daughters | Thornfield Hall

“Kat, this is your mom.” Click. Her phone messages were succinct.

“Kat, this is Susan.” Another message. Click.

I never called her Susan, but was pleased when she left a message. Usually she hung up. Mom and her friends didn’t have answering machines.

On the phone, she talked about Oprah and The Good Wife, and then steered the conversation to her favorite topic: how great I was. She was hyperbolic in her admiration of her children. We were born teachers, she said. We were born writers, she said. We were born doctors, she said. Well… I fainted in Health class during a film of a cow giving birth, but if Mom thought I’d be a doctor… she had to be right!

One thing riled her up: I was her favorite, so how dare I not be the favorite of everyone, not just in the family, but, if I understood it correctly, the entire world?

For instance, there was a fracas about my aunt’s will. Dad expected to be his sister’s heir. Instead, she left the whole estate to her bossy niece, X.

Mom liked my aunt (“the only decent one in that family”), but asked, “Why on earth didn’t she leave it to your dad?”

“Oh, X was always her favorite!”

“I would have thought you’d be her favorite! There you are, at her deathbed, and…”

“Mom, the intensive care unit was dominated by her visitors. They kicked us out!”

Mom was loyal to a fault. When my best friend and I took an acting class in fifth grade, we were cast as trees. The only speaking role was that of a bird, played by a fourth-grader.

“We’re better actresses,” my friend said. “She only got it because she’s pretty.”

Mom thought it was absurd that I didn’t have the leading role. “All that talent,” she muttered. Out of loyalty, she also thought the play should be rewritten so my friend could be the co-star.

And then there was the time I applied to only one graduate school (the applications cost $25, which I thought outrageous) and was offered free tuition and a teaching assistantship.

Mom looked suspiciously at the letter. “Why isn’t there anything about that fellowship?”

“Well, I didn’t get it.”

She wanted to call up and complain to the department chair, but I convinced her the whole thing was a whimsy (true) and if I didn’t like it I was coming right home.

Another thing she wondered: Why wasn’t I publishing my essays in The New York Times instead of the local newspaper?

“Gee, do you think they’d be interested in the butter cow?”

Okay, she knew when she’d gone too far.

The best thing she ever said to me: “We’re not just mother and daughter, we’re friends.”

Not only was she my friend, she was my best friend.

They are like the girls at school who are too eager to raise their hands. The minute their famous mother dies, they tell the world that she abused them. Maybe it’s true, maybe not. But it is the perfect topic to discuss in therapy.

I have not read the clickbait articles about Alice Munro’s daughter’s accusations, because (a) it is tacky that she contacted the press, and (b) I don’t believe it.

There are many of these tell-all memoirs. Anne Sexton’s daughter, Linda Gray Sexton, and Jenny Diski, who lived with Doris Lessing and her son, Peter, during her adolescence, both got books out of it. Sexton’s daughter claimed her mother had sex with her. At the time, I thought, How horrifying, but I have some doubts about it. Diski made no such claims, but made it clear that she disliked Lessing and thought she was a terrible mother. She raged against Lessing for “leaving” her children from her first marriage in Africa. She left them with their father, not on the streets! And she did take Peter to England, the son from her second marriage, but that annoyed Diski, too.

Some thoughts on the two memoirs. It is true that Anne Sexton was mentally ill, but since she was in love with her psychiatrist, she was probably pretty busy stalking him in her free time. It doesn’t matter how beautiful these women are, they are all out there crouching in their cars outside of their psychiatrists’ houses. And Lessing may not have been the best mother, but she WAS there at home, writing her books, sitting in the kitchen, where she could annoy both Jenny and her son Peter, like mothers everywhere.

Then there was the daughter of Marion Zimmer Bradley, one of my favorite dead science fiction writers. In 1990, Bradley’s husband was arrested for child abuse. Fifteen years after her mother’s death, the daughter claimed that her mother also sexually abused her. Bradley must have written and edited about 100 books, and co-written, in her old age, several books with other writers, so she was very busy. But, to my knowledge, at least the daughter has not written a book about her mother.

I strongly believe the therapist’s office is the place to discuss incest and abuse. The thrill of public attention and sympathy lasts about a minute and a half. And it is cowardly to come forth with “posthumous” accusations against famous mothers who aren’t there to defend themselves.

But that’s the whole point, isn’t it? THAT THEY’RE NOT THERE!