3. Why I Am Definitely Not Writing About What I’m Not Writing About

Fifteen years ago, while she was still alive, I submitted to my agent a partial manuscript about my mentally ill mother. It was called MY MOTHER IS CRAZY.

The first sentence was, It was the week before my fortieth birthday when I learned my mother had lost her fucking mind.

For a few months, it looked like an editor at a major publisher was going to buy it. The editor “got” the book— her mother was mentally ill too. The editor just had to “sell it upstairs,” which meant convincing her boss, and her boss’ boss, and her colleagues, and the sales and marketing departments, that the book would earn enough money to justify its existence.

The book made it past the first boss. Champagne! Then it hit the boss’ boss. It did not pass.

The editor came back to me and asked if I could change the tone of the book, which was too “dark,” as per her boss’ boss, and if I could add some kind of redemptive arc. They also wanted me to make the mother character more sympathetic, because in the current version, she was unlikable and hard to root for.

I agreed to make the book about my desperately unwell mother and her gruesome circumstances “less dark.” I submitted two new sample chapters, one about an abortion, and one about suicidal ideation.

The end.

I pictured the boss’ boss pinching her nose with one hand; her other hand extended as far away from her person as possible, holding the manuscript by the tiniest corner between the tippy-tips of her manicured fingernails. That’s how gross my mother and I were.

She and I occasioned so much dismay, every time we walked into a doctor’s waiting room. After I rode in her car with her, I stank. Riding home on Metro-North, people moved away from me. I was also having a panic attack.

I would take off my clothes at my front door and walk naked through the apartment to throw them in the wash and take a shower.

One time, I didn’t crouch high enough over the toilet seat at her house, and I accidentally brushed a centimeter of my skin against it, and it felt like glue on the back of my thigh. Soap did nothing to get rid of it, I had to use alcohol when I got home. This would be a funny double entendre, if I drank.

I used to be disgusting all on my own. When I was living in shelters and group homes in high school, when I stole and cheated and lied and was blithely shitty, and I did a lot of drugs and hung out in a squat and had sex with gross guys. My friends and I were a dirty nuisance, stumbling around the East Village all night with nowhere to go, peeing between garbage cans, getting chased away by Ukrainian women with brooms.

Twenty years later, I wrote about those times, and I became disgusting again. Occasionally I’d meet someone at a reading, and I’d sense reticence before shaking hands, and I’d want to say, “It’s okay, I promise, I’ve washed since then.”

In 2006, I had a very classy agent a few decades my senior who wore heels, suits, and brooches. We were not a likely match, the grungy pothead and the grande dame, but she got me a two-book deal at a major publishing house, so we tried to adapt to the other’s communication style.

One day, this agent was forced to call me and explain that an old short story I’d submitted for an anthology had horrified the editors, as it bordered on “pornography involving minors.”

For years, every time I recalled that conversation—not the words themselves, as I blocked them, but the staccato of her normally fluid voice, her reproachful tone—I would immediately say out loud, “I hate myself, I wish I was dead.” Now, because I practice better self-talk, I blurt, “Fine! I’m fine, everything’s fine.”

(Here I was going to quote the rejected story to show how puritanical everyone was being, but I just reread it, and it’s…explicit. It’s mostly explicit about the physical pain of having sex at age fourteen, because, when I wrote it two and a half decades ago, I meant it to be specifically anti-erotic [e.g., “It felt like someone had punched me in the pubic bone.”] But some people find the punched pubic bone of a fourteen-year-old girl to be an instant orgasm trigger, which means that this paragraph itself has just become problematic.)

To have young, cheap sex was bad enough; to commit that to paper, to brag about it for attention — that was repulsive. I don’t want to do that again. People won’t want to shake the hand that tried to clean waste from her mother’s bathroom floor. Ergo: not writing about my dead mom.