CW: Death of a parent, mention of disease and also literary snobbery
It’s Mother’s Day this upcoming weekend, in Australia. I have a child, so I will participate; I will get an adorable home-made card and perhaps some toast in bed. And I will think about my own late mother, who was taken from us early, and who I would have given books, as her gift.
Not my book. My mum would have hated my book.
Don’t get me wrong; she would have been proud that I had written a book, and that it was published internationally with a big-five publisher (once she worked out what that meant. She was an accountant; the publishing industry was outside of her frame of reference).
She most definitely would have boasted about it to everyone she knew—but there would always have been a few apologetic injections at some point of “it’s a fantasy novel for teenagers” popped in there, since she could be a bit of a snob about books. The type that thought stories about divorcees meeting hot Italians while finding themselves in Tuscany were great, but stories with dragons or vampires were dubious.
“Why do you have to write such spooky stuff?” She asked me more than once, when I tried to talk to her about my writing (anything remotely speculative was “spooky” no matter how little that word actually applied. Star War was spooky, apparently). “You write so beautifully—can’t you write something nice?”
Mum died a bit before the pandemic started, from a relatively quick form of MND. Two years of every day taking away bits of her, and then she was gone.
I always bought her books for presents, including at Mother’s Day. She said I was better at picking them for her than she was herself, despite the fact that she mostly read things one would classify as general or women’s fiction; not the shelves I head most often to, for my own reading.
She liked it when books were set in other countries or time periods, so that she could feel like she’d learnt something; and then would often go away to learn more. When I introduced her to Nancy Mitford, for instance, she devoured what I gave her (Love in a Cold Climate and In the Pursuit of Love, my favourites), tracked down and bought both the 2001 BBC adaptation and the 1980 one, and also made all her friends read them. Her best friend then bought multiple biographies of the infamous Mitford sisters and they all read those as well.
My job there was done. I left them all to it.
One of the unexpected ways that I end up thinking about my mother regularly these days is when I meet other debut writers whose work I know she would have loved. This Mother’s Day, I would have given her Nadia Mahjouri’s Half Truth, and Jane Yang’s The Lotus Shoes.
She would have loved both of these authors’ beautiful prose; to learn about other places and the lives of fictional women who were so different to her, but told her something universal about the truth of the human condition.
She also would have loved to hear about my meeting them at an event we all did together for debut authors at The Wheeler Centre recently (that’s where the pictures are from, on this post), and boasted to all her friends about it and then gotten them to read the books too; or perhaps she would have even come to the event, to watch us all herself.
Perhaps she would have told everyone there proudly that that was her daughter, who had published a book—a fantasy novel for teenagers.
Happy Mother’s Day, Mum. I’ll just have to read all of the books for you.
Lisa Tirreno 