Conversations with Mom

Author: Betsy Robinson

Conversations with Mom brought me to my knees. Betsy Robinson is an aging (the same age I am) baby boomer who has no mother to mentor her into years that we all find confusing – what have we accomplished? I’m scared. Where’s my Mom? I have asked these questions too many times.

In a funny, complicated and enlightening exchange of letters between an unemployed 60 year old daughter and her dead mother, Robinson is touching, hysterically funny and oh so wise. Robinson herself calls it “an epistolary work of fiction.”

Robinson says: “One of my favorite works was the epistolary work Letters to a Young Poet by Rainier Maria Rilke which I carried around with me like a talisman when I was in my twenties. Conversations with Mom is nothing like Letters to a Young Poet…except if you imagine Rilke as a wild, terrified, beautiful woman who came of age in the forties only to become a drunk and then a sober, somewhat crazy lioness in the seventies who joined forces with a poet who happened to be her daughter (moi) a wild terrified uniquely attractive young woman who came of age in the seventies, worked at a lot of jobs, then got laid off in the Great Recession, and at the age of sixty wondered how the hell she was going to exist for the rest of her hopefully long life.”

Robinson writes letters and then she writes her mother’s answers to her. With whimsy, wisdom and wild abandon we fall in love first with Robinson and then with her mother. A book that we all need, for we all need mentors and moms as we enter that age of the elder ourselves, and simply don’t know what to do.