October 14, 2010
On Bolting, and Bolters
One good thing about rereading What Maisie Knew was considering the character of Maisie’s mother, Ida Farange, a rather loathsome woman, and not just because she abandons her daughter after manipulating her or ignoring her for years. At one point, they refer to her “bolting”, to her being a “bolter”. Which made me think of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, which is the story of the Radlett family as narrated by their cousin Fanny. Fanny lives with her cousins because her parents have abandoned her as Maisie’s do (though in a far more light-hearted fashion), and her mother is referred to as “The Bolter”.
Perhaps Bolters were a blip in maternal history, a brief early twentieth century phenomenon amongst the English upper classes. (There is a biography called The Bolter as well, of someone called Idina Sackville). But I think we could actually do with a bit more literary bolting these days, mothers who take off without compunction. It was suggested to me that Alice Munro wrote about bolters, but we decided it didn’t count– her boltings always required sacrifice, but bolting doesn’t, by definition.
It occurred to me early on in motherhood why a mother might leave her children. (Not that I’d leave my children, but I have to say that, don’t I?). Because motherhood is all-or-nothing, overwhelmingly so, and if you discovered you just weren’t cut out for it, that you were terrible at it, and if you had financial means to flee, well then, wouldn’t you have to?
This is all assuming that there are women who just don’t “take” to motherhood, which I think is a healthy idea to be considered because of the number of times it turns out to be true. And I kind of admire the stance of the bolters, who don’t take to motherhood but don’t have to pretend that they do. They don’t have to run away and pretend they’re all torn up about it either. Which isn’t to say that the kids are all right, but maybe they are, or at least they will be, and the bolters don’t care regardless.
Now I’m not advocating bolting itself, though yes, undoubtedly, I’m glamourizing it. But I think these kinds of characters are positive figures in what they represent, in their freedom and their shamelessness. Adding the “bolter” to maternal archetypes, I think, would elevate maternity in general. Those of us who don’t care to bolt might be better mothers for carrying a bit of their spirit within us.
Update: See comment below re. Mrs. Brown who bolted from Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. And I just now thought of the mother from Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Replace Your Name, who had her own reasons.
June 22, 2014
Based on a True Story by Elizabeth Renzetti
I make a point of reading everything Elizabeth Renzetti writes, her Globe and Mail column one of my Saturday morning go-to’s. So I was always going to read Based On a True Story, her first novel, which Renzetti describes as “an alcohol-soaked comedy of failure and revenge”. I was thinking Kate Christensen’s In the Drink, Lucky Jim, and “Absolutely Fabulous meets The Devil Wears Prada,“as its back cover tells us, a blazing pink cover with lips, a lurid green type. The green is referential, the same lurid green as the book in the book, a book also called Based on a True Story, which is a surprise bestselling memoir was washed-up soap star and notorious drunk, Augusta Price. I was thinking also that Renzetti’s novel would be a send-up of tabloid culture and the current state of journalism (especially post phone-hacking scandal) in the style of Annalena McAfee’s 2011 novel The Spoiler, which had a similar set-up, but Renzetti has her tabloid journalist (young Frances in her cardigan) sacked not far into the story (which I suppose is a reflection on the current state of journalism in itself), so the narrative turned into something different. Something more like another novel about a woman called Augusta, Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt, mainly in that there are many many madcap shenanigans.
After far too many silly novels trying oh so hard to be smart, it was really refreshing to discover a smart novel that wasn’t afraid or ashamed to be silly.
The writing is as sharp and skilful as you would expect if you’d ever read a Renzetti column, with snappy dialogue and perfect cultural references. Augusta Pierce is a fantastic character, and another notable literary bolter, her complete lack of maternal instinct and similar lack of compunction for such a lack refreshing to encounter. Her self-destructive tendencies too—such a smooth slide down the spiral. And she’s got charisma, which explains her hangers-on—old friend and saviour Alma Partridge, one-time paramour Kenneth Deller (who now makes his living as “Mr. Romance,” host of a radio call-in show for the lovelorn) and pines for her across the world, and Frances the sacked journalist who agrees to ghost-write Augusta’s next book, but not before accompanying her on a journey to California to stop Kenneth Deller from writing his tell-all book first.
Augusta goes to great lengths to assert that her own book is just a version of the truth, the version she chose to share, though the excerpts from it that we’re privy to attest to its being a compelling read all the same, or perhaps because of this. (You really can’t always say this about excerpts from fictional books either. I will admit to skipping all the italicized parts of Possession.) And Augusta herself, with her sordid history, her mountains of baggage and disappointments, comes to be such a multi-dimensional character that it’s too bad that she’s given such a two-dimensional world to live in, that the narrative Renzetti constructs is less plot than scaffold. Material this good seems deserving of more.
Still, Based on a Truth Story is a worthy novel based on its insights, if not its plotting. Renzetti resists cliche in more than a few places, but in particular with her conclusion and its dose of sober realism (or unsober realism, as the case may be). “We have work to do,” says Augusta Pierce in the novel’s final line, and so too does Renzetti, and I hope she’s prepared to get hard at it one of these days, because her second book is going to be wonderful.
September 29, 2013
Projection: Encounters with my Runaway Mother by Priscila Uppal
A few years ago, I developed a cautious admiration for the literary bolter, those mothers in fiction who had dared to turn convention on its head and flee the children–the narrator’s mother in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love was known as “the Bolter”, and my thoughts had been inspired by the mother in What Maisie Knew. In conversation we also came up with Mrs. Brown in The Hours, plus the mother in Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. In the latter two books, the psychology of these bolting mothers and our eventual sympathy for them becomes the point on which the novels turn.
How does “the bolter” complicate our ideas about motherhood, I wondered? What if “the bolter” was a maternal archetype, instead of her actions being construed as unnatural? What does it tell us about motherhood and ourselves that we do such construing? And what does understanding the bolter’s psychology help us to better understand about mothers in general?
In Projection: Encounters with my Runaway Mother, Priscila Uppal is pondering the psychology of the bolter in order to understand nothing in general, but instead to better understand her own life. And here is the thing about non-fiction, of course, that it takes out the nuance and raises the stakes (and I still can’t stop thinking about that line from Americanah: “Like life is always fucking subtle.”). You see, my literary bolters of the fictional persuasion were always a but romantic, bobbed hair, cloche hats and long cigarette holders, far too fabulous for the home-front, or else they were running from something, selfless martyrs who flee for their children’s survival. But real life, of course, is rarely so photogenic, or tidy, as Priscila Uppal discovers for herself when she goes to Brazil to find her mother who’d bolted years before.
Projection has recently been shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Award for Nonfiction, and rightly so, as it is one of the most extraordinary memoirs I’ve ever encountered. It begins with Uppal–an accomplished poet, novelist and professor, with two experiences as Canadian Poet-in-Residence at the Olympics amongst her remarkable achievements–encountering her mother for the first time in twenty years on the internet. Though Uppal has not been pursuing her mother–it is while googling herself in search of reviews of her novel that she discovers her name listed on her mother’s website, along with a childhood photograph. After years of the past being put far away, Uppal must contend with evidence that her mother’s life continued after her bolting, and moreover that Uppal herself exists as a secondary character in her mother’s life.
She goes to Brazil in search of a story, curious and cautious about what she will find there. Brazil, where her mother had come from and the place to which she returned when her daughter is eight years old. And even Priscila can understand what drove her mother to go: an accident had rendered her father a quadriplegic, altering the trajectory of their family life and making her mother his full-time care-giver. Other details are harder to stomach though–how she cleared out her children’s piggy banks, for example, or that her children were left to care for their father in her absence, contending with a serious lack of essential financial and emotional support.
Uppal’s mother is a film reviewer, and a prolific movie watcher, movies becoming the method by which Uppal frames her narrative. Each chapter is title after a different movie, preceded by a line of dialogue, and the narrative of the film itself becomes integral to how Uppal understands her own narrative. Some of the movie picks are straightforward in their mother-daughter associations–Mommie Dearest, Stella Dallas, Freaky Friday–while others seem more of a stretch, but then Uppal makes the connections seem so natural. So too the lists that pepper her text, top 10 lists of things her mother and she share, or of places she has visited in Brazil on her trip. Her chapters also contain special cuts, montages, and flashbacks in keeping with the film motif. It is a curious construction, but one that works, in particular because these breaks provide moments of relief in a narrative which is full of unbearable tension.
It has become standard to refer to memoirists as “brave”, but I can’t help doing the same for Uppal, with the caveat that “brave” means something totally different here, something substantial. First, Uppal’s bravery in staring down this woman, her mother, who is clearly unhinged and exists in the alternate reality her love of movies provides. Uppal dares to confront her, but also dares to understand her, however unforgivingly. She is also brave to not forgive, or to have her story not adhere to standard narratives, to have a happy ending. She refuses to compromise, but also manages to see her story from all points of view. She is brave to take a story with so much pain and turn it into art that’s so extraordinary.
She writes, “I’m willing to endure [my mother] for a book for all the other children of disastrous, neglectful, and narcissistic parents, who beat themselves up for not being able to alter their gazes, not being able to create the love that would salvage the past, turn into into the turbulent backstory of a triumphant comedy.”
Projection is fascinating, compelling, as beautifully written as it is honest. Honest too that there is artifice at work here, that this book is so consciously art instead of a factual record. And yet there is documentation, note and photographs. A fantastic blurring of art and reality, which is the book’s very point, how we all do this to suit our own purposes, Uppal’s mother escaping to movies in order to justify her own choices.
The literary bolter in Projection must be read to be believed. She is so impossibly divorced from reality (as well as the common rules of social decorum) that if she showed up in fiction, you wouldn’t believe she was true. She exists to underline that mothers are fallible, and more: that some mothers are horrible. That real life is more complicated than a story could ever suppose, but then without story, how would we ever convey that?
