'We're All in Search of a Sense of Family'

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Craig Emory, a blue-collar guy in upstate New Hampshire-he didn't have a counseling environment around him, his friends don't go to therapy, it's not that kind of place. When his young son passed, he couldn't sleep that night. Early the next morning there was this light in the room, and he believed it was a miracle. Any one of his friends would have said it could have been a truck [shining its headlights into the room]. But he believed it was God telling him that his son had gone to heaven. And the validity of that is not as important as to understand as the kind of immense biblical thing he was dealing with, and how valuable witnessing that was to him. We talked about it last week, and he said, "I don't know what that was, I'm not even sure what I know about heaven, but I believe I will see my son again some day." And that continues to help him.

Religion was just a powerful force in just about every one of these stories and gave people guidance of all sorts. What I was most impressed with was how each person came to be a seeker. There's a story about a woman named Mary Naomi Garrett - who rose out of a tarpaper shack and had eight children kids in 11 years. Everyone told her she should go on welfare. But she worked in the post office at night, and managed to send seven of her eight kids to the best Ivy League schools in the country. I consider her one of the greatest mothers in the whole world. She defied every expectation you have about great mothers. But to get to religion, she was raised Catholic, and at a certain point she said, "I'm really having trouble confessing to a white man about my life." The notion that you have individual communion with God is what led her to the Baptist faith.

How did this book help you in your own personal life with your own family?

Around the time I began the book my mother's 65th birthday was coming up. My sister-in-law said, "You boys each need to write your mother a wonderful letter about how great a mom she's been. And we'll give her those letter on her 65th birthday." We all kind of gulped and dragged our feet. and sort of said, "how about a toaster?" It was incredibly awkward for us. I love my mom, but my feelings about her were very complicated. My parents had split up when I was very young. My parents were both involved in my life, but they fought endlessly for the next 20 years. And they both [tried to] turn us against each other, even as they expressed their love for us and fought for us. I never questioned that my mother loved me, but I felt like it wasn't the healthiest environment.

In the intervening months, I spent a lot of time inside some of the families chronicled in the book. Hearing these stories, I became cured of my need to judge my parents-in this case, my mother-against some standard of perfection. I came to understand that it is my mission and my mother's mission and everybody's mission to heal from what we had to deal with, to build on what we've been given, and learn to love other people better. I came to understand, particularly by sitting in the lives of other single working mothers and seeing the stress and the pain they go through, what my own mother had been going through in those years. I understood how hard it was for her to give me the things she had given me and how amazing it was that she had managed to do even that.

And in that spirit I was able to write her a letter in which I spoke about the values she taught me, how important it was that she taught me about cooking, and how big a role cooking and food were in my life today. How she forced me to talk at the dinner table about my relationship with girls, which I didn't want to talk to my mom about. But I grew into a man who could talk to women about my feelings about these most intimate things. And about how school was a real mixed bag, but my mom really emphasized reading. I was not a good writer when I was young, but she worked with me and here I am a writer today. The things that she taught me when I was young are the things that really formed my identity today. Seeing my mom around her family-as a kid growing up in a chaotic house with two brothers just always fighting-I think she was saying, "Is anyone listening to me?" I wanted to tell her that I always was listening, and the things that she taught me I'd heard and I'd built my life around. I sent [the letter] to her. And she wrote me back that "I feel like my life's work is complete." It was a beautiful moment for me .it really put us past something.

For people who are alienated from their families, you wrote that you need to "create a spine" on which to build. What did you mean?

You don't have to accept all those people, or get along with all those people, or like all of this-you need to find one person [in the family] to say, "I'm committed to sticking together in some form. I'm going to be there for you and you're going to be there for me, and that's going to make us stronger as we approach life." And to build on that strength rather than think you have to repair all those faults and all those weaknesses. We're all in search of a sense of family where we belong, and half of that is in the family experiences that we create, not just the one that we're given.

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