TBR: Unraveled
Today’s book is Unraveled, by Maria Housden. The subtitle of the book is "The True Story of a Woman Who Dared to Become a Different Kind of Mother" and the "different kind of mother" that Housden became is a non-custodial parent. When she and her husband divorced, she let him have primary physical custody, accepting a standard visitation schedule of alternate weekends and several weeks over the summer. For a while she moved to California to be with her boyfriend (now husband), but now she lives on the east coast, not far from her children. The book challenges its readers’ assumptions, raising the question of why is it shocking that a "good mother" — not one on the brink of collapse like Laura Brown, the runaway housewife of The Hours — would give up custody of her children, when millions of fathers do so all the time.
Unfortunately Housden spends far too long trying to justify her choice, rather than challenging the need to do so. And her justifications left me hollow: "I knew in my heart that my gift in the world was more as an artist than an everyday kind of mother. And my real responsibility to my life, the lives of my children, and the world, was for me to have the courage to create a sense of home and work that would allow me time to explore and express the things I wondered about and knew." I find this language incredibly insulting to the thousands of men and women who manage to be creative artists without walking out on their kids.
I’m not criticizing Housden’s choices. Unlike many of Laura’s commenters, I don’t believe that parents have an obligation to stay in unhappy marriages for the kids’ sake. She had married young, and (at least in her telling) her husband’s expections for their marriage were stuck in the 1950s of the Feminine Mystique. They had watched their 3-year-old daughter die, the sort of crisis that either makes or breaks relationships. Her husband was willing and able to be the custodial parent (with the help of an au pair). But I lost patience with the new-agey language, the constant claims that this was necessary in order to find her authentic self.
Sandra Tsing Loh reviewed Unraveled in the September Atlantic. I requested the book from the library based on the start of the review, only to discover later that Loh hated it, for mostly the same reasons that I did. But Loh then uses the review as a launching point for a semi-coherent rave about Oprah, Anna Karenina, and "female-rage anthologies by overstressed working mothers bitterly wrestling with husbands and playdates and deadlines." If anyone who has read Loh’s review can explain the last two pages, I’d love to hear it
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Updated: Go read Jody’s post on this subject. Thanks.
August 24th, 2005 at 12:01 am
Loh confused me, too. I really liked the part about how the first guest of Oprah’s Anna Karenina episode was Barry Manilow, but I wasn’t sure that the connection between that and Unraveled made a lot of sense. I’d have to reread the article to tell. I do recall thinking that she wanted to make fun of Housden passionate, artsy-fartsy escapades than say very much about the way gender roles intersect the obligations of parenthood.
Something about Loh’s tone kind of bothers me. A smugness or superiority, maybe? A glibness? I’m not sure. I seem to recall that she wrote an article (also in the Atlantic) about getting her kids into expensive preschools, and it seemed that she was being very condescending toward something that she avidly participated in. It felt more like earnest narcissism than ironic self-deprecation.
August 24th, 2005 at 9:16 am
After 15+ years of avid readership, I actually cancelled my Atlantic subscription recently. I was just too disgusted by the constant tone of smugness towards real-world mothers. (Don’t get me started on the drivel they allowed Caitlin Flanagan to publish.)
August 24th, 2005 at 11:00 am
FYI…there is a free copy of Loh’s review online at http://www.powells.com/review/2005_08_09.
I actually liked the end of Loh’s review. I get so tired of hearing all the whining from mothers around me…”it’s so hard to find a balance, it’s impossible to fit in exercise, daycare is too expensive, we should have maternity leave like Canada,” blah blah blah. Now I’m not saying that I never complain about anything or that being a working mother (or a mother at all, working or not) is not hard. It is very hard. But it’s not unique to this generation of mothers.
I really liked the quote that Loh pulled from The Road Less Travelled: “[T]hey moan more or less incessantly…about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties…as if life should be easy.”
I think Loh’s point in all of this is that for better or for worse, Housden found a way to get beyond all the bitching and moaning related to the struggle (real or perceived): She checked out and left the kids with their dad.
August 24th, 2005 at 12:47 pm
“I blame the media.”
Seriously, I do wonder if people think life should be easy because it always is on TV. How can you watch, day in and day out, a world where nobody really gets tired, they have infinite wardrobe choices, the apartments/houses are bigger than real-life and look bigger still because of the camera frame effect, and you know that any money or relationship problems will be resolved because the show has a contract — how can you look at this and not think the world should be like that?
I remember when I was a teenager & comic-book fan, Spider-Man decided with no foreshadowing to drop out of school for good because he didn’t have time to earn money, play hero, and go to classes. Understand – the character had been around for 25 years or so then, and always as a student. It was a basic part of his world. It was the first time, I think, that a popular piece of fiction had told me in a way I could grasp that no matter how smart and hard-working you are, you can’t have it all, can’t manage everything you want in a life. That shouldn’t have been such a shock.
BTW, Laura’s commenters were a bit of a shock too. Man, they’re angry at libruls!
August 27th, 2005 at 12:13 am
I like the idea of a book about a non-custodial mother who voluntarily left the kids with dad when he and she divorced. I also like the idea of a mother doing the less-than-saintly-perfect thing. Motherhood is not one long Anne Geddes moment.
But Loh nailed it when she complained about all the New Age hoo-rah drenching “Unraveled.” We have tantric sex with a man who wears clogs, a house in the redwoods, Maria meets her new husband at a retreat and they are married by a Tibetan lama, and of course good old “finding myself.” Sheesh, could things possibly GET any more white, upper-middle-class and privileged? I’m afraid the sheer Marin-ishness of “Unraveled” is going to turn a lot of people off, including me. And it’s going to give the right-wing types even more ammunition to beat “bad mothers” with. Because Housden, probably without meaning to, comes off as a caricature of a New Age navel-gazer.
The idea behind Unraveled is wonderful. The execution…ah, not so much.