Richard McCann on his autobiographical stories in "Mother of Sorrows"

(Originally published in the Denver Post, October 2005)

By Dylan Foley

In 1986, Richard McCann’s short story “My Mother’s Clothes: The School of Beauty and Shame” appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, detailing a prepubescent boy’s cross dressing out of his mother’s closet. The story caused a literary stir, and gained McCann, then an unknown poet, a book contract.

Almost 20 years later, McCann’s slim collection of linked stories “Mother of Sorrows” (Pantheon, $20) has finally been published. McCann has created a gorgeous work of autobiographical fiction about growing up gay among the prosperity and bomb shelters of 1950s and ‘60s suburban America. The young narrator’s melodramatic and over-the-top mother holds him under her spell, and the family is plunged into shock when the father dies, beginning the brother’s two-decade downward spiral.

“It’s only been 18 years--I delivered the final manuscript in 2004,” said McCann with mock indignation from a New York City coffee shop. “I’d been writing poetry and I was trying my hand at prose. I was writing what I thought was nonfiction.

“I sent ‘My Mother’s Clothes’ to the New Yorker nonfiction editor. He wrote back and said, “You’ve sent it to the wrong editor. I’ve forwarded it to the fiction editor.”

The contract became a heavy burden. “After the Atlantic, I got a contract for a novel, which I said might be a memoir,” said the 55-year-old writer. “It was a curse initially. I had never written prose, and suddenly people were expecting things. My original idea was to write about 1950s and 1960s suburban life. I was still finding out things about myself as a writer, to what extent could I write big?”

Right after McCann got his book contract, his life was wracked by a series of tragedies. “In 1986, my ex-partner had been living with HIV for two years. My daily life was saturated with AIDS. A lot of my friends were dying and I had a sick partner. The contract was a curse, for I could never decide where my attention should be. At the same time, my mother was going into a nursing home and my stepfather was dying.”

Then McCann’s own life took an almost-fatal turn. “I was diagnosed with Hepatitis C,” he said. “I spent a year waiting for a liver transplant, then another year recovering so I could go to a job. I have not recovered, but like the rest of the people in this coffee shop, I am still here.”

McCann’s real-life mother was a larger-than-life dramatic character. “She was a little too close and a little too distant from her children in certain ways,” he said. “Closeness and distance was constantly going from one extreme to another. As I wrote in the book, my mother seemed to be, in the small stage of the house, getting to enact al l the major parts. The rest were all subsidiary parts.

To capture the mother in the stories, he turned back to his Irish Catholic upbringing. “It was being a writer, trying to capture what it felt like to imagine the mother through the eyes of a child,” he said. “I grew up in a home where both parents were very strong Catholics, where there were a lot of shrines.”

For McCann, that meant making relics. “My aim was to get my mother as you often get people in religious terms--through a strong focus on the fetish objects. There is a powerful Catholic sense that if you want to capture somebody, you have to get a little bit of their reality, a shard of bone from the saint has to go in the alter. You start with my mother’s facts--her jewelry, the clothes in her dresser drawers, her padded brassieres. She wore Cherries in the Snow, a popular red lipstick in the 1950s.

“My mother had a lot of sorrows, she really did. I was very aware of her loyalty to the past, which can take you out of the present in a very painful way.”

In the middle of the story collection, the focus shifts to a fictionalized version of his brother. “My brother was a year older than me and we were both gay. I thought that I would have him until the end of my life. His death was a huge event for me. A parent is your past. A brother is your future. I felt that my future had been wiped out.”

Thou gh McCann had planned to end the stories in the 1960s, he felt the need to address the AIDS epidemic, the AIDS epidemic, which almost wiped out a whole generation of gay men. “[AIDS] became life,” McCann said of the losses he suffered in the 1980s and ‘90s. In the stories, the narrator focuses on a lover’s beautiful hair as the man slips into dementia, or a sweet Filipino man dying alone in a attic apartment in Paris.

Struggling with his own losses, the narrator tries to handle them differently than his mother. “I am very aware that the mother is grieving at the beginning of the book and kind of absent. The narrator is grieving at the end, but trying to figure out how to remain present.”

McCann has compared “Mother of Sorrows” to his own version of “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” Eugene O’Neill’s epic ode to tortured Irish families.

“It is sort of a joke, but sort of not,” said McCann. “It was my mother’s favorite play. She’d say, “This is what it means to be us,” as an Irish Catholic person. There’s that connection, with Irish Catholicism, where you’re living in the past, but have an ability to live in the present, as well.”

Like “Long Day’s Journey,” McCann’s real and fictional mother's shadow his stories. “Even when the mother is absent, they are still listening to the sounds when she is banging around upstairs,” said McCann. “In some ways, you are even more aware of her offstage than on.”

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Q&A: Sarah Manguso's Catastrophic Illness Memoir "Two Kinds of Decay"

(Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger in June 2008)

The poet Sarah Manguso was attending Harvard University in 1995 when she was struck down by a rare autoimmune disease called CIDP, where the body produces antibodies that destroys the nervous system. Manguso went through 50 plasma replacements and at times suffered almost complete paralysis. The disease went into remission in 1999, but was then followed by five years of severe depression.

In her new memoir “The Two Kinds of Decay”(FSG, $22), Manguso uses stripped down vignettes to create the terror of a disease that may start as numbness in the feet, but will completely incapacitate and even kill it sufferers. This is not a “rah-rah” survivor story, but a brutal tale told with black humor about Manguso’s refusal to capitulate to a devastating disease. It is a story about infected chest tubes, experimental drug protocols, sex as a lifesaving measure and a fierce woman coming back from an absolute physical collapse and steroid-induced depression.

Manguso, 34, was educated at Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the author of two poetry collections, “Siste Viator” and “The Captain Lands in Paradise,” and has written for McSweeney’s and the Believer. Manguso spoke to freelance writer Dylan Foley by telephone from Rome, where she is a fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Q. What brought you to writing your memoir?

A. It was in the summer of 2006. I was at the MacDowell Colony (in New Hampshire), trying to write a third poetry collection. I wrote an essay about social class that mentioned the tube in my heart. When I wrote the essay, I realized that I needed to write another essay about the tube and contextualize it. I just kept writing. I gave myself the project of writing one vignette a day from those years. It was a pleasant, easy exercise because I wasn’t thinking about it as a book. There was no pressure.

Q. Why do you use short, stark episodes, and are they influenced by your work as a poet?

A. You are on to something when you accuse me of being a poet. I really only had practice writing short texts, very short stories and poems. I was doing what I was comfortable doing. I don’t really like description. It seems like filler.

Q. Why did you get rid of the doctor who expressed pity over your medical condition?

A. It really was a strong instinct. It was a result of several facets of my personality and my surroundings. I was at this strange college and had grown up in New England, where people tend to be reserved. I had some very strong instincts on what would be helpful in my recovery. Not all of them were correct. I refused to talk to psychiatrists when I was still very sick. They kept sending them into my hospital room and I kept sending them out. I thought that if I started feeling anything, it would consume me, and I didn’t have time for that. That is what informed my reaction to my doctor. I know he meant well, but he did not align with the goals I set for myself. I was 21 and I thought I knew everything. I was very hard headed.

Q. At one point you seek “the cure” with your friend Victor, having sex so you can stop the antibodies that are destroying your body. What made you do this?

A. I was young and hadn’t had a lot of opportunities to goof around. I guess I had the young person’s concept of the power of meaningful sexual intercourse. The character I called Victor was really a uniquely generous and almost mythically empathetic person. It just made sense.

Q. Towards the end of the book, you are rather hard on yourself, that the years battling your autoimmune disease damaged your own sense of empathy. How did you address this?

A. I don’t think that I was being hard enough on myself in the book. I’ve really become a very hard person. For a long time, I was unwilling to address that for fear of the self pity and anger I might feel. I went ahead as this hard, not-so-self-aware, not very empathetic person. In 2004, I had this very unstable euphoria. It was a wild time. At the end of that period, I realized I had to change my life and completely breakdown all my hard ideas on how to function and how to treat other people. After 2004, I started handling the things I had refused to address.