Customer Reviews

The Mother Garden: Stories

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
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2 star:		(1)
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I am not much for short stories. Wow, was I favorably impressed with the collection of stories in Robin Romm's The Mother Garden. These stories are like a tender touch to a black eye. Without flinching, Ms. Romm looks closely at what it means to be human. Loss sure, but that is not, to my mind, the meditation here. Rather, its a close up exam of life's relentless hope in the midst of the inexplicable hardships that come our way. Romm gives many of her characters an off beat voice and just enough magic to sharpen the focus. These stories are redeeming, fun and poignant. After reading this book, I sent copies to several friends and family members all living in different parts of the country. Every person responded with an unusual degree of gushing thanks. In one way or another they all conveyed the same message: the book is different, insightful, and makes it so easy to touch those broken and bruised places we all tend to protect while longing to have them touched with a healing hand.

The surreal abuts the all-too-familiar in Robin Romm's exemplary collection of stories, where mothers take root (at least for a while) and an egg or a goldfish stands in for the fragile emotions at play. While death and illness are recurring themes, Romm deftly avoids bathos, finding her niche in the push and pull between horror, sadness, humor, and sex. There is nothing glib about Romm's magical scenarios; rather, by placing the outre alongside the commonplace, she unflinchingly illuminates both.

Robin Romm penned a collection of short stories with characters essentially dealing with loss and dysfunction with their parents/parenthood in her book, The Mother Garden. Romm began to write these stories while in graduate school at San Francisco State University, when she was dealing with the loss of her mother. This no doubt, inspired the rest of the stories, which all have similar themes.
Romm said in writing the stories it was never the goal to figure those deep themes out, but "it's the process." She must have really tried it to figure it out, from multiple angles, to explain the wide array of similar-sounding stories. Whether it was a resentful daughter of a woman dying of cancer, a resentful daughter of a woman who buries herself alive in her own weight, or even a father resentful of his wife and daughter: there was definitely resentment all around, seething quietly in a corner, underlying a lot of stories. However, despite the similarities of the pieces, she still manages to hang on to the reader by her deft language and striking word choice. Her endings rarely give the characters any answers or resolution, but Romm wants it that way. "I don't like it when a reader puts the book down and says `Ah,' and that's it," she says. Instead, she opts for a more open-ended approach, one where the story is open to unlimited possibilities, and it is up to the reader to decide what unfolds for these protagonists.
What is interesting about the protagonists is the gender of the main characters. While the majority is woman, two stories "Celia's Fish" and "The Egg Game," are told in men's perspective. Romm, when asked if her writing process was any different for writing a man's voice, shrugged off the question. "It's the same," she says. "I just try to imagine the man's perspective. But I suppose it is easier writing a woman's experience." Apparently, she is very natural capturing men's actions and motivations, because she does so so brilliantly, such as in the "Game," in which a man deals with impending fatherhood and commitment to his wife. Impressive still in the story, is how not only does she write from a man's perspective, but also from another race entirely.
I felt the weakest story in the collection was the title story, "The Mother Garden." I felt that it was a bit confusing, as there were never any clear or explanatory lines drawn for the reader as to how much magical realism is taking place. Romm noted that she felt more literary freedom when dealing with heavy issues such as death and grief, when she went for fairy tale-like feel or absurdity. The mother garden concept itself was intriguing, but I felt wasn't executed effectively. It seemed awkward almost, or forced, having Claire recruit these women to stand in a garden. The story straddled the line between realism and absurdity, and if it leaned more towards one way or another, it would have worked better. The highlight for me was reading the distinct dialogue of the, albeit one-dimensional, mother characters.
In the end, I appreciate the craft of Garden, but would like to see more variety in her content. Some places could have been more developed or worked on for better cohesion, but for the most part Romm is a great observer of the world and an expert on expression. In many instances she took my breath away with her simple, elegant and honest prose that it is enough to make me a fan.

After reading this book, I've been buying it for friends. Not only is the writing truly beautiful but the stories are deep and moving. And, every now and then, I get to laugh out loud. There's not a better combination.

What an odd and absorbing set of stories. Some of them are quite moving, others a bit puzzling. All of them will stay with you for days, their striking images the stuff of dreams.

You don't have to understand where the author is coming from to enjoy The Mother Garden's dozen stories. But if you take the time to read The Mercy Papers, Robin Romm's tear-inducing recollections of the waning days of her breast cancer-stricken mother's life (subtitled "a memoir of three weeks"), the stories will make a lot more sense. Nine of the twelve contain the theme in some form. The Arrival is the story of a family's encounter with a woman who washes up on a beach. The mother is dying of cancer. In Lost and Found, a father, thought dead, is found and a dog is lost. The narrator talks about the time in her life when her mother (p 22) "was dying." Tragedy is the main theme of The Tilt, in which a family tries to come to grips with the death of one of its members (though the method of death seems logistically unlikely). On page (p 76) it's revealed that the mother is dying of breast cancer. In The Beads, the little things are found in a cancer-stricken mother's stomach. No Small Feat begins with, "If I write that my mother died of cancer..." In Weight the mother's doctor tells her (p 124) "I think you should lose some weight...Cancer travels in lipids." Celia's Fish tells the tale of the relationship between a girl's father and family friend. Her mother is dying of cancer. Real mothers fill the garden in the title story in which (p 160) the mother has passed away. A daughter (p 185 and 186) questions her cancer-afflicted wheelchair bound oxygen tank using mother's feelings about the afterlife in Family Epic. Notably, both books contain a reference to two "greasy" men in "black suits" from the mortuary that almost drop her mother's body as they are removing it from their house (p 125 of TMG and p 176 of TMP).

Watching her mother's battle (and nine year victory) against an insidious illness and experiencing the loss of her death has obviously given the author a lot to think (and write) about. And she does a great job of creating clever, varied stories that hint at her ordeal. Lost and Found, and The Mother Garden, probably the oddest of the lot, were especially good. I think that the book would have been even better, though, without the inclusion of several intimate encounters as well as the use of my least favorite body part reference/expletive (find it in Family Epic). Even so, The Mother Garden is a great tribute to the author's mother's, to which the book is dedicated. Also good: The Mercy Papers by Robin Romm, The Summer of Ordinary Ways by Nicole Lea Helget, and The Twelve Little Cakes by Dominika Dery.

I agree with all the reviewers here... The stories aren't just about loss, but maybe more what people feel and what we do when we reach those edges -- death and love and all of the things we can't make sense of. What struck me, reading these stories was the strength of the language -- hilarious and tender, surprising, complicated and spare. I want to quote some of my favorite lines, but I don't want to ruin it for anyone else!

Depressing stories about the author's mother and the manner in which she faced death did not elicit my sympathy as the writing was too "wooden" in my opinion.