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Pamela Marin was fourteen when her mother
died of breast cancer. After keeping her illness a secret
from her daughter, Mildred Marin left her home in Evanston,
Illinois, to spend her last months alone and without treatment
in California. When she died in 1973, her husband buried the
family’s memories with her—clearing the house of her
belongings, avoiding any mention of her, and never once taking
his young daughter to her mother’s grave. Before Marin was
out of her teens, her father went bankrupt and moved in with
his thirty-years-younger girlfriend. Now in this luminous
memoir, written with rare grace and unflinching honesty, Marin
chronicles how she came to reject her father’s dismissal of
the past and ultimately to embark on a cross-country search
for traces of the mother she never really knew.
With family and home gone, Marin got to
work supporting herself, first as a waitress in Chicago’s
northside bars, then as a secretary, and finally as a journalist,
landing a job as a staff writer at a newspaper in Southern
California when she was twenty-seven. Two years later, happily
ensconced in a beach house with the man who would become her
husband and the father of her children, Marin began to dream
about the mother who’d been gone for more than half her life.
Those haunting dreams led to the quest at the heart of Motherland.
Fifteen years after Mildred Marin’s death,
the author dropped out of her own life to research her mother’s.
Using her reporter’s skills, Marin traveled to Tennessee,
where her mother was born and reared; to Chicago, where her
mother worked as a commercial artist and met the man she would
marry; and back to California, where Mildred Marin went to
die. Along the way, Marin collected treasured artifacts as
well as others’ memories of her mother. She confronted her
father about the silence that enshrouded his wife’s illness
and death, causing a rift in their relationship that would
last until he died a decade later.
Motherland is a journey shot through
with love and pain. It is a story of loss, discovery, and,
ultimately, forgiveness. By coming to terms with her mother’s
life, Pamela Marin opened the way for the emotional intimacy
she had craved as a child—and finally found in her own
motherhood.
Pamela Marin has written for Playboy,
Redbook, Parents, Parenting, Ladies’ Home Journal, and
the Los Angeles Times. A former staff writer for The
Orange County Register, she has been featured on The
Oprah Winfrey Show. She lives in New York with her husband
and children.
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