What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence (What We Don't Talk About Book 1)

by Michele Filgate

Three years later, I sent her the book I’d written. You can’t call me until you’ve finished reading it, I said. In it were all the things I’d never told her about the heroin and the parts of that job that hadn’t felt like feminist activism or even acting. Take as much time as you need, I said, hoping that she would take as much time as she needed to not need to talk to me about how it felt to read those things. She agreed. The phone rang the next morning at 7 a.m. Mom? You were supposed to wait until you finished reading the book to call me. I did. You did? I couldn’t stop. I kept putting it down and turning out the light and then turning it back on and picking it back up again. Why? I had to know that you were going to be all right. It was the hardest thing she’d ever had to read, she said. It was a masterpiece, she said.