“Are You My Mother?”–the clever gem that concludes our new issue, by Short(er)-Fiction-prize runner-up Sabrina Orah Mark–has what we might think of as a famous grandmother. A great many of us were raised on P.D. Eastman’s classic children’s book of the same title. Eastman’s book, first published in 1960, is a widely adored story about the search for love and belonging. Mark’s story takes this allegory and drags it into the lonely, fragmented, rootless, go-it-alone context of modern adult life. Mark is an accomplished poet, and she writes here with a poet’s thoughtfulness and concision. With a winning combination of humor and pathos, she takes on questions of feminism and fear, anxiety and influence , inspiration and spent dreams, and what we all lose when, as writers and as people, we grow up.
Please enjoy this wonderfully throwback video of the original “Are You My Mother?” below, and then click on the image to enlarge the excerpt of Sabrina Orah Mark’s story:
And, just for kicks, because who can resist Dr. Who?