By Mary Ellen Hannibal

To reading and snacking add a nap and you have my perfect day.  Kate Moses, well-known around these parts for originating (with Camille Peri), Salon’s Mother’s Who Think feature, selections of which became a national bestseller, is just out with her new book, Cakewalk, “a memoir of sadness and sweets.”

MEH: Mothers Who Think was in the vanguard of addressing a distinctive generation of mothers — women with careers in their life even if not at the moment, often bewildered about how to best reconcile the work and family worlds.  What are some of the most important issues you addressed?  And now that your children are a bit older, how has your outlook on this duality changed?

KM: Over the years it felt like we hit on just about everything, serious and not: from the guilt of mothers who, for one reason or another, made the choice not to breastfeed (sometimes incurring the judgment of other mothers) to why mothers are seldom included in the chronicling of their family’s big events (because they’re the ones behind the camera!); from the wrenching decisions of mothers who chose to give up their babies for adoption, to mothers who made the equally wrenching decision not to raise a child offered to them for adoption; from mothers who lived with the anxiety and unanticipated joys of raising a child with a difference, to one mother who had to decide whether she had time to rip off the brand-new sweater she’d just purchased before running to a child who was projectile vomiting.

But in every story we ran at Mothers Who Think, there was one issue underlying every mother’s experience: the isolation of feeling you were doing this profoundly important thing—learning how to raise a child—and that you were completely on your own. We discovered early that the great value of something like Mothers Who Think was in letting all of these mothers, with their varied experiences, know that they were NOT alone, that there were so many other women out there who understood their frustrations and their triumphs, and who were backing them up. That they really weren’t alone.

That was the beauty of discovering that the internet was such a perfect tool for mothers: that whenever you had the chance, even if it was at two in the morning while you were nursing a sleepless baby, you could go on line and find a community of people who understood.  When my co-editor and Mothers Who Think co-founder, Camille Peri, and I toured around the country after the book came out, that was the message that came back to us loud and clear: everywhere we went we were met by crowds of the most amazing, resourceful, wise and hilarious women who’d been connected by our little experiment on the World Wide Web.  To this day, though Camille and I left Mothers Who Think almost ten years ago, we still get emails from women who tell us how much it meant to them to know we were all in this together.

As our children have gotten older—Camille and I both have college-age sons now, and the youngest of our four, my daughter, is entering high school next year—the big surprise has been the completely unanticipated discovery that the kind of in-the-trenches experience of motherhood that we have had for so long actually comes to an end. Yes, you’re always a mother, always a parent, but it’s a shock to find that after all those intense and invested and sometimes relentless years, there comes a moment when your children are ready to leave you, just as you were trying to prepare them to do throughout their childhoods. And you’re not quite sure YOU are ready to let go…and who will you be when you do? Maybe there’s another book there…

MEH: Your novel Wintering is a recreation of Sylvia Plath—and your beautiful prose goes right down the rabbit hole with her.  How did you maintain your own equanimity while plunging after her pathology?  Is pathology the right word—how do you view her now?  Do you still read her poetry?

KM: Well, you’ve hit on the great challenge of writing Wintering, of trying to write from the perspective of the brilliant artist and deeply troubled, enormously complex Sylvia Plath. To write about her with authenticity, I had to get completely into her head, and as fascinating and euphoric as that could be, it was also excruciating, because she was so complicated and at times self-defeating, and because I knew where her story was going from the start.

But in my world, when the going gets tough, the tough get baking! I found that for the first half of the book, after completing each chapter I HAD to bake. Baking has always felt like a therapeutic exercise in order and control for me, and that’s what I needed after being inside Sylvia’s head. So I’d head for my kitchen and my measuring spoons. (Coincidentally, Plath was herself a compulsive baker—I suspect for the same reasons I am a baker, for that opportunity for control and order.)

Things intensified with the second half of the book. Once I hit that half-way milestone, it became clearer and clearer to me that no matter what life I revivified for Plath in my novel, nothing I wrote or did could ever recover for her the life she had lost.

It broke my heart, knowing that I could not save her from herself, and the closer I got to the end of Wintering, the more I needed to bake. I was baking every day, taking a breather from the catastrophic confluence of circumstances in her life that had led to her suicide. What still breaks my heart is that in the end the real Sylvia Plath was so close to getting the help she needed—her general practitioner, in particular, was valiant in his attempt to find her the right care for her mental illness—but that she slipped through anyway.

I knew from my research that later on the morning she killed herself, Plath was scheduled to see a specialist who was probably the only doctor in the world at that time who would have been able to diagnose her illness and treat it successfully, and, one hopes, to prevent the tragedy that marked her family’s life after her death. I understand that Plath’s daughter, too, suffered from the same biochemical issues that had plagued her mother; her son, who was only a year old when he lost his mother, ultimately committed suicide after battling with depression for many years.

I was profoundly moved by Plath’s poetry before I wrote Wintering, and I still go back to her poetry all the time. In fact lines from her work rise up to me frequently—when I bake I think of her poem A Birthday Present and the lines, “…measuring the flour, cutting off the excess, adhering to rules, to rules, to rules…”

In recent years Plath’s artistic legacy has begun to be reconsidered by the literary establishment that previously dismissed her as a mad housewife. She is finally being read and studied for the extraordinary audacity and technical genius of her Ariel poems, a poetic breakthrough that took place while she was quite courageously battling personal crises and mental illness (not to mention caring for two tiny children on her own). I am very proud that Wintering has played its small part in helping readers to experience Sylvia Plath in a new light. Her poems are so rich, they deserve being read and read again.

MEH: I haven’t read Cakewalk yet but I’m certainly looking forward to it.  Sadness and sweets, what’s not to like?  Did you start writing a memoir and then have this theme arise, or was there a different genesis?  And how are you managing to bake all the treats that are slated for your upcoming book events?

KM: I didn’t set out to write a memoir at all! In fact I jokingly told people I was writing a “cake memoir”—I thought I was going to write a book of essays about the bitter sweetness of life, with recipes. As a lifelong baker, I’ve always had the fantasy that someday I’d publish my recipes (bakers tend to have a huge ego investment in their recipes!), but I had taken the idea no further, it was really just a fantasy. Then in December 2007, my dear friend Diane Middlebrook, also a San Francisco writer and the acclaimed biographer of Anne Sexton, was in the last weeks of her life after a long battle with cancer.

Diane and I had met while I was writing Wintering and she was writing a biography of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and we became immediately inseparable. She was my soul-mate in many ways, and we became collaborators on our book research. We used to get together for what Diane called “tea and cake consultations”—we both had demanding sweet tooths, and either I would bake something or we’d get some wonderful treat from one of our local bakeries, and hash out ideas about our books over tea and cake.

After Diane’s diagnosis of a rare form of cancer, she pursued experimental treatments in Europe, but by the fall of 2007 the cancer was winning, and by December she was back in San Francisco for her final weeks. I was lucky to be with her during that time, and one day Diane began to have a morphine fantasy that her doctors had given her permission to have a bite of cake—at this point she had been unable to eat anything at all for several months and was subsisting on ice chips.

But Diane said that she had permission to hold a bite of chocolate cake on her tongue: not to swallow it, but to smell it and taste it and feel it and savor it, and for a couple of hours she described this bite of cake in the most voluptuous, almost erotic detail: its fragrance and feel and texture, and how the cake and the whole room would be blanketed in red rose petals, the entire room filled with rose petals, just like Cleopatra’s boudoir when she met Marc Antony for the first time.

The next day, I asked Diane if she remembered her chocolate cake. She didn’t remember any of it. And she told me, “You know, Kate, when you haven’t eaten for as long as I have, your body doesn’t want it any more. You don’t even think about it.” But I knew—that cake was the life she still wanted, all the moments of pleasure and experience that none of us want to lose.

After Diane’s death, I wanted to write a book about that bitter sweetness, of the chocolate cakes none of us want to let go of, and of appreciating the beauties of our lives, no matter where we came from or where we end up. In the process of writing that book, I discovered that my painful childhood had shaped my idea of appreciation and bitter sweetness much as my friendship with Diane had, and the story took on a life of its own–my life, unexpectedly.

Though Cakewalk ended up a real memoir, Diane’s generosity and gusto for life, her belief that we all deserve sweetness in its many forms and for its own sake, is its abiding spirit.

Filed under: Author Interview, Mary Ellen Hannibal, The Writer's Life