Vengeful, angry Uppal takes on her runaway mother
Author travels to Brazil to see her parent after 20 years
Editor’s note: Projection has been shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers Trust Prize for Non Fiction
Movies are rife with horrible mothers. Remember Faye Dunaway playing the child-abusing Joan Crawford in Mommie, Dearest? Or how about that slobbering monster called The Queen who was mother to all those acid-dripping creatures in the Alien series?
And then there is Ottawa’s own Runaway Mother. She’s real, although according to her abandoned daughter, Mother often views eight movies a day in theatres and essentially lives in a delusional cinematic world in which there is no past and only happy endings. Mother is the villain in this plot.
To set the scene, return to November 1982. The location is a comfortable home, with a backyard swimming pool at 2134 Erinbrook Cres. in Ottawa. The house was purchased in more prosperous times by the man of the house, Avtar Uppal, an Indian immigrant who was a rising star in the federal bureaucracy until a sailing accident in 1977 left him a quadriplegic, forcing the family to survive on a meagre public service disability pension.
On this particular November day, the woman of the house, Theresa Catharina de Goes Campos, is preparing to leave her husband, Avtar, and return to her native Brazil. A daughter of a Brazilian diplomat, Theresa has bought tickets for herself and her two children, Amerjit Uppal, 9, and Priscila Uppal, 8. But the children refuse to leave. They lock themselves in the house, clinging to the bed rail of their disabled father. Mother flies to Brazil and the children never hear from her again.
Now, fast-forward 20 years. Priscila has become one of Canada’s leading poets (Traumatology, Ontological Necessities). She has also published two novels (To Whom it May Concern, The Divine Economy of Salvation) and is a professor at York University in Toronto. One day by accident she stumbles across her mother on the Internet. Her mother is also a writer; a well-known film reviewer in Brazil. Priscila finds a telephone number.
In April 2003, Priscila flies to Brazil to spend 12 days with her mother. Those days are recounted in painfully excruciating detail in the newly published memoir Projection: Encounters With My Runaway Mother.
The visit is a disaster. Priscila’s mother refuses to discuss the past. She won’t even deal with the present. Priscila is aghast.
Knowing loads of film trivia will help readers to understand this sad, angry, voyeuristic book. Every chapter is given the name of a movie. Some involve creepy mothers. One chapter is called The Purple Rose of Cairo, a Woody Allen film in which a woman called Cecelia falls in love with a character in a movie.
“I’ve just met a wonderful new man,” Cecelia exclaims. “He’s fictional but you can’t have everything.”
Priscila’s mother is like Cecelia. She embraces the fictional, despite its shortcomings.
“I can’t wait to return to my peaceful life, Priscila,” the mother tells the daughter towards the end of the visit. “You will have no effect on me. I will wipe you from my memory.”
Priscila, on the other hand, is burdened by memory. Throughout the book, Priscila tosses insults at her mother, on paper, anyways, calling her “a bloodsucker,” “lunatic,” “repulsive” and other words not usually applied to the woman who gave birth to you.
Maybe Mother deserves this vengeful book. Maybe she just needs a psychiatrist. We hear her story only from the writings of a daughter who admits hating her. We don’t really learn what motivated Theresa to abandon her family. We can guess. But we don’t know all the story.
We do not even get all the author’s own story. Priscila, too, abandoned her disabled father at age 15, living on her own, working at an Ottawa drugstore while attending Hillcrest High School.
“There are good reasons I left home at 15,” Priscila writes, without telling us what those reasons were. Priscila prefers to save the vitriol for her mother. Father and daughter still see one another, although Priscila notes that her father has never read one of her books.
The more of this book you read, the less you like any members of the family. Just listen to Priscila discuss maternal instinct.
“When I imagine holding a baby of mine, I am overwhelmed by nausea,” Priscila writes. “Even if it makes me seem like a monster, let me confess that when I see newborn babies, especially newborns with scrunchy red faces or drooling lips or with spittle on their shirts, I feel disgust.”
Well, Priscila, thanks for the honesty. Let’s hope this book was a cathartic experience for you and you now can heal. Let’s hope you can forget your mother who, back in Brazil, has gone to the theatre more than 100 times to watch her favourite movie, Blade Runner, a science fiction classic in which a woman called Pris (short for Priscilla) is killed because she is really a “replicant,” an organic robot who has no mother.
In the real world, Priscila Uppal has a mother. But it is a mother who has run away and jumped into a movie.