I’m preparing for a book talk next month in my hometown of Hudson, Ohio—sponsored by The Learned Owl bookstore and held at the Hudson Library and Historical Society.
I’m going to say a few things about my Hudson writer parents—and especially my mother, a young novelist who didn’t fit into a WASPy, preppy town—but who probably kept The Learned Owl in business singlehandedly for some years. I spent a lot of time sitting on the floor in there while Mom endlessly shopped for books by Marilyn French, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Joan Didion.
During my talk, I want to hold up copies of my parents’ books—my dad’s mild fathering philosophy book, A Child to Change Your Life (that’s me on the cover) …
… and my mother’s book, Women With and Without—a by-turns agonizing and hilarious (and agonizing) novel about seven women living in a motel in Reno, waiting for divorces and desperately bewildered about how their lives have turned out and just how strange and terrible it was to be a woman in America in the 1970s (or anytime?).
That’s how I remember it, anyway. But when was the last time I actually read it? I think I tried and failed when came out. There’s not much here for a 15-year-old boy. I must have read it in my 20s—or during a little sabbatical I took, when I turned 30. Now, where is my copy?
I don’t have a copy of my mother’s only novel.
My sister has one, but she’s not about to trust the postal service or her brother who lost his only mother’s only book. I go online, and find one at a bookstore in Binghamton, New York. It appears to be the last copy for sale in the universe.
It arrives.
Amazingly, it comes with the original publication date announcement, telling reviewers, “This first novel heralds the emergence of a stunning, new, and accomplished stylist on the literary scene.”
The second page has her biography, and includes this unintentionally funny update on the frustrated-novelist’s career: “Women With and Without is her first published novel. She is currently writing her fourth.”
(My sister and I were visiting our older half-sisters in Michigan when the call came that this book would be published. I remember my mother was so maniacally overjoyed it was kind of scary.)
The musty smell of the release and the book act as a screaming upper, and I must drink gin just to keep my mind from racing as I tear in, taking a big snort of Mom’s style, in this brief prologue.
I also remember, of course, the opening lines of the main character:
(Spoiler alert: Babs dies at 52. Also, my mother died at 52.)
There is more of her style—endless scenes like this:
And, as the hour grew late and the twilight turned to lamp light, the color of the pages changed—I read the book in one sitting (and three gins)—and one of the characters wonders if she smothered her daughter, emotionally. (As I occasionally wonder if I smother mine. Oh, I’d love to talk to Mom about this.)
And along the way, I turned a page that I’ll share here next week, that hit me like a soccer ball in the face—an insight I’ve been missing in all my conversations about youth sports, around my book Soccer Dad.
Thanks Mom. It was wonderful spending the evening with you Tuesday, and I’d love to do it again sometime. (I’m 57.)
Meanwhile, I’ll tell those Hudson people about your book—which appeared, however briefly, on the shelves of The Learned Owl next to French, Solzhenitsyn and Didion—and I’ll hold up my copy.
And, if I look out on the crowd think they can take it, I’ll tell them what you wrote in your journal about Hudson women, who spent their time “decoupaging wastebaskets, macraming guest room toilet paper covers, playing bridge (and stuffing buckeyes down their brassieres?).”
