• Money and Career
• Legacy
• Shame & Self-Acceptance
• Worthiness & The Law of Attraction
• What’s Real and Does It Matter?
• Confusion & Addiction
• Love, Limbo & Pride
• Gratitude
• Loss & Connection
• Friends & Family
• Creation
• Aging & Ageism
• Memory
• Head Bugs
• Grumpiness
• Ceremony
• Prayer & Meditation—without Ceasing
• Surprise
• Being Here
• Spirit Helpers
• Sadness & Disappointment
• Enjoyment
• Rest
• Being Social
• The Human Condition
• Why Do Anything?
• Fear
• The Body
• Self-Evaluation
• Loneliness & Consciousness
• Courage
• Forgiveness
• How to Love (or at least feel compassion for) Those Who Have Hurt You

What is an “epistolary work of fiction”? Did you make that up?

Betsy Robinson: One of my favorite books was the epistolary work Letters to a Young Poet by Rainier Maria Rilke which I carried with me like a talisman when I was in my twenties. Another of my favorite books is the Bhagavad Gita, a dialog (rather than an exchange of letters) between reluctant warrior Arjuna and the god Krishna, who explains why Arjuna should get his chariot moving and, for goodness sake, fight.

Conversations with Mom is nothing like Letters to a Young Poet or the Bhagavad Gita. Except if you imagine Rilke/Krishna as a wild, terrified, beautiful woman who came of age in the forties only to become a drunk and then a sober, somewhat crazy lioness in the seventies, who joined forces with a poet/Arjuna who happened to be her daughter (moi), a wild, terrified, uniquely attractive young woman who came of age in the seventies, worked at a lot of jobs, then got laid off in the Great Recession, and at the age of sixty, wondered how the hell she was going to exist for the rest of her hopefully long life.

Who is this book for?

Betsy Robinson: Conversations with Mom offers some wisdom, I hope—to people of every age, but particularly to those of us who expect that we should be mentors or crones or at least grown-ups by the time we are on the cusp of being really old. It also chronicles the rather unique and funny relationship I had with my mother as well as my fun dysfunctional family history. So in that way, it’s a quasi-fictional-epistolary memoir. (Say that ten times fast.)