Discussion: Seeing Our Mothers As Characters

From Bookshop

Earlier this week, I shared some thoughts about transforming real people — especially parents — into characters in memoir. My primary text was Mark Slouka’s Nobody’s Son, and I invited all to explore those craft strategies in a fresh text, Patricia Hampl’s memoir The Florist’s Daughter. Recommended reading was Hampl’s first chapter, which is available (except for one omitted page) in the Amazon preview of her book.

This is an experiment as I’m mulling a more organized calendar for The Recovering Academic in 2025. In place of my more freewheeling rotation of original essays, interviews, and craft resources, I’m thinking about several structured mini-series, such as the My Ántonia Read Along I led last year. One variation on the read along concept could be a series of linked posts where I introduce a craft tool on Tuesday, then feature a text on Friday that shows mastery of that technique. Since a fair bit of labor goes into this, I’d reserve the discussion thread on those Fridays for paying members.

So give it a whirl. And please answer the poll at the end to help me plan.

Discussion: Seeing Our Mothers As Characters

I typically consider five ways to characterize a real person the way a novelist typically does. What sense do you get from the opening chapter of The Florist’s Daughter of Mary Marum Hampl’s physical appearance, her mannerisms, the way she speaks, the way she acts in certain situations, and the way she reacts in others? 

One thing that strikes me from the opening page of Hampl’s memoir is the shift in her usual voice. She is not typically a brusque writer. One of her books is titled Blue Arabesque, another A Romantic Education. She has a degree in lyric poetry, as she says here. So the fragments, the clipped narration, must have been influenced by her mother’s natural voice. What do you think of this as a way of characterizing someone — not merely in the conventional ways mentioned above, but also by adapting the tone and structure of the work to mirror their personality?

Form often follows a narrator’s state of mind. In the opening chapter, Hampl is preparing for her mother’s death, grieving while trying to remain present to those last moments and practical concerns. She creates a feeling of immediacy, as if we’re reliving all that with her. But a book like this is always written later, at some distance from the experience itself. So how does she make the form, the structure of her story, fit the situation it describes?

Charles Baxter claims that eulogies typically emphasize the good qualities of the departed so thoroughly that a stranger feels no emotional connection at all. So we have to do better than that in fiction and memoir. How well does Hampl highlight the quirks, flaws, and foibles that make her mother feel real, like someone we know, or like ourselves? Where do you see Hampl resisting the tendency to turn her mother into either a saint or a sinner?

A man at my grandfather’s funeral claimed that my grandfather was now in his 30s, tanned, enjoying eternal life in heaven. It’s one of those pretty pictures that falls apart the more anyone thinks about it (why tanned – why would anyone care one way or the other about something so obviously carnal in heaven?). But that fantasy poses an interesting question: when are we our best selves? Senior year of high school, when all our clothes fit perfectly? Mid-20s at the peak of our physical strength? The sliding scale of vigor and wisdom in our 30s-50s? Or do the Golden Years reveal our richest, fullest selves?

These are moot questions for the memoirist, whose job is to avoid the trap of pigeonholing people at any particular age. I never knew my mother as a girl, and my earliest memories of her begin in her mid-20s. But she was a character long before she became my mother, so if I wrote about her at any length, I’d need to think about all those selves nested within one another. How well does Hampl show her mother through time, at various ages, rather than in one fixed stage of life? 

And a tricky question to end on: Does each of us become many characters throughout our lives at various ages? Or is there a stable self that follows us through all those changes? How might you negotiate that question while characterizing one of your parents in memoir?

I’m eager to know your thoughts on Hampl!

Please also let me know in the poll if this is the kind of thing you’d like to see more of and, if so, if it’s valuable enough for you to consider supporting The Recovering Academic with a full membership.