A conversation with Nancy Bachrach about what it takes to write a memoir—and how she learned to laugh about a devastating childhood.
Nancy Bachrach was a young American woman living in Paris (with the job of trying to sell deodorant to the French) when she received a life-upending phone call: Her father had been asphyxiated by a gas leak and her mentally ill mother was in a coma. The year was 1983; Bachrach flew home to Providence, Rhode Island and –with her siblings--braced for a double funeral. Against all expectations, her mother survived: delusional, amnesiac, grandiose, demanding—and robustly alive.Bachrach’s moving memoir, The Center of the Universe (her mother’s name for herself), is just out from Knopf. That it’s harrowing isn’t surprising—but that it’s shockingly funny is. When I went to hear Bachrach read to a large crowd New York, she was constantly interrupted—as she wished to be--by the audience’s laughter.
A few days later, Bachrach and I had this conversation:
Q: There is a vast literature of troubled families, but not many memoirs are as genuinely funny as yours. Your mother wasn’t just quirky, she was mentally ill. How did you find the humor in it?
A: I wasn’t laughing at the time. When my mother was soaring, she was a force of nature who could come up behind me as suddenly as a twister and turn Providence into Oz. And when she crashed, she was the wind shear beneath my wings. But sometimes what’s deranged and absurd is also ridiculous, especially when seen through a long lens, and after a lot of therapy.
Q: Many women want to write memoir but are afraid of how their families will react. Did you worry about that?
A: I never thought I’d publish this memoir while my mother was alive, so I allowed myself to say some things that were supposedly unsayable. The pen is a blunt instrument, and I told stories that I’d never said aloud to anyone, certainly not to her. But she read a draft, and it was quite a conversation-starter. Afterward, the self-proclaimed “center of the universe” announced that I’d “never have better material.” The decision to publish it was hers — it isn’t a revenge memoir, after all. In fact, she thought I should call it Love Story.
