A Mother's Tale

by Phillip Lopate

Overview

In 1984, Phillip Lopate sat down with his mother, Frances, to listen to her life story. A strong, resilient, indomitable woman who lived through the major events of the twentieth century, she was orphaned in childhood, ran away and married young, and then reinvented herself as a mother, war factory worker, candy store owner, community organizer, clerk, actress, and singer. But paired with exciting anecdotes are the criticisms of the husband who couldn’t satisfy her, the details of numerous affairs and sexual encounters, and, though she succeeded at many of her roles, accounts of how she always felt mistreated, taken advantage of. After the interviews, at a loss for what to do with the tapes, Lopate put them away. But thirty years later, after his mother had passed away, Lopate found himself drawn back to the recordings of this conversation. Thus begins a three-way conversation between a mother, his younger self, and the person he is today.

Trying to break open the family myths, rationalizations, and self-deceptions, A Mother’s Tale is about family members who love each other but who can’t seem to overcome their mutual mistrust. Though Phillip is sympathizing to a point, he cannot join her in her operatic displays of self-pity and how she blames his father for everything that went wrong. His detached, ironic character has been formed partly in response to her melodramatic one. The climax is an argument in which he tries to persuade her—using logic, of all things—that he really does love her, but is only partially successful, of course.

A Mother’s Tale is about something primal and universal: the relationship between a mother and her child, the parent disappointed with the payback, the child, now fully grown, judgmental. The humor is in the details.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814274873
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	01/15/2017
Series:	21st Century Essays
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Phillip Lopate is a central figure in the resurgence of the American essay, both through his best-selling anthology The Art of the Personal Essay and his collections, Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body, Portrait Inside My Head and To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction. He directs the nonfiction MFA program at Columbia University, where he is Professor of Writing.

 

Read an Excerpt

Above and beyond any attempt to reach the truth, I know that transcribing these tapes and writing my responses to them has been an attempt to keep my mother “alive” for as long as possible, to get her off the gurney, to hear her voice again, and, in this way, to bring her back to life.

So, in a strange way, we have come full circle: I began by telling about my mother’s futile effort to call out to her father so forcefully as to deter him from passing into the shades, and now here I’ve been doing much the same thing, trying to summon her back from the underworld, largely by quoting her, with the quixotic hope that she will be pleased enough by the sound of her voice to re-emerge, however fleetingly.

Hearing these tapes again was a shock. Her voice filled the room where I write, just as strong and confident as it had always been. At times the things she said were so shocking, I would have to pause the tape and sit there, gasping. Uncle Morris? Really? And when it came to the argument near the end, when I tried to convince her that I did love and care about her, I was flabbergasted, sweating, as though I were still defending my life. Her voice was the original Other, but it was also a part of me. As a baby I had first learned human speech from listening to her, and as a child I had internalized that voice to such an extent that it was hard to say where she left off and my own voice began. That writing voice from which I take dictation, and of which I am so proud, started out being hers. (I still hear her in my head, sixteen years after her death. I don’t hear my father anymore because he was so silent, but when I look in the mirror I see him, especially when I don’t smile—that same grim, stern expression.)

Listening to and transcribing these tapes, I was impressed by the sweep of my mother’s life—all this woman had gone through. Born to European immigrants into in a comfortable middle-class home, she was her parents’ favorite but lost them at such an early age. She was raised by strict, indifferent siblings, a runaway and high school dropout. She was forced to reinvent herself over and over: working at a beauty parlor, becoming a housewife and a mother, running a candy store, working in war factories, starting a photography business and a camera store, clerking for garment companies, going into show business, touring America, doing commercials, going back to school. . . . It was a twentieth century life. Born in 1918, died in 2000, she began to seem to me representative of millions of women who had passed through the same time period: the end of World War I, the Depression, the New Deal, World War II, the Korean War, the civil rights movement, Vietnam and the antiwar movement, gay rights, feminism. Her very discontent seemed emblematic of millions of other women’s experiences, or so I have told myself, while working on this book, trying to quiet the carping voice that said: Who’s going to care about your mother enough to want to read it?

I am well aware that if I had transformed this account into my own prose, it might have read more smoothly, more palatably. My mother could exasperate or get on a reader’s nerves, just as she sometimes did on mine. But I opted for large sections of the transcribed tapes, more or less verbatim, because they graphically showed, to me at least, how one edges toward an insight and then backs away, how we rationalize or shift the blame onto others. I chose to include so much of her testimony verbatim because it seemed a more realistic presentation of the person she was, and the dynamic between us. (Realism, that old, disabused deity.) So yes, there is a scientific streak in me that is curious about the way people talk, and that would be inclined to diagram interactional patterns. The tapes also showed, in spite of the love and goodwill between us, how the wariness between a parent and a grown child might not overcome a certain impasse. The stalemate between us was unbreakable: we were too much alike. When I showed an earlier draft of this manuscript to someone, he was dismayed that there seemed to be no change in my views of my mother from my earlier self to my present one—no softening. This is true. I would have been happy to demonstrate some eureka, some redemptive insight that deepened or warmed my feelings, but in truth there was no On Golden Pond moment during her lifetime when we fell into each other’s arms, and since she is gone I have not found it any easier to embrace her ghost. I was raised by a powerful woman, and the defenses I developed against her have not essentially altered, any more than have the admiration, gratitude, and fascination I feel for her.

Table of Contents

A MOTHER’S TALE Also by Phillip Lopate Copyright Title Page Prologue Half Title Page My Mother’s Key Memory Her Papa Her Mother In Her Sister’s Care The Runaway The Prodigal Daughter Returns Boyfriends before Marriage My Parents Meet on a Blind Date Shame and Its Aftermath Wedding Bells Pop’s Family The Wedding The Honeymoon Settling into Marriage Motherhood The Candy Store Grandpa The End of the War Enough about Him The End of the Candy Store Williamsburg The Big Love File Clerk My Mother’s Body My Mother the Political Activist Gloria Willy My Father’s Poems My Father’s Chief Regret Singing Lessons Other Flings Therapy Changing Residences and Jobs Herbie Father’s Plunge Performing Betty Ann’s Party The Gay Crowd Grandpa Leaves Some Money On the Road The Obsession The Argument My Brother Becomes the Bad Guy Strays I Vant To Be Alone! Back to School Trying to Sum up Epilogue

Editorial Reviews

"My father's greatest regret in life is he didn't strangle my mother to death," Phillip Lopate tells me while sitting at his kitchen table in Brooklyn. "And my mother regretted that my father was alive. She said, 'I don't want to kill him, but, you know, it would be nice if somehow he would pass away.' "

He laughs.

"So this is a kind of Strindberg play, you know?"

Some people have mothers who are larger than life. Phillip Lopate says that his mother, Frances, "had an amphitheater personality," and so it's no surprise that she pursued an acting career when she turned fifty. She needed a bigger audience than her family.

Frances Lopate lived from 1918 to 2000, and over the course of her eighty-two years she "was forced to reinvent herself over and over: working at a beauty parlor, becoming a housewife and a mother, running a candy store, working in war factories, starting a photography business and a camera store, clerking for garment companies, going into show business, touring America, doing commercials, going back to school . . . It was a twentieth-century life."

Over three decades ago, Lopate, the prolific essayist and director of the nonfiction MFA program at Columbia University, asked his mother to talk about her life story, a request that resulted in over twenty hours of recorded interviews.

"As a child I felt a little overwhelmed by my mother's voice, so when I taped her it was an opportunity to hear her story but also to interrupt it and interrogate it."

But Lopate didn't listen to the tapes right away. Instead, he waited until fifteen years after his mother died to transcribe them. The result, A Mother's Tale, is a nonfiction book that gives Frances a lot of time in the spotlight. She's extremely candid with her son, opening up to him about her sex life, including her many affairs, and how she couldn't stand his father.

Lopate says that "there's a scientific side of me that's interested in the construction of self." By listening to the tapes, he could see how his mother formed her own identity. Much of the narrative is developed through direct quotes from the interviews. The result is a highly intimate work, more personal than many of Lopate's carefully wrought essays, because his mother says things he himself would never say.

"I thought it was a very intriguing demonstration of the way that somebody can move towards the truth and then back away from it," he says. "How rationalization works. So it seemed to me like a good demonstration of how even intelligent people have a hard time moving past their defenses. And it also seemed to me a good demonstration of the wariness and mistrust that can exist between parents and children."

A Mother's Tale shows how much we are shaped by the ones we love. Lopate says part of his personality is in response to his mother. "The personality of an essayist, which is to say somewhat detached, cynical." In fact, Frances accused him of being "clinical," while her son found in his mother a person "fueled by anger." They loved each other, but it was a "thwarted love," a relationship that required some distance between them.

For himself, Lopate doesn't find anything wrong with being clinical. One of the common problems he sees in some of his students' work is the inability to remove themselves, as well as "speaking out of the wound" with a lack of perspective.

It's not that the perspective has to be a definitive one. Lopate says that it's a good time for essays "because essays tolerate and even celebrate uncertainty, skepticism, subjectivity. You don't have to be a specialist to write an essay," Lopate says. "You can air your contradictory thoughts . . . and I think that's where we are as a people now. We're genuinely perplexed."

One of the many pieces of advice he gives to his students is to see their parents as "individuals in their own right" when writing about them. "They existed as individuals before they ever had you, and they continued as individuals," he says. It's advice that A Mother's Tale clearly takes to heart. Frances, and her opinions about "being thwarted by others" and being married to a lackluster husband, comes through clearly. Lopate's mother was a "monologist" who understood the power of narrative, and a person who could captivate and frustrate any audience who was willing to listen to her. She was stubborn, especially in her judgments of others.

"Part of what I was doing in talking to her," Lopate says, "was trying to nudge her away from some of her grudges, partly because ultimately I wanted her to forgive me and not hold such a grudge against me."

His plan didn't work, unfortunately. Even when Frances had some insights, she'd inevitably revert to her original opinions. "The stalemate between us was unbreakable," Lopate writes in the book. "We were too much alike."

Asked if he would ever do this kind of project again, he's quick to say no. "This is a one-time experiment," he says. "Nobody's voice has dominated me to the degree my mother's voice dominated me."

Michele Filgate is an essayist, critic, and freelance writer. She teaches creative nonfiction for The Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, The Rumpus, Salon, Buzzfeed, Poets & Writers, The Boston Globe, DAME Magazine, The Brooklyn Quarterly, Time Out New York, The Daily Beast, O: The Oprah Magazine, Vulture, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Capital New York, The Star Tribune, Bookslut, The Quarterly Conversation, The Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.

Reviewer: Michele Filgate

The Barnes & Noble Review

…[a] fascinating and deftly constructed book. Along with being unsentimental and chillingly honest, [Frances's] responses to probing, no-holds-barred questions are often extensive, as Lopate-the-interviewer yields the stage to her outsize personality. The narrative gains momentum when Lopate-the-memoirist re-evaluates contentious points, and what Lopate has written so astutely about the essay, the form with which he secured his literary acclaim, is particularly applicable here: "So often the 'plot' of a personal essay, its drama, its suspense, consists in watching how far the essayist can drop past his or her psychic defenses toward deeper levels of honesty."

The New York Times Book Review - Jerald Walker

I relished this book. From its clash between mother and son emerges a fortifying love, which (I guess like all parental love) has its casualties along with its lush victories.” —Richard Ford


“The gravitational pull of the child toward the mother is so powerful that it persists even in the face of cruelty or neglect. What is finally most affecting about this book is not Frances’s story but her son’s pained efforts to confront it.” —Ruth Franklin, The New York Review of Books 
 
 


"[A] fascinating and deftly constructed book." —Jerald Walker, The New York Times Book Review
 


“Lucky for us, the cassettes collected dust in a shoebox in the closet until he was ready to write this entertaining and moving book, which is equal parts reflection, reconstruction, police interrogation, psychiatric evaluation, and, ultimately, tribute to his mother.” —Annabelle Gurwitch, Los Angeles Review of Books


“By offering readers a candid portrait of his mother, Lopate manages precisely what he must: he takes a personal story and turns it outward, and in doing so, he makes it our story, too.” —B. J. Hollar, The Los Angeles Review
 


 
 “Lopate, who’s made a life out of language, listens back to the woman who first taught him to speak.” —Hayden Bennett, San Francisco Chronicle
 

 


“A Mother’s Tale is a nonfiction book that gives Frances a lot of time in the spotlight. . . . Lopate’s mother was a ‘monologist’ who understood the power of narrative, and a person who could captivate and frustrate any audience who was willing to listen to her.” —Michele Filgate, Barnes & Noble Review


“A Mother’s Tale shines with pain and laughter. . . . Lopate’s book is an antisentimental tour de force.”—Benjamin Taylor, author of Proust: The Search

From the Publisher