Scott Simon is the award-winning host of Weekend Edition Saturday and the author of Unforgettable: A Son, a Mother, and the Lessons of a Lifetime.From his Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:
How did writing the book change you? What did you learn in writing it, about both yourself and your mother, that surprised you?--Marshal Zeringue
Writing the book confirmed for me why I became a writer; how, in a way, it just fulfilled me as the kid who always put out the class newspaper. I don’t keep things to myself (well, some things I do, but not many). There’s a good reason why I didn’t go into espionage work. It’s just in my nature to try to fathom my experience and share it with others, be it the war in Bosnia, an interview with Bill Cosby, or my mother’s death.
In our last days together, my mother did surprise me by confiding a conclusion she’d reached a long time ago: that my father, who was a serious alcoholic, more or less willed himself to die when I was sixteen because he couldn’t stop drinking and realized he would drag us down with him. “It was the last gift he could give us,” is how my mother put it.
My mother didn’t want me to grow up with that thought pressing on my mind. I’d blame myself for not helping my father more (which, by the way, no one can do for a real problem drinker, especially not a truculent teenager). I’d wonder if...[read on]