"LIKE MOTHER, LIKE SON"

As the son of a talented but unfulfilled author, my literary ambitions live on.

 “LIKE MOTHER, LIKE SON”

We children carry our parent’s legacies and often their hopes and dreams. As the son of a talented but unfulfilled author, my literary ambitions live on.

         “How does one exorcise a ghost?” My late mother wrote that provocative line to open her unfinished mystery novel, The Secret Life of Dorinda Brown, more than 50 years ago. As a boy, I first discovered her work on smudged pages of flimsy yellow draft paper. She used a manual Smith-Corona typewriter, perched on a card table long after her husband and five children had gone to bed. Fueled by endless cups of Lipton tea and Winston cigarettes, these wee hours were her private time, a rare escape from housewife duties in the age of Redbook recipes, the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval and S&H Green Stamps.

         Peggy Hart Massé was a gifted but frustrated writer. A published poet as a dream-filled teen in Cleveland during WWII, she used her talents to secure a promising but brief advertising and radio copywriting career, cut short when she married my father, a handsome, charming dreamer. Later, she freelanced and was a skilled political speechwriter and consultant in metro New York. But her versatility masked the failure to write marketable fiction.

         I empathize not just as a son but as a fellow underdog author. I have had a long freelance career, published several books and even won a national journalism writing award, but there have also been thousands of rejections by agents, editors and publishers. Despite those setbacks, I’m proud of my achievements as one raised without privilege or pedigree. And I continue to write come what may. But I wonder if my surviving family will someday discover my forgotten stories, stored on hard drives instead of in dusty file folders.

         Did Mom abandon hope of seeing her mystery novel published? Maybe she believed I would pick up her mantle and rescue her manuscript. Her steely Northern Irish-Catholic spirit resonates in me. My author’s dreams live on, though years pass and rejections remain. The imagination keeps firing and a well-crafted phrase still inspires. “How does one exorcise a ghost?” If you’re a real writer, you don’t.

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