Write Who You Love: J. Ryan Stradal on Memorializing His Mother Through Fiction

Since my first novel was published, at almost every interview and live event, I get asked a version of the same question. Usually people seem just curious, but occasionally there are notes of hostility or amazement. They want to know why, and often how, I write my female protagonists.

The answer is simple, but not simple to talk about. These characters are my mother.

Karen Elaine Stradal was a descendant of North Dakota farmers, the daughter of a truck driver and a nursing home dietary aide. She was among the first in her extended family to attend a four-year college, not that she’d ever toot her own horn about such things. She was a gambler, a published poet, loved puns, loved anything on sale, loved blended margaritas, and read more books than anyone I know. She adored listening to Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Iris DeMent, although her favorite singer was secretly Barry Manilow. She went on a lot of vacations with her friends to Las Vegas, where they established thirteen ground rules, including “Never eat anywhere where the price ends in 99 cents,” and “Never stick your thumb in the volcano at the Mirage.” While she worked as a waitress part-time when I was very young, she’d mostly been a stay-at-home mom, although one with a furiously active social life. Few people I know loved, and were so loved by, so many. How do I honor such a person? I’ve already spent a decade and three novels trying.

She taught me how to read and write before I was four, and as the years passed, she read everything I wrote, always encouraging my ideas, but was more hesitant to share her own. I get it. By the time I was writing short fiction frequently, she was a mom with a full-time job, two teenage kids, and as active a social life as ever. I wish I’d pressed her more, but I know now what that’s like to be asked what are you working on, which is the other question I get at every event. For a writer at any stage it’s often a vulnerable query, and for a writer with little bandwidth, it can feel like a provocation.

By the time I graduated college in 1998, my mom was in her prime; she loved her job at the state government working for the Public Service department and had more time than ever to do things she enjoyed. She was starting to think about writing a book. Then, in fall 2001, she was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer, which had begun in her ovaries and had metastasized to her omentum, which held a tumor the size of a dinner plate. Doctors said she had about a year to live.

Given the options of how she could spend this time, she chose to do what made her happiest. Perhaps, in part, because of that, she would blow past her prognosis, filling unexpected year after year with travel, reading, her family, and her wonderful, active circle of friends. She worked right up until her health no longer allowed it. The only thing she hadn’t done was get around to writing that book.

My mom died about four years after her initial diagnosis, at age fifty-five, when I was twenty-nine years old. At the time, we were both passionate lifelong writers who hadn’t written a novel yet. I never knew what hers would’ve been. I had the faintest sketches—she talked to me about a character named “Peg”—and I knew that she wanted her characters to be working-class people in Minnesota. The kinds of people she’d known her whole life, most of whom had yet to see their lives appear in novels.

The year after she died, I wrote a novel-length manuscript. It will never see the light of day, and for good reason. I didn’t know until I sat down to write another novel almost a decade later how I could honor what she’d given to me. I realized that if I were brave enough, every day I write, I could bring my mom to life again. A writing mentor of mine, Lou Mathews, told me that once I started writing about things that were actually important to me, my work would get a lot better. I knew what he meant.

Once I allowed it to happen, the ten years I spent putting aside the grief over my mom’s death collapsed upon me at once. I spent days and days openly sobbing at my computer. Over time I learned how to stare into that loss, a loss that brought more pain and longing than I’d ever felt, and pull her back through it. I began to actively put her in my characters, and through their voices in my head, she spoke again, to me and through me. She told me what to include, what to make sure not to forget, and tells me she wouldn’t have said a line the way I’d written it. That first book she helped dictate, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, became a New York Times bestseller, won literary awards from the ABA, MIBA, and SCIBA, was translated into a dozen languages, and took me to over 120 reading and literary events in the U.S. and Europe.

My mother has been the load-bearing wall of every book since. There is no way Eva Thorvald or Pat Prager from Kitchens, Edith Magusson or Diana Winter from The Lager Queen of Minnesota, or Mariel Prager, Ellen Prager, or Julia Prager from Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club could be who they are without her. They may be fictional, but they are so full of life, a life that’s come and gone, that it breaks my heart to write them.

I’m envious of my characters, because they get to know and see what I cannot. Many of them I intentionally create as cosmonauts of inquiry, endeavoring to explore and clarify experiences and emotions. Some look backwards as much as I do, and have to be forced to evolve in order to find their own forms of happiness or resolution. I have to talk them out of their belief that the past is preferable to the present, and sometimes that’s incredibly difficult, because I have to convince myself first. I have to remind myself that my mom wouldn’t have agreed with these characters. She had been a living reminder to me of how much more fulfilling life can get as we get older. It doesn’t get easier, she’d remind me, but it gets better.

My mom never got to render her beautifully complex, painful, and joyous life in a book of her own. Every time I sit down to write, I do my best to put myself aside. If I’m writing from a deeply open-hearted place, she’ll find her way through me into my work. Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club is a story about family legacy, and mothers and children, but for me, it’s also my mom, alive, with her friends again. She’s not here to read it, but to anyone who does read it, here she is. She’s whispering to you from every page, grateful you made the journey, telling you to make yourself at home, and she’s so happy you’re here.

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Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club by J. Ryan Stradal is available from Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.