This beautiful essay by Barbara Kingsolver could easily be considered the autobiography of her writing career. In it, she
lovingly details how her
writing has reflected her relationship with her mother over the course of her lifetime
She starts by explaining that in college, she wrote her mother
letters when she was unable to say things over the phone. She wrote about all sorts of things, mostly to explain how she felt about the world and to put distance between her ideas and her mother’s way of doing things. This letter is different, though, in that she wants to feel close to her mother and to tell her about how she has come full circle in her understanding of their relationship.
Kingsolver summarizes the main events of her life in sections of the letter. The first is about how she stayed with her grandmother when her parents went on vacation alone. Although she had a great time, she really missed her mother. On the day of her parents’ arrival, she waited in the driveway until her parents’ car pulled up. Kingsolver was hurt and disappointed that her mother looked so happy, like she’d been having a wonderful time without her daughter.
As a teenager, Kingsolver wrote all sorts of terrible things in her diary about her mother, and then just as quickly took them back. The real split from her mother came later, in college, after Kingsolver was brutally raped by an acquaintance. Up until that point, Kingsolver had been the stereotypical good girl. Because she felt that her mother would blame her for what happened, she transformed herself into an angry rebel, which showed in the letters she wrote home.
She never lost the intense love she felt for her mother, though. Her first novel is described as a long letter to her mother explaining the choices she’d made and her political decision to help El Salvadorian refugees come to the United States. Of course her mother found the book to be beautiful and moving, and it seemed to bring them back together in a new way.
As her children are born, she sends letters and pictures to her mother, only to get letters and pictures back. She loves that her mother thinks her babies were just like her when she was little. Kingsolver’s own transition to motherhood helped her understand what she hadn’t about the day her parents came to pick her up at her grandmother’s house. Kingsolver’s mother wasn’t happy because she was away, she was happy because she’d missed her daughter as much as Kingsolver missed her.