Mothers, daughters, writers

Last night I watched the third remake of "The Diary of Anne Frank." I wasn’t intending to. I loved the original Millie Perkins as Anne. But this one might have been better. I tried to watch the way I do other programs – while sitting with my laptop. I muted it a few times when the shrill van Pels got to arguing. About halfway through I gave in and set the computer aside; fluffed my pillow; put my feet up, and wrapped myself in a blanket.

I’m a sucker for writer stories, love it when I see them get cranky about their privacy. In this version of the movie, there was Churchill on the radio, calling people to write, and saying that letters and diaries would be the only way people were going to know what was endured. I didn’t recall hearing that broadcast in the previous movies. The young actress in this portrayed the awakening of a mission so well. “I have to write,” she says. “I know what I’m going to be now. I’m not going to be like other women, like mother.”

She was so irritated with her mother! Her mother was the long-suffering type, always speaking gently. Her sister was timid and frail. Anne admired only her father and his integrity and strength but often lashed out childishly and considered herself unloved.

My feelings got so stirred up – as if so much of my life was shown so vividly in the family dynamic of living so contained in their attic. I shed a few tears at the end but felt sick with unshed tears after.

I always liked Anne Frank’s honesty. It was dear to me when I was young. It was different. Anne was different from other writers. I identified with her. There she was, in the most extraordinary and horrific circumstance and she marveled at how life went on…even there…and stood firmly in it.

But for all her wonder and dreams and her belief that people are good at heart, she couldn’t find a way to show love to her mother. And she couldn’t apologize for it. Her dad didn’t escape either. A letter she wrote him made him cry and he said, “I’ve encouraged you to be a writer and then you write this? You write to hurt me?” She cried, “I have to write what I feel!”

Oh, this writing thing. This living thing! It is so awful. So painful. So wonderful.

I didn’t know who I felt for more as it ended. Forgive me for saying this, but I was less involved (for the first time ever) in the larger story. I was feeling for my daughter and me. It was all about us in some way, in a way I’d never before viewed the story or the movie. I saw the pain and hurt of the mother/daughter relationship and the pain and hurt Angie and I cause each other. Sometimes I feel as if I hurt her by breathing; as if she rips my heart out with her strained smile. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder. Why? Why does it have to be this way? And sometimes I think the answer is because I write. Because I want time and space…like Anne…and because Angie is a young mother who cannot expect it and yet must live with me. And I do get it. Me – who complains about my need of it as if it is a right she is depriving me of. Me – who never gets enough.

And yet the feeling in the movie was that this tension had to be! That for reasons compelling and mysterious, it had to be that way. Anne could not pretend to feelings she didn’t have or keep the ones she did under wraps. She was born to be a writer and she had little time and Churchill called her: you writers are the ones who will tell what we have endured.

Why is there such pain and beauty and so much of what we call the human spirit in enduring? By the end of the story/movie, you love them all…poor, simple humans. All stuck together so that nothing could remain hidden. And with a writer amongst them to reveal it all and make it into an enduring story.


After the movie ended, a program on the Buddha came on. The TV was on mute. I watched images of men in meditative positions, very skinny, not interested in material things, eating little…and monks posing for photos for tourists.


I ended up babysitting for Angie’s first Saturday of school. It was a beautiful spring day. I took Henry out to my son’s where Ian is experiencing his first spring in my dad’s old house. We walked up and down the drive and around the house so that I could identify where the perennials are coming up, watched the birds that Ian is beginning to identify lighting on his new feeders, and then down to the lake where we cast fishing line into the water, Henry calling after each one, “Do it again!”

We came home and Henry was so tired he slept three hours. When his mom arrived I felt I had to have words with her about the way she hadn’t made arrangements for the day. We’re standing in the yard. She cries, “I’m sorry I ruined your day,” just before she walks away. We go in the house. The feeling of the attic closes in again.


This morning, I awake with a headache thinking about our freedoms and how central religious or spiritual freedom – well really all the personal freedoms – have been and are. How they look so big and “out there” and as different as the two stories that ran back to back on public television. I thought of how, when viewed from a distance or as issues, they appear this way, and how, up close, they are so infinitely personal and similar…no matter what form they take.