May It Have a Happy Ending: A Memoir of Finding My Voice as My Mother Lost Hers by Minelle Mahtani
Reviewed by Aviva Rubin
When Minelle Mahtani’s mother, Farideh, is diagnosed with an excruciating form of cancer that steals her speech, the author, having recently left an academic job in Toronto to join her partner in Vancouver, dives back into her childhood. Her choices, her relationship with her mother, and the many questions left unanswered and unasked. “I thought about all the stories of my ancestors now buried in my mother’s mouth.” Trauma begs the author to revisit the identities she slips in and out of, forcing her to interrogate her strong, conflictual desire to fit in. “I’ve been working so hard at sounding standard—at sounding white—that I sounded like nobody at all.”
Brave, painful, funny, self-deprecating and evocative, May It Have a Happy Ending immerses the reader in the fabrics, foods, onion-skin pages of old letters, and worn prayer books that beautifully, and sometimes stiflingly, clutter a mother’s home and a daughter’s childhood. For the brown, self-described “lopsided” daughter of an Iranian Muslim mother and an Indian Hindu father, growing up in 1970s and ’80s Toronto, expectations weighed heavily.
In a wonderful scene, nine-year-old Minelle waits with her parents in a cramped, sweltering apartment in Mumbai for her fortune to be told, as is the family custom for Mahtani girls. The fortune-teller declares that she will go to Harvard and become Prime Minister of Canada. Her father, jubilant, drags his daughter into a dance. Right then, she promises herself to do whatever it takes to make it happen. Thus, follow years of instruction on how to speak correctly and who to become—all driven by a harsh and shining love, often tinged with judgment.
At twenty-three, while home for a short break from her studies in London, England, Mahtani finds her mother—long-separated from her father—at the living room table, 100 Polaroids of potential suitors spread out before her. The author yells at her mom, sweeps the photos to the floor and storms out. The pictures are never seen again. It is years before the author understands that her independent, professional mother’s actions were less about control and tradition than the failure and unhappiness of her own mixed marriage.
In the book’s acknowledgments, Mahtani credits her friend and award-winning writer David Chariandy with the idea for the memoir. After describing a talk she gave at Dalhousie University as “a morose and meandering meditation on failure,” Chariandy laughingly (it deserves a laugh, and possibly Oy, Minelle) points out that she might just have a book there. And so it begins.
May It Have a Happy Ending is far from morose—although it has bleak moments, as stories of death and loss do—and if it meanders, it does so with the logic, intention and occasional wrong turns and dead ends of a complicated search for answers. As for a “meditation on failure”, it very much is. Mahtani takes bold and public risks, venturing into unfamiliar places without hesitating to share often crushing and embarrassing tales of self-doubt, impatience, and OCD.
The theme of meaningful inquiry, finding and framing the right questions to unearth unobvious truths, coincides with both the author’s struggle to make her new unapologetically feminist, anti-racist radio show Sense of Place—a success and her travels back and forth across the country frantically trying to care for, comfort, and maybe save her mother, as well as be there for her own child.
The irony that Mahtani is both a subject and an object in interrogating and unearthing an actual “sense of place,” is not lost on her and might explain why at times, the memoir, like the author herself, doesn’t quite know what it wants to be—a deeply personal and conflicted tale of loss, love, self-doubt and ego. Or a theoretical exploration on place, race, voice, and barriers. Many quotes by famous writers and theorists are scattered throughout the book—Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Arundhati Roy and Audrey Lorde. It can feel as though the author needs them to shore up her own understanding of belonging and non-belonging. She does not. Her bold honesty tells its own important story.
Shockingly (and the author acknowledges this) when speaking about her mother’s death, Mahtani writes: “I’m glad she is gone because her death was not just an ending, but a new beginning for me […] Although she held the spiritual connective thread of our tenuous relationship in her hands, her grip, I could, in this world, revisit my own thinking about her, who she was, what she did, why she had such a hold on me.” Death frees the author to know her mother anew.
Many of the places Mahtani occupies—the cultural mash-up that is her life—come beautifully together in the chapter about her mother’s final hours when she plays her one of her favourite songs, the Christian funeral hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful. Once her mom has passed, she utters the Muslim prayer for the dead, then opens her laptop and listens to Take Me Home by Phil Collins on repeat for an hour before making calls. The contradictions create a harmony—one that, in those moments, does not require answers.
Going through her mother’s house, Mahtani finds prayer books tucked in every corner, under pillows and scarves. As she lugs them downstairs to take to the mosque, a piece of paper flutters out.
In her mother’s beautiful handwriting is a prayer: Salaam Moon Kowlum Min R Rabin Rahim. May it Have a Happy Ending.
About the Author
MINELLE MAHTANI is an author, a scholar who studies mixed race identity and a former radio host. She has won several prizes for her work, including a Digital Publishing Award for an essay in The Walrus that became the basis for May It Have a Happy Ending, her debut memoir. She is an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia and lives in Vancouver.
Book Details
Publisher : Doubleday Canada (Oct. 1 2024)
Language : English
Hardcover : 336 pages
ISBN-10 : 0385675208
ISBN-13 : 978-0385675208
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