Mothers, Tell Your Daughters

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

W.W. Norton     2015
272 pages     Short Stories

In Bonnie Jo Campbell’s collection of short stores, Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, the difficulties of being a woman become quickly evident. Women are resilient, stubborn, and resourceful. Women are used, abused, and discarded. The fates of many lower middle class women rest in their relationship to the men in their lives. And mothers try to tell their daughters how it is going to be for them to become women in a hostile world.

No one writes better about challenged women than does Bonnie Jo Campbell. We were introduced to them in her first story collection, American Salvage. Although the characters are different, the themes remain. The first story that expresses the true nature of the mother-daughter relationship is called Tell Yourself, in which a mother with a young teenage daughter worries obsessively that her daughter may be too much of a flirt and consequently experience some of the abusive relationships that the mother experienced as a teenager. She  breaks up with her boyfriend rather than allow the possibility that he might be attracted to the girl. The girl, on the other hand, is appalled that her mother might suspect that she would be interested in an older man. “Of course, he is just one man of millions out there in the world, one of dozens of men who might take an interest in your daughter. . .” 

The title story, Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, expresses with sadness the complexity of the mother-daughter relationship. The mother in this story is dying of cancer, and her estranged daughter has come to be with her as she dies. No longer verbal, the mother muses about her life and how her daughter never understood the choices that she made in order to survive and to make sure that her children were raised. The daughter has become successful in life but is unable to give any credit to her mother or try to understand her mother’s life choices. The mother muses, “Someday, I hope, you’ll want to cut me down and gather me up in your arms, forgive me even if I can’t say I’m sorry.” 

Frankly, I admire some of the women that Campbell writes about—women who know exactly why they make the choices they make; women who make conscious decisions about survival; women who protect their children at all costs. At the same time, there is a terrible vulnerability in the women in the stories—women who have been abused, and who have so little but wish for so much. In one story, Someplace Warm, the mother seeks to make a safe place for her children but instead smothers them, and they rebel by leaving her.

Recently, the two women who work for me were able to get an apartment after many years in rooming houses and homeless shelters. The apartment isn’t much; just two rooms in a subsidized duplex, but their complete joy in having a place that is theirs is heartwarming. These women have cared for abusive spouses, slept in unlikely places, and fought mightily to raise three children together. I am so grateful that they are finally experiencing a bit of peace. These are the women of Campbell’s world. As a protagonist of one story says, “Our own home, a comfortable, well-lit place nobody can take away from us, where each of us has our own room and closet.”

Mothers, Tell Your Daughters is not a pleasant, warm read, but several of the stories are unforgettable. The summary paragraph of the Kirkus review reflects that the book is “a fine showcase for this talented writer’s ability to mingle penetrating character studies with quietly scathing depictions of hard pressed lives.”

Campbell is a local author. Mothers, Tell Your Daughters is the third book by her that I have read. The novel, Once Upon a River is based in Kalamazoo, and I was amused that so much of Kalamazoo shows up in Mothers, Tell your Daughters, including Campbell’s donkeys. I have followed Campbell on Facebook since our book club skyped with her when we read Once Upon a River. Check out her Facebook page and you will find her journey to this book and the guest readings connected with its release in October. I have included the advertisement for the book release party.

In addition to everything else I loved about the book, I was extremely attracted to the cover. 

The review on the Kirkus website. 

 

Glitter and Glue

by Kelly Corrigan

Ballentine Books 2014

224 pages     Memoir

I am in love with Glitter and Glue. I am in love with Kelly Corrigan. Those who know my reviews know that I am prone to finding the good in the books that I read, but Glitter and Glue is profound in ways that stretches beyond the page into the memory and psyches of the reader.

Corrigan puts on paper the memory of a summer in her life during the 1990s when she and a friend were backpacking in Australia and ran out of money. They each take a nanny job with a Sydney family to earn enough money to finish their trip. Corrigan's job is with an extended family, a father and two young children who have just lost their mother to cancer. The household also includes the mother's father and her young adult son from a former marriage. 

Like most 20-somethings, Corrigan is feeling very independent from her parents, especially from her mother, who she feels to be too no-nonsense, too demanding, too abrupt, too matter-of-fact. Father, who is called Greenie, is everything that Mary, her mother, is not. He is positive, loving, supportive, and encouraging. (Apparently, a previous memoir called The Middle Place is about her father.) "If my mother thought of me as someone to guide, my father thought of me as someone to cheer." Her mother told her once, "You father is the glitter; I am the glue."

Corrigan arrives at the Tanner house when the household is at their most vulnerable; their mother Ellie has just died and no one knows quite how to handle things--emotions are still too raw. The seven-year-old daughter Millie wants nothing to do with her and the five-year-old Martin just wants someone to be his Mommy. 

During the months that Corrigan works for the Tanner family, she learns so much about mothering, but more importantly about her own mother. She learns to appreciate her mother in new ways. After a particularly bad day with Martin and Millie, she muses: "I see that, sturdy though my mother was, she must have been gutted by the sound and sight and sheer vibration of her rabid daughter roaring, I HATE YOU! I HATE YOUR GUTS! I HATE YOU FOR EVER!.

I had thought a good mother would not elicit such comments but now I see that a good mother is required to somehow absorb all this ugliness and find a way to fall back in love with her child the next day." She learns that she will never have a girly-girl relationship with her mother, but as she tries to mother these motherless children, she finds herself wondering about what her mother would do in any of a number of situations. As she works to help these children through this crisis in their lives, she grows in innumerable ways and becomes a woman rather than a girl. 

As much as we think we know about our mothers, I am not sure that any of us truly ever knew our mothers, although my mother revealed more of herself than some other mothers I knew. My favorite sentence in the book says as much: "But now I see there's no such thing as a woman, one woman. There are dozens inside every one of them. I probably should've figured this out sooner, but what child can see the woman inside her mom, what with all that Motherness blocking out everything else." 

Sometimes I think to myself, "I'm becoming my mother." And then I feel pride, because my mother was a remarkable woman, and I would love to "be" my mother.

I hadn't picked up Gllitter and Glue yet when I saw the following video on Facebook. I remembered that the publisher had sent me the book to review. I dug it out of the pile and finished it in a few hours. I cried over the video and I cried over the book. That in itself may not be an endorsement, but besides all the emotion, there are some extremely funny moments. Kelly Corrigan is full of good humor and ascerbic wit. The combination makes for a great read! Newsday calls it a "Valentine to Mom."

Kelly Corrigan's website: http://www.kellycorrigan.com/

Newsday review: http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/books/kelly-corrigan-s-glitter-and-glue-valentine-to-mom-1.6912046

S’Mother: The Story of a Man, His Mom, and the Thousands of Altogether Insane Letters She’s Mailed Him

By Adam Chester


New York, Abrams, 2011

178 pages Memoir


Just in time for Mother’s Day, Adam Chester has written a funny-odd ode to his mother in S’Mother: The Story of a Man, His Mom, and the Thousands of Altogether Insane Letters She’s Mailed Him. I’m really not sure which genre this little book fits into—humor? Memoir? Psychology?

Chester collected the letters his mother sent him over the years, beginning with his arrival at USC as a freshman, when to her credit, she remained in Miami. He continued collecting them through the years, until now, when he says that she still continues to write him weekly even though she only lives 20 minutes away.

This book is a compendium of some of the funnier and some of the more pathetic examples of the 1000s of letters he has received over the years. The book is almost as schizoid in its format as it is in its content, although it is kind of “cute.” Letters are included as they are written and then translated into text so they can be deciphered. The style seems to suit the content. Here is my favorite:

Sat.

Adam—

Do me a favor—

Please don’t eat sushi!

Thank you—

Love,

Mom

I also loved the letter that was a quarter taped to a piece of legal paper with nothing else.

Chester says: “I had no choice but to accept my costarring role in my life’s popular, non-televised reality show, Adam’s Mom, as best I could.” The letters show a lot of love, a lot of worry, generosity, and a slightly manic desire to be part of her son’s life. Chester seems to acknowledge that love and be touched by that even as he fights against it.

I was reminded of the letter I received from my own mother, who, even though she was the mother of four of which I was the oldest, still found the time to write me every week I was away at college or in graduate school. I was planning on driving home from Boston at Christmastime with my new boyfriend Lee, and my mother wrote to tell me that if the weather got bad on the way home, we were to stop and get two motel rooms–one for each of us—and Dad would reimburse me for the cost when I got home. That was Lee’s introduction to my mother.

Chester’s mother seems to know when she goes over the line, but she just can’t help herself. I understand that. I have to catch myself all the time, and sometimes I cross the line despite my best intentions. The mother of adult children walks on a taut tight wire, and one can very easily fall off. My son told me the other day that I was becoming a caricature of myself. And while I understand the truth in what he was saying, I didn’t take it as a compliment. In this book, Chester has made a caricature of his mother. And while she understands the truth in it, I can’t believe that she is flattered by it. I hope that he is squirreling away the proceeds from the book to pay for his mother’s long term care.

I am not sure who the audience is for this book. One reviewer suggested that a child of a single mother with no siblings plays a unique role. I believe I understand that comment. Mothering, under those circumstances can easily become smothering. Perhaps this would be the best audience. I think my oldest son might find it really funny, since he bore the brunt of my single parenting. I don’t think my sister-in-law, who has one child and tends to be a smotherer, would find it funny at all. She works in a book store. I’ll ask her opinion.

I received a galley proof of this book from the publisher. From now on, I’m keeping my mouth shut!

Here is Adam Chester’s blog of letters from his mom and incidents involving his mom. There is also a video of Kevin Bacon singing. (Adam Chester is in the music business.) http://smotherboard.com/