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D R A M A_ Q U E E N

This won't hurt a bit! Ever been brought to tears while lying on your back with your legs open in front of a stange doctor? Share your tales of gynecological woe in Drama Queen for a Day contest.

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T A B L E_ T A L K

Do you help your kid with assignments and school projects? Weigh in on covert homeschooling in the Mothers area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

The worst trip ever
By Susan McCarthy
A sweaty cross-country trek in a 1937 Plymouth with two cranky siblings, a kangaroo rat in a box and a pogo stick turns into family legend
(10/20/98)

Beautiful Dreamer
By Lisa Kleinman
Babies No. 1 and 2 had to suffer through less-than-perfect strollers. But baby No. 3 will have the ideal ride -- that is, if there is a baby No. 3
(10/19/98)

Turtle time
By Anne Lamott
Salon welcomes back Anne Lamott after a six-month hiatus, and she announces she has overcome Linda Tripp, an expanding waistline and her compulsion to keep writing books
(10/15/98)

Time For One Thing: Acupuncture
By Lisa Moskowitz
My muscles relax. My eyes close. There is no real pain, just the apprehension of pain
(10/14/98)

Wild Things: Strange brew
By Polly Shulman
Love and art are the twin redeemers for the hipster heroes and heroines of Francesca Lia Block's young adult novels
(10/13/98)

BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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MOMMY DRESSING: A LOVE STORY, AFTER A FASHION | BY LOIS GOULD | ANCHOR BOOKS, 261 PAGES

BY DAYNA MACY | In the '30s, '40s and '50s, Jo Copeland's designs, spectacular clothes of couture quality, graced the bodies of the rich and famous. Her taffeta evening gowns, embroidered with hand-sewn French crystal, made the women wearing them feel as glamorous as Lana Turner or Grace Kelly.

Though Copeland achieved great success as a designer, she was a disaster as a mother. In "Mommy Dressing: A Love Story, After a Fashion," Copeland's daughter, novelist Lois Gould, captures the glamour and anguish of having a mother who knew everything about clothes and nothing about being a parent -- and transforms the experience of a loveless childhood into a sharp, severe but not unkind memoir.

Today Gould is the author of 11 books, including the 1970 bestseller "Best Friends." But as a child, she recalls in "Mommy Dressing," she didn't know who she was besides "Jo Copeland's daughter" -- a neatly dressed, clean accessory to her mother's work-absorbed life. Though Gould seemed to have it all -- a floral chintz, doll-filled bedroom on Park Avenue in New York, horseback riding lessons and gorgeous clothes, she was a neglected and mistreated child. Gould remembers the odd and harsh rules that governed her young life -- she was strictly forbidden to step on white diamond floor tiles; she ate her supper alone in her room every night facing a wall; and she was often punished by a sadistic nanny who force-fed her pepper when she wouldn't finish her meal.

But "Mommy Dressing" is not exactly "Mommy Dearest." Gould eventually learns that Copeland's own mother had died giving birth to her, poisoning her vision of motherhood forever. Throughout Copeland's labor and delivery of both Gould and her brother, the designer continued sketching, even when she was screaming and writhing in agony. "But when I finally understood her terror," Gould writes, "I also knew what made her cling to that pencil. She boasted that the dress she designed in the ordeal of my brother's [birth] was the hit of her next collection. True or not, she had created something that night, besides a baby. And she believed that it was the pencil that saved her. Perhaps it was."

"Mommy Dressing" is not only the story of a sad little girl's nonrelationship with her glamorous mother, but also of Gould's struggle to accept her mother's complicated legacy. In a recent interview with Salon, she recalls her mother's extraordinary need to create, Copeland's disdain for feminism and civil rights and the first time she saw her mother pinning a dress.

You had a remarkably unhappy childhood. Was your mother ignorant or cruel?

Definitely not cruel. Cruelty indicates some sort of intellectual motive. My mother was not there because she was incapable of being there. We had no relationship.

You write, "What I know about her was only the dressing. Nothing of the rest of her life was visible to me, unless dressing was, in fact, the life."

Working with design and creating this artificial reality which consisted only of surfaces were a consolation for some kind of deep and terrifying void within her. Dressing was more than just putting on and taking off clothes -- it was a grand coverup for immense terror and emptiness.

Your grandmother died giving birth to your mother. Was this the origin of her terror?

Can't have a worse loss than that because the guilt and terror marks the psyche forever.

Your mother sketched designs all the way through labor. Did she believe having a child would destroy her creative life?

She believed that if she had to have the child, she would get through it as quickly as possible and then get back to who she really was. And who she was essentially was not a mother.

N E X T_ P A G E: "She was not aware of me at all"