Photographs by Amy Elkins1.When I was 13, not long after my father had committed suicide, I asked my mother, “What’s the Oedipus complex?”“Why?” she replied at once. “Are you afraid you’ve got it?”Maybe. I wasn’t aware of wanting to murder my father, but in the four years after he suffered a massive stroke at 43, he’d been a volatile presence in our house, given to bursts of rage and tears, or rendered ominously mute by his paralysis. When he disappeared on December 6, 1972, leaving my mother, my sister, and me, I was troubled by a sense of profound relief. Unable to understand, let alone forgive, myself, I went searching for insight on the shelves of my parents’ narrow, high-walled study. Books offered a way to replace real self-knowledge with an official version—the idea of “guilt” instead of the intolerable feeling itself. In a volume called Oedipus: Myth and Complex, amid thickets of psychoanalytic jargon, I found what I was looking for.So why did I ask my mother the question, if I already knew the answer? To show off my new command of the term. To set her up for the unreturnable ping-pong smash I must have known was coming at me—to prove I could take it. I shared everything with my mother: Stanford’s football triumphs, the Democratic Party’s defeats, every Little League at-bat, every dream of glory on the stage or page. Why not my Oedipal anxiety?A few days later, she handed me her copy of Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence’s autobiographical novel about a sensitive young man who is shaped and crushed by the love of his domineering mother. “Read this,” she said. “It might help you understand our relationship better.”She was a small-boned, freckled, quick-tempered redhead with ironic blue eyes and astounding energy. She wore her hair short and had no interest in feminine things, or perhaps in being a woman at all. She preferred the company of men, while bitterly resenting their dominance. “I’m somebody’s daughter, I’m somebody’s sister, and I’m somebody’s wife,” she told a Stanford oral historian in 2014. “Am I somebody?” People said that she spoke in the accent of Birmingham, Alabama, where she grew up in the 1930s and ’40s, but I couldn’t tell. It was just my mother’s voice—gruff, tender, amused, the voice that’s left a hundred indelible maxims in my head: “Ninety percent of tears are self-pity.” “Push down, lick around” (on how to eat an ice-cream cone). “You’re too sensitive and you’re not sensitive enough” (on my character). “There’s no such thing as casual sex.” “Loyalty is my favorite virtue.” “I wasn’t a very good mother, but I was a pretty damn good father.”She loved to spar, and I made an ideal partner: Win or lose, her narcissism was satisfied. She championed me and competed with me—built me up, then knocked me down, then built me up again. At my 50th birthday party, she rose to make what I expected would be affectionate remarks and delivered a scorching roast. I was the recipient of her unending love, her unstinting attention, and her unvarnished judgment. She taught me how to throw a football and swing a bat, shave and tie a tie, and she taught me how to write. I have the scars.For a year or two after my father died, my mother and I went to see a lot of movies together in the art houses of downtown Palo Alto: Chinatown, Scarecrow, Swept Away, Cries and Whispers. This was the early ’70s, before anyone called my hometown “Silicon Valley,” and the movies, in addition to being great, were mortifyingly explicit. Sometimes my mother offered to sit several rows away, which would have made it easier for me to watch the teenage boy in Amarcord fail to satisfy the buxom tobacconist. But my mother was more fragile than ever before or after—some nights I still heard sobbing from her bedroom down the hall—and I always sat next to her, postponing my adolescent rebellion, as it turned out, forever.Except for the black-and-whites of her youth, my mother actually disliked movies, with a contempt that was both aesthetic and moral. Halfway through The Godfather she gave my shoulder a backhand swat: “Aren’t you about ready to leave?”“No, I’m enjoying it.”“Gratuitous violence.”Those hours in darkened cinemas following my father’s suicide always puzzled me, until my wife explained: “It was a way for her to be with you and be alone at the same time.”The problem with movies was that they weren’t literature, and literature was the closest thing in our family to religion. My mother’s sect was the short story. Chekhov reigned supreme, followed by Joyce, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Wallace Stegner (my mother’s mentor), and lesser deities. A moralist in a universe without God, she believed that human beings were the alpha and omega of existence, which made her a severe judge of people’s frailties, especially those of people she loved: “Affairs don’t jump at you as you are innocently walking down the road—you have to go in the woods looking for them.” But the writer’s duty is to see the full human truth and tell it as well as possible. In life, a lonely divorcée’s disappointing one-night stand with a sailor half her age whom she met on a plane might have elicited a terse “Pitiful.” But in a short story my mother wrote called “Small Moments,” she gives this character all the ruthless and compassionate understanding of her humanism.She published several small-press collections, the first at age 50: spare, witty, “no fancy dancing,” as if the worst literary sin was self-display. “Frances Benedict’s husband, Emery, was a lawyer. Successful. Frances herself might yet become anything, having tried nothing,” begins a 1967 story called “Early Morning, Lonely Ride.” But every attempt at a novel defeated my mother, and all her life she suffered from writer’s block. Rather than sit in the study at her Underwood manual typewriter, she would weed the backyard, refinish a table, shop for dinner—“Anything not to write, apparently,” she wrote her mother in 1966. A decade later, in a letter to her sister-in-law: “I don’t seem to have much drive to write anymore. I spent the summer trying but I never finished anything. I’d go to bed on, say, Monday night with eight pages of a story, go to bed on Tuesday with only six pages and by Friday I wouldn’t have any.”No one who spent 30 seconds in her presence could imagine that she lacked self-confidence, but inside the ego drive of any writer lurks the threat of falling silent. You believe you’re a singular talent—your parents, your teachers, your ambitions all say so—but the slight chance of finding out that you’re not is unbearable, and part of your vanity is being honest about your own work. All the while, the child in you who craves attention won’t shut up. The whole drama is contained in a few lines my mother wrote me when I was 19, about a story she’d just published: “The story is not much, in fact is kind of a phony. The woman’s motivation needs beefing up but I guess I wasn’t that interested in it. Nonetheless, I’ve gotten a lot of praise—well, not a lot but a couple of spontaneous responses from readers.”The success that my mother desperately wanted as a writer came to her from teaching. She trained several generations of Stanford students in the craft of fiction, including Scott Turow, Tobias Wolff, Michael Cunningham, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Akhil Sharma. She was unsparing but generous with her students. “They’re all human beings, they all have a capacity to grow, and they all have feelings, and never forget those facts,” she told the oral historian. “No matter how silly the story was, there’s always something in it.” She won several awards and retired in the mid-’90s, a sort of local legend. By then the university was becoming the tech juggernaut that it is today, Stanford Inc., squeezing the English department into irrelevance. She lived three more decades as a reminder of another time, a reproachful ghost of humanities past, until her death last year, one month short of 100.I doubt any of my mother’s students bore greater expectations or suffered more under her criticism than her son. I was the only one who could live out her thwarted dreams.2.Nancy Huddleston was the fifth of five children—born from 1918 to 1925—in a rambunctious, intensely political family. She came into the world battling for attention and prestige. When the dinner conversation ignored her, she threw her bread at a sibling or stood on the table and speechified. In a screwball comedy about her youth, she would have been the wisecracking little sister of the glamorous lead. She wore boys’ clothes and played boys’ sports, started smoking at 13, drinking and joyriding a year or two later. “I was a real happy tomboy,” she once recalled. “I always played with my brothers. My sisters were nonexistent for me.”Her father, George, was a pale, taciturn patriarch who dispensed unquestioned justice to his boisterous clan. In old photographs he is never smiling. He died at age 90, in 1960, a few months before I was born, and I was named for him, but he seemed so ancient that I could never quite believe he was my mother’s father. George Huddleston represented Birmingham in Congress from 1915 to 1937. He was a populist in the mode of William Jennings Bryan and a racial moderate by the standards of the South, which meant that in the 1920s he denounced the Klan while voting against an anti-lynching bill. Throughout his career Black people were denied the vote in Alabama, allowing him to take radical positions on behalf of Birmingham’s white working class while avoiding the true test of courage in southern politics. He had a diminutive southerner’s resentment of bigness, a political philosophy he called “Jeffersonian,” and he spent his whole career on the losing side—against America’s entry into World War I, against banks and railroads in the ’20s, and against the New Deal, which led to his defeat in 1936. He retired, bought some property, and became a hard-core Dixiecrat. “He sold out all his principles and became very reactionary,” my mother said in 1947, when she was 22 and still living under her father’s roof. When the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that progressivism and reaction can exist together in a certain American political type, usually from the South or West, he might have had my grandfather in mind.[From the November 1998 issue: Richard Hofstadter’s tradition]In 1917, at 48, George married his secretary, Bertha, a warm, vivacious woman almost half his age. “Huddlestons don’t gush,” he would insist, and she would retort: “No, they just dry up and blow away.” She escaped from her repressed and repressive husband in bathtub gin and infidelities. He took out an ad repudiating his wife’s debts. She was arrested for driving drunk with one of her lovers, and the incident landed on the front page of several national newspapers. The marriage was “a horror,” their oldest child, my aunt Mary, told me.Amy Elkins for The Atlantic. Source: Courtesy of the Packer family.Huddleston-family photos: Nancy stands at the center of the rear photo, and sits atop a horse in the photo at left. At right, with her father, 1940s.From her father my mother inherited her moralism, dislike of pretension, and sympathy for the underdog. Her mother gave her an enthusiasm for life that allowed her to thrive after tragedy. From the unhappiness of her parents’ marriage my mother acquired a habit of withdrawing into reading and a desire to write. Loyalty being her favorite virtue, she elided all the misery from stories she told about her family. They became comical southern yarns about a squabbling father and mother; a wild but loving tribe of siblings; their Great Dane, Duke, who survived a policeman’s bullet; the legendary incident in the 1936 election when her father, knowing he was going to be defeated, uncharacteristically lost his cool and demolished his opponent’s straw hat with a bottle of Worcestershire sauce.As a child I never questioned this picture. I glamorized the big, raucous Huddleston family, especially after my own turned so grim with my father’s stroke when I was 8. If only there were more of us; if only we had a heroic dog; if only my mother were still a cheerful tomboy instead of a tired, irritable parent; and if only my father fell silent when he was unhappy instead of bursting into tears. It was years before I learned the deeper truth about my mother’s childhood, and I found it in her fiction. Her most moving characters are children, desperate to feel secure in the love of an unreliable mother and remote father. The combative, vulnerable child remained alive in her all her life. At 99 she could still seem like the 3-year-old girl who yanked a pearl necklace off the neck of a family friend who said she was going to vote for Herbert Hoover.My mother came of age in the city that Martin Luther King Jr. called “probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.” Through her teenage years she took Birmingham’s racial order for granted. “I was extremely prejudiced at this time and very conservative,” she later said. “Mrs. Roosevelt, for example, was an abomination on the face of the world.” But when she was 17, in the fall of 1942, something happened that changed her life.[From the August 1963 issue: Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’]She had just enrolled at Birmingham-Southern College, a Methodist school that all her siblings had attended. Her two brothers were now in the military, and the campus was nearly empty of male students. One day, one of the few still around (“some thug”) recounted an incident: At a small-town carnival in southern Alabama, a Black boy had grabbed the side of a whites-only merry-go-round and held on until he lost his grip and fell under the spinning platform, which crushed him. A group of white boys, including the narrator, tied the Black boy to a tree and beat him with iron pipes as punishment for crossing the color line, leaving him paralyzed.This incident, and the casual pride of the thug describing his own participation, so shocked my mother that she wrote her first college English paper about it. She began arguing with her sorority sisters over race. Looking for a way to act on her new liberal consciousness, she signed a membership card of a left-wing organization called the Southern Negro Youth Congress. Without telling her parents, she joined a series of clandestine conversations between Black and white students at local colleges. But Birmingham’s racial hierarchy was inescapable, and it insulted the humanity of everyone it touched. When my mother made a point of sitting at the back of the bus on her way to campus, the Black passengers would stand up for the young white lady. Her attitude toward the Black students she met at the interracial dialogues mixed idealization and condescension: She was awed by everything they said, while hoping they wouldn’t make pronunciation errors.In 1947, an Illinois sociologist conducted a study of 50 or so white liberals in Birmingham on the subject of race. Among those interviewed was 22-year-old Nancy Huddleston. Strict confidentiality was promised, but a few years ago my mother’s transcript fell into my hands and exploded.As if self-lacerating honesty could cleanse her racial sins, she eagerly confessed to them all. She said that she had been a conventional racist until 17, “probably to gain my father’s affection,” and an enlightened one after that. Richard Wright was the only Black writer she had read. She had never entered a Black home, and other than servants she knew only three Black people in Birmingham. Her student meetings had smacked of noblesse oblige and accomplished nothing, and she despised her own righteousness. Her liberalism was merely “selfish”—she didn’t want to be deprived of the intellectual and artistic talents of Black people. Her views on race were “acquired attitudes whose urgencies I can ignore at times,” and she had promised not to embarrass her parents by breaking Jim Crow laws. What really got under her skin was the unfairness of “patriarchy,” because it hurt her personally. Her approach to race was sentimental, maybe moral, but not political. That would have demanded real sacrifice.Decades later, I asked what more she could have done. “I could have thrown a bomb, or at least not enjoyed myself quite so much,” she said. “My racial experiences are littered with shame.”In 1945, my mother left Birmingham to study for a master’s in theology at the University of Chicago. She was not even slightly religious, but she wanted to develop her mind, and the only professor at Birmingham-Southern who had taken her seriously (she credited him with saving her from a life of aimless drinking and partying) taught religious studies. Most of all, she wanted to get out of the South.My mother was not a classic beauty, but in Chicago she felt irresistibly attractive. Female-deprived men were coming back from the war, and she could have gone out 10 times a day. She briefly dated a Black man just to prove to herself that her reluctance to get involved with him had to do with his wife and children in Washington, D.C., and not with prejudice: “I would never have tolerated such freshness from any white man.” Her bridge partner and close friend was Morteza Sprague, Ralph Ellison’s literature professor at Tuskegee. Her friendships were intellectual. She studied Reinhold Niebuhr and William James and wrote a thesis on John Dewey. Her time in the university’s more equal and free atmosphere was the happiest of her life.In 1947 she returned to Birmingham with her master’s and stayed a decade.Why did she waste her 20s marooned in her parents’ volatile house, in a rigid and cruel society that she had come to despise and that had no place for a young woman except as a homemaker? She always said that her mother and father needed her, that an unmarried woman was expected to live at home, that back then middle-class white girls didn’t have “careers.”These were conventional excuses, and growing up I didn’t question them. Children don’t see their parents as people with complex, unconscious motives, or as individuals at all. Now I can imagine a story that my mother never told, perhaps not even to herself. It has to do with being a woman and a writer.She would bring armloads of books home from Smith & Hardwick, in downtown Birmingham, and spend her days in her parents’ house reading the great modernists—Kafka, Proust, Mann, Koestler, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe. She began to write autobiographical stories in a sharp, knowing voice. To see the hidden and unlovely truth about everything, especially oneself, with a mid-century-American dose of Freud, was the mark of literary sophistication. She also exchanged flirtatious, barbed letters with several men whom she had met in Chicago. And in both fields, art and love, she was plagued by fear of failure: rejection of her stories, surrender of her independence. If she was attracted to someone, she would turn the affair into a competition for dominance, win, and lose interest, or else find herself succumbing and end it. “Returned from France to receive your thoughtful morsel of intellect and Huddleston voodoo for which I thank you from my heart—but what badinage,” wrote a suitor who signed as “R.” “You know, baby, if you don’t hurry up I’m going to marry somebody else and you won’t have anything but those old books and hair lockets.”R. did marry somebody else, which Nancy learned on the same day in January 1950 that she received her first rejection slip, from this magazine. She had counted on success that winter with either R. or The Atlantic, then decided that she could have both, before coming up with nothing. She wrote to a friend: “Thinking that it was possible for me to have love and creativity, that there could be a both/and, I see that there can also be a neither/nor.”Rejections piled up—hers of the men, the magazines’ of her. Within the confines of the yellow house at 2816 Rhodes Circle, her confidence would soar, crash, rise again. “I’ve gotten six rejections for my hard efforts, have relinquished literature seven times, and have a divine plot for a wonderful story which I hope to start tomorrow,” she wrote to the same friend. “I sharpened my razor at one point, summed up my life as a total failure, and convinced myself there was never such a genius in the long years of civilization.”If she wasn’t a writer, who was she? Her aging father’s last daughter, under his roof and thumb. But if she turned out not to be a genius, she would have to submit to another male authority in the form of a husband who would gradually lose his awe of her and sink into careerism, alcohol, and affairs (this was the 1950s). In Birmingham, where the family name gave her a certain local fame, she could sustain her fantasies without having to test them against life.One persistent and disgruntled beau finally let fly a harsh analysis. “Let’s get on the ball, Nancy, and face a few facts,” he wrote. “You don’t dare admit that you haven’t the courage to face the world, so you take refuge in having to take care of Mummy & Daddy. Because you’re too ‘young’ to accept anything but top-notch success and you’re afraid you don’t have enough of what it takes for that, you withdraw from the world and stay home in your mother’s womb, where it’s a little stifling & quite crowded for one of your size, where you’re not wanted and whence you’ve already been ejected, but where it’s warm, not too uncomfortable, and safe.” He also accused her of being afraid of sex.This was a misguided strategy for conquering such a heavily defended stronghold. I don’t know what happened to the guy, but Nancy didn’t marry him (though she saved his letters). She did see a psychiatrist, but he was unable to solve her other problem: Almost nothing she started got past three pages. The one story she did finish—“Povera Baby,” a Hemingway imitation about a spoiled American woman on board an ocean liner to postwar Italy whose infected foot exposes her to the realities of poverty and war—was published in 1953, in Harper’s, no less, alongside an essay by James Baldwin. But success was a curse, and my mother’s struggle to repeat it produced an impasse that lasted the rest of the decade.Writer’s block is different from depression, to which my mother was almost psychologically immune. She had too much energy to sink into torpor—who knew, she might still be a genius. In 1954 her father’s old seat in Congress came open, and she considered running for it, almost as a lark—she was, after all, a woman. Then her older brother George decided that he wanted it. I’m somebody’s daughter, I’m somebody’s sister. My mother snuffed out her own ambition and became the manager and speechwriter of her brother’s winning campaign. Politics was a natural arena for her abilities, and she did some work for the Democratic National Committee. She wasn’t very interested in policy, but she saw ideas in vivid moral colors, she loved a fight, and she had become a passionate Adlai Stevenson liberal.That was how she got to know the man she finally married.In early 1956, on his way to California to start teaching at Stanford Law School, a Jewish lawyer and World War II Navy veteran named Herbert Packer passed through Birmingham to visit a friend, who invited him to a dinner party where another guest was Nancy Huddleston. These two 30-year-olds spent the evening talking about the coming presidential election. For the next two years they exchanged infrequent visits and frequent letters.I never really knew my father. When I was a little boy, before the stroke, he was a kind, overworked, rather distant presence; afterward, he was a person I pitied and feared. But his correspondence with my mother reveals someone unimagined. This is why letters are among the many things whose passing from our lives we will regret. After my mother died, a cardboard box full of them came into my hands, the airmail envelopes covered in stamps and postmarks, and without them I couldn’t tell this story. Letters have a humbling effect on memory. They reveal those closest to us without our distorting presence. They let other people come back to life and have their say.“You are so entirely desirable to me that nothing will ever be the same again for me unless I win you,” my father wrote in 1957, after a visit to Birmingham that left him palpitating. “So it’s my health as well as yours that’s at stake.” Who was this passionate lover? “I am not so moonstruck as to suppose that the doubts of a lifetime can be dissolved in a day. And I know that you will have your bad days, when there is no hope, no belief, just doubt and black despair. But through it all, remember this Nancy: I want you, I need you, I love you.”No wonder she married him—he knew how to talk to her. He pursued, but without coyness or aggression, cards on the table. He gave space and time, but not too much. He understood her resistance and waited it out. This dark, handsome Jew was exotic in Birmingham (her nearly senile father violently opposed him), more than her intellectual equal, but not a man who wanted to dominate her or ever could. He was offering to take her to California, 2,000 miles from the yellow house that had become her prison. By 1958, at 32, marriage might have been now or never. “I went into it with absolute blindness,” she told the Stanford oral historian. “I just knew it was an opportunity to get out and stop being a slug.” So she made what she called, in a letter written a few weeks before the wedding, “the most difficult decision of my life.”In California she was nobody. She had no one to talk with all day except grocery clerks and nothing to do but shop and receive furniture deliveries and wait for her busy, conscientious husband to come back from campus to the apartment in Menlo Park so she could cook dinner or go out with him and his colleagues. Herb volunteered to make breakfast and wash the dishes every Sunday so she could sleep in. Her reading was reduced to cookbooks; she wasn’t writing at all. This was the nightmare of losing herself, and she wondered if she had made a great mistake.And it turned out that she had bound herself to a fragile man. Herb was having trouble finishing a book he’d been contracted to write about the case against Alger Hiss and other American Communists. He was drowning in documents and had lost interest. His writer’s block sent him into a depression that became alarmingly suicidal. When Herb’s new wife returned to Birmingham to see her dying father, his letters, which before the marriage had been so sure, so persuasive, sounded self-pitying and reproachful. On a phone call, he broke down in tears. His inadequacy made him ashamed: He wanted her to need him as much as he needed her. But that would never happen.With his wife’s encouragement and force of will, my father finished Ex-Communist Witnesses. The marriage survived, and two changes allowed my mother to embrace her new life. One day, Herb ran into Wallace Stegner, the novelist and director of Stanford’s highly regarded creative-writing program. Knowing that his wife was sinking into bitterness with her stalled vocation, my father asked if she could take a class. Studying under Stegner, alongside talents such as Ken Kesey, Ernest Gaines, and Wendell Berry, gave my mother the confidence that she could hold her own. Her block lifted; she began to write stories again, and to publish them in quarterly magazines. She felt more like a real writer than ever before. When a rising young star named Philip Roth withdrew his acceptance of a Stanford lectureship, she was asked to fill in and found that she liked teaching more than writing and was better at it.It did not escape her notice that she had ridden into Stanford on her husband’s back. She was somebody’s wife, and she would spend the 1960s in his shadow.One day in 1959, the walls of Stegner’s classroom began to shake. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Packer,” he said. “You’re not having the baby. It’s just an earthquake.”That was the second change: motherhood.3.My sister, Ann, whom we called Annie, was born in March 1959. I arrived 17 months later. Almost every week for a decade, until my father’s stroke, my mother typed out a long, single-spaced letter on onionskin paper to her widowed mother in Birmingham. The letters create a montage of our California childhoods, sun-drenched scenes shot at close range by a sharp-eyed camerawoman who’s interested in everything about the subject—tedious to most viewers, endlessly engrossing to me. Could you replay that swimming-lesson sequence where I refuse to put my head underwater, then brag to my friends that I dove off the board, only for my mother to expose my lie?Amy Elkins for The Atlantic. Source: Courtesy of the Packer family.Packer-family photos from the 1950s and ’60s, including pictures of the author as a baby and a young boy;his sister, Ann; and his parents, Nancy and Herbert, on their wedding dayShe was too ambitious and resentful, too masculine, to adore motherhood. She had no use for baby showers, and the thought of breastfeeding disgusted her. She complained about how hard it was to find good babysitting so that she could get her work done (unlike the white ladies of Birmingham, most suburban-California mothers did without help). To put me, and herself, on a better sleep schedule, she gave me phenobarbital and Serpasil, a blood-pressure medication also sometimes used as an antipsychotic. (Apparently these were normal treatments for infant insomnia.) When I came down with a cold in my eighth month, she wrote to her mother: “He can almost sit up, almost crawl, and almost hold his bottle. He is the almost wonder of the world. And if that sounds a little hostile, I guess I have to admit that for the first time since he was circumcised, his having this cold is causing me anxiety and therefore hostility.”But the overwhelming fact of the letters is how much fascinated, puzzled, delighted, annoyed attention she paid to her children. Like every parent she failed us in a thousand ways, some of them barely forgivable, but her attention was a gift, the foundation on which I could grow up without the fear of abandonment that had haunted her as a child. Of course, I was completely unaware of it—that was part of the gift. She spared me the burden of having to become conscious. I was free to live in my own mind, except when she was angry with me, which I found intolerable—then I would do anything to win back her favor.One of my mother’s favorite quotes, usually a dig at someone’s lack of self-awareness, was from Robert Burns: “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as others see us!” Can I see myself in her letters? A greedy feeder, cheerful, volatile, wildly curious and easily frustrated, “clinging and adventurous,” indifferent to clothes, unshy because unconcerned with others, so competitive that I have trouble keeping friends? And if this is who I am, how did I get that way? It seems my character was already formed at six months. “Undiscriminatingly friendly, and yet so happy for a little attention”: I admit that sounds familiar. Compared with my hyper-observant sister at the same age, I was noisier, grinnier, and “not as individually aware of people.” All these traits would have consequences.My mother absorbed herself in both her children, but in different ways, with different levels of intensity. She regarded my sister with a sort of objective admiration: so bright and verbal, self-toilet-trained, good at everything she did, “incorrigibly social.” My mother’s investment in me was of another kind: “I must say that I am beginning what promises to be quite a love affair with the little boy.” But a love affair comes with a price, and the letters describe her efforts over the years to shape me after an ideal, constantly adjusting my levels of toughness, sweetness, wildness, self-control. She liked to say that her parents’ generation approached child-rearing as taming savages, her children’s generation saw it as nurturing flowers, and for hers it was like molding clay figures (one of her hobbies).In a letter written in 1968, my mother describes her children’s attitude toward reading. My sister read all the time, a new book every day, simply for the love of it. On the night Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Annie said that life in prison wouldn’t be the worst fate for the killer as long as there were books—in fact, she’d sort of like to go to prison and read all day. But my reading came from some internal pressure to know everything about a subject. Over breakfast I read the backs of Cheerios boxes because they displayed capsule biographies of the presidents, and presidential history—especially of the assassinated ones—was one of my obsessions in that year of political violence. My other interest was the NBA, mainly the Los Angeles Lakers. Sports was a passion I would share with my mother for the rest of her life. I barely registered that it left my sister out.“She is doing great in school,” my mother wrote, as if to reassure herself that her commitment to evenhandedness still held, “and has a lot of other interests, cooking and scouts, that aren’t intellectual but are perfectly fine.” Obviously, they weren’t perfectly fine. She found her daughter’s interest in the feminine arts of baking, sewing, clothes, and hair disturbing enough to use an adjective I’ve never heard from anyone else: “Annie is the most fixey child I’ve ever seen.” This was not criticism meant to inspire improvement, because my sister’s fault—being a girl—was irreparable. In turn, Annie disapproved of our mother’s short haircut and slacks. She became a caustic preteen, and a gap opened between them.During the ’60s my father was an important figure at Stanford. Amid the endless cocktail parties and business trips, he was named a top administrator just in time for the anti–Vietnam War protests that nearly destroyed Stanford and other universities. He took the students seriously, which meant that, unlike many of his colleagues, he refused to appease protesters when they occupied an administration building. Force was the opposite of reason, and reason lay at the heart of his philosophy, and his sense of betrayal made him a hard-liner and a lightning rod. He wrote brilliantly in defense of liberal education, but he was not psychologically equipped for a fight like this.My mother shared his values but not his high-mindedness, and she was better suited to do battle: “I wish I had his proxy sometimes, just so I could have some fun socking some people. Not Herb, though. All he wants is what’s generally best.”She was stronger than her husband but much less important, even after she was made assistant professor. Instead of pouring her resentment into her letters, she wrote “Early Morning, Lonely Ride,” perhaps her best story, so tense with marital vitriol that reading it constricts my breathing. Emery, a successful lawyer, and Frances, his restless, unhappy wife, attend a party in San Francisco, where he commands attention and ignores her, provoking her to throw verbal darts his way. When they leave, he insists on taking the wheel even though he’s drunk too much. On Bayshore Freeway they get a flat tire, and Emery is incompetent to change it. A car pulls up with three tough young men inside; it isn’t clear if they intend to offer help or commit rape. Their leader immediately senses the balance of power that favors Frances, and he orders Emery to sit in the back of the car while they change the tire. Frances tells her husband to comply. The leader comes on to her; she angrily rebuffs him. The story ends with Frances at the wheel and her humiliated husband in the back. She imagines how, later, at home, they will console each other by reducing the encounter to an amusing anecdote in which nothing important was at stake. “But for now, as Emery wept silently in the back seat, she drove the car and she was exhilarated.”Jesus! What the hell did my father think when he read this? And yet, around the same time that she wrote “Early Morning, Lonely Ride,” on their eighth anniversary she told her mother, “I believe I could not possibly have done better.” Loyalty, her favorite virtue, made her somebody’s daughter, sister, and wife.Amy Elkins for The Atlantic. Source: Courtesy of the Packer family.The author with his father, mother, and sister, late 1960s Our life as a family ended in March 1969 when my mother woke up in the middle of the night to find my father lying beside her stricken by a blocked cerebral artery. She would always blame stress from “the radicals,” but she knew better than anyone that her husband was fragile. In the years that followed he fought valiantly to recover speech and movement, but he had always lived through his rational mind, and it would never be his again.A memory from the early days of the catastrophe: My mother is driving me to the San Francisco airport—I’m flying alone for the first time, to spend a week with a friend’s family in Seattle. At 8 I’m too young to understand that my mother needs some respite and I’m the more exhausting of her children. We’re late, and the airport garage is nearly full. At last she finds a spot and starts to park, when two men in a fancy car sneak in front of her and steal it. My mother, now carrying the entire burden of our wounded family, makes a wide circle around the garage; comes onto a straightaway, at the far end of which the men are getting out of their car; and floors it. As we hurtle toward them their terror looks to be even greater than mine. My mother swerves away in time to avoid committing murder. For a moment she must be exhilarated.She would always say, “When your father got sick …” and this seemed to me an odd phrase. He didn’t have an illness—he was struck down as if someone had given him a blow to the head. In all the years I lived at home, I knew my mother to be sick only once, when I was 5 and a blood clot in her leg turned into deep-vein thrombosis that required her to wear knee-high, flesh-colored compression stockings for the rest of her life. But she didn’t refer to this as her sickness: “I call it an accident, because I don’t like the idea of having an illness.” It was as if getting sick suggested some deeper, probably fatal condition. Better not to get sick at all.Memory needs a story, and the one I tell myself about the period after the stroke—those years when my father grew a silver-flecked black beard because shaving was too hard, and limped along with a cane in his good left hand and a metal brace on his bad right leg, and drove an orange golf cart to campus, and cursed or wept when he couldn’t make himself understood, and my mother was often, in a favorite word of hers, “irritable,” and my sister withdrew further into herself—is a story of unrelieved misery. But my mother’s letters, less frequent than before, less full of energy and humor, tell a different one. They show me plugging away at one obsession after another: presidents and assassinations at 8, basketball and the Greek myths at 9, Stanford football at 10, Little League and World War II at 11, Shakespeare and girls at 12.Memory is notoriously selective, but so are the perceptions that adults have of children. Parents easily miss the secret grievances and torments their children carry inside themselves without the language or license to express them. “The children are in their prime,” my mother wrote a year after the stroke. “They’ve never been dearer, sweeter, more interesting.” She didn’t see any more than I did that the intensity of my interests, and her absorption in them, allowed me to live through the unhappiness of those years without having to experience it. But this left an empty, unformed space where inner resources never developed. So when my father checked into a San Francisco hotel and took an overdose of barbiturates, and when soon after that I decided to be a writer, I was unequipped for either.“I no longer burst into tears when anyone speaks to me of Herb, and in fact was able to sit through the memorial without shedding very many tears,” my mother wrote to my father’s sister in January 1973, eight weeks after his death. “I’m working hard and my friends are loyal and sustaining and the children are always entertaining and occupying, sometimes in ways I’d as soon avoid, but all in all I am being drawn back into life.”Her attachment to life: That’s what saved her. At 32, she had escaped her father’s old Birmingham house and released her energy in writing, teaching, and raising children. Our new California house had filled with cocktail parties for 30 and dinners for 15. Then, with my father’s paralysis, it became empty and silent; my mother stopped writing. His death when they were both just 47 ended her life as an adjunct to men. She never remarried, or even dated much, refusing to compromise the independence that had come to her through loss. She raised two teenagers by herself, got dinner on the table every night, published her first collection, transformed Stanford’s freshman-English program, became a legendary teacher, filled our house with her students and colleagues, and walked our dog, Frank, twice a day.I was too busy being a self-absorbed teenager to understand that, no longer somebody’s daughter, sister, or wife, she was now somebody’s mother—somebody she could shape to her will.Shortly after my father’s death, I took a seventh-grade typing class. The practice of touch-typing got into my head in a way that we would now call obsessive-compulsive: I acquired a mental habit of moving imaginary fingers over imaginary keys, typing out my thoughts as I thought them and my words as I spoke them, which made me conscious of what I was thinking or saying in an almost physically distressing way. Around the same time, I began systematically reading through the titles listed on the back of a CliffsNotes guide to Hamlet, checking them off one at a time, as if CliffsNotes was the ultimate authority on what a writer should read. I tried to sum up each book’s theme in a single sentence, which allowed me to resolve some inner tension caused by all the ambiguities of literary experience and move on to the next title. When the theme eluded me—this happened with Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio—I could reduce myself to tears.I can see now that the compulsive touch-typing and overwrought checking-off of titles were evidence of an anguish whose deeper source eluded me. At the time, all I knew was that I wanted to be a writer and that wanting to be a writer hurt.I showed my mother everything I wrote. The verdict was always good but not good enough, leaving me in agonies of frustration. My adolescent literary efforts are covered with commentary that might as well have been scribbled in my blood. It never occurred to me that my mother’s opinion was that of just one very overinvolved reader; however much it upset me, what she said was Truth. She would hunt down every labored metaphor and mark wherever a story inadvertently shifted point of view (a careless sin). She returned a maudlin stab at Romantic poetry with this observation: “Don’t try to write like Keats. I want you to try to write like Eliot.” Another forehand winner. Eyes burning, I said that I’d write the way I wanted to write—as if being my mother’s prize project didn’t make that impossible.Writing was far from the whole of our relationship. We watched hundreds of hours of TV sports; talked endlessly about politics; bickered over grades (“Why an A–?”), chores, and late nights out. On trivial matters I stood up for myself, and on important ones I thought I was living a life of my own making. In the same way that I couldn’t hear her southern accent or question her criticism, I never associated my desire to be a writer with my mother’s vocation. An idea of greatness that at 9 meant an NBA career like Jerry West’s, and at 12 had me performing onstage like Laurence Olivier, inspired me at 15 and 16 to write like Dickens, then Fitzgerald, then Joyce, then Faulkner. The results were predictably absurd.My mother liked to quote a piece of literary advice from Henry James: “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” Unfortunately, I was one of the people on whom a lot of things were lost, including myself. (I was too sensitive and not sensitive enough.) Nor did I follow James’s other famous advice—to write from experience. One of my characters was a British schoolboy who was looking forward to “Michaelmas,” a word whose meaning I didn’t know but I probably borrowed from Dickens. My imagination didn’t brim over with stories. I wasn’t a stylistic prodigy. I had nothing urgent to say. Everything I wrote, even journal entries and weekly letters home from college, carried a grating note of falseness. The words were meant to be overheard and admired.I published stories and poems in my high-school literary magazine because I was the editor, but in college I ran into failure after failure. A classmate in a fiction-writing course wondered why I wrote such formal, convoluted sentences—was I trying to sound like James? Everyone else was trying to sound like Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie, who, in the instructor’s opinion, were more appropriate models. In his office I tried to wheedle an assurance that I was one of the students who would make it. The instructor was crushingly noncommittal. I was doing well at just about everything I tried, except for the thing that mattered most.Amy Elkins for The Atlantic. Source: Courtesy of the Packer family.The short-story collection published by the author’s mother in 1976 was spare, witty, with “no fancy dancing,” as if the worst literary sin was self-display.My sister was a year ahead of me at the same college. One day, when she was a senior and I was a junior, she informed me that she had won a fiction-writing prize. The news surprised us both. She was the one who read to read, not to write. Growing up around writers had made her want to be anything else, because they all seemed unhappy. Our mother was so destroyed by rejection that she never sent her stories to The New Yorker, only small magazines—The Kenyon Review, Southwest Review. This was the sort of detail that my sister, on whom nothing was lost, noticed and I, distracted by my own performances, did not.My sister’s story was based on an episode I knew well. Her best friend in junior high, a brilliant and charismatic girl, had fallen in with an older scene of boys and drugs, shattering her parents. “Jessica at Fourteen” appeared in the campus literary magazine that had rejected every story I submitted. Reading it, seeing the way my sister transformed experience with imagination, the story told from the first-person viewpoint of the girl’s father, the work done through details, the lack of straining for meaning, even the simplicity of the title: I knew that this was what fiction should be. All those years of reading and watching in our mother’s shadow and mine had made my sister the real writer, later a celebrated novelist. She had become what I was supposed to be.My apprenticeship had given me an arduous training in prose style and left a hollow space where a writing self failed to emerge—until, out of college and living in a West African village 8,000 miles from my mother, I was visited by unfinished business from the past.4.In the summer of 1982 I went to Togo as a Peace Corps volunteer because I didn’t know what else to do. I was vaguely aware that being an undiscriminatingly friendly boy who was happy for a little attention had led me into a dead end, and that I was due for a reckoning. If I wasn’t a writer, who was I? I couldn’t have said this at the time, but I was afraid that the hollow space would become the whole of me. To avoid that, I wanted to put myself through something new and hard. In another time or from a different background, I might have joined the Army.My mother was troubled. Perhaps she knew that the person from whom I needed so much time and distance was herself. Our last days together before I went away for two years were tense, more so because my college girlfriend joined me for a few of them. “I’m sorry I was a bitch so much of the time you were home,” my mother wrote after I was gone, in the first of dozens of letters she sent, each taking three or four weeks to arrive at the local post office. She had been “an, at best, intermittently difficult hostess who is obviously jealous of her son. I think that usually I would control my feelings better.” She did not want to alienate me or separate me from happiness, “even when it doesn’t involve me.” She assured me that I was doing something important and right.As a going-away present, my girlfriend had given me a gold Cross pen. I planned on using it to fill letters and notebooks, to make the strangeness around me meaningful. I might have given up the ambition to be a writer, but I still felt an impulse to write. During my first week in Africa, I lost the pen. Its disappearance was a bad omen that rattled me, as if one of the strands connecting me to my past had been broken, and I might never make it back.In those first days, during training with other volunteers and Togolese English teachers in a small village up-country, a change came over me. It affected my body first: lightheadedness, a dry mouth, a suddenly racing pulse that I started monitoring with two fingertips on my wrist. I should have known that anxiety and even suicidal thoughts are among the potential side effects of chloroquine, the antimalarial medication we had to take. But I had no concept of them; I had never experienced real psychological trouble. The son of a suicide, I didn’t know what depression meant.Instead of locating what was happening to me in neurochemistry, which would have at least provided some rational comfort, I associated it with a change in the outside world. The crowing of roosters in the midday heat; the doughy texture of pounded yams; the children chanting “Yovo, yovo, bonsoir! Ça va bien? Merci ! ” whenever they saw an American—these were normal features of village life, but in bad moments I experienced them as not just strange but sinister. And I already knew that nothing would ever be the same, even if I went home, because this change that had begun in my head extended beyond the village to the whole universe. I looked at the humid sky and saw only emptiness. Whatever once gave meaning to being alive had drained away, and the loss brought panic.With such long intervals between letters, I tried to keep mine indirect to protect my mother, and perhaps to conceal my weakness from her. But desperation rid my words of the old falseness, and the letters must have alarmed her. “Sometimes when I think how out of touch we are, I feel that I can’t breathe and then I know I can,” she wrote. “Two years is a long time and you are right not to want to view it as an endurance test. If it is that, then you shouldn’t stay. I mean that.” She hardly knew how much trouble I was in, because I kept my darkest thoughts from her.I turned to a practice that had almost always worked in the past and tried to read my way back—to master chaos and fill emptiness with literature. Just as Sons and Lovers was supposed to help me understand my relationship with my mother, I asked her to send books to Africa that I hoped would explain the sudden vacuum of meaning: Kierkegaard on faith and despair, Mann on illness and love, Jung on the shadow, Conrad on the heart’s darkness. In my free time I searched for answers by kerosene lamplight under my mosquito net, taking feverish notes in the schoolboy copybooks I had bought for my lesson plans. All this effort made no difference; reading changed nothing. Instead, it mastered me, as if an insulating layer of intellect had been stripped away and for the first time in my life I was reading undefended, raw. A single sentence had the power to terrify me.[From the December 2024 issue: George Packer on how ‘The Magic Mountain’ saved his life]Once, on an hours-long bush-taxi ride north to Togo’s sandstone plateau, I came to a passage in Moby-Dick about the whiteness of the whale: “By its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation,” Melville writes. “Pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper.” My fellow passengers might not have noticed the American dissolving in front of them as he closed his book and put it away.Amy Elkins for The Atlantic. Source: Courtesy of the Packer family.The author during his Peace Corps stint in Togo, 1983I found myself thinking of my father. Thinking is too rational: His ghost had taken up residence on my side of the cinder-block, iron-roofed dwelling I shared with a Togolese family of eight. I wanted him to speak to me, but he couldn’t. For the first time in my life I felt close to him, sorrowful for his suffering, wishing I could bring him back from where he had gone, and frightened that I would join him there. I had believed myself untouched by his darkness. Now it was all around me and within me.“I hadn’t realized how closely you had identified with him and how much to heart you would take the knowledge that he had serious problems, and had known despair,” my mother wrote me. “It’s good for you to know that, I think, I hope. And perhaps it is good for you to work through the identification and get to the great difference. But it’s painful, treacherous, overwhelming. And of course trying to understand all that—all the anger you felt, all the love, all the loss—in such difficult physical circumstances and without anyone to help you is really dreadful. Dread. Is that a Kierkegaardian word?”I had always been an achiever among people who loved and admired me, she wrote. Now that I couldn’t be who I really was, “it was almost inevitable that you would begin to unravel a little.” Self-knowledge would set me free, but please go easy. With all of her intelligence and love, and none of her vanity, my mother tried to save me. But I had put myself in a place where only I could do it.I forgot the heartless voids and immensities of the universe long enough to spend hours after class sitting and talking with villagers, in their limited French and my minimal Ewe. The old chief, whose memory went back to the German colonizers before the First World War, told me the history of the village. I recorded his words and the words of others on the Sony Walkman I’d brought to Togo so I could listen to the Police and Bob Marley. I found that I had a knack for talking with people with whom I had almost nothing in common. These sessions provided an escape from myself that completely absorbed me while they lasted, but they had no clear purpose. They gave me nothing I recognized as subject matter for writing. I was hardly using the Olympia manual typewriter I’d brought to Togo; my literary efforts had come to an end. I didn’t know until much later what my life in the village had to do with being a writer—the kind of writer I would become.At the start of my second year, my mother came for a visit. She charmed the children next door with gifts of toy trucks and Winnie-the-Pooh View-Masters, ate pounded yams in pepper sauce with her fingers, and learned a few words of Ewe from the market women. But the life here disturbed her: the torpid afternoons, the evenings without electric light, the sense of stagnation. She advised me to buy more candles and fill my free time with projects. “The people are so kind and hospitable,” she said. “But don’t the Togolese want to make their lives better?” Her readiness at almost 60 to stay in the village should have made me proud, but her company exasperated me. We argued about abstractions like underdevelopment and cultural differences because I couldn’t articulate the real trouble. Her presence was splitting me into two selves: the son she had done so much to create—loving, confident, at ease in the world—and the lost soul with a racing pulse.At the end of the week, I accompanied her down to Togo’s capital for her flight home. When I got back to the village, my brain was swimming and a lump seemed to have formed at the base of my skull. I spent an hour studying the Peace Corps medical guide, Where There Is No Doctor. By nightfall I was so sure that an occlusion in my carotid artery was about to cause a stroke that I asked a bewildered neighbor to drive me to the provincial hospital, half an hour away. In the car I waited for the paralyzing blow to fall, while the mother of the family next door held my hand and tried to reassure me.I was kept overnight and woke up feeling better. The German doctor on duty asked a few questions, barely suppressing his irony, then discharged me with advice to have a drink in a nice hotel from time to time, a packet of anti-anxiety pills, and a piece of paper that said: “Beg. nervous breakdown.”This blunt diagnosis shouldn’t have come as a shock, but until that moment I hadn’t understood my trouble in personal terms—that it might have something to do with my relationship with my mother. In her letter replying to my account of the misadventure, she wrote: “Dear George, please try to be easier on yourself, a better friend than you have been. Don’t be ashamed of limiting the demons, of avoiding them if possible. Don’t be ashamed of finding some new purposes there so that you will be able to achieve/perform/be comfortable with yourself.”What else could a frightened mother say? You’re not your father—don’t do what he did. But this pleading to go back to who I was before seemed dangerous. Anyway, it was too late.At Christmas I traveled through Burkina Faso to Europe for a short visit. In Barcelona everything went wrong. The faces in the Museu Picasso were so grotesque that I could hardly look at them. The girl I had come to see didn’t know what to say to me. One day, I resisted an impulse to jump in front of a city bus and realized that, if I went back to the village for my last six months, I probably wouldn’t make it. For a year and a half I had been barely hanging on.In an English-language bookstore, looking for something to read on the plane back to the States, almost at random I bought a Penguin edition of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. The cover image showed a bolt-action rifle with brass cartridges, a crumpled red flag, and an old Spanish newspaper. I knew nothing of the Spanish Civil War, and I knew Orwell only as the author of 1984, a book assigned in high school. I hadn’t read any of his essays, or any writing of that kind at all. I had never thought of nonfiction the way I thought of novels and poems—as literature.Crossing the Atlantic I was overcome with a sense of utter failure. By leaving early, I had failed my students and friends in the village; and everyone back home, above all my mother; and most painfully I had failed myself. Disgrace and defeat were written on my face, and I avoided eye contact with other passengers. I felt that at 23 I would have to start over, with no idea how.I opened my book and began to read: “In the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined the militia, I saw an Italian militiaman standing in front of the officers’ table.”Something about this sentence struck me: its lack of fuss, its plainness and strength, the way “I” led quickly and easily to a scene, a view of the world. As I read more, the book started to give me courage. This might be a way of going on: by facing the truth and getting it all down, simply and clearly.First I had to face my mother. In the house where she had raised me, full of the books that had made me want to be a writer, we mostly avoided the subject of why I was home early. Instead, at dinner that first night, we got into an argument about literature. We were talking about Heart of Darkness, one of the books in which I’d searched for answers by kerosene lamplight. My mother thought that the narrator, Marlow, was kept sane by his devotion to work and duty—by repression. To me, Marlow could avoid Kurtz’s fate only by immersing himself in Kurtz’s madness. Of course, we were talking about why I was home early, and what it meant for me, for us. My mother spoke gently, with none of the old sparring, because she knew that she stood to lose something precious. I argued with growing fury, as if not just a literary disagreement but my whole life was at stake.Forty-one years later, as my mother lay dying in the same Stanford hospital where I’d been born, she emerged from dementia long enough to squeeze my hand and tell me: “I love you. I’m proud of you. Now go on about your business.” But that night in January 1984 she was still trying to hold on to the boy she had made. At last, as if admitting defeat, she said: “I thought you were steel tempered in fire.”That was the last time we spent more than a few days together. I went to Boston, for no good reason, and found a job on a construction crew. In the evenings after work, I sat at the Olympia manual typewriter that had gone silent in Africa and started to write. I wrote about the village, and I wrote about my father.This article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “Sons and Mothers.”