Mothers and Daughters
My mother has been my muse. There's no other way to say it. Every book I have written circles back to a central preoccupation and concern with mothers, or mothers and daughters. I find mothers in the hidden, silenced story of an eating disorder, in the invitations and impediments to women's spiritual and psychological development, in our story-telling, in the rhythms of our poetry, in the evolution of feminism, in our own history and political thought.
When I am writing my mother leans over my shoulder, frowning. She's hard to please, hard to describe or account for, but she's always there. I have finally learned to welcome her presence and build my written work around her.
With my daughter, a whole new type of relationship has developed, perhaps because we are so much closer in age. My mother was 40 when I was born, I was 23 when I gave birth to my daughter. I wanted a daughter, I couldn't imagine raising a son, sometimes since her birth I have thought that I wanted to have my own childhood back, to do it over and make it come out better. When I was pregnant, I had two favorite fantasies of life with my daughter. I imagined playing with her on the grass, rolling over and over and down hill. And I planned to take her to cultural events, all the things I loved best myself: to the opera, ballet, museum, art movies. What I imagined, I think, was myself as my own older sister, and my daughter Larissa as my child self reborn to a happier circumstance. We would be playmates, comrades, buddies, pals, companions. It didn't occur to me back then that this fantasy, if fulfilled, would deprive my daughter of a mother.
I have written about my daughter almost as often as I have written about my mother. [In My Mother's House, Crossing the Border, My Life as a Boy, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Her Mother] Still, I would not call my daughter my muse. She appears in my stories as a young person with whom I am learning about life, learning to love, to be consistent, learning a great deal from her about honesty and fairness. They are also stories in which I am passing on to her, in exactly the way I had intended not to do, some of the harsher sorrows of my own childhood: loss, abandonment, dark moods, angers and depressions.
Related Books
 In My Mother's House: A Daughter's Story (UPDATED!) |
 The Hungry Self: Women, Eating and Identity |
 The Flame Bearers: A Novel |
 Reinventing Eve: Modern Woman in Search of Herself |
 Sex and Other Sacred Games (with Renate Stendhal) |
 Crossing the Border: An Erotic Journey |
 In My Father's Garden |
 Cecilia Bartoli: The Passion of Song (with Renate Stendhal) |
 My Life as a Boy |
 The Woman Who Gave Birth to Her Mother |