Dear Mom: I'd Rather You Write About Me, Not You

Coming from a family of writers, I am all too familiar with the delicate issue you raise, Bonnie, of whether and how to write about one’s family. But I don’t think it’s fair to assume that just because Anna aired her problems with her mother’s marriage to a con man on the web, she hasn’t also had the “heart-to-heart talk” you wish for her with her mother. Nor do I think her piece came across as entirely “disapproving,” as you called it. There’s an interesting power dynamic between this suddenly giddy and irrational mother and her skeptical, now-protective daughter, and it’s one that Anna, as one half of the duo, has the right to hash out in print; provided, at least according to my family’s rules, that her mother get a chance to approve, veto, or tweak the final draft before it’s published. (As Anna wrote in a comment on Bonnie’s post, her mother did read and make corrections to the piece.)

For me, the most uncomfortable part of having a writer for a mother isn’t when she writes about me. She always shows me those articles first, and they’re usually not surprising—I knew her thoughts on our mother-daughter book club or my sister’s and my visible bra straps before reading the drafts. The unsettling part is when she writes about herself. With those personal essays, I feel like a bunch of strangers are learning things about my mother right along with me—her struggle over whether to get tested for polycystic kidney disease; her feelings of vulnerability when she lost her sense of smell. I had a particularly bizarre experience the other day when I e-mailed my mom to check in on how my grandmother’s doctor’s appointment had gone, and she wrote back with a draft of her piece describing not just the cardiologist’s advice (open-heart surgery) but her difficulty coming to terms with her mother’s mortality.

As hard as it may have been for Anna’s mother to read a piece about her own love life, it might be even more unnerving for her to read one about Anna’s love life.

Tags: mother daughter relationships

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Samantha Henig is the associate editor of Double X, and can be reached at samantha.henig@doublex.com.

Comments

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By: John562 | Mon, 02/08/2010 - 16:10

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Comment away, Mom!

By: Samantha Henig | Fri, 06/19/2009 - 15:00

Yes, happy to have you comment, Mom. And happy to have you writing about yourself; in a way, I guess it's better that I at least know about your thoughts on being diagnosed with PKD or watching Grammy make a decision about surgery -- even if knowing means I find out along with all the other readers of the NYT.

But hey, if you want to send me advance copies of your personal pieces, too, even if they don't mention me or my bra straps or my less-than-stellar soccer skills, I promise I'll stick to whatever embargo you set.

As the mother figure in this

By: robinhenig | Fri, 06/19/2009 - 13:42

As the mother figure in this post, I probably should comment – right, Sam? I know this is a dodgy issue, how much to reveal about your family in your writing – though, as you know, I tend to side with David Sedaris, who once defended himself when his sister accused him of co-opting her story by saying, “Well, YOU weren’t going to do anything with it.” When you live with a writer, it’s all material.

I must say, though, that I never thought about the flip side of the equation – that as hard as it might be for you to read what I write about you (and it was kind of you not to mention that piece I wrote about your all-girl’s soccer team, which offended you because I suggested that you weren’t the world’s best player), it’s even harder for you to read what I write about myself. I’m sorry about that. But really, I don’t think there’s anything I can do differently. Your sister has asked me not to write about her anymore, and so I don’t. I won’t even write about you if you specifically ask me not to. My own story, though, is mine, and sometimes I want to write it down – even if it hurts, even if it makes me look bad, even if it’s disturbing to the people who thought they knew me best. If I’m going to stay in the writing business, this is probably an inevitable bit of collateral damage.