A tribute to our mothers, who are the beginning of our own personal stories
I don’t remember my mother reading me a bedtime story. If she were alive, she would hate me for saying this, but I grew up at a time when distant parenting was pretty normal and, maybe from the excesses of my romantic tendencies, I sort of regarded my mom as a character in a book, a goddess in a Greek myth, a nymph in a fable, a model in a fashion magazine.
Lolita author Vladmir Nabokov, I think my favorite writer in the world, must have seen his mother, Elena Ivanovna Rukavishnikov, the same way.
She was a wealthy heiress, the granddaughter of a gold mine millionaire, and she was the same distant parent, leaving the education of her son to a series tutors and governesses, the custom for children of the upper class. She was extremely polished and highly intelligent, well-traveled and fluent in several languages. Like mother, like son, who spoke in Russian, English, and French, although he claimed he didn’t think in languages. “I think in images,” he said.
Elena took her son and his four siblings around and life at home was divided between their townhouse in a chi-chi neighborhood in St. Petersburg and a large family estate in Vyra on the banks of the breathtaking Oredezh River, about 80 kilometers from St. Petersburg. Nabokov never forgot the summers he spent in the countryside with his mother that he described as idyllic, magical, and revelatory and the misfortune that would befall the family, including their departure from St. Petersburg and, eventually, from the country on account of the Russian Revolution in 1917, would not eclipse such vivid memories.
My childhood, compared to Nabokov’s, was not straight out of a Russian epic, but at least my mother raised me in a house full of books, such as voluminous sets of encyclopedia, such as Lands & Peoples, dime novels and the classics, a bible almost a foot thick, the three-volume, seven-language Britannica dictionary, cookbooks, Reader’s Digest, Life, Vogue, Town & Country, the National Geographic, and more, including Lolita, which I read in my early teens.
When I was much younger, she also took me to National Book Store and bought me a complete set of the Ladybird book series, a collection of fairy tales, from Rapunzel to Puss in Boots. Each book opened up a whole new world for me and—because, from the forest of books in my house that belonged to everybody else, I considered my Ladybird series mine and mine alone—it was a whole world I could claim as exclusively my own.
I think I owe my life of reading to my mother, a life that also allowed me to be a writer, even if to me, to this day, writing is only an emulation of reading, the desire to replicate its joys and its sorrows, its agonies and its ecstasies.
Each of us has been shaped by a mother—her presence or her absence, her tenderness or cruelty, her proximity or her distance, her nagging or her indifference. If this is true, then each book is shaped by a mother as well.
World War Z author Max Brooks, for instance, owes it to his mother, Anne Bancroft, the famous Mrs. Robinson in the 1967 romantic drama The Graduate, to have been coaxed out of dyslexia, a learning disorder that made it very difficult to read. “My mother put her career on the shelf, to raise me, to be my educational advocate, and to teach herself about dyslexia...” he told NPR. “I can literally say that not only did my mother give me my life, she saved my life.”
It’s Mother’s Day on Sunday. Here’s how some of our favorite writers portray mothers and motherhood from some of our favorite novels and stories. Maybe we can see a little or a lot of our mothers in them.
All mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.
―Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago
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He wanted women to love him, all women, beginning with his mother and going on from there. Therefore, whenever any woman got mad at him, he felt maternal disapproval crashing down upon his shoulders, as if he’d been a naughty boy.
—Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
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And all my mother came into mine eyes
—William Shakespeare, Henry V
And gave me up to tears.
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My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.
―Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
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Mothers are all slightly insane.
—J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
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I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
—E.M. Forster, Howard’s End
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Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not.
—James Joyce
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A mother’s love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dates all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.
―Agatha Christie, The Last Seance
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All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.
—Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
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Pride is one of the seven deadly sins; but it cannot be the pride of a mother in her children, for that is a compound of two cardinal virtues, faith and hope.
—Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby