It's no wonder the narcissistic mother will always have a place in literature: she's a freak of nature.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
If mothers are our first teachers, then having a narcissistic one teaches us that human closeness is terrifying, and the world is a heartless, inconsistent place.
Moms in fiction and memoir get a bad rap.
My mother was terribly invasive, all in the name of psychiatric honesty. It was a bad thing in some ways, but I do think it had the effect of making me interested in 'the truth' as a writer - more than beauty, more than having a shapely story.
I find a lot of poetry to be narcissistic.
I don't know if my mother was a narcissist - or bi-polar or borderline. Those were words she tossed around over the years.
Only a great genius like the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell can be mother, wife and novelist without solitude. I couldn't write until my youngest child went to school, and then I began - the first morning - and I've never stopped.
Literature gives us a window into other people's experiences in other places, in other times, so I thought it would be really interesting to investigate how different people had written about motherhood, and childhood.
If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself.
An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children.
What makes a narcissistic mother so scary? Her absolute power and controlling influence. A narcissistic mother is your only 'friend,' at least until you're old enough to go to school.