Michele Filgate - What My Mother and I Dont Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

Praise for What My Mother and I Dont Talk About

Most Anticipated Reads of 2019 Selection by *Publishers Weekly* *BuzzFeed* *The Rumpus* *Lit Hub* *The Week*

A fascinating set of reflections on what it is like to be a son or daughter.... The range of stories and styles represented in this collection makes for rich and rewarding reading.

Publishers Weekly

These are the hardest stories in the world to tell, but they are told with absolute grace. You will devour these beautifully writtenand very importanttales of honesty, pain, and resilience.

Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Eat Pray Love

By turns raw, tender, bold, and wise, the essays in this anthology explore writers relationships with their mothers. Kudos to Michele Filgate for this riveting contribution to a vital conversation.

Claire Messud, bestselling author of The Burning Girl

Fifteen literary luminaries, including Filgate herself, probe how silence is never even remotely golden until it is mined for the haunting truths that lie within our most primal relationshipswith our mothers. Unsettling, brave, sometimes hilarious, and sometimes scorching enough to wreck your heart, these essays about love, or the terrifying lack of it, dont just smash the silence; they let the light in, bearing witness with grace, understanding, and writing so gorgeous youll be memorizing lines.

Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Is This Tomorrow and Pictures of You

This collection of storytelling constellated around mothers and silence will break your heart and then gently give it back to you stitched together with what we carry in our bodies our whole lives.

Lidia Yuknavitch, national bestselling author of The Misfits Manifesto

This is a rare collection that has the power to break silences. I am in awe of the talent Filgate has assembled here; each of these fifteen heavyweight writers offer a truly profound argument for why words matter, and why unspoken words may matter even more.

Garrard Conley, New York Times bestselling author of Boy Erased

Who better to discuss one of our greatest shared surrealitiesthat we are all, once and forever, for better or worse, someones childthan this murderers row of writers? The mothers in this collection are terrible, wonderful, flawed, human, tragic, triumphant, complex, simple, baffling, supportive, deranged, heartbreaking, and heartbroken. Sometimes all at once. Ill be thinking about this book, and stewing over it, and teaching from it, for a long time.

Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers

For Mimo and Nana

Because it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels...

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

by Michele Filgate

O n the first cold day of November, when it was so frigid that I finally needed to accept the fact that it was time to take my winter coat out of the closet, I had a craving for something warm and savory. I stopped at the local butcher in my neighborhood in Brooklyn and bought a half pound of bacon and two and a half pounds of chuck beef.

At home, I washed and chopped the mushrooms, removing their stems and feeling some sense of satisfaction as the dirt swirled down the drain. I put on Christmas music, though it wasnt even close to Thanksgiving, and my tiny apartment expanded with a comforting smell: onions, carrots, garlic, and bacon fat simmering on the stove.

Cooking Ina Gartens beef bourguignon is a way I feel close to my mother. Stirring the fragrant stew, Im back in my childhood kitchen, where my mother would spend a good chunk of her time when she wasnt at work. Around the holiday season, shed bake poppy seed cookies with raspberry jam in the middle, or peanut butter blossoms, and Id help her with the dough.

As Im making the meal, I feel my mothers presence in the room. I cant cook without thinking of her, because the kitchen is where she feels most at home. Adding the beef stock and fresh thyme, Im reassured by the simple act of creation. If you use the right ingredients and follow the directions, something emerges that pleases your palate. Still, by the end of the night, despite my full belly Im left with a gnawing pain in my stomach.

My mother and I dont speak that often. Making a recipe is a contract with myself that I can execute easily. Talking to my mother isnt as simple, nor was writing my essay in this book.

It took me twelve years to write the essay that led to this anthology. When I first started writing What My Mother and I Dont Talk About, I was an undergraduate at the University of New Hampshire, wowed by Jo Ann Beards influential essay collection The Boys of My Youth . Reading that book was the first instance that showed me what a personal essay can really be: a place where a writer can lay claim for control over their own story. At the time, I was full of anger toward my abusive stepfather, haunted by memories that were all too recent. He loomed so large in my house that I wanted to disappear until, finally, I did.

What I didnt realize at the time was that this essay wasnt really about my stepfather. The reality was far more complicated and difficult to face. The core truths behind my essay took years to confront and articulate. What I wanted (and needed) to write about was my fractured relationship with my mother.

Longreads published my essay in October 2017, right after the Weinstein story broke and the #MeToo movement took off. It was the perfect time to break my silence, but the morning it was published, I woke up early at a friends house in Sausalito, unable to sleep, rattled by how it felt to release such a vulnerable piece of writing into the world. The sun was just rising as I sat outside and opened my laptop. The air was thick with smoke from nearby wildfires, and ash rained down on my keyboard. It felt like the whole world was burning. It felt like I had set fire to my own life. To live with the pain of my strained relationship with my mother is one thing. To immortalize it in words is a whole other level.

Theres something deeply lonely about confessing your truth. The thing was, I wasnt truly alone. For even a brief instant of time, every single human being has a mother. That mother-and-child connection is a complicated one. Yet we live in a society where we have holidays that assume a happy relationship. Every year when Mothers Day rolls around, I brace myself for the onslaught of Facebook posts paying tribute to the strong, loving women who shaped their offspring. Im always happy to see mothers celebrated, but theres a part of me that finds it painful too. There is a huge swath of people who are reminded on this day of what is lacking in their livesfor some, its the intense grief that comes with losing a mother too soon or never even knowing her. For others, its the realization that their mother, although alive, doesnt know how to mother them.

Mothers are idealized as protectors: a person who is caring and giving and who builds a person up rather than knocking them down. But very few of us can say that our mothers check all of these boxes. In many ways, a mother is set up to fail. There is a gaping hole perhaps for all of us, where our mother does not match up with mother as we believe its meant to mean and all its meant to give us, Lynn Steger Strong writes in this book.

That gap can be a normal and necessary experience of reality as we growit can also leave a lasting effect. Just as every human being has a mother, we all share the instinct to avoid pain at all costs. We try to bury it deep inside of us until we can no longer feel it, until we forget that it exists. This is how we survive. But its not the only way.