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Hope and a Greater Compassion
In The Momma Puzzle. you share the childhood memories, stories from relatives, and letters that shape your experiences over decades of trying to understand your mother who died by suicide when you were a young girl. What inspired you to share your story with readers?
Ever since my mother died, I knew that I wanted to write a book about her. But I was warned as a child never to talk about her suicide. Through the weight of that secrecy and taboo and repression, I sensed there was an important story there to tell.
I wanted to tell Momma’s story in a way that would allow readers to see her as a human being, not merely as a terrible person, or a bad mother, or some kind of monster.
As a writer, and as her daughter, I was also embarking on a journey, through the process of writing the book, to discover as much as I could about who she had been and why she had to die in the way that she did.
How did your understanding of your mother change as you moved through letters, photographs, and medical records?
Since this is a memoir, the characters are, or were, real people. But for the purposes of writing the book and telling a story, these real people become created characters. I try to stay as close to the truth as possible, though, and use the process of writing to get even closer to the truth—even to create truth along with meaning, which gets at the value of art.
The character of Momma first appears as a young woman in the 1950s—the fresh, young, enthusiastic, adventurous college student who departs for a job in Saigon as a foreign service secretary. Through letters home to her best friend, and to my future father, Momma keenly observes life and politics in Vietnam; later she’s a newlywed, soon with one child, then two (the younger of whom was me); then comes her downward spiral toward suicide.
The character of the narrator (based on myself) is at first full of questions about Momma, and by the end reaches some understanding of who Momma had been, that her struggles were set in motion long before the narrator (I) was conceived.
Did writing the memoir change any of your relationships with surviving family members?
My relationships with my surviving family members have either improved or are stable/ unchanged since writing my memoir.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from your memoir?
I hope readers will take away hope and a greater compassion for people who die by suicide.
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The Momma Puzzle
Hilary Plattner’s The Momma Puzzle is a memoir about a daughter trying, across decades, to understand the mother who died by suicide when she was six. Plattner builds the book like an excavation, moving through childhood memories, family silences, old letters, medical records, obituaries, photographs, and the stories of relatives who remember too much, too little, or not quite enough. What emerges is not only a portrait of “Momma,” Ann Plattner, but also a tender, unsettled account of inheritance: grief passed through rooms, documents, voices, and even birthdays. The memoir begins with the terrible bewilderment of a child who doesn’t know how to answer the phone when someone asks for her mother, then widens into a search that reaches back to Ann’s father Henry, forward into Plattner’s own motherhood, and finally toward a hard-won farewell to shame.
What moved me most is how carefully Plattner resists the easy shape of blame. This could have been a book of accusation, or a book determined to absolve everyone, but it’s more honest than that. I felt the weight of the author’s longing in small, almost domestic details: the sequined fish Momma made for a sea-themed birthday party, the afternoon reading Charlotte’s Web in the bedroom where she would later die, the box of letters that becomes both treasure and wound. Plattner lets these objects carry emotional pressure without forcing them to become symbols too neatly. I found that restraint deeply affecting. The book understands that love for the dead is rarely clean. It can be protective, baffled, angry by absence rather than by rage, and still fiercely loyal.
The writing has a searching, conversational intimacy that I appreciated. Plattner often circles a memory, returns to it, reconsiders it, and then turns it in the light again, which gives the memoir the feel of a mind working in real time. At moments, that repetition can feel heavy, especially when the investigation moves through family history and documents, but I also think that heaviness is part of the point. Trauma doesn’t arrive as a tidy revelation. It gathers, misfiles itself, slips out of folders, waits in a photograph. The strongest idea in the book, for me, is that understanding may not mean solving the mystery in any absolute sense. It may mean learning where the story no longer belongs to you. When Plattner reads the medical records and begins to see that her mother’s path toward suicide began long before motherhood, the emotional shift is quiet but enormous. The daughter is not erased from the story, but she is released from being its cause.
I finished The Momma Puzzle feeling sobered, softened, and grateful for its refusal to turn pain into spectacle. It’s a memoir about suicide, but even more, it’s about secrecy, memory, motherhood, and the brave, imperfect work of telling a family story without pretending to own the final truth of it. Plattner has written a book that doesn’t close the wound so much as teach the reader how to sit beside it with more compassion. I’d recommend it to readers who appreciate reflective memoirs about family history, complicated grief, mothers and daughters, inherited trauma, and the fragile mercy of finally saying goodbye.
Pages: 340 | ASIN : B0G4G51M3D
