I Remember Nothing Read Online Free PDF

believe that a woman could do everything and Lillian Ross had dared to question it. In our house. So my mother threw her out.
    I loved this story. I loved all stories that proved that my mother was right and everyone else was wrong, especially since there was a piece of me that couldn’t help wishing she was exactly like everyone else’s mother.
    It was at least ten years before I began to wonder about it. Had it ever actually happened? There are all sorts of stories you grow up with, and then you getolder, and there’s just something about them that doesn’t pass the nose test. They’re somehow too perfect. And the most nagging part is the coup de grâce, the perfectly chosen last line. My father wrote a memoir once, and in it are several completely unbelievable episodes in which he tells people like Darryl Zanuck to go fuck themselves. This legend of my mother and Lillian Ross was in some way a version of those stories. It was too good to be true.
    My mother became an alcoholic when I was fifteen. It was odd. One day she wasn’t an alcoholic, and the next day she was a complete lush. She drank a bottle of scotch every night. Around midnight she would come flying out of her bedroom, banging and screaming and terrorizing us all. My father drank too, but he was a sloppy, sentimental drunk, and somehow his alcoholism was more benign.
    By the time I went off to Wellesley, their movie work had dried up, but somehow they were sober enough in the daytime to collaborate; they wrote a successful play called
Take Her, She’s Mine
, about a Southern California family whose daughter goes off to an eastern women’s college. It quoted the letters I’d written from college, and it opened on Broadway during my senior year, starring Art Carney as the father and Elizabeth Ashley as the daughter. Everyone at Wellesley knew about it and about my remarkable mother, the writer who could do everything.
    I didn’t expect either of my parents to turn up at mygraduation, but a few days before it, my mother called to say she’d decided to come. She arrived in all her stylish glory. She wore her suit, and her three-inch heels, and her clip-on earrings that matched her brooch. She slept in the dormitory, in the room next to mine, for two nights. I lay in my bed and listened through the paper-thin wall to her drunken mutterings. I was terrified that she’d burst from her room into the halls of Tower Court and mortify me in front of my classmates, that she’d stagger down the hall banging and screaming, and my friends would learn the truth.
    But what was the truth?
    I was invested in the original narrative; I was a true believer. My mother was a goddess.
    But my mother was an alcoholic.
    Alcoholic parents are so confusing. They’re your parents, so you love them; but they’re drunks, so you hate them. But you love them. But you hate them. They have moments when they’re still the people you grew up idolizing; they have moments when you can’t imagine they were ever anything but monsters. And then, after a while, they’re monsters full-time. The people they used to be have enormous power over you—it will be forty years before you buy a red coat (and even then, you will wear it only once)—but the people they’ve turned into have no power over you at all.
    For a long time before she died, I wished my mother were dead. And then she died, and it wasn’t one of those things where I thought, Why did I think that? What was wrong with me? What kind of person wouldwish her mother dead? No, it wasn’t one of those things at all. My mother had become a complete nightmare. She drank herself to death at the age of fifty-seven.
    I was thirty when she died. After five years as a newspaper reporter, I’d become a freelance magazine writer. I wrote for
Esquire
in the last days of editor Harold Hayes and for
New York
magazine in the first days of Clay Felker. It was a heady time. Magazines like
Esquire
and
New York
were the zeitgeist, and the