Judith Hannan's Blog - Posts Tagged "judith-hannan"
Blog Post #2
The other night I did a reading of Motherhood Exaggerated at the New York Academy of Medicine. It was sponsored by the Arnold P. Gold Foundation which is the preeminent force behind the move to instill humanism into health care. Anyone interested in the combination of the highest quality medical care with the highest level of doctor empathy and compassion (and we all should be) should check out the foundation’s work by going to www.humanism-in-medicine.org.
I was introduced by Sandra Gold, Founder and CEO. She didn’t want to deliver the standard recitation of where I went to school and my professional accomplishments. Instead, she asked me to tell her how I would describe the progression of my life—what I have strived for and how I have defined myself.
What I realized in talking with Sandra is that very little of what I have become good at was learned in school. Indeed, the one discipline I was specifically trained for—teaching music—is the one I spent the least time doing. I learned the educational theories of John Dewey, I crafted coherent lesson plans, I studied child development, but in the actual classroom I had no idea what to do. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have become a successful teacher over time, but if I had, it would have been because I taught and trained myself.
The first meaningful job I held was as a development professional at the 92nd Street Y. This job was counterintuitive to everything I knew about myself. Unlike music, which I loved and played, fundraising required that I do all the things I hated—being assertive, talking on the phone, “working the room,” meeting strangers. But I started at the bottom, took Anne Lamott’s advice and tackled one bird at a time, and morphed into the head of my department. I reveled in the evolutionary process more than in the career. I was fortunate that, when the learning curve began to flatten, I was presented with a new challenge: motherhood.
Like the profession I would soon leave, there were many reasons why I felt ill equipped to be a mother. I had decided I wasn’t good with children, without ever defining what that meant. When I took babysitting jobs as a teenager, my favorites were the ones with small babies who would already be asleep when I arrived. But I still spent the next hours until the parents came home in fear of the baby waking up. A crying baby was a mystery I was sure I could never solve. My problem with older children was that they had to be played with, and I was too quiet and bookish to be playful. Still, I loved family too much to imagine an adult life without children. So a decade into my marriage, my husband I began trying to conceive. It took four years. Three years into the effort, not only was I still fearful and not very playful, I was certain I was barren and that no child would ever find me attractive.
I was also a daughter who had lost her own mother. I was left only with a frozen image of the kind of parent she was, not what she would have wanted to be if she had a second chance based upon what she learned the first time around. I tried thawing out that image, but when my younger daughter Nadia was diagnosed with cancer, I would need more than remnants of one person’s way of mothering to help her. I was unaware of how I was changing while I was caring for Nadia as well as for my other two children. It was while I was writing Motherhood Exaggerated that I looked back and saw how I sifted and sorted, rejected and replaced so that I emerged altered and happier with the kind of mother I had taught myself how to be.
Which takes me to my current incarnation as a writer. When I was in fifth grade, because I had perfected my penmanship, I was moved into a creative writing class with all the other accomplished script-masters. The message that neatness and perfection were somehow a part of the creative process was embedded in me. Throughout my school years and in my work I crafted papers, reports, and proposals that were logical, symmetrical, and punctuated just the way Mr. Nelson and Mrs. Rhinehardt taught me in high school. Maybe there was a little something different about my grant proposals because people actually said they were interesting. You should be a writer, they said.
I think the real reason I started what I can only call “non-school” writing was because I loved the sensation of drawing a pencil across a new page of lined paper. It was hard to get over the “neatness counts” mentality and I was very proud of myself when, in my initial efforts. I created tidy packages made of words with combed hair and shined shoes. But if I loved the site of my kids when they were covered in glitter and glue, their hair filled with sand from the beach, their faces covered with chocolate frosting, then couldn’t the same be true for words. I had to loosen up, to take my words for a walk in the mud, through city streets, into the ocean—to get them covered in salt spray, blood, and sweat. I’ve had writing partners, taken a few workshops, benefited from mentors, but the process has revolve around what I have discovered and initiated in my writing, not what I have been taught to do.
Motherhood Exaggerated marks how far I come in that process but, I hope, it is not my final destination.
I was introduced by Sandra Gold, Founder and CEO. She didn’t want to deliver the standard recitation of where I went to school and my professional accomplishments. Instead, she asked me to tell her how I would describe the progression of my life—what I have strived for and how I have defined myself.
What I realized in talking with Sandra is that very little of what I have become good at was learned in school. Indeed, the one discipline I was specifically trained for—teaching music—is the one I spent the least time doing. I learned the educational theories of John Dewey, I crafted coherent lesson plans, I studied child development, but in the actual classroom I had no idea what to do. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have become a successful teacher over time, but if I had, it would have been because I taught and trained myself.
The first meaningful job I held was as a development professional at the 92nd Street Y. This job was counterintuitive to everything I knew about myself. Unlike music, which I loved and played, fundraising required that I do all the things I hated—being assertive, talking on the phone, “working the room,” meeting strangers. But I started at the bottom, took Anne Lamott’s advice and tackled one bird at a time, and morphed into the head of my department. I reveled in the evolutionary process more than in the career. I was fortunate that, when the learning curve began to flatten, I was presented with a new challenge: motherhood.
Like the profession I would soon leave, there were many reasons why I felt ill equipped to be a mother. I had decided I wasn’t good with children, without ever defining what that meant. When I took babysitting jobs as a teenager, my favorites were the ones with small babies who would already be asleep when I arrived. But I still spent the next hours until the parents came home in fear of the baby waking up. A crying baby was a mystery I was sure I could never solve. My problem with older children was that they had to be played with, and I was too quiet and bookish to be playful. Still, I loved family too much to imagine an adult life without children. So a decade into my marriage, my husband I began trying to conceive. It took four years. Three years into the effort, not only was I still fearful and not very playful, I was certain I was barren and that no child would ever find me attractive.
I was also a daughter who had lost her own mother. I was left only with a frozen image of the kind of parent she was, not what she would have wanted to be if she had a second chance based upon what she learned the first time around. I tried thawing out that image, but when my younger daughter Nadia was diagnosed with cancer, I would need more than remnants of one person’s way of mothering to help her. I was unaware of how I was changing while I was caring for Nadia as well as for my other two children. It was while I was writing Motherhood Exaggerated that I looked back and saw how I sifted and sorted, rejected and replaced so that I emerged altered and happier with the kind of mother I had taught myself how to be.
Which takes me to my current incarnation as a writer. When I was in fifth grade, because I had perfected my penmanship, I was moved into a creative writing class with all the other accomplished script-masters. The message that neatness and perfection were somehow a part of the creative process was embedded in me. Throughout my school years and in my work I crafted papers, reports, and proposals that were logical, symmetrical, and punctuated just the way Mr. Nelson and Mrs. Rhinehardt taught me in high school. Maybe there was a little something different about my grant proposals because people actually said they were interesting. You should be a writer, they said.
I think the real reason I started what I can only call “non-school” writing was because I loved the sensation of drawing a pencil across a new page of lined paper. It was hard to get over the “neatness counts” mentality and I was very proud of myself when, in my initial efforts. I created tidy packages made of words with combed hair and shined shoes. But if I loved the site of my kids when they were covered in glitter and glue, their hair filled with sand from the beach, their faces covered with chocolate frosting, then couldn’t the same be true for words. I had to loosen up, to take my words for a walk in the mud, through city streets, into the ocean—to get them covered in salt spray, blood, and sweat. I’ve had writing partners, taken a few workshops, benefited from mentors, but the process has revolve around what I have discovered and initiated in my writing, not what I have been taught to do.
Motherhood Exaggerated marks how far I come in that process but, I hope, it is not my final destination.
Blog Post #4
Eleven years ago, when my daughter Nadia neared the end of her treatment for Ewings sarcoma, we attended a benefit for the Children’s Museum of Manhattan. When I wrote about that experience in my book Motherhood Exaggerated, I described watching Nadia scale a climbing wall. She wears a bandana over her bald head, she is very thin and I am marveling at her energy since she spent the night in urgent care receiving a blood transfusion. While I watch, I think about who I am in this scenario. Am I, “… a woman who’s strong or sad or different or a martyr? Am I anticipating the time when I will be just like every other mom in the room—no longer special or super? Or will I realize that I was never either of those; I was just a mom with a sick kid surrounded by people with their own stories disguised by smiling faces so similar to my own facade.”
Months later, when Nadia’s hair had grown into a short pixie and the prominence of her bones lessened, I thought it was time for me to put the story of the year I spent caring for Nadia away. Despite the fact that we didn’t even know yet if Nadia would be a survivor, “I didn’t know how to introduce the topic [of her illness] without feeling as if I were dropping my burden like garbage on someone’s doorstep …”
At that museum benefit, I didn’t actually believe there were other mothers like me. I had immersed myself in my daughter’s illness with the focus of a meditating monk. It would have been impossible for me to recognize that the people around me were carrying similar wounds unless my trance was broken by their words. Which it rarely was. We have so many stories to tell, yet we keep so quiet. Motherhood Exaggerated has broken the trance and the silence.
Despite my own need after Nadia’s treatment to read stories similar to my own, and the prominence I gave in my book’s proposal and marketing pitch to the impact I hoped to have on the lives of others, I can’t say I understood the extent of the thirst for books like my own. Perhaps it was too many rejections from publishers telling me there is no market for “sick kid” books or that, even though I knew it was a book about a mother’s journey, no one else would see the universal story it contained.
After a dozen events, one-on-one meetings with readers, and mail correspondence, I wish I could go back into my book and rewrite that sentence about leaving garbage on a doorstep. Because the stories I am being told are given to me like presents that for so long could find no one to receive them, open the wrappings, and lift out the precious treasure. First the giver says thank you. Then he or she speaks.
“My son had cancer. He didn’t make it. Now I’m writing. My other son has psychological problems. You understand.”
“My son has a serious mental disorder. My stepdaughter had cancer and her mother wasn’t very much help.”
“My husband’s esophagus ruptured.”
“I have an incurable leukemia. I’ve only told three people, not even my children. Your book is such a gift to me.”
“I’m going to make my husband read this book. I’ve never had an ill child, but I am a mother and my husband has no idea what that means.”
They tell me about their daily hurdles, the major traumas—the moment that will grab us all someday when the path we thought we were walking alters course, like the stairs at Hogwarts that keep changing the place of their landing
A story-receiver is different from a storyteller. It requires a projection of the heart through the absence of words. The person speaking could be so fractured that you know even the slightest touch could shatter whatever protection they have erected around themselves. My hand, so ready to hold or stroke, must remain at my side. Others come wanting a continuation of the embrace the have found in my words. Still others come as equals; their tales are gifts that replenish my store of compassion, and I understand that I need them as much as they need me.
When it is time for me to speak, I know that what is wanted from me is not to take the pain away, to offer therapy or false promises of hope, as much as I wish I had the ability to do so. Whatever words I find must be both mirror and window. That part is like writing, but now I can see the face on the other side of the glass.
Months later, when Nadia’s hair had grown into a short pixie and the prominence of her bones lessened, I thought it was time for me to put the story of the year I spent caring for Nadia away. Despite the fact that we didn’t even know yet if Nadia would be a survivor, “I didn’t know how to introduce the topic [of her illness] without feeling as if I were dropping my burden like garbage on someone’s doorstep …”
At that museum benefit, I didn’t actually believe there were other mothers like me. I had immersed myself in my daughter’s illness with the focus of a meditating monk. It would have been impossible for me to recognize that the people around me were carrying similar wounds unless my trance was broken by their words. Which it rarely was. We have so many stories to tell, yet we keep so quiet. Motherhood Exaggerated has broken the trance and the silence.
Despite my own need after Nadia’s treatment to read stories similar to my own, and the prominence I gave in my book’s proposal and marketing pitch to the impact I hoped to have on the lives of others, I can’t say I understood the extent of the thirst for books like my own. Perhaps it was too many rejections from publishers telling me there is no market for “sick kid” books or that, even though I knew it was a book about a mother’s journey, no one else would see the universal story it contained.
After a dozen events, one-on-one meetings with readers, and mail correspondence, I wish I could go back into my book and rewrite that sentence about leaving garbage on a doorstep. Because the stories I am being told are given to me like presents that for so long could find no one to receive them, open the wrappings, and lift out the precious treasure. First the giver says thank you. Then he or she speaks.
“My son had cancer. He didn’t make it. Now I’m writing. My other son has psychological problems. You understand.”
“My son has a serious mental disorder. My stepdaughter had cancer and her mother wasn’t very much help.”
“My husband’s esophagus ruptured.”
“I have an incurable leukemia. I’ve only told three people, not even my children. Your book is such a gift to me.”
“I’m going to make my husband read this book. I’ve never had an ill child, but I am a mother and my husband has no idea what that means.”
They tell me about their daily hurdles, the major traumas—the moment that will grab us all someday when the path we thought we were walking alters course, like the stairs at Hogwarts that keep changing the place of their landing
A story-receiver is different from a storyteller. It requires a projection of the heart through the absence of words. The person speaking could be so fractured that you know even the slightest touch could shatter whatever protection they have erected around themselves. My hand, so ready to hold or stroke, must remain at my side. Others come wanting a continuation of the embrace the have found in my words. Still others come as equals; their tales are gifts that replenish my store of compassion, and I understand that I need them as much as they need me.
When it is time for me to speak, I know that what is wanted from me is not to take the pain away, to offer therapy or false promises of hope, as much as I wish I had the ability to do so. Whatever words I find must be both mirror and window. That part is like writing, but now I can see the face on the other side of the glass.
Blog Post #5
A Blog for Father’s Day
My husband and I are in an argument. Our older daughter, a junior in high school, has asked for an SAT tutor. She is an A student. She qualified to compete for a national merit scholarship after taking her PSATs.
“What does she need a tutor for?” I say.
“The SATs are important, Judi. I don’t understand why you would say no,” my husband responds.
“I hate this system. What about the kids who can’t afford a tutor?” I continue to argue.
“I’m sick of your liberal crap. This isn’t about some theoretical child. This is Frannie. If I can give her an opportunity to do the best she can on the SATs, why would I deny her that?”
And here comes the punch line. “You’ve had the kids for the past sixteen years. Now it’s my turn.”
His turn? What am I, some contractor who built his house and now, when he’s ready to live in it, I can’t come in?
This conversation took place eight years ago. Since then, I have seen some benefits to giving John his “turn.” Given where Frannie went to high school and where we lived, college admissions officers probably assumed she had been tutored. But I got to stick to my principles while Frannie got her tutor. She did well on her SATs, but she probably would have anyway. Her tutor wasn’t very good.
Despite feminism and fathers who change diapers and stay-at-home dads, we haven’t moved very far in the conversation about how women carry most of the burden at home. On any given day, women put in more time on housekeeping and child care than their male partners, even if they each work the same hours. But is this the way we should be comparing parental roles? Maybe it’s not in the day-to-day division of labor that we should be looking for parity, but in the overall arc of the years we spend not just raising our children, but nurturing and supporting them.
Somewhere during the time when Frannie was preparing for college and my two youngest were beginning their trek through high school and adolescence, I got tired of attending to the details of raising children. No longer dealing with toilet training and picky appetites, I was now monitoring curfew, using the goodnight kiss as a breathalyzer, shaking the kids awake in the morning to get them ready for school, and scrounging under beds and in the hamper to find the knee socks needed for the perfect uniform they forgot they had to wear until just that morning. I was beginning to think this idea of taking turns wasn’t a bad one. With Frannie now living and working on her own and her brother Max and sister Nadia in college, I have excused myself from worrying about my kids’ every concern. Not so my husband.
Max, a rising junior in college, began an internship at an investment bank this summer. John gets up with him each morning at 6:15 to make him a fried egg sandwich and see him off to work. I spent the first week of my son’s internship in Los Angeles on a book tour. When Nadia came home from a stressful trip to Berlin, John was home in New York when she arrived. I remained on Martha’s Vineyard where I was enjoying my weekend.
John helps the kids set up their bank accounts, understand apartment leases, and fill out tax forms. He stocks their refrigerators and pantries, makes sure their cars have gas and up-to-date inspection stickers. He worries when they ride the subway at night, if they don’t respond to a text within an hour, and over the courses they are taking in school. He keeps mental track of the schedule of the two kids still in college. He knows when they have tests or papers due. He loves them unconditionally and shows it by doing everything he can to make their lives as pain-free as possible.
Of course, pain does arise. Small hurts as well as trauma. This is where I emerge from the non-maternal life I have been building for myself—to talk, to soothe, to place a hand on a brow, to massage the tight cords of muscle along the side of a neck. John hovers like a bird who can’t figure out why his babies can’t fly. But he remains close by, ready to resume his daily chirping and encouragement.
I’m not sure the kids need all this hovering. Like the SAT tutor, I like to encourage more independence. But I often go too far. Some stressors are unnecessary when they can be alleviated so easily. Because John has made that his job, I am that much more free.
So I guess this is a thank you to John for taking his turn. Happy Father’s Day.
My husband and I are in an argument. Our older daughter, a junior in high school, has asked for an SAT tutor. She is an A student. She qualified to compete for a national merit scholarship after taking her PSATs.
“What does she need a tutor for?” I say.
“The SATs are important, Judi. I don’t understand why you would say no,” my husband responds.
“I hate this system. What about the kids who can’t afford a tutor?” I continue to argue.
“I’m sick of your liberal crap. This isn’t about some theoretical child. This is Frannie. If I can give her an opportunity to do the best she can on the SATs, why would I deny her that?”
And here comes the punch line. “You’ve had the kids for the past sixteen years. Now it’s my turn.”
His turn? What am I, some contractor who built his house and now, when he’s ready to live in it, I can’t come in?
This conversation took place eight years ago. Since then, I have seen some benefits to giving John his “turn.” Given where Frannie went to high school and where we lived, college admissions officers probably assumed she had been tutored. But I got to stick to my principles while Frannie got her tutor. She did well on her SATs, but she probably would have anyway. Her tutor wasn’t very good.
Despite feminism and fathers who change diapers and stay-at-home dads, we haven’t moved very far in the conversation about how women carry most of the burden at home. On any given day, women put in more time on housekeeping and child care than their male partners, even if they each work the same hours. But is this the way we should be comparing parental roles? Maybe it’s not in the day-to-day division of labor that we should be looking for parity, but in the overall arc of the years we spend not just raising our children, but nurturing and supporting them.
Somewhere during the time when Frannie was preparing for college and my two youngest were beginning their trek through high school and adolescence, I got tired of attending to the details of raising children. No longer dealing with toilet training and picky appetites, I was now monitoring curfew, using the goodnight kiss as a breathalyzer, shaking the kids awake in the morning to get them ready for school, and scrounging under beds and in the hamper to find the knee socks needed for the perfect uniform they forgot they had to wear until just that morning. I was beginning to think this idea of taking turns wasn’t a bad one. With Frannie now living and working on her own and her brother Max and sister Nadia in college, I have excused myself from worrying about my kids’ every concern. Not so my husband.
Max, a rising junior in college, began an internship at an investment bank this summer. John gets up with him each morning at 6:15 to make him a fried egg sandwich and see him off to work. I spent the first week of my son’s internship in Los Angeles on a book tour. When Nadia came home from a stressful trip to Berlin, John was home in New York when she arrived. I remained on Martha’s Vineyard where I was enjoying my weekend.
John helps the kids set up their bank accounts, understand apartment leases, and fill out tax forms. He stocks their refrigerators and pantries, makes sure their cars have gas and up-to-date inspection stickers. He worries when they ride the subway at night, if they don’t respond to a text within an hour, and over the courses they are taking in school. He keeps mental track of the schedule of the two kids still in college. He knows when they have tests or papers due. He loves them unconditionally and shows it by doing everything he can to make their lives as pain-free as possible.
Of course, pain does arise. Small hurts as well as trauma. This is where I emerge from the non-maternal life I have been building for myself—to talk, to soothe, to place a hand on a brow, to massage the tight cords of muscle along the side of a neck. John hovers like a bird who can’t figure out why his babies can’t fly. But he remains close by, ready to resume his daily chirping and encouragement.
I’m not sure the kids need all this hovering. Like the SAT tutor, I like to encourage more independence. But I often go too far. Some stressors are unnecessary when they can be alleviated so easily. Because John has made that his job, I am that much more free.
So I guess this is a thank you to John for taking his turn. Happy Father’s Day.
Blog Post #7
Defining Good
I crossed paths with a neighbor the other day who saw that I was carrying Edward St.
Aubyn’s The Patrick Melrose Novels. “How do you like the book?” he asked.
“I’m loving it,” I answered.
“Really, I couldn’t stand it. Did you get to the part with the drugs yet?”
“Just starting it. I didn’t expect it to be such a hard book, but the writing is unbelievable.”
I then bumped into the man’s wife with a few mutual friends and we had the same
conversation again. For all of them, it was just too hard to read. Drug binges are only part of
it; a father’s cruelty is evident in the first pages when he drowns and incinerates ants, verbally
eviscerates his “friends” who tolerate it, and then molests his five-year-old son. Yes, it’s
an unbelievably hard read but the writing is brilliant and the characters become real people,
although ones you don’t want to be with. (Another complaint from my friends.)
So what does it mean to say a book is good? Since joining Goodreads two months ago,
I’ve been thinking about this question a lot. I’ve been tempted not to rate books. It seems like
such a mathematical measurement for a subjective experience. I’ve also had to struggle with
the question as a judge of an essay contest for medical school students for the Arnold P. Gold
Foundation for Humanism in Medicine. We are asked to score the essays from 1-6 based on
content and 1-4 based on writing. It’s easy when the content is great to give the excellent writer
a high writing score. But what about the person whose use of language is unique, who writes
excellent dialogue, and whose metaphors are sunbursts, but who doesn’t say anything? Can that
person be a good writer?
Can content and quality of writing be separated? Can a book be brilliant even though, rather
than knock your socks off, it makes you want to cover not just your feet but to burrow under
a down quilt? Or, is a book that you keeps you riveted good even though it is poorly written?
(Fifty Shades of Gray anyone?)
There’s a difference between judging a book as good as opposed to likeable. This is what
I think about when I pick my number of stars. Am I conveying that I liked the book or that I
thought it was good? I actually don’t know the answer to that question. When I rated Chris
Cleave’s new book, Gold, I gave it four stars because I love his writing but the story in the book
disappointed me in so many ways. If I had given him two or three stars would that have been
more accurate?
These are all questions that I keep in mind in terms of my own writing. My book,
Motherhood Exaggerated, is, in my view a literary memoir. I want the writing to lead the reader
into the depths of his or her own life, not just my own. But when the story is about a mother’s
journey of growth during her daughter’s treatment for cancer, it becomes a sick-kid book or a
survivor story and the topic becomes the reason for reading it. The topic is very important to me
but so is attracting readers who are looking for good writing.
Over the years, I have become much more broadminded about the books I choose to read.
Increasingly, I pick up books like The Patrick Melrose Novels precisely because I don’t see any
obvious intersection with my own life. Then I start to read and I find myself reacting and then
learning things about myself based upon how I react.
So maybe that’s the sign of a good book. It teaches you what you don’t yet know about your
own self and about the world.
I crossed paths with a neighbor the other day who saw that I was carrying Edward St.
Aubyn’s The Patrick Melrose Novels. “How do you like the book?” he asked.
“I’m loving it,” I answered.
“Really, I couldn’t stand it. Did you get to the part with the drugs yet?”
“Just starting it. I didn’t expect it to be such a hard book, but the writing is unbelievable.”
I then bumped into the man’s wife with a few mutual friends and we had the same
conversation again. For all of them, it was just too hard to read. Drug binges are only part of
it; a father’s cruelty is evident in the first pages when he drowns and incinerates ants, verbally
eviscerates his “friends” who tolerate it, and then molests his five-year-old son. Yes, it’s
an unbelievably hard read but the writing is brilliant and the characters become real people,
although ones you don’t want to be with. (Another complaint from my friends.)
So what does it mean to say a book is good? Since joining Goodreads two months ago,
I’ve been thinking about this question a lot. I’ve been tempted not to rate books. It seems like
such a mathematical measurement for a subjective experience. I’ve also had to struggle with
the question as a judge of an essay contest for medical school students for the Arnold P. Gold
Foundation for Humanism in Medicine. We are asked to score the essays from 1-6 based on
content and 1-4 based on writing. It’s easy when the content is great to give the excellent writer
a high writing score. But what about the person whose use of language is unique, who writes
excellent dialogue, and whose metaphors are sunbursts, but who doesn’t say anything? Can that
person be a good writer?
Can content and quality of writing be separated? Can a book be brilliant even though, rather
than knock your socks off, it makes you want to cover not just your feet but to burrow under
a down quilt? Or, is a book that you keeps you riveted good even though it is poorly written?
(Fifty Shades of Gray anyone?)
There’s a difference between judging a book as good as opposed to likeable. This is what
I think about when I pick my number of stars. Am I conveying that I liked the book or that I
thought it was good? I actually don’t know the answer to that question. When I rated Chris
Cleave’s new book, Gold, I gave it four stars because I love his writing but the story in the book
disappointed me in so many ways. If I had given him two or three stars would that have been
more accurate?
These are all questions that I keep in mind in terms of my own writing. My book,
Motherhood Exaggerated, is, in my view a literary memoir. I want the writing to lead the reader
into the depths of his or her own life, not just my own. But when the story is about a mother’s
journey of growth during her daughter’s treatment for cancer, it becomes a sick-kid book or a
survivor story and the topic becomes the reason for reading it. The topic is very important to me
but so is attracting readers who are looking for good writing.
Over the years, I have become much more broadminded about the books I choose to read.
Increasingly, I pick up books like The Patrick Melrose Novels precisely because I don’t see any
obvious intersection with my own life. Then I start to read and I find myself reacting and then
learning things about myself based upon how I react.
So maybe that’s the sign of a good book. It teaches you what you don’t yet know about your
own self and about the world.
