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The virtual bitch slap
A new game, Sissyfight 2000, lets me be the playground bully I never was.
By Amy Silverman
[04/27/00]

The other side of the closet
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By Janet Nicolazzo
[04/26/00]

Sleeping with the enemy
While I'm planning security for the IMF demonstrations, my husband is getting thrown in jail. He better not ask me for bail.
By Lisa Guide
[04/24/00]

Born to pop pills
I have a well-chosen capsule for every occasion.
By Elissa Schappell
[04/20/00]

Our town
The place I share with Timothy McVeigh.
By Mark Phillips
[04/19/00]

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It didn't have a name back then. It was a pastiche of images drawn from life. "I've been writing about the lining in a baby's drawer," she'd say, and then she'd go on to name the specifics -- a white bureau, paper adorned by pastel teddy bears small as polka dots -- each word meticulously chosen, each word, it occurred to me, a tax on memory and imagination. "I've been writing about a daughter and a mother. I've been writing about cancer. I've been writing about birth." It seemed that it was important not to press, to simply listen and wait for whatever might be coming next.

MotherKind By Jayne Anne Phillips Knopf, 295 pages Fiction Also Today The flower of cities all In Zadie Smith's remarkable debut novel, London is a merry capital of mismatched lovers. By Maria Russo Also This Week Spring Fiction Fever Salon celebrates a season of exceptional books with a weeklong series. By the critics and editors of Salon Books Salon recommends The pick of recent fiction, from the critics and editors of Salon Books.

And so I waited and I listened and I understood that Phillips wasn't a daughter anymore. Life had turned her on its pivot and taken her to the opposite side of the breach. She was the mother now -- she was the one who had to take care, who had to soothe, who had to hone her own lonely instincts and finally trust them. Her subject now was motherhood. The daughter lived in memory.

When I saw Phillips again it was 1996, the Bread Loaf Conference in Middlebury, Vt. The book that had been fragments in Prague had matured into chapters, an overarching vision.

"MotherKind," as the book would soon be known, would capture nearly a year in the life of a young woman named Kate, whose first pregnancy and bewildering months as a parent coincide with the exquisite pain of caring for her dying mother. Two stepsons would be featured in the book, as well as a first son, a doctor husband and a town near Boston. Kate would be a writer born and raised in West Virginia. The mother, Katherine, would be a former schoolteacher who never would quite stop sharing her every confidence with her daughter. The book would carry the past into the present. It would look back at what had been lost, at things dissolved. It would be told in an airtight third person, from Kate's perspective.

From the back of a drafty auditorium, I listened as Phillips read an early chapter. In the scene that day, the baby was home from the hospital. Katherine, the mother, had come to live out her final months in Kate's unruly house. Kate was nursing; she was drifting through her life:

He was her blood. When she held him he was inside her; always, he was near her, like an atmosphere, in his sleep, in his being. She would not be alone again for many years, even if she wanted to, even if she tried. In her deepest thoughts, she would approach him, move around and through him, make room for him. In nursing there would be a still, spiral peace, an energy in which she felt herself, her needs and wants, slough away like useless debris. It seemed less important to talk or think; like a nesting animal, she took on camouflage, layers of protective awareness that were almost spatial in dimension. The awareness had dark edges, shadows that rose and fell. Kate imagined terrible things.

"MotherKind" is the sort of involving, brokenhearted book that easily could have devolved into the sentimental in another writer's hand. It relates a circumstance and not a plot. It divulges how it feels to need a mother, to lose a mother, to become a mother.

This is a book about forfeiting the strongest link one has to one's self, about turning around and spinning a web toward the baby in one's arms. It's about the circle of healing that does not close, about what will never be replaced. There is poetry on the fringes; there is real life in between; there is the planted perspective of the protagonist Kate, who never wavers from what faces her, nor from her own reactions to many uncontrollable fates.

"MotherKind" is a book for families, but it is a book for writers, too, shot through with Phillips' own lessons about words and the indelible weights they carry. Early in the book she writes:

Words are so often maligned by their meanings; Kate conceives of words as implements of pure energy, washed, infused, shadowed or illumined by all they carry in endless combination with one another. She writes words and works with them, for pay and for succor; she believes words open in the intangible spheres of their construction, yet stay apart from the world of use, innocent of motive, of healing or harm.

"MotherKind," Phillips says today, "is about paradoxes and patterns. It is meant to invite the reader into a layering of experience that is nearly limitless, yet wholly ordinary and familiar. I want this book to reach the large number of readers who are actually grappling with these issues in their day-to-day lives, and then to look beyond those lives, into what surrounds all of us."

She speaks to me from her home in Boston, her boys in the background, her mind busy with a syllabus she is preparing on a course called Primal Pictures, a course that, she says, "focuses on primal loss and its role in the development of the artist's consciousness." She speaks to me, wary, as she has always been, of taking what she has wrought into the world, of trusting the rest of us with the secrets she shares.

"MotherKind" is a book about loss by a writer famous for her protected loneliness. It is a stunning meditation on family by a woman who pioneered a shocking rootlessness. It is a lesson in writing by an author who is known to spend days patiently beading together words, knotting them into place, securing the clasp.

Whatever happens next with the book is beyond Phillips' control. She understands this better than most writers do, understands the separation between a person and a book, the demand that each be evaluated on its own mysterious, ineluctable terms.
salon.com | April 28, 2000

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