Summer of Sisterhood: a Q&A with Sue Monk Kidd, author of "Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story"

Sue Monk Kidd has touched the hearts of millions of readers with her beloved novels and acclaimed nonfiction. Now, in the wise and engrossing dual memoir, "Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother and Daughter Journey to the Sacred Places of Greece, Turkey, and France," she and her daughter, Ann, chronicle their travels together through Greece and France at a time when each was on a quest to redefine herself and rediscover each other. We asked Sue to share her thoughts on her recent memoir and the ever changing journey of motherhood. 

Sue and her daughter, Ann 

1.     The relationship between mother and daughter is so special, yet so complex. How did this journey/memoir come about?

The whole thing started with a trip my daughter, Ann and I made together to Greece to mark my 50th birthday and her college graduation. We were each crossing these big thresholds, both of us trying to figure out what to do with the rest of our lives. The trip turned out to be life-changing in those regards, but the thing we never imagined was how it would change our relationship. As we traveled, I realized we’d come to that very hard place in the story of mothers and daughters where the relationship has to be reinvented, if it’s to flourish. Traveling with Pomegranates tells the story of that reinvention, how we discovered each other, woman to woman, soul to soul. 
 
Writing a memoir about our experience was Ann’s idea. You know, when people discovered we were writing a book together, often their first reaction was to ask, “Are you still speaking?” The sheer number of times we got the question became sort of funny, and then sort of revealing, pointing to how complicated and intense the bonds between mothers and daughters can be. But yes, Ann and I are still speaking. In fact, writing the book brought us a lot closer.

 
 2.  What was the greatest lesson you learned from your daughter in sharing this experience?

I learned so much from Ann during the writing process. She had all this fresh vitality—the joy, hope, eagerness, and openness of being a beginner with her first book. She was unboxed. It rubbed off on me. I realized that as a writer, as a person, I wanted to always be a beginner in that same way. Plus, my daughter crystallized many things for me. For instance one day, while reading one of her newly written chapters, I came to the story of us in a cathedral in France, standing before a beautiful black Madonna. Ann wrote: “The two of us praying like this suddenly washes over me and I’m filled with love for my mother. The best gift she has ever given me is the constancy of her belief. Whatever I become, she loves me. To her, I am enough.” Those words overwhelmed me. As mothers, our belief in our children, our dogged love for them eventually translates into their own ability to love themselves, to believe in themselves, to feel they are enough.

3. What do you feel is the most valuable lesson you or your life can teach your daughter?

When Ann graduated from college, I bought a graduation card and sat up till 2:00 A.M., trying to figure out what to write it in. She was leaving, and I wanted to send her off with some salient words. But what? Naturally there were so many pieces of advice I wanted to impart, but in the end, I wrote this: “Listen to your heart, to the voice of your soul. Be true to yourself.” What I most wished in that moment was for her to seek out her true self, her own particular purpose and meaning in the world, and to be bold in expressing it. 
 
There’s a silent transmission that goes on between a mother and a daughter. Daughters learn more through osmosis than what we write in greeting cards. Ann watched me pursue my writing. She watched me struggle to give voice to myself. I want to think she soaked some of that up.  

4. What has motherhood taught you about yourself?  

Where do I start? Motherhood is about rearing children, of course, but it’s also about the cultivation of our own awakening and maturation. I don’t know of a more difficult or beautiful hands-on curriculum for learning how to be a loving human being than the School of Motherhood. It taught me patience. It taught me endurance. It has broken open my heart and expanded it a million times. Over and over it taught me to shed my selfishness and give myself to some little moment. It taught me to play. It taught me to forgive. I could go on. I’ll simply say, it taught me what matters.

5. What have you learned as a woman and an artist that you think could be useful to others?
           
 As a writer, the question that consumed me for so many years was: How do I serve my work? In other words, how can I make my work better, how can I write with depth, beauty, courage, authenticity, success? Serving our work is an extremely important matter for all of us, but as I got older, the question began to enlarge. It also became: What does my work serve? At fifty I became acutely concerned about the suffering world and what dent my work might make in it. I wanted it to serve something larger than myself. I don’t have an illusion that my work always serves a large, noble or unselfish purpose, but I think it’s good to keep asking the question. I recall something Fredrick Buechner said: “You are called to the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” I suspect our most radical joy comes from being in that particular place. So, perhaps this is the bit of wisdom I’ll offer, though inside ourselves, we already know it: We are in the world, to love the world. The world is in need of mothering, too.

6. What single event or experience, if there is one, brought you closest to your daughter?

I would guess that the closeness and intimacy I’ve shared with my daughter has come through the coalescing of many moments. There were all the little pajama parties we had in the hotel room, when we traveled. Talking, listening, laughing. One experience does come to my mind, though, mainly because it was such a watershed event for us. It’s one we wrote about in the book: an afternoon on the deck of a ship docked on the coast of Turkey. Until that afternoon, there had been a lot of distance and silence between us. Ann had fallen into a depression, and I didn’t know why. There was a wall between us, but cracks had begun to form in it, and on that day, Ann couldn’t hold back her tears. She cried as we sat there—she let herself cry—and it dissolved the wall, opening a space between us, one of immense vulnerability and honesty. The rediscovery, the reinvention of our relationship began right then.