How to Talk to your Mother

Krista Smathers

There are two aspects of this story that stand out the most to me.  The first is how the author includes historic events in her backwards description of certain key incidents in her life.  I thought this was interesting in that it made me think about how personal backstories are as important to the individual as historical events are to the world.  Sometimes Moore will start her passages off with the declaration of a historical event, but sometimes it is in the middle or at the end.  In any position, these sentences jar the reader and force them to think about a bigger picture than the narrator's life story.  This in turn makes the reader focus on these events and dulls some of the significance of the narrator's life events, just like she is being sort of dulled by societal standards and the other people described in her stories.

The other moment that I found interesting was when the narrator states, "What was once contained, now must contain."  She takes something so simple and overlooked as taking out the trash and puts a philosophical spin on it.  The idea of role reversal is prevalent throughout the story in how her relationship with her mother changes from beginning to end.  In the beginning, the narrator is "containing" her mother by being her care-taker in her final days.  At the end, because of the backwards progression, her mother is "containing" her literally because she is inside her mother's womb.

Moore's use of the second person kind of threw me off in this story.  When I was reading it, I did not even realize that it was written in the second person until I looked again.  Second person usually draws readers in and makes them feel like they are the main character, but in this instance I felt more like I was reading the narrator talking about herself in the second person.  I read it thinking that the "you" she was talking about was herself, and that she was almost telling these stories to herself.