By Anita Gill
Whenever I pick up a memoir or collection of essays, I first read the disclaimer where the author states the following is an account based on their memories, faulty as they are. It is a space where the author acknowledges that they had to do their best to fill in details and check records, along with the fact that some characters might have not-so-positive attributes. In Morano’s second essay collection, Like Love, she delves into the murky moments around love, such as crushes, infatuations, and desires. Unearthing these stories may appear salacious, but she approaches the subject in relation to numerous loves from her life, including her mother. Since Morano was approaching her personal stories about past attractions, I wanted to know how she would handle the tricky issue of turning real people into characters. The answer: “I have, however, altered identifying details to preserve the privacy of some people whose good or bad fortune led their lives to intersect with mine.”
That alone told me I was on a journey with a writer cognizant of the care and compassion necessary to portraying these moments of love on the page. Morano did not write seething with anger or yearning for revenge. Rather, she used her expertise to turn the lens on herself, to better understand these unconsummated moments of wanting.
Michele and I had a chance to talk over the phone about her upcoming book.
Anita Gill: The idea of love has been so heavily explored in our society. I think it’s hard to write something on this topic in a novel way and yet you have. I have to ask: How did you decide to pursue this topic?
Michele Morano: I am not somebody who is a super-romantic, so love doesn’t seem like the most natural topic for me, but I had written a few essays about the breakup of my family. I didn’t want to do a full-length memoir on that, nor did I have enough to say about it.
I was very taken many years ago with an interview by Jamaica Kincaid. She mentioned her relationship with her mother, which was a very difficult relationship and she said, “My mother was the great love of my life and the first really bad breakup.” That really resonated with me.
So as I was wondering what I wanted to make a project out of, I started thinking about how I’ve had experiences with a weird strand of romance that’s got no future, with these off-beat entanglements. I’m always very interested in crushes and infatuations and obsessions. I get crushes all the time even though I’m happily partnered, and I think it’s one of the things we don’t want to talk about because we’re so threatened by the notion that if you have a crush on someone it must mean something enormous. Sometimes it simply means that part of you wants to expand in some little way and that person you’re attracted to gives you insight into how that is. Sometimes it can feel like an illness or a feverish state, and if you just wait it out, it goes away. Those infatuations can be indicators that your life is not the way you would like it to be. I think often in people’s everyday lives we have these little crushes. When we’re young we get them on family members, and of course teachers. And even now I sometimes see my students have teacher-crushes on me, in that they look to me as the person they most want to get approval from. It’s fleeting, of course.
So I got really interested in this idea of the things that we are not supposed to admit to or talk about in terms of unconsummated romance.
AG: How did you decide to arrange your essays?
MM: The structure was first in chronological order and it read like this intense memoir of a family breaking up and then all these other stories. An editor friend of mine said I should get rid of all the adolescent stuff, and I didn’t want to do that because it felt really central, like I could feel there was a connection between those stories and the later stories. So, I decided to weave the adolescent story through and capture the way that ou
r formative experiences influence later experience and we keep coming back to them like a drumbeat.
AG: Could you talk a little more about your mother as your first heartbreak?
MM: I think this happens often when a family splits apart. Conscious uncoupling was not a thing when I was growing up. Family separations were usually really messy and there was a lot of anger. There weren’t models for how to split a family without rancor. And there certainly wasn’t a big push to protect the kids.
My mother was someone who was very lonely and I was the eldest child. From the time I was very young she confided me in a way that I know now was not healthy at all. I felt like we were best friends. When the split happened and I decided to stay with my father, that felt like a breakup. We never really got over that. My mother and I had a couple of really bad years, then we became close again, and then it got difficult while I was in graduate school and stayed that way. We loved each other but we could not connect again. She felt like an ex in a way.
AG: Your mother in these essays is a fleshed-out character with deep desires. Not only does she leave your father, she moves in with a woman she’s romantically involved with. Your mother is admirable for taking agency in her life, especially doing this in the 1970s, and yet, we as readers also see how her choice to break the family affected you as a daughter. Has writing and organizing these essays made you see your mother in a different light?
MM: I think it has over time, and certainly as I’ve aged and become a mother myself. I’ve been writing about this stuff since graduate school and she was still alive then. It was a little strange to be writing about her and then visiting her because I almost felt like I wanted to test out some of my ideas, asking if she remembered certain things. She didn’t know I was writing about her. I think she would have been happy to have been seen or know that I had paid so much attention to her, but I also think she would have been furious that I was telling her stories. It’s hard to say.
I think in nonfiction we fear people will respond badly to our writing about them. I’ve seen it so often with friends and former students that people actually respond very well and are kind of flattered to have had the spotlight shone on them a little bit.
AG: Speaking of that, did you run your essays past anyone who may not have come off well?
MM: I gave the book to my brother and asked him to identify anything in there that he didn’t want about him. That was really interesting. We don’t have a close relationship—we hardly keep in touch. That was one of the casualties from the whole situation. But he read it and said that he remembered some things differently but that this was my story to tell. There were a couple of tiny little facts I had gotten wrong. He told me and said it’s up to me if I want to change them. I really appreciated that he understood what I was doing and that this was my story.
AG: You focus a lot on relationships in these essays, but would you also say that you thought about a desire for place?
MM: Absolutely! Because I fall in love with places—I mean, really in love. To the point where I get butterflies in my stomach and it hurts when I leave. I am working on an essay right now about Beirut, Lebanon because that’s a place I’m completely in love with. I’ve been there twice in the last couple of years and I was supposed to lead a study abroad group back in March. I have friends there and I have been closely watching everything happening politically and with the recent explosion. I really do feel in love with that place. Oviedo, Spain was another one. I’ve been to a lot of places where I don’t fall in love, but every now and again I go to a place that feels like I’m more at home there than I am at home. Or I’m the version of myself I want to be when I’m home.
AG: All of these essays are so riveting and I have to ask: Was it difficult to decide which ones to include and which you had to scrap for making this book? Were there any close calls that still ended up on the chopping block?
MM: There was one that I had put so much time into. I had published an earlier version of the essay years ago and then when I first started thinking of this book, that was the first piece I returned to. It was about the boy I was completely in love with from 4th to 6th grade and he was not interested in me. It was that first experience of unrequited love, but also just the pleasure of really admiring somebody. And 6th grade was when it became clear that my parents were heading towards a breakup. I was trying to use that essay to get this whole story started. Ultimately, it put too much weight on that particular time and I had to finally say something doesn’t belong and it has to be this essay. Since I’ve already published a version of this essay, I now have this dead essay I can’t really use.
Anne Lamott has that great line about how you’re never wasting your time when you’re writing. Either you’re writing something or you’re figuring out what you’re not writing. I did a lot of thinking in the course of crafting that essay that was very helpful later on.
I did want to write an essay on love of place, but I felt the book should end with me as a mother, with stepping into the role my mother had at one point in my life.
AG: You end the collection as a mother and the last essay, “The Married Kiss” is in third-person. Why did you decide to go with third-person?
MM: I’ll preface this by saying I don’t usually like third-person essays. I feel they can seem precious or pretentious, which was a concern with this essay. When I started writing it, I think the hardest thing for me to talk about on paper was the fact that I didn’t love my son when he was a baby—that I didn’t feel love for him. That wasn’t something I was prepared for as a mother.
In order to write about that I felt I had to distance myself from it, so I was just playing around with the third-person, but then, I felt more things opening up. I was able to take these big leaps in to the Mary Cassatt paintings and talking about Oedipus. It felt like I had given myself some freedom there.
It was funny. My editor had read the whole book except “The Married Kiss” and she was a little bit apprehensive about the essay “Crushed” because you’re not supposed to admit that you can have a crush on a child if you’re an adult. She brought that up and I said, “Okay, but you might want to also read that last essay, which is in third-person.” And she said up front that she’s not a fan of third-person. But then she read it and said it was fine.
AG: “Crushed” was illuminating because you touched on something we have a notion of—especially as educators—but it’s hard to put down on paper. We see the world in black and white and you do such an expert job in getting into the grays of this. In this essay you take a lot of time and care to describe these feelings. Was writing that essay a challenge for you?
MM: It was a challenge. Kids at twelve or thirteen are so hilarious. The boys are in this goofiness where they have one foot solidly in childhood but they’re leaning toward adulthood. They still have this incredible sweetness. They’re not as self-conscious as they’re going to become shortly, but they still exhibit these mature moments. I loved working with them in this summer camp.
With every one of these essays, there was something in it where during the writing I could feel my shoulders starting to creep up towards my ears. Whenever that happens I know I’m onto something and I have to go further. You have to figure that out.
Oddly with “Crushed” after the first pass through it I felt like I had to push this a little bit further. I needed to make it a little riskier, I needed to be a little more honest. It had been more intellectual the first time through and I realized I had to make the readers’ palms sweat. I know everything turns out fine. The reader doesn’t know. But I needed to lean in a little more into the idea of what is means to have a real crush.
AG: Nonfiction has this tentative boundary where it can blur into a form of therapy. It’s writing, it’s baring your heart, but also it can feel therapeutic. How do you grapple with that?
MM: For me, writing has never felt like therapy. Maybe writing in my journal. But the actual writing is so hard!
But I did have one therapeutic experience when writing the essay “About Wayne.” The essay is about the boy down the street who has a crush on me and keeps leaving me notes. My mother finds out about it and we have a big fight about that. When I wrote the scene where she comes upstairs and confronts me, I wrote it from the perspective of my twelve-year-old self, furious at my mother. Then as I was revising this essay, I felt it wasn’t deep enough.
I sat down to write and tried to inhabit my mother’s perspective. What must it have been like for her? I do this in my workshops where I have students take a character in their essay and write a scene in their point of view. It’s really eye-opening. It’s a fiction exercise, of course, but that really helped me to think about my mother and that dynamic. It wasn’t just about me being angry with her. There were a lot of emotions going on. There was a desire for us to reconcile, too, but it didn’t pan out. So I think when it comes to writing being therapeutic, the value comes from mining perspectives where you are really trying to flesh out what was happening in that situation and you come away from it with a different perspective on your own life.
AG: Essay collections have been this growing genre in the publishing world. Are there any essay collections out there that have really resonated with you?
MM: I’ve just finished This is One Way to Dance by Sejal Shah. She started out as a poet, and is very comfortable being associative in her movement through a piece, which is something I want to emulate. I’m currently reading Hood Feminist by Mikki Kendall and How to Survive Death and Other Conveniences by Sue William Silverman.
There are several books coming out this fall that I am looking forward to, such as This Way Back by Joana Eleftheriou, How to Make a Slave and Other Essays by Jerald Walker, and Don’t Look Now: Things We Wish We Hadn’t Seen edited by Kristen Iversen and David Lazar.
Buy LIKE LOVE at your favorite indie bookstore.
Michele Morano is the author of the travel memoir, Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain (University of Iowa Press) and the forthcoming essay collection, Like Love (Ohio State University Press, Fall 2020). She teaches creative writing and chairs the English Department at DePaul University in Chicago.
Anita Gill is an award-winning essayist and an aspiring Hindi language learner from Maryland. Her essays and humor writing have appeared in The Iowa Review, The Rumpus, The Citron Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She founded the Westside LA Chapter of Women Who Submit, an organization that encourages women and non-binary writers to send work to literary journals. She is a 2019-2020 Fulbright Fellow in Spain.