Inter-Review

David Lazar [DL]:

Joanna, I'm delighted to be engaged in dialogue with you since This Way Back is such an extraordinary work of memoir in essay form. I want to jump right into the psychosphere, if you don't mind. Your book explores your father, your relationship with your father and your inheritance from your father, as well as your emergence, in all kinds of interesting ways. As someone who has frequently written about my mother and her death, at times almost obsessively, I kept thinking about a brilliant challenge a wonderful therapist brought to me years ago: pay attention to the less obvious parent. I've used this frequently in class. So tell me, what do you think the difficulties were in this exploration of father and daughter and self, of keeping your eye on your mother (who does figure so significantly towards the end)?

Joanna Eleftheriou [JE]:

David, I'm likewise thrilled to enter this dialogue with you, since I have long been impressed with your keen and expansive knowledge of all that the essay has been through its history, and can be today. I've also been thinking about the exquisite subtlety of some of your essayistic moves in Celeste Holm Syndrome: On Character Actors from Hollywood's Golden Age.

Back in 2008, when I defended the MFA thesis that eventually lent four essays to This Way Back, my advisor suggested I be prepared to explain why my mother figured so little in the thesis. I quipped that I could only write about my mother by accident; I had drafted a still-unpublished short story about a daughter who is disgusted by her mother's loud chomping on the brittle bones of forbidden birds. After I realized my subconscious had hoodwinked me into dealing with my mommy issues, I abandoned the story, titled "Pickled Black Caps." In the meantime, Jonathan Franzen (yes, the Jonathan Franzen) flew to Cyprus (my Cyprus), received hospitality and a tour of the black-cap-eating scene from my best friend's boyfriend, and published "Emptying the Skies" in The New Yorker. It's a phenomenal essay about my island, conservation, and forbidden cuisine. In the thesis defense, none of my committee members asked about my mother.

A few years after the motherless thesis and the failed short story, an editor that read an early draft of "Ithacas" wrote: "We are concerned that an 'unconscious gendered nationalism' is recreated in your piece, for instance in the disappearance of your mother and the construction of father as the one who bestows culture and connection to ethnic belonging." I was as frustrated by the editor's comments as I was by my adviser's warning, but in response to the editor I wrote ten pages acknowledging what they said and employing psychoanalytic and even postcolonial theories to account for my choices. The anthology they were editing fell apart, but I eventually expanded those ten pages into the thirty-page essay "Black Stone," published in Ergon: A Journal of Greek-American Letters.

A therapist actually said to me, "Asking why you don't write about your mother is like asking a woman why she wants an epidural rather than the full experience of labor pain." I found that comment validating. Even the essays in This Way Back that do include my mother were responses to some form of external urgency. "Your Schedule Depends on the Sky" got written in a coffee shop after I relayed the anecdote as a kind of joke, and a wise friend said I had to write it down. A professor urged me to write about childhood, yielding the scenes in "Ithacas" where my mother teaches me Greek. "Without Goodbyes," where I came out to my mother, arose after I had a full manuscript, and I knew this reckoning with my mother was needed to make the manuscript a book. [End...