Leavings: Memoir of a 1920’s Hollywood Love Child is the book my mother wrote that launched me into publishing. She didn’t conceive of the writings contained in her book as a memoir, but rather an assemblage, individual pieces of a patchwork quilt, written over years in her writing group in Denver. Originally she wanted to call the collection “Rag Bag,” and in the end found herself resistant to publishing the stories at all.
She ended up calling it Leavings, because at the age of ninety-three, her stories are all that was left, like crumbs on a plate after a satisfying meal. She wanted her friends and family to eat her leavings—to remember her life through her words.
I am responsible for making sure her story lives on, and this year Aristata Press will publish a novel that she wrote, which is a companion piece to Leavings—a fictional account of the same period of her life—told in three parts. Each part tells the story from the perspective of a different character.
things my mother taught me: Of fact and fiction
Megan wrestled with the best way to tell her story. The novel, A Time to Heal, was written as her Ph.D. dissertation in creative writing. She never tried to get it published. She was ambivalent about revealing the truths it obscured under the veil of fiction. What would people make of it? I never read her dissertation until last year when she asked me to retrieve a copy because she couldn’t remember ever having written it. She couldn’t remember the title, or what it was about. She wanted evidence that she had earned a doctorate.
And so, I managed to find a copy through an online dissertation repository. Delight spread across her face when I showed her that I had found it, but she didn’t want me to read it to her. “Put it away,” she said. I regret that I didn’t read it to her. It is beautifully written, and while in her memoir she tried to “tell it as it was,” the novel reveals more about her true feelings of the many situations she tried to write about objectively in Leavings. Both the “fact” and the “fiction” communicate their own truths in different ways.
things my mother taught me about point of view
Many years ago, long before reading my mother’s writing, or knowing her preoccupations with writing the truth, I began thinking about how we experience different forms of written expression. As a college student reading “the great books” at St. John’s College, and as an anthropology graduate student at Brown University I noticed my preference for reading poetry, fiction, and narrative prose over more expository, quasi-scientific writing. I became obsessed with voice and point of view, and the value of having multiple perspectives.
One time I expressed frustration with the great books curriculum to my mother, because at the time, the only woman in the curriculum was Jane Austen (although, my Greek class translated Sappho too). I longed for a female perspective. My mother, knowing that I had read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, suggested I read Society in America by Harriet Martineau, an English social theorist, a contemporary of Tocqueville.
For my senior thesis at St. John’s College I ended up writing a comparison of Tocqueville’s and Martineau’s perspectives on American society, and argued that the college should include Martineau in the curriculum alongside Toqueville’s Democracy in America. My argument failed to win them over, sadly.
On the bright side, my life trajectory turned because of my mother’s introduction of Martineau. I credit her with my decision to become a cultural anthropologist, and subsequently a fiction writer.
things my mother taught me: All writing is fiction
The word ‘fiction’ comes from the Latin fictio, to fashion or shape. My mother taught me that. Everything written, whether ostensibly factual or not, is crafted into a narrative that the writer creates toward a particular end, scientific or otherwise. Subsequently, readers consume the written word and interpret it through their own lenses. The original point of view belongs to the writer (or employer), as does the motive for writing a particular thing. Sometimes writers express someone else’s point of view, but there always is a point of view. Truth may exist, but it’s fool-hardy to believe when someone says “this is a true story” that it is. We all weave stories to please ourselves and others.
My mother planted these seeds in me. Those were some good leavings.
