Jonathan Corcoran has been writing about West Virginia and Appalachia since before I met him. We were both attending graduation programs at Rutgers University–Newark. After graduating, we continued meeting semi-regularly for an informal writing workshop where we would critique each other’s work and gossip about writers we knew. It was here, nine years ago, where I first read pieces of writing that eventually became his memoir, No Son of Mine.
Jon’s debut collection of short stories, The Rope Swing, explored a variety of characters in a fictional West Virginia town. Many of those characters were queer, and all of them were working through their experiences in rural Appalachia. In his new memoir, he cannot hide behind a veil of fiction. He dives into the real traumas of his childhood, and the relationship with his mother before and after coming out to her, and the parallels in his life as an adult where he finds love and family with his husband building a life filled with love in Brooklyn.
We met up at a bar in Brooklyn to talk about the book.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Ian MacAllen
After reading an early draft, I wrote: “I would like to see more of a relationship between the narrator and the mother.” The memoir now focuses on your relationship with your mother juxtaposed against the relationship of you with your husband. The first begins as loving and ends with you being disowned, and the latter is about you learning to have a loving relationship. Can you talk about how this narrative evolved?
Jonathan Corcoran
I think this book changed for me the moment my mother passed away. The focus of what I thought this book would be about became something slightly different. For most of my life I imagined writing a book about what it meant to be disowned, but when my mother died, it became an exploration and processing of grief alongside that.
Her death informed how I could even approach the story. After she died, this became a search to find clues about my mother, to find out who she was. I think the earlier versions and drafts I wrote was very much going through this intense process. Then she died. And that changed the way I wrote the book.
Ian MacAllen
You talk about grief, and this is tied to the pandemic—you think that you are close to death, and Sam [Corcoran’s husband] is close to death, and then your mother also dies, not related to COVID. How did that shared experience of the pandemic impact the way you thought of your personal narrative?
Jonathan Corcoran
COVID was an inflection point that allowed me to see our relationship in a different way. As the world was collectively grieving and experiencing trauma, I was able to harness that energy and that lens and reexamine what we had been. I began to understand what death was in a very different way as we were living around it and as it became present in our everyday. And I also, because of that, naturally I began to think about what living was. COVID taught me something about what it meant to be alive. I really began to examine what my life had been like, but more importantly who my mother was, and how she lived, and why she lived the way she did. Seeing people suffer and hurt taught to me to look at my mother in a different way.
I began to see what I had in my life, and that was Sam. That was my partner, that was a chosen family, and I think it taught me to appreciate what was already in my present life. We all took so much for granted and COVID was the great awakening. We all realized how precious what we had really was and we didn’t understand that until it was taken away from us.
Ian MacAllen
When you leave West Virginia to attend college, you end up in Providence, an East Coast city that is supposed to be woke—but you still encounter people harassing you. Were you surprised that you were encountering that in a fairly large city in a university town?
Jonathan Corcoran
It was surprising—but on the whole, what I’ve come to learn is bigotry and hatred is in every city, around every corner, and the kind of bigotry I encountered in the northeast is a different kind of bigotry than I encountered in West Virginia. I began to realize that there were no perfectly safe spaces, and a place like Providence, while at Brown, I definitely learned how to stretch myself and express my identity in a way that I couldn’t growing up in a really rural small space at that time in history. But part of the consequence of showing your identity more publicly and being more visible is you open yourself up to the kinds of things I experienced with men and tricked-out sports cars, yelling at me on the streets of Providence.
Ian MacAllen
In the memoir you discuss how you lived through the legalization of same-sex marriage, and how that changed your desire to marry. Do you see this book as an act of activism?
Jonathan Corcoran
We’re living through history every day. And a friend read this book, and they felt that it was special to them because they hadn’t seen that many examples of stable queer relationships on the page. I hadn’t thought about that while I was writing it. But I think this book did become a celebration of queer partnership. And a possible model.
Ian MacAllen
Do you think there is a desire to mythologize queer relationships as unstable?
Jonathan Corcoran
There’s a tug and pull. On one hand we lived through moments of acceptability politics where people say you have to live, exist, and act in a certain way to gain respect as a marginalized identity. You have people within a community to push these really prim and proper narratives. Then you have people who say, I want to fuck that narrative up, people who say, We don’t need that, we’re queer people, we exist outside of this. There is a push and pull. The very nature of queerness is that it is not a single thing. I am happy that a book like this can exist alongside something that really rips open what it means to be in a relationship with someone.
Ian MacAllen
You mention that while writing you begin to distrust your memory. I’m sure Sam has read this. Did he at any point correct your memory?
Jonathan Corcoran
Sam mostly gave his seal of approval for this book. He did correct some small things, including the color of the floors in his parents’ house, which I had fully imagined as a different hue. But it speaks to what you see. You latch onto something and you hold onto it. The purpose of memory in a book like this is to approximate what something felt like. What it felt like to exist in a time and place with certain people. And the details can fuzzy, but the feelings persist across decades.
Ian MacAllen
It does seem like so much of your mother’s life is shaped by bad men. A father who is not around, a husband who cheats on her. Do you think there is a world where she would have been a different person?
Jonathan Corcoran
Absolutely. My mother was 100% the result of bad men and intergenerational trauma. She had so many dreams and so many desires that were prevented because she fell victims to cycles of abuse and violence, primarily from bad men, from people who never treated her the way she needed to be treated. I was her deeply beloved son. And these issues with the men in her life who had taught a horrible version of what it means to be loved, and to love, prevented her from being the person she wanted to be.
She never really had a voice in her life or had the chance to tell the world who she was. She never had anyone to share her inner life with or people who would have been receptive to it. In some ways writing a memoir about myself, but also about her, is a chance to give her a hearing.
Ian MacAllen
Do you think the slow evolution of views was the result of her missing her son?
Jonathan Corcoran
I think the primary driver for her evolution was her love for me. She was very conflicted about many things. I would be shocked if my mother didn’t know I was gay from a very young age. I would be shocked if she didn’t know that and do everything in her power and ability to prevent me from expressing it. But also, to prevent processing it for what it meant for her. A lot of what I really figured out when I was writing this book is why my mother disowned me: it had to do with religion, but also appearances and what it meant if other people would know that I was gay.
This is the dynamic in small towns. Everyone knows everyone’s business, so to have been openly gay in that town would have marked them as something. My parents believed in me, and that was part of the problem. They believed that I could do good things, and so the ways they acted out was a desire to protect me, and protect our reputations collectively. Everybody knows now.
NONFICTION
No Son of Mine
By Jonathan Corcoran
University Press of Kentucky
Published April 1, 2024
