In Pursuit of Radio Mom:

Can you describe your memoir for us? 

In Pursuit of Radio Mom is the story of my search for a mother’s loving embrace. When I was a young girl my own was mentally ill, and her depression and violent temper resulted in a painful rejection of me and my needs.

It took many years before we had a relationship wherein she could express any kind of love for me or accept mine for her. In writing this memoir, I drew on my expertise as a clinical psychologist, exploring the chain of relationships between me, my mother, and my daughter. Writing the book illuminated for me the ways in which one generation impacts the next—both wittingly and unwittingly.

The memoir traces my struggle with debilitating anxiety, loneliness and shame, and moves on to discoveries about loss and healing and the ways in which I moved forward over the next forty years—beyond a dysfunctional marriage that mirrored the dynamics of my relationship with my mother. I pushed onward to both happiness and fulfillment as I pursued a successful career and joined in a fruitful and satisfying second marriage. However, while making my way over the complicated route of motherhood, I stumbled and was challenged to confront, yet again, the legacy of my past.

I was bolstered by a career in which I helped many other women transform their lives—lives which were often overwhelmed by troubled emotions—and as I began to write this memoir I accepted an unusual challenge. Generally, a therapist functions as a mirror for her patients, allowing them to see themselves, like a blank screen upon which they can project their emotions. Throughout the crafting of In Pursuit of Radio Mom, I stripped away my privacy. I wanted other women disturbed by the same sort of problems I had experienced to be able to use new insight and discover a love that is open-hearted. And then, most importantly, to find and extend forgiveness.

Why write a memoir?

I never intended to write a memoir. At least not consciously. The desire to write something so personal came only after I had abandoned a completed draft of a scholarly book about troubled mother-daughter relationships, one that was geared to reach my peer group of therapists. Producing a “professional” book that was clinical and oriented around my work with patients had had protective appeal. I could keep the reader at a remove; I could keep my exposure minimal and not reveal anything about my mother—or myself.

I was used to being the one who listened but who did not reveal personal information, and with that sort of book I didn’t have to acknowledge that the concept of emotional concealment had deeper roots for me. “Hiding” this way had been my pattern as a child and then as an adolescent. It was one way to feel safe.

Once the manuscript was completed, however, I realized how bored I was by what I had written—bored in the same way I knew I would be had I attempted a self-help book. Blah, blah, blah was all I heard as I flipped through the pages of what I had written. 

Only then did it become obvious to me that I had failed to find the true voice of the book. As I sat scribbling notes to myself about possible next steps, I found myself doodling little spirals onto my yellow legal pad, dark whorls that resembled tiny tornadoes ready to lift off the page. Had I ever felt so challenged, so conflicted?  Eventually, I came to accept why a textbook approach wouldn’t work: I knew I would be settling—choosing to “write safe.” It felt disingenuous.

However, it took a serendipitous conversation with Linda Gray Sexton, an acclaimed author whose memoirs I admired, in order to accept my own intention.

When she asked me, “what kind of book do you want to write?” she cracked the shell that had shielded me from acknowledging what kind of book I needed to write.

To make peace at last with writing a memoir allowed me to step out of the professional clinical shadow and place myself squarely in my reader’s sights—and my own. To connect in a way that was vivid and real. I reminded myself that I knew a great deal about the pain experienced by the women I hoped would be my readers. I’d spent the better part of my lifetime searching for my own answers—and for my own mother, as well. I’d spent the better part of my lifetime trying to pull her within reach, just as she herself had spent the better part of her lifetime trying to pull her own mother closer.

Yet, I’d dedicated several decades to digging for a reality that also fit with my emotions: I wanted my relationships with the important people in my life to be authentic; if I pushed hard, perhaps I could use my own voice in my writing. Wasn’t this Linda Sexton’s challenge to me? To take that inner voice, with all its insecurities and complexities, and offer it to anyone who opened the book? And if I didn’t write it now, in the third act of my life, then when?

What was the most challenging aspect of the writing process?

Let me say first that I found nothing easy about the writing process! The initial challenge was to come to terms with the knowledge that I would have to begin the book all over again, from page one. Was I ready to take that gamble? To bet on an uncertain outcome?  A deep breath. Then, “yes.”

I struggled, too, with how the people I loved would respond to the book. I worried most about how my daughter would react to my writing about my struggles (and sometimes failures) to be a mother different than my own. Could she trust me to tell my story, without taking over hers?

Similarly, would my siblings  feel that I had betrayed our mother? Would they tell me that I’d got it “all wrong?” Certainly there was  the possibility, the likelihood even, that some reactions from my family would be volatile. “How dare you?” described the opening volley I envisioned, one that might be followed by a barrage of sharp words mirroring those my mother had modeled for us all: words meant to “put me in my place.” 

I had to rake this ground about others’ reactions many times over. And with each pass, I reminded myself that I was writing about memories rooted deeply in my past, exploring the experiences that my mother and I had shared—and those we did not—as well as all the emotions that accompanied them.

In Radio Mom, I’d tackled the shifts that came in my relationship with my mother over the course of her life, and why those changes occurred. And I’d written about what I knew about healing. Memory and Perception. Which meant that, for all of my siblings, their own assessment of our mother might be right because all families are prisms. What is seen is either illuminated or distorted according to one’s own experience.

But for all the difficulties I faced, the most difficult aspect of the writing process was engaging repeatedly in what Linda had described as the “required strip tease of memoir.” Needing to write a memoir was one thing. But wanting to revisit all the pain and shame and trauma, being naked and on display, and risking judgement and the possible disdain of readers—such wanting was hard to imagine. Would all that really be required, in order to share my story with candor?

It would. It did.

Do you hope that readers will reflect on their relationships with their own mothers and daughters? 

In the poem, “In Blackwater Woods,” Mary Oliver wrote eloquently about connection and separation in a way that resonated for me throughout the writing of Radio Mom, and served as an anchoring theme.  “To live in the world,” she observed, “you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing that your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”  One take-away from the book is that the mother-daughter bond is not only powerful and unique, but that healthy relationships require, again and again, knowing when to lean in and when to let go.

Women who have been abandoned by their mothers in an emotional sense, or those who have abandoned their daughters (perhaps because they too were abandoned in just the same way), can learn that it is indeed possible to disentangle oneself from the grasp of an inadequate mother. Likewise, mothers who grapple with an overwhelming desire to be a constant in their daughter’s life can come to realize that relinquishing such an intense hold on a daughter does not constitute the abandonment so many of us fear. Instead, it helps us to build strong and healthy relationships with the people we love.

And as a book that makes transparent the process of psychotherapy, the memoir’s message is this: the excavation of pain clears space within the mind and heart, and affords the growth of new insight. It overturns fear and makes acceptance and forgiveness possible.