What My Mother and I Don't Talk About

Starred review from March 1, 2019

In October 2017, as the #MeToo movement gained momentum, Filgate published an essay on the website Longreads describing her strained relationship with her mother as a result of her stepfather's abuse that her mother never believed happened. This collection takes its title from that essay, which is reprinted here, and presents 14 other pieces by a diverse set of writers, including André Aciman, Alexander Chee, Cathi Hanauer, Leslie Jamison, Carmen Maria Machado, and Bernice L. McFadden. The essays all address the authors' relationships with their mothers in stories to be savored but not necessarily read in one sitting. A lot of the writing is heavy and deals with sexual violence, mental illness, estrangement, and physical and emotional child abuse. One piece even discusses a mother accusing her daughter of a crime she did not commit that sent her to jail. Other essays are powerful treatises on love and friendship between writers and their mothers, all are beautifully composed. VERDICT Highly recommended for readers interested in the complicated topic of mother-child/familial dynamics. [An editor's pick, LJ 2/19, p. 20.]--Erica Swenson Danowitz, Delaware Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Media, PA

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2019
Fifteen essayists--many luminaries--write unflinchingly about their mothers. From the first page of the introduction, where editor Filgate--an MFA student at NYU and contributing editor at Literary Hub--names cooking as a way of staying connected to the mother she doesn't talk to very often, this collection is honest and riveting. Kiese Laymon writes about the difference between loving someone and loving how that someone makes you feel, while Carmen Maria Machado explores how her feelings about the mother from whom she's estranged shape her thoughts about having, or not having, children herself. In her sharp contribution, Lynn Steger Strong considers what she cannot find a way to say about the anger she feels toward her mother. Julianna Baggott describes being her mother's "confessor." André Aciman's ruminations about his mother's deafness also serve as odes to language and bodies and communication. Brandon Taylor illuminates the experience of cancer and examines his lack of empathy for his mother, and Leslie Jamison rounds out the collection with a loving piece in which she attempts to "project my admiration back through time to reassure the woman my mom had been, that woman who felt only that she had somehow failed the man who loved her first--that women who did not know, could not have known, the road ahead." Most of the essays are pointedly literary and lyrical; many include meta-reflections on the nature of truth-telling, and the narrators show themselves thinking and rethinking the claims they hazard and then revise about their mothers. For the most part, the collection avoids cliché and sentimentality; equally remarkable, each one of these intimate and gut-wrenching essays reaches beyond itself to forge connections with readers. Other contributors include Alexander Chee, Melissa Febos, and Sari Botton. Moving Mother's Day reading for the fearless and brave--though some readers may want to have their therapist on speed-dial.

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Starred review from March 1, 2019
Ask 15 writers to share their most private thoughts about their perhaps most personal relationship, and prepare for fireworks. Filgate opens this lit-fuse collection with her essay on the abusive stepfather who tainted her relationship with her mother. The viral response to that piece, first published in Longreads, and the ultimate relief Filgate felt in writing it led her to gather these pieces from 14 other writers. Kiese Laymon explains why he wrote Heavy, winner of the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal, directly to his mother. Novelist Nayomi Munaweera discloses that her essay, relating the profound effects of her mother's lifelong emotional duress, is the hardest thing she's written yet. Andr� Aciman considers how his mother's deafness shaped her entire life, and made her a master of intimate communication. Seeking a topic that she and her mom don't readily discuss, Leslie Jamison must go back to a time before she was even born, through the autobiographical novel written by her mother's first husband. Sharing a very specific prompt while varying in nearly every other aspect?length, tone, style, approach?these essays, each one exceptional on its own, encompass both love and writing at their most vulnerable, and could power entire cities with their electricity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)