A Mother's Tale
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $19.99
-
- $19.99
Publisher Description
In 1984, Phillip Lopate sat down with his mother, Frances, to listen to her life story. A strong, resilient, indomitable woman who lived through the major events of the twentieth century, she was orphaned in childhood, ran away and married young, and then reinvented herself as a mother, war factory worker, candy store owner, community organizer, clerk, actress, and singer. But paired with exciting anecdotes are the criticisms of the husband who couldn’t satisfy her, the details of numerous affairs and sexual encounters, and, though she succeeded at many of her roles, accounts of how she always felt mistreated, taken advantage of. After the interviews, at a loss for what to do with the tapes, Lopate put them away. But thirty years later, after his mother had passed away, Lopate found himself drawn back to the recordings of this conversation. Thus begins a three-way conversation between a mother, his younger self, and the person he is today.
Trying to break open the family myths, rationalizations, and self-deceptions, A Mother’s Tale is about family members who love each other but who can’t seem to overcome their mutual mistrust. Though Phillip is sympathizing to a point, he cannot join her in her operatic displays of self-pity and how she blames his father for everything that went wrong. His detached, ironic character has been formed partly in response to her melodramatic one. The climax is an argument in which he tries to persuade her—using logic, of all things—that he really does love her, but is only partially successful, of course.
A Mother’s Tale is about something primal and universal: the relationship between a mother and her child, the parent disappointed with the payback, the child, now fully grown, judgmental. The humor is in the details.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1984, Lopate sat down with his mother, Frances, and asked her to tell him her life story, prompting her recollections with questions and interjections of his own. Thirty years later, he discovered the tapes of these interviews and decided to transcribe the conversations to bring his mother's energetic and vibrant voice to life. "I chose to include so much of her testimony verbatim," he writes, "because it seemed a more realistic presentation of the person she was, and the dynamic between us." In a voice that's alternately rambling and precisely focused, Frances recalls being orphaned and being sent to live with her sister, running away at 15, her marriage, her affairs, her acting career, and motherhood. When Frances calls her husband a "piece of garbage," her son disagrees, to which she responds with specifics: "He had a low-paying job, he was no bargain, he was a rotten lover." Looking back on these conversations, Lopate often interjects and reads his mother's situation through the lens of fiction: "It's starting to sound like Sons and Lovers... here again is the... woman... horrified by her... husband, and the sensitive son going back and forth between the two." Their relationship is, of course, complex. In Lopate's balanced writing, Frances comes across as a strong woman, going her own way in a time when women's ways were often dictated to them.
