Wishing for Snow: A Memoir

by Minrose Gwin

In this brave and beautifully composed tribute to her mother, Minrose Gwin accomplishes something rare in the craft of the memoir: not merely a record of a devastating mother-daughter relationship but a redemptive act of artistic witness as well. In telling the story of her mentally ill poet mother, Erin Taylor Clayton Pitner, Gwin looks backward and forward at a southern family, linking personal and cultural malaise while also attempting to envision the person her mother longed to be, the woman Gwin never knew. Erin Taylor wasn't always crazy. Her childhood diary from 1930 reveals a cheerful, observant Mississippi girl who steadfastly wished for snow, though usually it didn't come. And when it came it didn't stick. From a dreamy college student to a young divorced mother who then remarried, grew middle aged, and began to write and publish poetry, Erin Taylor spiraled deeper and deeper into the psychosis that eventually defined her existence until her death from ovarian cancer. Gwin searches for her mother amid the poetry, letters, recipes, traffic tickets, newspaper clippings, medical reports, and quixotic lists left behind. With humor, intrigue, and sadness, her compelling memo

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography Memoir

232 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Minrose Gwin is the author of three novels: The Queen of Palmyra, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award; Promise; and The Accidentals. Wishing for Snow, her 2004 memoir about the convergence of poetry and psychosis in her mother’s life, was reissued by Harper Perennial in 2011. Wearing another hat, she has written four books of literary and cultural criticism and history, most recently Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement, and coedited The Literature of the American South, a Norton anthology. Minrose began her career as a newspaper reporter. Since then, she has taught as a professor at universities across the country, most recently the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She currently lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Like the characters in Promise, she grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the more inventive and surprising memoirs I’ve read. Growing up in Mississippi in the 1920s and 30s, Gwin’s mother wanted nothing more than for it to snow. That air of wistfulness, of nostalgia tinged with bitterness, pervades the whole book. By the time her mother, Erin Clayton Pitner, a published though never particularly successful poet, died of ovarian cancer in the 1980s, their relationship was a shambles. Erin’s mental health was shakier than ever – she stole flowers from the church altar, frequently ran her car off the road, and lived off of canned green beans – and she never forgave Minrose for having had her committed to a mental hospital. “So what I did was this: I locked up the woman who gave me birth and I was glad of it. I have no excuse. I might well do it again. Be wary of me. I’m not a person you’d want around if you went crazy. … Were you the evil one, Mother? Was I? … You died thinking I was your enemy.”

It’s a story of loss but also of inheritance, starting with the alternating names: “Minrose” came from her grandmother, also Minrose, who was named after two maiden aunts, Minerva and Rose; Erin Taylor was named for her grandmother. Poring over Erin’s childhood diaries and adulthood vocabulary notebook, photographs, the letters and cards that passed between them, remembered and imagined conversations and monologues, and Erin’s darkly observant unrhyming poems (“No place to hide / from the leer of the sun / searching out every pothole, / every dream denied”), Gwin asks her mother, “When did you reach the point that everything was in pieces?” Her own story – a daughter born suspiciously soon after her wedding, a series of dead-end jobs before finally coming late to feminism and academia, moving to New Mexico with the woman she left her husband for – takes a backseat, and at times I would have liked to hear more. Still, this is a wonderful bereavement memoir and family memoir, full of arresting passages and the dripping-honey flavor of the South.

Some more favorite lines:

“Some stories are like stolen glimpses over the shoulder. … Some stories are never satisfied. They fly away only to return, predictably, in their own good time, hungry to be told again.”

“Grief is a matter of balance, of rivers and streams and dams and arroyos that flow and hold in time and space. If the balance is altered you can be washed away. You can drown.”

[Barbara Nutting · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit disappointed - not her beautiful lyric prose. I found it depressing and very confusing. Two of the characters have the same name, the time frame was very jumbled and I had trouble keeping everything straight!

Her whole life was tragic, but having read her other novels I see how she was able to incorporate all her real life problems into wonderful fiction.

Her entire family for generations was plagued by mental problems, in this memoir I thought she seemed quite odd too.

I didn’t like all the poetry, I never understand the symbolism in it. Glad I read this though, it makes me understand where she’s coming from.

[Gail · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actually, I think I'd give this book 2 and a half stars. The story itself was interesting, about the author's mother and how her progressively worse mental illness affected her family. Her mother was also a poet, and many of the poems are included in the book. However, I often found Gwin's writing style distracting. It's hard to follow a sentence when it's an entire paragraph long! So, I guess I'd give this a "thumbs up," albeit with some reservations.

[Maya · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this because the author was my college mentor. I found it fascinating because I knew her--I don't know if it would have been as compelling without that connection, though I can't really remember much about the book now.

[Leigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have great admiration for the writer. She had a rotten childhood, the stuff of horror stories. It's difficult to read, but short enough. Also, there are elements of her family's story in her fiction, which I found interesting.

[Krmcnall · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mental illness is so sad and destructive to the whole family.

[Kathleen Rodgers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Originally published in hardcover by Louisiana State University Press in 2004 and later republished by HarperCollins/Harper Perennial, June 2011

My thoughts:

The book opens with two diary entries of a nine-year-old girl named Erin Taylor Clayton. Both entries are dated Friday November 21, 1930, and Monday November 24, 1930. Young Erin is wishing for snow, especially because she lives in Mississippi and snow is rare. She sounds happy enough, a typical girl who writes that her mama calls her "little sunshine."

Erin would grow up to become a gifted poet who later suffered from mental illness.

What follows is the beautifully told but heart-wrenching story by Minrose Gwin, named the 2020 winner of the Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters Award in Fiction. As Minrose searches for the mother who existed before mental illness claimed any hope for a normal life, we learn of the author's own childhood filled with constant moves and a sense of chaos.

She refers to her stepdad as the salesman, a man who left his glory days of landing on aircraft carries far behind after he married her mom. The family moved often, taking young Minrose away from her beloved grandparents. Minrose's only connection to her biological father came each year in the form of expensive gifts she had to open in private and hide so her two younger half-siblings wouldn't get jealous. (See the author's essay "How I Met My Father" in the May 18, 2024 edition of The New York Times.)

Minrose Gwin's writing is addictive. Once you start reading, you can't stop. I admire how Minrose interspersed poems her mother penned later in life with her own memories of growing up with a troubled mom and a stepdad who appeared distant and angry all the time. These selections add to the overall story as the author delves deeper into her mother's mental illness and eventual death from ovarian cancer.

If you love good writing, if you love true stories where the author searches for hope no matter the circumstances, you'll want to read Wishing For Snow.

[Kay Hommedieu · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the second half of this memoir better than the first part because there was so much family history to display of the author's mother and her family.

The poems written by the author's mother and the mother's early diary entries as a young girl were especially lovely. 3/17/2018

[Leigh Hancock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gwin's memoir about her crazy mother (whom she commits more than once) is really a form-meets-content exploration of grief and guilt. And like grief, it doesn't progress logically through time; it's disorderly, rambling, funny, frustrating and acute. In the first paragraph alone the narrator moves from herself to her mother to her mother's birth which occurs at the time of day when "overripe figs tremble and slip to earth without a sound." Still in the same paragraph, we hear about yellow jackets who "straddle, lick and thrust," and we end by learning how this just-birthed baby dies.

And so it goes, for 227 pages, the story moving back back and forth over a hundred years, often without taking a breath. There are brilliant descriptions of Gwin's mother stealing flowers from altars and eating green beans off the floor, stories of ponies dragged behind trucks and grim picnics where no one speaks. This book reminds me of "The Sound and the Fury"--"beautiful and flawed." I loved it. I don't think everyone would.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the lyricism and episodic nature of Gwin's memoirs. She had me internally narrating events in her voice for days.
I found the story of Gwin's mother compelling as well. It was beautiful and tragic: the complexity of her as a person, her conflicting roles as mother, abuser, poet, cancer victim, and mental patient that played out in the stretches of prose between her truly beautiful poems.

[Lisa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ufda. Tough book for me to get through. Just not a good fit for me, i guess!

[Micaela · Rating 5 out of 5]

sad. intense. necessary. it matters to talk about this subject and this author does so in a painfully honest and beautiful way.