Catching up with the Mother of Sorrows
(Source: Vijay Times, BVT LifeStyle Pg 4.)
Copyright © 2005 Puja Goyal.
MOTHER OF SORROWS marks the fiction debut of Richard McCann. He describes a post-war middle class America and explores the difficult entanglements of family, the effects of shame upon the formation of one's most private identity, and the paralyzing closeness between a son and a mother.
BVT caught up with Dr. Richard, to discuss the book, and explores the process of writing the heart wrenching, "Mother of Sorrows". Excerpts from the interview…
How did you come up with the title Mother of Sorrows?
Like the mother in Mother of Sorrows, my real mother had an enormous gift for dramatizing herself, and I wanted to capture something of this in these stories. My mother's actual name was in fact quite close to the name of the mother in the book (her name was "Marie Dolores") and like the mother in Mother of Sorrows, she often reminded my brothers and me that her name meant "Mother of Sorrows", surely a weighty thing to tell one's own children.
In that sense it might be taken to mean that the children are a part of the mother's sorrows.
You had stated previously that the book is"homage to reality". Don't you think reality blurs when you combine it with fiction?
In describing Mother of Sorrows as "homage to reality," I mean to suggest that it's not a chronicle of facts but rather a mixture--like much of memory itself--of the real and the imagined. I also mean by the term that I see myself as paying a kind of homage to lives and places and experiences that have almost been forgotten, since the people who inhabit these memories have died. In making art, I don't think that reality gets lost as much as it gets transformed.
What were the most testing moments in the process of writing the book?
I think the hardest and "most testing moments" came toward the end, when I realized that I would have to write about my brother in order to finish this book. Like the narrator of Mother of Sorrows, I had a brother who was a year older than I and who died of a drug overdose twenty years ago, when he was in his thirties. For years, I had been entirely unable to write about him or about the relationship I had with him, even though I have lived for many years only a few blocks away from the apartment building in which he died.
For many reasons, I felt guilty toward him, and this made it hard even to approach him as a subject. But I also felt that I needed to understand better some of the things that had happened between us and even to make some amends to him, even though he was long dead.
What resulted from this was "My Brother in the Basement," the last story I wrote for Mother of Sorrows.
The ending of Mother of Sorrows, is sweet melancholy... Was it deliberate, or did it take its own shape?
Although "The Universe, Concealed" was not the last story I wrote for Mother of Sorrows, I wanted to place it last because I thought that it was not only a story of loss but also a story of a hard-won and even stubborn survival.
At some point, I realized also that I wanted to end the book, as it does, on the image of people moving through the dark.
Copyright © 2005 Puja Goyal.
MOTHER OF SORROWS marks the fiction debut of Richard McCann. He describes a post-war middle class America and explores the difficult entanglements of family, the effects of shame upon the formation of one's most private identity, and the paralyzing closeness between a son and a mother.
BVT caught up with Dr. Richard, to discuss the book, and explores the process of writing the heart wrenching, "Mother of Sorrows". Excerpts from the interview…
How did you come up with the title Mother of Sorrows?
Like the mother in Mother of Sorrows, my real mother had an enormous gift for dramatizing herself, and I wanted to capture something of this in these stories. My mother's actual name was in fact quite close to the name of the mother in the book (her name was "Marie Dolores") and like the mother in Mother of Sorrows, she often reminded my brothers and me that her name meant "Mother of Sorrows", surely a weighty thing to tell one's own children.
In that sense it might be taken to mean that the children are a part of the mother's sorrows.
You had stated previously that the book is"homage to reality". Don't you think reality blurs when you combine it with fiction?
In describing Mother of Sorrows as "homage to reality," I mean to suggest that it's not a chronicle of facts but rather a mixture--like much of memory itself--of the real and the imagined. I also mean by the term that I see myself as paying a kind of homage to lives and places and experiences that have almost been forgotten, since the people who inhabit these memories have died. In making art, I don't think that reality gets lost as much as it gets transformed.
What were the most testing moments in the process of writing the book?
I think the hardest and "most testing moments" came toward the end, when I realized that I would have to write about my brother in order to finish this book. Like the narrator of Mother of Sorrows, I had a brother who was a year older than I and who died of a drug overdose twenty years ago, when he was in his thirties. For years, I had been entirely unable to write about him or about the relationship I had with him, even though I have lived for many years only a few blocks away from the apartment building in which he died.
For many reasons, I felt guilty toward him, and this made it hard even to approach him as a subject. But I also felt that I needed to understand better some of the things that had happened between us and even to make some amends to him, even though he was long dead.
What resulted from this was "My Brother in the Basement," the last story I wrote for Mother of Sorrows.
The ending of Mother of Sorrows, is sweet melancholy... Was it deliberate, or did it take its own shape?
Although "The Universe, Concealed" was not the last story I wrote for Mother of Sorrows, I wanted to place it last because I thought that it was not only a story of loss but also a story of a hard-won and even stubborn survival.
At some point, I realized also that I wanted to end the book, as it does, on the image of people moving through the dark.
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