Daughters of the Dirt / Sarah Higdon

Marion Winik Cited in Austin
by Marrit Ingman

In her fifth collection of published essays, NPR commentator and former Austinite Marion Winik keeps on keeping it real--whether she’s cruising through Canada’s maritime provinces on a disastrous voyage with various relatives, struggling through her first (and only) marathon, going blond, getting tattooed, blending two families, having a baby at 42, having her tubes tied, or contending with her second son’s sudden criminal streak. She falls in love again, says a tearful goodbye to Texas’s “mad naked summer” nights, and plows the family car into a snowdrift on the half-mile driveway leading to her new homestead in rural Glen Rock, Pennsylvania—with keys, phone, and baby Jane locked inside.

But the book, Above Us Only Sky, isn’t a linear progression from then to now, from the Clarksville crash pad of her misspent youth to tumbling classes and Football Mom t-shirts. Like motherhood itself, the book is fractured and fragmented. Moments of deep recollection alternate with glimpses into what may come—as children grow, as parents age, as the world becomes more complex and loses its innocence. These themes are collected in the centerpiece of the book, a lengthy rumination on the events of 1981—the aftermath of John Lennon’s murder, the demise of the counterculture, some disastrous romantic choices, and a personal tragedy at home. Through it all, Marion Winik copes. She keeps her pluck and her wits about her, and she’s got some choice words to share about politics, religion, and culture—from bagel-marketing juggernauts to terrorism.

As she spoke about the book from her Pennsylvania homestead, Marion was preparing to return to Austin for two events: the Texas Book Festival and an author appearance at BookWoman. She also described the switch from a major, mass-market publisher to a smaller, feminist press and what it means to be unruly as a mother approaches 50.

Austinmama: How’s everything going with the book?

Marion Winik: I came to Austin last week to sign them at the Jewish Community Center and had a lovely time. It was pretty much an all-woman audience of about sixty people, and many claimed to have read every word I’ve ever written, so I had a lovey-dovey hometown audience, and I had a great time. It’s a very, very fun book to read from. The first piece, “Waiting for Daddy,” is kind of a performance piece.

AM: What have you got planned now?

MW: I’m going to be doing some stuff around here and the larger East Coast, starting in York, Pennsylvania, and there’s Baltimore, and there’s New York, and there’s two things in New Jersey. And then there’s Austin and the Book Festival, and then I’m going a mini West Coast thing.

AM: Besides travel and the budget and being a little more DIY, how has the experience of switching to a smaller press been for you?

MW: It’s been great. I really struggled with not having input on some things I really cared about in my last few books. My last book, which was [published by] Simon & Schuster’s Fireside division, called Rules for the Unruly—I hate the cover so much I almost can’t look at the book. I completely avoid looking at the book or holding the book or giving the book to anyone. I can’t tell you how unhappy I am with the way it looks. I had had little input into any of my covers since the hardcover of Telling (published in 1995). It was so important to me to have control. Seal [Press] went so far beyond what I thought. I’d been conditioned to expect [publishers] not to listen to a single word I say. I wanted to do a collection of essays when I published The Lunchbox Chronicles. But because Telling hadn’t been a big bestseller, they thought, ‘Nah, not a collection of essays. Let’s do something in the parenting category.’ So I had to rejigger what I wanted to be a collection of essays into a parenting manuscript. Everything seemed to have to have a niche, and to get the niche, a lot of what I wanted couldn’t be in it. Above Us Only Sky has everything in it that I wanted to be in it. One of my favorite essays in the book, “The Mad Naked Summer Night,” I wrote a long time ago when I lived in Austin. It was first published in the [Austin] Chronicle. It’s been kicked out of three different books for not being about the theme.

AM: It sounds like kind of an interesting place to be at midlife.

MW: Yeah, it is. I’ve had the good fortune of having some of my little childhood ambitions clearly fulfilled. I’ve written books and had them reviewed in The New York Times. I’ve been on big fancy book tours. I’ve stood on the stage with Amy Tan and Dave Barry and Stephen King. I’ve met a lot of authors I really admire as writers. I’ve had the chance to make my living as a writer since my early thirties. On the other hand, I haven’t turned into the world’s most famous and popular writer. [Laughs] I have this sort of hobbling-along career in some ways. But now I don’t have those lofty ambitions. Now just want to be able to write. So now I don’t care anymore.

AM: Some of the essays about the pain of parenting, about being rejected by your children as they grow up—“Mrs. Portnoy’s Complaint,” most obviously—were really terrifying. How’s all that working out for you?

MW: It’s good! [Laughs] Well, today is a good day.

AM: Nothing on fire?

MW: Nothing is on fire. No one has cursed at me today. No one has been arrested this week. The children’s legal problems have become a new feature of my life. You know, Hayes is going to college next year, so there’s also this incredible feeling about your kids leaving you, which—I have to be honest—I view with mixed feelings. Part of me will be really glad when he gets out of here. But of course I can’t believe that I’m not going to live with Hayes anymore. It’s going to be so weird. I won’t have an empty nest at all, but when your first one leaves, it’s big. I didn’t even write anything about that because it’s still coming up. The whole teenage thing has been...really hard. Really emotional. It’s much more emotionally challenging for me than anything with the little kids was. My teenagers don’t think of me as their best friend. I know they think of me as a pretty mellow mom, and I think I’m pretty helpful to them in a lot of ways. But they’re not very helpful to me, actually. [Laughs]

AM: I’m hopeful that once your children are living independently it’s going to be a whole other area to explore.

MW: Yeah, well, guess when that is? I have a five-year-old! I’m 47! Let’s see...I’m going to be almost 70 whenever it is you’re talking about. That’s why it’s really important for me to keep exercising and stuff.

AM: You have to deal with everything all at once.

MW: Jane is going to her first soccer practices now. It’s surreal for me to be going to kindergarten soccer practices again. But I’m doing it. Fortunately she has lived through my shortcomings and is now in kindergarten. Now I’m helping her write in her journal every day. We’re getting up to the stuff that I like.

AM: Once you can do things with your kids that you authentically do enjoy, it’s like an infusion in your soul.

MW: That’s a huge thing to cross, when you’re doing things that you would like to do anyway. My step-daughter—when I met her she was 11—and I trained her to be a Scrabble player. She is really into playing Scrabble, and I am really into playing Scrabble. It was a great element of our bonding. I hadn’t had so many of those things with my boys. I think I’ll have more of them with Jane. And I don’t have to worry about this now that she’s five, but when she’s older, we’re going to have all the complicated issues about body image and sexuality, and the whole ordeal of being female. I don’t fear it, but I know it’s going to be thornier for me to do this. With the boys I had this sense of ‘I can’t mess this up.’ I felt confident in myself as a model of womanhood from the perspective of a young man growing up. ‘They have an independent, kickass mom who is confident, and this is all good.’ And that’s good for a little girl, too, but the seamy underside is more apparent.

AM: So now Jane is going to have a tattooed, marathon- running, farm-living and occasionally blond mommy. That blows my mind. Especially the marathon.

MW: Oh well, I did that once when she was one. I doubt I’ll be going again. Now we’re on the four-milers. Didn’t you get the impression [from the book] that I might not be running one every few days?

AM: It’s so far afield of what I would ever do.

MW: Me, too! It just shows how suggestible I am! I start hanging around with people who think something is really great...

AM: Whenever I hang around with those fit people, I get the sense that, like you say, it’s an addiction. You’re going to get into this instead and do this all the time. I think it’s crazy.

MW: I took kind of a long break from exercising. I went to Paris with my extended family, twelve people from three generations, so I’m just getting back into it. I miss it. It’s not an addiction like drug addiction. I guess some people do get to that point. I definitely learned that it feels better this way. After two months of lolling about, guzzling red wine in Paris and stuff, I did want to start again. It was mostly because of how it would make me feel. Not because I’m on some crash diet or whatever.

AM: Wow.

MW: I think it is pretty good, as addictions go. It’s getting to be a decade since I left my total slob-hood behind. When I was your age, I would have been saying exactly what you’re saying. If I thought about it, I’d immediately get a cigarette.

AM: But are you still unruly?

MW: Yeah, I’m still unruly. It’s well-known. I’m still unruly in that I make mistakes and hideously embarrass myself once in a while. I’m still unruly in that I still believe things passionately enough to make an annoyance out of myself to others who disagree with me. I run around town in a sport bra and a pair of men’s underwear or something in a place where people really do not dress like this. I know that a lot of people here must think I am extremely eccentric. That’s kind of fun, running into the grocery store with bare feet, sport bra, and my miniature dachshund. That’s not a sight very often seen in Glen Rock.

AM: You don’t think it’s going to catch on?

MW:I hope so.

AM: Well, you’re certainly still opinionated.

MW: I think that might be my problem, really, as far as never having been best-selling. Maybe it’s because I’m too opinionated, and I’m too unrelenting.

AM: Sometimes I hear that’s a good quality in writers. But then when it actually happens, especially when it’s coupled with discussions of motherhood and family, people are really frightened of it. What’s the essay that’s really ballsy? “Mothers Against Faith.”

MW: As I said, in the middle of that essay, I was waiting to be struck down.

AW: I hate to see that iconic “mother” notion used to prop up ideas about patriotism or nationalism and all these things that divide people, and as I think you point out, these ideas are used to legitimize violence, which a reasonable person would think of as anti-mother.

MW: I don’t know how many people would join [Mothers Against Faith, the fictitious organization from the eponymous essay]. We are standing by!

AM: You could have a chapter in Glen Rock.

MW: This is the chapter. This is the national headquarters.

AM: You get issued your sport bra when you show up.

MW: And your miniature dachshund. So what did you think of the long essay? That’s the part of the book that took me five years to write, so I’m really excited to see what people think of it. It’s been completely unpublished. Any ‘test driving’ that essay had was received with extreme negativity.

AM: Really.

MW: It was a total failure in various forms for a long time.

AM: It functions in this collection in an interesting way. In the beginning of the third act of the book, there’s this very revealing, very intimate, emotionally open piece.

MW: There’s a societal level to it, too. It’s supposed to be about the time and the transition into the 1980s, and the way the concerns of our culture changed then. And it’s also kind of about coming of age in a general way, and how the place where you live when you’re in your twenties plays a unique role in your life. I hoped that it would have reverberations for other people about place and about growing up.

AM: It definitely does.

MW: In that piece, I’m not a mother. I’m not a grown-up.

AM: But you’re still you, and we see you becoming the person that you are in the essays that are more contemporary, at least in their setting.

MW: Going back to what you asked me earlier, I doubt anyone else would have let me put that in there. It’s very Seal Press. ‘Oh, sure! A 75-page essay that’s set in a completely different part of your life and has a totally different style than anything else in the book? Sure!’

AM: I have this theory that when you become a mother, especially when you’re new at it, you go through a period of being focused on how you got to this point. So think back to those times that were transformative in your younger life. In other words, as soon as you become a mother and you start thinking of yourself as “a mother,” you also think of yourself as “not mother.” It’s a dialectic. Now that I’m somebody different, what did I used to be?

MW: It’s also that because I’m a teacher and a mother of young adults, I’m dealing with people who are the age that I was when these things happened to me. And it’s another phase of what you’re talking about. When you start feeling like a parent to people who are 21, 22, and even teenagers, and dealing with the stuff they go through, you have to think about this. ‘How was this for you?’ and ‘What did you do’ and ‘Why the hell did you do it?’ There’s a lot of anarchic potential in that age, in that stage of life. A lot of people are very wide-open, and a lot of things can happen to them. It’s scary to be on the care-taking side of that. How could I take care of people who are drawn to the kinds of things that piece is about?

AM: How do you answer that question?

MW: This is going to sound really trite, but I try to keep the communication open. You do not trowel on the judgment, because then they won’t talk to you anymore. Don’t make them lie to you by creating a situation in which it’s impossible to tell the truth. And don’t believe that you can control them. You can’t. But you still want to stay in as much as you can. If you have a teenage daughter, and she has an experience that is upsetting and scary to her, you hope that she’s going to talk to you about it. That’s your best hope. You can’t hope that nothing upsetting and scary will ever happen to her or that she’ll never make upsetting and scary choices. You can, but you’ll be wasting your time. So all you can do is create the situation where you might get to know about this, and you might get to help her deal with it. And help her learn from it—as much as she’s ready to.
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Marrit Ingman writes for the Austin Chronicle, AustinMama.com and Mamalicious.  Her new book Inconsolable was released earlier this month to stellar reviews.

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