ME, MY MARVELLOUSLY ECCENTRIC MOTHER AND I

Tara Isabella Burton reveals what it was like growing up with her single mum

My mother did not like happy, Hollywood endings in which a man and a woman ended up married and content. They represented everything she detested – naivety, simplicity, what she saw as an American tendency to tie things up in a neat little bow. Her tastes veered more towards the ambiguous and sophisticated: French New Wave, Henry James, Kir Royales with brunch. As my mother’s only child (my biological father is a failed Italian writer with good bone structure and poor decision-making whom I didn’t meet until I was 19), she raised me in her image. Sometimes I would exult in my own sophistication — at 10, I had seen avant-garde exhibits at the Guggenheim involving dead rabbits, and read her copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

I ached for her approval. To be worldly was to get it.

Of course, my mother’s brand of worldliness was not rooted in any sense of the real, material world. A former Woodstock-attending hippie and model (she’d gotten, I grew up believing, in a fistfight with Janis Joplin over the last grape in the VIP area), she’d lived a panoply of equally improbable lives since then. She’d been the only female engineer at her university in the 1960s, then jilted a job and a would-be fiancé to run off to Paris and Rome for 20 years, where she’d worked as an investment banker by day and dated Brazilian counts, Danish actors and heroin-addicted motorcycle riders, before deciding – at 39 – to acquire herself a pregnancy.

Her boyfriend at the time, my father, was at first surprised by this but then, like many people in my mother’s life, acquiesced to her superior force of will. Clever, impulsive, at once erratic and single-minded, my mother cycled through personae with the seasons. She could never decide if she was a stately matron on New

York’s Upper East Side, a French investment banker in tailored suits, or an Italian devotee of the dolce vita. (Another early lesson I learned from my mother was to choose a name for my future child that ‘worked’ in French, Italian, and English, so I could pick up and move whenever I wanted; my mother had made this mistake, and had to settle for calling me Tara when we were in America, and Isabella when we were in Italy). And so she spent my childhood bolting from city to city, from identity to identity, explaining her decision-making process with a blunt and careless candour more typically reserved for a best friend, rather than a child. ‘The reason I never married,’ she told me once, ‘was because I loved cities more than people.’ I idolized her certainty.

She raised me with a similar blend of Edith Wharton-style snobbery and bohemian insouciance. I knew from the age of 11 never to date a German (they wear bad shoes) or an Englishman (they’re bad in bed, and also wear bad shoes). Next to her, my friends’ more traditional parents – who set their children curfews, who were married to one another – seemed impossibly eye-rollingly dull. She also allowed me to roam the streets of New York City in a pink wig, black corset and fishnets at 13, on the grounds probably no harm would come to me and, if it did, it was a learning experience. (I drank tea with honey in it and read my book at an East Village coffee shop, and nobody came to bother me). By the time I was 15, she was sending me alone to Paris with a box of condoms and a credit card. (I read Baudelaire and drank Evian and returned home still a virgin). She pulled me out of schools in New York, Paris, and Rome, and allowed me to home-school myself. It was only when I went to boarding school, as a teenager, I realised how strange my upbringing had been; I was proud and angry in equal measure. At 16 I was still my mother’s ‘minime’, parroting the worldly offhand statements I thought would bring me her love. I spoke, as a high-school classmate once said, like a Shakespeare character. In college, I grew angry. My mother’s world suddenly seemed a sickly and decrepit fiction. I ached for the things she disdained: companionship, commitment. I went to university in England, studying Christian theology, a discipline she feared. (‘Nobody,’ she lamented, ‘is going to talk to you at cocktail parties.’). I became as conservative as she had been madcap. Our relationship deteriorated, with us speaking increasingly infrequently, if at all. When I was 23, my grandmother – perpetually despairing, but full of fierce and genuine love for us both – died. In the following years, my mother and I alternated between catastrophic fights, during which she would announce she had resigned as my mother, and long periods of no contact, into which were interpolated hours, days, weekends, of obsessive closeness. We would denounce each other via Facebook chat in the morning and then, by afternoon, she’d want to know what I thought of that day’s news. By then, she had moved again, and we saw each other rarely.

Time brought us closer together. In my mother’s absence, I realised while I could no longer be her ‘minime’, I could also not – try as I might – become unlike her. I inherited her wanderlust, her varied personae, her proclivity for interesting people, her life cobbled out of books. I inherited, too, her difficulty with romantic commitment, leaving behind a healthy long-term partnership for a series of dramatic flings that, while toxic, nevertheless made good stories; her anxiety about ever being accepted, about being good enough. With time (and therapy), I learnt to love her for what she was, and not for what I yearned, and feared, she would make me into.

From the hit show Gilmore Girls to Greta Gerwig’s latest film, Lady Bird, complicated mother-daughter relationships have always been a major part of our pop culture landscape. But all too often, we make mothers into either heroes or villains.

Lorelai and Rory’s relationship on Gilmore Girls is an idealised mother-daughter relationship (although Lorelai’s relationship with her own mother is more fraught). On the other hand, we have the mothers who are portrayed as unambiguously abusive, who have somehow failed in this most fundamental female role. But, the truth is, mothers and daughters alike are just people with their own flaws. There are ‘good mothers’ and ‘bad mothers’, sure, but most of us are just people, doing the best we can to pass the best and the worst of ourselves onto our children.

I am 27, now. I live in New York – mostly. I’m a writer and a journalist. I have an apartment, which is tiny, but is deliciously, deliriously mine. My mother is retired. She lives between Tbilisi, New York, and a seaside villa in Rome. In Italy she goes barefoot and feeds the neighbour’s chickens; in New York she plays bridge at the Harvard Club. Like her, I have chosen an itinerant life — and a few times a year we meet somewhere in the world, and we talk and we fight and we cry and we kiss and we make up and we do it all over again. We have not solved all our issues, nor even most, but she was with me when my first novel sold, and she was the first to toast my book deal with Champagne. It is not an unambiguously happy, Hollywood ending. But my mother never liked those, anyway.

‘I ACHED FOR THE THINGS SHE DISDAINED’