The
'process notes' pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum
to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops
and classes. This note — the first in this series by a fiction writer — is by
Elizabeth Costello, author of The Good War. Costello, who is also a
poet, includes poetry and the struggle to create it in her novel. Here,
Costello places The Good War in the context of her upbringing and her
personal experiences of loss.
I still believe that the
house I grew up in is enchanted. There, objects move on their own or duplicate
themselves or hide inside small cold vaults, speaking death sentences. When I
was twelve, I wrapped up a book to give to one of my brothers for Christmas. I wrapped
it in my attic room and when I descended the stairs, I found the same book,
unwrapped, at the bottom of the flight. No one admitted to buying a second
copy. When I was eighteen, I found, in the windowless storage part of the attic
next to my room, the McDonald’s uniform my older brother wore weeks before he killed
himself. The uniform was colder to my touch than the air in the room.
On more recent visits to
Buffalo, years after my mother Anne Costello’s death, I have found her purses —
hardly used soft faux leather bags, always containing a travel packet of
Kleenex and a pair of even softer faux leather gloves — on bookshelves or on
closet floors, despite what I had believed to be my exhaustive efforts to bring
them all to the Goodwill. Cairns of unlike things — a bottle of Purell, a
screwdriver, a tarnished silver pinkie ring, and a shaker of Lawry’s Seasoning
Salt circa 1972 — balance in ways that seem impossible if not intentional.
These waymarks mark the path for the house’s sprites, demons, and leprechauns.
I do have an empirical
side, but when I’m in that house in Buffalo, she can’t win the argument.
Shortly after my mother died, I found
myself amidst an avalanche of socks. I suppose my mother bought them when she
was possessed by one of her most ferocious demons, the gnawing guilt she
soothed with belated buying and parental advice to adults. She had often seemed
to me to be covering up and retelling and providing retroactive explanations to
a band of invisible judges. When we were young, my sister and our two brothers
and I fished our socks out of one big drawer of singletons, hoping against hope
to make a match. Days after our mother’s death in 2014, when my sister and I
were gathering up her things, we found three drawers full of white athletic
socks, any one of which could be the match for any other. I thought our mother
must have heard me joke about the sock drawer, felt a gust of guilt-demon
breath on her neck, and attempted to prove to the judges that she had solved
the problem of socks. When I was in my thirties, she warned me anxiously and
uselessly that the sleeve of my robe might catch fire when I was making coffee.
When I was five, she left me without adult supervision after placing an
electric meat fondue pot filled with oil on a coffee table and plugging it in
to heat to boiling. I would trip on the cord and lose skin. I would spend ten
weeks in the hospital and lose confidence. I would be scarred for life.
One of the worst things I saw on that
hot June day of sock sorting in 2014 was my mother’s only published novel, Bittergreen.
Its frothy purple paperback cover could be a poster for a 1980s soap opera. I
placed several other books on top of it, shoved the entire stack into a corner,
and went on putting socks in bags. I didn’t want to think about that book and
what it represented to me: the differences between her dream of life and her
life, the dance of her ego around it, the fact that she never published
another, citing ill treatment by editors and marketers and publishers. I didn’t
want to think about how she competed with me. About how she kicked me when I
was down. Or how she cared for girls in the neighborhood but would not touch me
when I was badly injured as the result of her negligence. About the ways her
book manifested her lofty ideals and knack for lyric and about the ways I
wanted to tear it to bits with my editor’s red pen. How, when I read it for the
first time, in the early nineties, I wanted to make it better. How I wanted to
defend her against my hatred, which lived as fully in me as my love. Today the love
can win an arm wrestle against the hate and generate loving thoughts and actions.
But in those first days after her death, I couldn’t bear to look at her book. I
read and re-read the poems she had asked me to present at the service at her
Episcopalian church: “Question” by May Swenson and “The Starlight Night” by Gerard
Manly Hopkins, and one my father requested, “A Poem” by Wyslawa Szymborska. I
thought about what I would say about her, about my gratitude for the love of
language that she shared with me. About the fact that two of the poems I would
read while standing beneath those lattices and cornices were peppered with
exclamation points, the punctuation mark I most associate with her. About the
poem she had written to a cat I left behind on an East Coast farm when I moved
to a West Coast city. But I knew that at some point I would re-read Bittergreen.
That point was ten years later, in
2024, as I prepared to launch my own debut novel, The Good War. I had
the idea that I would write an essay that compared our two books — that I would
find a way to prove that while her book was rooted in a delusion of WASP
superiority, mine took her people to task. She was raised by two war widows, so
she must have taken comfort in believing that the men in her family were
members of the Greatest Generation. I know she was raised to believe that subsequent
generations were inconsequential in comparison. Beneath that dream of
impeccable sacrifice lay another, a Protestant touchstone, a hope that she
belonged to the elect. She comforted herself with a fantasy that good people of
privilege will lift the downtrodden and a delusion that all folly is resolved at
the altar. Bittergreen seemed to me to be in service to my mother’s
beliefs in noblesse oblige and in that old chestnut, the marriage plot.
My book, I would argue,
spins around a different set of poles. My book looks more directly at the mess
we make as human beings, the mess behind the myth. But when I tried to write
that essay, tried to compare our work as writers, I found myself comparing us
as human beings. I was engaging in the kind of competition that I had worked
hard, over decades, to reject. Because I’m not in competition with her. I hated
the tools she employed to win — her habits of subterfuge and random cruelty,
habits she inherited from her own mother. If I begin to pull on the thread of
her as a mother, her own mother gets tangled in the mess. And I can’t pull on
any thread of my childhood and young adulthood without pulling in my dead
brother. So, here I write as a daughter, granddaughter, and sister. As one who
was lucky and unlucky. The cairn that marks my way is the balance of these
things: her book; my book; a drawing done by my older brother in his last year
of life; and a stain on the avocado green living room carpet, the oil burn that
was my portal to another world.
I grew up with that stain, which
looked like an image of the sun. There is a dark brown corona, made by the rim
of the fondue pot, lighter brown like a gaseous interior within the circle and
splashes like solar flares along its edges. Years after I moved out of the
enchanted house, my parents got a different rug. The relief I felt at no longer
seeing that stain was coupled with a flash of anger that they had let it stay
so long in view, a constant reminder of the worst thing — until my brother’s
death — I’d ever experienced. My mother would leave this world without saying
the words I longed to hear, that she was the adult in charge on that day in
1975, that she was responsible for my safety, and that she was asking for my
forgiveness.
When I was in my
thirties, I received a letter from her explaining that my being burned had hurt
her more than it had hurt me. I was furious. I flipped her letter over and
wrote a response on the back: I can’t get in there (there being her
heart, her mind) and save you from your guilt. She would later apologize
over email for the letter, but she would never apologize in person or take direct
responsibility for putting me in danger. For her, perhaps it was too horrible a
thing to confront, that she had created a place of danger and left me to it.
She would not say the words I longed to hear, but she often shared with me her memories
of being abused by her mother in ways big and small. Of the way her mother
would simply deny the existence of something right in front of them — young
Anne saying look there’s a deer, her mother saying no there’s not. Or how, when
she was three years old and sick with a fever, a neighbor found her wandering in
their back yard. No one in her house had noticed she was gone. Not long after
she sent me that letter, I was in Buffalo. Out of the blue she said: “Oh you
stood up to me about that letter. Or did I dream that?”
Just like that, she was
telling me that I was not real. That I was her invention. She was engaging in
the sort of subterfuge she had grown up with, in her own enchanted house, a
place run by her mother and grandmother, two war widows, each of whom lost a
husband in World War Two. She was changing reality to suit the needs of her
poor ego, which had been bruised, over and over, by her own mother, who was a
dashing figure. A woman who was strong, beautiful, delightful, manipulative,
and cruel. A woman who had been a Rosie the Riveter during WWII and a chemist
at the National Institutes of Health afterward.
For me, my siblings, and
our cousins, our grandmother Priscilla Bunker Maury was an enchanting and
glamorous figure. She dressed well, drank potent cocktails (her signature drink
was, amusingly enough, the White Lady), smoked cigarettes and pipes, threw pots
on a wheel in her basement, and performed with the NIH’s theater group. She
hosted an annual Easter egg hunt that featured a golden egg decorated with real
gold leaf. She traveled and overspent and wielded the power of her personal
myth: she was unassailable in her stoic suffering as a widow and formidable as
a chemist at a time of limited access to such careers for women.
When I was very young, my
mother told me that her mother was crazy. She told me that she had been abused,
that her mother would hit her and then cry on her shoulder. That my Granny
would leave dishes of aspirin and other medications around in colored dishes on
surfaces where her grandchildren could confuse them with candy. My mother’s
siblings didn’t corroborate these stories when I first heard them, but when I
was an adult, one aunt who married into the family told me a story that fit the
theme of dangerous neglect. My aunt had left my cousin with Priscilla and when
she came back to pick her daughter up, my aunt found her toddler daughter on
the kitchen counter. The garbage disposal was on, and my cousin was reaching
toward the drain. Priscilla was not in the room, but luckily enough, my aunt
arrived in time. When I was young, all I knew was that I was supposed to take
my mother’s side in the cold war she and her mother had going, a conflict that
got chillier when Bittergreen was published in 1980.
I’m lucky in that I was
wanted. I’m lucky that my father had a job that he liked, teaching history at a
small college he could walk to from the enchanted house. I’m lucky that I had a
father at all. My mother’s father left for the Pacific front when she was four
and died a prisoner of war in the Philippines when she was seven. I’m unlucky
that I was burned with boiling oil at the age of five and that when I was
eight, I was hit by a car while riding a bike in front of the enchanted house
and broke my femur. In the hospital again, I cried in my sleep. My mother would
never say that she was responsible for my safety or directly ask for my
forgiveness, but she would say: “When you were in the hospital with your burns,
I was afraid to touch you.” She also told me that when I said I wanted to come
home, she responded, “You can’t come home. You’ll die.” About my breaking my
leg, she would say: “Your father and I were having the worst time of our
marriage. But we came together over you.”
In retrospect, her random
announcements made years after the initial injuries provided some useful
information. When she told me that she had been afraid to touch me, I
understood the power of a nurse’s touch when I was in the burn unit. One night
a nurse stroked my forehead, and it seemed to me that angels sang. I also
understood, once I had enough distance to be less angry and frustrated by my
mother’s admission that she had refused me her caring hand when I needed it
most, what a trap of narcissism she lived in. She couldn’t see past her guilt
and self-loathing to see that I needed her touch. To see me as both separate
from her and in need of her.
When she told me that my
broken femur had held her marriage together, I created a story about love, that
it requires sacrifice. That I cannot have it without giving up something, if
not my bones or skin, then my ambition or curiosity. In The Good War, I
explore the idea of love as sacrifice in ways big and small: in the noble
sacrifice of war heroes throwing down their lives for the sake of others or for
the sake of an ideal; and in the way that sacrifice plays out in families. In
my book, Charlotte Galle — who bears a physical resemblance to my mother —
rejects what her family has groomed her to do, which is to support her brother
Ed so that he can be an artist. Charlotte also rejects heterosexuality, and in
that way, she is drawn from my own experience, not my mother’s.
My brother Dave was an artist who lost
his way. He was there that day in 1975, when I tripped on that cord while I was
making my way to sit on the couch. At just shy of seven years old, he saw me
lose a big piece of skin, he saw me step through that corona of boiling oil and
change from a bold happy child to a fearful unhappy one. He saw me become
someone else. I was told that he was the first person to make me laugh when I
was in the hospital. Nobody thought to help him process what he had seen that
day. Seven years later he witnessed a friend die. They had been drinking beer
and handling a loaded gun at another friend’s house when the gun went off. Our
mother feared the family of the dead boy would blame my brother and come after
him, so she sent him to stay with my paternal grandparents in Elmira for a
couple of weeks. I know she thought she was protecting him, but her choice to
send him away echoed for me another choice she had made. When I first came home
from the burn unit, they had to send me back to the hospital because the house
was too dirty and chaotic for me to heal in. My poor mother had three other
kids, and my father did not help around the house. A neighbor who was going to
be away for an extended period kindly (luckily) offered to let me stay in their
house. Priscilla came up from Maryland to stay with me. My rational adult mind
understands these choices, but my child-mind experienced this move down the
street as a second banishment, after the initial terrible banishment of being
burned. I believe Dave heard what I heard, a whispered refrain of the demon
denizens of the enchanted house: children, you are not safe here.
In high school Dave was a
runner who also did drugs — we all did drugs if we could get them. In those
days, Buffalo in the mid-eighties, it was easy to get alcohol and weed and acid
and occasional cocaine. For fun we rode our bikes around town and drank and
drugged in traffic circles and parks and parentless houses. Dave and I and our
friends liked Depeche Mode and OMD and New Order in public and Black Sabbath
less publicly. He and I had some friends in common, but we went to different
high schools. I was not as popular, I hid my scars with big clothes and clownishness,
and I was dealing with a new set of physical difficulties — a chronic problem
with one hip that had begun as a minor birth defect and been exacerbated by the
breaking of my leg. I rode my bike around and wanted to run but hip pain
stopped me. I avoided sports, while Dave was captain of his cross-country team.
At the home of a friend
with artist parents, I found a mind-blowing record collection that included the
works of the Velvet Underground. I found their music before Dave did. When he
went off to his experimental college, I gave him my tape of the album VU, which
we called the couch album. It was the only music he brought with him. My mom
and I drove him to his new school in western Massachusetts. I remember watching
him push his skateboard, loaded with a box of comic books, toward his dorm. He later
reported to me from that hallowed place of college that having that tape had
put him in good standing with a roommate. I was proud of that. Halfway into his
second year of college and my first, he had a psychotic break. The following February,
he used his girlfriend’s scarf to hang himself from a tree.
When I was back in the Buffalo house a
few years ago, I found a drawing of Dave’s that I had always loved. It was up
in the attic room that used to be my refuge for smoking pot and making out. The
house is not big, but being enchanted, it is full of veils. We all cloaked
ourselves in what we could find for comfort. My parents had an open-door policy
toward our friends, which made our house a popular spot. I don’t think they
really wanted to know what we were doing. Our mother had been a bohemian type
in New York City before she met my dad. She was not one of those hippie parents
who smoked pot with their kids, but she was not strict either.
One time she came into my
room and there was a bag of hashish on the windowsill. “What’s that, a turd?”
she asked me. I looked right at her and said, “No mom, it’s hash.” She turned
around and walked away. The next day I found a letter on my pillow, a poetic
exegesis that told me “not choosing is also a choice.” I had no idea what the
fuck she meant, but to this day, I wish she had said it to my face. I also wish
that when Dave had his psychotic break at that college in Massachusetts, she
had invited me to come with the family to see him at the institution where he
would briefly stay. I was in college in New York City by then and she called me
when they were already on their way to see him. She said they didn’t want to
bother me because I had exams coming up. Later, a demon in me would say that
our mother did not want to be reminded of the ways she had failed me while she
was wrestling with the ways she had failed Dave. She did not want to see her
two failures together. But then, if I deploy the word failure, I become
entangled again. She often called herself a failure, which made it difficult to
criticize her. She read widely and had strong opinions, but in the middle of a
rant she would interrupt herself by saying “Shut up Anne!”
When love is winning, I understand
that in that terrible moment of my brother’s psychotic break, my parents must
have been terrified. They must have thought that with all the pain and trauma
I’d survived, that it would be too hard on me to see Dave all doped up and
institutionalized. What sucks about that is that I wanted to be in the family.
I wanted to be in it for the bad things as well as for the good. At the time, I
didn’t think to insist that I join them, something I regret to this day. The
Christmas of 1987 was our first without Dave, who was in the institution then. I
was still home for the break when he came back to the enchanted house. He used
to make jokes about everything, be disdainful of everything, but after his
break down he was quiet, mild, and opinion free. I regret too, that I went back
to my college as soon as I could. I had a job at the library, but most students
were still away. I lived on vending machine food and haunted the nearly empty
dorm. The last time I spoke to him on the phone he said, “I just wish I could
talk to someone.” I said, “You can talk to me.” In response, he said nothing
for what seemed a long time. I invited him to visit, but I knew he wouldn’t. He
took some classes at the small college where my dad taught history, got a job
at MacDonald’s, and after a couple of months went back to visit his girlfriend
at the college in Massachusetts, where he would end his life in a tree.
The drawing is beautiful. I can’t help
but read it as a landscape of the netherworld, of the place that Dave was soon
to pass through. I found it, poorly mounted in a sharp-cornered aluminum frame,
in my attic room behind a pile of books, nails, dish towels, and bike grease. I
took it with me back to Portland and had it framed. It turned out to be heavier
than I thought it would be and as a result I haven’t found a way to hang it
properly. It rests on the floor, like a beautiful tombstone, an image of a
winged creature and of what that creature sees as he passes through the
netherworld.
For years after his
death, Dave appeared in my dreams. He never spoke and when I asked him if he
was coming back, he gave a little smile and shook his head. When I asked him
where he’d been he showed me a dark, thick forest. Years later, when I was
living in Brooklyn in the early nineties, I heard a ruckus in the street in the
wee hours of the morning. I almost got up to look out the window, but I heard Dave’s
voice say, “Stay down!” Seconds later a bullet came through the window. It
would have hit me in the gut.
I dedicated The Good War to my
brother and mother, my beloved ghosts. They were both artists and outsiders to
themselves. They had the capacity to detach from and to berate themselves as venomously
as they would a sworn enemy. In Bittergreen, one of the characters contemplates
suicide. I know my mother had a lot of trouble and depression and struggle and
that she blamed herself for Dave’s death. It was terrible for all of us, but
her grief was all consuming and indiscriminate in its expression. She lost
weight and started smoking again. When we were talking about other things, she
would tell a story of Dave falling asleep when he was a child, of his head
suddenly lolling on his shoulder. We were all dealing with our own grief, and
for years, if she was in the room, we were dealing with hers.
On my parents’ second
date, my mother declared that she was getting a divorce from her mother. When
my dad tells that story, he always jokes that he kept seeing her anyway. My
mother may have gotten that divorce, but she never managed to fully cut the
psychic umbilical cord between them. She wanted Priscilla to love the book she
wrote, which featured a glamorous widow who finds love again with an English
gentleman widower. When Priscilla dismissed Bittergreen as the work of a
hack, Anne did not speak to her for a year, until Priscilla was diagnosed with
pancreatic cancer. Then Anne and her siblings — there were four of them, in the
same order by gender and roughly as close in age as me and mine — came together
to see their mother out of this world.
I don’t know what my mother would have
thought of The Good War. I suspect she would have said kind things and
then found ways to disparage it when I least expected it. I used some of her
family’s history as the basis for my book. It may offend some people who are related
to me. It’s not the first novel that I’ve written, but it’s the first I’ve
managed to get published. What seems ironic about that to me is that I have had
some measure of success writing about my mother’s people, though for years I rejected
the idea of using them as inspiration. Maybe I had to write The Good War
as way to propitiate my ancestors with a sacrifice of hours of labor. Maybe the
wounded child in me craves a declaration of truths as I see them.
It is very hard to know
what happens inside the family enchantment, even when the narrator is more
reliable than my mother was. Her truths were as likely to be emotional as
factual. Among the visions that she shared with me as if they were as real as
bread on the table or Reaganomics were her knowledge of her past life as a 14th
century servant girl impregnated by a lord of the manor and her visit to a
council of ravens who explained to her, as they wrapped her in their wings,
that she was “neither forgiven nor unforgiven, but known.” I did know her and I
loved her anyway.
When she lay dying of
breast cancer, I gave her the words of forgiveness that I understood she
wanted, though I had hoped she would ask me for them. For so many years, she
played Lucy to my Charlie Brown, placing the football of an honest conversation
about what had happened to me and then moving it as I aimed my kick. That
happened so many times that I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that I wanted
her to engage in the curative magic of making an explicit, verbal request for
forgiveness. I wanted the gift of this acknowledgment from her, this bit of
truth-telling: that when I was burned, she was the adult in charge, and I was
the child in her care. I gave forgiveness to her anyway. She had been hanging
on, it seemed to me, for those words. Her vital signs dropped precipitously
after I said that she was known, and loved, and forgiven. That night she died.
The last word anyone heard her say was my name, repeated three times. When I
went in to see her body, I saw that her expression was not peaceful. I did what
I’d heard Buddhists do — I yelled into her ear, “Go toward the light!”
Two months or so after
she died, I was walking near my place in Berkeley, where I was living at the
time. I heard her voice so clearly and distinctly, from above the trees. She
called out gleefully, like a child herself, “Hi Liz! Can you see me?” I
answered no! Where are you? But her answer, then, was silence.
Elizabeth Costello’s
poetry and prose have appeared in venues including Lithub,
Fourteen Hills, Crab Orchard Review, SF Weekly, 7x7,
and in her poetry chapbook RELIC. She grew up in Buffalo, NY, went to
college in New York City, and then moved around a lot before settling for many
years in the Bay Area. In 2021 she moved to Portland, Oregon. With Portland
painter and Soliloquy fine arts gallery owner, Ruth Meijier, she
co-founded ekphraestivalpdx, a collaboration among West Coast poets and
visual artists that culminates in exhibitions and readings in the spring. The
Good War is her first novel.
Maw Shein Win's latest full-length poetry collection is Percussing
the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024). Her previous full-length collection Storage
Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) was nominated for the Northern
California Book Award in Poetry and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for
Poetry. Her work has recently been published in The American Poetry Review,
The Margins, The Bangalore Review, and other literary journals.
She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, and the 2025 Berkeley
Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Awardee. Win's previous collections
include Invisible Gifts and two chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering
palace and Score and Bone. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at
the University of San Francisco and in the Low Residency MFA Program at
Dominican University. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she
is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a literary community. mawsheinwin.com
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