I’m giving a talk on Monday, Jan. 17th, at the Toronto Reference Library, Yonge & Bloor.
It’s part of their lecture series, Thought Exchange, and I’ll be exploring some of the themes in my most recent book, Home Free, about what the boomers have wrought in the current culture of family.
l – 3 p.m., Jan. 20th, Toronto Reference Library
Leonard Cohen was in Hamilton at the beginning of his two-yearlong sold-out world tour, when my phone rang close to midnight.
“I’ll be late getting home,” my husband said on the phone. “I’m backstage with Leonard and the band.”
Damn. That was supposed to be me.
My husband, Brian Johnson, is a writer for Maclean’s and, over the years, he has interviewed Leonard a number of times, through good years and bad. He is full of respect for Leonard as a poet, a musician, a sort of father figure and a 76-year-old man who still looks good in a fedora. Although his relationship to Leonard is professional, it also feels intimate and singular.
One time, when he was down in L.A. doing an interview with one or another celebrity, he ended up having dinner out, with Leonard and the actress Sandra Oh (another serial interviewee). She had just finished acting in the movie Sideways and “felt like ordering some interesting wines,” Brian said on the phone, with a happy lilt in his voice. “That’s sounds like fun,” I said gamely. Sandra Oh, Leonard Cohen … stiff competition! I hung up and jogged over to the cinder track of a nearby park, where I walked round and round with my headphones on, listening to Ten New Songs (The ponies ride … the girls are young …), renewing my private, exclusive, un-media-sullied relationship to Leonard (as I call him).
I realize I’m not alone. All over the world, there are fans who maintain shy but meaningful contact with the singer (who has always tended his website with care, like a bonsai gardener). The impression that each one of us enjoys, of having a privileged, personal connection to him, is one of Leonard’s most creative and generous gifts. Readers who connect with his poetry or fans who make a little nest for themselves inside his songs come to believe that Leonard has somehow gained access to the details of their secret lives. He outs us. We listen to “A Thousand Kisses Deep” or “Alexandra Leaving” as if standing in a spotlight before a mirror.
How did he know about my polka-dot blouse, my forward deck, my brush and comb?
His songs and writing make us feel more fully known, more clearly seen; of course, that’s what art is supposed to do — to offer up confessions that unlock your own. To risk the full human encounter.
My relationship with Leonard began in high school, in 1963, when I was 17 and read his first novel, The Favourite Game. The hero, Laurence Breavman, is a Montreal university student who spends one summer working at a summer camp, having sex and falling in and out of love with women. He is living at a certain anguished distance from his life. He’s horny, confused and unhappy — it’s really the perfect novel to read when you’re 17. The voice in it is comic and lyrical by turns, as if Holden Caulfield had migrated north from Manhattan to become a Jewish camp counsellor in the Laurentians.
Leonard the Great Connector is already in evidence in The Favourite Game. “His guitar was always handy,” he writes of Breavman. “The cedar wood was cool against his stomach. The inside of the guitar smelled like the cigar boxes his father used to have. The tone was excellent in the middle of the night. In those late hours, the purity of the music always surprised him and almost convinced him that he was creating a sacramental relationship with the girl, the outside city, and himself.” And, with me, I might add. Leonard prefaced the novel with a poem of his, that begins:
As the mist leaves no scar
On the dark green hill,
So my body leaves no scar
On you, nor ever will
What romantic 17-year-old girl wouldn’t memorize such a poem? Although Leonard’s early poetry was troubadourish, with little of the dark humour of his later writing (and none of the semen-on-the-windshield joie de vivre of his experimental novel Beautiful Losers), it wasn’t sentimental. The writing had precision and edge, and he trusted his reader to meet him halfway.
As a teenager longing for life and art to begin, I read his poetry as a dialogue between us on the page. That’s when you know a poem is pulling its weight: when it speaks to your secret life. (And poets assume we all have one.) By Grade 13, I was on a first-name basis with all he had written and felt it was time for us to be formally introduced. Leonard was living in New York at the Chelsea Hotel at the time, where writers, musicians and junkies rented rooms, to pursue dereliction and their craft. Where Bob Dylan wrote “Sad- Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” I remember you well, in the Chelsea Hotel, Leonard wrote in one song.
Sitting at my Selectric typewriter in Burlington, Ont., typing with the speed and skill of someone groomed for secretarial glory, I composed a short note to L. Cohen. His poems, I wrote, were like a telephone connecting everyone who read them. It was a terrible, ungainly simile, but I needed to thank him for breaking into my frozen Burlington heart and for speaking so unpatronizingly to me. For allowing all things, on the page.
(Before Prozac, there was poetry.)
Not long afterward, a letter arrived. My address on the envelope was written in purple fountain-pen ink. Inside was a sheet of semi-transparent (of course!) onion skin stationery.
Dear Marni, the message went, Thank you for your most perfect letter. Leonard.
That got me into my 20s.
But in university, our relationship grew moody. With “Suzanne” and his new career as a folk singer, Leonard became popular — too popular for my taste. I knew that his accolytes would only crush him; he needed my loving distance, my complicit silence. After all, Leonard had touched my perfect body with his mind — we didn’t need anything as coarse as an encounter in time and space.
So we continued to meet whenever we could, in my bed under the lamp, on a chair with a dead magazine or in the darkness of an audience as his imperfect voice released the dove of a new song
While waiting for Leonard to carry my groceries home, I met a man, a writer, who had published a small volume of poems.He had embarked on a crazy novel that I liked. We fell in with each other. He was a journalist who sometimes interviews stars and artists. Over the years, he has interviewed Leonard often and hung out with him at times.
One summer day, he interviewed Leonard in his Montreal apartment and, when the conversation was over and small talk resumed, Brian said, “I have to buy some fish on the way home.”
“I know where to go. It’s not far,” said Leonard. “I’ll walk you there.”
Later, up north at our cabin, I cooked the Cohen-consecrated fish. Delicious. Life is strange; somehow, despite being one of his original Founding Fans, I had become a journalist-in-law to Leonard.
Two years ago, partly to recoup his lost investments, Leonard Cohen embarked on a world tour that became one protracted love-in after another with his global audiences. How wonderful to command such a warm following in your eighth decade!
Early in the tour, he played several concerts in Toronto. With the interviews over, my husband and I joined the audience one night — a ménage, as it were. At 74, Leonard was in better shape than ever — sober, calm and in good voice.
The concert was masterful, a dance of light and dark that lasted three hours. He doffed his grey fedora repeatedly, paying his respects to everyone in the band. In the past, Leonard used to sing onstage with his eyes closed, primed by several bottles of red wine before getting up on stage. Now, his eyes are open, he has moves, he skips, he plays all the songs you want him to and even re-animates that durable old chestnut, “Suzanne.” He sings the words with care, in his old, tender timbre; you see the river in Montreal, you glimpse the garbage and the flowers. He brings “Marianne” and “Sisters of Mercy” to life again.
But the evening was not an exercise in nostalgia; it was a new window opening onto a beloved old view. As an encore, Leonard sang “Closing Time” with the band and then, as a joke, he came back onstage, almost sprinting, for yet another encore (there were seven). If L-dog (as my son affectionately calls him) can be this on top of things at 74, then there’s hope for us all. Maybe we don’t have to accept diminishment and decline as we age. Instead, we can become more ex-pansive, more generous, cannier at delivering what we have to offer. Ringing the bells that still can ring.
One encore included the hymn-song “If It Be Your Will,” a song about relinquishing control. Leonard’s art partly lies in erasing the marks of his own authorship and making the audience feel in possession of, almost the co-creator, of the music. We’re summoned to become more ourselves, in the presence of this smallish, smiling figure on stage. He’s there for us. He’s our man.
My son will make fun of L-dog whenever we get too reverential. He respects the guy, even though his own musical tastes run in different directions. But it turns out that he’s had a private connection with Leonard, too.
When he was 17 and living at home, the only computer with a printer was in my office. My son would use it to print out his high school assignments and other documents. Years later, I decided it was time to finally houseclean my computer, and as I was trashing files, I came across an old folder of Casey’s stuff. I opened it to make sure I wasn’t erasing school records or something of that sort. I found some photos and old resumes, along with a university essay on Lucille Bogan, Iggy Pop and “raising social issues through social deviance in popular music.” And there was also a “Letter to Leonard” that he had written sometime in his teens. I opened it.
Dear Leonard Cohen,
I am writing you to say how much I enjoyed your book, The Favourite Game. I know how much work is involved in creating a novel compared to the recognition it gets. I found it to be a very honest collections of moments.
The note went on for two more paragraphs, and closed with “Thanks for the story.” The book had offered him some timely solace, apparently.
I don’t know if the letter ever got mailed. But I’m sure Leonard got the message.
Zoomermag.com – Oct. 2010
By Robert Fulford
September 25, 2010
On Feb. 1, 1988, that always reliable trend-spotter, New York magazine, carried unsettling news on its cover: “Back to the Nest: Grown-up Children Who Move Back.” The article opened with a woman whose mid-20s daughter, running short on money, wanted to reclaim her old room in the family home. The mother was resisting. It violated her expectations. “People of 25 just don’t go home to their mothers,” she said. She was stating what seemed to her an iron rule. Then.
That may have been the first appearance of this subject as a big social problem. Today, after more than two decades, there’s still plenty of nervous talk about the failure-to-launch generation, the boomerang kids. The idea remains a killer of fond parental dreams and many North Americans haven’t yet absorbed the shock. (In some places, notably Italy, it’s much more common and more accepted.)
In the current edition of The Atlantic magazine, Michael Kinsley writes that many Baby Boomers, having paid publicly and privately for their parents’ generation to retire in comfort, now wake up to find that they are also supporting their children, into their 20s and beyond. This week’s New Yorker has a man in a cartoon saying, “I never thought I’d have to move back in with my parents.” He’s in a graveyard, sitting on the stoop of the family tomb.
Stay-around offspring exasperate parents, and can humiliate all concerned. Those who comment on it in public often imply that if young people would only try harder they could work things out for themselves and avoid being a burden. But Marni Jackson’s lively and thoughtful book, Home Free: The Myth of The Empty Nest, published today, avoids the blaming and shaming that often erupts around this subject. Her great virtue is that she comes through this experience with both her sense of humour and her love for her now 27-year-old son intact.
Jackson sets out to write about how people in their 20s “are taking their time to grow up and leave home.” She calls it a “twilight stage,” when they move out, move back in, then leave again. Naturally, she worries about the results of parental support. Do parents playing the role of landlord undermine the independence of their adult children, or are they simply helping them tackle a much tougher world than the one they faced when starting out?
An anxious mom, full of advice, Jackson can’t keep herself from meddling. She informs her son that the etiquette of applying for a job has in recent years ramped up to a level where every detail matters, even the smallest. “Did he know that?” she wondered. He did, and he tells her to give advice only when asked. Eventually, mother, father and son find ways to accommodate each other’s pride and anxiety.
Revealingly, parents dealing with these problems often sound as if they’ve been unfairly ambushed, not just by a weakened economy but by the reality of adult children. Kinsley’s phrase “wake up” suggests that parents doze off during the first 20-some years.
Parents are often caught off-guard because of their own lack of imagination and their failure to consider the future. Nobody understands, when considering parenthood, that you can’t have babies and you can’t have children. All you can have are human beings. These creatures grow old and remain permanently attached.
Like most long-term projects, parenthood involves more thought and effort than anyone expects; fortunate parents will know their children through many phases, into their 50s, even 60s. In my experience, this is more enriching than almost anything else on Earth. In any case, the nest never really empties (one of Jackson’s points).
Parents are likely to be disappointed if they believe that each generation will function much like the one before (only better, ideally). The complicated fact is that family structures change constantly and always have. They shift unpredictably, affected by everything from new technology and economic failures to widespread divorce and falling birth rates.
I grew up in a three-generation household: children, parents and one grandmother. My mother grew up in a three-generation household: children, mother and one grandfather. No one thought these arrangements odd. If we could accept the truth that civilization never stops changing, we might be less rattled when things fail to work out exactly as we’d hoped.
National Post
robert.fulford@utoronto.ca
To link back to the original article click here.
“Old age,” observed Bette Davis, “is not for sissies.”
Consider the boomers. Possessors of the most towering generational hubris the world has seen, our cohort has always been tempted to see its experience and enthusiasms as uniquely momentous. Now, no longer able to muster the febrile energies of youth, we find ourselves past 60, along with the spokesman who urged us, in those halcyon days of the generation gap, to never trust anyone over 30!
The pills we take are now more likely to be statins and Viagra than psychedelics, and we are confronting a Janus-headed momento mori in our parents’ failing health and the unsettling adult adventures of our children. Toronto writer Marni Jackson’s new book is a deft, literate memoir, both amusing and comforting, about what that confrontation entails.
Early on in Home Free: The Myth of the Empty Nest, Jackson lays out exactly what she’s up to. The award-winning author and editor, whose 1992 classic The Mother Zone: Love, Sex and Laundry in the Modern Family set a new standard for Canadian humour, is revisiting the story nearly two decades on. This time she’s dealing with loss and renewal in the many forms they take in any family’s story – aging parents, the emerging adulthood of children, and the complex reassessment of one’s adult life that emerges when both of these consequential transformations are happening.
“No one is in rehab or small claims court as I write this. I’m only talking about the ordinary anguish of raising normal children in this book – particularly the twilight stage, when they leave home, then come back, then leave again.”
Her son Casey, she reports, likes her book, despite the way it turns the intimate details of his life into public narrative. Many readers will agree. Home Free, which follows the author as she negotiates the illness and death of her parents, and her son’s alarming neo-bohemian travels and even more daunting attempts to get some traction in a difficult Canadian economy, is a book that is both timely, funny and wise.
Many boomers are caring for – or mourning – aging parents. We are sorely missing the adult children who have left home, or enduring the rigours of having them return to the empty nest. We are caught up in the vast echo chamber of our own extended mid-life crises while we flounder around trying to be useful to the strange creatures who used to be our children.
Lacking certainty, we may have to settle for rueful laughter, small wisdom, memory and compassion. These are all richly on offer in Jackson’s delightful book.
For example, her observation that, “This becomes our last parental chore – to dwindle, to clam up, to say ‘Well, you may be right’ and step aside,” may well be worth the price of admission.
Memoir is a tricky business, because it demands the writer find ways to make her unique experience resonate. It must chart a course between the details of an individual life and whatever more general meaning can be found in those details. Kids, don’t try this at home. The task is harder than it looks, and only a few memoirs avoid the perils of solipsism, sentiment and sensationalism.
Home Free manages that memoirist’s hat trick. Read it, gentle boomer, but try not to press it too enthusiastically on your children. Their time for the wit and wisdom of old age will come soon enough. For now, let’s keep Jackson as our final generational treasure. With so many of the cultural giants we grew up with now reduced to ring tones and car ads, we need all the genuine treasures we can muster.
Tom Sandborn is an author and social critic who lives in Vancouver. With seven children and 16 grandchildren in his insanely extended family, he knows with certainty that the empty nest is a myth.
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One of Canada’s most respected nonfiction writers, Marni writes about a broad range of subjects, including family, motherhood, medical education, pain studies, the literary world, and wilderness expeditions.
Her books combine novelistic narrative elements with cultural analysis, and she is best known for her stylish and darkly comic family memoirs, The Mother Zone and the forthcoming companion volume, Home Free: The Myth of The Empty Nest. Her work has been published in Canada, the US and England.
In the course of her career, Marni’s columns, features and essays have appeared in the Globe & Mail, Toronto Life, Maclean’s, Chatelaine, Saturday Night, Explore, Outside, Rolling Stone, The London Sunday Times, Utne, and Brick magazine, among others.
Her journalism has won numerous National Magazine Awards, for travel, humor, columns, and personal journalism.
From 2006-2009, Marni was Rogers Chair of the Literary Journalism program at The Banff Centre, a month-long residency for professional nonfiction writers. She is also on the faculty of the Mountain Writing program at Banff, a unique three-week program for mountain climbers and others involved in mountain culture who are working on essays or books.
Marni was also a senior editor at the Walrus Magazine, which has won more National Magazine Awards in Canada than any other publication.
Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Marni now lives in Toronto with her husband, film critic and writer Brian Johnson. They have one son, Casey Johnson (The Rock and Roll Doctor).
Books:
Home Free: The Myth of The Empty Nest, (Thomas Allen & Son), Sept. 2010. A multigenerational family memoir about leaving home, coming back, and growing up.
Pain: The Science and Culture of Why We Hurt, 2002, Random House. (Bloomsbury in UK, Crown in US). (Originally published as Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign) A narrative exploration of the science and culture of pain studies. Nominated for the Writers’ Trust Pearson Nonfiction Prize.
The Mother Zone: Love, Sex and Laundry in the Modern Family, 1992 (Macfarlane, Walter & Ross). (Reissued by Vintage Editions). A memoir about motherhood. Nominated for the Stephen Leacock Award For Humour.
Anthologies:
Essays and short stories have been published in:
The Heart Does Break:Canadian Writers on Grief and Loss, edited by Jean Baird, Random House, 2009
Double Lives, edited by Shannon Cowan, Fiona Lam and Cathy Stonehouse
Caught in The Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women, edited by Tanya Mars & Johanna Householder, YYZ Books, 2004
Dropped Threads, edited by M. Anderson and Carol Shields, 2000
Brick: A Literary Journal, Summer, 2003, and Spring 2002 issues
75 Readings Plus, edited by Buscemi, Smith & Wiznura, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 2002
Contemporary Literary Criticism, v. 153, The Gale Group, 2002
Local Colour, edited by Carole Martin, Douglas & MacIntyre, 1994
The Thinking Heart, Best Canadian Essays, edited by George Galt, Quarry Press, 1992
Taking Risks: Literary Journalism From The Edge, edited by Barbara Moon and Don Obe, Banff Centre Press, 1998
Dropped Threads, edited by Carole Shields and Margaret Anderson, Random House, 2007.
Fiction
She’s at work right now on a collection of stories linked by celebrity invasions, one of which, “Bob Dylan Goes Tubing”, appeared in The Walrus.
Radio: A regular panelist on CBC Radio’s erstwhile “Talking Books”
TV: Co-host (with flopsweat) on TVO’s book show, Imprint, 1998-2000.
Theatre: Co-writer with The Clichettes of “Half Human, Half Heartache”, a successful product of the amazing performance scene in Toronto in the 1980′s. She also wrote “She-Devils of Niagara” a prophetic gender comedy produced at the Factory Lab Theatre in 1985.
Film: The usual unproduced feature-length screenplays, plus several years working in development, first at The Canadian Film Centre, then Telefilm Canada.
Personal: For other particulars of her private life, more than you may require, please consult her two family memoirs.
From the author of the best-selling The Mother Zone, comes a candid narrative about an over-anxious mother and her twenty-something over-adventurous son.
Home Free is about the last secret lap of parenting: getting through your kids” twenties and learning how to let them go at the same time. The twentysomethings who invented the generation gap in the nineteen sixties have grown up to become hyperinvolved parents who can”t stop worrying about their adult kids.
Many of the kids are still living in the basement, bussing tables instead of going to business school, and depending on their parents for emotional support. Just when they thought family life was on the wane, parents are back on deck with their children; at the same time many are often coping with
their own frail or dying parents.
Is this the new, improved face of family, where kids still depend on their parents for stability, friendship and guidance in an increasingly unforgiving world? Or has this era of over-invested parents, living vicariously through the achievements of their children, bred dependency in the new generation?
Home Free is an intimate, candid, reflective and comic memoir that focuses on this new and undefined stage of family life: the challenges of helping our kids navigate their twenties-while learning how to let go of them at the same time.
They invented the generation gap in the 1960s. Now it’s closing in on them, as they become hyper-involved with their own adult kids. Just when they thought their job was done, parents are fretting about their grown children—often while coping with their own frail parents.
Marni Jackson’s intimate and witty memoir explores an untold rite of passage: the last lap of parenting. Home Free offers ground-breaking insights into navigating your kids’ twenties, and learning to let go.
To read excerpts from Home Free, please go to www.walrusmagazine.com (“The Boomerang Effect”) and www.macleans.ca (“Motherhood: The Third Act”).
A compulsively readable explorer’s journal of the hidden territory of pain, as profound and insightful as the work of Oliver Sacks and Sherwin Nuland.
A bee sting on the lips was the tiny lance that set Marni Jackson off on a four-year exploration of the many ways in which we suffer. Exiled for an afternoon in the country called pain, she realized that no one had the words to describe her condition although it was as familiar as a headache. A fusion of emotion, nerve and memory, pain inspired only questions.
“Why do we still distinguish between mental pain and physical pain,” she asks, “when pain is always an emotional experience? Why is pain so poorly understood, especially in a century of self-scrutiny? Hasn’t anyone noticed the embarrassing fact that science is about to clone a human being but still can’t cure the pain of a bad back?” North Americans spend $24 billion a year on pain relief while chronic pain is on the rise. If pain is the reason why most people visit the doctor, why are most doctors so bad at addressing the problem of suffering?
Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign dives back into the history of pain and forward into the possibilities of pain genetics, bringing us stories of both people in pain and the pain pioneers: eccentrics and artists, wrestlers and writers, ministers and mothers, psychologists and philosophers, nurses and doctors. Marni Jackson has created a definitive, heartfelt, funny and beguiling portrait of a condition we can’t live with – and can’t live without.
“A bouquet of empirical opinions and reminiscences of about all the many small moments that make up the mothering process.”
Sunday Globe
“Humourous, frank and passionate… Entertaining and gutsy, her account will warn and console parents.”
Publishers Weekly
“A wonderful memoir of what motherhood is really like…fun to read, eye-opening, humourous and exasperating.”
Library Journal
“[A]n exuberant, generous-hearted book about the experience of motherhood and the impact of that experience on her life and work … The writing is intelligent, reflective and touchingly brave … Jackson possesses a novelist’s eye and ear.”
Carol Shields, The Globe and Mail
“An intimate look at an evolving relationship and a startlingly honest self-portrait of an intelligent woman growing older and wiser….Jackson makes a major contribution towards restoring the dignity that mothering children deserves.”
Maclean’s
“A witty and honest account of the strange isolation, the mingled joys and madness of motherhood…funny, tough and relentless, pushing each thought as far as she can bear.”
The Toronto Star
“Truly one of the most enjoyable reads of the season…Jackson makes the pages crackle in the manner of Fay Weldon or Nora Ephron.”
ROB Magazine
“You’ve got to read The Mother Zone. ”
Kingston Whig-Standard
“A terrific book…Jackson concocts a refreshing tonic out of the comedy of errors we call family life…a treat for weary parents of either sex.”
Quill & Quire
“Delightful…funny, touching, reassuring, a revelation. The Mother Zone is a marvelous combination of personal experience tempered by intellectual observation… flashes of recognition occur on every page…a must-read for all modern mothers.”
Books in Canada
“I was hooked…Jackson’s writing is so succinct, so perceptive and flows so easily that it keeps the reader enthralled…her themes are so universal that anyone who has ever been a mother, had a mother, knows a mother, will know exactly what she’s talking about.”
Kitchener-Waterloo Record
“It reads like a novel, as intimate as a poem…With a gift for metaphor, good humour, and remarkably honesty [Jackson] calls up the feelings and minutiae of motherhood…This wonderful self-portrait of emotional life in the mother zone provides solace and surprises from start to finish.”
Kirkus Reviews
“A worthy companion to Dr. Spock on every parent’s bookshelf.”
Chatelaine
“It is hard to find anything that conveys the complex emotional truth about being a mother – the rage, the tenderness, the loss of self, the paralyzing fear, the numbing drudgery…The exception may be Marni Jackson’s new book, The Mother Zone… This book, with its humour, depth and compassion, could be a long-overdue manifesto for mothers, the beginning of an undeclared revolution.”
Ottawa Citizen
“Irresistibly funny… Poignant insight and a style that lured me to read the thing at stoplights… Drop all your preconceived ideas about mothering at the front cover… Marni Jackson’s first-hand account of motherhood deserves a category all its own.”
Charlotte Observer
“Jackson is truthful and hits female feelings right on the head.”
Calgary Herald
“The Mother Zone is filled with the kind of insights you’ll never get from Dr. Spock… Jackson is by turns tender and ruthless, unashamedly sentimental and fearlessly self-mocking… Her observations are often hilarious.”
Family Practice
“Reading Jackson’s book was like a re-run of my own alternatively dark and euphoric thoughts, only put in extremely eloquent, poignant, why-didn’t-I-say-that language.”
Victoria Times-Colonist
“You can be a sensitive male and motherhood will still be the dark side of the moon. This book takes you there.”
NOW Magazine
“Jackson gives readers back to themselves, the best thing a book can do.”
Edmonton Journal
