My Mother’s Blessing To Be A Writer

It’s been eleven years since my mother passed away, eleven years since I last heard her voice. She was sixty-three years old, unquestionably too young. After she died, I began paying attention to the experiences friends had with similar losses. Some of them spoke of messages they believed their loved ones had sent – birds outside their window, rabbits waiting in the driveway, rainbows out of nowhere, a sudden sense of peace. My heart broke with jealousy when I heard about their encounters because I felt no such pull, saw no such signals.

A few years later, I signed up for a writing class. I had been carrying a story in my head for almost ten years, and it was finally time for me to write it down. Although the story was inspired by my mother’s childhood home in Brooklyn, I never once discussed the idea for it with her. The story became my first novel, The Two-Family House, and I was lucky enough to have it published in 2016. On the day it was released, I waited for a sign – something to show me that she approved. I wanted her beside me, but all I felt was her absence, painful and raw.

My mother loved me intensely, but there were certain things about me that she never understood: why I loved old musicals, why craft projects littered the floor of my bedroom, why I was always at the library, checking out novels. The creative side of me was a mystery to her. She had always been so proud of my law degree, and she’d been disappointed when I gave up my practice.

After The Two-Family House was released, I received emails from dozens of readers, many of them close to my mother’s age. I was surprised by how many of them had read my acknowledgments, which mentioned my mother and her childhood home. They asked about her Brooklyn neighborhood, and which high school she attended. They remembered the 1947 blizzard, and the name of my mother’s street. One woman wrote to say that she had lived on that street and had known my grandmother and my aunts. I wished my mother were alive so I could show her all the letters. I ached to share this new experience with her, and I was angry that I could not.

In November of that year, I was invited to Florida, to speak at a Jewish Book Month luncheon. I was one of four authors presenting that day. Volunteers picked up authors at the airport to give them rides, and it turned out my volunteer was a woman I knew. She had raised her family in Longmeadow – the town where I grew up –and she had been one of my mother’s most loyal home catering customers. The coincidence was astonishing. At the luncheon the next day, she was the one to introduce me. She spoke of my mother, and our family connection. The room was filled to capacity, and when I approached the podium, I had to clasp my hands together to keep them from shaking.

Not surprisingly, my second novel is also inspired by certain aspects of my mother’s early family life. When she was a teenager, she moved from Brooklyn to Springfield, Massachusetts. The characters in The Wartime Sisters are more than two decades older than my mother, but I wrote about sisters and Springfield because of her, and I thought about her constantly as I wove my narrative. Still, it was only when I re-read The Wartime Sisters for a final round of edits that I put down my pen and burst into tears.

There’s a parable I’ve heard several times – rabbis tell it in their sermons, at holidays and bar-mitzvahs. It’s a story about our failure to recognize signs, about a man and a flood and waters rising over a home. The man is approached by a rescue boat and a helicopter, but each time help is offered, he refuses assistance because he is convinced that God will intervene to save his life. After he dies, he asks God why He didn’t help. God replies, “Who do you think sent the boat and the helicopter?”

During that last read-through of my second book, I finally realized what I should have recognized years earlier: My mother’s abiding influence on me was my rescue boat, my helicopter. For years, I had been searching for signs of her presence, but there she was in black and white – on every page. It shouldn’t have surprised me, but grief and insecurity had obscured my view.

I had always assumed I became a writer in spite of what my mother wished for me, but I realize now that I’m a writer in large part because of her. It was her stories, her lessons, and even her skepticism that led me to forge my own creative path.

Now, as the publication date of my second novel approaches, the sting of my mother’s absence is beginning to dissipate. When I compose dialogue, I hear her voice and her expressions. When I search my brain to form my characters, I see her red lipstick and violet eyes. For as long as I write, my mother’s life will shape my stories.

—

Lynda Cohen Loigman grew up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. She received a B.A. in English and American Literature from Harvard College and a law degree from Columbia Law School. Lynda practiced trusts and estates law in New York City for eight years before moving out of the city to raise her two children with her husband. Her first novel, The Two-Family House, was chosen by Goodreads as a best book of the month for March, 2016, and was nominee for the Goodreads 2016 Choice Awards in Historical Fiction. Her second novel, The Wartime Sisters, will be published in January of 2019.

Website | Facebook | Twitter | Amazon

About THE WARTIME SISTERS

For fans of Lilac Girls, the next powerful novel from the author of Goodreads Choice Awards semifinalist The Two-Family House about two sisters working in a WWII armory, each with a deep secret.

“Loigman’s strong voice and artful prose earn her a place in the company of Alice Hoffman and Anita Diamant, whose readers should flock to this wondrous new book.” ―Pam Jenoff, New York Times bestselling author of The Orphan’s Tale

“The Wartime Sisters shows the strength of women on the home front: to endure, to fight, and to help each other survive.” ―Jenna Blum, New York Times and international bestselling author of The Lost Family and Those Who Save Us

Two estranged sisters, raised in Brooklyn and each burdened with her own shocking secret, are reunited at the Springfield Armory in the early days of WWII. While one sister lives in relative ease on the bucolic Armory campus as an officer’s wife, the other arrives as a war widow and takes a position in the Armory factories as a “soldier of production.” Resentment festers between the two, and secrets are shattered when a mysterious figure from the past reemerges in their lives.

“One of my favorite books of the year.” ―Fiona Davis, national bestselling author of The Dollhouse and The Masterpiece

“A stirring tale of loyalty, betrayal, and the consequences of long-buried secrets.” ―Kristina McMorris, New York Times bestselling author of The Edge of Lost and Sold on a Monday

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing