Am I A Recovering Art Monster?
Some of my best work has also been my cruelest. Can I live with myself? Could you?
In 2014 I committed an atrocity. I published an essay about my mother that was arguably the cruelest thing I’ve ever written, if not the cruelest thing ever written by anyone ever. That last part is an exaggeration. Surely crueler things are out there. But as far as some of my mother’s friends were concerned, the title of “meanest, darkest thing ever written about a mother by a daughter” goes to me, a once innocent, oboe-playing girl who was raised in a perfectly loving household yet somehow grew up to be a memoir-writing monster.
They have a point. By normal human standards, I did a very unkind thing. I portrayed my deceased mother as a deeply flawed person whose inability to access her true self gave her an air of haughty affectation to which I felt almost physically allergic. Worse (at least, to me it’s worse), I described my mother’s death from cancer in sometimes grotesque detail. I wrote about her vomiting on the floor and slipping on the vomit. I recounted going to the pharmacy to purchase her adult diapers. I described one day during her illness when she felt good enough to walk a city block by herself to Starbucks, an occasion that caused me to fantasize about her getting hit by a bus because it would have been preferable to the agony of her slow death from cancer. In this essay, I admitted that I started packing up some of her things—for instance, a pair of table lamps that I liked—while she was unconscious but still alive in a hospital bed in her living room.
That last detail haunts me in particular. Was it really necessary to include it? If you did a cost-benefit analysis of the literary merit of that detail versus the guilt and distress it caused in myself and others, would it have been worth it?