Mother's Day
I adore my mom. She's one of my best friends. We talk an hour EACH day. I'm not sure why we always have stuff to say to each other, but we do. We play Scrabble together. She's teaching me how to purl so I can do more than knit lopsided scarves for the rest of my life.
But nice moms don't make for good dramatic novels. In thinking about each book I've written, the mom character has always been a crux--for good or bad. Or I've killed her off. Because I know that your relationship with your mother is something that echoes through your entire life, even if she's missing. It's your first imprint.
In Spanish Disco, my first novel, Cassie Hayes was the product of a bitter divorce in which, unusually for her age/the time the divorce occurred, her father assumed custody. Her mother was a villain. In actuality, her mother was very human, very shallow, but in the context of Cassie's life, her mother took on the life of a monster. I thought, as a writer, that was a dramatic thing to explore--because, I would hope by the time most of us reach 30, 35, 40, we have put into perspective the failings of our parents, just as I hope my own kids forgive me for the myriad ways in which I am an eccentric mother and somehow fall way short. People who fail to do this, fail to put the past into some sort of order--unfortunately, WAY too many people I know . . . as well as Cassie Hayes, my character--saddle themselves with a burden.
In The Roofer, Mom was bipolar. Drama galore. Even in books like Invisible Girl or Double Down, in which Mom is dead . . . her being missing is the gaping wound of my heroine's journey.
So how about you? Is MOM a big part of your novel?
Labels: moms in novels, mother's day
posted by Erica Orloff at 8:43 AM
8 Comments:
Interesting.
Because I've just looked at my current roster, and in all of them, I'd have to mark Mother as Absent for the protags.
My relationship with my mother is going through a rough patch, but it's not always like that. So I wonder about why it's like that in my WIPs.
may:
My editor forced me, kicking and screaming, to include a mother in Invisible Girl. So the mother is actually seen a great deal--in flashback prior to her death (not a spoiler, she commits suicide on page one). She is a heroic woman, the mother, and it made for a book I really feel is some of my best work--but my instinct had at first been to have her absent and not "present" in any way. And I've done that a lot. I think, for me, the father-daughter relationships in my books are so complicated, as are the brother-sister relationships, that I almost excised mothers as a way to keep my writing simple, in essence. To keep it graceful. Like there was enough going on without adding that dimension. So maybe that's part of it, May.
E
Hmm, sliding onto the therapy couch for this one :0
I just realized Mom's are either missing or monsters in everything I've written. Everything!
My mother is neither missing nor a monster. Huh.
We'll have to give some thought to what this means, Dr. Erica. :)
My WIP began as a paranormal romance and has since been recycled into a young adult novel because I realized the strongest relationship to explore was the one between the mother and the daughter. So my romance heroine is now seventeen.
lainey:
Honestly, I think--if you don't feel like you have big mom issues--it can be a choice for dramatic reasons. On the other hand, I have definitely had writer friends explore the real-life dynamics of their mothers.
And if we're talking mothers-in-LAW . . . well, then I could write a book!!! :-)
E
Heather:
That is really interesting. My three YAs (writing as Liza Conrad) have had an enabler mother to an alcoholic father (ROCK MY WORLD), a dead mom (yet again! the dead mom! HIGH SCHOOL BITES), and the functional but uptight mom (POKER DIARIES). :-) And I would say in High School Bites, that was a huge part of Lucy's journey.
E
Being adopted, I've always lived with that curious disconnect from my family that, people tell me, is normal for adoptees.
It was only recently that I realized that NONE of my characters, not in twenty novellas and over twenty stories, have parents. I just realized this, and I tried to put some in the latest. I haven't the slightest idea what to do with them.
Hi Spy:
Some of the responses on this tipic have been so interesting--does make you wonder how the subconcious works in writing, in a way.
E
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