Ether by Evgenia Citkowitz
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010

I suspect it's rarely if ever appropriate to tell someone you wanted to meet them because of their mother.  Being told that as a child you might be either flattered or alarmed, but it's certainly never happened to me as an adult, and I can't imagine how I would feel if it did, except I do think once we're emancipated we want to stand on our own.  A parent, famous or otherwise, ought to be irrelevant.  I admit it was fashionable once, seeking out the relationships between an artist's life and the work of art, the history of the times and so forth, so back in those days mothers and fathers and family trees could hardly be avoided.  Context versus content, or context illuminating content, that sort of thing.  You know of course how fond I am of that, how I am all about contextualizing everything, how I like to make connections.  How I keep a Burke's Peerage handy.  How, if I can squeeze in a stately home, especially a demolished one, I'm happy.

And yet, after hearing Evgenia Citkowitz read from her newly published collection of stories at Book Soup, I realized the backstory was simply that, not essential, not pertinent, so much background noise really.  What mattered was the writer who was reading, the story being read, the present moment in L.A.   "Sunday's Child" is the story she read, also partly about being a mother, and it is wonderful, funny, horrifying, brilliant.  I did not even think about it being Mother's Day weekend until much later, although along with her new book I did pick up a copy of the collected stories of her mother's, [Never Breathe a Word, the Collected Stories of Caroline Blackwood, Berkeley, Counterpoint Press, 2010].  I didn't mention it afterward, however.

I rarely do these things, but I ended up first in line for the signing.  She said she'd been nervous, that her hands were still shaking.  She was utterly charming.  I told her how much I'd enjoyed the reading and asked her to inscribe the book to my daughter, which she seemed to think was sweet.  God-daughter, technically, who is coming to visit me with her mother in a few weeks, but I was feeling shy and anyway it seemed unnecessary to explain.  The mother-daughter connection didn't strike me until later.  I was thinking instead how interesting it would be someday when my three-year-old grows up, to have a book inscribed to her by the author, and to imagine them meeting, when they are both adults and maybe even both mothers with daughters, and doing the math and being surprised and a little perplexed perhaps, and then realizing the connection, and how interesting and fun that would be, for them both.



Ether, by Evgenia Citkowitz
Detail, half-title, inscribed by the author.