The shame of it, the guilt of it, and the impossible nature of it was ultimately what the book is. As for what sustained me to keep going with it, I think it was just that itch-to not only figure out why I wanted to write about my mother, but also why I couldn’t. I don’t know if that means it was better or worse aesthetically, but there were times it was just a mess.
There are other times I could’ve published it, but it would have been a vastly different book.Īt times, it was much more unpublishable, whatever that means. It was a book of vast incarnations and multiplicity for me. I think at any time during those 13 years, I could have published Book of Mutter and it would have been a different thing. It went through so many stages of trying for it to become a book. I began trying to write about my mother-and about trying to be a writer-when I was 25. In the beginning, it didn’t have a name and I wasn’t sure what it even was. It’s like an itch I have to work on until I’ve figured something out, or until I can get rid of it or try to publish it. A book is like a tremendous site of yearning for me. It’s also not like I worked on it exclusively for 13 years-I was working on other books as well, and all of these ended up informing each other. I would say Book of Mutter has been a sort of love affair and also represents the agony of my trying to be a writer.
The idea of working on a single creative project for 13 years is hard to imagine.
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