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.
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