The First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the Mothers

From Dwight Garner’s review in the New York Times of Colm Tóibín’s New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families:

His essential point, driven home in an essay about all the motherless heroes and heroines in the novels of Henry James and Jane Austen, is that “mothers get in the way of fiction; they take up the space that is better filled by indecision, by hope, by the slow growth of a personality.” To put it another way, he writes, “The novel is a ripe form for orphans.”

That’s long been true of children’s fiction, where even young heroes who leave the protection of home (e.g., Dorothy Gale, Huckleberry Finn, Harry Potter) don’t have living mothers to begin with. Of course, there are also many classic and popular children’s novels in which mothers are a strong presence (Little Women, the Little House books, and Harry Potter again).

“The Nearby Explosions”

In anticipation of Independence Day, here's a quick extract from Steve Macone's Boston Globe essay about the temptation and dangers of illegal fireworks (illegal in Massachusetts, that is):

As an adolescent, fireworks were a kind of currency. You’d take them out of a backpack while your friends perched nearby on bikes and set them off in a spending spree.

Once, my father walked by and caught us. Just happened to be walking by, he said at the time. How unfortunate, I thought at age 12, to have my father be out taking a stroll, which he had never done before, and have him stumble upon us. It wasn’t, of course, the fact that he found troubling the combination of my not being home and the nearby explosions. . . .

We all know what’s good about fireworks. There’s something of the American ideal in their upward trajectory and beauty on the backdrop of open space. The fingers of the explosions, shooting off in exponential pathways, are a sort of Manifest Destiny writ large across the sky. And each beach organization always trying to improve upon last year’s show is like pyrotechnics as a sign of progress.

But that’s where fireworks belong: in the sky, not in kids’ hands--reflected in a child’s glimmering eyes, not lodged there. No one ever watches the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and thinks, “You know, I would like to orchestrate a smaller yet more dangerous version of that in my backyard.”

And that was true even before the Macy's balloons started crippling people.

Orphans 'R' Us

I was struck by this quote from a Publishers Weekly interview with the venerable Lois Lowry, on the occasion of her new book, The Willoughbys:

Lowry: I was in love with orphans when I was a kid, but that doesn’t seem to be very popular in today’s books. It’s become politically incorrect to do away with parents. We send kids to camp instead, to get away from their parents. So it began with orphans.

Wha'? No orphans in today's books? Heck, we're knee-deep in orphans these days!

What about a certain hero named Potter? Or the Grimm sisters? Or the Baudelaire children?

Lowry: I haven’t read Lemony Snicket, I’m afraid.

Ah.

The title characters of Lowry's Willoughbys are, PW says, "a quartet of old-fashioned kids who aren’t orphans--but who long to be." So it seems she's unwittingly come up with a parody of the recent trend of parentlessness in popular children's literature, as well as the previous trend of same. Still, it seems wise to know what you're parodying before you launch into it.

Definitely a Dead Mother Book

Publishers Weekly offers some interesting remarks from Susan Patron about how she came to write her Newbery-winning novel for the middle grades, The Higher Power of Lucky:

The genesis for Lucky goes back a number of years. Patron recalls a dinner at an ALA midwinter conference given by Dick Jackson, who had edited her earlier books. "Amy Kellman [one of the librarians at the dinner] asked me, "What are you working on?' I thought, 'Here's my chance to pitch this book.' I told them about it and they laughed at all the right places, and Dick said, in so many words, 'Send me some chapters and I'll send you a contract.'"

Pretty speedy path to publication, right? Well, not exactly. Patron says she ended up working on the book for 10 years. "Dick was very patient. Each time I'd send him a draft, he'd say, 'Not ready, not yet.' So I'd take another stab." Patron found a new direction for Lucky after her mother passed away. "I had this sense of being unmoored--it was a very surprising feeling. That gave the book its heart."

The Washington Post also reports on Patron's creative path: "For a long time she had the characters in her head but didn't know what they would go on to do. After her mother died a few years ago, she realized that her title character 'was really dealing with losing her mom.' The writing started to go faster at that point."