Mothers and Daughters in This Day and Age
$2.50
Excerpt
I’m wet laundry on the line, waiting to dry. Soaked through, wrung out, damp to the touch. Wet laundry on the line. When I’m dry, we have to go. When I’m dry, I’ll—
Not a whole load of clothes, fresh from the washing machine. Just the outfit I wore on the last day of high school. Skirt and blouse. Senior class picture. The skirt was handmade. The blouse was Lazarus. Couldn’t remember the last time I wore a skirt. Peace offering. Wore it to make Mom happy.
We’d cut school after the lunch period. Gone to Cindy’s house. Hey, check out our new pool, Cindy said. Isn’t it wild? Cindy’s family had the first in-ground swimming pool I’d ever seen in-person. Must’ve been the first one in Springville. The Schindewolfs were rich. There were still piles of dirt and new grass shoots around the concrete edges of the patio where the yard had been dug up. I couldn’t resist the pull of the water. Kicked off my shoes and skimmed my feet under the surface. In one corner, there was a set of small steps. The summer sun across the surface of the water stung my eyes with little knifepoints of light. The sky so clear and bright, I thought you could probably see that turquoise-colored kidney bean in the Schindewolf’s back yard from space.
Jack Moore
Jack Moore was born in Ohio and now lives in New York City. This is his first publication.
Patrick Ryan on “Mothers and Daughters in This Day and Age”
In the summer of 2025, when Edmund White died, the world lost one of its most prolific and dynamic writers, and I lost one of my dearest friends. Anyone who spent time around Ed knew that he was a brilliant, whimsical, generous, and life-loving person who wrote every day, had many devotees, and brightened any room he was in. He also published around thirty-five books in his lifetime. I’d known Ed since the mid-1990s, when my ex, the writer Michael Carroll (with whom I’m still very close), became his partner (and later his husband). I’d already been reading Ed long before I met him, and it was the first time I’d had the experience of admiring a successful writer and then acquiring that person as a friend.
Ed was so many things to me: a friend, a brother, an uncle, and a mentor. He watched me go from being a bartender to a proofreader to an office clerk to a magazine editor. In the sixteen years that I worked as an editor and Ed was alive, he only sent me three stories he admired so that I might consider them for publication. Of those three, the only one I went on to edit and see into publication is Jack Moore’s “Mothers and Daughters in This Day and Age.”
There is a freshness, an originality at work in Jack Moore’s writing that I find irresistibly compelling. Nothing flashy about the prose, no bells or whistles. Just a narrative about a dying woman going back, and back, to a pivotal afternoon in her childhood. I accepted this piece for One Story on Christmas Eve of 2024, a few weeks after Ed sent it to me. Then, as the magazine business sometimes goes, Jack’s story sat off to the side while the magazine published other things. By the time I started editing “Mothers and Daughters in This Day and Age,” Ed had died.
I know how happy Edmund White would be to hold Jack’s first publication in his hands and read it again, as Jack was one of the last writers he mentored and one of the last new friends he made. In that spirit, all the work Jack and I did on “Mothers and Daughters” is a tribute to our mutual friend. I’m delighted to be introducing this story—and this writer—to the world.
Q&A by Patrick Ryan
- PR: Where did you get the idea for “Mothers and Daughters in This Day and Age”?
- JM: My mother died in circumstances quite similar to the mother in this story. In the last weeks, she drifted in and out, and I wondered what was going through her mind. I liked the idea that rather than your whole life “flashing before your eyes” as you approached death, maybe just one little moment might return to you.
I had been wanting to write something about her death for a while, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to do it. I knew that, rather than memoir, I wanted to stir it all up in the big witch’s cauldron of fiction, with some essence of reality in there but also many other (invented) ingredients.
Then the great writer Edmund White, whom I had befriended after moving to New York City and who became a sort of mentor, suggested that I read The Death of Ivan Ilyich. I’m not at all proposing that my story is in the same league, and I don’t really think there are any real similarities beyond the obvious, but I was inspired, nonetheless. - PR: How long did it take you to finish a draft you were happy with?
- JM: At the time I wrote this story, I was meeting Edmund every Sunday. We would have dinner and then share our latest pages. (He was working on his last novel at the time.) When we first met, I only had about five stories that were in a presentable state, and I exhausted that meager collection pretty quickly. Basically, I started working on this story so that I would have something new for Edmund to read. I was also trying to write something a little different from what I usually did. Most of my stories up to that point were tales of gay desire or childhood reminiscences. I was trying to show a little range.
All that to say, the initial draft came together in probably just a few weeks. (No doubt I'm too easily satisfied!) - PR: How different is the finished story from the one you first envisioned? ?
- JM: I finished the story about two years ago. I made little changes since then, here and there. During edits for this publication, you encouraged me to try for a different ending. The original was rather abrupt. And I’m so glad you made that suggestion, because I like this ending much more.
In general, I am prone to constant revisions. Every time I look at my writing, I start fiddling. I can always find little things (and sometimes big things) to change, which is why I haven't dared to read this one again after it went to the printers—I am sure I would change something else! - PR: Your handling of time and memory in the story is fascinating. How did you settle on rendering your character’s life in this manner?
- JM: I felt that the memory sections needed to be in first-person. The “I” voice of the mother (as an eighteen-year-old young woman) came to me right away. But I thought it would be too cumbersome to retain that close first-person perspective into the present day, when she is experiencing her own death. For that, I thought I really needed some distance. I think there’s something impenetrable about death that even a writer’s boundless imagination cannot pierce. (Or at least mine couldn’t.) So, then I thought perhaps I could mix up first- and third person, so that the mother’s memories from forty years ago are rendered in first-person and the action of “today” is rendered in a sort of distant, detached third.
- PR: Were there any surprising advantages you found in allowing yourself to move around in time and voice? And were there any potential pitfalls you had to avoid?
- JM: I tried to use it all to my advantage, to be honest. Whenever I didn't feel like writing anything more in a certain section, I could just float back in time. In a way, I almost felt like I was cheating somehow.
As far as pitfalls: In my initial draft, I also toyed with the idea of playing not just with perspective but also with tenses—mixing up present tense and past tense in a sort of ironic way. But, in practice, I think it got too confused—and confusing. I’m traditional, at heart. The point of a story is the story, not any kind of fancy technique. And then, too, I was constantly getting my tenses mixed up. I was getting “lost in time,” so to speak. That’s always a pitfall for me, but also half the fun of writing—getting lost somewhere. - PR: What are you currently working on?
- JM: Right now, I’m polishing up a few new stories. One is about a misfit boy who wants to be the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio for Halloween, who discovers a grave family secret when he finds a pair of women's ballet slippers in the attic (they don't belong to his mother). I'm also working on a sexy short story about gay monogamy. In a way, it’s a tribute to Edmund.
My friendship—you could call it an apprenticeship—with Edmund constituted the only sort of training I’ve had in creative writing. I don’t have an MFA. I’ve never attended a seminar. I simply wrote Edmund a fan letter after I moved to New York City and he invited me over and told me to bring something I was working on.
I have about a dozen or so stories that I think would make for a neat collection. These were the stories I read to Edmund during the year of our friendship. For nearly all of them, he was my first reader. You could even call them Stories for Edmund. - PR: What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
- JM: This is actually more “reading” advice than writing advice, but I think it’s apt:
In addition to sharing our writing, I was one of Edmund’s many reading buddies. He loved to read with friends. Together, we read many greats: Stendhal, D.H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Bowen. When we read Henry James, which was my first encounter, I came prepared to talk about syntax and tone and all these writerly things (I thought I was being quite sophisticated). Whereas Edmund wanted to discuss the characters. And the characters as people—real people. Almost like gossip. I think that’s a vastly superior way to talk about literature. And more fun, too! It sometimes seems writers talk a lot about technique (and maybe a bit like a magician unctuously telling us how he really sawed the lady in half). The challenge for writers, I think, is to create characters that are worthy of being gossiped about.
