Our culture continues to suffer severe confusion when it comes to stories. We are trapped in a hellish, post-modern landscape in which we are so jaded that all stories become derivative. In a certain sense, stories have always been derivative, embellishing, altering, and refining stories passed down from generation to generation. But now, we no longer believe our stories.
Instead of inventing new elements to enrich age-old tales, ours is a culture that pours tired narratives into new packaging. Can anyone stand to sit through the next live-action reimagining of a cartoon? The exercise seems to seek fidelity to the original more than anything, a sad ritual of reenactment. It’s as though we don’t trust ourselves to make stories anymore and must continually recycle those made in a different time with a different kind of people who could imagine something new.
This narrative drought is evidenced by the continued misunderstanding of fiction based on real life. An imagined story featuring real-life events and sketches that resemble people from the real world is not memoir. It is not autobiography. It is not a record of how things really were and what really happened. This seems so obvious as to require no explicit spelling out. And yet, people frequently demonstrate an inability to grasp this elementary concept.
Authors of fiction are accused of lying, misrepresenting, or misleading. Our critics hone in on precisely how the source of inspiration fell short of anything beautiful on the written page. It is as though we are afraid to have heroes anymore. We prefer to live as scared animals, simply coping with the world as we find it, instead of daring to imagine something better.
One example of our cultural disease comes in the discussion of the biography of Sydney Taylor, best known as the author of All-of-a-Kind Family. In the Wall Street Journal review of From Sarah to Sydney, Meghan Cox Gurdon writes, “With autobiographical fiction, there’s bound to be a gap between the story on the page and the author’s experiences as they transpired in real life. So only a naive reader would expect total alignment between the immigrant Jewish household that welcomed Sarah Brenner as a newborn in 1904 and the domestic milieu she described in her acclaimed 1951 children’s book, ‘All-of-a-Kind-Family.’”
Thankfully, Cox Gurdon has enough insight not to accuse Taylor of misleading her readers, but she does express surprise, adding, “Still, even the jaded may be startled by certain discontinuities between fact and fiction in the world of the writer who, as a married adult, went by the name Sydney Taylor.” Cox Gurdon explains how drastically the real-life Sarah’s emotionally wounded mother differed from the fictional “Mama” so beloved by readers.
Relying on the biography by June Cummins and Alexandra Dunietz, Cox Gurdon writes, “The mother that maintained such high standards [for the girls dress] in the book exudes warmth, wisdom and deep maternal attachment.” Yet, “In reality, as we learn, Cilly Brenner was a chilly, exacting and undemonstrative woman who also endured great suffering.”
Learning about the familial dysfunction and senseless tragedy that pervaded the real-life matriarch’s childhood and adulthood, one does, indeed, find a very different woman from the selfless, self-assured, and unflappable Mama portrayed in Taylor’s fiction.
Understanding that elements were based on Taylor’s real-world experience as a child, one has an interesting alternate perspective. For example, the charming stories of the hijinks the sisters get up to after their early bedtime is in the fictional world a didactic example of a mother who prudently turns a blind eye to harmless mischief. Mama in the story manages her duties in order to ensure that she has hours of leisure in the evening away from her children, who are safely tucked into bed, whether or not they are secretly eating chocolate. In those hours, she spends time with her husband and finishes her sewing.
On the other hand, it seems likely that Taylor’s mother may also have put her children to bed early, but possibly for very different motives. A severely depressed and emotionally volatile mother sometimes puts children to bed inappropriately early not from the prudent decision to seek refreshment but from an inability to cope with her responsibilities. Despite the potentially dark motive for an early bedtime, the magic of storytelling opens up the possibility of imagining a happier, kinder world.
In another example, the strict but playful Mama in the book comes up with a game of hiding buttons and pennies to overcome her children’s constant bickering and ensure that dusting is done to meet her standards. A cold and exacting mother is unlikely to think of such an inventive way of engaging children while also getting accomplished what she wants from them.
It’s worth noting that Taylor wrote down stories about her childhood, with these notable embellishments, for the entertainment of her only daughter, Jo. Thus, Taylor came to the fictional writing of Mama with the benefit of experience as a mother. Part of what makes the All-of-a-Kind Family story so charming is how believable the children are and the mother. Their interactions are believable, even if they are less prone to dysfunction, unhappiness, and mess than your average family. Part of the reason for the believability is that the stories is likely informed by Taylor’s real-life childhood and her real-life motherhood. As a mother, perhaps she could more easily invent the mother she desired for her daughter, the mother she aspired to be.
Taylor’s biographers write, “By making Mama warmer than she really was, . . . and making teachers and librarians friendlier than they were, Taylor was able to show her readers what it was like to be Jewish on the Lower East Side in the early 1900’s in a way that her readers could accept and comprehend, and at the same time to see that place and that time as desirable.”
Elsewhere, Cummins writes, “Taylor portrayed a close-knit, loving Jewish family that was also, largely due to the influence of the mother, focused on cleanliness, proper behavior, refined possessions such as clothing and furniture, responsibility, social welfare, and orderly habits.” It is not that Taylor’s mother’s desires for order were rooted in her painful life. While a neurotic obsession with cleanliness could very well be an understandable reaction to difficult life experience, it is also a desire for something good. It is possible to imagine a world in which the tidiness of the real-world mother could be paired with the warmth and affection of a nurturing mother. That pairing exists in Taylor’s writing of Mama.
Cox Gurdon concludes, “Real life is messy. Perhaps the only lasting way to tidy it up is to be selective in the stories we tell about it. This fine first biography of Sydney Taylor shows how well that can be done.” Indeed, Taylor’s fiction shows the redeeming power of stories, the immersive telling of realistic story with the inspiration of imagining a better world.
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