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Summary
Summary
"A story that lingers in the heart long after the last page is turned." --HOPE EDELMAN, bestselling author of Motherless Daughters and The Possibility of Everything
This provocative, poignant memoir of a daughter whose mother left her behind by choice begs the question: Are we destined to make the same mistakes as our parents?
One summer, Melissa Cistaro's mother drove off without explanation Devastated, Melissa and her brothers were left to pick up the pieces, always tormented by the thought: Why did their mother abandon them?
Thirty-five years later, with children of her own, Melissa finds herself in Olympia, Washington, as her mother is dying. After decades of hiding her painful memories, she has just days to find out what happened that summer and confront the fear she could do the same to her kids. But Melissa never expects to stumble across a cache of letters her mother wrote to her but never sent, which could hold the answers she seeks.
Haunting yet ultimately uplifting, Pieces of My Mother chronicles one woman's quest to discover what drives a mother to walk away from the children she loves. Alternating between Melissa's tumultuous coming-of-age and her mother's final days, this captivating memoir reveals how our parents' choices impact our own and how we can survive those to forge our own paths.
Author Notes
Melissa Cistaro is a bookseller and the events coordinator at Book Passage, the legendary San Francisco Bay Area independent bookstore, where she has hosted more than 200 authors. A writer and mother of two, she has been interviewed on a number of radio shows and has been published in numerous literary journals including the New Ohio Review, Anderbo.com, and Brevity as well as in two anthologies alongside Anne Lamott, Jane Smiley, and other writers. Melissa graduated with honors from UCLAand continued her education with the UCLA Extension Writers' Program. She has participated in the Tin House Writer's Workshop in Portland and The Writer's Studio in Los Angeles. She lives in San Francisco.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
An undercurrent of unresolved hurt and anger runs through this affecting and deeply restrained narrative of a mother's abandonment of her children. San Francisco bookseller Cistaro alternates between 2003, when the author, the mother of two small children in L.A., was summoned suddenly over Christmas to her dying mother's rural home in Olympia, and the 1970s, when Cistaro and her two brothers were growing up in the care of their overburdened father. Cistaro was four when her hard-drinking, chain-smoking mother took off from their San Jose duplex in her baby-blue Dodge Dart to "take a break" from the responsibilities of her vivacious sons and daughter. Subsequently, the children rarely saw their mother, who lived from one boyfriend to the next, working occasionally as a cocktail hostess. They blamed themselves for making her leave, and while the boys spiraled into drug and alcohol abuse, the author became the "good girl" who never begged or made a scene. As her mother lay dying, Cistaro found a cache of "Letters never sent" in her mother's house, and though they help Cistaro sift through the wounded memories, there is no tidy reckoning between mother and daughter in this sad cycle of emotional devastation. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
When Cistaro was only four, her mother abandoned the family, leaving three young children behind. In this memoir broken into sections depicting Then and Now, Cistaro visiting her dying mother reflects on her own life and her mother's. While looking after her bedridden mother, Cistaro also pores over her mother's unmailed letters, some to her, many to others, and works to develop a picture of a woman who could give up her children to tour Europe, hang out with men and friends, and only occasionally visit the fast-growing, unhappy, troubled youngsters she left behind. This is a tale of seeking and hoping for forgiveness and enlightenment. Cistaro's prose is not maudlin but questing. Though she may not find all the answers she needs, she returns, stronger, to her own family, perhaps understanding her mother's hope of her recognizing . . . the person I am as opposed to the figure I am supposed to represent. A poignant exploration of choices and their reverberations.--Kinney, Eloise Copyright 2015 Booklist
Kirkus Review
A debut memoir about a woman's emotionally charged relationship with the mother who walked away from her marriage and family.The youngest of three children, Cistaro was barely out of toddlerhood when her mother got into her Dodge Dart and suddenly drove off. She neither called nor acknowledged her children's birthdays for the first few years of her absence. Only later would she connect with them, but only for short periods of time. When she did, it was often in the company of different men with whom she shared homes as well as alcohol and drugs. Cistaro's mother was constantlyand painfully"just out ofreach" of the children who craved her love. The author and her brothers became each other's main sources of support, and their father did his imperfect best to hold the family together. However, the children each carried a deep anguish that marked them for life. Both her brothers eventually became substance abusers, while Cistaro narrowly avoided a similar fate. She went on to build a happy, stable marriage and family, but privately, she lived with the constant fear that she carried a "leaving gene" that would cause her to want to abandon her own family. When she learned one Christmas that her mother was dying, all her old fears of being left behind resurfaced. The author went to her mother's side to "hold [the] body" she had not touched since childhood. During her stay, she discovered letters her mother had written but not sent to Cistaro and her brothers. From them, she gained insight into the powerfully contradictory impulses that drove her mother and that often surfaced in herself. The author finally found peace knowing that while her mother ultimately needed to fly free, Cistaro could embrace "the messy, maddening beauty" that responsibilities brought to her life with equanimity and even joy. An honest and affecting story of the many complexities involved with family relationships. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
THEN
a house underwater
Bun-Bun notices my mom outside before I do. He tells me about it. We watch her walk toward her car. She's wearing her summer dress that is the color of ripe avocados. Her brown purse, slung over her shoulder, is as fat as the raccoon that crawls into our garbage cans late at night, and she has an armful of clothes hooked into her elbow. Her favorite coat drops onto the pavement. It doesn't look like a coat the way it crumples up on the ground.
I know that coat so well, every bit of tan, brown, yellow, and red-every small wooden button. So many times I have traced the curling patterns and small rows of dots with my fingertip, and my mom always reminds me that the pattern is called "paisley." She turns around, picks up her favorite paisley coat, and tosses it on top of the pile of clothes she's already put in the backseat of her blue car, then slams the car door shut.
As she turns around to look back at the house, I have Bun-Bun do a little wave and a dance as I duck below the window in my room. She'll think Bun-Bun has really come to life. His tan head and floppy ears are made of real rabbit fur that only recently began to shed around his green eyes and on the tips of his ears. I know how to make him look like he's hopping through a field. I lift my eyes just above the ledge. My mom is standing next to the car looking down at her feet.
I am supposed to be taking a nap, but it's too hot and I don't like to sleep. During nap time my whole room comes to life and anything can happen. Stuffed animals talk to each other, fairies fly out of the wall sockets, and plastic horses gallop across the hardwood floor. My brother told me that when I'm five like him, I won't have to stay in my room during nap time.
For days now the air has been like fire, so hot that it ripples above the concrete and makes things outside look like they are underwater. It is the kind of heat that has made our next-door neighbor's dogs hide underneath our house where it's cool and dusty. Mr. Bird, who owns the dogs, came over and told us this just yesterday.
"Dogs know what to do with themselves when California heats up like this, but not people," he said. "It's the kind of heat that could cause some folks to snap." And when he said that word, "snap," he took the toothpick out of his teeth and broke it in two. Then he laughed like he thought he was clever. Later, I saw his broken toothpick on our porch and kicked it into the dead grass where it got lost in all the yellow.
I open my bedroom door and peer into the living room. My brother Eden is asleep on the couch with a box of Lucky Charms wedged underneath his arm. The TV is on and I watch for a moment as Underdog flies across the gray screen, and I remember that my brother Jamie isn't here. He's almost six and the oldest. He left the house earlier to go swimming in his friend Bobby Winston's pool. My mom was mad when Mrs. Winston showed up early to grab Jamie for swimming. She told Mrs. Winston that she only had two cigarettes left and didn't want to go out to the store in the heat.
When Mom is out of cigarettes, she counts on Jamie to be here with Eden and me so she can run down to the corner market. If she has to wait too long to get them, the house begins to swell with noise-the clap of cupboards opening and closing, the crack of the ice-cube tray slamming against the counter, and her voice rising over ours like a mockingbird.
I wish that Mrs. Winston had offered to lend her some cigarettes or get her some, but she didn't. She just pointed to her hairdo, which she called a "beehive," and said, "This darn heat is just killing me and my hair too."
After Mrs. Winston left, my mom said she thought that hairstyle looked "goddamn ridiculous." I picked up the box of cigarettes lying on the table and carried it to my mom. She tapped the last two out of the package. Then we sat side by side on the plaid couch as she smoked each of them. Out of her red shiny lips came rings of smoke like little white doughnuts floating through the air. I reached up and stuck my finger through the center of one. She pulled my arm away and whispered, "No, just watch."
She said she liked it when the rings began to lose their shape and stretch out. She said they were beautiful the way they disappeared. I didn't like it when they went away. I preferred it when they first came out of her red lips and looked like powdered doughnuts.
"Make more," I said. And she did, like magic, over and over.
With my brother Eden asleep and Underdog ducking back into a telephone booth, I sneak past them and into the kitchen where our old fan is clunking around in circles, but no cool air is coming out. On the counter there is a pitcher of sticky orange Kool-Aid with three black flies floating on the surface. The sight of the soggy flies makes me uneasy, and in an instant, the heat feels like it will swallow me. I want my dad to come home from work.
I race back to the window in my room to see if my mom is coming back in. She is standing in the same place. I want to tell her that it is too hot out there for her, that she could melt. But she's stuck out there, it seems, and I'm stuck in here.
I need her to come back in the house. I need her to tell me that nap time is over and that tonight we will go to Fosters Freeze where the ice cream races out of a noisy machine and into perfect swirls of vanilla and chocolate.
Instead, she opens the car door and gets in. I lay my hand against my bedroom window. The glass is warm and it feels like I can almost reach her.
I know this is not a trip to get cigarettes.
I want to yell out to her: "Please don't leave..." I am trying to say it. But nothing comes out. I just watch her without blinking once. Bun-Bun and I both have stupid plastic eyes and sewed-on mouths. Inside of us there is nothing but sawdust.
Then I see her mouth break open wide like a fish gasping for air. She is crying inside her car. The air wobbles above the concrete. Everything is underwater. It crosses my mind that I could swim to her if I knew how. Jamie does; he would swim to her if he were here.
I press my forehead against the glass and swallow every word I know. Underwater, everything is quiet and full of ripples. My mom is a mermaid as she swims away from me, her thick hair waving like strands of long seaweed. I don't hear the sound of the car engine starting up, but I watch as my mom backs up and drives away in her baby-blue Dodge Dart.
* * *
Jamie says he was bad and that's why Mom left. Eden cries the most and spends extra time in the backyard looking for gypsy moths and black crickets to kill. I collect small boxes from around the house-empty Band-Aid tins, Lipton Tea containers, and Lucky Strike matchboxes. They are tiny suitcases that I can hide things in. Anything I want: buttons, bad thoughts, daisy petals, and even the shiny sequins that fall off my Christmas stocking. I put these small boxes just beneath my windowsill, all lined up and in order, and keep them there so that I can show them to my mom when she comes back.
Our dad tells us she's taking "a break" from us for a while but he doesn't like to talk about it. Jamie says maybe we will see her when the weather cools down. Or maybe she will come if one of us has a birthday. I keep hoping it is all a mistake. When I hear laughing late at night outside our house, I stay awake in case it is her coming back. And sometimes I hear the radio next door shouting out songs she would sing along to. I can feel her swaying me in her arms and singing "Good-bye, Ruby Tuesday." I am waiting for her to come bolting through the front door and never stop hugging us again.
A sitter, who is not our mom, comes to live at our house so our dad can go back to work. And when that sitter gets tired of us, a new one arrives. Everyone says I am too young to remember what's happened and that children my age simply don't remember the details. I can't blame them for saying that. But I am as quiet as a cat, watching everyone and everything.
Excerpted from Pieces of My Mother: A Memoir by Melissa Cistaro All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
