Kate Mulgrew
Donal O’Donoghue meets the author, and star of Orange is the New Black
“You could say that I’m in the last chapter of my life,” says Kate Mulgrew, towards the end of our interview. “Along the way I’ve made impetuous decisions. I’ve made decisions to please my parents. I’ve made decisions to please the world. I seldom put myself first. Now I need to strip life down, look at what is being asked of me and answer correctly.” The decorated actress, best known for Star Trek: Voyager and Orange is the New Black, has just published a bold biography that voyages around the lives of her late parents. Raw and revealing, it pares a family to its bones and leaves its author naked. “I hope my siblings will understand that this is a book about what we suffered and how we loved and what we went through,” says Mulgrew. “It’s the story of a journey.”
She is speaking by phone from her home in New York City. I met Mulgrew a number of years back for Orange is the New Black. On that occasion, the actress talked about having spent part of the previous winter in Galway working on a book. This, I now realise, was How to Forget. “I wrote it over three winters in Connemara,” she says of her second book, following the best-selling memoir, Born with Teeth. “As you know winters in Ireland are bleak with small windows of light. But I found the conditions absolutely perfect for writing. The darkness would descend about three o’clock and I’d light the fire and reflect. I went back in time, down a very serious rabbit-hole, and into an emotional excavation the likes of which I’ve never experienced before.”
How to Forget was not what I expected. Rather than yet another dull biography by a famous person, it is a powerful work written with passion and literary panache. In two distinct parts (‘My Father’ followed by ‘My Mother’) it vividly resurrects the lives of Mulgrew’s parents, no punches pulled or emotions left unexamined. It exposes the fault-lines in a family and how the death of parents can unmoor their children. Before writing it Mulgrew realised that if this was to be the real deal she would have “to walk the plank”, and deliver a work with the potential to hurt her siblings. “I scratched at the privacy and character of a few of them and I don’t know if that is reparable,” she says now, her emotions seemingly caught between the professional pride of a job well done and the fall-out that may bring.
How to Forget is a book about remembering. “I was searching for a title,” she says. “I spoke with my oldest son about it. I told him about my parents, about how they were, trying to remember but in that process they were forgetting. And my son asked, ‘How is grandpa forgetting?’ And I said, ‘He is forgetting himself, losing his relationship with his wife. And my mother of course forgot her own history when she got atypical Alzheimer’s. So they were both busy forgetting.’ And when I said that my son suggested the title, ‘How to Forget’ and I thought that is exactly right.” But Kate Mulgrew didn’t forget? “No,” she says in that dramatic actor’s voice. “I remembered everything. It was all very vivid.”
Kate Mulgrew, the second eldest of eight, grew up on a 40-acre estate (Derby Grange) and in a lively Irish Catholic home in Dubuque, Iowa. Her father, Tom, was a lieutenant in the US Army; her artist mother, Joan, was friends with the Kennedys and part of the Camelot circle (Jean Kennedy Smith was a life-long friend). The book startles with detail: her mother reckons she had 18 miscarriages, alcohol was ever present (“Everyone in the family drank”) and when Kate was a teen, her mother revealed she was having an affair with the local priest. It is also a tale threaded with tragedy. Mulgrew’s youngest sister Maggie died in infancy, while another sister, Tess, was diagnosed with a brain tumour at the age of 12. “I was 18 when my sister died,” says Mulgrew who missed the funeral as her father insisted she honour work commitments in New York. “I loved my sister Tess and I never recovered from her death. It was an absolute fracturing. She was such a beautiful, strong, vital girl and to see that go over a two and a half year period, to see that tumour ravage her brain – she haemorrhaged out of her eyes and through her nose – was unspeakably grotesque. It was the second death in our family as little Maggie died when she was a baby, but Tessie was loved so much. To be taken at that moment was like a knife being taken to the family as well as to the relationship between my parents. There is no question about it.” Like her screen characters, Mulgrew seems like a formidable person, a doer, a leader and someone not to be trifled with. In How to Forget she writes “We cannot escape our DNA” and now she elaborates on what she inherited from her parents. “I have some of my mother’s eccentricities. I’m outspoken, I’m highly opinionated and I don’t suffer fools. I have my father’s pride. I have my mother’s quest for the mystery of life: ‘What does it all mean? Does God exist?’ I’m still questioning my spiritual dimension. She did until the day she lost her cognition. I’m sentimental but I also have a capacity for great fierce, loyalty and I love deeply and enduringly. Also, I don’t mind the odd glass of whiskey and by odd I mean frequent.” Mulgrew is tough but she says writing this book was one of the hardest things she has ever done. “Even though I was in a beautiful house on the shores of Lough Corrib, I was alone and isolated,” she says. “There was a lot of crying, a lot of stirring up of old and sometimes primitive emotions. But the most extraordinary thing about writing was going back to my little self. As the oldest girl, I came to maturity quite young. (My mother) wanted me to be responsible. She wanted me to be her confidant. She wanted me to share stuff that I shouldn’t really be sharing at the age of 13 or 14. But in writing this book the little girl was stirred up again. It was almost as if I
I loved my sister Tess and I never recovered from her death
had stirred up a ghost as she so vividly came and sat on my shoulder and beseeched me to remember her.”
Kate Mulgrew’s father only saw her perform twice over the course of 30 years (a production of Titus Andronicus at Central Park and Lovespell which was filmed in Ireland with Richard Burton). “I keep looking for a feeling of resentment or anger but it doesn’t come,” she says. “So I’ve come to the conclusion, that my father loved me notwithstanding that behaviour. And I used to laugh at it. Star Trek would be on the television and he wouldn’t look up or even acknowledge it. While he loved me I also believe that there were elements of my being an actress that he found unsavoury. He didn’t understand actors. And also the more I acted and the more successful I became, the more my mother came to me and away from him and that’s the rub right there.”
Early in her illness, her mother asked for help, tapping Kate lightly on the head and whispering ‘pills.’ “She wanted to die,” says Mulgrew now. “She didn’t want to go out losing her mind. Both parents were the same. They didn’t want to die in an agonising or protracted manner. That time my mother looked me dead in the eye and said ‘All I’ve ever had is my good brain, without that I don’t want to live. So don’t ask me to crawl out on my hands and knees. You know where to get these drugs. Just get them, I’ll take them, you sit with me and that’ll be the end of it.’” Mulgrew went to the doctor only to be told that her mother would have already forgotten her request. “So I didn’t get them,” she says. “I knew that I could never do it.”
All of Mulgrew’s siblings were shown proof editions of How To Forget before publication. Most responded, some lauding its literary quality. But it also reopened wounds. “When (Joe) read it, he was put back on his heels a bit and I’m very sorry about that,” she says. “But I don’t think I could have gone another way. And I do love my brother.” The book changed its author as well. “It has softened something and has also given me a much greater sense of the urgency of time. I’m 64 years old so I feel it as people of my age do. So I won’t say anything as stupid as ‘looking in the rear-view mirror’. But I want to be present as I’ve never been before. And I’d like to be surrounded by likeminded people. Every relationship going forward must be dead honest, otherwise forget it.”
On the day in 2004 when Tom Mulgrew was diagnosed with lung cancer, father and daughter sat up late drinking vodka. One nightcap led to another, a father talking of his love for his wife, a daughter anticipating impending losses. “I don’t fear death but I don’t welcome it either,” Tom Mulgrew told his daughter that night. Years later, in a wintry house in Connemara, alive with ghosts and memories, Kate Mulgrew considered her own mortality. “I’ve been afraid of death for most of my life,” she says. “We are certain that the darkness will be frightening. But as I get older, having seen what life can do to us, I see that death is just a part of it all. If I can face it philosophically I will be very proud of myself. But if I go kicking and screaming I will be ashamed. So make sure I go proudly.”
I’m outspoken, I’m highly opinionated and I don’t suffer fools