Geburtstags-Stilleben, Series 296, 1910, Oilette postcard depicting a birthday cake, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I was very blue for the weeks running up to my sixtieth. I suppose I was triste. I couldn’t explain to myself why I was so low. When I wasn’t researching and writing or sorting out my daughter’s university accommodation, I trawled the flea markets and vintage shops collecting stuff for my unreal estate in the Mediterranean. So far, I had found a pair of wooden slatted blinds, two linen tablecloths, a copper frying pan, six small coffee cups, and a watering can made from tin with a long spout. I was collecting things for a parallel life, or a life not yet lived, a life that was waiting to be made. In a way, these objects resembled the early drafts of a novel.

*

I was thinking about existence. And what it added up to. Had I done okay? Who was doing the judging? Had there been enough happy years, had there been enough love and loving? Were my own books, the ones I had written, good enough? What was the point of anything? Had I reached out enough to others? Was I really happy to live alone? Why was I so preoccupied with the fantasy of various unattainable houses and why was I still searching for a missing female character? If I could not find her in real life, why not invent her on the page? There she is, steering her high horse with flair, making sure she does not run over girls and women struggling to find a horse of their own. Does she scoop them up and ride the high horse with them? Do they scoop her up and take over the reins? Did that feel true? I hoped so. My fifties had been a time of change and turbulence, energetic and exciting. A time of self-respect and perhaps a sort of homecoming. So there you are! Where have you been all these years? Read More

Fred Bchx from Tournai, Belgique, 2010, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

It is not incorrect to say that, for years, the way my family grieved my mother was to avoid acknowledging her altogether. It is not incorrect to say that we hardly invoked her name or told stories about her.

Shortly after college, my father, Caroline, and Steph descended upon my cleared-out group house in Washington, D.C., for Thanksgiving. In my childhood home, my father’s stacks of clutter multiplied until they overtook the space that my mother had so carefully cultivated; it crowded my sisters and me out. I reacted efficiently, diligently, which is to say that I pretended that trips to Steph’s apartment in Rhode Island or Caroline’s in California were just a chance to visit another part of the country.

We’d decided to exchange Christmas gifts a month early, since we wouldn’t be together in December.

Caroline, dressed in a key-lime-green onesie, handed Steph and me sets that matched hers.

“They’re actually really comfortable,” she said. She smiled toothily and pulled up the hood to show us the outfit’s ears, her faded highlights a spray of lavender around her face.

The onesies were from the kids’ section, which was fine for us since everyone in our family, including our father, was small and roughly the same size. Steph and I donned ours, and I was grateful for anything to distract from how cobbled together holidays had become since my mother’s passing. My sisters and I stood on my front stoop to take a photo of us modeling our new outfits. In the photo, Caroline and I jam our hands into our pockets while Steph is wedged between us, her arms thrust into the air. We look so much like sisters, not just because, in this image, we are dressed identically, but because the ways we hold our mouths enthusiastically, wryly, are the same.

Afterward, Steph passed out slender boxes.

“I thought this might be good for everybody to open last,” Steph said. There was a question in her voice, a preemptive apology that made me tense. Read More

Baxito, A girl running while riding a bicycle tire, 2015, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The worst thing a little Black girl can be is fast. As soon as she learns her smile can bring special treatment, women shake their heads and warn the girl’s mother: “Be careful.” They caution the mothers of boys: “Watch that one.” When adult men hold her in their laps too long, it’s because she is a fast-ass little girl using her wiles. She’s too grown. She tempts men and boys alike—Eve, Jezebel, and Delilah all in one—the click of her beaded cornrows a siren’s call.

Fast girls ruin lives.

Even as a girl whose pigtails unraveled from school-day play, I was fascinated with sex and romance and why boys looked up girls’ skirts and why people climbed between each other’s legs. Why did fathers kissing mothers on the back of their necks make them smile such a soft, secret smile? Why did boys stand so close to girls in the lunch line? Why did my sister sneak her boyfriend over, even when she knew Mama had forbidden it? 

Why did Mama tell my father, with her eyebrows raised, that the only book I’d read from the Bible was Song of Solomon? Yet I knew not to say anything, because being a girl and talking about sex would mean that I was fast, that I was trouble, that I’d end up with a baby before I finished school. I didn’t want to be fast, but inevitably my experiences with sex and boys began early and I learned to keep them hidden away. Read More

Vaccarium, A street scene in Sittwe, 2018, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

My mother, father, and elder sisters spent their last years in Burma, the years leading up to my birth, in Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine State. My parents were transferred there as part of what my father described as a well-intentioned, though ultimately failed, government initiative to send educated professionals to the most remote and underdeveloped regions of the country. The initiative was a failure because many people who were transferred simply did not go and those who went did not stay. My parents were among the few who accepted their assignment, and who stayed for the full three years of their term.

When I asked my mother why they decided to go, she said, “I can’t even remember now.” Then, she repeated in English, “I don’t know why we made that decision.” Even after living in America for over a quarter of a century, my mother still pronounced certain words in a vaguely British way. The t’s in her don’t and that were crisp, precise. I always had the impression that my mother’s Bamar was sloping and rushed, while her English, learned from Anglican nuns, stood up very straight and proper. “We didn’t want to be cowards,” my mother said, switching back to Bamar. “We didn’t want to be so selfish. Maybe we felt we had a debt to repay. A duty to our country. I don’t know,” she said.

*

When I was a child, before I knew where or what exactly Sittwe was, I knew that it was a place of exile. For as long as I could remember, my family had lived in places where we did not belong, where people asked us where we came from—but my mother and father never spoke of the places where we lived, where I grew up, as places of exile. Sittwe alone was exilic. “It was like falling into an abyss,” my mother always said. The word she used, meaning gorge, pit, or chasm, rhymed with the word meaning fear. Like falling into fear, I heard. Read More

Rodrigo García’s new memoir, A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes, recounts the ailing health and eventual passing of his father, the writer Gabriel García Márquez, in close detail. Amid family discussions and trips to the doctor, García explores the challenge of writing about grief while living within it. In the below excerpt, García documents the aftermath of his father’s dementia diagnosis and considers the emotional weight of the memory loss upon the renowned writer. 

Gabriel García Márquez at the Festival Internacional de Cine en Guadalajara, 2009, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Writing about the death of loved ones must be about as old as writing itself, and yet the inclination to do it instantly ties me up in knots. I am appalled that I am thinking of taking notes, ashamed as I take notes, disappointed in myself as I revise notes. What makes matters emotionally turbulent is the fact that my father is a famous person. Beneath the need to write may lurk the temptation to advance one’s own fame in the age of vulgarity. Perhaps it might be better to resist the call and to stay humble. Humility is, after all, my favorite form of vanity. But as with most writing, the subject matter chooses you, and so resistance could be futile.

A few months earlier a friend asked how my dad was doing with his loss of memory. I told her he lives strictly in the present, unburdened by the past, free of expectations for the future. Forecasting based on previous experience, which is believed to be of evolutionary significance as well as one of the origins of storytelling, no longer plays a part in his life.

“So he doesn’t know he’s mortal,” she concluded. “Lucky him.”

Of course, the picture I painted for her is simplified. It is dramatized. The past still plays a part in his conscious life. He relies on the distant echo of his considerable interpersonal skills to ask anyone he meets a series of safe questions: “How is everything?” “Where are you living these days?” “How are your people?” Occasionally he’ll venture an attempt at a more ambitious exchange and become disoriented in the middle of it, losing the thread of the idea or running out of words. The puzzled expression on his face, as well as the embarrassment that crosses it momentarily, like a puff of smoke in a breeze, betrays a past when conversation was as natural to him as breathing. Creative, funny, evocative, provocative conversation. Being a great conversador was almost as highly regarded among his oldest group of friends as being a good writer.

The future is also not completely behind him. Often at dusk he asks, “Where are we going tonight? Let’s go out to a fun place. Let’s go dancing. Why? Why not?” If you change the subject enough times, he moves on. Read More

Still from Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970). Photo: AF archive / Alamy Stock Photo.

I was living in Hollywood. Somehow, I’d found my way back to the city of my birth at forty-one. Each morning, as I rose to consider the wreckage of my life—divorce papers, boxes of books I had brought home from New York, a visitation agreement for my three-year-old daughter—I felt as if I had been lost inside a tiny Bermuda Triangle, one whose points were visible from my apartment window. Across the street was a complex where F. Scott Fitzgerald, my adolescent hero, had been sitting one morning in 1940 when he keeled over and died. Next door was the Director’s Guild of America, where my mother, herself an unhappy, alcoholic screenwriter like Fitzgerald, had once thrown a drunken fit and then peeled off in her Mercedes, leaving me, at the time a sullen and supercilious teenager, to hitchhike home. From where I stood it seemed like I could almost see it: the dark scar my mother had left on the asphalt, the print of her tires where she’d gunned the accelerator and took off in flight from herself.

*

What makes Iago evil? For some years my mother and I had stopped speaking—throughout most of my adulthood, in fact—but we’d recently resumed after she had at long last gotten sober. My mother’s favorite writer when I was a teenager was Joan Didion, who had been our neighbor growing up. For some years our families had shared a housekeeper, a woman named Maria Camacho. My mother, I suspect, had then wanted to be Joan Didion, her radiant and successful doppelgänger. On my fifteenth birthday, she gave me a copy of Play It as It Lays, a book that exerted a scriptural pressure across the remainder of my adolescence. Years later, at a revival house in San Francisco, I caught a rare screening of the film adaptation, which had remained largely out of circulation since its release in 1972. Its script was written by Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne—their second screen collaboration of what would be many, after 1971’s The Panic in Needle Park—and the film was directed by Frank Perry.

*

Frank Perry. The name came back to me as that of one of those fabled “New Hollywood” auteurs, albeit one whose career, like my mother’s, had never quite achieved its optimal shape. After a striking commercial success with 1970’s Diary of a Mad Housewife, adapted from Sue Kaufman’s bestseller, there was … not much, a series of lower-key flops and then 1981’s legendarily risible Mommie Dearest, whose most famously absurd line (“No wiiiire haanngerrrs!”) my own mother too had enjoyed mimicking when she was in her cups. My mom’s failure had been decidedly her own: to write her single produced Hollywood feature she’d crossed a picket line and her subsequent blackballing from the Writers Guild of America rendered her unemployable. Still, there is a sense in which ruptured movie careers are all alike. Read More