marnie mueller

AN INTERVIEW WITH MARNIE MUELLER ABOUT MY MOTHER'S ISLAND

by Jane Blanshard

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JB: Was it difficult to write My Mother's Island?

MM: It was surprisingly easy, given the material. But let me be clear about what I mean by easy. The material was very painful, based as it was on my own mother's death in a small community in Puerto Rico. I had a complicated relationship with my mother, but by the time I set out to write My Mother's Island I had already psychologically resolved the stickier aspects of it. Perhaps I had done much of the hard work in those days by her bedside as she lay dying. So when I sat down to write, the words literally fell onto the page. In a strange way, this was one of those books that authors speak of as a gift. Even the sadness generated in the writing process was almost a pleasure. I call it an 'ecstasy of sadness'. Though it is something of a paradox, I'm sure people can identify with the pleasure of such a heightened emotional experience.

JB: Knowing you as I do, I know that this is a very autobiographical novel. How much did you fictionalize?

MM: You're right; it is autobiographical, as is most of my fiction. In this one I stayed pretty close to what happened, but I did change characters, such as the husband of the daughter. He is a totally fictionalized creation. In fact, Sarah had an entirely different fictional husband in the first draft, but my early readers said he was a no-go, so I thought a while, and Roberto, Sarah's Argentinean husband, came to me like a vision, as a complete person with history and particularized personality quirks. Again, a gift. The people from the neighborhood, the mother's friends, and the doctor take off from real people, but they developed into fictionalized characters as I wrote, becoming composites of a number of diffe rent individuals I know. Many of the plot twists and flashback episodes are based on real occurrences, but have been altered to fit the fictional integrity of the novel.

JB: Did you do much rewriting? The book reads seamlessly.

MM: Yes, I did do a good deal of rewriting. When I said before that it was an easy book, that doesn't preclude a lot of editing, restructuring and rewriting. I've mentioned the husband.?I had to throw out many, many pages and start over on him and then integrate the new character into the book, chapter by chapter. I also had a lot of enlivening of sections to do, to make the plot work and to develop simple subplots having to do with some of the minor characters. But most of the rewriting had to do with structure. My problem was, how could I integrate the long flashbacks, which I thought were crucial to understanding the relationship between Sarah and her mother, Reba? After many different tries someone suggested putting them all into the third person and the past tense so they would contrast with the first person, present tense of the day-to-day story. I liked this solution because it broke up the tone of the story a little and pulled the reader out of the claustrophobic atmosphere of the house and the dying mother. It gave breathing space, so to speak. It also gave you painful information that wasnít immediately accessible to Sarah. But back to easy; it was a pleasure to do the rewriting of this novel, similar to solving a puzzle.

JB: Choice is a very strong theme in the novel. Sarah chooses to care for her dying mother even when she feels her mother has damaged her. She chooses to give her mother's house to the woman who helped her care for Reba, even when she had earlier misgivings about the woman. It is very clear to the reader that these are positive and liberating choices for Sarah.

MM: I agree. Though we don't know by the end of the book exactly how much this will help Sarah in the next stages of her life, the reader suspects that Sarah will be the better for having given herself over entirely to her motherís care and for having the generosity of spirit to give the house to Lydia, the woman who helped her through her motherís death in a very profound way. Also, in signing over the house to Lydia and Lydia's adopted child, Sarah symbolically thanks the people who were her surrogate caretakers throughout her own life. In my case, and this occurs outside the walls of the novel, after my motherís death I felt in a state of grace. I had done everything I could for her and I was left completely without hatred, guilt, or remorse. Cleansed, so to speak.

JB: A more complicated choice is Sarah's decision not to have children because of her own painful childhood. She doesn't want anyone to hate her as much as she hated her mother . But clearly Reba loved her as much as she was able. Do you think Sarah comes to love Reba in the end?

MM: I think Sarah reaches a place akin to love for Reba. She has deep empathy for her mother's plight, sadness that it wasn't possible that they could ever find a place of real communication, and respect for who Reba was in her life and for Reba's courage during the ordeal of dying. I think Sarah comes a long way in the course of the novel. She puts her anger and resentment aside and can see Reba in all her aspects and embrace who this woman was. Perhaps thatís a kind of love.

JB: What do you want people to take away from this novel?

MM: So far the response to it has been a tremendous surprise to me. The secrets revealed in it are ones I've kept all my life, certain incidents I never even told my husband and my closest friends, mostly out of shame for myself and for my mother. But people reading it have so far said to me, in essence, You have written my life's story. Even people who have had decent relationships with their mothers. This is what has surprised me. So many people keep secrets in their hearts about their ambivalent feelings for their mothers. Many have the fear I had, that because of certain hostile impulses they wonít be able to take care of their mothers, or fathers, when the time comes. What I want the reader to carry away is that it ís all right to have these feelings and that usually when the time comes, we are able to rise above them and fulfill our obligations to our parents. We may not do it perfectly. Sarah certainly didnít. We may not do it with love in our hearts. Sarah couldn't find that place. But we do what we are able to do. And in the end, we're usually grateful for the opportunity to do the right thing.


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