WHERE YOU END AND I BEGIN

In the process of writing a book about her mother’s stories of her childhood trauma, the author found herself in a tussle over who owns the story.

"In my mother’s narrative of our lives,” writes McLaren, “the one I accepted and understood, the Horseman was both the clue and the final reveal. He was the keystone in the arch, the signature at the bottom of every page. As Homer Simpson once observed of beer, the Horseman was the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems." The author describes how she wanted to use her mother’s stories of abuse, starting at the age of 12, by her riding teacher, the Horseman, as material for a memoir, a project on which her mother, also a writer, had agreed to collaborate, according to McLaren. However, once the book was sold and the manuscript begun, her mother, Cecily Ross, withdrew her permission, deciding to keep the story for her own use, the author says. Rather than comply, McLaren chose to weave the unfolding conflict into the narrative, including the fact that her mother beat her to print with a 2020 essay in the Literary Review of Canada aggressively titled "This Story Is Mine." Her daughter disagrees. "Stories are like children,” she writes, “and children are like barn fires….Go ahead, toss a match in the hay. After that the thing will live and breathe. It will go where it wants. You cannot pretend to own it any more than you can control it." In the end, McLaren took a compromise position, minimizing the Horseman material and centering the mother-daughter relationship and other stories about her childhood—from a cruel game she played with her little sister to the pitched battles she fought with her stepmother to what seems like an early discovery of microdosing when she was in high school: "I spend my school days in a blur, snacking from the bottomless ziplock bag of magical fungus….Taken in small quantities, mushrooms lift my spirits."

A lot of good writing in search of a story with some juice left in it.