Mothers
Story Stream
The Moynihan and Buckley Era April 08, 2024
As a measure of how lefty my upbringing was, we had a portrait of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt hanging on the kitchen wall. My parents were ’60s activists-turned-urban pioneer social workers, my father a charter member of Missouri’s New Left, ...
The Secret Shame of Smoking Moms April 08, 2024
I wish I could say that I ever tried to hide my smoking from my children, but the reality is that I couldn’t, because I was around them all the time and I also smoked all the time. When I switched to vaping after about a year into my midlife relapse ...
We Are All Tom Ripley April 08, 2024
Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley pickpockets the plot of Henry James’s The Ambassadors (1903) and turns it into a detective thriller set in the early years of the Cold War. Oblivious shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf taps the e...
The Anger and the Resolve April 03, 2024
In 1947, the English pediatrician Donald Winnicott listed the reasons why it might be natural for a mother to hate her baby. His intention was to challenge the inherited idea that mothers spontaneously take to their children and, in this way, ensure...
Back Home Again April 01, 2024
The story begins in a hotel or motel, where the narrator, a twenty-something only child, has had a disturbing dream involving his or her mother. The novel, introduced by this scene and ending with what follows it, consists otherwise in a long analeps...
