Introduction

A fight, ended by a slap, sends Elizabeth out the door of her Baton Rouge home on the eve of her fifteenth birthday. Her mother, Laura, is left to fret and worry--and remember. Wracked with guilt as she awaits Liz's return, Laura begins a letter to her daughter, hoping to convey everything I've always meant to tell you but never have.

In her painfully candid confession, Laura shares memories of her own troubled adolescence in rural Louisiana, her bittersweet relationship with a boy she loved despite her parents' disapproval, and a personal tragedy that she can never forget. An absorbing and affirming debut, Letter to My Daughter is a heartwrenching novel of mothers, daughters, and the lessons we all learn when we come of age.

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George Bishop on Letter to My Daughter

My novel Letter to My Daughter features a middle-aged mother, her 15-year-old daughter, a boy in Vietnam, and a tattoo. Straight off, let me make a confession: I don't have a daughter. I don't have a tattoo, and I don't know anyone who fought in the Vietnam War. How, then, did I come to write a book so far removed from my real-life experience?

Fortunately, there's a good story behind this novel, and it begins in India.

A couple of years ago I was on a fellowship to do teacher training in India. It was demanding work, and at the end of my stay, I took a camel safari in Rajasthan, in northern India. To be honest, this isn?t as romantic as it sounds. You sit on a camel, with a guide, and amble along a dusty track under hot sun, stopping now and then at a village for tea. It's uncomfortable, the camel smells bad. Pretty soon you're thinking, Hmm--a jeep would've been faster. But sitting on a camel all day does give you time to think, and I did.

I was mulling over an earlier novel I'd written. I'd struggled with this story for years trying to make it work. I'd done a ridiculous amount of research, had bankers boxes full of notes, but the thing was like a black hole swallowing everything I threw at it. But this, I knew, was what writing was: mostly just hard work, and if you wanted a story to succeed, you had to stick at it. "Bash on," as my Indian friends would say. So on my holiday in Rajasthan, I'd begun jotting notes for revisions to this novel in a journal I carried with me.

After a few hours riding a camel, though, the mind wanders. Thoughts slip from their moorings, and you drift into that hazy, pleasant state where past and present, near and distant, blur together in an indistinct, vaguely foreign landscape. Soon I wasn't thinking much about anything.

Late afternoon we arrived at a desert camp. The camel folded its legs and I slid off. A man with a moustache and turban stood waiting on the sand with, improbably, a decanter of whiskey on a silver tray. After dinner and drinks with a retired Indian colonel, I hiked around the dunes. Nothing but sand and desert scrub, as far as you could see; above, the moon and an amazing profusion of stars. It made the camel ride seem worthwhile. Satisfied, I fell asleep on a cot in a tent, the campfire illuminating the canvas walls, and there I dreamed.

I dreamed the whole story. I could see it like a film un-spooling. A daughter steals a car, drives off into the night, and the mother, waiting her return, sits down to write a letter. The farm, the boyfriend in Vietnam, the Catholic boarding school, the visit to the tattoo parlor: it was all there. When I woke the next morning, I lay on the cot, letting the pieces of the story settle into place, and then went out and sat in a camp chair and jotted an outline in my journal. It was this outline that guided me as I worked on the novel over the next year and a half.

The curious thing is that I don?t know anyone quite like Laura, the narrator. She's not modeled after anyone in real life. Many of her opinions align with mine, true, but her voice and experiences certainly aren't mine.

So where did Laura come from, then? The Greeks, you know, assigned divinity to this kind of inspiration. They said it was the work of the Muses: Calliope, Thalia, Terpsichore... Myself, I don't call it divine. Instead, I'm reminded of those stories you read about the discovery of some new chemical equation. The scientist is going about his business, preoccupied with other problems, and while stepping off a city bus, it comes in a flash: the formula is revealed, the equation solved.

A bit like those scientists, I credit my own inspiration to years of tedious work on story drafts, endless revision of sentences, countless nights hunched in front of a computer screen, and, just maybe, a few lucky hours rocking on a camel in the hot Indian sun. --George Bishop

(Photo © Michihito)

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Excerpt

Chapter One

March 22, 2004

Baton Rouge

Dear Elizabeth,

How to begin this? It’s early morning and I’m sitting here wondering where you are, hoping you’re all right. I haven’t slept since you left. Your father says there’s no sense in phoning the police yet; you’re probably just blowing off steam, and you’ll be back as soon as you run out of money or the car runs out of gas, whichever comes first. I shouldn’t be so hard on myself, he says. What with the way you spoke to me last night, it would take more forbearance than anyone’s capable of not to react the way I did, and besides, it wasn’t even that much of a slap.

Still, I blame myself. I keep seeing the look on your face as you brought your hand up to your cheek—the shock, the hurt, then the cold stare that bordered on hatred. When I heard the back door close in the middle of the night, I thought to myself, Well. There she goes. But it was only when I was standing on the driveway in my nightgown watching the taillights of my car disappear down the street that I understood just how bad this has become.

I’ll try not to insult you by saying I know how it feels to be fifteen. (I can see you rolling your eyes.) But believe it or not, I was your age once, and I had the same ugly fights with my parents. And I promised myself that if I ever had a daughter, I would be a better parent to her than mine were to me. My daughter, I told myself, would never have to endure the same inept upbringing that I did. I would be the perfect mother: patient and understanding, kind and sensible. I would listen to all my girl’s problems, help her when she needed it, and together we would build a bridge of trust that would carry us both into old age. Our relationship—it seemed so simple then—would be marked by love, not war.

Well. Things don’t always turn out the way we want them to, do they? Sometimes when I’m yelling at you for coming in late, or criticizing your choice of friends, or your taste in clothing, or your apparent indifference to anything having to do with family or school or future, I hear my mother’s voice coming out of my mouth. My mother’s very words, even. In spite of all my best intentions, I find myself becoming her. And you, of course, become me, reacting the same way I reacted when I was your age, revisiting all the same hurts that I suffered, and so completing one great big vicious circle of ineptitude.

I want to stop this. I’ve thought and thought, and I’m not sure how to go about it, except maybe to make it a rule to do everything that my mother didn’t do and not to do everything that she did—a crude way to right the wrongs, no doubt, and not altogether fair to my mother, who on occasion could be a decent person.

But one thing I’ve realized that my mother never did—and this was perhaps her greatest failing as a parent—the one thing she never did was to give me any good honest advice about growing up. Oh, she gave me plenty of rules, to be sure. She was a fountain of rules: sit up straight, keep your legs together, don’t run, don’t shout, don’t frown, don’t wear too much makeup or boys will think you’re a tramp. But she never told me what I really wanted to know: How does a girl grow up? How does a girl make it through that miserable age called adolescence and finally get to become a woman?

This was something I thought I might be able to help you with. I always pictured us sitting down together and having a talk, mother to daughter. You’d take your earphones out, I’d turn off the TV. Your father would be out running errands and so we’d have the whole afternoon to ourselves. In this talk, I would begin by telling you, as straightforwardly as I could, the story of my own adolescence. My intention would be not to shock or embarrass you, but to try and show you we’re not all that different, you and I. I do know what it’s like to be your age: I was there once, after all. I lived through it. And hearing the mistakes I made, you might learn from them and not have to repeat them. You could be spared my scars, in other words, so that the life you grow up in might be better than the one I had. Today, I thought, would be a good time for us to have this talk, your fifteenth birthday.

As nice as it sounds, that probably isn’t going to happen, is it? I think I made sure of that last night when I slapped you and drove you from our home. I could hardly blame you now if you don’t want to listen to me. It’ll take more than apologies for you to begin to trust me again.

So what I’ve decided to do is that while I’m sitting here waiting for you to return, I’ll write down in a letter everything I’ve always meant to tell you but never have. Maybe a letter is a poor substitute for the talk I always wanted us to have. But it’s a start at least, and I hope you’ll find it in yourself, if not today then sometime in the future, to accept it in the same spirit that I write it. Think of it as my birthday present to you—something that my mother never told me, but that I’ll endeavor now with all my heart to tell you: the truth about how a girl grows up. The truth about life.

I’m on my third cup of coffee now and there’s still no sign of you. Your dad’s out back mowing the grass like nothing ever happened. I’m not going to get all panicky, not yet. It’s still early, and I intend to keep my mind from imagining the worst. But I do hope you’ll be back in time to spend at least some of your birthday with us. I do hope you’re okay, Liz.

# # #

Excerpted from Letter to My Daughter by George Bishop Copyright © 2010 by George Bishop. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. Mother-daughter relationships are the crux of this novel. How are these often complicated relationships portrayed? What differences, if any, do you see between the different generations, i.e., between Laura and her mother and Liz and Laura? Do these portrayals reflect your own relationship with your mother? How?
2. Liz’s side of the story is never presented in the novel. What impressions of her do you get from Laura’s letter? Do you think Liz and Laura have a similar relationship to Laura’s relationship with her mother?
3. Laura writes this letter to Liz in hopes of breaking the cycle of distrust and miscommunication that she experienced with her own mother. Do you think that this letter will have the effect that Laura would like it to? Do you think that writing this letter makes Laura more sympathetic to her own mother? Do you think that writing this letter was the right thing for Laura to do after her daughter ran away?
4. Laura waits until Liz is fifteen to tell her the truth about her own teenage years. Do you think it would have made a difference if she had shared her story with Liz earlier? What do you think Liz’s reaction to it will be?
5. Laura knows even before their disastrous meeting that her parents disapprove of her dating Tim. How do you think this affected her attraction to him and her devotion to their relationship?
6. Do you think Laura’s parents did the right thing by sending her away to school? What do you think their motivations were when they made the decision to send her away? Ultimately, did Laura’s experience at Sacred Heart make her a more or less dutiful daughter?
7. When Tim tells Laura that he has enlisted in the army, he claims he’s doing it for her. Do you think he and Laura both truly believe this at the time? Should Laura have asked him not to go, as her older self thinks she should have?
8. Laura makes a scrapbook for Tim of everything she has been doing while they’ve been apart because she wants to share everything with him. She says, “If you had to choose the moments that best represented your life, what would they be? The small actions that pass almost without our noticing them, yet that we spend most of our time doing; aren’t these in fact the real stuff of our lives?” (p. 56) Do you agree with Laura? How would you answer her question?
9. Sister Mary Margaret tries to help Laura and ensures that she receives Tim’s letters. Why do you think she puts her own job in jeopardy to help Laura? Do you think her transfer to another school was appropriate?
10. Laura refers to herself and her group of friends at Sacred Heart as the “charity cases.” Do you think Laura’s status remained this way throughout her high school years, especially after she found her niche on the newspaper staff? To what extent is this experience universal for high school students?
11. Laura starts to feel disconnected from Tim after not seeing him for a very long time and as she becomes more involved in life at Sacred Heart. And later, she stops reading Tim’s letters, as they become more depressing and pessimistic. She says, “I couldn’t take on the burden of being his lifesaver, too, his one and only hope.” (p. 115) How did you feel about Laura’s behavior towards Tim? Did your view of her character change? Why or why not?
12. Tim’s final letter to Laura wonders if she is in agreement with his dream of what their future would be like, but that regardless the thought of her helped him get through each day and be “a little bit kinder or a little bit braver.” (p. 124) Do you think Tim thought Laura would still be waiting for him when he returned? How important are beliefs like this, even if false, during times of extreme duress?
13. Laura and Tim are young when they first meet, and over the course of their courtship both of them grow and mature in different ways. Do you think this is an accurate representation of first love?
14. Laura agreed to go the senior prom with Chip, the fellow journalist that has been pursuing her despite her relationship with Tim. Laura is unfaithful to Tim with Chip, and Chip eventually stops talking to Laura after this. Laura doesn’t blame Chip for his reaction, and is very hard on herself for her behavior. Do you agree with Laura’s take on the situation? How do you think Liz will react to hearing this story about her mother’s past?
15. Laura sees her decision to get a tattoo in memory of Tim as an inspired moment. “It was as if the act had been there all along, in my mind and in my body, only waiting for this moment to be realized.” (p. 126) Do you think this was an appropriate way to honor Tim? What do you think Laura’s decision to get a tattoo of an Elizabeth Barrett Browning quote and to name her daughter after this poet really represents to Laura?
16. Laura refers to Liz’s father as she frets about Liz’s disappearance, and describes to Liz what he is doing while they are waiting for her to come home. As you were reading, did you think that Liz’s father would be either Tim or Chip? Who do you imagine Laura ended up marrying?
17. In the last scene of the novel, Laura is finishing her letter to Liz when she hears a car approaching. Do you think this is Liz coming home? Why or why not?

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