Thank you! May I be so impertinent to ask: Are you a fat baby who is a driver or a person who happens to drive a fat baby! (I’m hoping the latter, nothing against babies, but probably they shouldn’t drive.)
Haha! It's a play on the 2017 film Baby Driver, wherein a troubled young man drives fast to escape his problems but only finds more. I'm like him but fatter. My online persona is mostly focused on becoming a better race track driver, but the long shadow cast by a distant parent is also a favorite topic. Thanks.
I've just heard about your memoir through Instagram. I look forward to reading it. These things can be a bit messy and I can understand the vulnerability that your mother must be feeling but also seems fair game for you to write about what it was like growing up as her daughter.
I am also just a sucker for books that deal with mother/daughter relationships.
A remarkable piece and a remarkable story. When I wrote Motherland, I was faced with questions while on book tour: what gave me the right to write about my mother’s deeply traumatic past while she is still alive. The answer was and is always the same: every single thing I wrote about affected my life and affected it directly and indisputably, and made me who I am as a woman, a writer, a friend, a spouse. The trauma she experienced as a young woman was carried at the visceral level into my life, and she played it out time and again on me until I realized that I was either going to continue the loop and pass it on, or end it. I chose to end it (or at least I tried to). If however her story did not touch mine (and there was much that I didn’t share about her because it didn’t have relevance to me or the story), I didn’t write about it. Flipside: in my first book, I wrote about my paternal grandmother walking out on my 3 year old father and 8 year old aunt, in 1926. She eventually came back but the damage was done: my father metabolized his grief by telling me the story every fucking day of my young life, at the dinner table. It touched me deeply; I lived With hideous separation anxiety longer than I should have. I, like my father, sought out sustenance as a way to self-soothe. I became a food writer, who writes largely about nurturing, and filling spaces and sustenance gaps. When my first book came out in 2013 and I wrote about the abandonment, I assumed it was family knowledge and that my cousins had grown up with it the way I had. In fact, my aunt hid it from her (now 65 yr old) children. I was excised from the family, lost my cousins, lost my godbaby, etc, because I told a (hundred year old) family story —most involved in it were long dead—that their mother had kept a secret. I still have no relationship with them, but now I’m writing about the event because you can’t get disowned twice. So: what I say to you (and to anyone reading this) - It is difficult to be accused by those we write about for being wrong, or fabricators (“that’s not how it happened”), or appropriators. But we do not live our lives in a vacuum. If someone’s past or actions *directly* changes who we are, our world view, our Self, it is absolutely within our rights to write about it. The other parties may not like it, but they cannot control our truths and the telling of our truths. I very much look forward to reading your work. 🙏🏻
Elissa! Thank you for incredibly thoughtful, heartfelt response. It's hugely meaningful to me, and also a thrill because I A FAN (or more precisely an admiring reader). Motherland was a touchstone for me, so much so I'm not sure I could have staggered on to the end of my memoir without it -- your book and Vivian Gornick's Fierce Attachments were total epiphanies. I read so many others too but those two books I kept literally within touching distance, as a constant reminder that it's possible to write about complicated truths, loving and difficult mother-daughter relationships (or any relationship in fact) in a way that is not reductive or binary or -- my ultimate personal fear -- self-pitying. I'm astounded and humbled that you found your way here somehow and so moved that you took the time to write. As you know it can be be lonely in the old writing shed! I have to go now because some kid is flying a drone over my house and my five year old is starting to freak out. xxxx
Leah, so lovely to get your message, and thank you so much--Your story has profound meaning for me (and is being talked about at great length over on the Binders memoir page on FB). Would love to continue to chat. Send me your email at Elissa@ElissaAltman.com xxx
Excellent piece. Really enjoy your writing.
Thanks for reading, you are very kind x
What a refreshingly honest and brilliantly crafted story.
Thank you! May I be so impertinent to ask: Are you a fat baby who is a driver or a person who happens to drive a fat baby! (I’m hoping the latter, nothing against babies, but probably they shouldn’t drive.)
Haha! It's a play on the 2017 film Baby Driver, wherein a troubled young man drives fast to escape his problems but only finds more. I'm like him but fatter. My online persona is mostly focused on becoming a better race track driver, but the long shadow cast by a distant parent is also a favorite topic. Thanks.
Love it. You are among friends. Never change FBD.
LMx
I've just heard about your memoir through Instagram. I look forward to reading it. These things can be a bit messy and I can understand the vulnerability that your mother must be feeling but also seems fair game for you to write about what it was like growing up as her daughter.
I am also just a sucker for books that deal with mother/daughter relationships.
Thanks Madison — it’s been quite a process but a fruitful one. Let me know what you think of the book! And thanks for reaching out. x
A remarkable piece and a remarkable story. When I wrote Motherland, I was faced with questions while on book tour: what gave me the right to write about my mother’s deeply traumatic past while she is still alive. The answer was and is always the same: every single thing I wrote about affected my life and affected it directly and indisputably, and made me who I am as a woman, a writer, a friend, a spouse. The trauma she experienced as a young woman was carried at the visceral level into my life, and she played it out time and again on me until I realized that I was either going to continue the loop and pass it on, or end it. I chose to end it (or at least I tried to). If however her story did not touch mine (and there was much that I didn’t share about her because it didn’t have relevance to me or the story), I didn’t write about it. Flipside: in my first book, I wrote about my paternal grandmother walking out on my 3 year old father and 8 year old aunt, in 1926. She eventually came back but the damage was done: my father metabolized his grief by telling me the story every fucking day of my young life, at the dinner table. It touched me deeply; I lived With hideous separation anxiety longer than I should have. I, like my father, sought out sustenance as a way to self-soothe. I became a food writer, who writes largely about nurturing, and filling spaces and sustenance gaps. When my first book came out in 2013 and I wrote about the abandonment, I assumed it was family knowledge and that my cousins had grown up with it the way I had. In fact, my aunt hid it from her (now 65 yr old) children. I was excised from the family, lost my cousins, lost my godbaby, etc, because I told a (hundred year old) family story —most involved in it were long dead—that their mother had kept a secret. I still have no relationship with them, but now I’m writing about the event because you can’t get disowned twice. So: what I say to you (and to anyone reading this) - It is difficult to be accused by those we write about for being wrong, or fabricators (“that’s not how it happened”), or appropriators. But we do not live our lives in a vacuum. If someone’s past or actions *directly* changes who we are, our world view, our Self, it is absolutely within our rights to write about it. The other parties may not like it, but they cannot control our truths and the telling of our truths. I very much look forward to reading your work. 🙏🏻
Elissa! Thank you for incredibly thoughtful, heartfelt response. It's hugely meaningful to me, and also a thrill because I A FAN (or more precisely an admiring reader). Motherland was a touchstone for me, so much so I'm not sure I could have staggered on to the end of my memoir without it -- your book and Vivian Gornick's Fierce Attachments were total epiphanies. I read so many others too but those two books I kept literally within touching distance, as a constant reminder that it's possible to write about complicated truths, loving and difficult mother-daughter relationships (or any relationship in fact) in a way that is not reductive or binary or -- my ultimate personal fear -- self-pitying. I'm astounded and humbled that you found your way here somehow and so moved that you took the time to write. As you know it can be be lonely in the old writing shed! I have to go now because some kid is flying a drone over my house and my five year old is starting to freak out. xxxx
Leah, so lovely to get your message, and thank you so much--Your story has profound meaning for me (and is being talked about at great length over on the Binders memoir page on FB). Would love to continue to chat. Send me your email at Elissa@ElissaAltman.com xxx