Writing as Penance
Writing as Penance
It is the universal conflict between parent and child – the struggle to see past the roles of mother or father, daughter or son, and connect as human individuals. Sam Freedman’s bold look into his late mother Eleanor Hatkin’s life is a strange and intimate representation of this familiar emotional journey. It builds upon the residue left behind by a human life and restores it to a full-bodied memory of a meaningful existence in an artful reconciliation between emotion and historical honest, resentment and guilt, love and loss.
Upon first reading “Who She Was”, it is obvious that the novel is a skillful endeavor to redefine the polluted genre of memoir and create a reflection of a real woman. However at a discussion at Baruch College, Freedman revealed that the process of creating the book also transcended craft and became a personal penance for a deep-seeded sense of guilt. Having lost his mother in young adulthood, in the midst of severely alienating her in that notorious declaration of youthful independence, Freedman could not mend his relationship like those who “had grown into adulthood with mothers still alive and available for reconciliation.” Experiences - such as ignoring his mother while at college- that would normally be followed by maturation and mutual understanding in subsequent years, never got the chance to heal. Instead, as he stated in his discussion, after he used the writing process behind “Who She Was” to “become her son again.” As audience members listened, his discussion, like the book, became a window into the healing process that doubled as an intriguing novel. By digging into her life - from past lovers to forgotten ambitions - Freedman feels that he finds the connection to his mother that he had resisted while she had been alive and even for years after.
Despite the significance of the emotional aspect of this writing process, Freedman also had to balance his emotional immersion with his responsibility to be historically accurate and to recreate the environment that shaped his mother. As Freedman writes in his prologue, he used journalistic methods of “recapturing vanished times and remote lives” in order to paint a picture of the social forces that shaped his mother Eleanor’s life. No source was too small or too inanimate to shine a light on some aspect of the enigma that was Eleanor Hatkin. Freedom described one such experience, where Social Security records spanning the working lives of both Eleanor and her father evolved from simple numerical records, to vivid indicators of the financial instability that forced Eleanor to give up a college scholarship and take on the role of breadwinner before even outgrowing her teens. The research aspects and emotional elements of “Who She Was,” are not however, two separate entities. Craft and passion are seamlessly blended into an intimate portrayal of what made Eleanor who she was. Freedman described this interconnectedness as a rejection of the “false divide” between craft and passion, as passion breeds interest in research, and research ignites even more emotional response.
Sam Freedman’s personal yet systematic method of attaining a clearer view of who his mother was, created a lucid vision of a woman whose existence, while largely unappreciated during life, can be significant in many ways. While the novel is not written to a specific target audience, Freedman noted that he felt that his mother’s story can be insightful and important to many different kinds of people. From the child of immigrants, to a woman during the century of gender rights, to an embodiment of the American dream or simply a human being trying to live a happy life, Eleanor Hatkin’s story shows how every individual can be so much more than what is on the immediate surface. Freedman’s commitment to bringing his mother’s memory alive shows the true value of a single human life, and the relevance it can have on so many others. This newfound respect for his mother’s complexities and significance served as a catalyst for Freedman’s internal reconciliation with his mother, as well as his younger self. As the audience in Baruch listened to Freedman speak, it was as though they too, shared in his guilt and similarly, felt it being absolved as Freedman described his journey. This sharing of emotions is, perhaps, the mark of a truly gifted writer.