"'Oh, Dick, there was no Depression.' She was like a Depression-denier"/"My mother was more like a personal depression-denier. Her whole thing was if you were sad, she would say, 'Stop staring at your navel.' When I grew up, I didn’t know what other people talked to each other about, because there were so many things we didn’t talk about"/"My mother was very can-do. She told me, 'Nobody needs more than four hours of sleep.' I hate sleeping. Guilt gets me up"/"I like to sleep because I’m interested in dreaming, but it’s more like profound laziness or momentum. Once I’m awake, going to sleep just seems so annoying, and once I’m sleeping, waking up seems so annoying."
From "Roz Chast and Patricia Marx Mine the Mother Lode/The longtime friends on their new book, the pleasures — and perils — of childhood, and the remarkable success of their indie uke band" (NYT).
I've liked both of them for a long time. It's a funny interview. Their new book is "Why Don't You Write My Eulogy Now So I Can Correct It?: A Mother's Suggestions" — and I just pre-ordered it.
I just happened to run into that, but with 3 in a row on the topic of motherhood, this gets my "blog has a theme today" tag. First time since last November!
March 16, 2019
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
13 comments:
Were they old enough to have lived through the real Great Depression? Or is this just another tale of delusion?
"Were they old enough to have lived through the real Great Depression?"
These are women who, like me, were born in the 1950s. I presume their parents really did live through the Depression, as mine did.
Mine, too. I could only see the picture and the women seated didn't look old enough. I ran out of visits to the NYT. The sadness never ends.
@Darrell:
Were they old enough to have lived through the real Great Depression? Or is this just another tale of delusion?
Chast discussed this before on Fresh Air. Apparently, both of her parents were born in 1912, which would have made them a bit older than average when she was born in 1954. It's one of those my-parents-were-turned-into-lifelong-frugal-cheapskates-by-the-Depression kind of stories.
I wish my mother had been a Depression Denialist. It was all I ever heard growing up: "There we were with no place to live, nothing to eat, no clothes to wear ... and then, the Depression came!"
My parents grew up during the Great Depression. In fact, my mother wrote a memoir titled, "Memories of the Great Depression". Far from being a negative piece, she observed in it what happy times they were for children with lots of adventures and moving frequently, although she acknowledges it may not as been as much fun for the adults. She was frugal through her entire life but probably not due so much to the Depression as to her Scots-Irish genes. Even when she was well off she preferred to live austerely. I'm a little bit like her in that respect. There's no challenge in being able to spend as much as you want and it's also wasteful.
Someone in the family turned up some old film footage that captured my grandmother and several of my aunts (as kids) downtown during the Depression. (I'm unclear exactly what the motive for the film was -- perhaps a newsreel of some sort). I was surprised by how busy everything looked and how fast everyone was walking and mentioned it to an uncle who said, basically: Yep, everybody was hustling, but nobody was making any money.
My mother always saved old bread bags.
Some aunts tended to come away from restaurants with sugar packets..
“ It's one of those my-parents-were-turned-into-lifelong-frugal-cheapskates-by-the-Depression kind of stories.”
And many of those religious, conservative, people were turned into lifelong FDR Democrats, continuing to vote Democrat long after that party had morphed into something antithetical to every belief the people held. And they passed this illusion on to their kids. I always found it fascinating to talk to an elderly working-class person who clung to the antiquated spats’n’monocles view of the Republican Party. They’re mostly dead now but their simple ideology still reverberates in small town politics.
And many of those religious, conservative, people were turned into lifelong FDR Democrats
I was soundly chastised for voting for Nixon in 1960.
Ten years later, my mother denied she voted for Kennedy.
Thanks for letting us know that Roz has another book out.
there was no Depression
I'm sure that those who say such things do not mean that there was no economic depression, but that it has been over-hyped in the way that it has been presented as everyone being unemployed, everyone being uprooted from their homes, everyone getting all their meals from soup lines.
Well, here are the unemployment numbers --
1930 -- 8.67
1931 -- 15.82
1932 -- 23.53
1933 -- 24.75
1934 -- 21.60
1935 -- 19.97
1936 -- 16.80
1937 -- 14.18
These numbers are rather harshly high, but at the height of the Depression, over 75 percent of people looking for work were gainfully employed. And most years, over 80 percent were employed. They had jobs, they had homes, they had food, they had clothes.
Sure, it sucks to be one of the unemployed, but that is true when the rate is only five percent. However, the numbers suggest that the Depression was not as apocalyptic as many have made it out to be.
Post a Comment