Featured Author - May 2009
Online exclusive: Read the full interview with the author featured in the print edition.
Robin Romm
Santa Fe resident and creative-writing instructor Robin Romm lost her mother, Jackie, to breast cancer. In Romm’s new book, The Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks (Scribner, 2009), she recollects this loss without turning it into a lament. Instead, Romm confronts submerged emotions connected with suffering—especially anger—and writes about them with an honesty that makes the reader question life’s fairness. A review in the January 2, 2009 edition of the New York Times noted that “‘The Mercy Papers’ is no blind rant. In Romm’s hands, anger becomes an instrument for pursuing truth.” Jeff Berg discusses with Romm her bold new work.
Q: Did you have any hesitation about sharing what is a very personal and intimate experience with the reading public?
A: It’s terrifying to put your real self forward the way that I did in The Mercy Papers. But in order to get at what I wanted to get at—the real nature of love in the face of loss—I couldn’t shy away from what was unpleasant or raw inside of me (or outside of me). The truth requires a willingness to risk vulnerability—and even ostracism. That said, it’s a truly validating thing to see the book land gracefully, both in terms of reviews and readers.
Was it cathartic to write the book?
I have an aversion to the word cathartic. It suggests that I wrote the book to purge something. Actually, what I felt was more like comfort—even happiness. The story is a sad one, but I got to spend all these extra years in my mother’s company. Every time I wrote, I sat with her. Turning in the book was a painful day, because I knew that I was giving up yet one more link to her.
The book shows a strong connection with your anger and the release of it.
I think anyone who confronts the permanent loss of a loved one feels anger, among other feelings. But the anger in the book isn’t just at death, it’s also at nicety and platitudes. I yearned for something more honest and complex than what I was being offered. I wanted someone to validate the depth and completeness of my pain and my mother’s pain. And I didn’t find this anywhere.
In reading your book, I sensed a tremendous loneliness, both from you and for you. Did you feel alone before, and do you now?
I suppose that there’s nothing lonelier than facing the death of the person you love the most. I knew, when my mother was dying, that I would be alone in a way I never had been before. Friends would call to check in on me during this time and it felt so . . . awkward. Because what I wanted to say, I couldn’t. What I wanted to say became The Mercy Papers. Now that the book is out, I am getting letters from people who have found the book comforting in some odd way. They are glad someone is finally giving weight to all the fury and pain. The interesting thing is that I never felt more isolated than when I was writing The Mercy Papers, and now that it’s out, and has landed in the hands of so many people who get it, I have never felt so part of something larger.
When not pursuing his freelance writing “career” in Las Cruces, Jeff Berg reads too much.
Synopsis of The Mercy Papers: In her searing memoir The Mercy Papers, Romm uses this magic to expand the weeks before her mother's death into a story about a daughter in the moments before and after loss. With a striking mix of humor and honesty, Romm ushers us into a world where an obstinate hospice nurse tries to heal through pamphlets and a yelping grandfather squirrels away money in a shoe-shine kit. Untrained dogs scamper about as strangers and friends rally around death, offering sympathy as they clamor for attention. The pillbox turns quickly into a metaphor for order; questions about medication turn to musings about God. The mundane and spiritual melt together as Romm reveals the sharp truths that lurk around every corner and captures, with great passion, the awe, fear, and fury of a daughter losing her mother.
