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August 27, 2007
Dear Friends,
I
would always have said, when asked about regrets in life, that one I placed
right near the top has been the absence of greater closeness with the
one remaining member of my family of origin -- my sister Rona. Although
we've loved each other, we have maintained an uneasy distance for most
of our adult lives -- so much so, in fact, that many people who know me
barely knew I had a sister, and I suspect the same is true for Rona.
Eighteen years ago, when our mother was dying, we had a particularly painful
falling out (a story I recounted -- at least, as I experienced it -- in
my memoir, At
Home in the World). Now, with the wisdom time confers, I can
recognize that the situation set us up for trouble: two women in
their thirties, who had competed with each other all their lives, reconnecting
over the terrible event of their mother's terminal illness. As women
who have had radically different styles of interacting with the world,
all our lives, it's not surprising we clashed at such a stressful time.
Overwhelmed with grief and loss, and weary from the months of watching
our mother slip away from us, we lost sight of each other too. And
for a few years after that, the breach between us remained so profound
we didn't even speak to each other.
But just as the passage of years allowed me to revisit the old bitterness
of my divorce, so too, the experience of growing older opened my eyes
to a new way of looking at the old familiar story of my sister Rona and
me. Maybe one thing I finally grasped, somewhere around age fifty,
is that life is too short to bear grudges, or be angry, and a longtime
relationship with a person you have loved and cared about is as much a
part of what I could call my life assets as the equity in my house or
my IRA account. Much more, in fact.
Belatedly, I applied, to my life, a skill every writer needs to employ
in her work, I believe -- the capacity to put one's self in another person's
shoes (namely, those of other characters, fictional or real). When
I did -- and I revisited the experiences that had distanced me from my
sister, but through her eyes as much as possible -- everything looked
different, of course. And what had seemed like inexplicably hurtful
events became comprehensible.
Like me, my sister Rona has been a writer all her life , though she has
focused her career on making other writers look good, by being a
phenomenal editor. A year or so back, she retired from her position
as editor in chief of the Canadian women's magazine, Chatelaine,
to write fulltime, at last. Sometime last fall, the thought occurred
to me: suppose my sister and I were each to use the great gift our
parents had given us -- our ability to tell our stories -- to explore
the story of what it meant to be each other's sister? Perhaps, by reading
each other's words, we might even make sense of the deep breach that continued
to exist between us.
So I asked a magazine I write for sometimes -- MORE
-- if they'd like us to take on this challenge, and they gave us the go-ahead.
Our editor made an unusual request of us then: that we not consult
with each other in any way, during the writing process, and (here we were
on the honor system, but we abided by it) that we not read each other's
essay, once they were complete.
The process of telling our two very different stories of growing up in
the same complicated household proved to be one of the most demanding
and moving challenges of my writing life. When it was over, and
each of us was finally allowed to read what our sister had written, Rona's
words about me, and our relationship, moved me to tears. For the
first time in longer than I can remember, I picked up the phone to call
my sister -- though I had to look up her number.
Since then, we have communicated in a whole new way, and where in times
past, the ways my sister differed from me so often proved frustrating
and alienating, I have been treasuring many of her qualities now -- most
particularly, Rona's quiet, sober perceptiveness and wisdom, her wry humor,
and most of all, the fact that she remains the only person alive on this
earth who shares with me the experience of having grown up with the same
wonderful, brilliant, inspiring and sometimes damaging parents. She is,
for me, who I hope my children will always be for each other: a
veteran of the same struggles, an immigrant from the same country, and
the only one left who remembers the day of my birth. Someone who knows
where I come from. The only person who truly does.
For all the years she was alive, I used to count on my mother's
vast knowledge of poetry and literature -- the wonderful way she could
summon just the right line from Emily Dickinson or W.B.Yeats or Edna St.
Vincent Millay, to address some difficult situation in my life.
Now, my sister offers that same gift. So not long ago, when I found
myself discussing with Rona my feelings about a man I loved, she was able
to send me a poem that specifically referred to those feelings I'd been
going through. But more, even, than her familiarity with poetry and literature,
what I treasure about her is her familiarity with me -- and mine, with
her. "You know," she said recently (now that we are talking again),
"every time I listen to Joni Mitchell's Blue
album, I think about you."
Then she began to recite lines from the song, on that album, that is one
of my two favorites. "'I want to knit you a sweater; I want to write you
a love letter...'" And from the other I love best. "'I wish I had
a river I could skate away on..." Maybe nobody but my sister understands
those songs speak to me as they do.
The issue of MORE magazine with
our two essays in it -- mine about being Rona's sister, Rona's, about
being mine -- has just been published. If you'd like to take a look,
here's a link: A
Tale of Two Sisters: Joyce and Rona Maynard.
By the way, when the September issue of MORE
was being laid out, and the art director asked us for photographs of ourselves
together as children, we discovered something that said much about how
we grew up. Hardly a single photograph exists, with the two of us
together, though Rona did locate a couple, for the magazine. A photographer
was sent out to California -- and Rona flew out for a visit -- for the
purpose of taking a portrait of the two of us together. I can't tell you
I'm totally wild about the results (I think I look like Jackie Collins.
Rona says she looks like Debbie Reynolds. We think maybe the photographer
was instructed to make us look a little uncomfortable with each other,
initially, and if so, he succeeded. But turn the page and you'll
see us as we really were, that day: laughing and happy. (After the
photographer and his crew went home, by the way, I threw a party so some
of my friends could meet my sister. I made a giant mess in the kitchen,
as ususal. My sister, true to form, chopped her onion with perfect
precision, and not a single piece anywhere but on the cutting board.)
I also want to let you know that Rona's memoir, My
Mother's Daughter, will be published on September 15. (The book
is being published in Canada, but can be purchased on Amazon -- you may
sign up to be alerted when it's available. I highly recommend it, but
understanding that my own recommendation is somewhat biased I'll also
mention here that Alice Munro -- one of my favorite living writers --
has called Rona's memoir "wonderfully honest and enthralling.")
I am, as you can no doubt tell, enormously proud of my sister, and happy
at the unexpected gift of knowing we have found our way back to each other.
I'd like to think that other women out there (and maybe some men) who
may struggle with their own relationships with siblings, may be helped
by reading our story, and inspired to pick up the phone and dial a number
they haven't tried in a while. (And if you are one of these people,
I hope you'll let me know how it goes.)
__________________________________________________
The Norton collection edited by my friend Ellen Sussman, Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave
,
in which an essay of mine appears, was reviewed in the August 24 issue of
the New York Times Book Review,
and has spent several weeks on the San
Francisco Chronicle bestseller list. I hosted a wonderful group of writers at my home this month, for one of my day-long memoir workshops, and will be holding a second (my last of these, for a while, probably) on Sept. 22. A few places remain in that group. Maybe you'll join us. It's always a wonderfully inspiring day, not to mention, a lot of fun.
Or -- best of all -- come to Lake Atitlan, Guatemala, next February, for my weeklong writing workshop, where I'll be teaching alongside my great friend Bob Bausch (leading fiction) and -- for the first time ever -- the poet Jane Hirshfield. If you're considering joining us, but sitting on the fence, feel free to email me with any questions. I'll do my best to convince you to come for a week I promise you'll remember always.
That's all for now. (That's enough, don't you think?)
With friendship,
RECOMMEND JOYCEMAYNARD.COM TO A FRIEND
