The Fraud In The Mirror

Bex O’Brian

Word Count 739

Early in her career, my mother wrote copy for a fashion magazine where she learned to imitate how the models regarded themselves in the mirror. The pose. One leg slightly forward and bent, head held up, eyes on high beam, a look that broadcast, "I'm stunning."

Only my five-foot-odd Cockney mother could take full pleasure in posing the same way—one stocky peasant leg thrust forward, her head with its untamed mane held high, her eyes gleaming with unalloyed delight.

Whenever I watched her, getting ready for work, or an evening out, I'd wonder, "Who the hell do you think you are?“

I was also, however, becoming aware that reality can be malleable, shape-shifting. A concept that thrilled and unnerved me.

In my mother's weekly column for our local newspaper, she often wrote about us. She was sort of a bitter Erma Bombeck, but British, far more political, and completely devoid of sentiment.  

On the bus heading to school, I'd sometimes see someone reading her column. On the days I was featured, –the smart-ass high schooler with a rapier wit, a penchant for cutting classes, and crossing swords with any sort of authority, I'd nervously bite my nails looking for, what? I don't know what would have been the right response. Rolling in the aisles? Tossing the paper aside with a look of disgust because they knew as I did, that I was a fraud?

Recently, I threw out all my journals from that time. Decades later, even I couldn't begin to parse the madness on those pages, the missing words, the atrocious spelling, the backward sentences, the cluttered, and jumbled thoughts. All markers of dyslexia ADHD but this was the 60s; none of those diagnoses were floating around. Indeed, I had been led to believe I was a genius, a natural-born writer.

Mother.

It was easier for her to anoint all her daughters a genius regardless of our talents, rather than deal with or, even acknowledge, any failings. I have stacks of homemade birthday cards– Virginia Woolf glued beside Jane Bowles along with cut-outs of audiences clapping–early, miniature versions of what later would be called a vision board–, all versions of what my mother thought my life was going to be. Inside, in my mother's vaguely childish script, would be a poem extolling my glorious future.  

As all good novelists should be

Part of you is 93

But a lewder you is nearer to 22

The insights you have are more like a woman of 44

And only a mother sees when you're not much 

more than 5 or 10

But your birthday age is 43

The time for fame and royalty.

That, as you might have guessed, was a poem for my 43rd birthday, an age when most writers have published a thing or two. I had just barely begun to publish, and that's only because my husband would patiently take my backward, spell-crazy work, figure it out, find the hints of a theme, and bring it to light.

You really can't have a career as a writer if you need another writer to rewrite what you have written.

And yet.

There was my mother, and there I was, two completely deluded women carrying on as if I would find fame in the next turn of the screw. 

The years piled up, and the birthday cards sounded even crazier as mother extolled how I was going to take the world by storm with my prose. I came to hate those cards, not just for the lie, but because Mother never really thought I was a writer in the first place and would tell me often enough. When speaking to my husband, who has published five books along with a varied career in magazines, she would often turn her back on me and use the royal we when discussing editors, copy, or the difficulty of writing.  

Then something started to happen. Technology. Spell check, Grammarly. Ghost Reader. An indifferent and entirely patient computer program removed my self-consciousness. Since I started this piece, I have barely broken pace to ask Siri how to spell: miniature, glorious, and self-consciousness. 

Another thing happened. My mother died. And, while I'm struggling with the howling grief that comes with the death of a woman whose every utterance either cut me to the quick or dazzled me with her wonderful irreverence, on the creative front I feel free. Finally, I can be my own writer. 

—

Bex lives mostly in Brooklyn with her husband and their dog. She’s been scribbling around on various projects for the better part of thirty years and made very little money as a result. Thus conditioned, she is thrilled with the advent of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. She is the author of the novels (Under Bex Brian) Promiscuous Unbound and Radius, also available here. At present she’s working on a new novel entitled, My Memoir Of An Impossible Mother. Read an excerpt from Radius on our DPA+ page,