‘How I stopped loving my mom’
A memoir that’s candid, conflicted and packed with humiliations.
When Glen David Gold was 12 and living with his mother in a dingy San Francisco apartment, she left him at home alone and joined her new, much younger lover in New York. In total, she left her son on his own for five months between 1976-77.
Years later, when Gold confronted her about the abandonment, she claimed it never happened. But if it had, she argued, risibly, it was all about trying to find him a good father figure.
US writer Gold, best known for his 2001 debut novel Carter Beats the Devil, examines their relationship in his hefty new memoir I Will Be Complete. It’s candid and conflicted, packed with humiliations and, sometimes, terribly sordid.
A book that took Gold more than 20 years to write, it demanded brutal levels of self-examination. Being his mother’s son, he reveals, meant he’d developed a carapace of emotional toughness: “I don’t have emotions so much as I describe them.”
To that point, when the memoir ends, he was married to celebrated writer Alice Sebold. But that marriage is now over.
As a brief summary, Gold’s life started relatively conventionally, the only son to his engineer father and his English mother, the second marriage for both. They lived in a modern house south of Los Angeles, and his father became a millionaire – on paper.
Young Gold was a bright, hyperactive, anxious insomniac. He was fixated on his pretty mother who, he increasingly noticed, often had a “look”, indicating something was off. When his father lost his job, he also lost the company stocks and the marriage fell apart.
On a whim, mom (Gold never reveals her name) and son moved to San Francisco, where she fell under the spell of a suave grifter, Peter Charming. It was the 70s, a time of promiscuity and drug abuse. The tone is creepy and sinister. Many years later, Gold hears that Charming was rumoured to be involved in white slavery.
With the help of Charming, Mom
begins “investing” her divorce money with ever-diminishing returns, and they keep having to move to cheaper apartments.
After the home-alone episodes, Gold removed himself by going to boarding school, funded by his father. His mother asked him to sign over that money when he was 14.
By the time Gold started attending the University of California, Berkeley, she had gone through a devolving series of relationships, ending up at the age of 51 with a man named Daniel. He was 27, a violent, illiterate crystal-meth user.
It was an untenable situation and Gold made a decision: “I want to explain how I stopped loving my mother.” And he does, in the most excruciating detail.
Throughout, amazingly, he is not self-pitying, although he writes searingly about prolonged bouts of depression and his struggles to find an identity.
Writing has been a partial catharsis and, now 55, he has an attitude towards his mother that means, “I have empathy for her without having to defend her.”
But, as always, she insists he is wrong: “My mother assures me none of this happened.” No doubt she has to.
I WILL BE COMPLETE, by Glen David Gold (Sceptre, $37.99)