“No Son of Mine” Recounts a Son’s Life When He’s No Longer a Son https://ift.tt/ChpIwYJ
The loss of a parent is devastating and even more tragic when it occurs more than once. The repetition of loss is the heart of Jonathan Corcoran’s memoir, No Son of Mine, in which his troubled mother disowns him because of his sexual orientation. Separated by distance and silence, their lives remain intertwined even as Jonathan recreates a life without her.
Corcoran’s story opens in early 2020 in New York, shut down and gripped by COVID. He and his husband, Sam, are sick and unable to leave their apartment when he receives a call from his sister that their mother has passed. Corcoran recalls his harsh upbringing as a young gay man from a small town in West Virginia who shunned sports and avoided fights with bullies, much to the chagrin of his laborer-father, who spends his life drinking and womanizing. Yet his docile and zealously religious mother is always there for him. Corcoran succeeds academically and attends Brown University, where he meets Sam. On one visit home from college, he inadvertently leaves behind a notebook with a never-sent love letter to Sam and sketches of his lover naked, which his mother finds in his room, prompting a phone call that alters his life. On his twentieth birthday, she tells him, “You are no longer my son.”
He is cut off, but the turbulent relationship with his mother does not end there. Through years of separation and silence, his mother periodically harasses him with unexpected phone calls, sometimes silent, sometimes intense (“You’re going to die of AIDS,” she once told him). He cannot tolerate her abuse and rejection, yet he cannot help but love her. It is only because of Sam, who in Jonathan’s worst moments tells him, “Breathe,” that he finds any measure of security.
Corcoran’s relationship with his mother is volatile and complex, marked by years of little or no communication and sporadic attempts to reconnect. Her words are always in his head. Yet Corcoran proves to be a fighter. He will not accept his mother’s condemnation of his gayness or her refusal to acknowledge Sam. He is sometimes hopeful of reconciliation and being able to move on, yet suspicious of her later attempts to reach out, assuring him that she still loves him.
“There’s a voice that certain people use,” he writes. “It sounds like a gentle hand pulling the blanket up to your neck. It sounds like a lullaby. It’s a dangerous voice, because it’s real and honest, in its way. It sounds like a childhood memory, and it can transport you from the present to the womb. I have learned not to trust this voice.” Later, when detachment and dementia render her incapable of reconciliation, he feels helpless to heal himself. With no hope of ever repairing their relationship, he feels irreversibly abandoned,
Corcoran pieces together the fragments of his troubled childhood with intensity and memorable detail. His recollections of his mother’s docility and quirkiness are sympathetic but biting and honest. “She was so fixated on the weather that she talked about it like a person, all the things this awful person had done to her.”
He recalls hiding in the backseat of a car in the middle of the night while his mother searched the town for her unfaithful husband. Yet there are explosive moments where his mother, fed up with her life and marriage, breaks every dish in the house and, one year, rips the cord attached to a string of lights out of the wall socket and “cancels” Christmas. His fits of anger sometimes mirror hers, making him prone to outbursts in which he kicks his mother out of his apartment during each of her visits to New York, leaving her on her own to find her way back to the Greyhound station, abandoning her as she abandoned him.
The most vivid moments in the book are those that capture Corcoran’s utter loneliness: his first Christmas after his mother’s disownment when he panics over no longer having somewhere to go home to if he is sick; his walks through the small town in which he grew up, deteriorated and abandoned, like himself; the remnants of his childhood slowly fading from memory, reduced to a photo album he steals from his parents’ house during a visit home. Later, he discovers his mother was herself abandoned, haunted by vague memories of a man walking along the railroad tracks that she believed was her biological father. Her dim recollections of a parent she never knew heighten the intensity of Corcoran’s loss as he realizes she has become the same to him.
Corcoran’s memoir is intense and, at times, difficult to read. He makes it clear from the beginning that there will be no moment of reconciliation, no peace between him and his mother. His real journey is not about how much his mother made him suffer but how he creates an identity apart from her and overcomes the sense of life having cheated him. No Son of Mine is a deeply personal view of what it means to be a son, and when one has to stop being a son and become someone else — a husband, a friend, or even oneself.
NONFICTION No Son of Mine By Jonathan Corcoran
University Press of Kentucky
Published April 1, 2024
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