Is loving your mother worth the pain?

I'm obsessed with my mother because in some ways I cannot forgive her for me having been born. I'm like, ugh, the separation. I haven't heard that way before. Totally. It's unhealthy. This is unhinged. Talk about unhinged. The fact that I would swallow my mother whole if I could. Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. Today on the show, I'm joined by Mary H.K. Choi, the New York Times bestselling author of young adult novels, Emergency Contact and Yolk. Her newest novel, Pool House, is for adults and details the relationship between a Korean-American D-list actress in her 40s and her 20-year-old daughter, who's always lived in her mother's shadow. Today's chat is all about families, how they change, how they don't, and why we keep on loving the ones who hurt us the most. This episode contains profanity and references to self-harm and suicide. Mary, welcome to It's Been a Minute. Hi. How are you? It's very happy to be here. Good. Very good. I'm going to start off by asking a question that we ask a lot of people first thing right off. What is the most unhinged thing that you sincerely believe? Well, I do have this conviction that is largely unfounded, where. When I believe that someone is lying to me, when someone is being, like, even remotely untruthful, or if something is, like, I'm not catching something in the minute, like, I just, my brain shuts down and I go complete, resolute conviction that the person is lying. And I actually, and I do know that, like, I'm an adult person who draws, like, good people around me, and the likelihood of someone outright bald-faced lying to me is very, very slim. But in that moment, I'm like, when you say unhinged, I think that definitely that's it. And I have zero detachment from the truth. I'm, like, in a full flight of fantasy. And I can just feel when I go there. And since then, it's like, if I'm 100% sure on something, like, 100%, I know I'm wrong. I like that. I like that. That's a really thoughtful answer. It's a really thoughtful answer. I'm like, if I had to answer that question today, I think I would probably be like, why did I get married? It's actually Tyler Perry's best film. And if he had stayed at that level of quality, people would feel really differently about him. Yes, but I guess that that has everything to do with what Tyler Perry's goal was, you know, when his absolute endgame was. Because I think, like, he's not really the one I worry about so much in terms of, like, personal fulfillment and joy. That's very true. That's very true. Mary, I have to say, I really enjoyed reading your most recent book, Pool House. And I'm still thinking about it. I'm still thinking about it. This is a book about family, the family that you're born into, but also about, like, the kind of static, neatly narrativized kind of family that we see on TV and how we deal with comparing ourselves to that sort of ideal, if it even is one. Just for people who don't know, two of the three main characters that we are following throughout Pool House, they start as mother and stepson. on a hit family sitcom. They are all faulty at best and definitely corrosive. And yet the characters don't want to separate themselves from the family, whether it's the real family or the imagined family. What is it about family? I realize I'm about to ask you this right now, and I'm like, we could talk about this for 90 minutes. But what is it about family that keeps us so bound? You know, it's really fascinating. I think that family as a tradition or family as a cult or family as a thing that we all insist upon doing is deeply, deeply fascinating. Like, I am so obsessed with my mother. Like, I have dedicated my entire creative life to my mother. I am so enamored of my mother that it prevents me from being a mother. Like, my mother was so large and all-consuming that I was like, I am not going to even, like, replicate this. It's like any sort of, like, carpet weaver putting, like, a little error in it so as not to, like, test the authority of, like, Allah. Like, that is, like, I have a very unhealthy relationship with my mother. That said, like, so that's, like, kind of the core wound from whence all of my, like, storytelling comes. But, you know, it is so interesting because family as a construct, it's like the one arena in which you are fascinated by them but also wholly incurious about them. Because you feel like you're not alone. You're not alone. You're not alone. You're not alone. You feel as though you know everything about them despite how, like, apocryphal an origin story might be or, like, whatever, like, or how uninterrogated your version of what you understand your parent to be is. Like, there's all this, like, these schisms, these, like, delicious sort of, like, breaches and cracks. And sometimes we can reconcile them and sometimes we can't. And it hurts us so much when we can't. And it also just, like, feels so, like, narcotically good when we can. And it also just, like, feels so, like, narcotically good when we can't. And then those moments are ultimately fleeting. Like, one of the strangest things about being alive, of which there are many, many strange things, is that we, if it all goes right, we'll bury our parents. Yes, I always say that. It's so gross. If all things go in their natural order, I get to see them all the way through to the end. And it's crazy because even if they were so unbelievably lacking, even if they gave you nothing other than like, to your point, corrosive trauma, that just, like, the gift that keeps on giving, like, even then, it's like, you know, will you please, please love me? My biggest thing is, like, when my father died, and he actually died while I was writing Pool House, I was so caught up in his, like, care. Because he had ALS, like, he did not speak English. And so I was translating things. And it was just, like, everything to the, from, like, telling him he had, like, ALS, but not knowing what that word was in Korean. And it was just, like, everything to the, from, like, telling him he had ALS, but not knowing what that word was in Korean. And then us, my brother and I being, like, you know, like, Lou Gehrig, like, that thing. And him being, like, you guys aren't doctors. Because we lacked authority, he was, like, no, I don't believe you. And I was, like, oh, this is going to be a wonderful journey. And so I say this to say that, like, he was incredibly absent. He was very sort of, like, patriarchal and, like, stoic at times and seemed very uninterested in us beyond when we were cute children. And even still, like, I was just, like, so ready to, like, give him everything. To almost be, like, buried alive with this person in how much I wanted to devote to his care. And I was staring at that and I was, like, this is all so fascinating. Like, what, like, genuine, like, what is this? It's, it's, it's, it's, it's beautiful. It's heady. It's awful. And it's deeply unfair. But it is interesting. We're truly the worst thing that happened to him is also the patriarchy. We've got more coming up after the break. The different configurations of family that you sort of, like, put together and take apart throughout the book, they are all equally riveting, to be honest. But there's one character that everybody is sort of, like, bound to and connected to, and that is Moon, the mother. In pretty much every configuration of family in this story. And you once described all the main characters in Pool House as mother-starved. I wonder, what is it about mommy issues that you find so inexhaustible? Well, I mean, like, the reason I called Moon, Moon, because it's, like, the wholeness of it. You know, it's just, like, shoot the moon. It's, like, swallow the moon. And the concept of orbit, too. And even just women in general. I mean, I think that's, like, the core part of it. Like, the witchiness of women. The fact that the moon. Like, controls the tides, controls our, like, our menarche, our menses. You know, the whole thing of it is bizarre. And so, like, the fact that, like, I'm obsessed with my mother because in some ways I cannot forgive her for me having been born. Wait, not ugh life. Like, ugh, the separation from her. Totally. I mean, it's unhealthy. It's unhealthy. It's totally. Like, this is unhinged. Like, talk about unhinged. The fact that, like, I could. I would swallow my mother whole if I could. Like, I just. just, like, like a freaking snake eating a chicken. Just, like. And, you know, it's because, like, I'm never. She was also. My mother was beautiful, which is its own specific torture. Like, she was not only beautiful, but she was dainty. And so, like, from that, too, it's, like, I've never forgiven myself for being larger than my mother. And so I have, like, a history of disordered eating, a history of disordered, like, body image issues and all this stuff. And meanwhile, my mother, not that nice a person. Like, not that. She's not that soft. She's very. You know, I've called her narcissistic at different points. And she is very sort of self-obsessed. Meanwhile, you yourself has, like, a kind of, like, failure to launch. And so you're kind of stultified and you're trapped in this, like. like not only being a daughter, being just like so inferior to this other person and and so that too like you know you have moon as this main character in this in this book and then you have stevie her daughter in that relationship and i mean but then it's like it's it's so fun being aged and perimenopausal as in me because i'm like oh i'm i'm both these people yeah and i'm always going to be both these people and so that too was something i wanted to write about right through and really begin to understand writing from moon's perspective was like really being in like the grown-up mind i suppose but also like the character stevie her daughter who's like 20 and 21 in the book um she felt like such a bridge i mean she's so clearly represented i don't know even how i look back at my younger self being that age and i'm being so completely unaware of how close i was to childhood stevie felt like this bridge between just like girlhood and and sort of like like you said perimenopause this the precipice of perimenopause the precipice of perimenopause that moon is in what was it like to um to write from the perspective of somebody who's closer to your own age and also um who was a mother in this way it was really wonderful and i think in in ways like you know there was so much change happening in my life as i was writing this book like not only did my dad die my mother was suddenly alone and then it sort of like had this like guilt of like why do i live so far away from my family why do i live so far away from my mother like and then also i was diagnosed as autistic as i was writing this book and so that really changed my understanding not only of myself but the fact that like it's it's largely hereditary so i was like looking at my mom i was like bro and so she heard some of her behaviors growing up and some of our hardship and some of the ways in which she hurt me like suddenly came into like really sharp relief and so it was just kind of like galaxy brain um but the thing that i really loved about writing through all of this was like i was kind of writing through some of my own grief and deciding not to have children like i entered perimenopause during the writing of this book and so you know at the beginning of this like ostensibly through through like the gift of science and lots of money i probably could have physically had a child had i wanted to and then by the end of this book and it coming out that sort of windows began truly closing and so that grief too was something i was writing through but then it's also the grief of the fact that this bananas thing where it's like I am I'm a Gen X person I like like cling on to that very end of like 79 I was born within the last month to qualify as Gen X and now if I look at Gen Z it's you know it's like the epic handshape meme it's just like eating disorders are on the rise like you know everybody is just like a bobble-headed spoon body like you know the patriarchy is not only alive and well but like almost like it feels like it's been exhumed like the intensity of it you know it's it's just like you know we have all these different waves of feminism I'm like what wave of patriarchy are we in and why does it feel like the same thing over and over again it just feels like deja vu and so like I really liked the idea of this sort of like snake eating its own tail of like Stevie and Moon and them just being sort of like refracted and them also confusing each other for themselves and confusing like different versions of each other because that's another thing I love about family it's like which version are you reacting to you never know it's like the entire like like telescope and then a kaleidoscope you're like well I'm mad at you and no no no no and then meanwhile your mother is like that file needs to update because that like that OS was from when I was like 32 and you're like fair and you're like I know it was 40 years ago I know yesterday to me yeah and that too it's so interesting how wobbly time becomes as you both run out of it like that is just wild to me what do you mean wobbly just like you know like my mother and I like we really are just like bound to each other you know it's it's like we will have known each other a very very very long time and I think that's what's so interesting about it is that it's like we will have known each other a very very long time and the fact that I can that time can sort of collapse in on itself in an instant if you say something that triggers me right back to my 11 year old self then we're just there together and I know too that like in the same way that I look at my mother and I think about all the versions of herself the angry furious versions of herself or like the vain version or like the very sort of like she's giving like you know like Sunset Boulevard mother version of her where I'm like I don't know I don't know I don't know I'm like like all of those versions are dead and they've been overwritten by this smaller drawing of my mother who's like rendered in graphite rather than like insane like you know like baroque shadows and oil painting and she's shrinking like physically literally shrinking and and I just want this like 70 something year old body to be like to sort of shoulder the whole life and every moment we had and it just like the center will not hold makes me think about how um as my mom gets older I am and I I start to I guess you know more people around me have children I don't have children more people around me have children and I like have become acutely aware that my mother used to be a little girl which is something I know it's like you know it cognitively but I don't think I was able to understand or experience it like psychologically or emotionally until I really became an adult and now sometimes when I am talking to my mother it feels like a like a tiny girl version of her is also now in there which is like a new edition um and then I all then I also feel kind of ashamed because I'm like how did I not understand that but I mean I was a girl but yeah it's like she knew me as a girl but I didn't know her as a girl something about that feels almost a little unfair and also a little tragic in a way that I think has also made me think very differently about our relationship as we both get older it is weird that's gorgeous though like the fact that you have that that you have capacity for that because to me that likes you know like because for so long as you as you are like growing up as someone's kid like they have these like they're this like authoritative figure or like you have this like again like to this the point about this version of themselves and like giving them enough grace and space to actually change or like bring in like earlier versions of themselves like bringing another like seat at the table like that is such a process like I remember when I saw my mom first as a kid like like you were saying like it wasn't with compassion I immediately got really angry because it was like a shock to my system I was like how very dare you it was almost like seeing her as a child let me see her fear for the first time and I got mad about that because it scared me yeah and she's supposed to you know the parents supposed to protect each other so it's like you're not allowed to be afraid I'm supposed to be scared totally and and so like that part and then now it has mellowed and it has really changed and now I have like actually like being diagnosed autistic and I was like oh my god you were also an autistic child like I saw my mother so clearly I'm like oh I really understand some of the sort of like I keep calling it crayon operating system where it's like the weird rules that she made up and sort of like jury rigged and rigged and like the way she does things which I was just like why do you do things in such a bootleg way and like when I was young I was like this is so like immigrant or this is so something but now I'm just like man you are hella autistic and now there's like so much humor and grace and like compassion and like also just pride I'm like wow this was actually kind of genius but yeah like when my dad died though my my ghost dad relationship is very chill and my ghost dad is like a child like my ghost dad is like a full-on like like maybe like eight or nine year old person and like that's my dad now and like we hang out that makes me think about um another sort of aspect I mean of of pool house like this is a very light spoiler this is something that happens within the first couple chapters of the book this is not gonna hopefully wreck your world but um you know conversely like even though moon is kind of the center of pool house like like the book is shaped by the loss of a patriarch figure um the father in this book is physically absent but looms large and also we learned throughout the book wasn't all that great when he was alive and that's such a common dynamic in real life uh dads can kind of be unknowable like that's okay for dads to be unknowable or to be not very nice um um and they can also kind of get away with not really being around I wonder like how does that kind of like this sort of like expectations a much lower expectations that people have for what fathers are going to do or not do um how does that kind of shape our expectations and the reality of how families work I mean far be it for me to speak on like how other families work and especially work is such an interesting way to put that I don't know if these things work at all I think it's a really astute thing to say where you're like interestingly this person is forgiven a lot and like that's just men man men stay forgiven men stay forgiven men stay forgiven men stay being given like the benefit of the doubt men stay being like given all this effort into trying to understand them you know there is so much forgiven in the way of like oh well that person's a genius and that person largely especially for that mantle is considered a dude but i do think that it has tremendous effects that reverberate i mean the worst thing that happens to adam adam like the first man aka the the third protagonist the boy in this is that like he's a dude like it's it's the thing that absolutely hog ties him and absolutely like stunts him throughout and it's something he's not even that good at it's like i was so interested in writing about a male character who is so generically handsome like i think i describe him as like the protagonist of like an airport espionage novel where he's like you know there's like hollywood hot and then there's like cbs hot you know they're like different things you know and and so like i he's like in everyone just supposes or like sort of projects on him that he's like competent and capable and smart and he keeps falling short of all of these things just because he's like you know north of six one and like not butter-faced and like the things that he's given is just like tantamount to like his own like ruination ultimately not only that but he's rich and so like i wanted to sort of lard him with all of these things that wind up being complete albatrosses because i think that's sort of funny i mean i mean exactly to your point i mean he kind of he can't he can't really he's never really all that good at anything nor does he follow through on anything nor does anybody either people kind of don't notice or they notice and they just go well and that is very true to life it's like no totally for him to be okay yeah he like walks around like any other one of these adams or jasons or scotts you know like he's just chilling but you know i i did i wanted to like him too and so like there are sort of hexes and poxes i just sort of like throw on him but i don't know i don't know i don't know if i'm going to be able to do that he does try and i did want to have this kind of character where truly the worst thing that happened to him is also the patriarchy don't go anywhere do i wish that naturally everything i wrote was so palatable that like everybody wanted to give me all the monies yes i just don't know how much of a choice any of us have we've got more coming up after the break you know there's a lot of things that i want to do but i don't know how much of a choice i'm going to there's been a lot of chatter about how like in heterosexual dating at least like women have made so many advancements professionally financially etc etc that they kind of don't have to choose male partners at least like out of um need but out of desire like they're they don't have to kind of choose from the failed sons you know and pick a failed son out of the basket and then get married um and adam kind of makes me think of that like he doesn't have to be the guy that you choose um but i also feel like i kind of see the same thing happen to him like he doesn't have to be in family structures like there are some millennials and gen zers um who like have chosen to go low or no con there's people honestly actually people are older than that who've chosen to go no or low contact but i don't know i feel like more people are open to negotiating how family looks for them and how it feels to them um rather than some kind of ordained obligation i wonder how do you how do you think about that and is that something that you feel like plays out in pool house or something that was on your mind when you're writing the book oh absolutely like i am part of a 12-step um group called adult children of alcoholic and and dysfunctional families and basically it is you know just it's it's the program for people who struggle with their families and i do think it's really important that there even is a term for it like low contact no contact i think the most important thing about or even going low or no contact is just being open to the fact that it's not a new rule like you're not like i just hope that if you had a horrible childhood and your parents were really really deeply flawed and they did everything short of they did a bunch of malevolent deeds but at the at the end of the day are not malignant people if one of them gets sick and you find yourself at their bedside i just hope that you can give yourself enough grace to not feel bad about being there like you don't have to actually pile the guilt on top of that or or like perhaps you are self-harming and that's like that's got to be okay if that's what you need or for some reason the universe has decided to give you this lesson that you need to relearn re-remember or change and learn differently like i would just encourage that if you go no contact low contact that you just like that you interrogate it once in a while like when my brother had kids those two boys are like the men in black light they are just and then me and my mom were good and we were like whatever we feel lobotomized in front of these children because they're great and they feel like do-overs for our entire family and like my brother is crushing at being a dad like for some reason and like my brother and i will talk about it i'm like i'm not having kids because of these guys and yet you had more than one kid like walk me through this and so even that conversation i'm like this is miraculous i want to turn to another theme in this book that is fading beauty moon is a d-list actress whose career highs are behind her and it's clear that she is not a d-list actress she is not a d-list actress she is not a d-list actress she is not a d-list actress she is still objectively very beautiful but she's no longer young enough to profit from her beauty in the same way that she was before um she is painfully aware of this it occupies so much of her thinking um and colors all of her behavior and all of her relationships what did you want to explore about mid life and the loss of beauty capital through moon i say this with humor and like genuine love like koreans are so like terminally vain it is like a national sport and i i love us for that and so i i say this to say that for moon even as someone who's part of like the diasporic um like korean culture as a gen xer like she's she's hit doubly you know she's she's not only is her her looks fading it's that she also also like insult to injury cannot afford a deep plane like facelift like she's upset about it and she's she's so upset about it and i i love that like i think it's i think it's like important to talk about it's it's not only like like i i just i just decry this idea that somehow like aging gracefully means that like we surrender or like we give it up or we we we don't notice because our priorities have shifted but i think if you have always been sort of like categorized and taxonom taxonomized and understood by the merit of your beauty and that begins to fade along with your esteem along with like the jobs you get along with your like paycheck along with your ability to afford your house like that's just why wouldn't i talk about this in the most granular detail possible especially as someone who has a history of disordered eating who in a previous life interviewed so many celebrities like i have ghosts written dj kaleds book i like went on tour with rihanna i have written a lot of cover stories for a lot of actors and like musicians and so like looking at these people forensically even like comparing them to like this is what they look like before glam this is what they look like during glam this is what they look like after retouching like all of that and i'm autistic so i'm like really interested in this like from a special specific place and it's like when that comes apart i think grieving it and acknowledging it is a very important thing and i think it's a very important thing acknowledging it is the only way to metabolize it i think it's like really like denigrating it for being like anti-feminist or even questioning it by saying that like you know it happens to everyone i just think that sort of reduces the experience of it and i also sort of want to take it out of the sort of arena of thinking of of it is like a trivial thing i don't think it's a so you can process it is kind of important i mean it's kind of i mean to a certain degree i understand i mean that my job used to be not visual at all and now it's deeply visual as we are talking to each other um that is very evident and it even just in like the few months that we have been doing this it is so funny how many the way it's like it's kind of changed the way that my brain works but um i think about myself in a project as a project which is not something that like i had it's not a way that i had thought about myself before and the way that we think about ourselves the way that we look at ourselves and how we're refracted back to ourselves has changed so much even since i was a young adult it's like a depersonalization Um, I think we all kind of have that to a certain degree and thinking about that, um, as we age and how that's kind of baked in now, like I have the microchip, you know, it's going to be, yeah, it's going to be an, it's, it, it already has been kind of a, an interest. I can see it's very different than the experience that my mom had and it'll continue to be different. Totally. And it sucks. Like that part is really painful. Like I have never been younger and I've never been older. And like, I, you know, I was on tour for this book and I've done a lot of like, you know, as you know, podcasts require video now and it's not the best time for my neck, you know, and that's just really real, you know, like where I'm just like, and, and a friend of mine and I looked at a photo of someone, a celebrity, a man, and we both said verbatim, like, Oh, he needs a lawyer. At the same time, unsolicited, unprompted. And we looked at each other, we laughed. And then we like, kind of were horrified. Because your brain has downloaded the filter. Totally. Like, and it was just like, and I was like, what was that? But also he's a man, so no one's going to tell him. Unlike a woman, 30 people will tell her that morning. They'll let you know. If it's, if it's never occurred to you, someone will think of it for you. Totally. One of the best parts. I, I, um, I, I want to, all the characters in Pool House, I grew so much affection for, and I really enjoyed being in their minds and living with them. But they also make a lot of diabolical and confounding choices. It's not Full House, you know what I mean? Moon is a trip. Adam is a mess. And Stevie is making a lot of mistakes trying to figure her life out. Do you sort of see that, that sort of like reader? Do you sort of see that, that sort of like reader panic as a writer? Is that something that ever comes through to you? And how do you kind of, how do you manage to craft a cast of characters who are morally questionable? Oh, gosh, I'm so glad. Because, you know, it's not like I'm out here being like, let me just like, you know, calibrate precisely the likability and then err on the side of like, you know, it's, these people just come to you and they're just like kind of galomping around in your head and they make these choices. And it's not even like, I'm not going to do that. I'm not, I'm not a plotter. So I'm not like, oh, I need their character arc to do this. Like, they will just do something really, really like out to lunch where I'm just like, oh, what the, like, and, and then I'll just sort of like figure out what's happening. But, you know, I do, I do worry. I think it would be incredibly disingenuous for me to say that, like, I don't worry about the likability of characters. I worry about it a lot, but I am helpless to do anything about it. But like, I am aware that these characters do this. They take big swings and it's messy and they sometimes don't land. And I actually think that people and readers who worry about likability or readers who are like, I wouldn't do that. I think that some of that detachment is because you're sitting in your own audience. It's kind of like what we were thinking before. It's like, well, if I was being in a book, I wouldn't do that. And I'm like, none of these people in this book know they're in the book. Like, do you understand that part? And I think that that's kind of difficult. I think that that negotiation is actually difficult, like, philosophically in this moment. None of these people in this book are genre aware. And so they are just happy. You happen to find them in this moment of grief that the three of them are being brought together with this death and they're, they're acting out. And there's part of it that they, they are doing publicly or in front of each other. But most of it is like private. Most of it is squirrely and messy and like fetid. And like smelly and weird. And it's private activities that I happen to sort of, you know, blow the lid off of because I'm like, guess what? You're on candid camera. Like, you are in a book. Like, that's how I see characters. Do I wish that naturally everything I wrote was so palatable that like everybody wanted to give me all the monies? Yes. I just don't know how much of a choice any of us have. I deeply enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. This was so rigorous and bracing. I'm so into it. Check it out now. NPR's Newsmakers, wherever you get your podcasts. And to all of you watching, thank you so much for hanging out with us. Make sure you come back to this feed for a fresh video episode every Tuesday.