Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing
Professor Kirsh’s RELG 327 class welcomed guest speaker Elissa Altman to discuss the making of her book, Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing, which the class read prior to her virtual visit. Altman first addressed the nature of the meeting over Zoom and forewarned that her small herd of animals may walk into the room at any moment and interrupt. She laughed as she said this from her home in Connecticut, where she lives with her wife Susan and their many animal companions. Connecticut wasn’t always Altman’s home, however; she reminded the class that she grew up in 1970’s New York in a Jewish household with her father and mother, a former TV singer.
Altman described her mother, Rita, as a “hyper heterosexual woman” whose self-worth comes from her physical appearance. Rita’s precarious relationship with food due to her body dysmorphia profoundly affected Altman’s own relationship with food as an adult, she recalled. Inspired by the way food not only sustains life but how it brings people together, she became a food writer. Consequently, Altman had become the complete opposite of her mother: “I am my mom’s worst nightmare, a lesbian food writer.” In a 2015 column, Altman wrote about her experiences feeding an older, body-dysmorphic parent and the “great disconnect” it created with her mother, which inspired her to write the memoir, Motherland. Rita’s illness raised many questions that challenged the stereotype of the overbearing Jewish mother who expresses her eternal love for her children through food—and lots of it.
“How can I be a good Jewish daughter even if my mother is abusive and won’t let me feed her?”, Altman asked aloud as she retold the painful and life-altering moment when her mother called her to tell her that she fell. Now her full-time caregiver, Altman affirmed that the experience of having to help Rita in every way unraveled both women’s stories and forced her to confront who they are to each other outside of the Jewish stereotype. Faced with the decision to cling to stereotypes or to reject them, Altman chose the latter, stating, “Motherland is an evocation of desire to be something that I am not but to accept it and to heal.” Shame and love, two feelings that are inextricably tied to the moral and religious obligation to honor thy mother and father, create a thread throughout the memoir which traces Altman’s process of forming boundaries while being perceptive to how her culture perceives it. Although her childhood home was secular, she was expected to adhere to the commandments; the weight of these “ancient issues,” as she referred to it, translated into seeing herself as free game for her parents, until she later realized how unhealthy that kind of dynamic was.
Given the tumultuous relationship with her mother, Altman felt compelled to share that she doesn’t believe in revenge writing. Every memoirist must ask themselves what their motivation is for writing, and Altman’s response reveals the ethical considerations of the project as well as the emotional release of her trauma: “I wrote Motherland to transcend an extraordinary amount of pain that I carry in my own soul.” The journey of writing the memoir empowered Altman to heal and understand and to have more compassion for her mother. As the conversation came to a close, Altman expressed her hope to finally visit Professor Kirsh’s students in-person at William & Mary in the near future.
