Somewhere, Freud remarks that he who is his mother’s favorite will carry that victory with him to the end of his days. I believe this may well be the case for me—but, as many other favored children can confirm, the victory is almost always a Pyrrhic one. How do I know this? Well, in part because I’ve spent the past two years both contemplating the possibility of my imminent demise and writing another novel about my mother.

That’s right—another one. When I embarked on writing this second novel about my mother, Elaine, my wife remarked laconically, Well, finally you get to sleep with her. But even if Oedipus is never far behind once Freud has been invoked, it’s not his incestuous role that I’ve assumed this time, for the novel is written from her point of view—my mother’s.

Which implies that I get to be her having sex, rather than—in an obsolete locution that she, nonetheless, at one time preferred—have her. I accept the emotional realities of this, and in what follows, I am as willing as I’ve ever been to expose myself. Yeats’s father, the painter John Butler Yeats, stated that “a work of art is the social act of a solitary man”—how much more solitary still is the novelist, who invents the social worlds he frequents. I’ve always worried I wasn’t quite solitary enough, given the amplitude of my ambition, but as my illness has intensified and my symptoms have become more troubling, I’ve found the social realm inimical to me as never before. The formication beneath my skin, together with a tight, burning sensation on its surface, is the result of the cancer: myelofibrosis, which, while doing its thing, somehow messes with the histamine content in my skin.

How exactly? How the hell should I know—I’m a writer, not an oncologist, and as of now, a pretty irritable one. The formication seems just, though, in a ghastly, Book of Job way: the objective correlative of that disaffection from one’s fellows and their finagling that goes with the job of satirizing them on the page. Be that as it may, the artist must gain more from chance than he loses—and just as my illness has gifted me with insight I wish I’d had ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, when I was trying to realize the lives of others with as much youthful verve as empathy born of emotional maturity, and when my eldest brother and I found my mother’s diaries, while she was dying. It was far too great a donnée to pass up. Jumbled up in a brown cardboard box in her North London apartment were over thirty different notebooks, in which she’d kept diaries between the years 1949, when she was twenty-eight, and 1986, two years before she died.

Born Elaine Rosenbloom in Middletown, Ohio, in 1921, the daughter of an advertising man, himself the son of an itinerant cantor, and a mother who had likely been born in the Pale of Settlement, she was a week short of her sixty-seventh birthday when she died from metastatic breast cancer at the Royal Ear Hospital, which is a few hundred yards from Gordon Square, where Virginia Woolf established herself as the cynosure of her first little talking shop. Would it have pleased Mother to die in Bloomsbury, if not as one of the Bloomsbury Group? Well, there are no counterfactuals—the world is simply “everything that is the case,” according to no lesser an authority than Ludwig Wittgenstein. And although it’s the case that if I make it through this year, my life will have been saved by a stem-cell transplant performed in the hospital (University College) down the road from the one where she died, I find this coincidence as serendipitous to me as a writer as I find it minatory as a man.

Indeed, as I walked toward the bright and shiny cancer center at University College Hospital and noted the gaunt old Royal Ear on the next block, I felt . . . well, perhaps as the poet or poets we call Homer did, when he/she/they, after many hexameters, miles, and years, finally tied the plot threads of Odysseus and Telemachus together in that narrative-resolving swineherd’s hut. I heard yet again my mother’s voice in my inner ear, as I have myriad times in my writing career: “That’ll make good copy.”

I hope so. Yet the truth is, it was really Mother herself who provided me with some of my best copy over the years, as well as hung around, like a revenant with a library card, to read it.

She had had a lumpectomy, but we knew that after the surgery, the radio- and the chemotherapy, there was a possibility—indeed, a likelihood—the cancer would recur.

Yes—you try hanging on to bits of yourself, and then you lose the lot. While many would also subscribe to Philip Larkin’s life lesson—“Get out as early as you can, / And don’t have any kids yourself”—I’m still here, and I’ve had three marriages and four kids. Which surprises me, given how fissiparous my own family was: Mother proceeded through life from the Midwest, via New York, to London, like some charged emotional particle, smashing into this person or that family, and fissioning them in turn. Wilde’s great biographer, Richard Ellmann, said of the writer that he lived his life twice, first as a scapegrace, then as a scapegoat. The same could be said of Mother, whose first marriage—to the American academic and literary critic Robert Adams—played out in the leafy environs of Ithaca, New York, and whose second—to my father, the English political scientist Peter Self—reached a grim finale in the equally bosky byways of the Hampstead Garden Suburb in North London.

Each liaison lasted around fourteen years, the first producing an only child—my much older half brother—and the second myself, as well as my immediately older full brother. Each of these marriages was unhappy, but contra Tolstoy’s dictum, both were unhappy in much the same way, having been contracted by Mother out of neediness rather than love, and therefore, in their anfractuous courses, displaying a passionate turbulence, successively checked, dammed, and in full spate. I witnessed the collapse of the second of these marriages live: it constituted the very circumstances in which I came to consciousness. It took me another half century to learn more about the course and collapse of the first—and even then, it’s been only Mother’s version that I’ve had to go on.

In the diaries, her account of the end of that marriage, between the fall of 1954 and the fall of 1956, runs to well over five hundred pages. Most of these, written in Mother’s properly schooled, regular, cursive hand, are perfectly legible, despite their being often interspersed with all sorts of lists, minor essays, and at times outbreaks of mad doodling, her frenzied scribbling seemingly an unconscious (or, possibly, perfectly self-aware) representation of the awful migraines that plagued her for most of her life, and which at this time accompanied her equally awful premenstrual tension.

I have based my novel Elaine on these pages—and, in the process of parsing them exhaustively, have tried to absorb Mother’s style. Not that the novel is an attempt to reproduce it, but at times I nevertheless felt as if my own hand were gloved in Mother’s while she guided me from one line to the next. For, just as I have written the first drafts of at least ten of my books on one or another of the Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriters I inherited from her, so, with this book, I joined with Mother in writing the entire first draft longhand.

She never completed a novel of her own, though the diaries are interspersed with the occasional effort at fiction. But her own marginalia expresses her dissatisfaction with what she knows falls far short of her ambitions, vaunted on the same pages. A few detail a young woman’s reactions to her host at a party, and a few more essay the same in respect of a young woman being introduced to some chic New York bohemians, bearing evidence that their author was unable to resolve one of the basic issues involved in writing fiction, one I conceptualize as “What’s on the floor?” In order to create the lifeworlds of others, you have to be there in advance—you have to already know what’s on the floor, so to speak, before your character swings their feet out from under the covers and places them on that surface. Which means, in turn, that you don’t have to describe, or even consider it.

This noted, what Mother is brilliant at is showing us the rug being yanked from under her feet, again and again, in terse, breathless prose—sometimes girlishly purple, at others brusque with the idioms of the era. The setting of one simple three-act drama is the Cornell faculty milieu within which her first unhappy marriage subsisted, and beyond that the environs of Ithaca and the psychic penumbra of New York. Its themes are love and its lack; the social world and its vicissitudes; neurosis in all its most vomitous hues. The drama begins when the Adamses meet a new colleague at Cornell—a sociologist and his wife—and become fast friends. So fast, indeed, that Mother thinks this may well be it, that at last she has fallen properly in love. What follows is breathless, giddy, silly, sad, and tragic, as the two couples are attracted to each other first as couples, and then as individuals, a movement Mother expresses on the page by treating them first as types—then as characters.

Do the diaries have literary merit? It’s debatable, but they have definite value as documents detailing an important phase of social change: the return to gender-stereotyped domestic roles of educated women who had experienced a degree of autonomy—financial, emotional—during the Second World War, an experience many identify as the crucible within which second-wave feminism was formed.

Or do they? As I typed those words, I thought how pious and sententious they sounded to my inner ear: just the sort of thing a sixty-three-year-old valetudinarian male novelist might be expected to write about his troubled mother’s diaries, thereby molding the emotional mess of lived human life into the bricky quantifications of the dust we all become, and in the process placing himself on the right side of history. The truth is that, while the content of the diaries may have some significance, it’s their style that’s arresting, because in its very waywardness it embodies Mother’s own divagating life course. For her sons, who surely were in the best position to experience the particularity of her being, the last thing the diaries can be seen as is the justification of her abuse and neglect by reason of her life in mid-Fifties America being in some sense typical for women of her type. Mother’s behavior cannot merely be transliterated into social history.

When, after she died, we returned in the small hours to her small apartment and saw all those old American spiral-bound college exercise books scattered about the place, my eldest brother said something to the effect of: “Now it feels wrong to be reading these . . . ”

However, read them he did—and when I visited him at his house in upstate New York in the early Aughts, he gave me a complete photocopied set. I’d tried to read them myself a few times before that, but committed the error of beginning near the end, where Mother’s entries were beyond heartbreak, especially the ones about me, who, in between the lumpectomy and the soulectomy, had to be put—by her—into rehab for my heroin addiction. Guilt and shame were enough to keep me away from the things, except to fillet a few bits and pieces for How the Dead Live (2002), the first novel I wrote featuring a Mother-alike.

When I asked my brother for his overall impression, having read her entire Nachlass with the zeal of the scholar and completist that he is, he replied with characteristic pith: “She got better.” These three words served both to definitively pathologize her and to place her mental health on an ascending scale, one that coincidentally meant that mine and our other brother’s childhood—being cared for by this troubled if charismatic woman—was also, in his opinion, necessarily . . . better.

Can this be true? My eldest brother certainly seems to have had some of the troubles you’d expect from a childhood in an unhappy family, witnessing its radical disincorporation, and then his being transported across the Atlantic so that his mother could marry the English academic who, while on sabbatical at Cornell, had impregnated her with the child who was to become our other brother.

But better? Mother seemed to spend much of my childhood having her migraines and what she styled her “crises de nerfs,” which entailed retreats to bed for long sojourns with library books and Valium. There was quite a bit of drinking, too—although not nearly as much as there had been Stateside in the Fifties, if the diaries are to be credited. My father wasn’t a fighter, but there were fights. The marriage had been contracted in haste, and was repented not at leisure, but over a series of frenzied and hysterical moments—moments that extended over a decade. Was she worse at bringing up me and my immediately older brother than she had been bringing up my eldest brother a decade or so earlier? Well, if you’re a moral consequentialist, probably not: by the time I was sixteen, I was sitting in the upstairs bedroom fixing amphetamine—and as a young teenager, my brother was sexually abused by two teachers at his school for a couple of years at least. The family hadn’t been operating effectively for more than five years at this stage.

Can bad parenting be judged cumulatively? Somehow, I doubt it—and this applies to Odysseus and Penelope quite as much as to Mother and her husbands. The moral character of the Odyssey’s protagonists is established not by their intentions, nor by what they actually do, nor even yet by the results of what they do, but by their own intrinsic virtues, which in turn derive from attributes that are innate, fixed, and immutable. Mother had her virtues—quite a few of them—but they were all double-edged: she had great wit, but as Proust, a writer she loved, rightly observed, a writer’s transcriptions of great remarks, heard extempore, are always rather more labored than those they invent themselves.

During the period covered by my novel, Mother met literary people. She entered into a correspondence with William Carlos Williams—and withal the age difference, fancied him. When I was a child, she told me she used to see Nabokov stalking across the Cornell campus en route to his classes, occasionally skewing off the path to fence, whimsically, with some shrub or tree, using his cane. Arrogating to myself (since no one else will ever do it for you) the powers of the imagination, I’ve built this recollection of the great fabulist—whose celebrity was, at that point, still inchoate—up into an entire scene in the novel, then extracted from it a motif.

That’s what fabulists do, isn’t it? And in so doing, we gain control—in the loathsome modern parlance—of the narrative. First literally, then metaphorically, then literally again. In the diaries, Mother writes that she’d like to be the author of an unsettling story, one the macabre character of which slowly impinges on the reader, to devastating effect. Sometimes I think my life is this story—indeed, that like in some Borgesian conceit, Mother created not the unsettling story, but the unsettled individual who writes the stories in her stead.

What was Mother reading at this time? For read she always did, and voraciously. Not much discussion of it enters the diaries—but then, there is absolutely masses about her emotions. The intersections between cultural assay and quotidian life must have been all around her as the wife of an English literature professor jockeying for tenure. She mentions some books she’s been reading, but the revelations of her literary mind are in asides: “I like Henry Green novels—I am read [sic] Loving; I liked Back + I shall look up others. I’ve read Party Going and Living I think.” Elsewhere: “V Woolf’s Journal, she hated Katherine Mansfield.”

There’s an obvious inference to be drawn from Mother’s premise—“Women could not write the sort of books men can. I do not mean there are not good women writers; there are simply no great ones”—to this self-laceratingly honest conclusion: “I want to write to be famous & think I cannot write because I must punish this mean desire.”

Because, of course, what writing she has been doing besides the diary is typing for her husband, who’s preparing his first book, a study of critical responses to Milton. She remarks not at all on the author of Paradise Lost and, arguably more significantly, Areopagitica, although she’d studied English, first at Queens College, in New York City, then at Penn State, where she was taught by—and was friendly with—Theodore Roethke.

In the first of Mother’s diaries, from 1949, Mother and Robert are staying with the recently bereaved widower Kenneth Durant at his farm in East Jamaica, Vermont. Durant, who at one time headed the U.S. bureau of TASS, the Soviet news agency, was a wealthy Philadelphian who, besides mourning his wife (the poet Genevieve Taggard, who had died a year earlier) and apparently fending off Mother’s advances, was thinking at this time of setting up some sort of project for disadvantaged kids. Durant and Taggard had been connected with the Communist Party—and so had Mother’s husband.

Or at least you would have to conclude so from a diary passage from 1956 that I’ve transcribed verbatim in my own account, but which I won’t reveal here. True, I wouldn’t say that my novels are exactly page-turners—they’re certainly not intended to be—but anything I can do in this instance to compel the reader, I will, for reasons that should be self-evident. Besides, this is surely only the interplay between analepsis and prolepsis that propels the plotting of most narratives (and, indeed, consciousness itself), expanded to include a further mode of presentation: this essay, “Ithaca.” Certainly, the poet or poets who composed the Odyssey had a good command of these techniques, and by parting their tale into two strands—one of which begins near the chronological end of the tale, and the other at the beginning—and then alternating between them, thereby evoked the plait of the human symbolic mind, and together with it, its eternal plaint: that life can only ever be experienced de novo, but only ever understood—if at all—in retrospect.

To judge from the tapestry she wove—that is, her diaries—Mother was a near-psychotic Penelope, confined as she was to Ithaca, spending each night for long years beside a husband whom she was so far from truly trusting and being intimate with that he might as well have been on a decade-long picaresque, making his way home from the war. Although not the Trojan one. Robert Adams had served in the military as a logistics officer, resolving to enroll (according to his own unpublished memoir, Winter Arches) after the attack on Pearl Harbor, although he’d been diverging from the party line since the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was announced. By his own account, he spat contempt toward those he’d formerly traveled with, and whom he now saw as de facto fascist sympathizers.

How far had he traveled? In his memoir, Adams animadverts at some length about the Marxist circle he was involved with at Columbia, where he studied as both an undergraduate and a graduate student. He goes on to place himself adjacent to a number of a prominent Communist academics of the period, one of whom—Oscar Shaftel—first introduced him to Mother, who studied under Shaftel at Queens College. Shaftel fell afoul of New York’s Rapp–Coudert witch-hunting committee that attempted a purge of Communist influence in the public-education sector. Adams, being a graduate student at Columbia, didn’t, although he changed his name (his birth name was Krapp) when he enlisted for the army. Quite possibly, he was seeking to distance himself from his radical past as much as rid himself of a name at once Germanic-sounding and risible.

Was Mother lying when she claimed that she married a Communist? And when she claimed, moreover, that the contortions involved in hiding this past during the Fifties, as he ascended the academic ladder, were also intrinsic to his character, and played out in the confines of their relationship? Lying to whom? Herself? Because the entry represents an inflection point: not just between fabulism and fact, or love and hate, but between left and right, man and woman, gentile and Jew, black and white, and who knows—gulp!—maybe even that most unfashionable of contemporary dichotomies: the one between right and wrong.

Throughout the diaries, Mother ruefully acknowledges that Robert has had to look after her in all sorts of ways because of her poor mental health: going to the drugstore at night to fetch sedatives and, on one occasion, having to stop the car and find a doctor in order to calm her down. She is, in the diaries, grateful—but resentful. The principal events that establish this negative dynamic in their relationship—and, indeed, if such a thing were possible, the underlying etiology of Mother’s fundamental neurosis—lie beyond the scope of her pages and any living recall. Yet, in her diaries, we have at least an eyewitness account, albeit one distorted by a seemingly limitless sense of grievance and loss, the dark shadow thrown back into her consciousness by the overwhelming anxiety that always clouded her life. Mother was both agoraphobic and claustrophobic, and I can remember times when she hesitated at the doorstep, unable to either exit or return home.

Perhaps that’s why she returned to Ithaca a second time, with a second husband, and a second family. My father took a second sabbatical there in 1966, while I attended grade school for a couple of semesters. We lived in a duplex in a small development somewhere in Cayuga Heights—I was five and, for a kid from the London of the era, a city still pitted with bomb sites and cloaked in the cold wet flannel of austerity, going to America was like time-traveling to the future. When one of the kids in class was sick, our teacher, Miss Hansen, pushed a button on the public-address system in the classroom and spoke through it to the school nurse. It was like Thunderbirds!

But why, after a decade, did Mother return to the site of the conflagration that had destroyed her first marriage—beyond the fact that my eldest brother was by then an undergraduate at Cornell? When I read the diaries, I came across the backstories of characters—sorry, I mean “people”—whose homes I remembered visiting a half century earlier: a tony-seeming couple in a modernist house beside Cayuga Lake, for instance, who had an electric carving knife and an inflatable plastic chair. It happens that this was the woman whom Mother limns as a sort of faculty femme fatale in her diaries—the one who’d had an affair already with the man Mother had set her cap at.

Was Mother—as someone violently unsympathetic might put it—a bitch returning to her own vomit, or was she compelled by some sort of nostalgia? Neither seems right—I think she was displaced and deracinated, and that this sense of being pasted onto backgrounds like some sort of decal followed her through life. She wanted to be a writer, because she desperately required a consistent narrative, but all she ended up with was a series of disconnected scenes. I know the feeling.

Was Mother justified in her gripes about her husband and, beyond him, the whole patriarchy? She was certainly psychoanalyzed, and the diaries that cover the period of her marriage’s disintegration begin with a copy of the letter she wrote to her former analyst. The analyst—Robert Seidenberg—practiced in Syracuse, an hour’s drive or so from Ithaca. He was one of the earliest psychoanalysts to hang out his shingle in upstate New York. By Mother’s account, he seems a purblind sort of Freudian, one who ascribes much of her neurosis to penis envy, together with her guilt about what seem to have been juvenile sex games with her older brother.

Seidenberg’s papers are deposited at Northwestern University, and it would be fascinating to read his account if—and I don’t know the ethics of this—he preserved his notes from his sessions with Mother. Given that he went on to become a prominent feminist and the president of the Syracuse chapter of the National Organization for Women, Mother’s take seems curious—unless, that is, she was just one of the furious mid-Fifties women he had on his couch who radicalized him.

Mother was as fond of Yankee facticity as she loathed what she saw as the legerdemain of the ironizing English middle classes. But life isn’t an ideal of the real, any more than novels are a further idealization. It was my eldest brother who was in a position to point out to me how good a novel this would-be adulterous episode in Mother’s life would make, given its plot-propelling misunderstandings, confusions, and evasions—plus the sex. Or, was it rather that he wrote an essay of his own about this period in her life—and his and his father’s lives—and showed it to me?

At any rate, I have the essay still—titled “Mother”—and it sets out the fundamental plot dynamics well; although, when I came to write my own, more Mother-centric version, on rereading it I found myself dissenting from Adams’s portrayal of her as a leftist fangirl when he was introduced to her at age twenty-six (she was five or six years younger), the imputation being that she was more sexually experienced than she should have been—and quite certainly more than him.

Then, while he was away in the army, she had affairs—ones that dogged her. The climactic final eighteen months of their effective marriage (it limped on for a while afterward, as these zombies do), commenced with her attempting to rekindle a liaison with her wartime boss in Manhattan: Harry Abrams, who worked at the Book of the Month Club. There was also a young artist, Jimmy, whom she went on idealizing in a girlish way, almost right up until her death. Both men were, of course, married. And, if the Mother I knew went along to consciousness-raising sessions in the Seventies, and never ceased reminding her sons of the iniquitous inequalities to which women were subjected, the one revealed in her diaries remains almost timelessly girlish—as suspended as her beloved Proust in an endless, seemingly Eleatic contemplation of an inamorata that will never be attained. Yet the recto to this histrionic verso (and believe me, she could moan, she could kvetch, she could rant, she could embroider; she was a mistress of the put-down and, when animate herself, of the lightning quip) had an enormous, seemingly boundless capacity for intimacy.

At least, seeing now perhaps the wider ambit if not the full compass of my life, I realize that my own affective disposition was not only forged in the white heat of my mother’s intense need for closeness, but that it has remained there. The evidence lies in her diaries, which I began to read as she lay dying a couple of miles away. On the night she actually expired, my brother and I returned from the hospital in the early hours, and he made his remarks about how “wrong” it felt to be reading the diaries, now that she was gone.

Which might seem an odd inversion if you didn’t know Mother, or an invocation of transcendent human being if you didn’t know my brother. No, the truth is that she was so psychically troubled—and troubling—an individual that her translation into inexistence potentiated a strange sort of afterlife. For the writer, death is always a career move, and as she died, Mother, being a writer manqué, made a different sort of career move: having long since trained up an apprentice, I was charged with having the career she never did.

She trained me first by teaching me to read and write before I went to school, at age four. Concurrent with this, she read aloud to me and my immediately older brother—a lot, as I recall. And with reading aloud came exposition—a lot of this too, and it was often very funny. Library books were changed weekly—six at a time. Mother inaugurated what she called “reading suppers” when I was a little older: no talking, except references to the books beside our plates. We didn’t have a television, of course—and this, perhaps, was the most segregating factor, since it meant I couldn’t offer my own bad version of a Monty Python sketch seen the previous evening, alongside the other girning boys outside the school gates. I’d seen bubkes.

I could go on enumerating the culture Mother introduced me to, or the ways in which she encouraged my increasingly ambitious literary and artistic projects—but this wouldn’t be to grasp the point at all. I think she knew she had a smart kid on her hands—but she’d had those before, as the diaries attest. It’s more that with each of us she managed to impart a dangerous sense of exclusivity: “You’re my favorite!” she’d hiss to me, after there’d been some sibling contretemps or other. Of course, we all knew she said it to all of us—and, of course, long before we reached puberty, we realized she was being ironic—but is that necessarily a good thing?

No—it’s neither necessary nor of any benefit to children growing up in already confused circumstances. That “bubkes” was out of place: Mother never used any Yiddish words, nor really acknowledged her Jewish heritage beyond using it as a heuristic: “In the States,” she’d say, “they hate you because you’re a black, or a Jew, or a woman; but here they hate you personally, and you just incidentally happen to be a black, a Jew, or a woman.” It’s the “personally” that’s of course key—Mother took things very personally indeed, because what she craved most of all was to be loved entirely for herself as she saw it, which she felt she never really experienced.

I’m certainly not the first son to have spent the greater part of his life responding emotionally to the woman who bore him—and what’s that if not being someone’s lover? Mother always told me that she was being psychoanalyzed by Anthony Storr while she was pregnant with me, that it was he who persuaded her not to abort me. Yes, that was Mother in a nutshell, or a caul: an overemotional territory with no boundaries whatsoever. Anyway, after she died, I came across letters from Storr that confirmed she had been his analysand—so I went to see him, and asked him if Mother’s story was true. He confirmed it, and on the same occasion told me that if he could have—metaphorically speaking—removed from his waiting room all the people there who were having relationships not with their ostensible partner but with one of their parents, alive or dead, his practice would have dwindled away to almost nothing.

Has my entire literary career been a desperate attempt to reach out to my miserable mother and so comfort her? Quite possibly. Because what, in the final analysis, is effective writing? I don’t make an evaluative judgment here, only a practical one: if the task of the fiction writer, in particular, is to re-create the lifeworlds of others from the inside out, then this isn’t simply the social act of the solitary man, it’s an intensely intimate one. At least, that’s the idea of écriture that Mother inaugurated in me, then nurtured so effectively that almost four decades after she died, I’m still at it: attempting to project my innermost thoughts and feelings into the psyche of another, through the medium of literature.

Are readers and writers lovers, then? Why, yes, of course—and in common with all lovers, we become nakedly interconnected, as we are shorn of all contingencies of identity; and because, in the depths of the night, under the covers, in the warm flashlight of sensual intimacy, the words lift from page to eye as lip touches ear. Thoughts, feelings, sensations: all are shared, just as when we make love, the other’s skin becomes our own. As I contemplate my potentially imminent demise, I consider the discourses of intimacy woven by my mother in Ithaca, and in London, and how, over the decades, they have beautifully, and awfully, unraveled.

It took me a long time to get around to writing this second novel about Mother—and by the time I was ready, my relationship with my eldest brother had undergone all sorts of vicissitudes: the novel wasn’t the proximate cause of our eventual rupture, but it became the gravamen. Having been prepared, initially, to go so far as to send me helpful briefing notes on the environs of Ithaca, and the milieu of his parents’ marriage when he was a child, he later retrenched radically. Before the pandemic, we had planned to take a trip to Ithaca together in order to scout locations, but when I finally went, in May 2022, I went alone, and discovered from the university librarian that he had been there without me the previous fall.

Our meetings on that trip were frigid affairs: I wasn’t invited to his house upstate, which would’ve been a logical stopping-off point on the way to Ithaca. Instead, my elderly brother and I walked painfully around a few blocks in Midtown Manhattan one day before I went, carefully observing any number of no-talk rules. While I was in Ithaca, unable to locate the development where we’d lived when I was a child, I asked him—and he denied knowing, which I thought disingenuous. When I returned to New York, we arranged to meet at the Wave Hill gardens in the Bronx, a near two-hour subway ride from where I was staying in Brooklyn—and a two-hour car ride from where he lives upstate. These were the lengths he was prepared to go to in order to avoid offering me xenia. At the gardens, having arrived before me, he’d already bought his lunch: a salad bowl covered in polyethylene. I doubt we’ll ever see each other again alive. His position during this period seemed to be that I should realize the extent of his trauma as a result of his parents’ breakup and not trespass on this territory, which remained mined, and could still detonate, with potentially bad psychic consequences. His final communication with me on the matter was to say that, as with my own autofictional memoir, Will—and indeed all of my other works that draw on my own biography and family—I should leave him out of it.

I’d already put stuff from Mother’s diaries in How the Dead Live, which includes a scene also depicted in Elaine—one relating to my brother that he would no doubt find upsetting if he ever read it, which I don’t believe he has. But that’s not the point: it’s the social aspect of that act of the poet—or novelist—that he fears, not the intimate one. He’s a published author himself—as is our other brother, who wrote his own memoir of our dysfunctional upbringing and his sexual abuse. But their social acts are quite different from my own—rather more discreet, to begin with.

So, I’ve defied my eldest brother: no writer should be censored in this way, by another’s fiat, let alone barred from writing about his own mother. Moreover, this fiat couldn’t be construed as anything but personal and punitive; after all, the diaries are available both at Cornell and at the British Library, where my own literary papers are archived—so, freely available to anyone who should wish to novelize their mother’s life. Or, indeed, their own.

My brother never has to read my novel—or anything at all, really. That’s one of the important aspects of literature, as opposed to the specular media that so dominate our age: you need to make an effort; it doesn’t just get upside your face. I need to make a different effort, one summoning the uncanny crunching sound of my spine being compressed as I slowly turn my head from left to right in the prescribed way. I’m exercising—of course. How fit do I need to be to have the best chance of surviving the stem-cell transplant? I asked the consultant: As fit as a boxer, he said. Who knew cancer could both enjoin—and entail—such vigor? I exercise now pretty much constantly, inasmuch as my symptoms allow.

“Vigor”: a word Mother liked to apply to or remove from men, depending on her approbation. Toward the end of her own life, she wasn’t vigorous, but faded fast: on the last outing we took together, to the grounds of Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath, she told me, “The best thing about being a pessimist in life is that you’re never wrong-footed when shit happens.” It was vintage Mother—and, if I recall rightly, she lapsed into a coma only days later.

“Lapsed” sounds like this episode was lacking in vigor: it wasn’t. My immediately older brother and I were present as the cancer metastasized into the meningeal fluid of her spine and then into her brain. She went from languishing but compos mentis to a sort of bellowing stuck-pig woman in no time at all. We called an ambulance, and the wait, and then the strange clamorous ride to the hospital, was, indeed, that cliché: “seemingly unending.” But actually, there’s no similitude, because it’s still continuing: it is the discourse between intimates, whether they be parents and children, siblings, lovers, or writers and readers. It’s what the patient in the Royal Ear Hospital says to the one in University College Hospital, and what he says, even thirty-six years after her death, to her: I have returned. I am Odysseus—yet also Telemachus, because I never left. I am your favorite—I will slay all those suitors, the ones you find troublesome. I am your only reader—just as you are mine.