My Mom Is My Literary Meal Ticket

My mother and I are neither perfect nor (I hope) excessively flawed, but we are definitely negotiating a growth period in our relationship, as I am newly a bona fide adult. I will be getting married in less than a year and am feeling like I need to shed the vestiges of overgrown adolescence that still linger. This molting will not be easy for either of us. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen my mother really break down into tears. But she’s already informed me that at my wedding, she’ll be bawling in the front row.

My mother has always been the most frequently recurring presence in my first-person writing. An e-mail she wrote inspired the website I co-founded, Postcards From Yo Momma [2], which collects the random and sometimes profound electronic missives sent from mothers to adult children. This led to a book, Love, Mom [3], based on the site, and a Talk of the Town [4] in which she is accurately described as a “psychiatrist with a cool haircut.” I’d like to think that in my writing she comes off as an intelligent, appropriately involved (if occasionally absurd) person. But now that we’re practicing at being (sort of) equals, I wanted to give my mom her own say. Instead of me writing about her, we’ll write together, or at least I will quote her extensively without any snide commentary or aw-shucks asides. We’ll cover my upcoming nuptials, maternal guilt-trips, aging parents, armchair shrinkery, and our shared love for Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

I’ll start on safe, easy territory, with books.

In the space of a few weeks, I got several press releases about nonfiction books on recovering from your narcissistic train wreck of a mother. I wasn’t sending these as a passive-aggressive message to my mom. I just thought as a shrink, she would have something to say.

Will I Ever Be Good Enough: Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers [5], by Karyl McBride, is a fairly straightforward self-help book about how to “heal” when you catch your mother making out with your ex-boyfriend in front of all your friends at your birthday party … while she’s still married to your father. It’s about how to respond when she says to you, by way of explanation, “Well, he asked me to go home with him and I said no.” (This is an actual example from the book.)

I called my mother up to see what she thought about it.

“I skimmed it thoroughly.”

“And?”

“Well, if you were just realizing that your mother was a narcissistic jerk, then it could be helpful. But if you’d had even one iota of therapy, this would not really be worth reading. She does help the reader put a name to her mother’s abhorrent behavior, but identifying the problem isn’t going to help you fix a lifetime of resentment. And there was something else that bothered me.”

“What?"

“Well, it was so sympathetic to these daughters and didn’t spend much time getting them to examine their own behavior. But from what I’ve experienced, daughters of narcissistic mothers are usually terrible narcissists themselves.”

She has a point. And even McBride admits that if you have a narcissist for a mom, it’s “very likely” that her mother was somewhere on the narcissism spectrum, too. Since my mom wasn’t taken with Will I Ever Be Good Enough, we were searching around for something else to discuss. That’s when my mom suggested that perhaps we talk about literary and fictional moms instead.

“Joel Kovel, a brilliant psychiatric supervisor of mine, once said that the best case studies are great literature. Much better than a self-help book,” she offered. In the same NYT Arts section in which that Kaylie Jones’ book was reviewed [6], there was an article about Julie Myerson, a British novelist “pilloried in her home country this spring as cruel, selfish and manipulative for writing about her teenage son’s descent into drug addiction in the memoir The Lost Child: A Mother’s Story [7].”

I asked my mom what she thought about Myerson, and she said, “She lost her credibility with the column that discussed the intimate details of her son’s pubic hairs way before the book was published.” My mother has long been against the practice of writing about the genitals of one’s progeny. I remember her saying of Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions [8], “I liked it, but I couldn’t get over the reverie she had about her son’s penis while he was in utero. TMI, as you would say.”

“That’s the big thing now, all these mommy blogs,” I told her.

“What are mommy blogs?”

I explained to her that there is a booming cottage industry of mothers sharing the most intimate details of their parenting experiences on the Internet, and she was vaguely appalled. From a psychiatric standpoint, she’s against it.

“Although nothing is black and white,” she says, “I think writing about your kids when they are under 20 is just absolutely wrong, even if what is written is completely positive, and how boring would that be, anyway? Like Sally Mann's photography [9],”—Mann is best known for controversial images of her young children naked—“such experiences are life-alterers and no one can foresee the consequences. There might be good consequences, but there almost certainly will be negative ones that intrude upon a child's need to self-determine the course of his or her own life.”

My mother did say that she thought parents could write about their own children in a nondestructive way: If the children were adults and could give their own input. The article about Myerson mentions David Sheff and his son Nic, who both wrote memoirs about the latter’s crystal meth addiction. David showed Nic everything he was going to publish and gave him veto power. “That was a collaboration between two adults; that seems to me to prove real assent,” my mother said.

The idea of two adults creating a shared framework is very appealing, and so I’m going to try to continue this column as a joint effort. Because of my forthcoming wedding, a measure of benevolent turmoil has been introduced into our relationship. As I moved through my early and mid-20s, I grew up and apart, but in imperceptible increments that totted up eventually.

But a wedding is a major life event. I find myself in a truly lucky position, as my mother and future mother-in-law are both eminently reasonable, and not one of the three of us gives a fig about the color of the tablecloths. Even so, I am learning that some of the stress around these ceremonies—there has already been one notable clash between my mom and me on the venue—has nothing to do with anyone being a perfectionist, materialistic Bridezilla [10] (or Mom-thra). It has everything to do with the palpable strain of pulling away.