What Mom Taught Me
Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda and his mother, Luz, talk love, life lessons and the music that makes them cry. Plus, more toasts to moms from coast to coast.
Some say he’s a genius; some compare him to Shakespeare and mean it. In the last three years alone, Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator and star of Broadway’s Hamilton, has received a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” a Pulitzer Prize, an Emmy, a Grammy, multiple Tonys and an Oscar nomination. But ask his mother, Luz Towns-Miranda, what she loves most about her son and you won’t hear about any of that.
“He’s kind. He’s thoughtful, he’s sweet. He comes across as this very loving and lovable person, and that’s what I love about him.”As for Lin-Manuel, currently in London filming Disney’s Mary Poppins
Returns with Emily Blunt and Meryl Streep (due out in 2018), he says he feels “really, really grateful” for a mom (and dad) who always made time for him (and older sister Luz Miranda-Crespo), taught him to prioritize family and gave him the gift of “perspective.”
“Her best advice to me was, ‘This too shall pass,’” he says. “That’s the advice that gets you through, not only in bad times but also in good times.”
Lin-Manuel navigates by Luz’s corollary to that advice: “It’s all grist for the mill.”
“She prepared me that no matter what you’re going through, whether it’s agonizing or joyful, it’s all material to be mined. She’d say, ‘You want to be a writer? Well, you’re going to have to understand human experience.’ ”
While Luz was the stricter parent “in some respects,” she was the more lenient when it came to Lin-Manuel’s desire to pursue a career in the arts. “My husband [political activist Luis A. Miranda Jr.] would say, ‘We’re going to have to support him for the rest of his life!’ He wanted
him to have a fallback, to be an attorney
and a songwriter. And my son is not cut out to be an attorney by any stretch of the imagination.”
Mother and son both laugh. “Attorneys have to be willing to argue and fight, and my son is a collaborator at heart. He wants to make peace and he wants to make wonderful things, not fight. So I went to the mat for him.” And that was that.
“They always made time, particularly when it came to the arts,” Lin-Manuel says. “They never missed a play.”
His mother’s wide-ranging musical tastes also have served him well, playing a key role in shaping his own aesthetic.
“Some of the best moments we had were in the car, because I love to blast music and I have eclectic taste,” Luz says, “from old ’20s songs to classic rock like Janis Joplin and Moody Blues to Broadway hits.”
“The Mamas and the Papas cassette got a workout in our Subaru,” LinManuel says.
He in turn schooled his mother in rap and hip-hop, making her mix tapes for Mother’s Day featuring songs from Tupac and Biggie. Then one day he brought home the Les Misérables soundtrack.
“I remember my mom crying every time she heard ‘Bring Him Home,’” Lin-Manuel says. “If you’re looking for a formative experience for me, that’s it: to see music’s effect on people you love.” “I’m tearing up now!” Luz says. Although the Mirandas didn’t sit down to dinner together every night— Luz, a psychologist, and her husband both worked full time—family was always around. “For Puerto Ricans, there’s no such thing as ‘nuclear’ family,” Lin-Manuel says. “I can’t think of a time when it was just our family living in the house. We always had an aunt or a cousin or whoever.”
Now Lin-Manuel, his wife, lawyer Vanessa Nadal, and son, Sebastian, 2, live in the same uptown New York City neighborhood where he grew up, 15 blocks from his parents. Lin-Manuel stops by often, and once a week Luz babysits her grandson, who calls her “Layla,” short for “abuela” (grandmother). Their life reflects Luz’s belief that caring for and prioritizing family isn’t just a cultural norm. You live it, she says, “by your actions as well as your words.”