I started jotting down a few things I wanted to recommend this week and quickly noticed that they are all about parents. Fraught parental relationships have been cropping up in conversations lately; I’m also reading Rainbow Milk by Paul Mendez, which is superficially about a young gay black man whose new life in London finally allows him to confront the trauma of a repressive childhood in a strict religious community. But I think the novel is really about parentage, intergenerational trauma, historical wounds, and absent love.
Hence, this list of a few melancholic and vulnerable explorations of parent-child relationships (and a lesson in French cooking). It’s nearly autumn, after all.
Unsolicited Recommendations
Long but worth it: Nick Laird’s elegiac poem, Up Late, written for his father, Alastair, who died of COVID-19.
Carol Classen reads her heart-wrenching creative fiction piece, How to Kill Your Father.
This one is a bit out of left field (and much less doleful), but stay with me: an explanation of the five French “mother sauces.”
Author Douglas Stuart on the Louisiana Literature podcast talking about his novel, Shuggie Bain, which has a mother-son relationship at its heart. I haven’t read the book (yet), but the interview stands on its own merit.
Since we’re talking parenthood, here’s a QtA post I wrote earlier this year about why people want to become parents.
Questions to Ask your parent that they won’t know the answer to.