My mother wrote a beautiful essay about a friend's passing about two years ago. It is one of her best works. She is a fiction-writer by nature. I have come to believe that fiction is usually not fiction at all, but a thinly (or I guess sometimes thickly) veiled memoir of people, places, and things dear and painful. My mother's writing is beautiful, but being her daughter, I see those people, places, things that sometimes are dear to me as well, and that are sometimes her 'dear' and my 'painful'.
She never writes about me.
And that's okay...I think I understand it. Writing, Southern writing in particular, is born of painful separations, raging fathers, long lines of passive aggressive matriarchs, wild children, Gothic homes large and small, cheap alcohol and the subsequent tidying of those memories through fictionalized redemption, revenge, and revision. I haven't left her much to re-write. Barring a brief rebellion in my mid-teens, I am a natural pleaser and survive on food, water, and the approval of others. I wanted to move away and live in a glass apartment in SoHo; join a synagogue and travel around the world.
I live in a three-bedroom with my husband and daughter, both whom I adore, in my hometown and attend the same church as my parents. I love my family and I feel lucky that my story is unfolding in this way but there are sentences...okay, maybe chapters, that have not turned out the way I imagined.
So much self-control I've tried to practice. Reading 'Little Women' and closing my eyes imaging Jo's mother explaining how with her devoted husband's help she had learned to close her lips tightly, bite back her words, and quickly leave the room. I've practiced for fifteen years and I finally think I'm getting the hang of it. No more spontaneous outpourings of words or thoughts or outrage. Look how far I've come! I thought to myself this week when confronted with some very unpleasant situations and people. Ha! I'm not exploding, I am controlling my thoughts, my emotions, my feelings...I stopped short. ...feeling? Am I? Why do I have less to say? And the little voice at the base of my brain replied, Because you're imploding.
Shit.
I read Mom's essay and it made me laugh, and cry, and resent myself (while also being relieved) that I don't really cause anything worth writing about except reproduction which, being insanely in love with my daughter aside, let's face it, didn't take a whole lot of skill or thought on my part but a lack thereof. A lapse I am grateful for everyday but nonetheless, there it is. There's the fact and my disclaimers one after the other, in case you missed the first, lest you think of me as flawed, selfish...human.
I sit here trying to tie all of these thoughts up with a neat ribbon that shines a pinprick of light but I can't find that neat little ribbon. Though I know it's buried there somewhere in the depths of my scraps and messy papers, photos and keepsakes. Scrunched at the bottom underneath a short lifetime still ongoing and changing--I'll find it or maybe, there it is.
Fiction (Latin: fictum, "created") is a branch of literature which deals, in part or in whole, with temporally contra factual events (events that are not true at the time of writing).
