When my children were toddlers, they enjoyed a lift-the-flap book by author and illustrator Karen Katz called Where Is Baby’s Mommy? I found the title both amusing and alarming. Why did Mommy leave Baby on his own, searching inside, behind, and underneath furniture to find her? Was Mommy drinking alone in the closet? Was she under the bedspread, trapped in a deep depression? Or, worse yet, had she simply left? But I should have known, just as in the companion text, also by Katz—Where Is Baby’s Belly Button?—Mommy would always be found. She was firmly attached.
Even in a culture that prides (or deludes) itself on women’s freedoms, the abandoning mother is nearly unthinkable. Perhaps that’s why she makes such a compelling story.
I acknowledge “mother” is a broad term: not all mothers are women or biologically bound to their children. Instead, the noun “mother” seems earned through the verb “to mother.” One becomes an ideal mother through caretaking, selflessness, sacrifice, and unconditional love. This reification of mothers may not be healthy for mothers or children, yet it is an abiding cultural construct that there is nothing as fierce as a mother’s love. Therapeutic resources on healing the “mother wound” ask practitioners to affirm eternal, unquestioning protection for their inner, younger selves, for this is what a mother does, what a mother should do. (Notably, fathers are not held to a similar standard.) The mother’s unwavering love renders abandonment an even greater betrayal.
This summer I encountered abandoning mothers everywhere. I picked up the memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died, by former child star Jennette McCurdy. Expecting a comedy, I found a deeply disturbing tale of a mother who stayed close but “abandoned” her daughter by putting her through decades of mental, physical, and emotional abuse. My son and I watched the family movie Enola Holmes, in which Sherlock’s heartbroken younger sister searches London for a mother who has disappeared to fight for suffrage, believing she has protected her daughter by leaving before the law comes for her. In the news, the story of Alice Munro’s choice to stay married to her daughter’s abuser and live estranged from her daughter led readers to question whether Munro should keep her prizes, whether as readers they could continue to enjoy her work. Is there a more cursed figure than the mother who willfully abandons her child?
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Kimberly Grey’s collection of poetic hybrid essays A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing takes on a critical exploration of her own abandoning mother and the aftermath for Grey, her daughter. The more than fifty essays, each titled with an abstract noun ending in “-tion,” serve as lenses through which to explore grief and trauma, to make sense of the senseless. From “Dislocation” to “Disintegration,” from “Concatenation” to “Consolation”: the table of contents reads like stages of a long, psycho-mechanical process. The Latinate titles reinforce the idea of intellect. This is the language of science; there are stages; there is an order. While many of the titles are commonly used words like “Multiplication,” others, such as “Halation,” a photography term for the spreading of light in a halo effect, signal a specialized diction and a speaker whose knowledge covers disparate subjects. Ranging in length from one sentence to three pages, the essays indeed engage with a variety of critical sources, including poetry, philosophy, psychology, as well as literary, musical, and mathematical theory, citing thinkers from Roland Barthes to John Cage to Anne Carson to Sigmund Freud. Though she writes mostly in prose, Grey interweaves lineated and visual poetry and an occasional drawing. The collection is beautiful and unsettling. It requires rigorous attention and attempts to capture unruly emotional hurts within intellectual frames. Like a literary version of EMDR therapy, it tests language’s ability to reconstruct, redirect, and create a tunnel out of trauma.
Though visual poetry is not Grey’s primary mode, “Triangulation” serves as a representative piece, demonstrating how Grey works with language and space, layers and contradictions. The title functions in two ways—it refers to the shape of the poem, and it calls forward the psychological phenomenon of one person manipulating two others, supplying just the right fuel to ignite each against the other. Here, the mother is the apex, and the “others” are not even important enough to be specifically identified. The most legible lines flow down from the mother. Even before reading the piece, it is clear that she is the source.
The poem can be read in a clockwise path, starting with the topmost word and moving inward to the center. Thus, it would open, “She says I destroy everything, in one direction”—a line that suggests, in contradiction to the form, that there is one way for this story to play out. This version of the poem ends, “She tells the news of me / which is not news / but is relayed as fact. / I trash / and I / thrash.” Grey is the destroyer, the fighter, but she cannot right the narrative. Even in her own rendering—this poem—she is penned into a tiny space at the center. But there are other ways to read the poem. Each line against a triangle’s edge could be a top line, leading down a narrowing stanza. These stanzas are less logical on a sentence level, but they strike some deeper emotional notes. The rightmost stanza becomes more musical, with the rhyming “-tion” line endings:
She says I destroy everything, in one direction. I know that brutality requires imagination.
She tells them I’ve done something to deserve this alienation.
She controls the truth in one direction.
She tells the news of me
I trash
The three end-stopped, rhymed lines create closure, certainty. The stanza’s closing line shows that “the news” is about Grey’s character: “I [am] trash” or “I trash [everything].” The lack of period after “I trash” leaves the previously resolute stanza feeling unresolved.
Other top-to-bottom readings also have emotional resonance. For example, “I am a target destroyed semantically / which is not news” shows destruction has happened over and over. Even the image of the fish on the stick becomes more brutal when read top-to-bottom: “The truth of me is controlled as if I were a fish on a stick. / Brutality requires the ability to watch one thrash.” The fish in the clockwise reading may have already settled into death, but in the top-to-bottom reading, the impaled fish is alive and fighting. This is both more hopeful and more brutal, a contradictory space that Grey probes in many of her essays. In “Triangulation,” Grey creates a tidy contained structure for a writhing spirit—“I trash and I thrash.” Her writing is at war with itself, the adult speaker’s polished veneer hitching on the hurting inner child.
A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing refuses to provide a narrative. The essay “Narration” offers “Once I was her daughter. Then I wasn’t. The end.” In another book, this brief attempt at beginning / middle / end might feel flip or ironic, but Grey spends so much of the text cataloging her pain that this reads not like a middle finger to the reader, but instead like the most she can manage. The non-story is followed immediately by “Translation,” where Grey explains, “I know you want a narrative. I’m trying.” She protests “all I can give is a rendering: mother, father, child, child, child, child, child, child, child, child. I must have been unastonishing among them.” Not only is this not a narrative, but the explanation that she did not stand out as one among eight children feels disingenuous in the voice of the sophisticated adult speaker. Surely this is the wounded child-self speaking. The distance between Grey’s intellectual feats and this speaker still in the thrall of the mother serves to demonstrate the power of the mother. Not even a strong dose of critical theory can wipe her out. The explanation for the inability to form narrative comes in “Traumatization.” Grey writes: “I learned that traumatic memories lack narrative and context. They are encoded in the form of image and sensation and also called indelible or death images.” Though we never get a chronology of events that lead to exile, we get isolated images, as in “Fiction,” of “the last time I saw her . . . She stood her body in the doorway of that house, a home as one had ever so been, and I knew, I knew I would never get back in.” As a reader trying to make sense of abandoning mothers, I found myself waiting, wanting a story to unfold. Then, halfway through the text, in “Interrogation,” I encountered a list of questions that ended in ellipses: “When did she . . .” “Why did she . . .” “What can I . . . ” At last I realized that Grey and I had the same questions. She had immersed me in her position: bewildered, bereft, unable to make sense of what has happened.
While Grey cannot create sense of the time before abandonment, she demonstrates the effect of trauma on her psyche and body. She flirts with the idea of death, wishing she were a victim of the September 11th attacks, imagining death might garner her mother’s love. “I think I am one of those people who imagines a death I don’t want for a love I can’t have. A desperate exchange.” She researches how poets from Sappho to Vladimir Mayakovsky died by suicide, surmising that suicide would be “a chosen banishment, not imposed by the mother, but orchestrated by her: our collaboration of elimination.” What a mind-game! Even suicide, the ultimate act of self-ownership, would somehow be enacting the mother’s plan. While this twisty logic fortunately keeps Grey alive, it also exemplifies the profound depth at which her mother is embedded in Grey’s sense of free will. Grey diagrams how traumatic experiences move through the brain, keeping the body in a state of hypervigilance. She explains, “Trauma ravages the body. The spine becomes a stake in you. It holds you up, yes, but the nerves dotted up and down it burn like thousands of little fires.” She carries abandonment with her, even in sleep. Her trauma has also spoiled her other attachments to people, notably to the husband who is depicted through the book as “one foot out the door” and then gone after a twelve-year marriage. Grey laments: “Now that I am pain’s darling, now that I am pain’s darling (it echoes like a song I wish were not sung) no longer does anyone, not even a lover, look me straight in the face.” By severing the mother/child relationship, the mother has managed to sever Grey from everyone. But how much of the pain of exile comes from losing the actual mother, and how much from losing an idea of what a mother should be?
Grey creates the ideal mother in “Curation.” Speaking “as a child, newly born,” her view of the mother takes form:
She is God and the world.
She is weather, pleasure, and time.
She lights the room or darkens it. Creates form. Each new day.
Every answer to when, where, how, and why.
This allusion to the Biblical story of creation shows the mother as omnipotent, all-encompassing. Its sonic chimes, the anaphora in “She is,” the slant rhyme of “weather” and “pleasure,” the distant rhyme “time” and “why” are typical of Grey, who even at her most theoretical writes with an ear toward music. This litany is followed by another, strung together in a paragraph: “The mother tends to the child, bends the child, fends for the child; breaks the child, and wakes the child, sometimes bakes cakes for the child. These gestures make the child.” Tucked into the tender caretaking is the boundary testing—“bends the child”—followed by abuse—“breaks the child.” The idealized mother has quickly devolved. The mother “builds the child before the child builds a self.” Thus, she is the “Curator,” which Grey notes comes “from the Middle English curat: person charged with the care of the soul.” This line is left hanging; as readers we need no explanation of the state of Grey’s abandoned soul.
Just as this mother has curated the child, Grey recognizes that she curates a mother. After a meditation in “Representation” on Magritte’s Treachery of Images, a painting of a pipe alongside the script “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe), Grey admits: “The word is not the thing, as the map is not the place. The way the mother, in this story, is not my mother. Not exactly.” Similarly, the speaker is not Grey, exactly, but the version of herself she has constructed for the page. In the following essay, “Elucidation,” Grey indicates that her goal is not creation, but understanding. Above a line drawing of a face are two sentences: “ ‘How can one learn the truth by thinking? As one learns to see a face better if one draws it,’ wrote Wittgenstein.” She is merely “drawing” to “see,” suggesting that though she as an author wields a godlike power to construct, it is a far cry from what a mother can do: “building a self.”
But as the book progresses, the essays posit increasing power. In “Calculation” Grey creates unflattering images of the mother as a planet—“one thing on its sky-throne / with the many bowing things before it.” The mother stokes competition among her eight child-moons—“The mother wants this war, it keeps her living.” Here at last is an adult-self seeing her narcissistic mother for who she is, a being who creates pain for others. Grey speculates about the effect on the mother if she ever were to read this book. The single sentence essay “Reaction” reads: “When I think of her reading this, I think of bruising her mind.” This serves to remind us that the mother is a real person—not just a representation—a person who may have already traveled through this text. As thrilling or terrifying as that might be, the bruised mind is small revenge when balanced against Grey’s anguish. But by the time Grey reaches “Fiction,” a treatise on the novel Frankenstein, she assumes more power: “I am my mother’s monster as she is mine. We are both each other’s creation.” She asserts an equivalence, suggesting that what she can do with words is as weighty as what has been done to her.
One of the central questions of the text is what words can actually do. Early on, Grey names them a lifeline: “as long as I write, I cannot be erased.” She attempts to create new relational pathways, calling on her mind in “Consolation”: “Mother me, mind.” She is particularly focused on verbs: “I’ve always fervently desired possibility,” she writes in “Conjugation,” “and verbs, in all their forms, provide it.” She gravitates toward the infinitive, a form that “says go, go as if action can berate you into action. It is action that says to you—you cannot make this a memory, you cannot.” With its ever-unfolding nature, the infinitive keeps Grey present, away from the past, which is where the mother resides. The future, similarly, is unthinkable. “What tense describes never again? . . . When I ask language, language tells me to keep moving.” Thus, the book is punctuated with right-justified poems written using infinitive verbs as an anaphoric chant:
To consider the temporality of an apple.
To feel hungry all through the night.
To think a lover exists for the sound of their breathing.
To not think about the possibility of his leaving.
In the infinitive form she can fix both hunger and its cure—the apple. Neither one disintegrates or increases. She can keep the lover nearby. She can keep herself in denial about being left—or can she? By introducing the possibility of the end, the end becomes inevitable.
In “Exilation,” one of the final essays, Grey quotes Ovid when giving the reason for her exile: “My carmen et error, I say.” (My poem and a mistake.) Here at last is an explanation, cloaked in Latin.
My ability to work, to write, is my error. To tell the truth and tell it widely. Cause to its linguistic effect. I saw a bricolage of dysfunction, a family wrought with wounds passed down from generations. . . . I did not speak, but could, had the capacity, the tools to tell of the unspoken family rules. Here they are, silently lettered down.
Using words is simultaneously the most terrifying and powerful thing that Grey can do, such that even now, the words are “silently lettered down.” In “Tenderization,” while listening to Tom Petty’s opening line in “Free Fallin’ ” about the good girl who loves her mama, Grey considers silence—
Would a good daughter write all of this or keep it to herself, like some martyr responsible for upholding the myth of mothers: that they all love without reservation, without condition, with a goodness bestowed to them as living earth-angels, incapable of harm or any form of badness?
But ultimately, she follows best-practices for healing the mother-wound and chooses to affirm herself. “The story must be told, not for harm, but for my own goodness, in my own eyes. The trauma story recognized, then reconstructed, in order to survive.” Other motives for dissecting, examining, intellectualizing, and reconstituting trauma in language are eclipsed by its power to heal.
The book’s title, A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing, might suggest that the mother has been intellectualized as a barrier to a perhaps too-painful emotional engagement. And Grey certainly wields intellectual tools to catalog her childhood as the family scapegoat and her exile as an adult. Yet trauma care involves a blend of metabolizing emotions and retelling a story so that its traumatic casing can be unstuck and re-formed, memories revisited as relics of the past, instead of relived as active harm. Intellectualization alone may help, but not heal. Grey may also be suggesting that a mother, her mother, is an intellectual thing whose main verb is not “to mother” but “to manipulate,” using the tools of the mind instead of the heart. In “Halation,” Grey suggests her mother does not mother because she cannot feel:
Is a mother an error when she cannot love her child? A malfunction of instinct? If she is not hard-wired. If she cannot feel shame. If she does not feel at all or feels hardly. If she can banish you. If she cannot love you. If she cannot love.
Would I still call her Mother? other? her?
This is mother as “malfunction,” as one who negates herself through inability to do the thing that bestows the title “mother.” “Other” and “her,” kangaroo words within “Mother,” create a jarring oxymoron of distance and closeness. Grey’s query—are abandoning mothers still mothers?—again suggests that the action of giving birth should not come with an emotional mantle. Instead, the title “mother” must be earned through right-feeling, right-action.
A third reading is signaled by the book’s epigraph, “a tear is an intellectual thing,” a line taken from William Blake’s “The Grey Monk.” Blake’s poem argues that none will be freed with “Sword” and “Bow,” but instead with “a Sigh,” “a bitter groan,” and a “tear,” all bodily displays of emotion. If only this triumph of feeling over violence were the poem’s tidy conclusion! Instead, the poem circles back on itself, with the terrible “Purple Tyrant” being crushed by those who become the new tyrants. Blake wrote of the French Revolution, whose revolutionaries eventually rose to oppress others, and Grey may also be nodding to the cyclical nature of trauma if it is not healed. But perhaps more fruitful for Grey’s purposes are two moments earlier in the poem. The poem opens with “I die! I die! the Mother said.” Though suffering, this mother lives to speak these dramatic lines, and her call for attention seems in keeping with the mother Grey describes. A few stanzas later the grey monk, a writer who shares a name with Grey, declares with woe:
When God commanded this hand to write
In the studious hours of deep midnight,
He told me the writing I wrote should prove
The bane of all that on Earth I lov’d.
For the monk, writing creates his exile, his hermit-like existence. And though he survives, he must witness the destruction around him. As for Grey, writing is both his salvation and curse.
“How do we know early hominids existed? What they made survived them.” Through making, Grey aims to prove that she matters, that she exists. The text that signifies her reason for exile is also her ladder to a world beyond it. In “Abstraction,” Grey reveals, “I have this theory that every sentence weeps openly and once someone tries to understand it, the weeping stops.” The image of a page of text, not to mention shelves of books, sobbing to be read, is haunting. Yet, the simple act of being read makes the weeping stop. Is this healing? Likely not. But it is proof of life, proof of mattering. And perhaps this distant metonymy is the beginning of healing—the author as the words she leaves behind, as the sentence—weeping openly until she is brought into being and community through an attempt at understanding.
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A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing. By Kimberly Grey. New York: Persea Books, 2023. 136 pp. $17.00.
