“We are doomed historically to history, to the patient construction of discourses about discourses, and to the task of hearing what has already been said,” wrote Michel Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic. He was making the methodological point that we are always immersed in the knowledge and terms that precede us, that the language we inherit to comment on the world has already shaped how we will comment. But his contention could double as a description of what it’s like to relate to someone with dementia.
“I know I’ve asked you this before,” my mother often says to me these days. “But where do you live?” New York, I tell her. “I wonder why I can’t remember that,” Mom responds. Because you’re having some memory problems, I advise her. She can’t remember that either. I try to be patient, as Foucault advised. Unlike Foucault, I’m not a student of discourse, and unlike my mother, I’m not a student of history. But one way to remain with my mother is to become a historian of her, and to do so is to submerge myself in her discourses about discourses: medical discourses, sexual discourses, family discourses, diet discourses. It is also to hear what has already been said, or in my case to read what has already been written, in the journals that my mother has kept since 1975.
For years, Mom’s ever-growing collection of private volumes dwelled in her study, wedged between her extensive Foucault collection and her stand of books on 19th-century French sanitation. As my mother’s memory has faltered and then departed, I have returned often to a conversation we once had about these journals, my historian mother’s own archive. “Do you want me to redact the sex scenes?” she asked me over the phone one unremarkable afternoon in 2018. “I could just blot them out with a marker,” she added, before warning me that “these will be yours one day and some of this stuff is pretty racy.” I responded agnostically about the prospect of scrubbing her erotic life; aren’t we all pornographic in our own way? The main thing, I said, was that I’d rather read about her life with her than have to stumble through her thoroughly illegible handwriting — a mix of print, cursive, and what might as well be Cyrillic — with a flashlight and magnifying glass after she passes. The sex scenes remain, as does my mother, who is very much alive. Yet here I sit, with her forty journals spread over just as many years, reading and writing her life without her.
She was prolific in the late 1970s, as she transformed herself from a Southern belle whose favorite book was Gone with the Wind into a polyglot PhD who could quote Albert Camus off the cuff. She wrote most months of the 1990s and the early aughts, as she secured a tenure-track job, published a book, delighted in the study of medical history and in the fact that her children had become somewhat self-sufficient. There is less of a record of the 1980s, a time, it appears, of professional despair and the deep personal ambivalence that is unique to child-rearing. The 2020s will form her own lost decade; she’s been simultaneously present and not. But throughout all the journals, intimate crises — affairs, divorce, a slew of births and deaths — offered occasions for open and searching prose. Birthdays urged annual accounting both moral and fiscal. Above all, and ironically for a Foucauldian—or perhaps appropriately, depending on how one reads him — Mom’s journals were a vehicle for the disciplining of herself, particularly around the subject of her weight; for the keeping of her sexual secrets; and for her ruminations on the deviant sexualities around her — mine, for example.
I have known of Mom’s journals forever. On car trips through the American South, as my father drove and she navigated from the passenger seat, they often rested on her lap. On transatlantic flights, after she’d had a glass of sauvignon blanc to calm her nerves, one would emerge from her bag. When she waited to retrieve me from tennis practice, I frequently saw her jotting in them. As young adults, whenever my sister or I felt pained or bewildered, whenever we encountered the personal or professional obstacles life is so famous for putting in one’s way, Mom’s advice to us was the same: “Keep a journal.” Would a biologist mother, an interior decorator mother, a lawyer mother have offered different counsel? Probably, but my own mother was (is?) a historian of French public health who spent her days in archives and libraries, and if her daughters were going to suffer, she believed they should have a record of it.
