Interviews
Listen to Laura’s interview on Midmorning with Keri Miller on Minnesota Public Radio
Minneapolis Metro Magazine Keeper Award Article
Laura Flynn on writing Swallow the Ocean, Interviewed by Abbye Simkowitz
Q: What inspired you to write a memoir?
A: I always intended to write. I never intended to write this story. My childhood with my mother felt too dark, too shrouded in secrecy and just too plain creepy. At a certain point in my mid-thirties I was doing some other writing and started thinking about the doll games my sisters and I played when we were children. Everything came back to me in a flood. I suddenly saw my childhood less starkly. In the same way that those stories carried me through a difficult time in my childhood, they also opened the door to writing about it.
Q: How was your experience writing Swallow the Ocean? What was your family’s reaction?
A: Once I made the decision to write the book I was so on fire with the idea I was sure it would only take me six months or so – it took closer to six years. I am incredibly lucky in that my father and sisters have been so supportive, and generous in sharing their memories with me – despite the fact that the thought of this book made them queasy at the outset – and possibly still does. The long time frame may have helped. We all had time to have many conversations about the past, and we all grew up a little bit more.
Q: San Francisco family law in 1970s: custody was an uphill battle for your father. The courts seemed very sympathetic toward the mother at that time. Do you think this has changed?
A: At that time for a father to gain custody of his children he had to prove that the mother was grossly unfit. My father initially underestimated just how high the burden of proof would be and, in addition, the court moved with glacial speed. I would like to believe that our experiences in family court could not be repeated today. Certainly there is far greater awareness of mental illness, and less of a bias against fathers. Still someone like my mother — middle class, functioning well enough to get the kids off to school, smart enough to keep her inner life private, and with young children who were primarily loyal to her – might still be able to put up a pretty good custody fight even today.
Q: How did you come to realize, at such a young age, that your mother was spiraling into mental illness and home life was atypical?
A: I didn’t hear the word schizophrenia until I was ten and by then my mother had been sick to some degree for at least five years.
When I was very young my mother seemed magical, later she seemed difficult, more intransigent than other peoples’ mothers. Then as she became more and more angry she seemed bad — a bad person. At some point, probably around age eight or nine, I understood that the things she told me were not real. I never believed she was actually communicating with the spirit of JFK or that the clothes we wore would protect us, but I had no language for what was wrong. When my father finally explained what schizophrenia was, it was not a shock at all, more of a clicking into place of something I already understood instinctively.
Q: Feminism in 1970s: do you think this contributed to your mother’s illness in some way?
A: My mother was part of a generation of women who came of age on the cusp of the feminist movements of the 60s and 70s. She was very much a quester, someone looking for a mission in her life. She never quite found it. She was very smart, smarter I think than the men around her, and yet the options she felt she had when she graduated from college were so limited. I’ve always felt that if she’d been born even five years later some things might have been different.
None of this is to say she would not have become ill. That would be absurd. But I do wonder if a very insular domestic world may not have been the best environment for my mother.
Q: In Swallow the Ocean, you mention feeling guilty about leaving your mother after your parents’ divorce—do you think her condition was the main reason for this guilt?
A: I’ve felt a deep sense of guilt towards my mother both as a child and as an adult. If your parent is ill and you cannot care for them you are going to feel guilty, regardless of the circumstances.
This sense of guilt was a major stumbling block in the writing of the book. On some level I felt I was betraying her. I was still in some way the little girl who didn’t want to let on that she wasn’t on her mother’s side.
Q: Though diagnosed with schizophrenia, your mother still remains completely unmedicated. How do you feel about treatment?
A: The mental healthcare system in our country is broken. My mother’s case is somewhat unusual in her unequivocal refusal of any kind of intervention, coupled with her ability to take care of herself. Many people who are seriously mentally ill are not able to hold it together enough to stay off the streets, out of jail, and out of the hospital, to maintain their autonomy. The tragedy is that the system only intervenes when people are in the most dire crisis, something akin to using emergency rooms for primary healthcare.
With schizophrenia there is such diversity in the severity of illness, in outcomes, and in response to medication that is not good to generalize. I would hate for people dealing with schizophrenia today to read this book and despair. There are so many more resources and treatments available today that the outlook is more hopeful. That said, people suffering chronic mental illness, even those who want treatment, are likely to have a very difficult time accessing good care. A bill introduced by the late Senator Paul Wellstone that would guarantee mental health care insurance parity recently passed the Senate, but is still stalled in the House.
Q: Do you and your sisters still see your mother?
A: I see my mother briefly whenever I am home. One of my sisters visits every couple of weeks. We bring groceries to her, she talks with us for a couple of minutes in the doorway of her apartment, and that’s about it. I last saw my mother in May. I told her I was getting married, and she asked several questions about what the ceremony would be like. My younger sister recently brought her newborn son to visit. My mother reached out and touched his head.
Q: The memoir begins with your childhood as a family, pre-illness and divorce. Why did you choose to begin here?
A: Those early memories, like the doll stories, are part of what charmed me into writing the book at all.
It felt very important to me to show this early part of my childhood — to recreate my mother as she was before she was ill. When you tell someone that your mother suffered from schizophrenia they immediately imagine that you had an unremittingly bad childhood. That really wasn’t the case for me. I also wanted readers to feel the full impact of what was lost.
Q: The medical term “paranoid schizophrenia” is only used a few times in your memoir. Is this intentional?
A: I think for most people that term is deeply off putting. They think Charles Manson or the Unabomber. “Schizophrenia” is perhaps becoming less fearsome. Nevertheless, I purposely did not use the term until nearly halfway through the book. Swallow the Ocean is written from my point of view as a child and I didn’t know those terms then so I did not want to include them. I also wanted to describe who my mother was, what she was like, before giving readers an easy medical label about which they probably have a bunch of mis- and pre-conceptions.
I don’t think the term “paranoid schizophrenic” is even used medically today. My mother was given that diagnosis in 1977, so I included that fact in the memoir. I think we need to be careful about these labels though, because they keep shifting. A psychologist pointed out to me that so little is still known about the physiology of mental illness that what doctors currently call “schizophrenia,” may one day turn out to be a hundred different diseases of the brain that exhibit similar symptoms.