How to Talk to Your Mother

In Moore's How to Talk to Your Mother, the story of a woman's life and relationship with her mother is told backwards from a couple years after her mother's death. This technique is the cause of an unusual emotional experience. Learning about the death of the woman's mother first was interesting because we don't yet know anything about her. But as I approached the end of the story and beginning of the narrator's life, I already knew what happens later in her life. It was a similar feeling to that of reading the last chapter of a book before beginning the story. Things are perceived differently when the mystery of the ending is taken out of the mix.

The title suggests that the story is a how to article. To me the title and the story itself is showing that had the narrator known about what her relationship with her mother would become later in life, she wouldn't have talked to her the way she did when she was young. I think this is an important message that the author wanted to get across. People think that individuals in their lives will always be there, and they tend to be unappreciated.

I think the strategy used in this story was extremely effective. I attempted to read the story over again from the beginning of the narrator's life and it wasn't nearly as interesting.