The Weight on My Shoulders

My mother had a sad life. Her three children, my sister, my brother and I took the brunt of a part of that sad life. Many of the details about her struggles and ours I wrote about in “The Wheaton Girl,” an essay published in the Fall 2025 issue of North American Review. I tried to do her life justice, to be fair to her. I hope I succeeded. In the end, my mother, Marianna Rehling Goodman, who died in 1996, lived a sad life. That’s a fact I came back to again and again in my effort to be fair with her on the page. 

My mother grew up in the 1930s and 1940s, when it was rare for women to go to college and even more rare for women to have a career. What talents and ambitions these women had, what yearnings for self-realization, they often sacrificed to their role of wife and being a mother. What these women might have done! Yes, they raised their children, and that is a most difficult, all-consuming and crucial job, but there is little room in that calling to exert the measure of your powers, to become who you dreamed you might be.

I wanted to write about the struggles and disappointments my mother had. There was so much I didn’t know. I talked to her about her past and about my father—her husband—about their marriage and divorce and about her heavy drinking and her lonely life after leaving my father. We spoke for hours and hours on the phone. She told me things I never knew before about her and about her life. One question and revelation led to another. I discovered so much, and we became closer just by my listening. I took pages of notes. 

“Are you going to write about this, Richie?” She asked me one day. “Please don’t publish anything while I’m alive. People I know might read it. They don’t know I was a drunk.”

Yes, she said that. I feel uneasy even now even telling you what she said about her drinking years after her death. It feels like a posthumous betrayal.

What I wrote about her wasn’t just about her difficulties with her children and about her pain. I wrote about her intelligence, her humor, her spirit, her beauty, and how much I loved her and still do. I wrote about the young woman who went to Wheaton College and who made lifelong friends there and who experienced her mind awakening and saw her intelligence recognized. I wanted to show that side of her. Because it was her, as much as her pain and her despair.

There is a point I want to make to writers who might read this. Or a caution, perhaps. If you write about people you know, about family or friends, alive or not, you have their fate in your hands. They will be seen as you depict them on the page. You will include what you feel is relevant, necessary to your story, sometimes dark and ugly matters, and leave out things about them, perhaps even positive things they might like to be known, because that’s not part of that story as you see it.

I felt the weight of that responsibility on my shoulders as I wrote about my mother. At times, that weight made me feel uneasy. Was I being fair, was I being just? I wanted the reader to know I was aware that any decision—including literary decisions—has consequences that go beyond the page. If I took that responsibility seriously, as I hope I did, readers will sense that.

Because your subjects have no say in the matter. Yes, I know that sometimes writers show what they’ve written to people they write about, especially family, before they publish their stories. That certainly is a choice. If you do, be prepared for them to ask you to cut or change your words, even great portions of them. If you’re ready for that, fine. You will have their blessing—or not. I can also tell you from experience that a person’s reaction can be very different when they read something before it’s published than when it is published and the words are out in the world and cannot ever be changed.

Objectivity in your memoir is impossible. You are seeing things through your eyes. You are not a camera. Ask someone else who was there, and they will give you a different story. And fairness? Your idea of fairness may not coincide with someone else’s, especially with the person or people you’re writing about. (I know. I have experienced blowback from one of my pieces about family I thought was fair.)  Does this mean you shouldn’t write the truth as you know it? That you should avoid anything ugly or painful? Of course not. But sometimes it’s easier to be truthful than it is to be truthful and fair. It is a balancing act that may prove to be daunting. But daunting is not a good reason not to attempt something.

There are other writers who, on hearing a plea like my mother’s from a family member will announce, “I’ll do what I please. It’s not her story, or his or theirs. It’s mine. I have a right to say—and publish—anything I want.” I’ve heard this from young writers as a teacher. I’ve heard it from other writers. I’ve seen what can happen afterwards. It can cause chasms that can’t be closed. For some writers, that’s acceptable. But I don’t think fairness should be a result of a fear of consequences. It exists apart from whatever might happen after people read your words. It exists because fair is fair.

It took me a few years to get my piece to where I felt I couldn’t do any better. I had to come to grips first with my own anger at my mother, with her alcoholism that drew all the air out of the room and made her all but abandon her role as a mother. I didn’t publish my essay while she was alive, though. She was living in an assisted care home in Florida, and the idea that one of her dinner table mates might read it and ask her about it and even tell others about it and ask her if she still drank and who knows what else, made it impossible for me to try to publish the piece. I never showed it to her, either. There was just—too much there. Too many raw sores. I’d written truthfully, I thought, and even-handedly. But would I want such things exposed about me while I was alive, even if they were true? I put the essay in a drawer.

My mother died relatively young, at 78. She hadn’t taken care of herself very well. In addition to the alcohol, she smoked most of her life. And she had some heart problems, as well. A few years after she died, I pulled the essay out of the drawer. She couldn’t be hurt by my words now, even if that was never my intention. I began looking for a publisher. I sent the essay everywhere I could think of. One after another, journals and magazines rejected it, even places that had accepted other pieces I’d written. They all said no.

I didn’t give up, though, because it was important to me that people read my mother’s story. I wanted to show how hard it was to be a divorced woman in the 1950s in America with three young children to care for and a big stone of pain in your heart and not a lot of money. People do not have long memories, and a previous generation’s struggles and dramas with all the limitations and travails soon become history instead of memory. Lives become still and blurry and voiceless. It was important for her memory’s sake but also in case readers had a mother who lived a similar life or had an aunt or a friend’s mother who led a life like that. In case they knew a woman who felt more of life’s blows and setbacks than its joys and successes and who cried many tears and asked many unanswered questions. A woman who had her heart broken. 

So I was happy and relieved that North American Review took my essay and that it found a good home.

My mother often tried and failed, but that’s the thing, isn’t it? We all fail. We all fail at being the person we know we could be. We all come up short. We all hurt people. We all take more than we give too many times. That’s who I am. Weak, struggling, often lost.

William Faulkner said a writer must write with pity and compassion. I ask myself, would I want someone to write about me after I’m gone in the same manner as I wrote about my mother? If I can say, well, I may not be happy with everything they wrote, but at least they tried to be fair, at least they looked at the whole person, not just at my shortcomings, at least they looked at my life with pity and compassion and understanding and love, then maybe I can rest in peace.

Richard Goodman is the author of French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France. He is also the author of A New York Memoir and The Bicycle Diaries: One New Yorker's Journey Through 9-11. He is co-editor of The Gulf South: An Anthology of Environmental Writing. He also writes on Substack. Author photo by Ellis Anderson.