My Mother Made Me a Writer

My mother suffered with alcoholism from when I was about my earliest memories until I lost her at 16. She felt as a working-class woman, she felt very overlooked,. not only by the broader world, but even in the community we were in. There was so much stigma around addiction that it was often kept at home and people didn't want to look at it. So one of the ways I could keep my mother's attention on me was to sit down and write her memoirs. It gave her someone to tell her stories to her life. But the Elizabeth Taylor thing for my mother was really about, you know, Elizabeth Taylor is an actress, an incredibly glamorous woman. But as the