Mom's Novel

Or, A Certain Creative Destruction

Dear Republic,

This fleshy tour de force by Nick Rombes about his mother's creative work will captivate, horrify, move, and astound you — just as her lectures did to him.

-ROL

MOM’S NOVEL

Sometime in 2004 my Mom asked my wife Lisa and me to type up her novel, Loose Ends, which she’d written longhand over the course of several months, reading us portions in marathon sessions in my childhood home in northwest Ohio. We were back in Waterville for Christmas, home from graduate school at Penn State and dividing the time between my parents and Lisa’s, who lived just a few miles away, up the long hill that led away from the flat floodplain of the Maumee River, where my parents lived. Lisa and I had attended the same schools together since elementary, had dated since junior high, and married in college at Bowling Green. All this time Mom had been descending—sometimes gradually, sometimes in jagged fits and starts—into a necrotizing mental illness, untreated, enabled by my father. I’m only now, four years after her death, coming to terms with the creative destruction left in her wake, a wake that unsettled the family and broke parts of it off, parts that I fear are now forever lost.

I say creative destruction because it’s impossible for me to separate my Mom’s creative side—the rhetorical and performative brilliance of her lectures, her writing (both fiction and plays), her watercolors, and her earlier life as a ballet dancer—from the ways in which these talents were used to drive us, her family, away.

Her readings aloud of her novel were a brutal experience, but you wouldn’t have known this from the outside looking in, as Lisa and I sat on the living room floor, Mom reading page after page from her yellow legal pads, the ones I’d bought her the previous May for her birthday. Influenced by the novels of Dean Koontz and by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, which had been published in 2003, Loose Ends is, at heart, a family drama cloaked in a murder mystery, and the family depicted across its 165 pages is modeled on our own. Even had the novel not been about us in the sense that it reflected the world of my childhood, it would have been impossible for me to serve as the ideal listener for my mother, as her own self-doubts and self-hatred were projected onto me. Watching this unfold, you might think the one reading the novel aloud was the performer. Yet I was the one being scrutinized, each of my reactions to her reading a potential trap, time bombs that would come back to haunt me down the road: you were obviously bored to death, or didn’t you think I saw you roll your eyes? She sensed false praise as well as the next person, and yet I couldn’t be honest with her either: I don’t know, Mom, the characters just don’t seem real to me; they feel like clichés.

In graduate school I was learning about narratology, which could be dry as bones but was, for me, a key to unlocking the poisonous spell my Mom’s lectures held on me. In Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Seymour Chatman rigorously laid out the distinction between story (content, events, plot, characters) and discourse (how the story is expressed in terms of how it is framed, how time is handled, from whose point of view is the story told, and qualities of tone and style). The takeaway was both remarkable and obvious: there are no stories apart from their telling, and the situation of their telling. The plot and events of a tale take on different meanings and feeling with the simple switching of narrative point of view, or the quiet withholding of a key piece of information.

One of the thorniest challenges in any act of sharing our personal stories, I’ve come to see, is the discourse part. The objective facts and events—the story—no matter how outrageous, are relatively straightforward: this is what happened, then this is what happened. What’s trickier is, of course, the performativity of telling, trying to recapture the texture, the granularity, the feeling of the story, the taking it out of real, historical time and re-framing it as narrative.

Emily just continued to stare out of the windows ahead of her. She noticed the homes that lined the river were beautiful and big. The yards were large, and they curved down to the sparkling water. It was here that the car suddenly slowed and turned into the driveway of a big blue house.

“What’s wrong,” asked Emily, thinking they were going to turn around.

“We’re here, Emily. Home.”

The little girl peered out the window. She saw the front door burst open and Ann and Tom Campbell came running toward the car. Behind them, a tall boy, a little girl, and a big, black dog, with its tail wagging furiously, came too. All Emily could remember of that day was thinking, “I’ve finally come home.”

This is the second time I’ve typed those words from my mother’s novel. The first time was in the basement of our little house on Grosse Ile, in Michigan, on the same computer—a Macintosh SE/30—on which I was composing my dissertation. And here I am, now, in 2025, looking at that the dot-matrix printout my father gave me after Mom died. What’s being described in this passage is the arrival of Shelly, the person who would, two months later, officially become my sister, brought into the family in 1978 in the wake of my sister Kori’s death in 1975. She is being driven to our home (I’m the “tall boy”) by the adoption caseworker, the person who, in real life, betrayed my sisters by ignoring their complaints and pleas about the screaming and abuse in our home.

Mom’s focus in Loose Ends on the surface, the things seen—the beautiful and big homes, the large yards—was in keeping with everything about us: the soft rot beneath the windowsills, the layers of paint as a disguise, the endless additions to the house that disoriented space, the name brand, ironed clothes we wore, the Maumee River flooding our basement each spring, leaving rotting carp and worms behind. A few pages later, Emily becomes “overwhelmed by the generosity of these people and in her hurt little soul, a suspicion began to grow that this was all a trick to hurt her once again. But this—this big house, on a beautiful river, this wonderful bedroom and canopy bed, this beautiful black bouncy dog—this was all too much to lose.” My Mom had known loss—real loss, the death of a daughter from a brain tumor at age ten—so this wasn’t the work of a shallow person mesmerized by the surface of things. And this is the strange sadness of what Mom became, someone who went deep and who urged me to go deep as a boy and a young man as I slowly found my way into becoming a writer, fueled by the confidence she gave me. The person who introduced me to the poetry of Carl Sandburg in middle school, setting me off down a lifelong path of discovery that led to becoming an English professor. So, when she said, years later, “you don’t got it anymore” in reference not only to the books I’d published in the late 2000s but also in reference to my creative imagination, it felt as if some invisible balloon inside me deflated. It was not a feeling of pain so much as emptiness. A lack. Could she have known that it wasn’t the reviews, the Goodreads ratings, the occasional random laudatory e-mails or Twitter messages from strangers that charged me, but rather just a few words of praise from her?

The same sweeping, storytelling qualities that made my mother’s long lectures about what disappointing children we were so compelling and often mesmerizing—even when you yourself were their terrible subject—are on display in Loose Ends, where the pacing and rhythm invite the reader to stay in the story. The movement between exposition and dialogue creates a sense of motion, a back and forth not unlike her lectures, which toggled between similar poles of explanation (what a sham and disappointment I had become, a pseudo intellectual, a faithless son and terrible father) and interaction (direct questions to me, lending them a dialogue-like quality).

By 2004 anything I published, in print or online, provided content for my Mom’s own creative output, which took the form of long, winding disquisitions that she eventually encouraged me to record so that Lisa—who was often “not there” during the calls—could listen later. Mom had stumbled onto a powerful new discovery: she need not rely on things I said or did not say, tones of voice I expressed or didn’t express, for her supply and ammunition. My books themselves became stand-ins for who I was, open targets of a more permanent and available sort, an always-at-hand archive. In one long phone call in 2010 about A Cultural Dictionary of Punk, which had been published the previous year and dedicated to her and my father, she said that my work was a pale imitation of others’ greater work. “I’ll tell you something,” she said, “if you were in a writing group this is what you’d hear. And you wouldn’t be in that writing group very long because your ego can’t take it.”

I didn’t need to tell her, because it would not have mattered, that I had a fat file of rejection slips going back to my first submissions in 1983 to journals I had looked up in the library reference room’s hardbound copy of Writer’s Market, to say nothing of the email rejections post-Internet, or any of the non-response rejections where you just never hear back: the soft ghosting endemic to the world of publishing. I suspect that of all the writing project ideas that I’ve pitched and all the poetry, fiction, and non-fiction I’ve actually submitted to journals, websites, and publishers over the years, only about 15% have been accepted. And there is the entirely other dimension of negative, sometimes aggressively hurtful, reviews that come with the territory of having one’s writing published. My mother saw herself as a lone truth teller in a wilderness of sycophants, and yet there is nothing more common for a writer than an editor or a publisher telling you, Sorry, your work just didn’t speak to me.

In her critique of my writing, my mother revealed something, as she always did, about herself, her own ambitions, perhaps thwarted by the burdens of family and perhaps by the powerful forces of sexism that made it difficult for her, as a child of the 1950s, to see herself as a writer. Pivoting from my writing to hers, she got to the heart of the matter. “Let me tell you something, soften it up,” she said in one of our recorded conversations. “Why, why are you so hard? Why is your writing so hard? Seymour Rothman was my first experience with a writing group. Tell this to Lisa. She should be listening to this too. He was a professor at the University of Toledo and he lived in the Old Orchard district over at the University of Toledo. See there’s a lot about us you FUCKING DON’T KNOW because you never GODAMNED WELL asked.” I have used all caps on those phrases that were not only yelled, but full-throated screamed.

I’ve escaped her words, and yet here I am memorializing them.

My palms still get anxious-sweaty typing them out.

Writing about my Mom involves a weird act of simultaneity, as the process both carries me away from and closer to the hot center of her rage. And there is that detective-like feeling, the searching for a clue, some key that lay there in her strewn words that might unlock the secret of what plagued her that must be right there before me, so visible it’s invisible. In 2009 I didn’t have the knowledge or language of mental illness, at least not enough to know, or even guess at, what was ailing her. And there was the force of my father, as loyal to Mom as if she were his God, telling me, and my sisters, that her lectures were simply the products of love and common sense. This is what good mothers did.

And yet how, loving her so much, could he not see that she needed help, that she was slowly killing herself with her anger, and then with drinking to dull that anger?

And how, loving her so much, could I not see this?

“See there’s a lot about us you FUCKING DON’T KNOW because you never GODAMNED WELL asked.” The hot acid of those words. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault pierced the roots of language itself, going back into deep time when words were a gut response to the thingness of things, “imposed upon language by nature in the form of involuntary cries spontaneously employed by the language of action.” These “elementary sounds”—the roots of language—are the cry of feeling, the cry let out when yanking our hand, for instance, away from a flame. My horrible thought: I had become that thing that provoked in my Mom these involuntary cries of hate, of pain, of anguish, the root words of her inner being. And yet, still, I return to those words, pulled in by their gravity.

There is a passage near the end of W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz as the narrator recounts the video cassette that Austerlitz slows down and scrutinizes, searching for his mother, as he says he “strained to make her out among those fleeting faces.” And then: “In the end the impossibility of seeing anything more closely in those pictures, which seemed to dissolve even as they appeared.” That feeling of elusiveness bordering on the impossible, I think that’s what keeps luring me back to her words. For why else have I returned so many times to the scenes of pain? It is not—it never was—the simple content of her accusations that both repulses and attracts, but rather the pull and power of these accusations, their destroying creativity.

To convey my Mom’s voice and style I need to go beyond the familiar genre categories that we associate with creative work and instead look to where she excelled in perhaps the only form readily available to her: the lecture. If she struggled to be a writer, she excelled at being an orator. Often triggered by a minor transgression—such as glancing at my watch in her presence during a visit—these lectures, usually over the phone, transformed into something hybrid, a combination of soliloquy (she knew several from Shakespeare by heart) and sermon, moving with ease from broad-stroke condemnations that linked me to cultural and generational forces to the most intimate of personal details. Story and discourse, perfectly rendered and seemingly spun out of the air spontaneously.

Here is one unbroken phone conversation between us from 2010 capturing the ebb and flow and rhythms of her words. This is transcribed word for word:

Mom: You and your generation made us the enemy. I love Lisa only because you do. Period. She has not been Kori. She has not been a daughter to me. She has let me down time after time after time. But it doesn’t matter. You don’t owe me your wife. She has to face God. I think I’ll be there. I think I’m gonna be standing right there when God says, Who else stepped up to the plate for you? She’s gonna struggle with that answer, Nicky. And I’m gonna be there. You and Lisa both know it. Besides that, you had a life with us. We were the original three. You dubbed it, you said it, you write about it. I’m gonna tell you something Nicky about these little books and these little movies that you’re too superior to see, there’s a lot of grace in them. The little movie called Maid of Honor, M-A-I-D, a fabulous little movie. You had a mother and a father who brought in two little children so you wouldn’t have to be an only child.

Nick: I know.

Mom: Fuck it. FUCK IT! ACT LIKE IT! I’m gonna tell you something buddy, you owe us more than you’re giving us. Chicago, no. Franklin Park Mall? No. Day after day after day after day after day AFTER DAY AFTER DAY THAT’S WHAT COUNTS! Your wife NEVER calls. Your wife never sees to it that her children thank us for ANYTHING! [quietly] You think that’s right?

Nick: No, it’s not.

Mom: ANYTHING! YOU THINK THAT’S RIGHT? You think it’s right to write a book, a dictionary of punk and act like you know about being punk? How COULD you? You were getting hamburger gravy and tuna fish casseroles in Waterville Ohio!

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How and when did my Mom learn to punch rhetorically in such a fast, powerful way? Were her long lectures her way of writing long-form essays in the air that teased and circled around their central topic: the many faults of her son Nick?

Here’s the rub: the transformation of her past experiences into a story, a narrative, was a powerfully creative act, an act that resulted in what most speakers and writers hope to achieve: moving readers to heightened emotional levels. And that’s just what my mother’s words did to me, flooding me with dread, sickening my stomach, keeping me up at night. More than the words of any novelist or essayist ever could, Mom’s language provoked a response in me that bent me before their power.

And yet just when I was truly at despair’s edge she’d toss me a morsel, a sideways compliment. In retrospect these assurances (often along the lines of you’ve got it in you to be a good writer) kept me in the fold, preventing me from making the final break with her. “There is another side of you that is good.” She paused here. “And that is the Christian side. It doesn’t need to be a Christian piece of work! Dean Koontz clearly is not a Christian writer. Stephen King is not a Christian writer. If you wanna write in that genre clearly they’re not. But we’re talking, we’re talking there’s a whole genre of people that write that give people something. People are searching. People are searching for something.” But how could I be what I wasn’t? I did not have any life lessons to impart, or warm tales about broken families with good and loyal dogs, or stories of Christian goodness triumphing over evil. And it wasn’t lost on me that I had been trained to see fiction through various lenses; I had never thought of books as a direct mirror of the author’s beliefs. That, for me, was the magic and power of art: through it, you could create other selves and alternative ways of seeing and being in the world, just as, on the other end, the reader participates and completes the work in her head.

Here is the paradox: even though I was the terrible subject of my Mom’s scalding lectures, they mesmerized me. I was beholden to a corrupt version of myself that I must have recognized as dimly true. That’s the power of brainwashing for you. That’s the power of a family cult. Her language worked its darkness on me, I understand now, because she was dark herself. She spun her words into an art form whose subject, at the end of the day, may not have been me at all.

Nick Rombes is the author of the novels The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing (Two Dollar Radio) and The Rachel Condition (CLASH Books), as well as one of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series books on the first album by the Ramones. His work has appeared in The Believer, Oxford American, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Photo: Gina Rowlands in “A Woman Under the Influence”