Can You Wave Bye Bye, Baby?
by Elyse GascoPicador, $17 hard
In these seven stories, Canadian writer Elyse Gasco humorously and painfully meditates on mothers — women who need them and women who are becoming them. These stories tell it like it is, the aching disaster of early motherhood, the soaring insanity, the overwhelming grace. Similar in their worlds and concerns, these tales could be a novel, but as stories they punch more than a longer excursion could. “You Have the Body” records the fears, compulsions, and desires of a pregnant woman who is herself adopted. As she adjusts to the notion of the growing baby within, she imagines the unknown woman who gave birth to her, and the mother she herself will become. In “Elements,” the mother of a young daughter is haunted by her imagined birth mother, a woman who guzzles milk from the carton and listens to old Bob Dylan albums all afternoon. The story is punctuated by the narrator’s memories of her recently deceased mother and phone calls from her grieving father. In other stories, emotional life becomes real when a mother imagines her newborn is God and a single mom’s sense of being unable to love any more drives her to finally give up all demands but those of the baby she must love. In the final story, “Mother: Not a True Story,” a woman answers her adopted teenage daughter’s divisive questions about her birth mother with increasingly elaborate lies. Oddly, the majority of stories are told in second-person point of view, a device that some may find annoying and too cleverly intimate. But beneath this playfulness Glasco delivers the goods. Humorous, compulsive, self-deprecating, shameless, and right-on about the radiance and rage of mother-love, the best of these tales record the inner soundtrack of early motherhood, a song that has been too little sung.
This article appears in September 10 • 1999.