Under Magnolia: A Memoir , by Frances Mayes

Frances Mayes’ Under Magnolia: A Memoir (2014) is not really what the name suggests—at least not what “magnolia” suggests.  From childhood on she is not a typical mid-20^th century Southern girl.  She isn’t particularly social, can display an attitude, and reads voraciously.  She follows her own mind. She doesn’t revolt when she reaches adolescence.  She‘s well into revolt from an early age.  Although the title might lead one to expect an account of life in a small South Georgia town, what one in fact gets is a portrait of a dysfunctional family—indifferent older sisters, a vain and beautiful mother who resents being stuck in Fitzgerald (she may be the magnolia of the title), an angry father disappointed in his wife and himself, capable of loving his children and also verbally abusing them (there is no physical abuse).  Although Mayes remembers her father’s love, she doesn’t mourn him when he dies.  Her mother is a more complicated figure—a needy alcoholic who inflicts her bitterness on her youngest daughter, but who loves her at the same time, and who, after a serious stroke leaves her debilitated, can’t manage to die for decades.

Mayes specifically remembers the times when her parents don’t notice her—that is, don’t notice when she disappears from the house, don’t know where she is.  This sense of being overlooked, ignored yet tyrannized in various ways, pervades the book.

This is an impressive book of recollection. It brims with details, conversations, thoughts, nuances from the past. Mayes has a good memory, but she must also be drawing from words she put down in her daily journal, which she says she began to keep when she was twelve.  The narrative is fluid and wavelike, moving back and forth in time, fragments of memory here, more sustained accounts of her past there.  She begins with a discussion of how she and her husband decided to move from San Francisco to North Carolina.  Then she delves back into her past, returning to her North Carolina home again at the end.  Sometimes I was reminded of Virginia Woolf’s prose. Mayes occasionally remembers that she has a house in Tuscany as well.

In old age one doesn’t necessarily forgive one’s parents for their failings.  There is a lot Mayes hasn’t forgiven, that she hasn’t forgotten, and her resentment is evident in the narrative.