the last book I ever read (Are You My Mother? excerpt four)

from Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama:

Near the end of the book tour, I was talking with Mom.

Peggy Harris said something to Barbara about the book, about how terrible it was that you'd done this to your mother.

Huh.

She had shared a few of these second- and third-hand reports from friends.

Y'know, at my readings, someone always asks, "What does your mother this of all this?"

Really?

Yeah, and I say, well, you're not happy about it, but at the same time you have a kind of aesthetic distance.

Wait, I just read something interesting about memoir. Hang on.

Are you there?

Uh huh.

It's by Dorothy Gallagher.

"The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. Not, you may note, to serve her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve the story."

Wow.