Thank you for reading it! Yeah, we’ve been fiddling with the description from time to time. Still trying to figure out the nuances of contextualizing a work for a public audience, in terms of what should they know going in, what shouldn’t they know. Or how direct I want to be about what’s inside it, and how much should be left up to reader interpretation.
That your mother would share such a work with you (and allow (encourage?) you to read others) is interesting but maybe not surprising, since I feel like I’ve seen that happen to other kids. It always makes me wonder to what extent it’s “look, you don’t have it this bad” versus “look how bad I had it” versus subtly trying to give you a language to grasp your experiences. And, yeah… I can’t imagine how anyone sharing this with their mother would go.
Mom didn’t directly spur me to explore strained mother-child relationships in fiction, but there was a lot of emotional offloading to us in which she would try to like, explain or contextualize her behavior. Which… I’m not sure if that made things more clean or more messy, especially at that age. When there’s enmeshment, it’s hard not to give her some like, grace and benefit-of-the-doubt anyway.
I’m glad you keyed in on the multitude of grief that powers this. We never really got a roadmap for grief at all, and so when she passed it was like, welp, guess she died? And it took a long time and a lot of information elsewhere to realize that the tragedy of that was not just that she had died, or died too young, but that she deserved a better life with more support, that she and I deserved a healthier relationship, or at least for some more years with her before the rest of our family dug their claws into me.
Ahem. Anyway.
It’s certainly an experience learning as we grow that we mirror our mothers in certain ways, isn’t it? And maybe recognizing the cyclicality of things. Even when it’s things I don’t like about myself, it’s tough not to see her in my reflection, and long for or resent her. I don’t expect I’ll ever have children, but if I do I will probably need to unlearn some behaviors first.
I hope your relationship with your mother can become something more healthy as y’all continue to grow. Or, if it doesn’t, that you can get the space from her necessary to flourish.
Thanks again for reading this, and for reassuring us about the choice to include the letters!!! We wish you the best of luck in escaping the fast food grind. 🙏