Mother Talk Philadelphia

The Mother Talk event on Thursday the 17th was great -- well-attended, entertaining, just a lot of fun. Part of this was due to Marion Winik, who is pretty much a traveling party. She is hilarious, knows how to spin a story, always ready with a dead-on quip.

The evening started out with people drinking wine and eating food and catching up with friends; there were many people there who had been to the last Mother Talk with Miriam and a few people who had attended the Time Out! event at the end of October. There was a reporter from the Philly Inquirer there, and she asked us a lot of questions while everyone milled about and the Inky photographer snapped pictures. Once the small-talk was done, we convened in Elise's living room and got down to business.

Miriam spoke for a bit about both Marion and I, and about her thoughts on reading our most recent books. Then Marion read one of my favorite essays of all time, "Mrs. Portnoy's Complaint," or, as it was title when it ran on Salon, "Gods and Monsters." (Warning: if you click on that link, be prepared to sob hysterically, especially by the end.) Marion is a fabulous reader -- those 15 years of NPR experience sure pay off -- and she had the crowd in the palm of her hand as she ranged between the hilarious and heartbreaking. The ending of that essay is one of those that just gets you, and it was hard not to cry just listening to hear read it. It was a powerful reading of a powerful piece about the necessity of your children separating from you, staking out their own ground in direct defiance of you, being cruelly in opposition to you.

After she finished the essay and everyone composed themselves, she shared a story about how she was invited to read the piece at a high-school assembly, and how frightening and incredible it was to say this stuff to the kids -- who, in the end, were able to identify with her and her perspective as a mother in a way they hadn't ever considered before. Miriam wrote about this kind of power of the personal essay on her Playground Revolution blog:

When writing becomes so personal, when good writing becomes so personal, it takes a 180 degree turn. We may think it's narcissism, we may think it's about something so narrow it only pertains to one person's experience, but there's the turn, waiting to surprise us. Just when we think it's just about the particular, the writing flowers and it's about the biggest broadest expanse of human life. It's breathtaking when it happens.

Then we talked about "It's a Boy," and there was a lot of great audience participation, with women sharing their stories about raising sons. Since many of the people there had been to the Time Out! event where I'd read from Mother Shock and the Boy book, I ended up reading Catherine Newman's sweet and funny piece from "It's a Boy" titled "Pretty Baby." What fun to read someone else's words instead of my own! And a pleasure to read a great writer aloud. I had to stop myself from laughing out loud over passages like this:

Or is the worry just that pink will keep Ben from achieving his proper patriarchal birthright? .... Will Ben’s preschool class photo be uncovered one day and threaten his entry into the World Wrestling Federation? Will those pink-threaded boyhood outfits prevent him from registering a firearm or sucking beer out of somebody’s ass crack at a fraternity hazing? Will he be clinically incapable of slouching in front of the Super Bowl like an overgrown, chili-fed larva? Or do we just worry that he won’t know how to camouflage himself properly as an imbecile stone when a lover tries to enter together with him into the world of human feelings?

The reporter picked a great night to come -- the conversation was bawdy and funny and raucous even as it was serious and thoughtful. (My favorite line of the night, when Marion was talking about teenagers and sex, and the fultility of pressing for abstinence: "Why do we want to stop the people who want to have sex the most from having it? Tell middle-aged people to stop having sex! Then that approach will actually work!")

The evening wound down around 10:30 or 11, and I was able to hang out a bit with Marion and Miriam, which was really nice, as up until now Marion is someone I've only known via email, and as Miriam is 9 months pregnant and due in about 3 minute and hasn't been able to make it into town for coffee lately. It was a wonderful night, just a pleasure to talk about interesting things with women who were interested in joining the discussion.

And to the woman who arrived with her annotated, underlined, dog-eared, post-it-note bedecked copy of Mother Shock -- you made my night!