Jeanne McCulloch, Author of ALL HAPPY FAMILIES
[0:00]Welcome to Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books, the podcast that features conversations with
[0:15]writers of all types. Today's episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books has been sponsored
[0:20]by the Craft Studio, with locations in New York City on the Upper East Side and in Tribeca,
[0:24]the Craft Studio is a perfect place to bring your kids for some crafting fun.
[0:27]Craft Studio NYC.com. I'm thrilled to be talking to Jean McCulloch today.
[0:33]Jean is a former managing editor of the Paris Review and a senior editor of Tinhouse.
[0:37]She was the founding editorial director of Tinhouse Books and is the co-founder of Toto's Santos
[0:43]Writers Workshop. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, the New York Times Book Review,
[0:48]Bogue, O Magazine, Allure, the Northwestern Review, and other publications. I'm talking to her today
[0:54]about her amazing memoir called All Happy Families, which really everybody should read.
[0:59]She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and I'm thrilled to welcome her today.
[1:03]So welcome, Jean. Yes, very good. Very good. I'm so excited to be doing a podcast with you today.
[1:11]Thanks for coming. Thank you. So for readers who don't, who have not read All Happy Families yet,
[1:17]can you tell them what the book is about? Yes. The memoir begins in 1983. It's an August weekend
[1:26]near the tip of Long Island in the East Hampton, New York, and it is the weekend of my wedding.
[1:33]What very quickly readers will note, because it's in about the third page, is that simultaneous
[1:41]to the wedding preparations taking place, my father has just had a stroke, and he is lying in
[1:49]Southampton Hospital on life support. So essentially what you have is two families that are coming
[1:57]together for one event, a wedding that being my family and the groom's family, and it very quickly
[2:05]is turning into a completely different event. My mother was convinced the wedding should go forward.
[2:12]I think she was tired of my father derailing things. I should say he had a stroke that was caused
[2:19]by abrupt alcohol withdrawal after being a lifetime alcoholic. She had told him he had to sober up
[2:27]for the wedding if he wanted to be there, and so she said we're going to go ahead with this.
[2:35]So it sort of opens on a weekend that had sat in my mind for decades, literally, and I hadn't
[2:44]known exactly how to tackle it in terms of a memoir, and it took me a long time, needless to say,
[2:50]to do that. And it then progresses, and it goes into that weekend, but not only that weekend,
[2:58]also the repercussions from that weekend in both families, and that's the course of the book,
[3:03]basically. And you do such a great job of really painting the backdrop of the story. I feel like
[3:08]the Hampton's in your home there by the sea. That was like another character in the book I must,
[3:13]and I'm just going to quote from, you wrote, the gardener Vincent and yellow protective earmuffs
[3:17]and a fishing cap drove his seated mower and even rose up and down the sloping lawn as he did
[3:22]every morning of the summer, this day steering around the large white party tent erected earlier
[3:27]in the week for the reception. I just felt like that sentence was so perfect. Like you can just see
[3:31]it, you can see the lawn, you can see the house, you can just put the reader right there. So why
[3:37]did you decide to write the story? Like why now? Well, I have a two-part answer to that. Okay.
[3:45]The first on a technical level, on a technical level, I had written an essay. I'd been commissioned
[3:52]to write an essay for an anthology called Money Changes Everything that came out about 10 years ago.
[3:59]And the editor, Alisa Chappelle, who had commissioned it, had seen my house in East Hampton,
[4:07]my family's house. She and her husband, she had been a colleague of mine at the Paris Review,
[4:12]and then later at 10 house, the literary magazine we both went on to. She had seen the house,
[4:18]the whole staff in the Paris Review had stayed at my house one weekend when we've been celebrating
[4:23]the 40th anniversary of the Paris Review. And so she knew that this house existed. She knew that
[4:31]my mother had given this house a name. And I think she was fascinated by the notion that people
[4:37]actually lived in houses that have been given names. So even then, the house became a character
[4:45]in not only our imagination, but in other people's imagination because it had a name. So I wrote
[4:51]the essay and it was the hardest essay that I've ever tried to write. It took a long time. The reason
[4:57]being, she wanted me to talk about, to write about what it was like to grow up in that world,
[5:05]which was sort of a esoteric world. It was a slice of life that not everybody sees.
[5:14]And yet at the same time, it was for an anthology about money. So I was trying to figure out how
[5:20]to write about having grown up in a big house by the sea. Where despite the outer appearance
[5:28]of beauty and glamour that one might put on the house by seeing it, very real things were
[5:36]happening inside and quite a few thumb or not exactly happy. So I wrote the piece. It was in the
[5:41]anthology and editor read it and offered me a book contract to expand it. I did what I had always
[5:49]told my own writers, because I've been an editor most of my life, never to do, which is to
[5:55]accept a book contract when you have no idea what the book is actually going to be about. So I
[6:02]merely said, oh yes, sure, no problem. And I sort of could see it. But then when I actually sat
[6:08]down with the essay, I thought to myself, well, I said everything I want to say on this topic,
[6:14]and I feel comfortable saying on this topic in 5,000 words, there is no way I'm going to expand it.
[6:20]So I did it about that for a long time. And during the time I was dithering, I was changing jobs,
[6:28]I had children to raise, and the editor who had assigned the book had left and gone to another house.
[6:36]So a lot happened such that sort of the heat was off in a way, but finally it was no longer off.
[6:44]My editor had landed at HarperCollins. The book was back on. And that also had the advantage that
[6:50]I had taken a long time to really figure out how I wanted to write. And then it started, I would
[6:58]say it started with an image. It started with the image of me, up in my mother's bathroom,
[7:04]on the wedding weekend. And I'm in my wedding dress, and I'm looking in the mirror and I'm brushing
[7:09]my hair. Outside the window, I can hear people being seated in the garden below the string
[7:15]quartet is playing. I can hear distantly the waves on the shore. And suddenly I hear in my mother's
[7:24]bedroom her dialing her little princess phone. I hear the click click click click. And I thought,
[7:30]who could she be calling at this moment? I'm about to go walk down the aisle with my half-brother
[7:37]because my father was in the hospital. And I heard her at that very moment say into the phone.
[7:44]She was clear. She was calling the hospital at this point. She said, put me on with the doctor
[7:51]that's going to be on call tonight. She got on the phone and she said, if anything happens to my
[7:56]husband tonight, do not call his house. We're having a party. And I never got over that as one
[8:03]can imagine. And the next thing I heard was my half-brother knocking on the door saying it's time
[8:09]and he was there to take me down to get married. And that it haunted me. And so I thought, okay,
[8:16]let's go from there. Let's just write that scene and see where it leads. And so I picked a 20 year
[8:25]arc basically to write about. And I very much wanted it to begin and end in the same location
[8:33]with a 20 year span in the middle. It begins with my mother walking into the water to have her
[8:41]morning swim the morning of the wedding. And it ends 20 years later with me in front of the house
[8:47]at the exact same place. Seeing the house for the last time, we had sold it and it was under
[8:54]demolition. It had only been demolished from the inside at that point. So there were still shards
[9:00]of glass in the windows. And that's the final scene of the book is me seeing it for the last time.
[9:06]And it ends with the sun setting. It had begun with the sun having just come up. And as the sun
[9:13]is setting at the end of the book, it is reflecting in the last shards of glass that are in the
[9:20]window. It's reflecting red. So I end with an image that had been an image I had my whole childhood,
[9:27]which is every time at that time of day, the sun set on the windows and the windows turned this
[9:33]beautiful burnished rose color. I would imagine that every room of our house was filled to the
[9:38]brim with roses. So I was able to begin the book with the image of me that had haunted me
[9:47]in my wedding dress. And I ended with an image that had also stayed with me my whole life and
[9:53]is still with me, which is of the house filled to the brim with roses, which I felt was such
[9:58]a metaphor for family.
[10:00]life. And in that way, the book really did allow the house to become a character in that
[10:08]so much in any of our houses so much family life takes place over long periods of time everybody
[10:15]has their own memories. Everybody has their own images that they take with them. And therefore
[10:21]when the house is gone, it's not as if a chapter closes really. It's as if everybody just
[10:28]takes those memories in their own heads. And this was an opportunity to write down some of
[10:33]mine. One of the added lovely benefits of having published this book is that people that read it
[10:40]who did know me then. And I just gave a reading out at book Hampton in East Hampton. So I had a lot
[10:46]of the hometown crowd over there that I hadn't seen in years. Everybody comes forward with their
[10:52]own memories. And they'll say, oh yes, I remember your mother with a cigarette. And I remember the
[10:56]little cigarette lighters, or I remember that ceramic cabbage where we hid the pot on the coffee
[11:02]table. And she never knew it was right there in front of her face. That kind of thing. Wow.
[11:08]That's beautiful. By the way, you just listening to talk. You should be like a storyteller.
[11:14]You should just go around and like hire you to read my kids. It's like I just want to listen
[11:20]to you talk all day. So I really, first of all, when you just said how you started the book
[11:28]with your mother going for her morning swim, when I first opened it, I thought for sure it was
[11:32]going to like circle back and something terrible was going to happen on the swim. But so there's
[11:36]like that element of like what's going to happen on her swim. What's coming next? You're like
[11:42]immediately uneasy. You probably did that on purpose. Well, you know, I did and I didn't. It's
[11:47]interesting that you cite that because when I first was writing the book, I teach a workshop
[11:53]down in Tota Santos in the winter. And we have a faculty reading every session. So I read the
[12:01]very beginning of the book that there were sort of my dry run, you know, that I read them little
[12:07]passages every year. And I read just the beginning, the first three pages. Yeah. And afterwards,
[12:15]a lot of people came up to me and said, so did your mother commit suicide. Yeah, that's sort of
[12:19]what I was thinking. And so I thought, okay, so the next page I'm going to say later that afternoon,
[12:25]she pinned the family veil on my head. So it's very clear in the first chapter that in fact,
[12:31]no, that's not what she was doing. She was taking her morning swim. But I, in so doing and then
[12:38]adding that last bit about she put the veil on my head, it also meant that I was going to encapsulate
[12:44]in the first chapter the fact that she called the hospital and said that. Yeah. And that was a
[12:50]lengthy discussion I had with my editor a few times because she said, you really want to divulge
[12:55]that that early on. And I said, yes, I tried not to. I tried to put it at the end of the first
[13:00]section, which is where chronologically it doubles back to. But I actually felt like it needed to
[13:06]be right there because otherwise people are going to be distracted by what you just mentioned.
[13:12]I mean, obviously worked really well. Thank you. Good call on that one.
[13:19]So I really loved in the book how you talked about wealth. I know you said it came from an
[13:24]anthology about money. I feel like a lot of writers or books. It's not ever addressed straight
[13:32]out the way you did. And you told it in such a way. You didn't even have to say it, right? Like
[13:36]social register books, aligning the bookshelves and all this stuff. And how you used to lie about
[13:43]your address, which is literally across the street from where we are right now. And he used to say
[13:48]that inherited wealth could be a birthright, a genetic twist of fate as random as they read hair
[13:53]or a disposition to drink was a notion I distressed it. How much was real and how much was illusion
[13:59]and how might the perception of money make anyone person different from anyone else?
[14:02]These were the questions I pondered, questions I pondered and easily as a child as I lied about
[14:07]my address. Then you say, so money, what of it? A long gray shinkled house by the sea, a bonfire,
[14:13]lighting up the night sky on summer evenings, a softly lit tent where guests danced in late summer.
[14:19]Does the postcard beauty of these scenes suggest that beautiful times were more beautiful
[14:23]for my family than for others or terrible times more terrible? Our lives might have looked pretty
[14:28]because the backdrop looked pretty certainly. It might be less inspiring of empathy than as
[14:32]soon as it's almost done by the way. It might be all those things and that's fair to assume.
[14:36]But like alcoholism, despair is an equal opportunity condition and the daily human struggle to
[14:41]escape its grip knows no boundaries of wealth or class. Early on I understood that a mansion by the
[14:46]sea can just as easily be a jail cell as a dreamscape. It's so compelling. I mean, that's
[14:52]like amazing. It's such an amazing description of growing up that way and there's this whole feeling
[14:58]of are you too lucky to be sad? Are you too lucky to be depressed? Are you too lucky to have
[15:04]strife? Can you talk about the juxtaposition of wealth and sadness and the added, not burden,
[15:11]but the added expectation that wealth means you can't be sad? Well, that was exactly what
[15:19]that trying to get that right was the struggle that I had in the original essay, which of course
[15:27]was about money. And my whole thesis in that essay was bad stuff still happens. And in that
[15:38]passage that you just read and thank you, I loved listening to them. I would like you to be the
[15:43]reader instead of me. I also talk about how our neighbor, one of my earliest memories was that
[15:51]our neighbor swam out to sea and was trying to kill himself because his beautiful checking
[15:59]account in his beautiful wife and his beautiful house did not make up for the despair that he felt
[16:06]inside. So early on, that's how I recognized that a big house by the sea can just as easily be a
[16:13]jail cell as a dreamscape, but that is a tricky notion to sell to people. For obvious reasons,
[16:21]it's a tricky notion, even though my own children, I'll use them as an example, they did not
[16:26]grow up in that house by the sea, but they have early memories of that house by the sea. And of
[16:29]course, they were little. And it was, I do look to them. And whenever they talk about it, still
[16:37]they have trouble. They look at that and they say, what a great place to be a kid. What a great
[16:45]place to have parties when you were a teenager because that they sort by. And yet they know
[16:50]the story. They know that backdrop. So there's even in my own children's mind, there's a failure
[16:58]to compute there. And I get that. I wrote that passage, particularly that passage I struggled with
[17:05]in the book because I knew that it would be all too easy for somebody to read my book and do not
[17:17]read very deeply in it, just to read it. And in the back of their mind, they're thinking poor
[17:21]little rich girl, cry me a river. And I thought, okay, when we write memoirs, we are given our stage set,
[17:30]right? This was my stage set. This was my life. And this was the story I wanted to tell.
[17:37]So that's already a given. Then I put the players on the stage as they were. I put the situation
[17:44]on the stage as it was. And I let it play out. If we take away that backdrop, if you imagine it
[17:50]as a stage set, and we put in a different one necessarily, but the lines are the same. And the
[17:57]situation is the same. Maybe we'll take out the gardener, but you know what I'm saying.
[18:04]It's a story of a very human family event, right? It could be anywhere, but it's distracting
[18:11]sometimes to have the stage set that I had. So that is where that comes in, that kind of
[18:19]tension. And also what I felt as my responsibility as a writer was to really tell the story
[18:26]and get past the stage set, even though one has to acknowledge its presence, and that cynicism
[18:32]might be a place that people would go before they would get to empathy.
[18:37]I wrote this short essay on Easter, which I don't even really celebrate, but my
[18:43]emma's were here and the kids were dying to eggs. And it's just one of those really hard days
[18:46]when I was crying in the bathroom. And I was like, but this bathroom is so pretty.
[18:50]Yes. So I wrote this essay like too lucky to cry on Easter. Because how can I cry? I have these
[18:57]beautiful kids in this nice life. And I wrote it and I get such great responses from some
[19:02]people because on the outside, a lot of, you know, you can't, you know, we don't have to fight for
[19:06]food or you know, but that doesn't mean there aren't issues going on. Right. So anyway,
[19:11]very profound issues can take place no matter where you are. That's true. That's very true.
[19:18]So your father's alcohol, who made a shift away from the story. Your father's alcoholism played
[19:23]a big role in the story. And you talked about his bad days and the remorse he would feel,
[19:28]the butterflies he had for breakfast and how it impacted you. And you said, even as an adult,
[19:33]the child of an alcoholic forgets how to speak or more accurately loses the belief that there
[19:38]words of any power to make a difference or to matter. It was part of the strategy of retreat
[19:43]that we learned early in childhood to master. So can you tell me a little more about how it shaped
[19:49]you growing up with your dad's alcoholism or when you even realized your dad was not
[19:53]a alcoholic or different than anybody else's dad? Well, um, and this actually does go directly
[19:59]back to the last.
[20:00]thing that we were talking about, I feel as though one of the things that people see as a
[20:09]benefit of wealth, this would be my father who inherited money, is that you can sort
[20:15]of choose the life that you want, you don't have to go do a job that you might not like.
[20:24]In his case, too much free time was not a blessing, and too much free time can be greatly
[20:31]overvalued.
[20:33]And I believe that the alcoholism, there were many reasons for his alcoholism, but I do
[20:39]believe the fact that he had a lot of time on his hands, and yet he was this intellectual
[20:46]genius.
[20:47]He spoke 14 languages, he was fascinated by language, the different verb forms.
[20:55]He had little index cards with verb declensions piled up by his feet as he was studying
[21:01]a new language every year, but also he was in our living room.
[21:08]In his PJs, in the middle of the morning, with verb declensions by his feet, and the
[21:13]Hannah Budweiser on his breakfast tray, so what is wrong with that picture, right?
[21:19]I think it takes a child a while to figure out that that is not normal.
[21:30]You can figure out very easily that everyone else's parents are going off to work, and
[21:36]their peers are not, but how that translates into the fact that his life had taken on
[21:46]sort of a force of its own in the grip of an addiction is a lot, it takes a lot longer.
[21:55]I remember anxieties a child about, like birthday parties, what he show up in embarrass us.
[22:02]We adored our father, but it was as if there were two fathers.
[22:06]There was the lovely funny charming one, and then there was one that was a bumbling
[22:12]oof, and that person sometimes showed up at birthday parties and scared children and upset
[22:18]parents, and there were stories that I would hear from other kids in my class about
[22:25]him at parents' meetings.
[22:27]There was one famous one where I guess he spoke up very eloquently in the middle of
[22:31]a parent's meeting about the way he disapproved of the way that French was being taught
[22:35]at our school, and then when he went to sit down he fell off his chair, so it was like
[22:41]right there were the two parts of my father, and I heard that from a kid at school the
[22:44]next day, right?
[22:45]Because the parent had obviously been talking about it, and the kid had heard it.
[22:51]So then you are very aware of it.
[22:53]You're very aware of it, and yet you have no idea what to do about it, and you retreat
[22:58]into the background.
[22:59]In my case, I think now I could never have articulated this then, but I think the combination
[23:08]of the family dysfunction that comes with not knowing at any given point which parent is
[23:14]going to be there.
[23:18]And social protocol, which I grew up in an environment where children were to be seen
[23:22]and not heard.
[23:25]Not completely, but in a certain way.
[23:28]You know what I mean.
[23:29]The Desquorum was there.
[23:31]The combination of those two things made a child retreat into the background.
[23:37]You lose your voice because nobody is asking your opinion, and nobody is going to hear
[23:43]it anyway.
[23:44]If there is a distraction of somebody who is in the grip of alcohol.
[23:49]So when I looked back at this story, all I could think to myself, and my husband from
[23:54]that time now, my ex-husband, every time I had seen him over 30 years, he also said,
[23:59]why didn't we stop this wedding?
[24:01]How did we let it go forward?
[24:03]It took me a long time to realize that was all a part of losing my voice at that time.
[24:08]I literally did not feel that I could say stop.
[24:16]I don't want to blame that on my father, but I do think that the adult child of an alcoholic
[24:21]struggles with things that were imprinted from an early age.
[24:25]In terms of discrediting yourself, sorting by other, never sorting by itself, because
[24:32]the other is so theatrical.
[24:34]And if you add to that social protocol, that's another big theatric that's going on right.
[24:40]My mother's mantra, we will get through this with grace and style.
[24:44]If it kills us, that's what she would literally say.
[24:46]If it kills us, the grace and style comes first.
[24:50]That's the priority.
[24:51]So I had those things in juxtaposition to just growing up, and ironically, becoming an editor.
[25:01]As an editor, it's easy to coax stories out of other people.
[25:04]It's not always easy, but that's your job and it becomes a privilege to do so.
[25:08]One can relax into that job more easily if one is used to being in the background and
[25:14]watching other people's lives sort of unfold before them without having a voice.
[25:20]It's very natural, for me at least, I don't want to speak for all editors in the
[25:24]world, but for me at least, it was a natural progression to then go and help other people
[25:30]tell their stories and love doing that.
[25:32]I still love doing that rather than write my own.
[25:37]Took me a long time to hear my own voice, to let myself hear my own voice.
[25:42]And I bet your mother, not just with the protocol, but you illustrated her personality
[25:47]so well in so many ways, and I could identify different things about different people
[25:51]I know.
[25:52]And the way you talked about your mom went, you know how I loved your scene with the automatic
[25:57]pat.
[25:58]I had someone who called her pat and not by her last name, and she freaked out about
[26:02]that.
[26:03]And she used these four in accents too, and she seemed to be a force to reckon with as well,
[26:12]especially when she wouldn't give you one of the dresses when you're up in the attic
[26:16]at the end of the book.
[26:17]Yeah.
[26:18]And I don't want to give anything like that.
[26:19]I don't think it's going to be anything.
[26:20]But anyway, you wanted to dress, and she was like, no, no, I'm going to keep it, and
[26:22]you're like, you're like, you're never going to wear this dress.
[26:24]Yeah.
[26:25]Yeah.
[26:26]So I feel like maybe was it just, you know, the combination probably.
[26:29]I mean, do you feel like you've worked on your relationship with your mom in addition to
[26:35]your dad, or do you think it was the combination?
[26:37]Well, I'm just like, I'm like being your family's like, I'll just say, I'm sorry, no personal.
[26:41]No, no, no, no.
[26:42]I'm delighted.
[26:44]I'm delighted to have you guide this that way.
[26:48]No, I think with my mother, one of the most important ingredients for me in what I needed
[26:57]in writing this book, I understood her a lot more when I became a mother myself.
[27:03]And even as, well, with both my children, my son and my daughter, particularly my daughter,
[27:08]she started to get older.
[27:10]And I started to think about ways in which mothers always want to protect children and
[27:15]do the right thing, but of course we're all fallible, right?
[27:18]We're people too.
[27:21]And in order for me to really understand my mother in a way, let her off the hook, even
[27:27]though she's no longer walking amongst us on the planet, I had to see it through her eyes
[27:35]in the closest experience I had, which was being among myself, and knowing ways in which
[27:41]I was fallible, and we're just all trying our best.
[27:45]And in that way, I think I understood her motivations for all, for the most part, coming
[27:52]from a place of doing what we all do as mothers, which is we're lionesses if we feel
[27:58]our cups are in trouble, or if we need to guide them in one way or another, right?
[28:03]Because we got fears, and she became fears.
[28:07]But she was also a very imperious person, although she had deep in security within her
[28:12]that came from her childhood.
[28:15]Her inner child was not a happy person.
[28:17]Her inner child felt abandoned.
[28:20]And you know, that was, I can draw a direct line from that to the senior sighting where
[28:25]she wouldn't let me have that dress.
[28:27]Her inner child deep inside her, I don't want to sound like psych 101 here, but that
[28:32]inner child was saying, mine, mine, you can't have it, it's mine.
[28:36]Even though she was in her 70s when we had that conversation, right?
[28:41]She literally was never going to wear a beautiful silk dress again.
[28:46]Didn't matter.
[28:47]It was hers, and she wanted it.
[28:50]So that kind of thing took me a long time to be at peace with.
[28:58]She was also, you know, there was a side of her that was just a lot of fun, particularly
[29:03]as we got to be teenagers.
[29:05]She was a lot of fun.
[29:06]My friends all just adored spending time with her, you know, we literally would all sit
[29:11]around and gossip and spoke cigarettes with my mother.
[29:14]And drink diet soda and do all the things that people weren't doing at home with my mother.
[29:22]But there were also ways in which she was, you know, there's always those parents
[29:28]that everyone else says, your, your mother's so cool and your friends will say, she's
[29:33]not your mother, you know, yeah.
[29:35]So there was that, too.
[29:37]There was that, too.
[29:38]But she was such a larger than life character.
[29:40]The writing about her on one level was very easy and on another level was very hard
[29:44]because I did want to get all those very different aspects of her on the page to the extent
[29:51]that I could.
[29:52]Your memory about her, I mean, I, you, the scenes were so crystal clear.
[29:57]Did you write, did you keep a journal or do you do you do you do you do you do
[30:00]We just have an amazing memory.
[30:02]Well, some of the book I did actually write down a lot of it
[30:06]at the time, particularly the second section,
[30:09]which we haven't spoken about,
[30:10]which takes place up in Maine.
[30:12]And it's my name.
[30:13]That's awesome, I think.
[30:14]My husband's family, my in-laws,
[30:17]and it's all about a holiday.
[30:19]A week up there, a Christmas week up there,
[30:22]that I had all written down at the time,
[30:25]because it was, I did feel like I was watching theater
[30:29]in a way.
[30:31]And I think it has that quality in the book, too,
[30:35]that it was like a scene was unfolding,
[30:37]and I was watching it, and then my mother would call in.
[30:39]And then, you know, it would be very immediate,
[30:40]because there would be this disembodied voice calling
[30:43]from the upper east side of Manhattan going,
[30:45]what are they doing now?
[30:47]You should be home for Christmas.
[30:48]You shouldn't be out there with that, blab, blab.
[30:51]Anyway, I did write all that down.
[30:53]But in terms of my mother so much of it
[30:56]was so imprinted in me, and in my friends,
[30:59]I mean, they'll say, now, oh my God,
[31:01]the fact that she called everybody deory,
[31:03]and you have it all in there, or friends will say,
[31:06]I was one of the ones that made the mistake
[31:09]of calling her a pat, and I got in trouble,
[31:12]you know, that kind of thing, that did happen.
[31:15]But I do think they're just in terms of process
[31:18]of writing a memoir.
[31:19]I do think there's an element of having a literary sayance
[31:23]in your head sometimes.
[31:25]And towards the end of the book,
[31:28]there was something missing.
[31:30]And it had to do with my mother, and I couldn't get it yet.
[31:34]Because what was hard about her character
[31:37]is because she was so imperious,
[31:38]and because she was so bossy,
[31:41]it's very easy to make her one dimensional.
[31:43]I knew she was not one dimensional.
[31:45]So there were two things I actually added
[31:48]towards the end of the writing process,
[31:51]and both of them come out in the third section of the book.
[31:55]One of them was I was straining to hear something
[31:59]that she said, I knew there was something
[32:01]she said in that attic scene,
[32:03]which is also the scene you cited with the dress,
[32:07]that changed the coloration of the wedding weekend for me,
[32:12]and allowed me to layer off the hook.
[32:15]And I was walking my dogs one day in Brooklyn,
[32:17]where I live, and I suddenly heard her say in my head,
[32:21]I remembered the voice saying,
[32:26]I wish I could have been a better mother to you
[32:28]the weekend of the wedding, but I was numb.
[32:32]Now, it's not like I hear voices, I don't want to sound
[32:36]that way about it, but I think when you're deeply involved
[32:40]with a character that you're writing about sometimes,
[32:43]something like that will make itself known to you
[32:46]if you've been with the material long enough.
[32:48]And I literally tied my dogs up and took out a receipt
[32:51]that I had in my pocket, but kind of wrote down that line,
[32:55]and I thought that was it.
[32:56]And that was one, the other one was,
[33:00]which you, I know you've mentioned to me
[33:02]in our lovely emails back and forth.
[33:06]At the end of that attic scene, we go downstairs
[33:08]and we're looking out the window,
[33:10]and it has cleared from being a gloomy rainy day.
[33:13]And she said, you see, I told you,
[33:14]you should trust your mother, I told you,
[33:15]it was gonna be a perfectly glorious day.
[33:18]And I repeat that line at the very end of the book,
[33:21]but at the same time, she grabbed my hand
[33:23]and she squeezed it four times.
[33:25]Which was an old childhood game of ours
[33:28]that four times was, do you love me?
[33:30]And the squeeze back was three, yes, I do.
[33:33]And then she would squeeze two times how much
[33:36]and then I would crush her hand.
[33:38]And then I would do four times
[33:39]and she'd do three, then two, then one.
[33:41]That was another thing, I remembered very late
[33:45]in the process.
[33:47]So I think, again, there's certain things you remember
[33:50]right away, there's certain things
[33:51]that you haven't down.
[33:53]And yet, there are also these things
[33:56]that you just have to be very, very patient
[33:58]and they will come.
[34:00]See that, you know, the other trick of memory.
[34:03]When I read that in your book,
[34:04]I literally was like,
[34:06]cuz I had forgotten, I used to do that
[34:08]with my mom all the time.
[34:09]And I don't think I ever would have remembered that.
[34:12]And it like brought tears to my eyes,
[34:14]cuz you remembered it, I remembered it.
[34:16]It's like, it's like, oh, no, you're bringing tears
[34:18]to my eyes.
[34:19]I'm so thrilled that it could have always triggered that for you.
[34:22]I couldn't believe I wanted to like call my mom,
[34:24]but I probably shouldn't have.
[34:26]So what did the rest of your family think about you
[34:30]divulging all this information about your family?
[34:32]I think you thanked them, what did you say?
[34:34]And the acknowledgment she said, you know,
[34:38]it's never easy to have a writer in the clan.
[34:39]I get that, we each have our own version of events.
[34:43]Thank you for giving me the space and the respect
[34:45]to tell mine.
[34:46]So how did everybody in your family respond to this,
[34:48]just wondering?
[34:50]Well, I haven't actually talked to absolutely everybody
[34:53]in my family, but I was keenly aware of my two sisters,
[34:58]my full sisters, not my half siblings,
[35:01]because they really were the ones who shared our mother,
[35:06]obviously, it's not my half siblings, mothers, our mother.
[35:10]And also who would, they are the two that had grown up
[35:13]with my father, right?
[35:15]Our half siblings saw my father on occasions
[35:20]and lived with us for the month of August every year,
[35:22]but that was not the same thing as growing up
[35:25]with our father as an alcoholic.
[35:28]So I was mostly concerned about my two sisters.
[35:31]I was concerned about everybody, but particularly those two.
[35:34]And I said to both of them, when I finally sat down
[35:38]to write the book and realized this,
[35:40]I was going to write about this particular weekend,
[35:43]I said to both of them separately,
[35:46]when I just happened to see them.
[35:49]Look, I'm writing about this
[35:50]and we all have our own versions of this story, our father died.
[35:54]I just would like to tell it from the perspective
[35:57]of the bride that weekend.
[35:59]So that's my story.
[36:01]And I sent them both the manuscript.
[36:03]I sent them both the manuscript and my husband, Dean,
[36:06]my first husband, Dean, the manuscript
[36:09]before I sent it to my editor and my agent,
[36:11]because it really mattered to me that they be okay with it.
[36:17]And with both of them,
[36:20]I wanted me to, she said,
[36:24]I don't really ever use that expression.
[36:26]I'd really like you to change it.
[36:27]And I was like, okay, that's fine.
[36:28]Yeah, that's what I remember,
[36:30]but you know better than I am.
[36:32]And the other one, I changed,
[36:34]I mean, her complaint was so esoteric
[36:38]and so much my father's daughter in terms of language.
[36:41]I had changed the last name of one character
[36:44]from Mahoney to Montgomery.
[36:46]And she said, you cannot change
[36:48]an Irish name to a Scottish name.
[36:49]I said, is that really your own, they complain
[36:53]because I'm not going to stop the present.
[36:55]And that really was her, that was the one thing
[36:57]she thought was wrong that I got wrong.
[37:01]Now, Dean, my husband, I did talk to him,
[37:03]my ex-husband at Gray length,
[37:06]because I very much wrote about his family.
[37:09]And I have not seen those people, most of them,
[37:13]for a very long time, as in 30 years, long time.
[37:17]And I finally decided that I was going to change
[37:20]the name of the family, the last name
[37:22]and all of their first names.
[37:24]And he said, well, okay, but if you're gonna do that,
[37:26]can I stay Dean?
[37:27]So I said, yes, you can stay Dean.
[37:30]But in the thanks, I give him at the beginning
[37:32]of the acknowledgements, I use his initials
[37:35]because I know that whether he cares about it,
[37:40]hugely or not, his family might,
[37:42]that I not use their proper last name.
[37:46]So there are different ways in which one tries to be respectful.
[37:51]I haven't heard from everyone in my family
[37:53]and there might be people that are unhappy with things.
[37:58]I hope if that's the case that they'll know
[38:00]that I'm very approachable and I can talk about these things.
[38:03]But they may choose not to, I don't know.
[38:08]I've been on both sides of this
[38:10]as someone who's been in the literary world
[38:12]for as long as I have been.
[38:14]I have been a loosely-based character
[38:17]and other people's work and in one case,
[38:19]not loosely-based at all.
[38:23]And there are different ways in which I think about that,
[38:27]but I think what I finally at the end of the day
[38:29]can say in a general way is,
[38:32]as long as something isn't written for a malicious reason.
[38:36]If it's really written in the name of art
[38:39]and creating a story, a real story,
[38:43]then I can go with that.
[38:44]I can live with that.
[38:45]If it is malicious, that's something else again.
[38:48]And there was one case in my life
[38:50]where somebody wrote something
[38:51]because basically they wanted me to know something
[38:53]but they didn't want to tell me in that.
[38:56]That I don't admire.
[38:57]No, that's not good.
[38:58]Right, yeah, right.
[39:00]So, but in that way, one has to be respectful
[39:03]and yet one has to tell their story.
[39:06]I feel as an editor,
[39:08]I talk to a lot of my writers and other writers,
[39:12]friends who are writers about this over many, many years
[39:15]in terms of what is your strategy,
[39:17]how do you approach family in these matters?
[39:21]It obviously isn't always lovely
[39:23]to have a writer in the family at all.
[39:27]And I got different answers,
[39:28]but the one thing that seemed to be the general truth
[39:31]and all of that and the take home for me was,
[39:35]you cannot let that stop you from telling your story.
[39:40]Whatever footwork you have to do
[39:43]to go to various people and talk to them about it,
[39:46]if you're gonna tell your story, you're gonna tell your story.
[39:51]And that was sort of the way I proceeded.
[39:53]I know it's not going to be easy.
[39:56]Right.
[39:57]And it's also not easy when things are being...
[40:00]Reviewed, because you obviously can't control the media and the press.
[40:04]And you know, there was, you and I just spoke about one treatment in the New York Post.
[40:09]I was very unhappy with because I thought this is disrespectful to my family.
[40:15]It's not really the subtlety with which I hope I have come to the material, but it was the New York Post.
[40:22]And that kind of thing, you can't control.
[40:25]You can do damage, control, and call it the people that might see it.
[40:29]But that's what you do and that's part of the job.
[40:32]That's part of the privilege of having your work published, even though a privilege can sometimes, as we know, go both ways.
[40:42]Right?
[40:45]So are you going to do, are you going to write another book?
[40:48]Yes, yes, yes, yes.
[40:50]I'm already working on one idea that I have.
[40:56]And can you give any more than that?
[41:00]Not really.
[41:01]Not yet, okay.
[41:02]Not yet, really.
[41:04]It is, again, more material.
[41:07]Excellent.
[41:08]Yeah.
[41:09]But, you know, right now I'm worrying, sort of on the level of what we've been discussing in terms of privacy and what not.
[41:17]I'm thinking a lot about that, about I don't want to break the anonymity of some of the people that are involved.
[41:26]So I am just beginning, in my mind, to construct the story and we'll have to see where it goes.
[41:32]But I'm looking forward to it.
[41:34]Excellent.
[41:35]Yes.
[41:36]I do.
[41:37]I'm delighted.
[41:38]Well, thank you.
[41:39]Thanks for letting me pry into your...
[41:41]Oh, it's your pleasure.
[41:42]The pleasure.
[41:43]The inner details of your family life.
[41:45]Thank you, guys.
[41:46]You've been with the wonderful book.
[41:47]You're a gift as a reader.
[41:48]Oh, really.
[41:49]You really are.
[41:50]You know, you bring so much.
[41:52]You get so much of the nuance and really thank you.
[41:55]It's been a privileged to have you read my book.
[41:57]Oh, that's sweet.
[41:58]Oh, thank you.
[42:00]Thanks.
[42:01]This episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read books has been sponsored by the Craft Studio.
[42:06]Craft Studio NYC.com.
[42:08]Thank you.