Thanks, Ma

Apart from all that twee rubbish about giving me life--which, if you think about it, isn't actually especially noteworthy because if this hadn't happened then you obviously wouldn't be around to know--I'm grateful to my mother for one very specific thing.

I've mentioned this before, but my all-time favourite writer EVER is the late humourist and playwright Jean Kerr. She wrote several plays, including 'Mary, Mary' in collaboration with her husband, drama critic Walter Kerr. For a time it was the longest running play in Broadway history. But Jean Kerr is better known for a book of her collected humour essays entitled 'Please Don't Eat the Daisies', which was a national bestseller and spawned a movie starring Doris Day.

Today, she's largely forgotten. Her books are out of print and hard to find and her plays are no longer being performed. Hardly anyone knows who she was or what she did and I always felt like this was a terrible shame because she truly was an incredibly funny woman.

And I probably wouldn't know she existed myself, were it not for my mom.

When I was about ten or so, my mom checked out a bunch of books on tape for me to keep me busy on an upcoming ten-hour road trip to North Carolina. (I can't read or anything in the car because I get carsick.) Among them, for whatever reason, was an abridged recording of 'Please Don't Eat the Daisies'. I don't even know why she picked it, since it was never in the children's section and it honestly doesn't look or seem like a book a ten-year-old girl might enjoy, but she did, and from there on I was in love with Jean Kerr's wit and humour.

It actually took me over a decade to track down any more of her work--I did attempt to learn more about her in the late 90s and early 2000s but never found much of anything. Most of what I found was about the movie version of her book and nothing about what else she wrote and where and how to find them. All of her books were out of print and had been for many years. So I just kind of gave up for a while and tried to accept that I was probably never going to be able to read them.

Then randomly one day a family friend gave me a very old copy of another of her books: 'The Snake Has All the Lines'. By this time the library from which I borrowed and re-borrowed the audiobook had closed and taken its copy with it, so I was very happy to not only have something of hers I hadn't read before, but also because it reinvigorated my desire to track down more of her books. Over the next few years, aided by the increase in user-to-user transactions on Amazon that hadn't existed before, I managed to find the rest of her books. They're some of my most treasured ones.

Reading Jean Kerr's work was what really kickstarted my love of writing. I'd enjoyed writing before then, but wrote only fiction and poetry; it was Jean Kerr who showed me that you can write about absolutely anything and everything, no matter how mundane, and you can even make it incredibly funny. While I have long since abandoned any ambitions of literary success, I've never stopped writing. I hope I never do. I want to keep writing--and reading--forever.

And I have my abusive mother to thank for it.