Janice Erlbaum | Author of Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir - 1. Why I’m Not Writing About My Dead Mother

1. Why I’m Not Writing About My Dead Mother

It’s grim. Why would I subject anybody to this gruesome story?Nobody would want to read it. I mean, I’d want to read it. I wouldn’t enjoy it, though.

I’ve already written so much about my dead mother. Essays, poems, partial manuscripts. Always the same details: the decompensation, the squalor, the twenty-five cats. All the public agencies that failed me. “Her fifth husband, a schizophrenic.” I never describe him any other way. It’s his full royal title.

I don’t want to think about her. Her yellow-grey toenails, curled like goat horns. How she sat on the doctor’s examining table reeking in her paper gown. The doctor got one whiff of us in the waiting room and insisted on payment in cash before she’d see my mother. I ran to withdraw the maximum the nearest ATM would give me, once from checking, once from savings. We were beggars.

I don’t want to explain the five levels of squalor. I want to say we were at Level 5 but I don’t want to say what Level 5 is. You don’t want to rub your reader’s nose in shit.

I’d have to add all the decades of tedious backstory. And I already did that. I wrote an entire book about the thing with her and her fourth husband. Do I need to write a whole ‘nother book about her fifth? And, if so, do I have to draw the parallel between the past and the present, like, “Will I attempt, yet again, to my own detriment, to mother my own mom, or will I learn from the mistakes of the past?” That’s so on the nose.

I’m invading my dead mother’s privacy, and the privacy of her husband, who may still be living, for all the fuck I know. These are/were vulnerable, marginalized people who did not consent to being written about, and it’s unethical of me to “use” them—real, feeling human beings, who wanted dignity and respect, like everyone else— for “material.”

I’m exploiting the mentally ill! For my own glorification! For pity points! For clout! Please censure me before I have to write any more of this.

Oh God, so many reasons. But mostly, because it hurts.

Posted on Saturday, January 31, 2026 at 15:36h

Categories: memoir, not writing about my dead mother

Tags: #deadmom, #excerpt, #memoir

15. “My mother is dead, again.”

I gave up on writing about my mother after MY MOTHER IS CRAZY was rejected in 2010. I wrote two other books instead — a novel for adults, and a novel for tweens.

14b. The Monotonous, Grinding Mechanics of Long-Term Talk Therapy: A Partial Summary, Part Two

For the seventeen years I worked with Judith, I thought therapy was like school. You put in the hours to master the concepts, and then you passed the test. Once you learned some

14a. The Monotonous, Grinding Mechanics of Long-Term Talk Therapy: A Partial Summary, Part One

My therapist Judith and I argued for years over her calling my mother “psychotic.” My mother, I maintained, was a fucked-up person, but she wasn’t psychotic. Judith nev