Literary Mama Blog

In Honor of Tillie Olsen: 1912-2007

The entire Literary Mama community mourns the passing of Tillie Olsen, who died on New Year's Day at age 94. She was -- and is -- a hero to women writers everywhere, especially to those of us who try every moment of every day to balance writing with motherhood.

Lengthier and more formal obituaries can be read in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, and they do a fine job reciting the facts of Tillie's life. But Tillie was more to us than a resume, more than a prominent writer and early feminist.

She was a mother who wrote, and wrote well.

It wasn't easy. Born in 1912 and a mother at age 19, Olsen lived in poverty for years, working in one menial job after another while raising four daughters. In the nooks and crannies of her time, she wrote about women like her, women whose voices were silenced by the demands, needs, and expectations of everyone around her. But still she kept writing. In her own words:

Time on the bus, even when I had to stand, was enough; the stolen moments at work, enough; the deep night hours for as long as I could stay awake, after the kids were in bed, after the household tasks were done, sometimes during. It is no accident that the first work I considered publishable began: "I stand here ironing."

Olsen's body of work is slim: only five stories, an unfinished novel and several poems written over seven decades. But her work was powerful; it unlocked and opened doors to other women like her -- like us -- who insist that art and motherhood are not contradictory, but complementary. "[Children and art] are different aspects of your being," she once said. "There is . . . no separation." A life combining meaningful work and motherhood "could and should be" possible for women.

And so we grieve, for the loss of a mother and writer who -- in many ways -- made the existence of Literary Mama possible. "Among women writers in the United States, 'respect' is too pale a word: 'reverence' is more like it," novelist Margaret Atwood once wrote about Olsen. "This is presumably because women writers, even more than their male counterparts, recognize what a heroic feat it is to have held down a job, raised four children, and still somehow managed to become and to remain a writer . . . The applause that greets her is not only for the quality of her artistic performance but . . . for the near miracle of her survival."

But while our grief is for a public figure who felt close to our hearts, there is one among us who mourns for a beloved grandmother. Tillie Olsen's granddaughter, Ericka Lutz, is a Senior Editor and columnist at Literary Mama. Her column, Red Diaper Dharma, explores the legacy of growing up in a family of strong people like Grandma Tillie, and includes her personal remembrances in the most recent installment.

Tillie's 95th birthday would have been this Sunday, January 14. Her family requests that on her birthday, people whose lives have been touched by Tillie gather with friends in their homes and public libraries to celebrate her life and to read her work together. For more information about how to email the family or to make contributions in Tillie's name, see the Tillie Olsen memorial Web site.

Elle Reviews About What Was Lost

Elle Magazine online features a review of Literary Mama columnist Jessica Berger Gross's new book About What Was Lost: twenty writers on miscarriage, healing, and hope, which hits the stores this December just in time for the holidays. Congratulations, Jessica!

Leslie Morgan Steiner Responds to LM Review; Caitlin Flanagan Recommends the Halibut

Leslie Morgan Steiner responded to Mary Tsao's review of her book Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families on Literary Mama. In her review, Tsao wrote that while the book is a good one, its title and subtitle are unnecessarily divisive. Steiner responded:

I loved the Literary Mama review of Mommy Wars. I just wanted to explain the title.

What I found in talking to hundreds of moms over the past three years is that the worst "mommy war" is the one inside women's heads as we struggle to come to peace with our choices (or lack of choices) regarding work and kids. Nearly every college-educated mom I know struggles with whether she's made the "right" choice about how to balance raising kids and working. It's an inner dialogue that sometimes causes us to lash out at other moms who've made different choices -- hence the so-called "mommy war" between working and at-home moms.

No one in America tells moms that we are doing a good job. We all need to tell ourselves, and other moms, that we are good mothers. No "perfect mom" exists, despite the commercials, television programs, and articles that seem to insist that some kind of perfection is possible if we try hard enough! Moms are like snowflakes -- no two are alike. This doesn't mean we are better or worse than other mothers. We are simply ourselves.

Ask yourself "would I like to be my own kid?" This will give you a lot of answers about just how fine a mother you are.

All the best,

Leslie Morgan Steiner

Meanwhile, I had emailed Caitlin Flanagan to let her know that the author profile and book review had been published on Literary Mama. Flanagan did not comment on either piece, but instead sent me this:

Spray a pyrex baking pan with Pam
Put halibut steaks in the pan
Drizzle with combination of teriyaki sauce and olive oil
Put crumbled feta cheese on top
Bake at 375 degrees for 15-20 minutes
Serve with couscous to which you have added some chopped pecans and fried cranberries

Different authors, different approaches to publicity.

The Cost of Motherhood

The Dallas Morning News ran a piece on December 18 about the economic cost of motherhood, based on a study by economist Amalia Miller.

Miller discovered that a "year of delayed fertility leads to a 10% increase in career earnings, a 5% increase in career work experience, and a 3% increase in career average wage rate. The effects are not the same for all women, and women with college degrees, and those in professional and managerial occupations receive the greatest returns. Surprisingly, family leave laws are not shown to alleviate the tradeoff."

Miller is aware that she is treading on somewhat dangerous ground and seems careful to ensure that her research is not somehow twisted to blame mothers themselves for the economic imbalance: "It is no secret that Motherhood may be the remaining obstacle to women’s achievement of economic equality with men (Fuchs, 1988), and deferred motherhood may be a mean of reducing that inequality. At the same time, any financial rewards to motherhood delay are themselves a central component of the work-family conflict."

Food for thought.

A Moment of Silence

It is December 6.

On this date, in 1989, 14 female engineering students were murdered because they were women. Because they were, in the mind of a serial killer, feminists.

The Association for Research on Mothering has asked us to take a moment today to remember these 14 women, who today might have been at work or making preparations for the holidays or rocking their children to sleep had their lives not been cut brutally short.

Geneviève Bergeron

Hélène Colgan

Nathalie Croteau

Barbara Daigneault

Anne-Marie Edward

Maud Haviernick

Barbara Klucznik Widajewicz

Maryse Laganière

Maryse Leclair

Anne-Marie Lemay

Sonia Pelletier

Michèle Richard

Annie St-Arneault

Annie Turcotte