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As a teenager, I often felt confined by my mother’s narrative about me. I didn’t appreciate her knowing reactions to certain things I did (“You’ve always been like this”) or her surprise when I behaved in a way that she perceived as out of character. This is probably a nearly universal experience between teens and their parents, but that doesn’t make it any less excruciating. A close friend recalled that once, while home from boarding school for the holidays, he got into an argument with his mother, who told him, “I don’t even know who you are anymore.”
“Of course I had changed,” he told me recently. “I was 17 and she hadn’t seen me in three months.” After that visit, his relationship with his mother took a turn for the worse and never recovered. “She couldn’t look beyond her own version of who I was. If I wasn’t fulfilling her expectations, I was a disappointment.”
This friend’s mother was a writer — and so was mine. Nora Ephron’s famous maxim that “everything is copy” may sound cute, but the problem with turning your life into a story is that it can be hard to change a story that you’ve gotten accustomed to telling a certain way. Narrating your life is an act of creativity, but when you’re a teenager and the narrator is your mom, narrative can feel like a cage.
