1959

JENNIFER EGAN

My mother and I aren’t crazy about this photo. It doesn’t look like her, really—more like an idea of what a pretty girl should look like in the late 1950s. It’s one of only two pictures she can find of herself (the other is even more artificial) before she gave birth to me at twenty-four, within a year of marrying a man she would divorce two years later. The photo was taken while she was on a picnic in Chicago with some fellow Marshall Field copywriters, the summer after she graduated from college. She was twenty-one. The photographer was a suitor whose ardor she did not reciprocate. Could those eyes be on the verge of rolling just a little? My mom is a beautiful woman, and in 1950s America, beauty like hers must have felt like destiny. I remember her telling me once that the purpose of her Vassar education was to make her a more “ornamental accessory” to whatever man she would marry.

I sometimes wonder what kind of life my mother would have had if she’d been born ten, or even five, years later. She would have pursued a career in theater casting, she says; she’s been a theater nut all her life, and a devotee of culture and the arts. She is perhaps the only mother I’ve heard of who was actually excited to learn that her daughter wanted to become a fiction writer. Her own career didn’t begin until the tail end of her second marriage, when she was in her early forties. She opened a modern art gallery in San Francisco and sold art for the next twenty-five years. She nurtured artists into vibrant careers and has nurtured mine from the start. Her life would surely have played out differently had she not been saddled with a two-year-old daughter when she exited that early marriage in 1965, at age twenty-six. But she has always made me feel that my arrival—and then my brother’s—have been the great joys of her life.