“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” may be a well-worn adage, but we all have intimations that we have taken root within our parents’ shadow. When the people we once depended on and thought of as immortal slip away from us as we and they age, we become the custodians of their memories in a lockbox of time. Our own memories become works in progress. For the 25 authors included in Apple, Tree: Writers on Their Parents, edited by Lise Funderburg, memorializing their parents is a bittersweet act, and sometimes just bitter.
Each writer included here is unflinchingly candid in their portrait of a parent — even one as “narcissistic” and emotionally wounding as author Kyoko Mori’s father was. As she writes after finding out about his terminal cancer, “I wouldn’t have gone to say goodbye even if [he] himself had asked me to.” Although she counters the idea that she may resemble her father — given that she is not a habitual liar or sexual adventurer or physically abusive —she also admits that the only way to be not like him was to behave as badly as he had, by erasing his memory. She closes her essay with this: “I survived being his daughter by acting just as he did.”
The topic of parenting may be a universal interest, but the trenchant treatment of one’s parents in literature is a relatively new pastime. In the 1950s, Robert Lowell’s influential Life Studies galvanized a generation of poets to write about their childhoods, acerbically pointing out the hypocrisy and malfeasance of their parents. Famously, Plath, Sexton, and Berryman felt victimized by their parents and attributed their own self-destructive behaviors to the faulty, even sinister behavior of their mothers and fathers. But pop culture, embodied in celebrity memoirs like Christina Crawford’s Mommy Dearest, took the blame-game mainstream.
D.W. Winnicott termed the concept of the “good enough parent” to offset the dangers of idealization. In his maternally oriented model, the new mother first adapts to the needs of her infant, so that the infant sees no differentiation between itself and the mother – but that fusion is later tested when the mother no longer accomodates every cry and allows the infant to experience the frustrations of separation. She is “good enough” — the child can now tolerate not having its needs filled immediately. But when was good enough ever good enough? If it were, the imprint of early tensions wouldn’t dominate so many of our novels, poems, essays and general crankiness.
In my research into the intergenerational transmission of trauma, I’ve found a pattern of parents and children blending without boundaries, which causes the child to identify with a suffering parent and impedes the child’s mental progress. It is interesting to me that Apple, Tree takes for its theme the commonality of parents and children, and the writing in it becomes an opportunity for the authors to separate themselves from that merger. Perhaps this is fundamental to our natures –- an inclination I found in something I wrote about my own mother:
“On the day my mother died, I was watching reels of home movies that were delegated to me when it was clear that she would be spending her last months at the nursing home. And in the projector’s jittery afterlife, I could see her resurrected as a novice wife wearing a pleated skirt and tailored top, showing off her new pink Maytag washing machine, as my father trailed after her with the unsteady camera. In those days, being a good housewife topped the gender codes and success was measured by how Spartan-clean the house was and by a wife’s cooking. The scene then shifted to a day in the park, where she was seen rocking a baby buggy with the black hood up. In the background, leaves were falling in slow motion before the film appeared to jolt and run out but then something was spliced back in. So in the final frames, I saw her waving and smiling to the camera, her lips moving like a foreign film star’s dubbed in, as she entered the nursery in her quilted robe, carrying a baby that I confirmed was me, and I could see myself there, my old face buried in her young one.”
In her introduction, Funderburg writes of her own parentage, “Welcoming the likeness, the echo, isn’t the same as according it value. My father delivered me into a world so different from his that such public cautions were unnecessary.” By trying to understand the flawed humanity of our parents, we begin to revise some of the more inwardly destructive patterns within ourselves. Thus the project of Apple, Tree seems not only to air the authors’ grievances, but to generate empathy for their own struggles.
Apple, Tree starts out with writers writing about a trait inherited from a parent, and how that affects them today. The book is then divided into three categories: resemblance, caregiving, and heritage. In the resemblance essays, authors meditate on similarities between themselves and a parent, such as Ann Patchett’s remembrance that she and her beautiful mother looked so much alike they could be sisters. But Patchett devised her own relation to beauty: “I didn’t color my hair or buy mascara. I aspired to a oook thatv was clean, well-kempt, invisible; and in this I was successful. I had seen the nebefits and coists of beaut5y and decided to pass.” Laura van den Berg describes visiting a psychic, a habit she and her mother have in common. S. Bear Bergman’s humorous account describes his physical resemblance to his father, warts and all.
These essays, finding ways to portray parents in an unsentimental light, accept both their endeavors to be models for their children, and the shortcomings of those models. In Avi Steinberg’s contribution, he praises his mother’s sense of humor while chiding her hoarding of junk: “For my mother there is sadness and shame in all this … And what can I say? I’m my mother’s son: if your legacy is a pile of antique sardine tins, its probably best to have a sense of humor about it. For me, humor itself is a part of that legacy.”
The caregiving essays, often poignant, focus primarily on memory loss, describing the hardship of seeing one’s parents become more frail and childlike while their children are cast into caregiving roles. When my mother’s dementia overtook her managerial mind, I was shocked by how disorganized her thoughts had become; she was no longer able to administer her own insulin or dress herself, and I must admit that I felt strangely dehinged from my own identity as a scatter-brained daughter now responding to my mother as if she were me. It was very discomforting when she looked to me for protection as I always had looked to her. I was engaged by Lizzie Skurnick’s postmodern collage of her own mother’s dementia through various snips of discourses juxtaposed to one another, a vertiable labyrinth of misdiagnosis and culpabilities evoking the many voices that inhabited this alien planet that had become her mother. Matt Johnson writes convincingly about his mother without sentimentality and allows himself to see the humor in this very human plight.
The third section of the book addresses legacy. Intriguingly, this is where I sense a coming together of the authors and the various psychological syndromes that can effect children who grow up in dysfunctional families, and in many cases may find writing to be a means of exploring difficult feelings resurfacing even after decades. John Freeman recollects being an adolescent trying to cope with “the zoom and swerve of my father’s anger” by trying to detect and then interpret the meaning underlying that volatility. As if he were telepathic, Freeman sees a connection between language and affect that profoundly influenced his litwerary capabilities. He writes that his father’s negativity “mold[ed] [him] into … a receptive editor” because he was forced to learn to read the signs of words.
These essayists reveal our most ardent yearning for affection alongside its deprivation. But the contributions are also idiosyncratic, and the reader must create one’s own pattern of understanding through the narratives. I learned from their examples. While we all must make the best of the parents we are given, life has a way of pointing us back to our beginnings. Most of the writers strike a note of appreciation – as Kate Carroll de Gutes does at the end of her essay:
“This has become one of my mother’s greatest gifts to me, this remembering to be in the ever-presnt now – not the past, not the future – breaking the family pattern, and not viewing the constant redirection back to the present moment as a failure, but as course correction toward some point on my horizon that I can’t see and, if I am living in the present moment, am not yet supposed to see.”
[Published by the University of Nebraska Press on November 1, 2019, 232 pages, $24.95 hardcover]