“Don’t worry, you can write about your mom when you get older. She did a whole revenge book about me,” my mother said to my teenage son, laughing so hard she had to wipe tears from the corners of her eyes.
My kids and I were visiting her, just before my son left for college. He’d shaved his head completely bald, and I was trying gently to tell him I preferred his usual haircut. He shrugged and gave me a look that said, Mom, please stop talking.
My mother watched the exchange from the couch, grinning.
“She used to do that to me all the time —” she said to my son “— get so angry at me for things I said to her. And now she’s written an entire book telling everyone how bad I was.”
It’s become a bit of a family punchline, her calling it my “revenge book.” And I laugh too, but there’s a reason it lands, because it’s not completely wrong.
Five years ago, after decades of dreaming about it, I started writing a book about growing up with a mother who desperately wanted me to be thin. As I wrote the book, I shared its details with my family, including her. Everyone knew the book would have echoes of my complicated, and sometimes dark, relationship with my mother. Then two years ago, I got a book deal, and ever since, the excitement about it coming out today has been mixed with the joking about it being my “revenge book.”
Even though the book isn’t technically a memoir, the emotional skeleton of it is my life. The shame, the weight obsession, the impossibly high expectations — they’re real. As is the mother who believed thinness equaled beauty, and the daughter who believed she had to earn her love by achieving it.
When I was 13, my mother told me, “I love you, Rebecca, but I don’t like you.” We’d been fighting for months. I ran to my room, pulled out my diary, and wrote I HATE MY MOTHER in all caps, followed by a page full of exclamation points. That was the moment something cracked between us. I wasn’t the daughter she wanted. And she wasn’t the mother I needed.
She’d grown up in a world and a time that told her that a woman’s worth was found in the shape of her body. To her, one of the worst things a woman could be was fat. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what I was. She put me on diets, held weigh-ins, tried bribes, threats and tears. I understood all of it as a message: You’re too much. Too big. You’re not lovable like this.
I never got thin. Instead, I settled into my average-American-size body and learned to love and accept myself the way I was. My happiness changed her. It didn’t erase the past, but it reframed it. She stopped looking at my body as a problem and began seeing me as a woman she admired. I became a lawyer, got married and had children. We found a way to talk about our past without judgment. We worked to heal our wounds and love each other in a way that felt expansive and true. Two decades later, I started writing my novel.
Then something happened that felt like the opposite of revenge.
Courtesy of Rebecca Morrison
I saw my phone vibrating. It was my mom. We FaceTime every day, sometimes so long she jokes it’s like we’re living together. I tell her about my work and my kids; she tells me what she and my dad are up to. But today was different.
An essay I wrote about the two of us had just been published on the “Today” show website. It had gone viral, and there were thousands of comments pouring onto their social media pages. I couldn’t wait to tell her how our story was resonating — how women and men of all ages were saying it made them feel seen and made them understand their moms or their daughters.
I answered the FaceTime call expecting to see her still-mostly-wrinkle-free 72-year-old face. Instead, the screen filled with red puffy eyes and a trembling mouth.
“Don’t do that again,” she said through sobs. “Don’t ever … do that again. Don’t write about me.”
“What? Wait, what’s going on?”
“Margaret called me. Then Leila. They asked if I was OK. They said the piece made them feel so sad for me. Like I’m some kind of … monster. They asked how a daughter could write those terrible things about their mother.”
“But we’ve talked about me writing about us for two years,” I said. “I read you the essay. You were OK with it. I’ve written about this before — in The New York Times, The Washington Post — ”
“That title.” She cried. “It’s horrible. Why did you write that?”
The title was, “As a Girl, My Mom Taught Me That Being Fat Was the Worst Thing a Woman Could Be.” It stayed at the top of the “Today” show homepage the entire day, alongside articles about the Met Gala and Tina Fey. But none of that mattered.
“I never said that,” she insisted. And it’s true. She never had to say it. She showed it — in her disappointment, in her desperate efforts to change me, in the sadness that filled the room when I stepped on the scale. But this wasn’t the time to rehash our past.
“I didn’t write the title,” I told her. “And if they’d actually read the whole piece, they’d know it’s not about you being the bad guy. It’s about you being human, doing the best you knew at the time, about us coming back together. It’s a love story.”
“I … I’m not a monster,” she sobbed.
Her pain gutted me. I’d been writing the book for two years already, not as payback, but to understand myself and help women who grew up in the same system, women who were taught their worth depended on the size of their bodies. I thought my mother and I were on the other side of this. Healed. Safe. Now here we were again, both shattered.
“OK,” I said. “I won’t write about you.”
“Good,” she whispered, wiping her face. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
I sat in my closet-sized office, heart pounding, wondering what I’d done. Writing had become more than work; it was my purpose. My way of making sense of what it means to be a woman in a world that never lets you be at peace with yourself.
Was I the monster for sharing our darkest parts and her worst moments?
Hours later, my phone rang again. It was her.
“I don’t care what anyone says. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. Go after your dreams,” she said. “I love you. Keep writing.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, stunned.
“I’m a hundred percent sure. After I read the piece again, I realized what hurt me the most wasn’t the story or the title. It was when you wrote in there that I didn’t love you unconditionally. That’s not true. I always loved you unconditionally.”
“You’ve never told me that,” I whispered, a lump in my throat growing.
“Well, it’s true. You’re my daughter. You’re my life. My love for you was always unconditional.”
And there it was. The sentence I’d waited my whole life to hear.
Courtesy of Rebecca Morrison
That’s real love — the messy, hard-earned kind that keeps showing up, even after the damage. Even when the damage is the story.
I told her what I truly believe, that no matter how much the struggle wounded us, no matter how much heartbreak lived inside that child and that mother, who was herself, in many ways, a child when she had me, there is always the possibility of healing. There is hope for reconciliation. For love.
If either of us had refused to step beyond our own egos — if we’d stayed stubborn — we wouldn’t be here now, able to joke about something that was so hard, so serious and, somehow, so beautiful.
She still calls it my revenge book. And I’m OK with that. But we both know better.
I didn’t write it to get back at her.
I wrote it to understand us. To trace the damage and see what was left. I wrote it because she let me. She gave me the space to tell the truth, even when it stung. That’s a powerful kind of love.
So yes, maybe it started as a revenge book.
But it ended as a love story.
Rebecca Morrison is the author of “The Blue Dress,” a novel based on her childhood as an Iranian immigrant trying to fit into her homeland and conform to her family’s expectations of beauty. You can find her at rebeccakmorrison.com.
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