Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in
2-3 sentences?
Through Jewish and French Canadian family stories, meditations on my
family’s glamorous past in 1970s and 80s New York City, and the tale of
caretaking my vibrant and charming mother with Alzheimer’s while confronting my
sister’s drug addiction, I explore memory: tyrannical in trauma, compulsive in
nostalgia, and tragic when lost. Through this lens, my memoir unravels dazzling
ancestral myths and damaging family secrets, and in the process explores the
possibility of rewriting one’s own story to reconcile traumas both personal and
generational.
Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why? And,
which essay gave you the most trouble, and why?
My favorite to write was the first, “A Taxonomy of the Unknown,” which
uses French Canadian genealogical research and my Franco American family’s
personal mythology to get at the ethos that my mother created for me growing
up, an ethos that in many ways preferenced the unreal, the romantic, and the
wished-for to the real. Discovering that many hundred-year old family stories
as well as archetypal French Canadian origin stories were suspect helped me
piece together the larger themes of the book—that the stories that you make up
for yourself can be as integral a part of your identity as what’s fact. Another
thing I loved about this essay was that it took me about 20 years to understand
the significance of genealogical records that I’d dug up in Quebec on a grant
in 1997. Many people told me to look up those records—in Quebec this is a very
popular thing to do, because the French Canadian genealogical record is nearly
unparalleled in its endogamy and comprehensiveness. Ultimately, I was able to
use the data to show the evanescence of genealogical “truths” and a practically
complete family tree. I had over a thousand ancestral stories to choose from,
but none of those stories was complete. In some ways, the data only allowed me
to imagine my own story more richly, but in a way that I could see was more
imagination than fact.
The one that gave me the most trouble also had its seed in the research
trip that took me to Quebec in 1997, “Ghosts.” This grant also brought me to
Maine and Boston to research my family history, but, subsequently, I had to
research and write the essay several times. This was because, first, I lost the
manuscript—a short story that I submitted for my graduate creative writing
workshop. After the workshop, the carton containing the original manuscript and
the copies with my peers’ and professor’s comments was mistakenly discarded
during a move. Luckily, I still had my research notes and transcripts of
interviews with family members, so I used them to piece together another essay
which, seeming to lack something, led me on a subsequent research trip to
re-interview several of the subjects on the mid 2000s. By that time my mother
had Alzheimer’s and couldn’t answer new questions that the research unearthed,
but by going through the research carefully and revisiting some pieces of it, I
was able to unearth the family secret. Thank goodness I didn’t publish the
earlier version of the essay, because unlocking the family secret also unlocked
the significance of the story of the essay and its theme—transgenerational
trauma. That, in turn, gave me the key to unlock the book itself. This was the
last essay that I wrote before the book was selected for publication (I wrote
one other after the fact). It was the Rosetta stone, really. Until then, I had
a book manuscript that didn’t quite know what it was about. I’d written an
adventure story, but its center was missing.
What boundaries did you break in the writing of this
memoir? Where does that sort of courage come from? Tell us a bit about the
highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
In a sense, my story was too good a story—single mother, fashion model
and 1970s New York City doyenne gets Alzheimer’s while living with
dysfunctional grown daughter in a walkup in Queens and becomes charming and
broke wander risk. Narrator must manage. It was Grey Gardens meets An
Unmarried Woman—too easy. This narrative was seductive to both me and
literary agents, and led me on the wrong path entirely. I wrote several
versions of this book manuscript, and it was never very good. It wasn’t until I
took a workshop with the editor Karen Braziller and read Vivian Gornick’s The
Situation and the Story that I understood the central missing piece, that
this had to be my story, not a story about other dramatic, interesting,
and tragic characters. However, I was still tied to the advice that my writing,
when not subjected to the utmost rigor, moved around in time and space too
much. It moved in ellipses and spirals, and it kept repetitively going over the
same material. What broke ground was perhaps that I finally gave in to my
instincts to tell a story that mimicked the experience of traumatic and
nostalgic memory, revisiting images and incidents, and shifting from different
points in the past to different points in the present repeatedly. The latter—a
shifting and non-chronological present moment—owed to the fact that I was
writing the book while my mother’s condition was progressing, and then through
her death and into the aftermath of grief—for me—and homelessness—for my
sister. Over this present moment, episodes from the past would assert
themselves in no particular order. In organizing the book, I struggled between
ordering it according to the progression of events in the past or the progression
of events in the present. Finally, I realized that the overlay of many pasts
onto many presents revealed just the right the mind state for the book, and so
I chose themes, instead, as an organizing principle. This in part came from
advice by the writer Mira Bartok, who worked with me on a manuscript
consultation. Mira’s book The Memory Palace also works in this way, so
my structure is perhaps not exactly groundbreaking, but it does feel to
be an essential and unusual element for so dramatic a plot. The courage of
going with this non-traditional structure definitely came from failure. At a
certain point of having worked on the book for so long and having had several
agents but no book contract, there seemed nothing to lose in writing exactly the
book that I wanted to write.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice? My
favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What
surprised you in the writing of this book?
My favorite advice for writing memoir is an amalgam of Vivian Gornick’s
“find the inner story” and John Gardner’s insight that all stories are about
the transformation of a central character through an escalating sequence of
challenges and tests. So, I ask memoir writers, how are you and not your
subjects the central protagonist in your story? How are the stories that you
are telling your story, and what do you—the protagonist—have to discover
in order to change. What surprised me was how hard this actually was for me to
do, and how, when I finally did, how obvious the answers were. My story was
that I had internalized my mother’s central trauma, without even knowing what
it was. Once I got to the root of it and discovered our family secret, I was
able to see how that secret—and my mother’s shame and evasiveness surrounding
it—had contributed to my own traumas and shame, and to dysfunctional systems in
my family growing up. Discovering her secret give me the distance to see
clearly not only her story, but mine.
Who is your ideal reader?
My story felt very dramatic to me when I was experiencing it, but in
connecting with readers and friends I’ve realized that most aspects of it are
universal, and not just in a general sense. My ideal reader sees her or himself
in my story. With the aging of the baby boomers, many grown daughters and sons
who have led unconventional lives so far find themselves in the surprising
position of having to take care of someone when they can still barely take care
of themselves. Also, many people find themselves at the intersection of the
opioid epidemic and the Alzheimer’s epidemic. The scheme that seemed so
unworkable in my family—dysfunctional child is living with ailing parent and
becomes that parent’s caretaker but is completely unequipped to do so, and
other, functional sibling who has a full-time job must step in—is in fact,
systemically speaking, inevitable. Another thread that will feel familiar to
many readers is that when one or especially two family members are in crisis,
the bottom falls out quickly and surprisingly, because in the U.S. there is no
safety net. That my mother could not qualify for insurance-covered home care
felt wrong to me in so many ways. That my sister lived with her only lessened
my mother’s eligibility, whether or not my sister was functional. In fact, I
was called by adult protective services to be told that my mother was in danger
on the same day that another government agency rejected her for services. This
inspires a kind of rage that others can surely relate to. I am not the only
person who has been let down by social services, and, on top of that, to have
an experience of extreme panic and distress along the way. The book, in its
way, suggests a political agenda that I hope will connect with readers who see
the grand scale of the problems posed by the Alzheimer’s epidemic (and opioid
epidemic) and what they reveal about the shortcomings of our medical and social
services.
Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated
with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)
My mother loved traditions, but they had to be made up, and this
possibly explains the fact that our family celebrations invariably involved a
cake that has no known origin in any of the traditions we actually hail from.
This is Paschka, a delicious Russian Orthodox Easter cake that in our family
was always made with a ricotta cheese base, and was set to mold in the
refrigerator overnight in a flower pot—though we never had a garden,
houseplants, or any other use for ceramic flower pots. We had to go out to the
store to buy the flower pot each time (why we didn’t save one, I am not sure).
Traditionally, this cake is decorated with the Eastern Orthodox cross, but my
mother always decorated ours with pale purple-colored candied lavender from the
nearby Hungarian shop on upper Second Avenue, Paprikash, and edible flowers
such as nasturtiums—or inedible ones, because, why not? Like most things in the
model’s diet, this one is extremely high in fat but not high in sugar—my mother
used to eat buttered toast with a pat of butter on each slice and still stay
thin.
INGREDIENTS
2 egg yolks
1 c whipping cream
Dash of salt
1/2 c sugar
1 t vanilla extract
6 c ricotta cheese
1⁄2 c room-temperature butter
1⁄4 c roasted almond slices
candied lavender
fresh flowers
Cheesecloth
Place egg yolks, cream, salt, and sugar in a saucepan and cook on low
heat until they form a custard, about 10 minutes
Remove from heat, stir in vanilla
In a glass bowl, using a wooden spoon, combine ricotta and butter, and
then add egg yolk mixture
Stir in almonds
Line a medium sized clay flowerpot with damp cheesecloth
Pour cheese mixture into pot; fold ends of cheesecloth over top. Place
pot face up on a plate and place weights over the cheesecloth the help drain
excess moisture through the hole in the bottom of the flowerpot
Refrigerate overnight, removing any water from the plate
Remove cake from flowerpot by upending it, and carefully remove
cheesecloth. Decorate outside with flowers and candied lavender
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MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR:
https://elizabethkadetsky.com/
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AN EXCERPT OF THIS BOOK, “The Memory Pavilion”:
