How to navigate complicated family dynamics (w/ Emerson Whitney)

How to Be a Better Human

In this deeply personal episode of How to Be a Better Human, Emerson Whitney discusses his memoir 'O Mother,' which explores his complex rel

Key takeaways

• Grief can catalyze profound personal transformation and a shift toward inner calm and authenticity.
• Shared neurodivergence and chronic pain create both connection and isolation in familial relationships.

Main topics

• Navigating complicated family dynamics
• Grief and the aftermath of suicide

Notable quotes

"Since you're dying, I am completely changed. I used to want success or something, but now all I want is calm, a pervading calm."

Conclusion

Emerson Whitney's journey underscores the importance of confronting difficult truths, embracing

Transcript preview

Speaker 6 (0:01) This is How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Today's guest is Emerson Whitney, the author of the new book, Oh Mother. And before we dive in, I want to just give you a quick heads up that today's episode is going to discuss suicide. So if that is not a topic for you right now, totally understand. We will see you back here next week. Now, O Mother is a very personal book. It is a book about Emerson's complicated relationship with his mother, about moving back home to an island in Maine to be closer to her, and how that decision does not go at all how Emerson had planned, ultimately ending in tragedy. But as specific as Emerson's story is, the themes in this book are incredibly universal. This is a book that asks questions like, what do we owe our family members? What about if our relationships are really, really, really hard. How do we handle the difficult things that we inherit from our families, both biologically and emotionally? It also asks questions like, what makes a life livable? And can we accept it if someone decides that their life is not livable? To me, these are the kinds of questions that get at the heart of what it means to be human. These are questions that everyone ends up wrestling with at some point in their lives, but we often wrestle with them all on our own. And maybe that's because we're ashamed or scared, or maybe we just think that you're not supposed to talk about these things publicly. Well, today's guest, Emerson Whitney, talks about them publicly and writes about them and thinks about them really deeply. And I'm so glad that we are going to get a chance to hear from Emerson today on the episode. To get us started, here is Emerson reading a passage from O Mother. And the book is all written in second person. So it's all directed towards his mother. Here's Emerson reading that Speaker 4 (1:45) passage now. Since you're dying, I am completely changed. I used to want success or something, but now all I want is calm, a pervading calm. Roland Barthes writes about this in his Morning Diary, a book of notes compiled after the death of his mom. He writes about how he notices a totally different feeling after she's died. He no longer cares about posterity and writes of a complete acceptance of vanishing utterly, no desire for a monument. He goes on to write that he can no longer bear traveling. Why is it that I keep trying, like a lost child, to get back home, though mama is no longer there? I relate to this so much. Before this, I was working toward being interesting and cool, at least in my mind I was. I thought so much more about what people thought of me. The approval I was seeking in others was maybe your approval, which I guess is a standard thing. You'd warned me forever about not staying in the house like Grammy, the value of trying to have friends and being out. I'd been letting go of this performance for a while in little ways, leaving the city, being more honest with myself about what this body needs, but your death gave it that final push out the door. Everything was leading to this. I've put up a cattle gate a few yards from my house, and I want to stay inside it with the dogs and your ashes. Speaker 4 (3:01) That was the Speaker 6 (3:02) author Emerson Whitney reading a passage from his new book, Oh Mother. And we are going to talk a lot more with Emerson in just a moment. But first, we are going to take a quick ad break. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. Speaker 2 (3:26) Support comes from WISE, the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world. Your life is global. Your money should be too. Some providers promise no fees on overseas transfers. Don't be fooled. Extra costs often hide in bloated exchange rates. Choose WISE. You can send, spend and receive money in over 40 currencies. Count on the exchange rates that you'd usually see on Google. That's how millions save billions on hidden fees. Be smart. Get WISE. Visit WISE.com. Speaker 3 (3:57) I'm Phelan Johnson, the host of See You in Court, and we are back with an all-new season. Our first episode is about a woman named Gwen Jacob, who, on a sweltering day in 1991, did what she had to do to cool down. She took her shirt off. She was catcalled, fined, and arrested. But she refused to back down, sparking a national debate about baring breasts. Listen to the story of Gwen's topless walk on See You in Court, on CBC Listen, and everywhere you get your podcasts. Speaker 6 (4:30) And we are back. In today's episode, we are talking about inheritance. We're talking about health and we're talking about complicated family relationships with the author Emerson Speaker 4 (4:39) Whitney. Hi, I'm Emerson Whitney and I'm an autobiographical writer. My most recent book is Oh Mother out with McSweeney's. Well, Emerson, thank you so much for being on Speaker 5 (4:49) the show. I'm so excited to talk to you. I loved your new book, Oh Mother. I think it is like just beautifully written. but also so moving and thought-provoking, and it's about so many different things. So as a person who's had to talk about this book and think about how to explain it to people who haven't yet read it, Speaker 4 (5:12) how do you explain what Oh Mother is about? I'm really grateful to use the term immersive memoir. It's about the last two years of my mom and my time together. So really, it's the story of our time together. It's also the story of our shared disability, our shared chronic pain, and our shared life experiences, which have a lot to do with this island where we lived. Just Speaker 5 (5:37) so that people know the kind of like plot pieces of, it's a real story, but the plot pieces of what happened here so that we can have this conversation. I think you just brought up a bunch of the things that led to it. You have this kind of troubled childhood with your mom. Sometimes you're extremely close. Sometimes she and you can butt heads and not understand each other. In some ways, you write in the book that you and your grandmother feel more like a mother and child relationship. And then you want to have a closer relationship as an adult with your mom. You move back to the island in Maine. It seems like it's going to be perfect. Then there's this real distance. Yes. Speaker 4 (6:18) You Speaker 5 (6:18) and your mom actually aren't seeing each other as much as you thought. And then the end of the book is your mother has done really well and then kind of has some sort of backslide into depression and suicidality, but also maybe drinking. Definitely. Speaker 6 (6:34) There's this moment where she is. arrested for stealing from Walmart and knows that that's going to go into the paper. And that is what you believe was the driving force for her to take her own life. The book is Speaker 5 (6:47) obviously about that story, but it's about so many different things as well. You know, in the book you talk about before your mother passes away, there's this, there's a lot of things that you and your family share. Chronic pain, neurodivergence. relationship to the outside world, to socioeconomic background. But you never really get the opportunity to fully talk about these things. And a lot of the book is a conversation. It's written in the second person. It's a conversation with your mother. What kinds of things do you wish you could have shared with each other? while you actually were both in the same place? I wonder if the book brought up new ideas of things that you wish you could have talked about. Speaker 4 (7:31) I think of this question all the time. My mom and I had a really interesting and complicated relationship. We both struggled with so many of the same things that it often was hard to connect because we were both kind of in a way on our own islands. You know, the metaphor maybe of the island, not necessarily the material reality of the island. And weren't always, they weren't always bridged. in our lifetime. So most of what we got to experience that was about sort of neurodivergence or shared pain was often in kind of this family joking or like the largesse of a family hangout where we got to make fun of each other for all the things that were hard or laugh with each other about what was going on. Now when I look back, I feel like the book itself was absolutely a way that I got to process so much of that. My grandma, I hang out with my grandma quite a bit, and she just has so many memories of hanging out with mom and I and not, I guess she didn't have the same process. So she often talks with a tremendous amount of regret. And I feel similarly. I wish my mom and I, I mean, every day I'm like, I wish we could have gone to this. random new restaurant. So we're like, we could have gone to this like weird thing together. We could have talked more about class. I think that would have been nice. My mom was a housekeeper for one of the wealthier estates here. And it was really hard on her for many reasons. And I wish we could have had a chat about that. Definitely more about what it meant to be people who have autism and ADHD and to live on that spectrum, I think, would have been really fun to talk about with her. And we didn't get to do that. I mean, there's so many moving scenes of Speaker 5 (9:19) the book about all sorts of different things. But there's so much joy when you and your mom and your grandma are hanging out together, just laughing around a table about things that no one else can understand. even things that everyone can understand, just sharing these small moments. I think you capture that feeling of laughing with people who know you so well and have known you for your whole life in such a real vivid way. I haven't really seen that in many other books captured so accurately. Speaker 4 (9:46) I really appreciate that. That's absolutely what I was trying to do, because I really wanted it to be kind of glorious. In the book, I talk about wishing my mom could have had a parade. One of the saddest parts of this, I feel like I got these headphones like a few minutes ago, or before this, and I went to the Walmart where my mom, because that's our one kind of electronic store nearby, where my mom was arrested for shoplifting. I feel like one of the Most powerful aspects of this was shame, that she was really so scared of being seen as not totally capable. And I wish in the book that we could have, like, had a parade for her, even in her death, because, you know, she had a self-completed death or suicide. And it was... in direct response to being arrested at Walmart. And it was obviously devastating to learn that, but it also did something to my, to, I guess, our community expression of gratitude for her in her passing. There was so much shame. There was family shame that came up. Like, why would she do that? What, what happened there? But I'm grateful to have very little of that confusion because she and I were so similar. So I just wanted, I wanted this book to be that parade to some extent. Speaker 5 (11:05) I think it really is. I mean, it's such a beautiful parade of scenes and portraits and feelings and stories. I think parade isn't necessarily the first word that I would have come up with. But now that you say it, I think that really actually is an accurate description of the book. I think. When you're telling a story that involves suicide, there's this tendency to not want to talk about it openly. There's this, like, Speaker 6 (11:29) we Speaker 5 (11:29) get awkward about speaking about it. And I think a lot of the book is about that, too, especially the second half of the book is about why do we feel like we can't talk about this? On page 171, you talk about this idea that scholars have talked about that when you have someone you love who dies through suicide, that you're called a survivor. And it's the idea that you survived another person's suicide like a car crash. And you said that you write about a scholar saying that that's reductionist. The quote is, it's focused on blaming the suicidal person and ignoring interlocking systems of oppression that lead to a life being unlivable. That was a line that just stopped me in my tracks. And I underlined multiple times that idea of what is it that makes someone's life unlivable and how that has. so much broader than any one story, feels like a really different way of thinking about it and a really important way of thinking about it. Speaker 4 (12:26) It was a turning point for me. I was really struggling, obviously, in my own blame. I lived 15 minutes from my mom. And like, as you were saying in your intro of the full scope of the book, she and I had been close and not close. But when I moved back here, it was with the intention of