Storytellersunplugged

THE FILTH AND THE FURY

“Why do you write such filth? Nobody wants to read that.”

So said my mother after reading the opening chapters of my first novel, The Unwelcome Child. Initially I was perplexed. What filth? I hadn’t realized I’d written any. Okay, there’s some cursing. But some of my best curse words I learned from my mother. My very first was bullshit — which my mother pronounced as ‘bowl shit.’ I never understood why she used to scream about bowls of shit whenever she was angry, but I thought it was so funny that one day while washing dishes with my brother I handed him a bowl and said, ‘Here Billy, have a bowl of shit.’ That was also the first time I had my mouth washed out with soap.

But I digress. You may be wondering why I’ve chosen to bring such a charming bit of family history to this blog. It’s because I imagine that I’m not unique in feeling that as a writer, having your family, parents especially, read your work can be a loaded endeavor. When strangers in the world hate your writing, it’s not that difficult to brush off. To each his own, everyone has different tastes, that kind of thing. But parents are a different matter. After all, these are people who have known you your whole life, think they know you better than anyone else and will, to varying degrees, always think of you as extensions of themselves. But the truth is, at least in my case, is that my parents know absolutely nothing about me. Based on their reaction to my novel I think they must still see me as the girl who was crowned Little Miss Springtime in her dance recital, won the Golden Tennis Shoe Award for being the highest stepper in my High School marching band, and while other teenagers where getting turned on by sex and drugs, I was in the dance studio working on my turn out. This is not to say I didn’t live on the wild side for some time, but that was only once I was out of their radar.

Upon reflection, though, I realized that besides the cursing, the passing reference to fellatio with a decapitated head, lesbian love and more, what really was upsetting my mother was that she probably sees the novel as some kind of condemnation of her. After all, the title of the book alone doesn’t reflect well on the mother/child relationship. I’m sure that when she read the sentence, ‘For the first time in her life she realized how much she hated her mother,’ she felt those words as strongly as if I’d said them myself. Well, I don’t hate my mother and although our relationship has been a complex one, I swear I have never dreamed of swinging a bucket at her head. The monster-mother has always been an archetype in fiction, and always will be. Unfortunately, I will never convince my mother otherwise, not only because she’d rather focus on the ‘filth,’ but because there’s nothing an author can do if someone identifies with one of their characters, either for the good or bad.

Anyway, it’s a good thing I haven’t told her about the novel I’m currently working on, where a character with a life-threatening condition is very much like her. As yet I haven’t decided whether to have her live or die. My decision will depend on what serves the story best, of course. But for those of you who have a tendency to see yourself in characters created by authors you know, you might think twice about insulting their work.