Don’t Tell My Mother

What do you do if you want to keep a secret? You blog about it.

I found out a couple of weeks ago that one of my best short stories has found an excellent home. After the screaming stopped several musts ran through my mind—must update cover letter, must send out more stories, must tell Mom. Oh, wait. Scratch that last. Can’t tell Mom because the story is about her.

More precisely, the story was inspired by some experiences with my parents. My father, no problem. He’ll get red-faced, pound the dinner table with his fist, and shriek about my pinko politics, but he seems to believe he has no right to criticize his children’s (non-voting) behavior—to their faces, anyway, which is all I care about. If he recognized himself in the story he’d laugh about it or ignore it. Now my mother, there’s no doubt she’d recognize the evidence of their inspiration. And she’d let it be known that she was not amused. She’d let it be known loud and long.

So when I told my sister about the story, I added, “but don’t tell Mom.” When I sent my mother-in-law an e-mail sharing the good news, I asked her to tell my father-in-law not to mention it. My mother sees my father-in-law fairly often because he’s her dentist. Can’t have them swapping family gossip and my father-in-law says, how about that story, huh? I was so happy for Claire! And my mother looks up, past the glittering dental tools, her mouth wadded with cotton. “Whu thtowee?”

*** 

Have you published a story yet, huh, have you, have you? My mother never asks me how the work is going, and why should she? Who but another writer cares about the work? She just wants some good news. If I can’t report a success there’s really nothing to say about my work. So the fact that I can’t tell her about my first fiction publication in a literary magazine is evidence, says my husband, that the universe has a sense of humor. I say it’s just the latest proof that I don’t learn from experience.

A few years ago I sent a story to a local contest. The story’s two main characters are inspired by family members who, despite my having invented the story they act out, would be recognizable to many in my father’s very large cast of relatives. I’d even kept the names the same because it just so happens that these two people were named extraordinarily well—no fictional names could do them justice. Who would ever know? 

As it turned out, the story won an honorable mention, which was the ticket to publication in the city paper. I lived in North Carolina, my family in Virginia—no one there would even know about it, surely. I told my mother about my good fortune and she said something about how that was very nice, sweetheart, but let me finish what I was saying about last Thursday’s trip to the grocery store. So for sure nobody was paying attention and I had nothing to worry about. Just before I e-mailed the manuscript to the newspaper editor some barely audible voice of reason and survival told me to change the names. I did.

The story appeared in the Sunday paper. My mother called Thursday. Turns out an old friend of a cousin lives in Carolina. She recognized my last name and called Mary-Lynne, who said, why yes, that’s my first cousin, mail me the clipping. When she got it she passed it along to her mother—my Aunt Edna—who passed it to my mother, who, after praising the story, said, “Thank God you used fake names.” 

In the weeks that followed, my mother was no longer interested in lingering over the details of potato chip aisle encounters because now she was being besieged by cousins and neighbors and friends of friends who were papering a few counties of Virginia with copies of my clipped story. They had no idea her daughter was so talented! Almost every day I got another phone call from Mom, reporting more words of praise from someone I didn’t know. So began my mother’s harangue: Have you published another story yet, huh, have you, have you? She wants another month like that.

***

I spent a college summer living with a man who was too old and too angry. But he offered escape from the dull hum of sweltering afternoons in Williamsburg, Virginia, where absolutely nothing ever happened. I moved into his run-down house in a decaying suburb in Alexandria, Virginia, where the dull hum of sweltering afternoons was punctuated by argument and complaint. For sweaty recreation we built pretty monuments to resentment. Eventually we agreed that it was better to be bored and pissed and hot with people we liked better, so he went out to gas up the truck while I went upstairs to pack. I took that opportunity to scour his room for the letters and photos I’d given him, which I found and destroyed. I’m not saying I’m proud of that act but… I’m not saying I regret it, exactly, either. At the time it felt like I didn’t have a choice. I just couldn’t stand the thought of this man having documentation of my private thoughts. I couldn’t bear the thought that he would own my words.

I stole my letters, too, from a former friend who left her room unlocked. I attended an Amnesty International meeting and got all pumped up to support the cause until they asked me to put my name on a membership roll. When I registered to vote I refused to pick a party. When I attended workshops and seminars I shoved my name tag in my pocket. In act after small, fruitless act, I pretended to anonymity. Not that I wanted to be voiceless, mind you, not absent—I’ve always been opinionated, the one to raise a hand at the company meeting, the one who follows a dinner party declaration with, “Oh, I don’t know about that.” But I planned never to leave a fingerprint, you see. I’m still stunned when anyone says, “I thought of you when….” Worse, “I remember what you said about….” 

Of course once I decided to be a writer I had to think about this question of anonymity. Was I going to write with gloves? With sunglasses and a headscarf? When I sent that story to the Raleigh paper I had to resolve another problem of names. I’d always thought, and said, that I would use a pen name if I ever published anything. Frances St. Clair. But when it came time to send the manuscript I couldn’t do it. I write because I want to engage—with my life, with the worlds people carry into the produce section or the parking garage or the DMV, with the people I claim to know and the ones I will never meet. I want to connect and I want to do that with authenticity. Frances St. Clair never experienced an authentic moment in her lingerie-shopping, leopard-print-purse-carrying, bon bon-laden life. Good luck to her, but keep her away from me.

***

Is writing always about stripping? Even fiction? I thought I avoided writing so long because I feared arty failure but maybe I was just too wrapped in fig leaves to consider such a naked occupation. My journey as a writer so far is partly about going from a resentful, letter-stealing girl who refused to sign her name to anything, to a nervous but eager Facebook-lurking woman who blogs about the latest secret I’m trying to keep. Now anyone can have my words.

In the days before I admitted I wanted to write I settled for vicarious pursuit and bought books about the writing life. One of my favorites was Writing Past Dark, a book of essays by Bonnie Friedman. In her excellent “Your Mother’s Passions, Your Sister’s Woes: Writing About the Living,” she addresses this problem of writing stories inspired by people we know. “Is it wrong to write about the living?” she asks. Wow, I remember thinking, tough stuff. Come to think of it, that’s when I decided I’d use a pen name if I ever published anything—you know, to protect the innocent. But now I ask: What does writing and publishing my stories have to do with innocence or guilt? Anyway, innocent of what? Innocent of ambition? My mother wants me to publish and the price of that is exposure. Innocent of conceit? Signing my work “Frances St. Clair” would be quite the act of ego, wouldn’t it? Did I ever really suppose my words could have such power that I must be protected from them? That my family must be protected?

“It’s hard to keep a secret.” That’s one of the things my mother-in-law said in her reply to my e-mail reporting my good news. It was an appropriate, gentle admonition, to which I responded that if my father-in-law happened to forget and mention the story to my mother, so be it. It’s not his secret to keep. I had to think longer about my reply to her next remark: “I’ve sometimes wondered if you’ve written about me.”

I have, of course. Sort of. I have written mothers and even once a mother-in-law whose personalities include traits my mother-in-law possesses. Every character a writer creates takes something from someone—probably lots of someones—she knows. You have inspired me, I said, but no, I have never written you. It’s impossible to write you.

There’s a reason why I wrote this story that will soon be published as fiction, even though it relates events that are almost completely true. Because almost completely true is not the same thing as true, and although some creative nonfiction writers don’t make such a fine distinction, I do. I am telling a truth but in story form and it is my truth. But it is only one of my many truths connected to those events, certainly not the whole truth—the whole truth would make a rotten, baggy, unreadable story. It is a crafted truth—a fiction—which means it as at least as false as it is true. And which means it is wholly mine.

That’s what I intend to say to my mother. Because I’ve made a decision about this secret I’ve been keeping: I’m telling Mom. I’m telling Mom because I think she can handle it. Because she’d better learn how to handle it. And I don’t want to cheat her of the news. Nor do I want to have to explain one day why I kept this story a secret. I’m telling Mom, and then I’m going to thank her. For inspiring a story I loved writing, for being so fascinating she can’t help but inspire me. I think she will see the truth in that.