Writing About Our Mothers, With Elissa Altman

Of all the topics that haunt memoir writers, writing about our mothers is on the top of the list. Holy, wholly hard, a holy terror and everything in between, our family of origin is as elusive as it is unforgettable and when we sit down to write about any member of it we can buckle under the weight of the assigned task. Here is the great writer Elissa Altman to straighten out some of this for us in a QWERTY interview you will not soon forget.

Read along as you listen to this episode of QWERTY, my podcast with co-host David Leite. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes, Spotify or Stitcher. (The following transcript has been edited from the original recording).

David:  I am delighted to introduce you to our guest today. Now, we’ve known each other for more than a decade. In fact, Elissa was the person who kicked my ass and made me understand that I needed to write my Portuguese cookbook way back when, when she was an editor at Clarkson Potter. But besides kicking writer’s buts, Elissa is an extremely talented writer herself. She’s the award winning author of three memoirs, including Poor Man’s Feast, followed by Treyf, and then just released, Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing. Her work can be found in Tin House, The Washington Post, The Rumpus Lit Hub, The Guardian, and has been anthologized for six consecutive years in best food writing.

Marion: Welcome to the show, Elissa. I am thrilled to meet you. And I’m just going to elbow you right out of the way, David, because I want to have at her immediately.

David: Go for it.

Marion: I have so much to ask Elissa. Let’s start broad and we’ll get more granular, but you’ve said that memoir writing is a particular kind of risk-taking with our own pasts. So, let’s talk about that right off the bat, please.

Elissa: First of all, thank you so much for having me. It’s really a pleasure and a delight to be here. Memoir writing is particular risk-taking when we step inside of our own stories as narrators, as characters. Invariably, we will discover things that we didn’t know on the front end. We’ll discover things about ourselves. We’ll discover things about our stories. The stories surrounding our lives and the lives of the people around us and the places we live. And so, there’s always a significant amount of risk taking involved.

David: Well, the “failing” New York Times has preferred to your first memoir, Poor Man’s Feast as, “One of the finest food memoirs in recent years.” But I think it covers so much more than food. And we both know that. And in it you laid out all the tensions we all have between carrying out heritage and being ourselves. And I certainly understand that. And it resonated with me, of course being Portuguese. Now, first, let’s give the listeners a little bit of the story in context for them to understand. Then I want you to talk more about processing and whether you knew the things you wrote about before you wrote about them or after you learned them as you were going along.

Elissa: Well, where Poor Man’s Feast was concerned, that was my first memoir, and that came out in 2013. And I had been writing a blog for a while at that point, that started, I want to say, in 2008 or 2009. That quickly became a narrative blog, and it became a place where I was literally experimenting, testing narrative, trying to see if there was anybody out there who was going to be interested in reading long form narrative writing online. And, of course, I had been told, and I suspect that perhaps you had been told also, that no, no, no, people just want quick in, quick out, a recipe head note, that’s the end.

And I never believed that. And I always felt that where there is… And I think there’s certainly room for both. And we know that both types of writing, of food writing, have succeeded. But I didn’t want to go down the road of quick in/out recipe head note. There are other people out there who do that much better than I do.

I was more interested in the telling of story and the inhabiting of story and the inhabiting of culture. And I feel very strongly. I am in my 50s. David, I know you’re in your 40s and celebrating your birthday today, actually.

David: Thank you. Thank you so much.

Marion: So neither of you can do math.

Elissa: Right. I suck at math. And David just gets prettier and prettier with every passing year.

David: And younger and younger.

Elissa: And younger and younger.

Marion: He needed to hear that, absolutely.

Elissa: Well, he deserves it. What I really feel very strongly is that, unless we tell our stories, the stories of our cultures, the stories of our histories and keep the people who came before us alive, those people and their food lives and their myths and their own stories will disappear.

David: It’s true.

Elissa: It’s our responsibility. It was your responsibility when you wrote your Portuguese cookbook. And again when you wrote your memoir. And I feel that we all have to bring that to the table.

Marion: I love so many things about what you just said. I love the fact that you believe in testing your material on the public. And I say this to my students all the time. I say this to other writers all the time. I love the fact that you’re keeping these stories alive. But I really love the fact that you proved people wrong, people in publishing wrong when they said you’ve got to go short, get in, get out, give them a recipe and get out of town. Because this is the thing. Good writing is always going to win.

David: Story always wins.

Marion:  And all of these stories allow us to process our own. And in your early memoirs, you beautifully processed your evolution from someone who can whip up any culinary feast into someone who goes to the simple. And the provocation there seems to be meeting your life partner, Connecticut Yankee and the terribly frugal Susan who serves as such a mirror, the ultimate foil, the very best Greek chorus. I love what you do with her. I love your life with her, but I love what you do with her on the page. So let’s talk about making our loved ones characters in our own work. How do you best look at those people, and what do you do with them?

Elissa: Well, I think that I start from a place of understanding that they are not the only characters. I am a character with them. And I’m actually teaching, I just finished teaching a class on memoir, not food memoir, at Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. And I’m teaching another one as we speak right now. And one of the things that I talk about is narrator as character and the necessity of that. Vivian Gornick, the great Vivian Gornick, has this incredible quote that I have tacked on my bulletin board above my desk where she says, “For drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.”

And I think that when I write about family, when I write about the people in my life, I have to see them from all angles, and I have to see myself, I have to be able to step away from myself as the person sitting at the computer or with the pen in my hand and inhabit the character of the narrator. And I also have a very visual, a strong visual sense. I come to a lot of my work visually. And so, when I made the move from my tiny apartment on East 57th Street to very tiny Harwinton, Connecticut, down the road from Litchfield in 2000 to move in with Susan and to really change my life, it was like somebody had taken my glasses off and cleaned them and given them back to me. Everything was new. I absorbed everything around me like a sponge. Susan is from that part of the world. She’s from Farmington originally, was born in Hartford, raised in Unionville, which is sort of a burrow, as they say, of Farmington. And she grew up in a very, very different kind of world than I did and with very different background, coming from very different background, and listening to the way she interacted with her family.

When I joined her family it was like just a huge Greek chorus. There was multitudes of aunts and uncles, and these people saw each other all the time and they lived into their 90s, and they were in and out of each other’s lives in business. And whenever I saw them, it was like another chapter unfolded in front of me.

The other side of it is that Susan is also a great reader. She is also a book designer. I should be really upfront about that. She’s a book designer at Random House. And she also thinks in story. We think and we talk in story.

Marion: Helpful. Very helpful.

Elissa: It is very helpful. And when I first met her and I began spending my weekends in Harwinton, I remember she had a copy of Jane Kenyon’s collected essays sitting on her nightstand. And that was her world. That was the world that Susan loved, small, quiet, not so quiet, bubbling underneath the quiet. And I really learned to listen to the world around me. This very changed world around me when I made my move, which was a shock to my nervous system.

David: It’s interesting that you say, when Marion asked you about character, the first thing you did was say, “I look to myself as the character and this other person in terms of what’s happening.” And what you talk about really is discovering character in interaction, in what happens between both the space between you and someone else’s, where character lives. We can do all these paragraphs after paragraphs of describing someone, describing their behavior. But it’s in the interaction with us or from one character to another that we see their character in action and we see their character develop. And that’s what I think you are so extraordinarily good at. As we see the action with your mother, with Susan, with the other people in your life, and we see how they act and we come to understand them. And I think that’s really an extraordinary ability, and I think it’s very economical at the same time.

Marion: Very storytelling. Yes, it reveals a great deal of story. Absolutely.

Elissa: Thank you. I think that one of the most complicated things that we can talk about when we talk about narrative and the creation and craft of narrative is the issue of voice and where voice comes from, where narrative voice comes from. And it’s a difficult thing to try and explain to a new writer, because when you say something like, “What is the voice of the narrator? What is the voice of the story? What is emerging on the page?” New writers often think of actual voice, the excited voice, the sad voice, the disappointed voice, the angry voice. And that’s not what we’re talking about.

We’re talking about the overall narrative sensibility of the story. And that voice, and you have to really get quiet and sort of listen for it. And it doesn’t always emerge in the first draft or the second draft or sometimes even the third. But that voice often emerges in spaces in conversation.

When I was teaching a couple of weeks ago up in Provincetown, I was talking about negative space, about the use of negative space, and how our inclination, because we live in a world of noise and action and we don’t like quiet, how we are often inclined to fill negative space with color, with description, with picture, with movement, with action, with character, with more character, with food. And to take a step back and let the narrative breathe and let the story settle. That’s the place where voice begins to bubble up to the surface.

Marion:  Such good advice.

David: And I think what’s interesting when you’re talking about the idea of letting voice bubble up from the surface, of course you’re worth, Poor Man’s Feast was first, then Treyf: My life as an Orthodox Outlaw, which I love as a title, covers growing up in the ’60s and ’70s in Queens, and quote, you always say that, “You’re always on the outside looking in.” And you’re searching for ways to nourish and sustain yourself. But then you write your next book, which is Motherland.

So there’s such rich material in all of this and you tease it out beautifully. But then you tease out another book, and then a third book. So how did you differentiate the material from one book to the next without having any overlap, but yet really writing about the same timeframe, which is from your adolescence all the way into your adult life?

Elissa: Right. Well, I think with Motherland, Motherland really was born out of a little place in my brain that was not that connected, at least not consciously connected to Treyf and to Poor Man’s Feast. When Poor Man’s Feast came out I wrote it, it was a linear story. There were some backstory in it, but it was primarily a linear story that took place mostly over the course of a year. And it was, if you time-lined it, you could easily timeline it in the course of a year. And I knew how the story was going to begin, and I knew how the story was going to end, because I wrote it from a vantage point of being able to look back and see that, okay, I’m now living in the country and this is who I was when I lived in the city. And this is the way I thought of food.

And I had a lot of readers say to me, “Your grandparents were in that story, and your aunt and uncle and your cousins and your mother. I want to know more about the person who was living in the city, who found themselves growing up in a home, where her mother was just a terrible cook.” God bless her. Just a horrible cook. And then you found yourself in cooking school and working at Dean and DeLuca and completely obsessed with all things culinarian and gastronomical.

And so, I started to really think about backstory and the fact that we, all of us, my grandparents, my father, my parents, we were all on the outside looking in. I had the benefit of a lot, as a lot of my friends in middle school and grade school did, in the 1970s in Queens, early 1970s and late ’60s. It was a very mixed community and we were all in and out of each other’s houses all the time. We didn’t think anything of it. We didn’t think that it was that extraordinary to do that.

But my father’s parents had come over in the early part of the 1900s from Eastern Europe and they both had been very raised in orthodox homes, and they had to straddle the fence between the new world and the old world and those things, that question affected every part of their lives, especially at the table.

Marion: I can relate to this. I also grew up in the ’60s and ’70s in Queens. And so, I just wonder if we ran on the same circles at all.

David: Circles.

Marion: And my mother, too, was the… Well, she was, she was competitively the worst cook that ever lived. And we thought of entering her in varieties of contests. But it was a time she’d scorched the kitchen ceiling the one time she tried to make something flambed that she gave up.

Elissa: Oh, God.

Marion: And it’s just a story I need to write. But you and the outside looking in thing is fascinating. You let us be the ones looking in when you wrote this monthly column in The Washington Post entitled Feeding My Mother. And it ended in May of 2016, I think. It’s a stunning run of pieces that ultimately had me smacking my head and rolling my head over my desk groaning for you as you dealt with someone who is as narcissistic, dazzling, pathologically needy and imperious as anyone I’ve ever witnessed in literature.

And so, you let us look in with you. You let us look in. It was an extraordinary way to get us engaged in this topic. So, the column, can you talk to us about how you started that? And was it with the full sense that this was going to be a book?

Elissa: It was absolutely not connected to a book at that time at all. The interesting thing was that my editor at The Washington post, Joe Yonan, and I had been talking a lot over the years about how could we work together. And I was not going to be delivering him recipes. He has a lot of people in his universe who do that, again, a lot better than I do. And that was not the angle from which the point of view from which I wanted to write for him. But the elephant in the room, she would kill me for saying that, given her-

Marion: Her slender obsession.

Elissa: Her size obsession. The slender elephant in the room was always my mother. And I had started to write other small pieces here and there about… She always showed up on my blog. I wrote about my mother and eggs and the fact that eggs were always my mother’s mood barometer. And the angrier she got over the years, the harder she cooked the eggs, until they were like the yolk was brown instead of yellow. And you all know what that’s like.

David: Yeah, absolutely.

Elissa: And we worked together and came up with the idea for a column about trying to nurture someone who will not be nurtured. Someone who is actually fearful of sustenance. And it started out as a column literally about feeding my mother. How is it possible to feed someone as they’re growing older who has a pathological fear of food when we now know that food is such an important place, such an important role in staying healthy and vital over the aging process and years.

And so that was the jumping off point. And we knew that there was were not going to be any recipes in it, because my mother doesn’t cook and she hasn’t turned her stove on since Clinton was in office, I think. But what it ultimately wound up being, if you look at the arc of the column, it wound up being a combination of story of the two of us and role reversal, the inevitable role reversal that every mother, elderly, oh God, forgive me for saying that mom, sorry, elderly mother and her middle-aged daughter aging in parallel, face together. And the fact that many of us are incapable of sustaining and nurturing others who will not be nurtured and sustained, and coming to a certain place of acceptance and love and compassion and finding compassion where there possibly had not been any before.

The interesting thing is that, and I just want to add this as an aside, is that they tell you never read the comments. And of course the first column I did read the comments. And it was some guy wrote in and said, “Why don’t you just give her Ensure and be done with it.”

Marion: Kind of missing the point of the column.

Elissa: Right. But there were a lot of really interesting comments that were like that, that came primarily from men. And the women readers were more inclined to saying, “Oh, my gosh, I’m trying to get my mother to eat this and I’m trying to get my mother to do this and that.” And you know, the men were like, “Problem solved, give her Ensure and get on with things. I don’t understand what the problem is.”

So, it was a really interesting experience. And I backed away from that thinking, “Okay, it’s now time for me to write about her and to write about myself.”

David: And was that the moment you decided to turn a lot of this into the book?

Elissa: There is virtually none of the column at all in the book. The column was really about, “How do I feed her, how do I care for this person?”

Marion: You say that, and that’s what’s so fascinating to me. You say in your Washington Post column that your mother would rather starve than run out of eyeliner. One of my great new favorite lines. Your goal is to feed her. Hers is not to eat. It is the perfect setup for conflict. So how do we report on the conflict we have in our lives and deal with the feelings it evokes, get it on the page, but also process it at the same time?

Elissa: It’s very, very complicated. And when I wrote Motherland, in the earliest drafts, I had a difficult time of finding the place into the story. And very often, when I start a new book, I will write from the chapter that reveals itself to me first. And that chapter may wind up being in the middle of the book, it may wind up being at the end of the book, and building the book out from there. And I spent probably four or five months, six months, I wouldn’t say spinning, but really thinking long and hard about what was going to be the entry point into the book. And I was still on my book tour for Treyf, and I came home one Saturday night, sat down on the couch, kicked my shoes off, and my mother called and said, “I fell.”

And it was that moment. It’s the call that every one of us gets at some point. I live two hours away from her. And that was the point at which I knew our story had turned. Our story had changed, and that my proximity to her, emotional proximity, physical proximity, the distance, the safe distance that I had put between us, although, for all those years, and that distance does not imply lack of love, distance means safety. All that distance was going to slam shut.

And I went through the following six months being her primary caregiver, getting everything set up, dealing with addictions that we discovered that we had no idea… Well, we kind of had an idea, I shouldn’t say no idea, a little bit of an idea, but didn’t want to deal with. We had to deal with those. We had to deal with financial issues, the complicated practical issues of caring for someone who will not be cared for living in another state. The narcissism issues, mental health issues, aging issues. And I wrote the book from the inside of that story while it was unfolding.

Marion: Yeah. I call that writing in real time. And I teach it.

David: And that’s hard to do because there’s no perspective.

Marion: Teach a lot about it. And so, were you taking notes? Were you carrying a notebook? Were you using your phone? How were you getting it down on the page, getting it down in your head?

Elissa: I did all of those things. I always carry a notebook. I’ve carried a notebook with me probably since I was 15. And if you saw what my office looked like right now, you’d laugh because I am surrounded by them.

Marion: Me too.

Elissa: It’s really incredible. Random House is actually doing a little photo thing that they do called Writers at Work. And so, you’ll see the inside of my office. But I wrote everything down. I told her at one point that I wanted to talk to her about something that had gone on in the past that I will not give away about her father and food and love. And I said, “Can I tape you?” And she said, “You’re asking a former singer, can I tape you? Of course.” All I have to do is say, “Mom, can you speak into the microphone?”

Marion: Mom, can you sing into the microphone?

David: She’s off and running.

Elissa: Sing out, Louise.

Marion: That’s great.

Elissa: And so, there was that. And I wrote and wrote and wrote. I came home from her house and I wrote. I probably wrote 1000 pages of manuscript.

Marion: Good.

Elissa: That I then had to whittle down and chisel down, and a lot wound up on the cutting room floor.

Marion:  Well, you say you teach. I know you teach memoir writing. And in your description of a class, I read your description of your current class, you say you’re going to teach about the ability to curate one’s own story. So, in this particular difficult topic of our mothers, all of us can relate to trying to report on our mothers, how do you curate within what’s a hot button to you but not necessarily going to make a point to the reader? How do you pick out the details that work?

Elissa: Well, I think that you have to listen very, very carefully. And again, as you say, there is the kitchen sink approach, which of course is the wrong approach. There’s the linear approach, which can often just be autobiography. And then there is memoir. And memoir is, I think, a sliver of time and space. And I wrote and wrote and wrote and rewrote and revised and revised and edited and edited. I have a wonderful relationship with my extraordinary editor at Ballantine Books, and she herself had known my work for a really long time. And she was, I wouldn’t say she was brutal, but she was brutal a couple of times, and said, “This 120 pages is really lovely, but it’s got to go. Because it bears nothing on the story.”

And when I teach curation, and I actually just taught a class last night on hierarchy, on narrative hierarchy, what are the things that are going to pull the narrative elements, that are going to pull the reader through the story? What is the chord? What is the mystery spot? And when I read something and when somebody else reads something, we may come to two different places. That happens all the time. But at the root, this story was about, again, certainly, it’s the Vivian Gornick situation versus story thing. It’s a story of aging and mental health and addiction and love and all of those things. But that’s the situation, the story is a story of isolation and compassion and forgiveness.

And that may sound pat and it may sound canned. I got to a place at the end of the book that I did not expect to get to at the beginning of the book. I didn’t know.

Marion: Oh, that’s wonderful.

Elissa: I didn’t know what I was going to find. We have not had a good relationship over the years. And yet if people try and pit us against each other because we’re so different, and we are each other’s foils. It’s just that’s the way it is. We’ve been that way certainly my whole life. We’ll turn into a pair of bonded grizzlies. We’re fiercely protective of each other.

Marion: Wow.

Elissa: Even though we drive each other out of our minds.

Marion: It makes for such good story. It makes for such beautiful reading.

Elissa: Thank you.

David: The last line of the book just got me, because there’s so much portent in there. There’s so much meaning in the last line of the book, the last thing your mother says, which was pretty astounding to me.

Elissa: Yeah.

David: Thank you so much, Elissa, for coming on the show. We appreciate it.

Marion: Thank you.

Elissa: Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

David: The book is Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing, by Elissa Altman. You can find Motherland wherever books or audio books are sold. And you can read more about Elissa at her blog. And don’t forget to subscribe to QWERTY, and listen to us wherever you go.

Have you got a question you’d like us to answer or to ask our authors? Send it along to us and we’ll choose a few each week and answer them on QWERTY. Just drop me a line at my contact page. 

Want more of a writing education? Come join me in one of my online memoir classes. They run all the time and all of them will help you get where you want to go in your work.