Benign Neglect
Hearing the news about CEOs and Hollywood stars implicated in the recent college admission scandal infuriates and inspires me. I am a writing coach, with three published novels, numerous essays, and decades of teaching high school and college students with stints in schools blacklisted by the Chicago Police Department for gang activity and schools famous for the wealth of its students, the rigor of its classes and its social pressure. I work with rich kids, poor kids, and everything in between. My message to them remains the same, tell your story, tell it well. Teenagers need to be allowed to find their own identities through music and books and their peers and teachers. Not their parents.
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Public Writing
Although my father, the literary critic and novelist Julian Moynahan, had writing and reading space in a separate building in our back yard, nicknamed by my mother, “The Ivory Tower” my clearest memory is not one of a static writer sitting at a desk but more one about edges, the side of the dining room table, the kitchen counter, a chair in the living room. He had his solitary side but clearly he found inspiration when his time was short, compressed, dictated by dinner and putting out the garbage, the only domestic duty I recall him performing.
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Growing Up with the Trojan Woman
She was never a normal mother. Normal mothers in the sixties wore aprons and used Tupperware and stayed home unless they were teachers or nurses. No one’s mother was an architect or graduated from Harvard or washed her hair in the kitchen sink. She was beautiful and walked and swam as if time was running out. A repeating memory of her disappearing, her long legs moving her too fast for me to catch up, her stroke was a crawl that would leave you gasping for breath. My repeated dream was she was dead, in a coffin and I was being told to tell her goodbye.
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