So it’s Mother’s Day this Sunday. I know that because all of my magazines are full of Mom stories. Mostly, they wax eloquent with a slight hiccough: “I love[d] my mom BUT.” Jamie Lee Curtis has another piece in More this month talking about her mother, Janet Leigh. It’s not very good–as a piece of writing that is. Her prose is awkward, as if she’s uncomfortable with her words and her thoughts, and maybe she was.
It’s tough writing about a parent, particularly a same-sex parent. Your relationship is so filled with twists and turns and enough layers that a slice of it would resemble a cross-section of a mountain.
Is it even possible to capture it on the page? I think so, but you have to do it in bits. The temptation when writing a memoir is to start at the beginning and plow through to the end. Just writing those words, I start to nod off. How about starting at the end? Or the middle? How about reconstructing that mountain by going through those separate layers of silt and stone and soil and writing about each one as a story unto itself?
I went to a workshop on “How to Write About Your Mother” last weekend, and one thing that I clearly got from listening to the other writers reading their work was this: our relationships with our parents are best expressed in the small stories we tell about them. Grand gestures, attempts at summation don’t work as well as just narrating that one time on that one day when something small but significant happened.
photo credit: water.usgs.gov/ympb/ images/cross-section.jpg
