Missing Mom

Excerpt

This was the season, people said, that Nikki Eaton broke into pieces. To me, it felt like the season I put myself together, stronger than I'd been.

The first thing Smoky did in his old house was to flop down on the kitchen floor in a patch of sunshine and roll over excitedly, showing his splotched-white tummy. His big-jowled face flashed from side to side and his tawny eyes glowed in unspeakable cat-ecstasy.

The second thing, Smoky scrambled to his feet and investigated the corner of the kitchen beside the refrigerator, where his food bowls had always been set out, on neatly folded sheets of newspaper. These were missing, but I would soon replace them.

The third thing Smoky did was to explore the house, cautiously. Peering into each room with his tawny-quizzical eyes, tail and ears pricked up, looking for someone who wasn't there.

Awards

• New York Times Notable Books of the Year
  
  
• International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award, 2007 Longlist

Reviews

• Booklist, June 1 &15, 2005, p. 1713
• Kirkus Reveiws, July 1, 2005, pp. 705-706
• Publishers Weekly, August 8, 2005, pp. 209-210
• Library Journal, September 1, 2005, p. 133
• Christian Science Monitor, October 4, 2005, p. 13
• New York Times Book Review, October 9, 2005, p. 8
• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania), October 9, 2005, p. J5
• The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, VA.), October 9, 2005, p. E3
• Columbus Dispatch (Ohio), October 16, 2005, p. 7G
• The Providence Journal (Rhode Island), October 23, 2005, p. D7
• Washington Post, October 23, 2005, p. T6
• Boston Globe, October 24, 2005, p. B9
• New Statesman, October 24, 2005, pp. 52-53
• Omaha World-Herald (Nebraska), October 30, 2005, Books, p. 7
• Atlanta Journal Constitution, November 13, 2005
• The Seattle Times, November 27, 2005, p. J8
• Grand Rapid Press (Michigan), December 25, 2005, p. J5
• Village Voice, May 24, 2006, p. 38
• Solares Hill, August 18, 2006, p. 14

Notes

British Title: "Mother, Missing"

Other Editions

Interview

Missing Mom is dedicated to your mother, and the line "this is my story of missing my mother" suggests it was inspired by her death. Is that the case?

When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother, Caroline Oates, had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover. This "worst nightmare" is an experience I needed to objectify in a way that could be communicated dramatically.

What were you interested in exploring in this novel?

The ongoing process of grief and mourning which remain a mystery even to those who have experienced them.

Is Missing Mom meant to appeal especially to anyone who has faced or is facing the prospect of losing their mother?

The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way. Among many of my friends and acquaintances, I seem to be one of the very few individuals who felt or feels no ambivalence about my mother. All my feelings for my mother were positive, very strong and abiding.

What or who inspired the character of Gwen?

Gwen is an unusual individual in that, quite without irony, she is extraordinarily "nice." There is so very little that literature has been capable of saying about genuinely "nice," "good," "good-hearted" individuals that I took it as a sort of challenge to create a portrait of an unfailingly "nice" woman whose very "niceness" becomes a liability.

She is very much modeled after my mother Caroline Oates, even including her physical characteristics. Her "upbeat" personality, her personal warmth and instinct for sympathy, her homemaking skills, cooking, sewing, gardening, "arts and crafts" of every kind, friendships with other women, and all the rest. Both she and my father baked bread. Like Gwen Eaton, my mother was enormously supportive of my writing; she and my father kept scrapbooks something like those kept by Gwen Eaton of her daughter Nikki's journalism career.

Gwen and her daughter are fundamentally different yet, as the story unfolds, Nikki recognizes how much she needs her mother's way of life to survive. Why does Nikki react this way?

Nikki comes to realize that her mother was right about many things. She had been living an essentially superficial, immature, as she says "slapdash" life out of a fear of not measuring up to her mother (whom everyone in Mt. Ephraim felt they knew, completely); by the novel's end, Nikki's confidence has been wounded, and she understands how much she needs others, how emotionally dependent she is. (A realization that is true for most of us.)

Having written so many different stories, with so many different themes, what for you is the purpose of storytelling?

Fundamentally, to expand sympathy; to break down barriers between individuals who seem unalike; to tell a fluidly moving yet human "story."

You are a remarkably prolific writer and, I imagine, must have more ideas than you have time to write. How and why does the idea for one book, rather than another, take precedence in your mind?

Writing is a consequence of having been "haunted" by material. Why this is, no one really knows.

Throughout your writing career you have continued to teach. What do you enjoy most about each activity?

Teaching is a socially exuberant, intellectually stimulating experience altogether different, for me, than writing, which is essentially solitary, inclined to the obsessive. Teaching has its collaborative features; writing is wholly one's self.

Even now, in the early twenty-first century the title of "Great American Novelist" is attributed to men more so than women. As a woman writer, with as much claim to the title as your male peers, do you find this frustrating or irritating in any way?

Truly, I don't think much about this. The nineteenth century was broad enough to accommodate a number of "great" writers, and so was the twentieth century. One can assume that the twenty- first will be equally expansive.