Writes the seeker,

Q. I am a widow with a 15-year-old daughter. I have been going out with someone for six months but he lives and works abroad and I usually go and see him. On the few occasions when he has come to stay with me and my daughter in England, she has been absolutely poisonous towards him. (She is just jealous. He is a very nice man.) Now he has invited us both to stay with him for a fortnight in the summer in his holiday house in Italy and I am at my wits' end to know how I can get my daughter to behave on this holiday and prevent her from putting him off me because the ‘baggage' is too difficult to handle. What can I do?

Freud: I'm leaving this one alone.

Marie Antoinette: I don't understand. Why don't you just stay at separate chateaux?

Vladimir Nabokov: Urbane, European boyfriend? Bratty 15-year-old daughter? Selfish, widowed mother? This should end well!

Joan Crawford: Isn't there a bathroom somewhere she should be cleaning?

Nathan Bedford Forrest: I hate Italians.

Little Edie Beale: She's jealous? YOU'RE JEALOUS!

Oscar Wilde: I find you unspeakably tedious.

Dorothy Parker:
You're boyfriend's married,
You're daughter's a pill.
I wish I didn't, but
I know that drill.

Lizzie Borden: Watch your back.

Dare Wright: Why don't you just live together, do elaborate photoshoots and play with dolls? What is this "going out" of which you speak?

Joseph Smith: And why is this young woman yet unmarried?

Jack Kerouac: Fuck You

Your problems solved [SpectatorUK]

Earlier: What To Do When You're In Love With Your Sister's Widower?

It was a strange coincidence that the much-anticipated TV movie of Grey Gardens and former Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl's fourth memoir, Not Becoming My Mother, should come out in the same week. While the differences are obvious - one's the story of fallen aristocracy, the other of mid-century malaise - both deal with thwarted female ambition, make one wonder whether fragile psyches can ever triumph over adversity, and, most of all, explore how these questions impact on mother-daughter relationships.

Most everyone - at least, readers of this site - knows the Beales' story: the New York socialites, mother and daughter, whose grandiose showbiz ambitions gave way to a life of delusion and squalor, made all the more dramatic by their family connection to Jackie O. The HBO film, while it broadens the focus, doesn't tell us much we didn't already know about their decline. To anyone who's read one of food writer and editor Reichl's memoirs, this one will not contain shocks, either: her neurotic, frustrated mother is a constant, infuriating presence in her books, her mental instability and scorn for her daughter's career a constant cross for Reichl to bear.

This memoir, title aside, is more sympathetic; Reichl explores the broken dreams that made Miriam Reichl the woman and the mother she was: her wasted education, her thwarted desire to become a doctor, her suffering through what Reichl terms "the worst possible time to have been a middle-class American woman." Reichl's writing is always curiously indifferent to whether the reader likes her, and this is no exception; despite her newfound understanding of her mother's struggles, the ambivalence is the memoir's third character. Miriam's disdain for Ruth's career choice may come from a desire to see Reichl do something more - and from a wish to protect her from crushing disappointment - but it's still cruel, and there were many mothers of the same generation who were able to muster far more support.

Then too, the main question we're left with at the end of the book is, how much was her? It's the same question that dogs Grey Gardens. Could Edith Beale have sung professionally, if not mired in the world of upper-class marriage? Or was it this very life which allowed her to cherish her illusions? Could her daughter have become a musical star without her mother holding her back, or were these women too damaged from the outset? Of Miriam, Reichl writes, "Was she crazy, or was she crazy because she had nothing to do?" As one reviewer puts it, "At times, Mim's mental health seems so fragile that the focus on her thwarted career seems misplaced: You wonder if she could have found satisfaction in any field or had condition, perhaps biological in origin, that would have caught up with her in any job."

Whatever the truth, the one certainty is that the daughters get sucked into the mythology; a daughter has to live her mother's reality, however damaged or damaging that may be. Reichl breaks free, Little Edie (of Miriam's generation) doesn't - but their mothers continue to haunt them, both with the realities and the realities they made. So, how do you break away? If you believe Reichl, the only way is to physically separate yourself from a personality that can dominate you; certainly the Beales show the danger of the alternative. Distance - not just physical, but emotional - is critical. You need to see a parent objectively. In Reichl's case, this meant a lot of anger, a lot of distancing, reducing her mother to a caricature. And then, ultimately, having the maturity to see her as more. In a sense, breaking this hold, as she tells it, is almost like the stages of grieving. And when one considers how domineering these personalities are, that makes a kind of sense. Together, this is an odd Mother's Day roundup, for sure - but certainly a potent one.

Ruth Reichl's Memoir ‘Not Becoming My Mother' – An Apple Falls Far From the Tree [One Minute Book Reviews]
"Not Becoming My Mother [New York Post]
Not Becoming My Mother [Amazon]

No, the importance of Little Edie is that her variation on a towel dress is representative of the can-do spirit that we're all being urged to adopt now that we're in a Recession. What she wore — the countless bizarre "costumes" and outfits and mix-and-matched pieces — was cool, yes, but what made her a true Recessionista (as it should be used) was that she used limitation as a jumping-off point and did more with that than had she had a huge clothing budget. Did she sew? Re-use? Reinvent? Yes! But even more important, she dressed without fear, for self-expression. She reminded us of the redemptive powers of clothing and how little they have to do with frivolity. There is nothing of the clotheshorse in Grey Gardens: the point is never acquisition, but the actual purpose of the clothes themselves. When designers took inspiration, it was literal: replicating a bejeweled sweater turban or a skirt made from safety pin trousers. But it was the spirit of her dressing that's a help to the rest of us. Nowadays we're inundated with tips for essentially how to manufacture the illusion of an unchanged lifestyle, and that's not tenable. Little Edie, from madness or wisdom, didn't do that. She created a new reality for a new set of circumstances.

It's easy to see why fashion types are enchanted with the famous eccentric, but still a bit jarring. When the Grey Gardens musical first hit the stage, suddenly Little Edie wasn't just the property of those of us who'd long loved the cult Maysles documentary — and maybe wrapped sweaters around our heads in high school: everyone loved her! A film of cut scenes was released. Philip Lim's 2007 show, Marc Jacobs, the Olsen Twins and Italian Vogue were all competing for her favors. Rhapsodized Isaac Mizrahi in 2006: "The way that we now make mistakes on purpose comes from Edie Beale. I'm still and always trying to match her sense of the absurd, her playfulness, her sense of the drama of clothing." The stylesmith for the newest Grey Gardens stage production, Alex Jaeger, had this to say in Sunday's Washington Post:

Her fashion sense comes out of a deep need to be creative. And she was fabulously creative. These outfits, she made them out of whatever she had. As strange as they may be, there was a lot of thought put into them, and she would make 10 or 12 a day. She would change her clothes all day long.

But all of this is really beside the point: Little Edie was poor — very poor — and she was obviously not well. Said Simon Doonan, seldom a slave to fashionable bromides, in May: "[Said my friend Deb] who works in a psychiatric hospital and has a front-row seat at the unwitting fashion show that is mental illness. 'Walk around any in-patient unit: Lots of people are sitting around with things tied around their heads, just like Little Edie. They are not making a fashion statement; they are trying to block out the voices in their heads.'"

It should be said that Little Edie was probably more concerned with covering a bald pate, but there is something exploitative about mining what is essentially tragedy for inspiration (while crying homage), but whereas the Little Edie fashion moment of the past two years had me cringing, I feel like now her true fashion moment has come. Because the times in which we live are unprecedented, an unprecedented role model is called for; we're left not with a scant pile of threadbare basics that need to see us through the next half-decade, but, rather, the detritus of petty decadence: trendy, cheaply-made things never intended to last, that now reproach us from our overflowing closets. In this, Little Edie is a great help. She made the clothes work for her, remembered that they were nothing more than fabric — not a season, not a style, only raw material. She had nothing to do with Fashion, but a lot to do with everyday clothes and the people who wear them. People embraced her a few years ago because they were jaded, hungry for novelty, and sick of perfection. We can embrace her now not ironically, not patronizingly, but as a true role-model, and a boon for our times.

Standing on Fertile Ground for Creative Expression [Washington Post]

Related:
One Flew Over the Couture's Nest[New York Observer]
Little Edie, Big Style [New York Daily News]