The Night Garden: Of My Mother is a memoir that delves into the intricacies of familial bonds, offering an exploration of love, frustration, and the ties between mothers and daughters. Why was this an important book for you to write?

To be honest, I don’t know that I ever weighed the importance of writing this book. If I had, Night Garden may have developed much more heavy-handedly, suppressing the real life of these characters — as they finally are just that, characters. Traditionally, I am a fiction writer, so I have learned how to allow characters their own lived lives on the page.

At the same time, the mother/daughter dynamic has always been central to my writing, to my novels, however subconscious. In my first novel, Blue Glass, I naturally fell into the first-person perspective of an only child, which I am, to explore the nuanced mother/daughter relationship. The mother in that novel is entirely fictional – I honestly don’t know where she came from, as she is the complete opposite “character” of my mother. But what I do think I pulled from—again, subconsciously—was the integral bond between my mother and me; that intensity of love and devotion of the only daughter.

Though I have to say, this memoir was finally so much harder to write than my novels because the subject was right there in front of me – it was lived. What was most difficult was finding the structure – writing of scene comes naturally to me, and many of these moments I dramatized through the years as they were happening. Other scenes are a kind of consolidation of events, to concentrate a truth. I think I knew I had strong material here, even if it was hard to write. And perhaps in the writing, I was able to objectify in a way that offered me a layer of emotional protection—the harder that things became for me and my mother, the more I wished I could distance myself from it all.

What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?

The Night Garden chronicles a period in my life when I was deeply divided between my roles as a mother and daughter, by both distance and powerful emotional pulls—I had my two children in my 40s when my mother was already in her late 80s. When my mother falls and breaks her hip, what I recall best is being unable to nurse my three month old while she was in Emergency, the physical feeling of being torn between my mother’s needs and my children’s. This torn feeling I believe is far more universal than we realize, as women are having children later in life. Granted, my situation was even more skewed, as my mother too had me later in life. But there is something to be said for the fact that birthrates have fallen in every age group except for women in their forties. Women, whether in relation to children or their own parents, are still most likely to be the designated primary caregivers.

I appreciated the candid nature with which you told your story. What was the hardest thing for you to write about?

I think the hardest was reliving that period when my mother manifested dementia — it was a quick and deep descent in her last two years, and one much darker than I experienced with my father — my father’s deterioration was over the span of 13 years, and while he was diagnosed with Alzheimers, the terrain of his dementia was much gentler. No deep descents. My mother would find herself locked in empty churches, dental chairs and in jail. The hardest moment was when she no longer recognized her own home, what she’d always referred to as her “happy house;” and in that lack of recognition, I already felt left behind, as I would wandering that house alone once she was gone.

The second hardest was writing about the grueling lesson of navigating the dementia, one I learned from her aide who had witnessed this dynamic between child and parent so many times before. She understood my desperation in needing to convince my mother that she was not actually locked in a church, but at home in bed with her beloved two cats. In my denial was indeed, a refusal to let go. So instead of trying to convince my mother that she wasn’t locked in a church, I learned how to soothe her in the moment, to promise I would send a parishioner drive her home. But my desperation finally was born out of a stubborn denial — on some level, however old we are, we are still the child unable to imagine losing a parent, however fraught that relationship was or wasn’t historically. Once stripped of our role as child, how do we reimagine ourselves? And how might this reimagining impact our own roles as mothers?

What do you hope is one thing readers take away from your story?

I’ve already received messages about how Night Garden is helping those currently in caregiving roles, whether or not they are balancing young children as well. I do hear mostly from women, who appreciate my candor about conflicted feelings: unable to bear that thought of losing a parent— of our role as child— while resentful of the toll caregiving is having on our own lives and mental health. We are no longer a society of extended families — at best, we are families scattered across the country, so that usually the caregiving does fall to one child, one sibling. Readers of my story I hope will feel a little bit less alone in what finally may be an inevitable quagmire, but also forgive themselves for feeling conflicted; the child/parent relationship is resounding in its complexity, if not always rooted in unconditional love.

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