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[laughter] there is no person sitting in the book. and giuliana got to meet my mother today. but i thought we would start with michelle, this idea was yours and we would love to know where the essay came from and how you attempted to write something like this. >> i started writing when i was an undergraduate well over a

decade ago. when i read the essay i thought that i was writing about my stepfather. which i was but it took many years of therapy in the real story behind the essay was a fracture the essay came out right after the me too movement. and it went viral and chaired by some of my favorite writers. and on and on. i quickly realized people were not responding to just the content but the title of my essay about my mother and i don't talk about. so many people came to me, strangers, friends.

so then i put this together and it came out this year end has been with the exciting to travel around the country and talk to people about this topic. everyone can relate to it. >> it is very relatable.

it all comes with the wall and front of it.

i went to acid panel, each of you, what does that prompt you to write about and what does the prompt make you to think about. michelle reached out to me when i publish this and i was living in madison wisconsin in graduate school when my mom died. and i was walking on the highway when i got the phone call that she died. and right then as a writer whenever something horrified happens i turned to writing to think of how i feel. my mother and i always had a complicated tumultuous relationship to my family is on a family that talks or expresses themselves. so there is a cone of silence both up around a relationship from the very beginning. when i sent out to to write my way through this confusion i found i do not have a language and did not even know how to

begin to put on the page i wrote the beginning of an essay and published it. but it felt like only a part of the story and it was not until years later that i developed my craft as a writer and really sat down to try to tell a more complete story, not the story of a son who had been wronged or all the mean things that my mom did, but a conscious person who is capable of inhabiting the experiences of others and i sat down to write a more complete version of the story. when the implicated myself as an incomplete human. so i wrote the essay and i thought yes, that is out of my life and i'm done with it. and i send it to my editor and i wrote this weird thing would you

like to publish it and he said okay. and then i heard nothing from him until three days before he published it on the internet. and when you publish something on the internet universit thinks going to read it. >> i read that stuff everyday. >> i put it on the internet but publishing goes into the world but no longer has anything to do with you and you do not expect it to come back. but publishing that peace, people started reaching out and similar to michelle i had family members reaching out and saying i never knew anyone else in our family felt this way. i never knew anyone had the same feelings of confusion and hurt and sadness and fear that i did. so hearing for my own family members was the most terrifying thing because i don't like it when strangers read my work let alone what family members in the innermost trauma. then michelle reached out and i would like to include this in a felt really powerful act to

commit the wild vulnerability to a book that contains so many other amazing authors and that's the wild story of how it came to be. >> what processes did you think. >> i sell the book on twitter and i immediately preordered it. definitely have deep issues and silences that's why i'm a writer today. it made me think about specifically the ways in which it's hard to talk to my mom about money. a group with a single mother and i never met my dad and my mother often worked three jobs to support me and i often did not see her and grover myself. it's very difficult now that i had successes and it's hard for me too talk about money with her. there is also in a block tradition the way you're always taking care of your family.

there is a burden i feel sometimes in a way thinking about making sure my mom is okay. it is very difficult to toggle and talk about with her. then you think about a poem which is chapter 23 which her older sister is asking do you love me mama and she said doyle of you, you're alive aren't you, that's how my mom was about survival. the fact that you die, what you talk about love business. i read the chapter it shook me and it was translating so muc much -- i did not have a mom -- the way i went to sleep i would hear the keys coming into the door at 1:00 o'clock in the morning. so it's interesting is not thinking about writing it to female rappers and in the lyrics as many of you might know cardi b or the lines of i have to make

sure my family is taking care. there's always a sense of taking care of and making sure everyone in the family is good. and they wrote an article about the millennial piece and it missed a little bit of how were all tired and millennial's to take care over mom's tires or grandparent and that's an extra burden on her shoulders. that is something hard to navigate and toggle and sometimes when iran a price i get excited and i call my mom and tell her that it won $10000 for a poem and she says how much money are you going to give me. of course that feels hurtful and i hope she does not watches. when you asked me i did not know it was going to be taped. but i know the root of where she's coming, are you going to take her be.

so there was a silence and how i responded and it's something i'm working on. >> that's an interesting version of what is in the book and what we think about is the role of a mother. so the speaking of taking care of her mother. my mom and i are very close, we talk about everything but what i really think and what it actually feel, i write because she does not read in english. >> that is great. [laughter] i think many people can relate to this, as a child of an immigrant and immigrant myself, i feel like immigration was very humiliating for my parents especially for my mother. because she can't read in english i can write in english, she could have an opinion about photography or painting or music

so i don't do those things. this is what i do. >> constantly? >> i think i do it consciously because i feel like i want to give her this respect and i want to respect her opinion. i want to be right about something. and thus she can have no opinion about so i am right. >> first of all it is been so fascinating to hear the different places and the idea. i'm also very close to my mother and when michelle first got in touch with me about this i immediately thought and other said yes, this book needs to be in the world, what an incredible generative prompt for writing more broadly in the things that

feel more necessary to speak and most difficult to speak or write and particularly situated and is very electric between mother and child so it felt immediately resident. but i was not sure that i had something to contribute because my mother and i talk about everything and a, i'm not exactly sure where i would take a prompt and i felt self-conscious about being sleep sorry i'm not sure what were the canoes and to be. >> say whatever. [laughter] [bleep] but the ideas, who wants to read pages and pages of somebody going on with the functional relationship of their mother that gets old quickly. and i didn't realize that my relationship with my mother had been maybe not the only thing

but certainly the primary thing or one of the largest things i had never been able to write about, i say at one point trying to write about my mother was like staring at the sun. it felt like it constituted the memes. and they have become transparent to be visible again. and when i thought about it there was a particular way into her experience that i was excited about in a way that it would fit a call and my mother was. three times but the first time she was quite young and she and her first husband that were hippies together that a successful open marriage and it was successfully open and did not enter after they separated.

the second i heard that i was 30 years old and so desperate to read it because there was an era of her life that turned into a myth in her mind where they were doing acid on new beaches and poet couples and that was a part of her that i knew was lodged in her core but very inaccessible to me and somebody had written a novel about it and made it more accessible. i've embarked on the journey of the piece and what was exciting is it was personally a personal essay about her relationship and more than a personal essay it was a critical and journalistic essay but i was close reading

this unpublished novel and doing a lot of interviews with my mother and her first husband on their years together and getting the fascinating style and where they'd emerged and it was wonderful to be able to take it and come at it through these other approaches of criticism. >> i think particularly applicable ones so why is it so important to break silences and

even if it's not about something dramatic, there's a lot of talk about trauma and things like that in everyday things that we might not talk about. >> so i think that is often where most important stories are, the things we are not talking about, for me as a writer that is the first thing i go to what am i not talking about and why. in leslie's case, that is not silent about trauma at all, it's about trying to understand who her mom was before she became her mom. that is fascinating and what a lot of people wonder about. like you said not every essay is about trauma, there are people close with their moms who wrote essays for this book including leslie and for me i felt like what we need to do is encourage

people to have open conversations about things. that leads to healing. silence can be toxic to. even in a good relationship silence can conceal things that we need to reveal to move forward in relationships. that is something that i was definitely thinking about and putting the book together. is that where you went when you thought about tonight's topic, is about what i'm silent about. >> for me, silence does many different things. it creates a system of magical thinking i which you can ignore or sidestep things that should be addressed in my case, my family is built of many different types of silence in many different types of things. so silence operates in a protective capacity but in another sense silence is where

the most interesting stuff often lies. silence does not always indicate a protective mechanism. it indicates a place where language has failed and i think of story and narrative like you should go to the place where language fails and were you struggle to be articulate answer for me breaking the silence was about acknowledging there is a perpetual silence between me and my mother because we never got that movie of getting to go back and address all the wrongs there was no tearful at sightseeing. so my essay was in part grappling of what it means of the fundamental foundational relationship in my life that will always be unresolved and how do i make sense of the silence. and also working through what it means to be a survivor of a system of silence very much built up to suppress my

experience by my family into exist of the unit because they think that is how that they persist into believing what is happening is not really happening. that is a part of how i think about silence and those need to break it in those moments where it exist as a prompt or a call into the voice. >> two things, and the black community, especially thinking about the 30s and 40s like if the husband was abusive to his wife you would not call the police because you did not know if you will come back home. that's a damaging lineage and i think my job as a poet to speak to the silences and it was really hard when i started to write about my family of being afraid how that would impact them. i'll never forget those came to

graduate school and i asked her when she had written about her brothers meth addiction and she said it changed my life, nobody owned your story and women of color in another form of violence and when she said that i was like okay, i'm going to go home and have a poem where my mother-in-law wanted to take a family portrait added plantation and i kept it hidden and i did not put on social media but then i put it out and it was very damaging to the family. and i had to have a uncomfortable conversations with my love o under mother-in-law because she saw herself as a good white woman.

and it was very hard to see the imprint and to have the conversations about what that meant for me. and i was getting letters from high school students saying i had my graduation picture and had idea that place was a pride which is also shocking about our education system. i was weighing what it meant to have that in the world and have a conversation with my mother-in-law and be receiving those e-mails at the same time. >> the last time they were silence must've been when i was eight years old, i immigrated to this when i was seven but my mom had come when i was five and that is very typical of immigrant families and i did not see her for two years. and i remember the moment i

dropped her off and i remember the moment i saw her at lax. i remember distinctly reuniting with my mother and feeling so shy around this woman that i've only known through voters that i knew she was my mother and i cannot interact with her in that way. and it seems like she has disappeared and even though i had talked to her on the phone and seen her photos, i believe anybody would see her and not think she is so beatable because that is what i thought when i saw her picture prude and i think the shyness took a long time to get over. and ethic my mom was guilty about and now she warns me that i can never do this even though i kinda wanted to. it's kind of nice to drop off your child for two years.

[laughter] i think because of that we have to talk about everything. i feel like it's been nice but also a burden. i don't feel like i got to be a child. i felt like i had to know about everything. and i wonder what is better. i don't have a child yet but maybe i'll find out that there is no better. >> it is interesting to think about the difference between silence is a symptom of trauma or certain kind of wound but also speech itself as a symptom gutfeld pressure -- i don't know to what extent you felt it or she felt it but the sense of having to be in conversation because there had been a gap or space, it's really powerful.

i think breaking a silence means something a little different in the content of the piece that i wrote when i hear the phrase because as you mentioned there is not an essay about trauma. but one thing i felt that i was doing was unearthing and on excavating the little history that had been lost in it was not that there was a novel that amanda had worked very hard on and not published which is not an unusual circumstance but my mother's first husband when he had just one typewriter copy of the manuscript he saved for years and years and even just the first thing i did was to ask him if he would send it to me and i put it in the scanner as a

place that i work in is not that he does not know what computers are but he said there would just be a copy permanently. and i said yeah, and i felt even if i had not done anything besides put in the scanner, i made it more durable in a certain way. and i also think and a deeper emotional way for both my mother and peter who are still friends, this brief searing, passionate afforded marriage that they had had for both of them represented a faith and love and they have a very strong social justice principles of what had brought them together as they followed in different directions.

and peter became a protester who kept $4000 a year for his entire adult life getting arrested at nuclear test sites. he lived in the woods literally and on the margins and did his work from outside the system and my mother stayed committed to the same principles from inside religious and social academic institutions. for them they had been brought to brother that they'd followed in different directions but they had a feeling that these years together had shaped them and they did not have a vessel in which to put the years that these years mattered and it's not that i felt that i was going to do a job of saying that for them but it was showing up and shining a light on the period of their life that they felt mattered that did not have room to talk about in the day-to-day system as 70 euros people moving to the world. i think in that sense i felt

like i was breaking another kind of silence by eliminating memory that they did not necessarily feel they knew how to integrate into their daily lives. >> i think the underlines all of what you said for me. and there's any essays in the book even my own thinking which we can be here for hours. [laughter] . . .

>> with the idea of your mother as a person changed. [laughter] >> it's less about that directly. i think it's not as genuine but as you come in adult, you cease to rely on the vision you had as a child all of these adults are monolithic. and they become like people in the world so my mom wasn't

your stereotypical mom because my mom worked in factories and my dad stayed home and my mom was not interested in being a mother she wished she did not even want one everyday of my life. she didn't want children. so i was the son of a woman who did not want to be a mother and she was violently opposed to the very institution. so i had a lot of feelings about that as a child. it was a painful journey we can discuss later but when i got older i high - - i had to try to step outside of that

hurt and that attitude of course she didn't want to be a mother. she was attacked and became pregnant as a result. whose life was interrupted and that whose life was derailed in many ways. nobody was to work in a factory so this was an exercise to be a black woman from rural alabama in eighth grade to have these two children that were legally blind and disabled to be a person that was the rudiments

of what she wanted as a young woman. and then imagine the destiny because my mom was mean to me when i was eight and she was harsh to me so why can't i do this for the person who matters too much? and then to inhabit that so the message is it is really hard. it is really really a difficult life. it so hard to look at it is unbearable. my mom becoming a person but it deepened my understanding of the world and i became more able to see it from her point

of view and i couldn't do that and it was really awful things. >> my writing has helped me with my mother it will challenge myself and my students especially with those angry poems that come in. [laughter] from the people that have hurt you and it freezes time so i'm able to see a space when she comes home that i can take off her shoes and i can be mother and to reimagine time that way.

my mom loved country line dancing and i don't want to go and is only the black woman there and she is out on the dance floor and has complete joy of begging me to dance with her and it's horrible to say that i felt shame but i felt so awkward that everybody is watching me and in the poem that she was begging me to dance floor that moment of joy we could have shared together so now i wish i could be with my mom and to be there with her so they can mourn and celebrate. >> it definitely have empathy for my mother but for me it so

incredibly difficult. so the layers of denial that she lives in, i understand how she could be that way and i try to understand why she is that way. but i say in the introduction that i imagine cooking a meal for her. because food is an important thing. so when i cook that is a way to communicate with her so i write in the introduction i imagine cooking a meal for her and that's a gift.

because this was literally the only way to communicate to her after that time. and i wasn't getting through to her about it. >> you captured her very well the very first page that is very evident. and with those founding moments of parenthood you make her very real. and then it never feels like you do that like you are not going out of your way. in a way that i don't necessarily know. >> it is my hope i opened my

essay with our mother and our first home now i cannot even remember my own line. [laughter] i used to have it memorized. our mother is our first home and that is why we always try to return to them to have one place that we've along where we can set but i really think that's true. always right towards my mother and when i feel and i love my mother and in fact i had this profound moment this summer my mother, my dad's mom passed away in this book is dedicated to her into my mom's mom because they are two of the strongest women and when she passed away it was so hard and

my mom came to the funeral we hadn't spoken in years and she came right up to me first and it was like everyone was watching and she gave me a hug and i started crying and said i loved her and she said she loved me too. that was a powerful moment. so i have hope. >> that's a brave way to break the silence also i love to talk about a particular piece of this book when they wrote a really powerful essay in a family where the immigrant parents are writing about a mentally ill mother and she

was scared to publish the piece and she had to show it to her parents before it went in the book. she sent it to them and her mother wrote her the most profound response saying she was so proud of her and she knows this essay will help so many people so we included that in the postscript of the book and that is the kind of healing that i believe the book can do. >> the audience microphone is right over here. go ahead. >> this is my wife. [laughter] >> i love this collection so much. one of the things i keep talking about is obviously as a daughter it was thought-provoking but also as

a mother. my daughter is only seven so she tells me everything but i am waiting for the day when i realized she will not share everything with me so if you are parents how has that informed you? >>. >> i think one of the reasons it felt so right is that i have given birth to my daughter fairly recently and interviews i did with my mom around putting this together and then with the breast pump in the background so that

process felt very much intertwined so there is one scene in the essay where i describe this moment after my daughter was born my mom came to the hospital was holding my daughter and me and i felt that. that feeling of empathy is a fallacy because you don't know what it feels like to be another person never felt like my mom can be a mom but i could glimpse in that moment like what she had fell for me for 34 years and it just felt so powerful. so i think my daughter is almost two so she tells me

more. that's her one word right now about her desire. [laughter] but this connects to the last question but i think one of the things that was powerful for me is writing this piece thinking of all the things my mother was before she was my mother. after the divorce she had a long depression in her life with sexual assault and working add a call center connecting families to soldiers in vietnam that was debilitating work that she had a point where she had no perception of her own future. i related to what they were saying that one of the things

that happens is imagining going back to tell that woman who could not see a future. but the flip side of who is my mother before she was my mother even afterwards she was 10000 other things. she had a whole identity. i think about that a lot. i am a mother but i'm also on the stage and in this room. and hopefully in a real way that what i try to bring into that so i think about this

hypothetical child all the time. and the first story that i wrote was a mother who marries her mentally handicapped daughter. and that story was a mother doing something for her child all by herself whether or not it was right or the right decision but the last story was parents abandoning their children in the apartment. in a way trying to write away from parenting. parents are human and they are allowed to have their own lives and desires so i wish most for my mother is that she would be happy over there in her own life and that would

bring me so much happiness. and it took me all of my twenties to figure that out. i hope that my future hypothetical child will understand that also. >> do you have that pressure quick. >> know because i feel parenting is such a big and important decision. i can't believe i'm not thinking about it right now paraguay think about it all the time. so i put that pressure on myself because it will change everything why would i want to think about that from every angle? >>.

>> i think society has a lot of thoughts of who moms are and how they should act so i think looking at your own experience it can be very difficult to compare the two. did you have any specific difficulties with your own experience to see other people's experience or have other people tell you how you should react quick. >> yes. my mom works in a factory coming home in a shoe factory coming home covered in black dust. even with my own family my aunts more traditionally they didn't work in factories they

were much more girly as my mom would say. my mom would wear men's close and no jewelry. my mom is always very different from other people's mom's i would talk with my mom with friends at school and say they bake pie at my mom doesn't cook. [laughter] so they always found it strange that there was a platonic projection from society with my own experience of having a mother who was very different from those in my neighborhood so sometimes i don't even know how to react i remember when my mom died everybody was hands-on people

would say you must be so devastated. we didn't really talk i felt uncomfortable receiving their condolences because it didn't match as an entity so i always found it difficult even to talk about my mom so i have in my mind to have that rejection coming at me and missing the mark. >> that bumps up to what we were talking about that so

much of motherhood is also a construct is where it is set up to fail they make movies called bad mom moms. [laughter] how does that play into your own feelings or how you approach your own brothers talk about how our mothers cannot possibly check all the boxes that we need so i do think as a society there so much pressure no matter what you do you want one kid then when you have your second.

but also people who don't want to have kids. i am child free and never have wanted to have kids and i have dealt with a lot of pressure from that now i am 36 and thank god people have stop putting as much pressure although it still that expectation so that idea they have to be maternal to begin with is wrong. i see myself maternal that i teach that there are many different ways to be a mother in the world. i'm interested one of my favorite writers talks about rewriting the myth and i think about that because i'm

interested in creating a new myth around motherhood and what we all want out of motherhood and to see mom says three-dimensional human beings not just like mother but those multiplicities. >>. >> certainly there is such a powerful way among other things i feel mom shaming is a way to get to do the dirty work so those casual ways that the conversation whether you are connected enough to your

child in there so many layers underneath and it's about choices so that bill to fail impossible ideal but with a couple of other pieces of writing thinking of these enduring archetypes so that which has more iterations than i have realized that it is a impossible maternal idea that goes onto the dark other stepmother who doesn't have

that maternal impulse that would harm the child rather than caring for the child. if you look at the grimm brothers fairy tales let they revisions between 1850 and 60 all the mothers that killed their children became stepmothers because it's harder to stomach that some he was to kill their child. but every mother has had those dark feelings. to create the bodies but not

all's depth mothers are evil but there was. in the aftermath of the american civil war of the sentimental stepmother was so virtuous basically from the day she was born wanted nothing more than to mother so i feel that was just as damaging if not more because they had no room for that multiplicity i don't know if i want children but those statistics are stacked against me even as an academic those numbers triple because often for black mothers and

hospitals so i did a piece where she was very abusive to her daughter and i grew up in a house of yelling so what does that stereotype mean cracks and that rage is not really about you but you are absorbing that. so that something i felt very comfortable to say that to think about how you put them all in a video i often think of my mom and all that overate

outrageous in her that's hard for me to manage but to talk about that empathy it makes me understand where that outrage comes from. >> we were talking when we were setting up that you said you'd told a story about your mom so what is that interplay? what you need to talk to your mom about? >> again my mom likes to say family shouldn't have

boundaries but that's opposite of therapy. [laughter] so it's hard to work through it but it so complicated. i don't know. is difficult to work through. sorry i feel like i have to protect her in some way i love her and money is a source of a lot of fear but i try to have that abundance for her as well. >> is there anything you have ever written about. >> i made her promise not to read anything.

[laughter] it is a gift to me. but what i wanted to say earlier i am an only child board in china after the eighties there's very little interaction with other children there are no other babies around so i feel in terms of what we are talking about society giving mothers a pressure to be a certain way the mothers of my generation failed in every way. they did not cook for us. i was left in someone else's care until i could drive. so i feel maybe i never felt this pressure to be the stereotypical nice mother forgot i don't know what that

meant. but i wonder if this conversation is eye-opening for that how come i don't feel that pressure and how i interact now with the world. [laughter] >> i have seen a number that this can lead to conflict.

this is a wonderful place to add. thank you for coming today. we will be back. inky to c-span and the madison public library that allows me to do this job. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

>> it's my great honor to be here with my friend your most recent bestseller the witchhunt which is a fascinating read that tells us the tales we have been going through since 2015 that is part of your bestseller the russia hoax number one bestseller