Jessica Grose and her mother talk about their relationship.

Photograph of Jessica Grose and her mother courtesy of Jessica Grose.

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, which collects the random and sometimes profound electronic missives sent from mothers to adult children. This led to a book, Love, Mom, based on the site, and a Talk of the Town 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, 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.