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Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography
The Mama Chronicles: A Memoir
Winner of the 2022 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Life Writing
Growing up in the Delta town of Yazoo City, Mississippi, Teresa Nicholas believed that she and her country-born and -bred mother weren’t close. She knew little of her mother’s early life as a sharecropper during the Great Depression, but whenever she brought up the subject, her taciturn mother would snap, “You ask too many questions, young’un.”
Nicholas left Mississippi to attend college, then settled in New York to work in the hard-driving world of commercial book publishing. Twenty-five years later, eager for a change, she and her husband decided to shift careers to writing, trading their home in the New York suburbs for a casita in the Mexican Highlands. But as her mother’s health deteriorated, Nicholas found herself spending more time in the small town she thought she had left behind. Over long afternoons in front of Turner Classic Movies, she grew closer to her mother, coaxing stories from her about her hardscrabble past―until a major stroke threatened to silence her mother's newfound voice.
Torn between her new home in Mexico and her old home in Mississippi, Nicholas struggled to find her place in the world. She discovered that the past isn’t always the way we remember it, and as the years ticked by, that she and her mother could grow closer still. The Mama A Memoir is a funny and poignant account of a mother-daughter relationship and, ultimately, a meditation on acceptance and what it means to call a place home.
Growing up in the Delta town of Yazoo City, Mississippi, Teresa Nicholas believed that she and her country-born and -bred mother weren’t close. She knew little of her mother’s early life as a sharecropper during the Great Depression, but whenever she brought up the subject, her taciturn mother would snap, “You ask too many questions, young’un.”
Nicholas left Mississippi to attend college, then settled in New York to work in the hard-driving world of commercial book publishing. Twenty-five years later, eager for a change, she and her husband decided to shift careers to writing, trading their home in the New York suburbs for a casita in the Mexican Highlands. But as her mother’s health deteriorated, Nicholas found herself spending more time in the small town she thought she had left behind. Over long afternoons in front of Turner Classic Movies, she grew closer to her mother, coaxing stories from her about her hardscrabble past―until a major stroke threatened to silence her mother's newfound voice.
Torn between her new home in Mexico and her old home in Mississippi, Nicholas struggled to find her place in the world. She discovered that the past isn’t always the way we remember it, and as the years ticked by, that she and her mother could grow closer still. The Mama A Memoir is a funny and poignant account of a mother-daughter relationship and, ultimately, a meditation on acceptance and what it means to call a place home.
256 pages, Hardcover
Published September 16, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 7, 2021
Sorry ! I didn’t mean to rate my own book. I gave it one star but went back and corrected it to five. I hope you will read it and decide. Best, Teresa
October 27, 2021
Teresa Nicholas knows how to tell a story, even if it’s nonfiction. She proved this in 2016 with “Willie,” her biography of fellow Yazoo City, Mississippi native and writer Willie Morris. And before that, with her memoir about her Lebanese Catholic immigrant father, in “Buryin’ Daddy.” She could have spun some great fiction—she’s got literary chops like Welty and O’Connor—with the fodder of her family’s hardscrabble lives in the Mississippi Delta, but as you will discover by reading “The Mama Chronicles,” she had no need to make things up.
After leaving the Mississippi Delta for school at Swarthmore, and spending twenty-five years working for Crown Publishing in New York City, Nicholas and her husband decided to move to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where she hoped to “find my own language and try to make it dance.” Two writers on an idyllic adventure—or so she thought—until her ailing mother needed her help back in Mississippi.
Who could have guessed that this experience with a mother with whom she had “miscues and misunderstandings” in her teenage and young adult years would not only bring healing, but offer content for this, her third book. As she says early in the memoir, “So I’d come back . . . seeking my past, circling around unresolved feelings . . . out of a combination of love, tamped-down hunger for a relationship with my mother I’d never had . . . ” and feeling “enwombed by her presence.” Enwombed. This is how Nicholas writes.
Nicholas shares a strong feeling of expatriation with Willie Morris. As a native of Mississippi, I understand this and often share Nicholas’s feelings: “I’d thought of myself as part of that generation of southerners Willie Morris had written about in his autobiography, North Toward Home, expatriates ‘in the European sense,’ who couldn’t live in the south but couldn’t get it out of their imagination.” Eventually Nicholas relented, saying, “Mississippi, unlike New York or Mexico, was my place of memory . . . . It could be a difficult place in which to dwell.” Like Nicholas, I have stayed in the south (Memphis) but have not returned to live in Mississippi since 1988.
The middle chapters of the book chronicle her mother’s years in and out of hospitals and assisted living, with Nicholas and her sister shift-sharing months at home with their mother. So much of this felt familiar to me—as it will to many readers who have also traveled this bumpy road of caregiving for a parent. I wrote about my difficult journey with my mother in Tangles and Plaques: A Mother and Daughter Face Alzheimer’s in 2017, one year after my mother’s death. And while the devil may indeed be in the details—including Nicholas’ fear of learning to catheterize her mother—those details also contain the universal truths, trials, and triumphs of human life at its most vulnerable point.
Throughout the book Nicholas shares her efforts to get her mother to talk about the past. Early on her mother would refuse, saying, “Don’t nobody want to hear nothing about that mess.” But later she writes about interviewing her mother. “I’d ask for information, and she’d provide it. This was an act of love.”
The best “surprise” in the book, for me, was the letters Nicholas discovered in a footlocker when she cleaned out her home in New York City. Some of those letters were from her mother when Nicholas was in school at Swarthmore, and surprised her with their powerful messages of affirmation and love. “In the intimacy of the letters . . . she found her voice . . . . It was an antidote to mourning.”
Susan Cushman is a native of Jackson, Mississippi and the author of a novel John and Mary Margaret (set in Mississippi and Memphis) and a memoir Tangles and Plaques: A Mother and Daughter Face Alzheimer’s (also set in Mississippi). She is editor of three anthologies, including Southern Writers on Writing (University Press of Mississippi, 2018).
After leaving the Mississippi Delta for school at Swarthmore, and spending twenty-five years working for Crown Publishing in New York City, Nicholas and her husband decided to move to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where she hoped to “find my own language and try to make it dance.” Two writers on an idyllic adventure—or so she thought—until her ailing mother needed her help back in Mississippi.
Who could have guessed that this experience with a mother with whom she had “miscues and misunderstandings” in her teenage and young adult years would not only bring healing, but offer content for this, her third book. As she says early in the memoir, “So I’d come back . . . seeking my past, circling around unresolved feelings . . . out of a combination of love, tamped-down hunger for a relationship with my mother I’d never had . . . ” and feeling “enwombed by her presence.” Enwombed. This is how Nicholas writes.
Nicholas shares a strong feeling of expatriation with Willie Morris. As a native of Mississippi, I understand this and often share Nicholas’s feelings: “I’d thought of myself as part of that generation of southerners Willie Morris had written about in his autobiography, North Toward Home, expatriates ‘in the European sense,’ who couldn’t live in the south but couldn’t get it out of their imagination.” Eventually Nicholas relented, saying, “Mississippi, unlike New York or Mexico, was my place of memory . . . . It could be a difficult place in which to dwell.” Like Nicholas, I have stayed in the south (Memphis) but have not returned to live in Mississippi since 1988.
The middle chapters of the book chronicle her mother’s years in and out of hospitals and assisted living, with Nicholas and her sister shift-sharing months at home with their mother. So much of this felt familiar to me—as it will to many readers who have also traveled this bumpy road of caregiving for a parent. I wrote about my difficult journey with my mother in Tangles and Plaques: A Mother and Daughter Face Alzheimer’s in 2017, one year after my mother’s death. And while the devil may indeed be in the details—including Nicholas’ fear of learning to catheterize her mother—those details also contain the universal truths, trials, and triumphs of human life at its most vulnerable point.
Throughout the book Nicholas shares her efforts to get her mother to talk about the past. Early on her mother would refuse, saying, “Don’t nobody want to hear nothing about that mess.” But later she writes about interviewing her mother. “I’d ask for information, and she’d provide it. This was an act of love.”
The best “surprise” in the book, for me, was the letters Nicholas discovered in a footlocker when she cleaned out her home in New York City. Some of those letters were from her mother when Nicholas was in school at Swarthmore, and surprised her with their powerful messages of affirmation and love. “In the intimacy of the letters . . . she found her voice . . . . It was an antidote to mourning.”
Susan Cushman is a native of Jackson, Mississippi and the author of a novel John and Mary Margaret (set in Mississippi and Memphis) and a memoir Tangles and Plaques: A Mother and Daughter Face Alzheimer’s (also set in Mississippi). She is editor of three anthologies, including Southern Writers on Writing (University Press of Mississippi, 2018).
December 24, 2021
Steeped in the South, this is a touching and relatable memoir about the changing dynamics between a mother and daughter. It is a beautiful example of how this bond can be strengthened later in life with intention, commitment, and love.
November 16, 2021
I enjoyed this Yazoo City girl’s Memoir. Having lots of relatives from the places she described made it all the more enjoyable.
October 10, 2021
More compelling even than Burying Daddy
Theresa put words to my emotion and memories of the time, a few years earle, my two sisters and I travelled much the same path. I also grew up in Yazoo City and 9 years ago, the spirit moved me back, after 40+ years, to Mississippi ..Oxford. My daddy's family w ere sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta. Aside from those obvious connections, this is an exquisitely told story of a daughter seeking her mother and finding her mother and herself. Poignant and honest and loving: thank you Theresa Nichols.
Theresa put words to my emotion and memories of the time, a few years earle, my two sisters and I travelled much the same path. I also grew up in Yazoo City and 9 years ago, the spirit moved me back, after 40+ years, to Mississippi ..Oxford. My daddy's family w ere sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta. Aside from those obvious connections, this is an exquisitely told story of a daughter seeking her mother and finding her mother and herself. Poignant and honest and loving: thank you Theresa Nichols.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews