And then, relatedly, that Samuel Delany quote about the St. The Spanish word muchedumbre, which means something like crowd or throng or undulating mass of bodies. I guess when I was younger I thought I’d either quit or be cured. On the other hand I’m surprised to find how vivid the lifelong torments remain. I’m surprised to find that I’m a good enough mother to myself. I think I haven’t done anything but then I see I’ve done the one thing that enables me to go on. Sometimes I “wake up” from rough stretches in my life and am amazed by the way I’ve unconsciously rationed my energies towards the projects or opportunities that are most likely to sustain my writing life. Even though I’m a Taurus, I experience myself as disloyal and impatient, so the evidence of my own steadiness always takes me by surprise. I like this question, with its implication that dedication is itself surprising. What has surprised you most about your dedication to this writer’s path? But poetry remains a place where I can keep secrets out loud. Yikes, that alliteration! Over time I’d have to learn that my poetry couldn’t stay proper if it was actually going to help me live. Poetry permitted my precious feelings-I was an only child, a crybaby, and a precocious people pleaser-a proper place. Soon after, I would discover that I don’t have a gift for plot, and poetry presented itself as an alternative to storytelling. But when they ask what’s most important to me, I say “my family, my feelings… and oh! The big book of stories I’m working on.” This is the early evidence. The Little Princess, The Secret Garden, etc. “They were not white you would only call them that if the word ‘white’ meant something special to you.” Well then! Like Kincaid I think I was influenced by what I had been told was literary. Much later I’d read Jamaica Kincaid’s essay “On Seeing England for the First Time,” where she visits the white cliffs of Dover after reading about them in countless poems. When they ask me where I’d like to take a vacation, I say “England-because of all the HISTORY!” Kind of a colonized mind moment. There’s a video of me in second grade for a school time capsule project, where the second graders interview each other, and many of my answers are eccentric. Their early years were times of traumatic loss, unhappily dominated by death and human frailty.Įlegantly assembled and presented, Writers and Their Mothers will appeal to everyone interested in biography, literature, and creativity in general.Weirdly, yes. Many of the contributors evoke the ideal with fond and loving memories: understanding, selfless, spiritual, tender, protective, reassuring and self-assured mothers who created environments favorable to the development of their children’s gifts.Īt the opposite end of the parenting spectrum, however, we also see tortured mothers who ignored, interfered with, smothered or abandoned their children. In compelling detail they bring to life the thoughts, work, loves, friendships, passions and, above all, the influence of mothers upon their literary offspring from Shakespeare to the present. Ian McEwan, Margaret Drabble, Martin Amis, Rita Dove, Andrew Motion and Anthony Thwaite are among the twenty-two distinguished contributors of original essays to this landmark volume on the profound and frequently perplexing bond between writer and mother.
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