Which bring us to
The Mother,
written by Hanif Kureishi, directed by Roger Michell and starring Anne Reid as a widow who thought nobody would ever touch her again except the undertaker.
The Mother
is a far subtler piece of filmmaking than
Something’s Gotta Give
and it ultimately rends your heart. We follow May, an aging housewife of the fifties, on a trip to visit her grown children in London. During the family fun, her husband suffers a fatal heart attack.
After his death, May tries to return home, but finds she cannot stay there and waste away by the telly like her friends until it’s time to enter the old-age home. She decides to seek the cold comfort of her son and daughter’s ménages. Her daughter is having an affair with a married bloke—Darren played by Daniel Craig—who is also renovating her son’s house.
Darren is one of those sexy drifters who appeals to women of all ages. His tenderness and skill in bed conceals his rage at the world and at women. May surprises herself first by kissing him, then by inviting him “to the spare room” where they make outrageous love together. May’s daughter, Paula, is also obsessed with Darren—a very tasty hunk of manflesh but hardly suitable for the long term.
Paula wants Darren to move in with her and she solicits her mother’s talents as a go-between. Paula simply cannot conceive of her mother having needs of her own. She uses her as a baby-sitter, go-between, confessional, and emotional trash bin until, convinced that her mother is poaching on her stud, she gives her mother an impressive black eye.
Even more shocking than the sex between a woman in her sixties and a man in his thirties—probably as old as civilization—is the viciousness of the unresolved mother-daughter fury.
May is a woman who sacrificed her whole life to husband and children—just because it was “done”—and never gave herself a chance to discover who she wants to be. Her drawing, writing, and taking a young lover constitute her first tentative feints at self-knowledge, while her daughter Paula takes self-expression as her right yet can do nothing creative with it. She tries to write plays but winds up burning them and blaming her mother for the conflagration. It turns out she is even more in the thrall of patriarchy than her mother.
May has begun to glimpse freedom for herself, but Paula is utterly blind to her own needs and thinks attacking her mother is somehow therapeutic. May’s son is equally selfish. As for Darren, he is fucked up on drugs and full of rage, but at least he has given May fleeting pleasure and a new understanding of herself as a creature apart from slavery to family.
Daniel Craig’s Darren, with his irresistibility to women and his incurable self-loathing, reminded me of a man I spent entirely too much time with at a certain point in my life. He became my lover, housemate, and dependent. Though the sex never flagged, my patience with caring for him did, especially when he began drifting into other women’s beds. When I kicked him out, he left his barbells, cameras, books, and glossies in my attic. He eventually turned up again after a failed marriage left him with two little children. He brought them to me, probably hoping I’d take them in as I once had him. He could only see me as a caretaker or a sex object and he hoped his two sweet kids would worm their way into my heart. It was pathetic but I sent him and the children on their way.
Craig was utterly convincing in the role of sexy drifter, as was Anne Reid as the grieving mother who needs to be touched before the undertaker comes.
Since I live in New York, I was fortunately spared the prurient British tabloids’ response to this film, but I can well imagine them.
The Mother
is not shocking for the raw sex but for the naked revelations of family misunderstanding and rage. The generations not only can’t communicate, but the younger are so lacking in empathy that their progenitors have no choice but to die on the spot or walk away to preserve themselves.
The Mother
is a harrowing movie and a true one, unlike the flossy and amusing lies of
Something’s Gotta Give.
Why all these postmenopausal women having sex in books, movies, and on TV? Well, baby boomers have always expected the world. Why should they give up the benefits of sex just because of a few wrinkles? They are the generation who always got their way, who pushed the envelope in the sixties and hardly expect to give up pushing now that
they
are sixty. Do they see sex as akin to vitamins—something you do for increased longevity? We know that coupled people live longer than single. We know that our generation is health-crazed. Why should we give up intimacy and sexuality just because it shocks our kids that we still need it. Fuck ’em! We will go on having our way until we are carried out feet first.
Is the news that older women are enjoying more sex a trend caused by our aging populations? Will we see the elderly increasingly engaging in youthful behaviors of all sorts—from Roller-blading to composing love songs? I think so. Our kids will have to get used to the idea that they can’t corner the market on lust and love. It won’t be easy for them. They want us as kindly old grandmas and -pas ready to baby-sit for free. They don’t want to find us in the spare room with some Darren. Not only does it shock them, it cramps their style.
Evolution dictates that we stand aside and help to raise the next generation rather than have adventures of our own. Our adventures will not result in babies—so we must let the babies have their due. Grandparents have always been vital as caregivers and teachers. Since human babies are so slow in becoming independent, it takes a village to raise them and we are that village. Should we be fornicating in the spare room when the toddlers may need us? Absolutely not. But most of us don’t live in extended families with our kids so we don’t need to resort to hot-sheet motels with our lovers. Just as we fled from our parents we now have to flee from our children—pleading pottery classes or shopping or doctors’ appointments. We may be liberated but our kids are not. Having suffered from our derangements and divorces, they are far squarer as a generation then we were. They want white weddings and diamond rings and happily ever after. Good luck to them and God bless. Remnants of the seventies, we still want a whiff of Woodstock in our later years. But we’ll have to hide it from our progeny. That we know. Fortunately, we have our own digs.
Will sex ever be free of secrecy and repression? We think we are so liberated, but now we find ourselves sneaking around to deceive our children. It is just not in the nature of things for the generations to celebrate sex simultaneously.
Our children believe they have cornered the market on sex and let them think so. They don’t want to imagine granny in a hotel suite one delicious afternoon a week. Perhaps that’s why there has been so little open discussion of the subject of postmenopausal sex. One giggles about it with close friends, but it seems not fit to print in family newspapers. Nobody wants to acknowledge publicly that sex has no age limit. Perhaps it’s a question of oedipal suppression. Kids hate to think of their parents having sex.
For the parents, however, the urge to merge may be a response to many things. Sexual craving may be less of a factor than the nearness of death. Sex is a way of convincing yourself you’re still alive. I think of all the distinguished old men—poets, novelists, professors who wooed me when I was a miniskirted twenty-two. I felt sorry for their ardor, which I could not share. Now I understand their desperation. They wanted reassurance that they were still part of the dance of life. They wanted proof that the angel of death was not hovering too near. They thought they heard the dark wings beating overhead and they hoped my youth could protect them.
Sex is a very profound drive for human beings because it can serve so many purposes. It can convince us we can still feel. It can fill us with hope. It can enliven the mind as well as the senses. If we take a broader definition of sex than intercourse alone, a Lawrentian view of sex, we discover that sex is the secret key to letting the world in. It is a universal curiosity, a need to reach out and give ourselves to others as well as a need to take others in. No wonder we learn so much from sex. If we will only allow ourselves to understand sex as something beyond reproduction we will have a clue to its enormous power. In their sexual meditations, Tantrists find union with God. They use the body to get beyond the body. We can discover this exercise of sexuality at any point in our lives. Perhaps, in truth, we are better at it when hormones alone do not rule us. The Greeks knew that Eros and Aphrodite ruled even the other gods. Perhaps it is time for us to rediscover their wisdom.
27
ON BEING A CAR WRECK
May your every wish be granted.
—ANCIENT CHINESE CURSE
On Sunday,
the
New York Times Book Review
called my new book,
Seducing the Demon,
“disheveled” and “trapped in time.” That review wasn’t as scary as the one in the
Chicago Sun-Times,
which called me “a delusional car wreck.”
Ever since I published
Fear of Flying
in 1973, some reviews of my books haven’t just been bad, they’ve been apoplectic—as if I’d committed a crime that had nothing to do with words. Being called a “giant pudenda” by Paul Theroux still sticks, three decades later.
For most of my career, after reading a bad review I would take to my bed, refuse all calls, drink wine straight from the bottle, eat chocolate cake, swear off writing, and consider going into social work and fantasize about doing bodily harm to critics. I considered hiring a hit man, but since I’ve always pretty much hung out with liberals and eggheads, I never had access to that phone number. So my revenge of choice would be public humiliation. Four inches taller in my black velvet boots, I would splash cold vodka in my critics’ eyes at the PEN gala. Blinded for the evening, they would still see the errors of their ways, repent, fall to their knees, and write letters of retraction.
Yet I never was able to inflict my fantasy. I am neither Gore Vidal nor Camille Paglia—the only two writers who make vitriol both illuminating and entertaining. I have stood face-to-face with my detractors and said nothing but “How are you?” while they shuffled from foot to foot, bracing themselves for a punch or that vodka. Am I cowardly or wise? Wise by default. I know that revenge springs back on the avenger. Also, ever since my prescribed Wellbutrin kicked in, I’m able to be a lot more mellow when I get bad news. What used to be body blows are now slaps. So instead of seeing the review as a personal vendetta or sexist attack, I’m living with the fact that the critic simply thought my book sucked. So how can I write a better one?
Here’s how. Become less self-centered. One thing my critics, my husband, my daughter, and my editor all make fun of me for is my narcissism. How do I get over myself? Being a grandmother helps because it made me realize what a self-absorbed mother I was. The nanny changed my daughter’s diapers. As some kind of penance, I now insist on changing as many of my grandson’s as my daughter and son-in-law will allow.
Besides, I’ve always wanted to improve and evolve as a writer. I’m now writing a novel about my doppelgänger, Isadora Wing, as a woman of a certain age, and I’ve finally, at age sixty-four, gotten to the point where I realize that there are lives and characters more interesting than mine—and Isadora’s. After inhabiting a writer’s mind for decades, I’d like to inhabit the mind of my readers and, God help me, my critics. To love them instead of demanding that they love me.
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN
SEDUCING THE DEMON: WRITING FOR MY LIFE
978-1-58542-444-3 (hardcover)
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ANY WOMAN’S BLUES
978-1-58542-549-5 (paperback)
FEAR OF FIFTY
978-1-58542-524-2 (paperback)
PARACHUTES AND KISSES
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HOW TO SAVE YOUR OWN LIFE
978-1-58542-499-3 (paperback)
1
In Gore Vidal’s brilliant phrase, we are “The United States of Amnesia.”
2
Laura Bush, an articulate woman who calls herself a feminist, has also not seen fit to influence her husband on reproductive choice for American women. This bewilders me. She is, after all, the mother of daughters.
3
Actually, we were deep into the backlash against women’s rights and we didn’t even notice. Periods of high feminism have historically alternated with periods of backlash. But when you’re in the cycle it’s hard to see.
4
Now (2006), Hillary and Murdoch are chums and even the
New York Post
no longer trashes her.
5
Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914), a much-neglected poet of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, often probed women’s issues.
6
Not as conspiratorial as the Egyptian press, however, which at the time of this writing is speculating about the Mossad’s involvement in Di-Dodi’s death. Their theory is that the Jews wanted Di dead so that she couldn’t convert to Islam like her friend Jemima Goldsmith. Here is a conspiracy theory to demonstrate the irrepressibility of anti-Semitism even unto absurdity.
7
Actually, Nabokov’s passion for verbal accuracy was such that he responded to his interviews in writing, on index cards, from the fastnesses of his retreat in the Montreux-Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland. The entire quote, which comes from the
Paris Review
(1967), is worth repeating: “Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable last name.”
8
This essay was first published in the year
Lolita
turned thirty. She is now fifty-two.