Motherland: Interview with Author Elissa Altman
“There are those memoirs that act as mirrors for us, calling us to reflect on the importance of healing, heartache, and the power of sharing your own truth. Motherland is one of those reflective books. Weaving both compassion and grit, Elissa Altman speaks to the complicated mother-daughter dynamic in a way that the reader will hauntingly recognize.”
-Megan Febuary, Founder of For Women Who Roar
Elissa your work with Motherland was truly one of the first books in a long while that I couldn't put down. Thank you for your candid and beautiful storytelling. What was the prompting for you in writing this memoir? Did you have any resistance you had to bust through to get the words on the page?
Thank you so much for your kind words. Motherland was my third memoir, and a story I always knew I would someday have to write. James Baldwin once said, “Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.” Every writer, I believe, has a primal story– the one that won’t let go, the one that keeps us awake at night and informs everything else we create. It whispers in our ears, colors our thoughts, and pulls us along, whether or not we believe we can control it. And the more we try and control the stories we tell, the more fruitless that control is. My very complicated relationship with my mother was at the core of both Poor Man’s Feast and Treyf; it was always there. But in 2015, I launched a year-long column in The Washington Post called Feeding My Mother, which started life as a narrative food column addressing the vagaries of getting a food-hating, eccentric senior citizen to eat. By the time the column was finished, in 2016, I had written a year’s worth of essays that focused more on the emotional aspects of sustenance and nurturing in all their forms, and what happens when mother/daughter roles reverse, which they inevitably do. That seeded the earliest work on Motherland, which took that role reversal question to the next level: what happens when a hyper-heterosexual, former television singer, glam-queen, narcissistic personality disordered octogenarian mother has to be cared for by her middle-aged lesbian writer daughter who has long ago fled the scene for her own emotional safety? I have sometimes likened our story on the surface to the thing that would happen if Anna Wintour gave birth to the Susie character from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
Memoir is an exceedingly challenging form to write in, but the most complicated issue for me– apart from having to write about someone who was (and is) still alive –was creating our story from the center while it was still unfolding, without benefit of context. I had to find the right voice and the right amount of distance that would allow the story to unfold. But the most difficult hurdle was finding a way to write Motherland in an even and fair way, and with the knowledge that my mother would, at some point, read it. I was very lucky and grateful to have her support.
The Mother-daughter dynamic is one that needs to be shared more, and your honesty will no doubt allow more womxn to feel less alone in their complicated relationships with their mothers. What do you hope mothers and daughters reading Motherland will take away from this book?
The mother/daughter relationship in all its complexity is as old as time. It forms the bedrock for the way we nurture ourselves and think about nurturing others; unfulfilled, it can bear the fruits of depression and addiction and want (all of which can take on forms other than how we traditionally know and understand them). I could go down the trite road and say that healing is always possible (and it is), but perhaps the most important thing that I hope mothers and daughters reading Motherland will take away from the book is the possibility of understanding. We tend to look at our mothers and the complicated relationships we have with them in something of a vacuum: our mother are our mothers. But the fact is this, simple though it may be: our mothers are women who had lives and histories long before we were born, and those lives and histories will directly impact their relationships with us, their daughters. I believe that one can only do what one can do, and be who one can be. I wanted my mother to be someone else: a 1970s television mother bursting with love and affection. But she couldn’t be that any more than I could be what she wanted: a mini-me, a daughterly representation of herself. Not only was I not that; I was the polar opposite of it. Once I understood who she was long before I was in the picture, I understood the core of our relationship. It didn’t change it, but it did clarify it.
You speak to the complicated enmeshment and even addiction to your mother, which resonated with me at a soul-deep level. Was it cathartic to write about this dynamic? Have you met other readers who resonated with this in particular?
At every reading I give and at every talk, there are women in the room nodding, and saying Yes, me too. It was indeed cathartic to talk to other women who have experienced this dynamic. We live in a world where we are taught that addiction is chemical, pure and simple. But this is not the case: many of us learn, very early on, that Mother not only gives love, but also takes it away. And if we have that little taste of the former– of its warmth and its beauty and kindness; its promise! We will do anything to have it again, along with its connected dopamine rush. When it is withheld, we struggle, we yearn, we try and fulfill it in other ways. What did we do? How can we get it back? How will we feel good again? Maternal codependency is like the myth of Tantalus and the grapes: we believe that delicious sweetness is possible, that it can be had again, even when Mother may not always be capable of it and uses its promise to her own ends. I tasted that sweetness and I wanted it, desperately, from the time I was very young; it was often withheld from me, unless I reflected back to my mother her beauty, and her place at the center of the universe. When I began to have my own needs and desires (as growing children do and must), our relationship exploded. She could not and would not see me as a separate person. But the addiction to each other—and the need for that glimmer of sweetness, of promise and hope remained, even after I fled the city where we both lived. And this is why having to return to her side to care for her as a senior citizen who suffered a catastrophic accident was so very precarious.
I think it's hard for people to feel like they have permission to share honestly about the complicated relationships they have with their parents. Did you ever feel a sense of guilt or betrayal in your writing, or was it healing to speak your experience?
I felt a sense of guilt absolutely all the time, to the degree that on several occasions the writing took a massive physical toll on me, as if I was collapsing from the inside. And interestingly, I teach writing workshops about the issues of permission and story ownership, which seem to be the biggest hurdle that writers of memoir face: who am I to tell my story? But not one of us lives in a vacuum. Where there is life, there is another life. The best that a writer of memoir can do is be kind and if not kind, then even, and fair, and always as accurate as possible. I am often asked Why didn’t you wait to write this until your mother was gone, and the answer is this: because I wanted to know us together, living and growing in parallel. I wanted to write from a place of who we are, not who we were. And therein would be the possibility of healing and clarity.
Your book felt like such a beautiful and raw dedication to your mother. Thank you for allowing us to hold space with you in your sharing. If you were sitting with your mother one last time, what would you like to say and/or hear from her?
Thank you for saying that, and for seeing that. My mother is still very much alive. The last conversation would be, I hope, one of love and understanding. And she’d probably then tell me to get my highlights done.
For writers wanting to write their own memoirs, particularly involving family, what suggestions would you give?
Writing from a place of acrimony is ill-advised, as is revenge-writing. Step back as far as you can while still retaining a grasp on the story you have to/want to tell. Let your characters blossom independent of your egoist control; I wrote four drafts of Motherland, each one crankier than the next, until I realized that I had to release control of what I wanted the reader to know and think about my mother. I had to write her and myself– as character, albeit accurately. The great Vivian Gornick famously said, “For drama to deepen we need to see the cunning of the innocent and the loneliness of the monster.” We are all complicated, challenged beings– Mommy Monsters, included– and all of that complexity allows memoir to be what it is at its best: reflective of the human condition, in all its extreme messiness.
If you could tell womxn one thing today, what would you want them to know?
You can write anything. Anything. Tillie Olsen famously began writing in her sixties. Shirley Jackson watched the world around her, put pen to paper and turned the universe upside down. No one can tell you what or what not to write– what to create, if writing isn’t your thing– and so, you must. Tell your story; show it; paint it; sing it; cook it; write it. It’s yours and no one can take it away from you, although many will try. Don’t let them.
ELISSA ALTMAN is the critically acclaimed author of Poor Man's Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking and the James Beard Award-winning blog of the same name and Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw. Her work has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The New York Times, Tin House, The Rumpus, Dame Magazine, LitHub, Saveur, and The Washington Post, where her column, Feeding My Mother, ran for a year. Her work has been anthologized in Best Food Writing six times. A finalist for the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize, Altman has taught the craft of memoir at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, The Loft Literary Center, 1440 Multiversity, Ireland's Literature and Larder Program, and has appeared live on stage at TEDx and The Public, on Heritage Radio, and NPR. She lives in Connecticut with her family.
Want to dive into Elssa’s newest book, Motherland? Click here.