Jessica Barraco: Moving Through Motherless Milestones
photo via Jessica Barraco
As Jessica Barraco says in the book trailer to her memoir, The Butterfly Groove, she always knew who her mother was—but because her mother had died when Jessica was still a young girl, there were many unanswered questions about the past that had made her who she was… and that’s what Jessica set out to investigate. In this guest essay, she explains how she hasn’t just filled out her understanding of her mother’s life; she’s also gained a richer understanding of how her mother continues to be a presence in her own life.
One year for a birthday present, someone gave me a vintage album of my mom’s favorite song: “Cherry Bomb” by John Mellencamp. It was beautiful, and such a collector’s item. The original recording happened to take place during the year and month I was born: August of 1987. It was meant to be a sweet gesture, but the truth was, my heart sunk and my eyes filled with tears, and I couldn’t understand how such a nice gesture could make me feel so distraught. The whole next day, I learned a harsh reality to losing my mom at twelve years old: Every happy moment in my life will be bittersweet. No matter the joy, it will inevitably sink in that my mother will not be there to enjoy whatever it is with me; to see me grow, to watch me smile; and that no matter how you slice it, that is so very sad.
Always being an ambitious person both personally and professionally, I often pictured milestones: my first job, book release, wedding, birth of my children. And I can’t think of any of these moments without seeing the obligatory empty chair that my mom should be filling. The daily phone call I don’t get to make that so many others take for granted. The reassuring glance I have almost forgotten. I can get easily overwhelmed imagining any one of these moments.
My mom passed away sixteen years ago after suffering from cancer and its horrendous complications for nearly twenty years of her life, and for all of mine. I learned a lot about my mom while researching and writing The Butterfly Groove, but I was also able to imagine how she handled her own life’s milestones. I am comforted by now knowing the true series of events in her life that I wasn’t aware of previously. Along with the truth, I was fortune enough to learn how these experiences both inspired and influenced her choices: whether positively, negatively, or seemingly not at all. I call it learning the emotional genealogy of a person. I always knew where I came from, but I wanted to know from whom I came from.
2 November 2015 | guest authors |
Susan Barker: 6 Years, 7 Cities, 1 Novel
photo: Derek Anson
Late last summer, a friend who was in England tweeted about a novel she’d just found, The Incarnations by Susan Barker, and how amazing it was. It didn’t seem to have an American publisher, and it sounded like exactly the sort of thing I’d like to get a look at in my capacity as an acquiring editor, so I made enquiries, and found out that I was just a smidgen too late—the rights had already been picked up. Now, a year later, I’m finally getting to see why my friend was so excited, and I’m having much the same reaction. I’m approximately one-third of the way through, and there’s suspense, there’s the possibility of fantasy, and at the heart of the novel there’s a compelling character study wrapped in a portrayal of life in 21st-century China. In this guest essay, Susan Barker talks about the circumstances of the novel’s creation over a period of time in which it seems the only constant was the novel’s creation.
During the six years I spent writing The Incarnations I lived in seven cities in four different countries. I moved in and out of seventeen different houses and flats in Beijing, Seoul, Colorado, Boston, Leeds, Washington, DC, London and Shenzhen. I have lost count of the long-haul flights I made, crammed in economy, crossing oceans and continents and time zones, between the UK, China and the US.
This itinerant life, where I got a new stamp in my passport every three to six months, wasn’t my original plan. When I first moved to Beijing in 2007, I expected to spend several years researching, writing and completing my novel. However, a pre-Olympics change in China’s visa regulations meant I had to leave mid-2008, and then came the offer of house-sitting gigs in the States, and then the decision to accompany a boyfriend to his new job, and so on and so forth. The regular packing of suitcases, getting on and off aeroplanes, recovering from jet-lag, acclimatizing and settling in, were at odds with the stability and routine I need to work. But as a self-employed writer with no 9-to-5 job, mortgage or children, I was free to improvise my life, moving whenever a new opportunity arose.
23 August 2015 | guest authors |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
