed out no matter how hidden, and my recommendations to change crucial details like genders, ethnicities, or location (within reason) might be for naught in protecting my poster child virginity. My real question for you guys with some media knowledge (I have quite a bit myself but am curious for second opinions) is, in a nutshell, would it sell and therefore be worth it? She’s considered a memoir/autobio before in print and is working on an adaptation of a different, wholly unrelated work I expect to do well if handled right by producers, the success of which would enable something of a better ending than real life so far, which she thinks might be decent inspiration porn compared to somebody banging their head against walls and biting things but which I think is kind of pathetic from a middle-class TV-binger’s viewpoint. Here it is. I’m not always a very sympathetic character, kind of a brat or creep at times judging from how peers have reacted, but maybe my age makes a difference. Feel free to ask questions or give suggestions, of course, and sorry if TLDR.

Characters:

George (26, diagnosed with you-know-what at 8 when it was still called AS, college degree but part-time underemployment, may be writing myself more in reference style on special interest—God it hurts just to type that cliché; even keel, before medications got right could tantrum a bit, now bemused by the extremes of human emotion but overall content unless my long-term security’s threatened)

Mom (67, Baby Boomer, liberal but born to conservative middle-class Chicago Anglo-Scandinavian suburbanites, the father a banker and mother a nurse, who migrated west to Iowa around retirement while she stayed tied to the area, taught school, edited references, gophered at newsrooms, and worked as staff RA at U. of C. where she met Dad and married him in 1980, his third and her second after an eventually abusive Jewish prodigal son to Harvard wealth, family ostracized her and parents refused couple’s help keeping their Wisconsin lake house; intellectual with a sentimental streak, resourceful enough to survive essentially on her own from 17 up, clinically depressed though well-treated owing to mix of family history, family and community ostracism, and relationships with detached/abusive men)

Dad (73, Late Silent Generation/Pre-Boomer, skeptic libertarian child of Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors, the father a tradesperson, who settled in Boston after a spell in France, ground his way through Boston University and U. of C., edited references too where parents first collaborated, hired back by BU to head overseas study launch in Paris after fall of Wall; excellent schmoozer in ways that bleed into womanizing and not a big fan of sharing kids with exes who kind of hold the bag, fortunately, only one successful and slightly spoiled daughter 20 yrs before me, now an ophthalmologist, and one delightful, multitalented son 20 yrs after; Holocaust survival effects of being in hiding much of infancy make him wary of authorities and requests for unconditional favors according to Mom, his e-mails make him sound a little gloomier than he is in person, thinks he’s a better parent but never had much time to walk the talk and I suspect couldn’t have handled as well what transpired)

Synopsis:

Since George’s birth, the marriage is long-distance. Mom lives in gentrifying neighborhood around Chicago’s Hyde Park until George turns 3, then Dad buys us rustic McMansion in “small-town France,” a couple hours’ drive west of Paris in Vendée. He tries to get side job in nearby hamlet running culture center, close-knit community won’t let him set foot there after he helps set it up, anti-Semitism may play a role. Otherwise, he lives in Paris while we visit on weekends, as I bounce between schools, a child who developed precociously with no regression but is considered unmanageable by schools and occasionally beaten for no good reason (mild spankings, nothing Dickensian), never quite fitting in but befriending the occasional French weird kid, including a couple of girls that are my first crushes. ADHD is first diagnosis, but stimulants cause tics and were considered voodoo by the Freudian French medical establishment. Paris visits, where we mostly travel the city by subway while Dad avoids interacting, are the highlights of my life. It is Mitterrand’s France, when the EU was young and the city was no longer existential, not yet as immigrant-filled. Computers enter my life and never leave, at first connected to the Minitel, France’s quirky pre-Internet that looks and acts exactly like a retro version of touch-screen store kiosks these days.

Mom moves me to the States in about 1994 for the first of 3 therapeutic day schools, in the Chicago exurbs, and they don’t handle individual learners well; my friends were interesting if kind of weird. There’s definitely an “alternative” vibe” to the place. She is forced to home-school me much of the time, in her own way, and gradually finds the workplace closing to her. Her family refuses to help her settle into their own community in the Iowa Research Corridor, including her resentful sister and her henpecked brother’s social worker wife (a respite coordinator for those more severely affected, the first of many to see me with skepticism and resentment they project on Mom). We move back by 1995, this time trying a prestigious private school called Gerson in Paris (they let fascists with Opus Dei links teach there, I just found out); I am disciplined as a disruptor for being curious, mainly with exile from classrooms, and make no new friends. Meanwhile, Mom teaches English at Paris Dauphine University, mainly gen-ed for the more social-sciences-focused place, gets ostracized by fellow teachers and administrators and loved by Gen-X students for teaching American lit like an American who knows her s**t and not posting kids’ grades in public to shame them. The students will go on to create French pop culture of today and/or be the bureaucrats ripping the Eurozone apart, while Mom got a f**kton of bad references and has never been gainfully employed since.

Mom would move me back to the US, more or less permanently (save for two plane visits in 2001 and 2011), in 1996. It is the Clinton age, with Congress in the maw of the Gingrich beast, America full of fin-de-siècle optimism, and special ed booming in the wake of the ADA. Dad proceeds to alienate his secretary with extensive extracurricular trips that likely include an affair with his next wife, a Russian educator 20 years his junior whom he contacted on business there during the Yeltsin opening who eventually moved to France proper. We stay in touch by phone, and the college kids keep coming there. Mom rents a duplex in Wilmette, just north of Evanston on Chicago’s North Shore next to a lovely Korean-American family, including a teenage daughter who becomes a sort of big sister on the few occasions that we interact that don’t involve their jumpy dog on the neighboring patio. Around the corner are a family with police connections, a hankering for foster kid money, and a nasty attitude when confronted with a parent that gets their kids’ special needs more than they do. Mom’s job becomes phone tag, first with the local elementary whose teachers and special-ed aides think we’re both bothers. In any case, she gets connective-tissue disease, later supplemented by diverticulitis, and becomes more exhausted and less mobile, making work more draining had she attempted it in her precarious position. My only friends there are a couple kids way into Nintendo 3D platformers whose parents were a bit dysfunctional but held it together on his grocery salary until he breaks his back and they start resenting us while their kids grow into bicycling and shun me. We go into the city to see the museums and aquariums and off to the beach nearby to walk, and my literacy grows in tandem with my Internet use, which dates from that age of dial-up. After hypersensitivities that turned me off of audiovisual entertainment as a young child (or perhaps attention span issues) fade, I become more of a film and TV buff, but the quick rush of music becomes an enduring passion. In 1998, I get my AS diagnosis, long suspected by my mother and only 4 years off the DSM-IV, with the help of neurologists and one in a long chain of therapists and life coaches (the last was also a martial arts instructor, as was one of my hairdressers later in life). By 3rd grade, I am in another therapeutic day school, this time suburban but relatively close, and elementary-level handling is overall excellent, leading to deep friendships and even my only real intimacy ever with a girl (dry humping/heavy petting, no penetration or orgasm) that nevertheless are cut off when I leave as the middle school falls apart in sixth grade, which wouldn’t have been a problem if I’d been granted access to the greatest school on Earth, New Trier, which the district wouldn’t let me enroll in. My mother’s parents visit occasionally; the mother is an enigma cranky after a stroke, the father an affable WWII vet who served in the radio corps in the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Usually, we wind up visiting on the outskirts of Chicagoland.

In 2002, Mom and Dad divorce, and she is armed by 20 years of marriage with a decree requiring child support and maintenance payments, which he promptly throws a monkey wrench into by marrying the Russian. He goes through the motions the next six years, gradually building his new life in Chirac-era France with no role for my mother except that of crazy harridan he talks to occasionally and a bit begrudgingly, neither of them setting foot in the other’s country. The same year as the divorce, wanting real equity for me, they co-sign at the height of the housing bubble for a nice house on the outskirts of Galena, near Illinois’s northwestern corner. The rent has been going up in Wilmette, due in part to pressure from upper-crust neighbor Winnetka, and the Galena site combines proximity to a sheltered workshop (school failures made my prospects look quite dim at this point) with the exercise and purpose of an orchard, vineyard, and black walnut grove from whence the prior owners were retiring. Mom’s a bit romantic and mooney-eyed about it, and Dad’s skeptical but signs on the dotted line despite intense, prophetic pressure from neighboring property interests to not sell to us; the mortgage makes us one of the housing bubble’s many victims. My father lives with us for some of his last years, getting to know the local elderly but ultimately unable to deal with our menagerie of pets (we had a cat with an unexpected family in France, two cats adopted from allergic people in Wilmette, and those same cats plus an adopted, aging retriever in Galena) and in a state of growing hostile dependency on my mother, leading to him leaving for her brother’s environs in Iowa.

I get into Galena’s public high school by the skin of my teeth on the strength of a local therapist’s support (great guy, Boomer like my parents, still keep in touch, none of my many counselors in schools has ever come close) and standardized test results off the charts (Woodcock-Johnson, etc.), and immediately become both a bullying victim (never physical, though) and the highest scorer in decades if not ever on the school’s quiz bowl team, a once-popular pastime now maintained by the district as filler to help kids earn extra credits and coached by the slippery head of the drama club. The next-door neighbors quickly turn vile after helping with some housework, revealing themselves to be xenophobic localists enamored with drunken partying on the other side of their lot; they ran construction and mowing businesses that openly operated without historical district permits and in violation of environmental laws (which they held violent grudges against my mother for reporting and got away with due to local government and police connections), and may well have been cover for drug trafficking or other unsavory activity in the Tri-State area (Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin). Not people to cross, and my mother doesn’t suffer fools gladly. In the summer of 2004, America now in the full throes of redneck fascism a la Bush, she is threatened by one of them with a bulldozer near their property and later drives into an illegal parking spot the neighbors routinely use during a sinister shindig, where they block the car and threaten her until she orders me and Grandpa back to the house, after which the neighbors call police who yank her out of the car, maul her, arrest her on trumped up resisting and battery charges w/o evidence, and stash her in jail without charge until we bail her out. Multiple attorneys exploit and abandon her, the local public defender refuses to help and would likely railroad her anyway, and she winds up pleading guilty and getting community service, taking years to expunge her record while the neighbors successfully portray her as the “lady who scratched the cop with her keys,” said cop being roid-bulked and a foot taller than her and our doc refusing to give her the X-rays that showed her injuries. In 2005, the unusually fair-minded outsider (for the conservative town) school principal dies and the assistant gym teacher with family connections takes over, and arranges with band and drama club to allow quiz bowl team members involved with those activities (practically all of them except me, save for some lighting work on a few plays) to take rain checks from bowl whenever they felt like it and still get credit, removing expertise in classes I hadn’t taken yet and preventing the possibility of state championship placement like we got the first year. I drift from one group to another, getting shunned by a group of stoners who think I’m a narc because of my truth-telling for instance, developing a few decent ties with teammates, but nobody ever invites me into my life and an understandably skittish Mom fills me with scare stories of my possible exploitation at gatherings in a town with little to do but drink and drive (which an acquaintance got injured in the same night as my mother’s arrest), maybe with good reason. No dating or sex (I was accused of stalking for saying hi too much freshman year, kind of kills your reputation in a small school, even though the girl became a good friend), no hanging out, just school, extracurriculars, and hobbies.

By the end of junior year, I go back to home school, ultimately finishing online AP courses, getting a GED, and getting accepted everywhere I apply for college in 2007 after ACT and SAT scores in high percentiles. Afraid of change, socially burned out, and unable to hack the essays and visits at many colleges, I settle for one in driving distance in Dubuque. It’s a Catholic school and seems idyllic, but I almost get rejected for allegedly yelling at my mother during orientation (I thought a girl was laughing at me, calmed down pretty quickly, but my Mom’s despair and embarrassment was viewed as my making her cry by a nosy English teacher) and quickly anger a devout acquaintance I make by whining about her unfriendliness on Facebook and calling her some names on a rant in a tiny discussion group. I am once again ostracized and never regain my footing fully (she gets the school to enforce a non-legally-binding no-contact order despite my never making any kind of contact, and I honor it), not so much from a small student body as from simply never knowing how to go about things and having increasingly elaborate Internet hobbies occupying more and more of my spare time. In 2008, as I lock in my three-quarters scholarship won in an essay contest to start school, Dad is forced into retirement by a Recession-wracked BU and struggles to get back his Social Security, acting cagey and dishonest with my mother as he begins withholding maintenance called for in the divorce decree, not just the no longer applicable child support. Mom scrambles in vain for work but we fall behind on the mortgage without his money, and by my senior year (2010-2011), the property is in foreclosure and bought for a song by the neighbors who ruined my mother’s ability to get a job there. Meanwhile, Dad has my brother with his new wife and therefore another excuse not to send the money.

A sometimes prickly and misogynist but generally hands-off landlord, brother to the neighbor, lets me, Mom, and our only current pet, a cat Mom adopted from a tragic garbage-can litter situation after his subsequent vet fixing, pick up the pieces as one of the downtrodden. Without payment of rent a year in advance, means-tests would block the food stamps we relied on and taxes would eviscerate her life savings, all dried up this past year. I graduate in 2011, newly politicized and now sharing my mother’s leftist politics as a result of our recession experiences and the behavior of the conservative town of Galena into which we tried to fit. Our car goes to salvage and I spend my last semester taking the bus to campus. Dubuque is much more cosmopolitan and solidly Democrat-voting outside of a coterie of working-class white Trump cranks on the northwest side, but I and Mom are still lonely, and my college acquaintances and professors, while nice, never really extended themselves. Friends from one environment never carry over to another for me, and I lose the stamina to shoot social niceties ad nauseam when I have nothing to offer them and they offer me nothing even if they can. I struggled to find motivation to get a job and to hold them down once I got them, usually focusing on call centers because my clumsiness made me afraid of blue-collar work and I had nothing but a liberal arts B.A., albeit summa cum laude, to my name with considerable but average debt to my name. I switch from deferments to income-based repayments and in 2012, Mom’s estranged brother lands us a 25-year-old but mostly un-used car after semi-reconciliation at their father’s funeral, while in 2013 I get my current job at a call center with no dress code beyond high school and flexible schedules, of which I work three days a week eight hours. Issues with meds and the like sort themselves out with the godsend of Medicaid expansion certified by ObamaCare, which I shall defend to the death if need be until universal goes above and beyond, and the work family becomes some of the most supportive I’ve ever found at the coach level, though I don’t get along much better with co-workers in the other phone cubicles than I did with classmates and have resigned myself to a solitary but pleasant existence in a small, small world. A friend of Mom’s from college ponied up some money from old stock investments to move June 1 to a place closer to my job and our car repair, and the place is a better deal anyway, in the nick of time since my Dad pulled the plug on any more than the standard 1/5 of his obligations he sends, in fairness due in part to his consultancies with colleges drying up and the crazy European situation where his Russian wife’s assets are looked on with suspicion by the EU and her family’s villa in the Crimea threatened briefly by the Ukraine war. He lives in the France of Hollande and longs for the Russia of Putin, the Poland of Kaczynski, maybe even the Hungary of Orban, much to my chagrin, despite knowing full well how fascism is not the answer first-hand, and the wave of Syrian refugees brings back bad memories for him as we both wonder who will get the nuclear football next. My life and Mom’s are decent, his is glum but OK, but it’s no happy ending, and unless her other screenplay takes off, I don’t think anyone will see it as escapist good or bad.

Anyway, what do you think?