WHEN THE MOTHER/DAUGHTER KNOT COMES UNDONE
“Writers are always selling someone out,” said Joan Didion. In Leah McLaren’s piercingly addictive memoir, two gifted writers, mother and daughter, struggle to love each other while fighting covert battles that will strike a chord with all scarred veterans of what we blandly “boundary violations” (or “enmeshment,” the term McLaren chooses).
My own mother floated through boundaries like a shape-shifting enchantress. She delighted, amused and enraged me. No way could I resist this book.
McLaren, the daughter in this tale, chose to tell it while her mother is still very much alive and vigorously protesting the decision (they are now estranged). The prose ranges from seamlessly assured to ravishing. Yet many disclosures left me queasily aware that if I were the author’s charismatic, flawed, colorfully neglectful and narcissistic mother, I’d feel violated.
My mother had been dead for many years when I finally told the truth about our complicated bond in a memoir, My Mother’s Daughter. I couldn’t have done it during her lifetime; I adored her and didn’t want to lose my treasured afternoons on her couch, sipping mint tea from an antique pot while sharing confidences. Nor had I found the courage to “[set] my story against hers, as Jeanette Winterson writes in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, her memoir of escape from the psychic clutches of a harrowing mother. More to the point, my mother’s commanding presence in my life obscured the woman she had been before my birth, and would always remain at heart. I saw her only in relation to me, not as a fully rounded human. Quite simply, I wasn’t ready to write her.
Turning back to McLaren and her story: Did she have to tell it now? Could it be one of those stories that reveal hidden layers over time?
And the mother of all questions still on my mind: Why is the love she must have felt for her mother so hard to detect in the story? If not for love, that fierce longing for connectedness, it wouldn’t be so hard to break the hold of a narcissistic parent. I was reading quickly, pulled by the narrative tide. Perhaps love is in there, between the gorgeously crafted lines. But it feels underplayed to me, if not missing altogether.
It’s been a while since a family memoir roiled me as this one did (and I’ve read some doozies). Meanwhile I hear George Saunders in my head: “Kindness is the only non-delusional response to the human condition.”
