Listen Mama: A Memoir
By: M.S.P Williams
Souls Take Flight, 240 pages, (Paperback) $2.99
978-0-578-73017-2 Reviewed by Diane Donovan April 7, 2021)
Listen Mama is powerful reading for the teen and young adult audience it’s directed towards—but then, many other genre reads also embrace themes of abuse, depression, and struggles with a parent’s mental illness. What sets this story apart from others is its attention to bringing these situations alive through diary entries, letters to a mother (that come from a fourteen-year-old recovering from his abusive parent’s physical attacks), and the devastating and healing effects these had on a loving family and his long-term relationships
The first thing to note about Listen Mama is its candid assessment of how these choices were not cut-and-dried (as they too often appear in other stories of family mental illness). Williams acknowledges, from the beginning, the clash between belief systems, values, and realities which require hard decisions that often go against all perceptions and ideals: “…although you screamed to the heavens that everyone was against you, that’s just not the case Mama. The vote to have you committed was a lot closer than you would have ever imagined…But the concerns of the rest of the family had me pretty worried. They said they did not know what might happen to you, that this was wrong, and nobody’s freedom should be taken away from them. And I’ll be honest, I was really scared due to the portrayal of mental institutions in films and television. For all I knew they would have you locked up on the same wing as some psychopath or deranged killer . . . I was mainly terrified at the potential for abuse and mistreatment at the hands of the clinic’s staff. For one, I thought it was more like a jail scenario, with all degrees of the mentally ill lumped together.”
As the narrator reviews the ideas and realities of not just mental health and illness but institutionalization, the healing process of all involved, and young Manny’s search for answers about his own place in life and his role in his mother’s illness, readers receive a compelling saga. It moves into adult choices when he finds himself in a caretaker role while struggling with his own legacy of mental illness.
Many other issues are woven into the story, from racism and poverty to struggles to identify and separate mental illness concerns from daily life obstacles.
One reason why Manny’s story is so accessible to teen readers, especially, is its candid, heartfelt acknowledgments of searching for a mother’s love and accepting both the good and bad moments that stem from that search and the alienating facts of mental illness’s effects on love, parents, and children alike: “Whenever I am away and don’t visit her for a while, I find myself missing Mama for all the wrong reasons. How she made me feel about myself is high on the list. How she gave me tremendous love as a child when no one else could/would—not even you. How she made this sad little boy think a withered old lady would slay a dragon if it meant keeping him from harm. On those days I ran home crying, I was not aware of anything offhand that I had done wrong to deserve a treatment of this caliber from society. And Mama Dear would often cry silently too. She would then try to get me to understand that I was normal, like any other child. The only difference I had was actually on the inside. That’s what made me special. That’s what made me different—not the burns on my head. But I was usually not appeased, and I would beg her to tell me when it would get better. When would people see my inside instead of my outside—just like she could? And her reply was always the same, “Sooner than you think, honey. Sooner than you think.”
Manny speaks of the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and social interactions that also intersect with family strife. He also adds humor and close inspections of family circumstances which ultimately gave him the strength to rise out of poverty, prejudice, and abuse to live a good life.
All these make for compelling reading that injects a positive note into a situation seemingly fraught with inevitable disaster: “Did I have a tough life? Yes. Did I grow up in poverty and face things during the day and night that I would never wish upon my worst enemy? Yeah. Do I wish he had shown just the slightest interest, or at least talked/met me once? You bet. And while I am not a saint or martyr, I am also not vindictive. I am not spiteful and I am not a bad person.”
Young adult (and many an adult) readers will find Listen Mama a thoroughly absorbing story about not just a mother’s love and a family’s mental illness, but the dysfunction of society as a whole.