The Lost Mother
by Mary McGarry Morris

List Price: $23.95
Pages: 256
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 0670033898
Publisher: Viking Adult

Mary McGarry Morris is the author of Vanished, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award; A Dangerous Woman, which was chosen by Time as of of the five best novels of 1991; Songs in Ordinary Time, an Oprah's Book Club Selection and national bestseller, and the critically acclaimed Fiona Range and A Hole in the Universe. She lives in Andover, Massachussetts.

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Q: It is interesting to note that, in the past, you have been compared to John Steinbeck, whose The Grapes Of Wrath is probably the most famous piece of literature about the Depression, and now you have written a novel taking place during the same time period. Did you draw upon The Grapes of Wrath or any other works either for research or inspiration? Did you set out to write a novel about the Depression, or was it the characters that served as your take-off point for The Lost Mother?

MMM: My most enjoyable research for The Lost Mother was reacquainting myself with stories I'd first heard in childhood, personal accounts of life during the Depression. Inspiration was easy because it was during those same years that my grandmother abandoned her husband and three children. The day she left, she brought her four-year-old daughter and youngest child, my mother, to a friend's house, then, dressed in her very best clothes, my grandmother climbed into a taxi and rode away forever. The image of that little girl watching from the window as her mother deserted her would come to me whenever there was sorrow in my mother's life. Forgiving by nature, my mother tried to understand what had happened, but because she felt such love and fierce loyalty to her own children, her mother's actions remained a painful, troubling mystery. Growing up, I was keenly aware of the loss my mother felt as well as the great love and admiration she had for her father, a quiet country man who raised his three children alone in those desperate times, often working day and night to support them.

I had read The Grapes of Wrath years ago as a student, but decided not to reread it until I had finished writing The Lost Mother. With that second reading I was deeply touched by the novel's power and Steinbeck's great achievement in depicting the triumph of the human spirit in spite of cruelty, unimaginable loss, and degradation. The Depression was the necessary setting for the story, but the characters were the true genesis of The Lost Mother. They've been in my thoughts for years, wanting their story told. One summer day I sat down to continue work on a novel I'd been writing for some time when a young boy's voice broke through onto the paper, and I was off and running, trying to keep up with Thomas Talcott.

Q: You've rendered Margaret and Thomas's experience, as well as their relationship to one another, so beautifully and convincingly. Would you talk about the difference between writing with a "child's eye" as opposed to an adult's view of the world?

MMM: A child's view of the world works especially well when a writer is trying to get at the heart of a puzzling story. Particularly in this case with a woman's unfathomable abandonment of her family, the child as narrator came naturally. Children are always asking why; then why again, why to every answer, which is precisely fiction's purpose, posing a question for which there is no one correct answer. It is from such doubt and uncertainty that greater truths are often revealed, and even more insightful questions raised. Children are so forthright and persistent because they haven't yet learned how damaging the truth can sometimes be. While an adult perspective allows a bigger picture to be seen, a child's perspective is that knee-high puzzlement of secrets and evasions that can give a story its emotional energy.

Q: In addition to being so likable, Margaret and Thomas are also very easy to identify with and seem quite ordinary apart from their circumstances, especially compared to characters in your previous novels, many of whom have been described as "on the fringe" or even "somewhat unusual." Would you talk a bit about how you see Margaret and Thomas and how they compare with your previous characters?

MMM: I'm often as amused as bewildered to hear characters from my previous novels described as "on the fringe" or "somewhat unusual." It is always surprising to be asked if I know "people like that." Of course I do; we all do. I see them as aspects of all of us. The shy confusion of Aubrey Wallace in Vanished. A Dangerous Woman's Martha Horgan, painfully aware of how out of step she is with everyone around her. Songs In Ordinary Time's Marie Fermoyle, a loving mother, so desperate for her family's success that she can be their harshest critic. The wild young woman in Fiona Range made all the more headstrong and reckless by her father's unacknowledged paternity. In A Hole In The Universe the determinedly unrelieved guilt of Gordon Loomis, a good and decent man in spite of his participation in a long ago-murder.

Perhaps in The Lost Mother Margaret and Thomas Talcott will be considered "on the fringe" because with their mother's rejection and their father's hardships they too have lost their place in society's view of what a normal life is. What continues to fascinate me is how close to the fringe we all are, as close to the bounds of normalcy as to the fringe of chaos, disruption, aberration, and loss.
Q: It seems at almost every turn that someone is being mean or deceitful to the Talcotts. Is it the Depression that makes some of your characters act in an uncharitable manner or is it something deeper? Would Irene have walked out on her children during prosperous times?

MMM:Once the bulwark of family protection is removed all children become vulnerable to life's cruelties. This is true in any time and place, and was especially so during the Depression years. If some people were mean to the Talcott children, there were also people who were kind and as charitable as their circumstances would allow. Also, there was not the same veneration of children then as there is today. Children were expected to know their place, which usually meant unquestioning obedience and deference to adults. In more prosperous times, Irene Talcott might have had more choices. But for a woman of her temperament there probably still would have been some form of abandonment, if not physically, then surely emotionally. And in some ways that emotional abandonment can be far more damaging because it is so insidious.

Q: It is a poignant irony that Mrs. Farley smothers her son with love to the point where Jesse-boy can't stand it, while Margaret and Henry are desperate for their absent mother's love. Although these two examples are quite extreme, do you think it's possible to strike just the right balance, so that both parent and child are happy, or is this discordance an inevitable part of the child-parent dynamic? Do you think it's possible to love a child too much? Does Irene love her children?

MMM: By its very nature and in its healthiest aspects, the child-parent relationship entails discordance, conflict, struggle. I don't think it is ever possible to love a child too much. Oftentimes, however, the worst parenting is done in the name of love. And that can run the gamut from excessive permissiveness to abuse. Mrs. Farley's love for her son, Jesse-boy, keeps him an invalid. It is the worst kind of love, voracious and so protective that it is restricting, all-possessive, and, of necessity, controlling. What Mrs. Farley loves above all else is being needed. Irene Talcott's love for her children is almost the opposite of Mrs. Farley's, colder and more rational. Irene no longer wants to be needed. In a sense she is afraid of her children, because she fears all that motherhood can demand, loss, sacrifice, the repression of her own goals and yearnings.

Q: Abandonment is an issue you've visited several times before; for instance, in your book Fiona Range, the character of Fiona believes she was abandoned by her young mother. As a mother yourself, could you ever imagine a circumstance where you could have walked away from your own children? Are there circumstances under which walking away could be an acceptable option? As mothers, do we ever get to put ourselves first, or is sacrificing some of our own happiness an inevitable part of the role?

MMM: I wrote this book precisely because the idea of abandoning one's children seems such an unnatural thing for a mother to do. And yet it happens more often than we realize. Emotional abandonment is the most inexplicable of all. It is one thing to walk away when there are issues of poverty, addiction, or abuse, but to stop caring is the hardest to comprehend. All parenting requires sacrifice, especially motherhood. Because love is the giving over of one's self to another, there must be sacrifice or else the love is depthless and self-serving.

Q: What are you working on now?

MMM: I am working on a play and another novel.


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Excerpted from The Lost Mother © Copyright 2008 by Mary McGarry Morris. Reprinted with permission by Viking Adult. All rights reserved.

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