SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Twenty years ago, before author Tayari Jones became the literary superstar she is today, she was a bewildered new author at a writing event.
TAYARI JONES: I didn't know anyone. I was overdressed because I am a Southerner, and we dress for things. I had on - my dress had, like, rhinstones on it because it said gala on the invitation. And I didn't know where to sit. I didn't know what to do.
DETROW: One woman invited Jones to join her at her table with her husband.
JONES: They were so nice to me, and we exchanged information. And I wrote her a thank you note because, as I stated previously, I am a Southerner.
DETROW: That woman was the writer Hilma Wolitzer. And she told Jones one thing that stuck with her.
JONES: She said to me, I have a daughter about your age. She's a writer. Her name is Meg (laughter).
DETROW: Meg as in Meg Wolitzer, who's written many books, including the novels "The Wife" and "The Interestings."
MEG WOLITZER: She's always been supportive of younger women, and I think that's motherly to me.
DETROW: Ahead of Mother's Day, we brought these two writers, two friends we discovered thanks to Mama Hilma's support, to talk about what they love about reading and writing about mothers.
WOLITZER: I started thinking about Mrs. Ramsey in "To The Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf. And I found a quote from her, and she said, "until I was in my 40s... the presence of my mother obsessed me. I could hear her voice, see her, imagine what she would do or say as I went about my days' doings" - because her mother had died when Virginia Woolf was young. But then when she wrote the novel "To The Lighthouse," she said, and when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice. I do not see her. So it was as if in writing about this character who was so strongly influenced by her own mother, I don't know if she exorcised her, but she got some peace from it. But she also just worked it through, understood her.
And I think that one of the things about writing about mothers is that, yeah, I mean, you could write the bad mother - the no-more-wire-hangers "Mommie Dearest" mother - or you could write the virtuous mother. But what matters in writing a mother is that it's a singular character. You have to write who that person is. And that's what matters the most rather than whether you're lauding them or damning them, I think.
JONES: Yes. I mean, you never want to laud or damn any character, be it a mother or not. But, of course, for me, all roads lead back to Morrison. You know, we have Sethe, the mother in "Beloved," who so loves her child that she basically decapitates her to spare her a life of enslavement. But Sethe outside of being a mother is where her full personhood blossoms. You know, she falls in love with Paul D., and, you know, she has this relationship with her mother-in-law and all of these things she witnesses, but this violent act of motherly love is what defines who she thinks of herself as and also who her community considers her to be. But who she is, is all these other things.
WOLITZER: Well, you know my mother, Hilma Wolitzer, who is 96 years old. She's your friend and my mother and my...
JONES: And my pen pal.
WOLITZER: I love that connection, I have to say, very much. I realized today that it's been 60 years since her first short story was published. It was called "Today A Woman Went Mad In The Supermarket," and it was published in the old Saturday Evening Post. And when she sold that story, I was so proud of her, but, of course, I did realize she's as interested in this as she is in stuff going on in our home. I had a sense of it, and I think I must have filed it away for what it must mean to be a writer. You have to have a life in which the characters, when you're writing, speak to you in as loud and urgent voices as your children do when you're with them.
JONES: Well, I feel like in my newest novel, "Kin," both my characters are motherless because, you know, one has a sainted, you know, dead mother in the sky, and the other one's mother has run off, but she knows - she just believes, my mother is misunderstood and when I meet her, we'll love each other. She's just, you know, a fantasy. And as I was writing it, it occurred to me, too, the way that real-life mothers are compared to fantasy mothers and how you can never live up. So when you write about motherhood, you're always writing about a person who is measuring herself against this kind of ideal.
WOLITZER: I wrote a novel called "This Is Your Life," and later it was republished as "This Is My Life." And it was made into a film that was Nora Ephron's first film that she directed. It is about the two daughters of a mother who becomes a stand-up comic. And I wanted to have the daughters looking at a mother sort of trying to have a life outside of them, who has things that interest her and excite her that aren't about you and how you reckon with that. And when the film was made, I think that Nora and her sister Delia looked at it from the mother's perspective, too, whereas the daughter in me, you want to be the center of your mother's world, and to realize sometimes that you're not can be rattling.
JONES: My mother is an economist, actually. She has a Ph.D. in economics. My daddy has a Ph.D. in political science. Like many women, I feel like my dad's career was part of what we did as a household and not hers. Like, I know a lot about political science. I don't know very much about economics. And I found out only recently that my mother is only, like, the third or fourth Black American woman to get a Ph.D. in economics. And I learned that this year. I discovered that my mother kind of made history, and I didn't know.
WOLITZER: There is that sense of mothers quietly doing what they do and not getting appreciation for it that still goes on. I mean, I think when you write about motherhood, you're often writing about ambivalence because of the way in which motherhood takes you away from being in the world.
JONES: It's true. And also, I am not a mother, just, you know, for the record in this conversation. And I know I was once talking to my mother, and it came up that I did not think that I probably would have the life that I have were I a mother. And she didn't say, no, of course you could have. She said, I think you're right. And that was, like, a - kind of a moment.
WOLITZER: I actually did an event some years ago, and during the Q&A, somebody stood up, and she said, my daughter really wants to be a writer, but I know how unbelievably difficult it is. What should I tell her? And I said, well, is she talented? And she said, yes, very. And I said, is she burning to do it? Because you have to be burning to do it. And she said, absolutely. And I said, well, I think you should tell her, that's great, try. Because the world will whittle your daughter down, but a mother never should.
JONES: That's really - that's moving. You know, for me, when people have asked me that - my daughter wants to be a writer, what should I do? - I just say, get out of her way.
WOLITZER: Get out of her way is really moving to me, too. People sometimes will say, do you and your mother have competition with each other? And that is far from, I think, either of our minds. Not everybody reads fiction. So somebody who loves fiction and happens to be your mother and you can talk about fiction together - the fiction you love and the fiction you write - is such a gift. And I had that in my house growing up, and I will never forget it.
JONES: You have these wonderful, not prickly things to say. You're like, my mama, she's a writer.
WOLITZER: Well, do you...
JONES: She had my back.
WOLITZER: You want me to say something prickly?
JONES: No, no, no, don't you say anything prickly about Mother Hilma. I will not allow it.
WOLITZER: I never would.
DETROW: That was Meg Wolitzer, who wrote her most recent book, "Found Sound," with her son, as well as Tayari Jones, whose latest book is "Kin." Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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