I never appreciated Joyce Brothers's public persona. I found her a little condescending and off-putting, not someone I would ever appeal to for advice. This is just in response to her media presence. Not exactly sure why, and I don't really think it matters. I never read her column...and now, knowing this about your mother, I'm feeling regret. I want to read it now! It still boggles my mind that women have had to fight so hard to claim our place in the world. I became a feminist when I was in kindergarten. It didn't seem complex to me, it was common sense that we are, whatever our gender, equals to one another. I'm glad your Mom knew her own worth, that's not often the case with many who work so hard for the things that fulfill them. I hope she had satisfaction in what she was able to accomplish given the constraints of her era. I just ordered a copy of Raisins and Almonds. Looking forward to reading it. xoxo
Nan, if you're curious, you can find some of JB's advice at the Internet Archive. A quick dip would give you the idea. She did not identify as a feminist, and it's safe to say that you and she are not kindred spirits. Raisins and Almonds is warmly remembered in Canada. I hope you enjoy it.
Oh, she absolutely knew she was exceptional. Wherever she studied on the way to her Radcliffe doctorate, she quickly established herself as the star. She had the awards, the recommendations, the Phi Beta Kappa key—but not a penis.
This was so fascinating. I don't blame your mother's resentment at all. There were a few times when I was working that others took credit for my writing and it burned my insides for a long time. I agree, I would choose recognition of my me-ness and talent over money any day (but I recognize that sentiment comes from a place of privilege). Thanks for the shout out to honest, minor writers and for writing one wonderful column after the next every single week!
Rona, I loved this. You write with deep generosity and compassion of two exceptional women who faced similar challenges, but ended up with vastly different outcomes. I grew up seeing Dr. Joyce Brothers as famous for being famous. Even as a child, I did not trust her. Your story tells me why. Good lord, the pornography story alone shows us how fraudulent one of America’s Ten Most Admired Women was. I have no doubt that had she not exploited your mother’s brilliance, she would have been seen as a bubblehead. I love the picture of the three women in your family looking grim. That Meet the Beatles photo alone would have made me want to claw her eyes out. Side note: I loved meeting you in Sarah Fay’s Zoom yesterday. You have a wonderfully kind presence that informs your work. I always look forward to your stories.
Mary, my mother would relish this comment. If there is an afterlife, a notion she vehemently disbelieved, she is chortling at this very moment. Wasn't it wonderful to end up in the same breakout room yesterday? You and I could have gone on and on. We must have a private Zoom one day soon.
Rona, this piece reached me in so many ways. There’s such VOICE weaving through everything.
And I hope this is OK to say, but the pang of your mother’s resentment feels so familiar to me. Even the wording she used — it gave me a certain shiver. Reading about her now, she feels like such a towering figure! So I hesitate to even share this or equate myself with her … but I experienced this same tension as a researcher and ghostwriter for years-long stretches in my 20s and early 30s. I found I had to pivot away from the work when I couldn’t stomach it anymore. I like pure editing just fine, but eventually I reached my breaking point where ghostwriting only ever felt like someone stealing my DNA.
I’m glad your mother eventually got her voice and ideas and story into the world. And, I hate to say it, but there are a lot of Joyce Brothers in the world. I could go on and on but I’ll leave it on a high note — your story reminded me today of all the ways my grandmother asked me to “tell the world” about her. Her great wish was to be known, and quite possibly, understood at last. I’m so inspired. 🫶
Amanda, I am touched and gratified to see this comment from a well-respected editor. Ghost-writing can be an exceptionally good living, but there's just no denying the urge to speak as yourself, in a voice all your own. Not many women of your grandmother's generation (my mother's?) dared to say, "Tell the world about me." They mostly thought no one would care--a fear that haunts women memoirists today. Your grandmother sounds like a woman of conviction. I hope you give her story wings.
A few years before my grandmother died, I had the inclination to send her a series of questions via email (we wrote often via snail mail as soon as I knew how to write). In one of her replies, she wandered into a story about how her first name was Marvel and her middle name was Evagene but her family has always called her by her middle name. She was really proud of the fact that she took college courses in business and had a job all her life, even while she was still single and in her 20s and it “wasn’t too common.” In one particular note, she shared that one of her first bosses in the 1940s couldn’t remember her name so she told him, “If you call me Jean, I’ll come a runnin’!” And the shortened version of her name just stuck from there on.
When my husband and I were in the thick of fertility treatments in 2021, I felt that something was different about this pregnancy and had a strong hunch that we would name my daughter after her, if I was able to carry to term this time. So Evagene Lee is now 2.5 years old and currently playing with a towel on the floor in between my feet in the kitchen. I love that her name can’t be found in a quick Google search and there’s no official meaning, but if you separate Eva and Jean, you get something like “noble life.”
I love telling people my daughter’s name because nine times out of 10, their eyebrows rise, they smile or remark that it’s such a beautiful and different name. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my daughter’s due date would have been my grandmother’s 100th birthday. I feel in some small way I am laying the ground to tell her story every time I say my daughter’s full name.
Thank you for making a space to share about both Evagenes. I feel I’ll carry your mother’s story for a long while in my heart.
While reading this wonderful column (blog? article? story?) I'm reminded of my mother's words in her book "Silences". "The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being but cannot."
Julie, thank you for mentioning Tillie Olsen’s visionary SILENCES. My mother introduced me to Tillie’s work and took me to her reading in Toronto, as I’ve written here previously. An “unnatural silence” plagued my mother for years, although she was making a good living as a magazine writer, in a voice not her own.
It is interesting that both you and I had very smart and strong mothers. Yours was literary, mine was political. My mother was what might be called a 'policy wonk' in today's parlance and spent her life initially working for the New Deal (she claimed to have written the Social Security Act, but was in fact a junior member of a team) and then as an advisor and lobbyist on behalf of various democratic causes. She was also a bully, including to her own family, and it is hard to remember her with much warmth. I admire your efforts to write about your mother. It is something I could never do, having spent some years shedding her heavy shadow and allowing myself to develop y own voice.
Ann, while I do remember my mother warmly, I also felt overpowered by her during her lifetime. A vague sense of being less than my mother persisted long after her death, in attenuated form. Part of the work of adult life is becoming one's own person while incorporating, one's parental legacy.
Rona, apologies for writing yet again, but I have been contemplating this off and on for much of the day (and it is nighttime now in London). I have concluded that I agree wholeheartedly with the first part of the last sentence, but not so much with the second. We all have two parents, with complicated backgrounds themselves, and we may not feel like we belong with either. I do know I have parts of both my parents in me somewhere, but do not see it as part of my life's work to 'incorporate' their 'legacy', whatever that means. Our job is to recognise who we are - not just as we have been seen by others, including our parents (my mother told me it was OK for me to become a 'homemaker', immediately downgrading me in her eyes). But I end the sentence there. You are welcome to disagree, of course.
I like that perspective of we all have two mothers, Ann. With all the role playing a mother does when she’s able to reveal her own individual identity, it becomes more dimensional. I remember when I was with my mother in Faneuil Hall in Boston at about ten years old and she bumped into an old flame. Something shifted in me and I saw my mother as a person who existed before I did.
I loved this piece, Rona! And wish that you wrote fiction—what a novel these characters and story would make! Emblematic of their time in different ways….(Tangentially, I was so envious of the freelancers who made so much money on celebrity profiles, Can This Marriage Be Saved columns, etc. back in the day.)
Thank you, Sarah. Fiction? Just maybe... Btw, my mother also wrote for a Good Housekeeping column called "My Problem and How I Solved It." One, written dishonestly and without my consent, was about me. She used an altercation between me and my father, in which he behaved appallingly, as the basis for a piece about a father stepping up to tame a teenage shrew. Anything for money from GH. Can you tell it still makes me angry?
I think I remember that column, and I would be angry too! But I guess no true or real story would be told in a column like that. Incidentally, I was looking through ‘40s era Good Housekeeping magazines recently (novel research), and I was struck by how judgy the women’s magazines were, and I assume this persisted through the 50s and beyond.
As someone who came of age in the 50's...oh yes oh yes the women's magazine were judgemental and powerful. I read them with desperation - trying to figure out how to be an adult, a wife, a mother... and oh my oh yes ...a housekeeper. And of course, they had no "helpful hints" for the reality that I had to work (and wanted to work) for my family to survive. And there was nothing that addressed my strange commitment to completing a college degree while raising children (and being an employee) and trying so hard to be a good wife and and housekeeper.
And these were the magazines that kept my mother busy as a freelancer. To their credit, they did publish important health information, especially on unnecessary surgeries imposed on women. My mother was proud of those stories, and rightly so.
This reads like a wonderful premise for a movie. And yet it's actually true, and must have been incredibly frustrating for your mother. Thanks for sharing her story!
Oh, Rona. We might be minor writers, but some of us minor writers are damned good, and that includes Fredelle - and you - and me & Debby. I'm not sure F. would appreciate the full import of being so lovingly and honestly written about by one of her children, but we sure do! Thank you. (Love to Casey.)
Amy, it's no small thing to call yourself, with conviction, a damned good minor writer. Alice Munro had been writing for decades before she could call herself a writer. She didn't have a room of her own, choosing to write in a corner of the living room. Women writers struggle to take themselves seriously. The first barrier is within. Glad you enjoyed this.
Thanks for pulling back the curtain on Dr. Joyce Brothers and what a delight to know it was your mother who was her ghostwriter. Loved reading about how she handled this. So wonderfully written! Amazed and delighted.
As her daughter, you witnessed your mother from one vantage point, but you are able to show us another side of her as a woman writer in the workforce given the context of the times.
One of my favorite things about this community is the amazing connections you find. So many great stories out there. Your mother seems like a phenomenal woman.
You may be interested in the book "The Equivalents," describing the ground breaking Bunting fellowships at Harvard initiated in the early 60's "to provide an intellectual lifeline to talented women whose careers had been sidetracked by marriage and children." Mary Bunting was the new president of Radcliffe. She proposed creating an institute where fellows would receive office space, access to Harvard’s resources, and a part-time stipend to pursue their creative and scholarly work. Unfortunately your mother might not have been a candidate since she already had a Harvard degree.
I did not know this history — so interesting! I've never seen it linked to family obligations like this. The name has changed now, I think. Applied a couple of times, long ago, and was turned down. A lovely grant.
There will be more, Deirdre. She left quite a trove. An edited collection of her letters, interspersed with my commentary, would be a fascinating project, although I resist giving her any more space in my head than she has taken up already.
I never appreciated Joyce Brothers's public persona. I found her a little condescending and off-putting, not someone I would ever appeal to for advice. This is just in response to her media presence. Not exactly sure why, and I don't really think it matters. I never read her column...and now, knowing this about your mother, I'm feeling regret. I want to read it now! It still boggles my mind that women have had to fight so hard to claim our place in the world. I became a feminist when I was in kindergarten. It didn't seem complex to me, it was common sense that we are, whatever our gender, equals to one another. I'm glad your Mom knew her own worth, that's not often the case with many who work so hard for the things that fulfill them. I hope she had satisfaction in what she was able to accomplish given the constraints of her era. I just ordered a copy of Raisins and Almonds. Looking forward to reading it. xoxo
Nan, if you're curious, you can find some of JB's advice at the Internet Archive. A quick dip would give you the idea. She did not identify as a feminist, and it's safe to say that you and she are not kindred spirits. Raisins and Almonds is warmly remembered in Canada. I hope you enjoy it.
I'm sure we aren't, and that's just fine! I might take a peek in the IA to see what I find. All the best to you!
Oh, she absolutely knew she was exceptional. Wherever she studied on the way to her Radcliffe doctorate, she quickly established herself as the star. She had the awards, the recommendations, the Phi Beta Kappa key—but not a penis.
50 hearts, 50 minds, 50 pairs of hands
+1,1,1
won
Glad you picked up on the hearts, minds and hands. Thank you.
This was so fascinating. I don't blame your mother's resentment at all. There were a few times when I was working that others took credit for my writing and it burned my insides for a long time. I agree, I would choose recognition of my me-ness and talent over money any day (but I recognize that sentiment comes from a place of privilege). Thanks for the shout out to honest, minor writers and for writing one wonderful column after the next every single week!
Thank you, dear Michele. I'm delighted to have you with me, week after week.
Rona, I loved this. You write with deep generosity and compassion of two exceptional women who faced similar challenges, but ended up with vastly different outcomes. I grew up seeing Dr. Joyce Brothers as famous for being famous. Even as a child, I did not trust her. Your story tells me why. Good lord, the pornography story alone shows us how fraudulent one of America’s Ten Most Admired Women was. I have no doubt that had she not exploited your mother’s brilliance, she would have been seen as a bubblehead. I love the picture of the three women in your family looking grim. That Meet the Beatles photo alone would have made me want to claw her eyes out. Side note: I loved meeting you in Sarah Fay’s Zoom yesterday. You have a wonderfully kind presence that informs your work. I always look forward to your stories.
Mary, my mother would relish this comment. If there is an afterlife, a notion she vehemently disbelieved, she is chortling at this very moment. Wasn't it wonderful to end up in the same breakout room yesterday? You and I could have gone on and on. We must have a private Zoom one day soon.
Yes! A Zoom would be wonderful. DM me.
Rona, this piece reached me in so many ways. There’s such VOICE weaving through everything.
And I hope this is OK to say, but the pang of your mother’s resentment feels so familiar to me. Even the wording she used — it gave me a certain shiver. Reading about her now, she feels like such a towering figure! So I hesitate to even share this or equate myself with her … but I experienced this same tension as a researcher and ghostwriter for years-long stretches in my 20s and early 30s. I found I had to pivot away from the work when I couldn’t stomach it anymore. I like pure editing just fine, but eventually I reached my breaking point where ghostwriting only ever felt like someone stealing my DNA.
I’m glad your mother eventually got her voice and ideas and story into the world. And, I hate to say it, but there are a lot of Joyce Brothers in the world. I could go on and on but I’ll leave it on a high note — your story reminded me today of all the ways my grandmother asked me to “tell the world” about her. Her great wish was to be known, and quite possibly, understood at last. I’m so inspired. 🫶
Amanda, I am touched and gratified to see this comment from a well-respected editor. Ghost-writing can be an exceptionally good living, but there's just no denying the urge to speak as yourself, in a voice all your own. Not many women of your grandmother's generation (my mother's?) dared to say, "Tell the world about me." They mostly thought no one would care--a fear that haunts women memoirists today. Your grandmother sounds like a woman of conviction. I hope you give her story wings.
A few years before my grandmother died, I had the inclination to send her a series of questions via email (we wrote often via snail mail as soon as I knew how to write). In one of her replies, she wandered into a story about how her first name was Marvel and her middle name was Evagene but her family has always called her by her middle name. She was really proud of the fact that she took college courses in business and had a job all her life, even while she was still single and in her 20s and it “wasn’t too common.” In one particular note, she shared that one of her first bosses in the 1940s couldn’t remember her name so she told him, “If you call me Jean, I’ll come a runnin’!” And the shortened version of her name just stuck from there on.
When my husband and I were in the thick of fertility treatments in 2021, I felt that something was different about this pregnancy and had a strong hunch that we would name my daughter after her, if I was able to carry to term this time. So Evagene Lee is now 2.5 years old and currently playing with a towel on the floor in between my feet in the kitchen. I love that her name can’t be found in a quick Google search and there’s no official meaning, but if you separate Eva and Jean, you get something like “noble life.”
I love telling people my daughter’s name because nine times out of 10, their eyebrows rise, they smile or remark that it’s such a beautiful and different name. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my daughter’s due date would have been my grandmother’s 100th birthday. I feel in some small way I am laying the ground to tell her story every time I say my daughter’s full name.
Thank you for making a space to share about both Evagenes. I feel I’ll carry your mother’s story for a long while in my heart.
What a wonderful anecdote. The whole story will come in time.
While reading this wonderful column (blog? article? story?) I'm reminded of my mother's words in her book "Silences". "The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being but cannot."
Julie, thank you for mentioning Tillie Olsen’s visionary SILENCES. My mother introduced me to Tillie’s work and took me to her reading in Toronto, as I’ve written here previously. An “unnatural silence” plagued my mother for years, although she was making a good living as a magazine writer, in a voice not her own.
Oh my heavens — had not heard of this book. Looked it up, and it sounds fascinating.
And I forgot to mention that Tillie is one of the women profiled in THE EQUIVALENTS, a terrific book mentioned here by Liza Blue.
Maria, I wrote about Tillie Olsen here.https://open.substack.com/pub/ronamaynard/p/voice-lesson-from-a-literary-warrior?r=ngwcq&utm_medium=ios
It is interesting that both you and I had very smart and strong mothers. Yours was literary, mine was political. My mother was what might be called a 'policy wonk' in today's parlance and spent her life initially working for the New Deal (she claimed to have written the Social Security Act, but was in fact a junior member of a team) and then as an advisor and lobbyist on behalf of various democratic causes. She was also a bully, including to her own family, and it is hard to remember her with much warmth. I admire your efforts to write about your mother. It is something I could never do, having spent some years shedding her heavy shadow and allowing myself to develop y own voice.
Ann, while I do remember my mother warmly, I also felt overpowered by her during her lifetime. A vague sense of being less than my mother persisted long after her death, in attenuated form. Part of the work of adult life is becoming one's own person while incorporating, one's parental legacy.
Rona, apologies for writing yet again, but I have been contemplating this off and on for much of the day (and it is nighttime now in London). I have concluded that I agree wholeheartedly with the first part of the last sentence, but not so much with the second. We all have two parents, with complicated backgrounds themselves, and we may not feel like we belong with either. I do know I have parts of both my parents in me somewhere, but do not see it as part of my life's work to 'incorporate' their 'legacy', whatever that means. Our job is to recognise who we are - not just as we have been seen by others, including our parents (my mother told me it was OK for me to become a 'homemaker', immediately downgrading me in her eyes). But I end the sentence there. You are welcome to disagree, of course.
I like that perspective of we all have two mothers, Ann. With all the role playing a mother does when she’s able to reveal her own individual identity, it becomes more dimensional. I remember when I was with my mother in Faneuil Hall in Boston at about ten years old and she bumped into an old flame. Something shifted in me and I saw my mother as a person who existed before I did.
Sounds like a moment from a short story, Shelley.
I loved this piece, Rona! And wish that you wrote fiction—what a novel these characters and story would make! Emblematic of their time in different ways….(Tangentially, I was so envious of the freelancers who made so much money on celebrity profiles, Can This Marriage Be Saved columns, etc. back in the day.)
Thank you, Sarah. Fiction? Just maybe... Btw, my mother also wrote for a Good Housekeeping column called "My Problem and How I Solved It." One, written dishonestly and without my consent, was about me. She used an altercation between me and my father, in which he behaved appallingly, as the basis for a piece about a father stepping up to tame a teenage shrew. Anything for money from GH. Can you tell it still makes me angry?
Ye gods.
I think I remember that column, and I would be angry too! But I guess no true or real story would be told in a column like that. Incidentally, I was looking through ‘40s era Good Housekeeping magazines recently (novel research), and I was struck by how judgy the women’s magazines were, and I assume this persisted through the 50s and beyond.
As someone who came of age in the 50's...oh yes oh yes the women's magazine were judgemental and powerful. I read them with desperation - trying to figure out how to be an adult, a wife, a mother... and oh my oh yes ...a housekeeper. And of course, they had no "helpful hints" for the reality that I had to work (and wanted to work) for my family to survive. And there was nothing that addressed my strange commitment to completing a college degree while raising children (and being an employee) and trying so hard to be a good wife and and housekeeper.
And these were the magazines that kept my mother busy as a freelancer. To their credit, they did publish important health information, especially on unnecessary surgeries imposed on women. My mother was proud of those stories, and rightly so.
This reads like a wonderful premise for a movie. And yet it's actually true, and must have been incredibly frustrating for your mother. Thanks for sharing her story!
There were so many stories like hers. You'll be seeing more about Fredelle in months to come. Thank you for visiting and joining the conversation.
“But when one honest writer homes in on the me-ness of me, readers are stirred by the us-ness of us.” 💕💕
Classic!!
Oh, Rona. We might be minor writers, but some of us minor writers are damned good, and that includes Fredelle - and you - and me & Debby. I'm not sure F. would appreciate the full import of being so lovingly and honestly written about by one of her children, but we sure do! Thank you. (Love to Casey.)
Amy, it's no small thing to call yourself, with conviction, a damned good minor writer. Alice Munro had been writing for decades before she could call herself a writer. She didn't have a room of her own, choosing to write in a corner of the living room. Women writers struggle to take themselves seriously. The first barrier is within. Glad you enjoyed this.
Thanks for pulling back the curtain on Dr. Joyce Brothers and what a delight to know it was your mother who was her ghostwriter. Loved reading about how she handled this. So wonderfully written! Amazed and delighted.
Thank you, Jill. My mother could be infuriating and I'm not sure I've forgiven all her trespasses. But she was a most delightful character.
As her daughter, you witnessed your mother from one vantage point, but you are able to show us another side of her as a woman writer in the workforce given the context of the times.
One of my favorite things about this community is the amazing connections you find. So many great stories out there. Your mother seems like a phenomenal woman.
She sure was, Matthew. It's a great pleasure to introduce her to new generations of readers.
You may be interested in the book "The Equivalents," describing the ground breaking Bunting fellowships at Harvard initiated in the early 60's "to provide an intellectual lifeline to talented women whose careers had been sidetracked by marriage and children." Mary Bunting was the new president of Radcliffe. She proposed creating an institute where fellows would receive office space, access to Harvard’s resources, and a part-time stipend to pursue their creative and scholarly work. Unfortunately your mother might not have been a candidate since she already had a Harvard degree.
So glad you brought this up. I loved that book. My mother was a happy fellow of the Insitute and wrote much of her first book in its embrace.
I did not know this history — so interesting! I've never seen it linked to family obligations like this. The name has changed now, I think. Applied a couple of times, long ago, and was turned down. A lovely grant.
Amazing! Loved your mom’s “today is Joyce brothers day” piece, wow would love to read more.
There will be more, Deirdre. She left quite a trove. An edited collection of her letters, interspersed with my commentary, would be a fascinating project, although I resist giving her any more space in my head than she has taken up already.
Ha! I get it and you’re lucky to have it. It’s cool to have another window into someone you know so well.