Your Monthly Momecdote, Issue 28: August, 2026

This blog post was originally published in my August newsletter. Subscribe to receive next month's essay along with book and music recommendations.

I mentioned (by that I mean, discussed at great length) in my most recent Not Writing installment that my son has gotten very invested in Star Wars, the unexpected result of happenstance that came with getting to squire around the R2-D2 robot at Disneyland. My little boy king was essentially like, wow, I’ve found my soulmate, please tell me everything about him Mother!, and so we embarked on the journey that was all 9 Star Wars films and also the Clone Wars animated series, Rebels, and The Mandalorian. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this about Mr. Blake before—surely I’ve mentioned this initial bit—but he’s from rural Iowa where there’s… let’s say, a very extreme tendency toward homogeneity. Anything that’s the slightest bit “weird” (or “nerdy” or “eccentric” or, I would argue, “interesting”) is passive-aggressively shamed out of everyone who lives there, so while I would argue that the original Star Wars is not weird and in fact so incredibly, ubiquitously popular that the US Department of Defense named a program after it, he had never seen any of the films prior to meeting me. He was so unfamiliar with the franchise that he once asked me who “the Skywalker” was and also referred to our friend’s daughter Leia as “Leah but spelled weird.” All of which is to say—this was his first time watching all the films in sequence, too.

So now we are all, as a unit, Star Wars fans. I’m not sure what more to say about it (aside from, again, the bits and pieces of incoherent rambling in my video) except to remark that the weird thing about being a mother is that I now find it incredibly difficult to ignore the mothers even if the material does. What are they thinking and feeling, what’s going on with them? I think the most disappointing thing about The Rise of Skywalker wasn't really even its fault, because it clearly needed the character of Leia—as far as I could tell, she was positioned to be the central piece of Kylo Ren’s redemption arc. More so, arguably, than Rey, but then, of course, we lost Carrie Fisher, and in so doing lost what was probably a much stronger, more complex story. One result of my son being so very, very into Star Wars is that I’ve had to explain to my in-laws what Star Wars is and why it’s so beloved. It is, as I tried to make as simple as possible, a space opera about a family. The ships are cool and the action is fun and yes there is a grand, overarching moral clarity about war and imperialism, but it is often ultimately about fathers and sons, or mothers and sons. The central tension is about the intimacy of love and betrayal, corruption and forgiveness.

So when Kylo Ren—Ben Solo—believes he cannot come home because his mother can never forgive the person he’s become—there’s such profound tragedy in that. You can really feel, even without the powerfully acted scene we might have had from Carrie Fisher, that whatever his mother might have reached out to him with through the Force is bigger, grander than anything Luke Skywalker or Han Solo might have said or done, because she’s Leia. She has always been the way forward; she has always represented hope.

But don’t take this to be any sort of official narrative criticism, because I mainly want to talk about what happened when I looked at my rapt son and said, “Even if you join the Dark Side, you can always come home. Okay? Listen to me—I promise you can always come home.” And he said what and I said, ahem, I said, even if you join the Dark Side and he said why would I join the empire the empire is bad and I said I’m not saying you will join the empire and he said I DON’T WANT TO JOIN THE EMPIRE and I said NOBODY IS MAKING YOU JOIN ANYTHING I’M JUST SAYING and then he said but I want to come home! and I said you ARE home! And then eventually Kylo Ren saved Rey and my son whispered “oooooh, I really like this part” because he is a baby Reylo.

(Quick sidebar: he doesn’t let us call her Princess Leia—she’s General Leia. I love that for him, that he demands we recognize her rank. He also called Padme Amidala in the gladiator ring “a really cool guy,” so basically, the Star Wars project gave me a deep respect for his sensibilities, even if he’s mainly in it for the ships and droids.)

Speaking of The Mother. I recently started reading THE BLOODY CHAMBER by Angela Carter, which is a collection of Gothic stories that are essentially fairytale retellings. The first story is the titular story, “The Bloody Chamber,” which initially reads like REBECCA by Daphne du Maurier although it’s a retelling of Bluebeard, the one where the new husband who has a bunch of mysteriously dead wives tells the innocent new wife not to open the secret door in his big fancy house, and of course she does, and nearly dies for it. It’s largely a story about temptation and/or “fatal feminine curiosity” (a gender-swapped version would be Melusine or Melusina) and I didn’t remember the ending of the fairytale because, I don’t know, you never know how gruesome things are going to get in fairytales. Certainly my first thought was: this is a cautionary tale intended to teach morality, and so she will be punished. Curiosity killed the cat and all that.

But Angela Carter surprised me. In the story, the heroine makes it clear many times that she is young and that her temptation was a trap; she knows her husband is a bad person and so she interprets her moments of desire for him (or rather, her desire for his desire for her) as shameful. I thought many of the opening details in the story were purely in service to the unnamed narrator's youth—she begins by mentioning that as she marries her husband, she leaves her mother’s apartment, becoming no longer her mother’s child. A typical view of marriage. She mentions offhandedly that her mother has a past—she once killed a man-eating tiger. Okay. Interesting, but it’s only one sentence. Partway through the story, though, wandering alone through the house, the narrator calls her mother and begins inexplicably to cry. She’s just so wealthy now, it’s wonderful. Uhhhhhhhh, says her mom.

Fast forward: this is the Gothic, so the heroine meets a sweet, innocent lover who would do anything to save her. And in the end, when the heroine is moments from decapitation, who rides up to save her?  

Her mother, who once killed a man-eating tiger, who is never without an antique service revolver, who started riding the moment she heard her daughter cry, because it was weird and she knew something was wrong.

This is incredible. This is incredible. Have you ever read a fairytale where the child was protected by their mother? I most certainly have not. The entire story shifted in my mind. I had initially understood and sympathized with the young, sexually naïve protagonist because, of course, I was once a young woman whose desires were treated as shameful. And then we got a glimpse of the mother and I realized I was her, too. And it was even better than the heroine saving herself. It was the heroine being saved by love despite her shame, despite the scar on her face to remind her always of her sin of curiosity. It was love that was not desire—it was unconditional safety. Incredible. Incredible. I was, to put it poetically, shook.

My biggest narrative obsession aside from matters of power and exploitation (you know, those old chestnuts) is how to live. How to live well, specifically. It’s all very existential. Why are we here, what’s the point, what exactly matters? When you’re young it’s about achievement. It’s about collecting all the necessary relics before thirty, for some reason, because that’s the finish line for prodigies, so that’s when you’re supposed to have all your ducks in a row. But then after 30, it’s, what, just looking at your orderly ducks, hoping nobody tries to rob them from you? I don’t accept the premise that everyone gets conservative eventually, or that once you have assets to protect, you necessarily change the way you see the world. But after you have the ducks, it’s true that life just keeps going, and you just have to keep doing it. For what purpose? That’s the question. That’s what I’m routinely writing about.

Now I understand that what I have actually achieved is a position to ensure someone else’s safety. To be able to say, sure, you may have joined the Dark Side. You may have used the key you weren’t supposed to. You may have been corrupted by greed or ambition or fatal feminine curiosity and while there may be consequences for that—you may have done some senseless killing, but if now you'd like to stop doing senseless killing—you can always come to me and I will help you. And I will happily shoot your evil husband if that’s what the moment demands.

So the definition of a hero keeps on shifting. Isn’t that incredible? Yeah, I thought so, too.