If you could ask the author any question, what would it be and why?

Hi, Katie. I am so sorry to hear of your loss, and the multiple losses that you’ve experienced.
I don’t know about you, but when my mother died, I felt the grief of having lost the first mother all over again as those memories of her came back to me, and any hope I had of her full recovery also died. It took writing this book to fully see how the first mother was still there in the mother of my thirties, and that we shared many loving moments in the last years of her life.
I had to shake off all our cultural notions about what mother-daughter relationships are supposed to look like and accept that just sitting together and sharing a meal inside a studio apartment, over and over again, is not only OK, but very meaningful.
The mother that I most miss today is that third mother. I encourage you to write because it can help with processing your grief and it allows the relationship with lost loved ones continue to evolve.

Hi, John. Thank you for your question. It was definitely a struggle, especially throughout my 20s and early 30s. When I wrote about the 3rd mother that emerged during those 10 years I was cooking for her, it was partly because of the way that process allowed us to reconcile.
There’s a moment in the book where my advisor says to me, “Maybe you’re keeping her in the room,” with the emphasis on the “you.” I reacted badly to that statement at first, but then I realized that I needed to forgive my mother for the things she couldn’t help, as well as for her imperfections. I needed to let go of the wish that she be a different kind of mother. That shift in perspective ultimately changed our relationship. As I wrote to another reader, I didn’t get the opportunity to go through that process with my father because he died when I was still too young and angry to practice forgiveness.

Hi, Taylor. Thank you for your question. It pains me to hear that my father came across as vilified, because that was not my intention. However, I can speak to a couple of reasons why there’s an imbalance in the attention I paid to their stories:
One is that I made a conscious decision to focus this story on my mother and my relationship to her, so all the other characters in the book are minor. I had a whole chapter about my dad, which I ended up cutting out because when my editor and I were doing the final revisions, we realized that it didn’t really fit. I have written a little about his traumas elsewhere though (the postscript to my first book, for example).
Another is that I didn’t know my father as well. I spent far less time with him during my childhood (because he traveled), and even less during my adulthood. We were estranged through most of my early twenties and then he died when I was 27. I’d like to think that if I’d had more time with him – more time to work through our problems and more time for me to mature – I could have seen him with a deeper level of compassion.
Finally, I hope that you and other readers can see the differences between Grace, the character and Grace, the narrator. The areas where there’s a harsh tone towards my father comes when the character of Grace is in her early 20’s, which was a time in my life when I had a lot of anger towards him. I hope that it reads differently when the character is a little girl or when I’m writing as the narrator, who understands that he was a product of his time and place (coming of age as a farmer in rural white America in the late 1930s) as much as I was of mine (coming of age as a liberal arts college student in the early 1990s).

Hi, Jennifer. Thank you for your question.
The answer is… complicated. I pursued my post graduate degrees primarily to please my mother, and I was miserable for much of the time, but I also did it because it provided me with a structure in which I could explore my family history.
Understanding the past and the social context of my family’s history was a tremendous need of mine during my young adulthood, and it still is today during my middle age.
The desire to confront trauma has been a constant throughout my life, and I’ve done it using the tools I learned in graduate school (research, writing, creative work). In that sense, my mother pushing me to be educated was an incredible gift.
So no, it’s not hyperbole, but the consequences of doing something to please my mother were very beneficial for me. I should also mention that I’m no longer confined by academia, and I’m in a place that suits me now.
There was a moment, after my mother died, when I thought I’d leave academia. I took a year off and pursued some creative projects, and then I realized I could make it all work by pursuing creative work through academia.