“My father’s greatest regret in life is he didn’t strangle my mother to death,” Phillip Lopate tells me while sitting at his kitchen table in Brooklyn. “And my mother regretted that my father was alive. She said, ‘I don’t want to kill him, but, you know, it would be nice if somehow he would pass away.’ ”
He laughs.
“So this is a kind of Strindberg play, you know?”
Some people have mothers who are larger than life. Lopate says that his mother, Frances, “had an amphitheater personality,” and so it’s no surprise that she pursued an acting career when she turned fifty. She needed a bigger audience than her family.
Frances Lopate lived from 1918 to 2000, and over the course of her eighty-two years she “was forced to reinvent herself over and over: working at a beauty parlor, becoming a housewife and a mother, running a candy store, working in war factories, starting a photography business and a camera store, clerking for garment companies, going into show business, touring America, doing commercials, going back to school . . . It was a twentieth-century life.”
Over three decades ago, Lopate, the prolific essayist and director of the nonfiction MFA program at Columbia University, asked his mother to talk about her life story, a request that resulted in over twenty hours of recorded interviews.
“As a child I felt a little overwhelmed by my mother’s voice, so when I taped her it was an opportunity to hear her story but also to interrupt it and interrogate it.”
But Lopate didn’t listen to the tapes right away. Instead, he waited until fifteen years after his mother died to transcribe them. The result, A Mother’s Tale, is a nonfiction book that gives Frances a lot of time in the spotlight. She’s extremely candid with her son, opening up to him about her sex life, including her many affairs, and how she couldn’t stand his father.
Lopate says that “there’s a scientific side of me that’s interested in the construction of self.” By listening to the tapes, he could see how his mother formed her own identity. Much of the narrative is developed through direct quotes from the interviews. The result is a highly intimate work, more personal than many of Lopate’s carefully wrought essays, because his mother says things he himself would never say
“I thought it was a very intriguing demonstration of the way that somebody can move towards the truth and then back away from it,” he says. “How rationalization works. So it seemed to me like a good demonstration of how even intelligent people have a hard time moving past their defenses. And it also seemed to me a good demonstration of the wariness and mistrust that can exist between parents and children.”
A Mother’s Tale shows how much we are shaped by the ones we love. Lopate says part of his personality is in response to his mother. “The personality of an essayist, which is to say somewhat detached, cynical.” In fact, Frances accused him of being “clinical,” while her son found in his mother a person “fueled by anger.” They loved each other, but it was a “thwarted love,” a relationship that required some distance between them.
For himself, Lopate doesn’t find anything wrong with being clinical. One of the common problems he sees in some of his students’ work is the inability to remove themselves, as well as “speaking out of the wound” with a lack of perspective.
It’s not that the perspective has to be a definitive one. Lopate says that it’s a good time for essays “because essays tolerate and even celebrate uncertainty, skepticism, subjectivity. You don’t have to be a specialist to write an essay,” Lopate says. “You can air your contradictory thoughts . . . and I think that’s where we are as a people now. We’re genuinely perplexed.”
One of the many pieces of advice he gives to his students is to see their parents as “individuals in their own right” when writing about them. “They existed as individuals before they ever had you, and they continued as individuals,” he says. It’s advice that A Mother’s Tale clearly takes to heart. Frances, and her opinions about “being thwarted by others” and being married to a lackluster husband, comes through clearly. Lopate’s mother was a “monologist” who understood the power of narrative, and a person who could captivate and frustrate any audience who was willing to listen to her. She was stubborn, especially in her judgments of others.
“Part of what I was doing in talking to her,” Lopate says, “was trying to nudge her away from some of her grudges, partly because ultimately I wanted her to forgive me and not hold such a grudge against me.”
His plan didn’t work, unfortunately. Even when Frances had some insights, she’d inevitably revert to her original opinions. “The stalemate between us was unbreakable,” Lopate writes in the book. “We were too much alike.”
Asked if he would ever do this kind of project again, he’s quick to say no. “This is a one-time experiment,” he says. “Nobody’s voice has dominated me to the degree my mother’s voice dominated me.”
Photo of Phillip Lopate: Sally Gall
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Sig Nordal 