MOTHERCARE by Lynne Tillman

Author:Lynne Tillman [Tillman, Lynne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781593767181
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2022-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

Mother always pointed out how much younger she looked than any other old person. “Looking young” was crucial to my parents, then to their daughters, a plague for life. She and my father appeared much younger than they were, especially my father. His hair remained thick and black into his late sixties. His friends were jealous in a good-natured way, and teased him about dyeing it. He didn’t. Once Mother saw a picture of me in a newspaper, accompanying an article about a new novel. She disparaged the photograph. “You look much younger than that.” She didn’t care about what had been written about the novel.

When she moved to Florida, Mother read airport books, like Sidney Sheldon, which was what the other women in the condo did. She had never read books like that before. Back in New York, and when she was ill but her condition was somewhat better, we would give her books, and she’d read them, but had no memory of what she was reading.

She read James Frey’s memoir A Million Little Pieces several times. She would often tell me how good it was. She didn’t remember what she read, so each reading was new to her. That fascinated me. James Frey and I were once in a spelling bee together, a benefit for the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, and I told him how she read it again and again. I also told him Mother hated my novel No Lease on Life, because it used “bad language.” She didn’t mind those in his book, I told Frey. When I asked her why, she said, “Because he has to use them.” Curiously, while Mother was reading Frey over and over again, the arguments and “scandal” about his book not being really “true,” not really a memoir, were raging. Truth or trueness rests only in facts, seemingly, not in verisimilitude.

Oprah’s outrage was televised. Frey appeared on Oprah’s show, and she asked about his girlfriend’s suicide. Did she hang herself? No, Frey said, she hadn’t hung herself in the shower, but she had taken pills. Oprah was shocked, horrified. The book had lied to her. The truths in fiction, in representations of realities, were lost in a fury of thoughtlessness.

I thought Frey had been handed a lousy deal, by his agent and publisher. To Mother, none of this mattered. She loved his book.

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