Life
Modern Love Revenge: Joyce Maynard's Daughter Gets Her Turn To Speak
Coming to terms with my mother's decisions to write about her life—even when I am the lead player in the story.
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For most of us, sitting down with our Sunday New York Times is a relaxing experience. But for subjects of the "Modern Love" column, it can suddenly turn into a choke-on-my-scone nightmare. For those unlucky few, DoubleX launched Modern Love Revenge, a series of responses written by the subjects of Modern Love columns. Got a lead? E-mail us.
My mother, Joyce Maynard, writes for a living, so I have spent my life learning that an event recounted by one person might not sound like the same event when recounted by another person, even if she was there, and witnessed it, and was at the center of it. It can be frustrating for me to let my mother own her stories—and by proxy, the stories of the people close to her. Even if I can come to terms with her perspective, it doesn’t mean I want strangers to be reading her words and breathing their life into what she claims as truth. Especially when I am the subject.
This past July, my mom published a piece in the New York Times’ “Modern Love” column that stretched my ability to accept her profession. The final published piece was my mother’s story, told from her point of view, about her emotional response to a difficult situation. But it still felt like a personal invasion. It was titled “My Secret Left Me Unable To Help” and told the dilemma of a mother who was worried for her daughter’s well-being to the point that she decided to snoop around in that daughter’s private e-mail account. By prying, she did uncover details of the challenging situation that the daughter (me) was in—but she also realized that it was a problem she could not fix. The mother felt left out of her daughter’s life, she writes, in a moment when she wanted nothing more than to be there for her. And to top it off, now she had to live with the fact that she had done something she had vowed not to do: violated her daughter’s privacy.
That’s her story. Here’s mine. I was only 23 years old when I moved on my own to the Dominican Republic, so I don’t blame my mother for worrying. I didn’t really know anyone there when the plane landed. While interning at a nonprofit down there, I fell in love with an amazing young man, Johnny. We were responsible and got blood-tested early on, which led us to discover that Johnny was HIV positive.
Stunned by the magnitude of the situation we found ourselves in, Johnny and I turned inward and toward each other to cope. We focused intently on our immediate, daily-life tasks and chose not to tell people until we, ourselves, had made better sense of what was going on. Thoughts of mortality, access to health care, privilege, and justice were all swirling around in my head in a visceral way that made me ache all over and toss in bed. I was not in much communication with anyone in the States during that time, particularly not my mother, because I knew she would be able to use her maternal intuition to decipher trouble in my voice and even written words. Instead of reaching out to people, I was reading up on the latest medical research and trying to navigate treatment options in a region of little opportunity.
By the time she confessed to me that during that period of radio silence she had broken into my e-mail account, it was six years after the fact. I was offended, but forgave her before I even got mad about it. (Unlike her, I didn’t have the emotional baggage from a diary snoop that left me scarred.) For me, what was much harder was my mother deciding to write her viewpoint on an event that was so personal and life-changing for me. Over the years, my mother has often written works of nonfiction detailing my family’s life and times—but never had anything so intimate or inherently mine to tell been the topic of her writing.
Even though my crisis in the Dominican Republic happened years ago, the story resurfaced for my mother while she was on a writing retreat last spring. I suppose the time had ripened for my mother to deal with her unresolved feelings surrounding that era, and so she felt a great need to write about the intense feelings she had when worrying about me. That’s how she processes things as a writer, I suppose.
To my mother’s credit, she did communicate with me as soon as she had written the story to ask me to look it over:
Dear Aud, I have written an essay that I need to show you. An editor at the New York Times would like to publish it, but I will not do this unless you can feel alright about this. I am guessing that if you could have chosen, you would prefer to have a mother who did not, as I do, write about her life. Though of course, if that were the case, you would have a totally different mother. And be a different person yourself.
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