Her own mother, she explained, had neglected to teach her some important life lessons, such as the danger of opening bobby pins with one's teeth. My mother had been opening bobby pins with her teeth all her life, and it was no wonder she had such bad teeth. She wasn't going to make the same mistake with me that her mother had made with her.

"I've got lessons," she said. "Just give me a minute to come up with one." Finally she leaned forward and spoke in the breathy, Marilyn Monroe voice that was, and still is, her trademark. "It's OK," she said, "to date a fat man."

Then she sat back triumphantly in her chair and slotted the cigarette I had rolled for her into a rhinestone-studded cigarette holder, oblivious to the threads of tobacco that dropped on the marble-topped table and secure in the knowledge that her maternal duties had been accomplished. She could now relax and enjoy not just her dinner but the rest of her life.

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There may have been other lessons she had intended to share that night, but we were soon giddy with champagne, and since I was about to move to New York, she shifted to advice on more pressing matters: sure ways to bypass the lineups at Studio 54, CBGBs and the Mudd Club. "Just say to the doorman, 'I'm a friend of Michael's,'" she advised. "There's a Michael at every club."

By the time we shared this dinner, my mother already had her own hard-won freedom -- such as it was. A bitter separation from my father when I was 12 (and my brothers 11 and 13) was followed a few years later by a divorce that meant economic privation for all of us. And she ended up with three pissed-off teenagers who were not at all interested in a mother who had decided to follow her heart at the expense, as we saw it, of our family home in Toronto's affluent Rosedale neighborhood.

It would be she, not my brothers or I, who would eventually leave the nest -- first trying a week in New York, then a month in Mexico and, finally, a more permanent move that we kids saw, at first, not as her rejecting a traditional role but as her rejecting us.

Virginia Woolf once wrote that "we think back through our mothers if we are women," and indeed I have often thought back through my mother, and the mothers of my childhood friends. It is their examples, their failures, their strengths and sorrows that have provided the rule against which I have measured my self -- and found that self wanting.

When I was a girl, before I learned to read, my mother used to play a game with me. She would sit me on her lap at the kitchen table, in front of the typewriter, and encourage me to hammer away at keys until the page was filled with odd figures.

Then she would read to me from the story that she said I had written. "This is your story," she would begin softly. "This is what you wrote." "Once upon a time, at the bottom of the sea, there was a little girl ..." and so on.

Since then, her story has been inextricably bound up with mine. She was, at first, a full-service mom. A baker of cakes. A maker of kites. On Valentine's Day our school clothes appeared with felt hearts sewn on the collars, pockets and sleeves, made from stencils found in Good Housekeeping. But at night, from somewhere in a closed room, I sometimes heard her crying.

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