This Is Your Mother (Scribner, May) by Erika J. Simpson, a moving portrait of grief, growth, and the inextinguishable bond between mother and child, in which a daughter recalls her complicated childhood, her mother’s terminal illness, and rules for survival amid it all. Agent: Cindy Uh of Creative Artists Agency. Editor: Emily Polson. First Lines: “Imagine this is your mother. Sallie Carol. Daughter of sharecroppers. Middle of ten. She’s a June Gemini, inquisitive and playful, so sensitive she cries before the switch reaches her legs.” Author photo: Christopher Rubarth)
My mother, Sallie Carol Simpson, was a teacher, storyteller, and notebook scribbler. She would testify to anyone who’d listen about the many hurdles she faced with money and illness. My sister, Samantha, was a writer too, but I wanted to be a famous actress who made enough money to get my family into stable housing. Despite my best efforts in college, the theater program that I attended eliminated half its freshman class after a year, and I was one of the students that got cut. I avoided writing for as long as possible, like it would pin me down to the same story as my mother, but I wound up an English major anyway.
When Mama died in 2013, after her fifth bout of cancer, the lights went out on the metaphorical stage I’d been free to imagine beneath her unyielding faith in dreams. A year of personal darkness followed. Then in November 2014 my sister suggested we do NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month—together. I wrote fifty thousand of the most depressing words imaginable: the full story of my mother’s passing, written in second person. I knew it was something, but not everything, and I left it to marinate for eight years.
In 2019 my best friend, Jeremy O. Harris—who got cut from theater school the same year as me—achieved success with his playwriting debut, Slave Play. He encouraged me to apply to graduate school so we could both continue growing as artists, and this felt like something my mother would have pushed me toward as well. I got into the University of Kentucky’s creative writing MFA program with scholarships. While in a creative nonfiction class, reading Kiese Laymon’s Heavy: An American Memoir (Scribner, 2019) showed me what was missing from my earlier writing: the navigation of my life for the reader.
I penned an essay, “If You Ever Find Yourself,” that detailed the rules for surviving poverty that nine-year-old me learned from my mother. It was selected by Meg Pillow as winner of the University of Kentucky’s 2021 MFA Award in Nonfiction, and she passed it on to her colleague Roxane Gay, who selected it for her newsletter, The Audacity. Later, Alexander Chee included it in the Best American Essays 2022 (Mariner Books). After it garnered such positive attention, Jeremy passed the essay to contacts he had at different agencies, and I started receiving phone calls. One agent believed in me but not in my timeline, as I was excited to release a book soon and he spoke more about building an online presence and trying to get smaller pieces published first. Cindy Uh, an agent at Creative Artists Agency—and a Gemini like my mother—was fully enthusiastic and ready to pitch whenever, so I chose her. We decided that when I graduated the following year, we’d lean into autobiography and attempt to sell a book of essays.
This proved to be challenging. Emily Polson, an editor at Scribner, asked if I’d be willing to switch from essays to memoir. I liked that she was a Virgo (I asked for zodiac signs in every meeting with publishers) who had stimulating ideas that moved what I had written forward. I redid my book proposal entirely, interweaving my 2014 NaNoWriMo writings about my mother’s death with canon events from my childhood. The memoir came alive. Another publisher showed interest, but Scribner won the auction in the end.
In This Is Your Mother, I turned the rules of survival into scriptures from the “Book of Sallie Carol,” solidifying my mama’s essence and faith. It took two years—plus passing the tenth anniversary of my mother’s death—to complete the book, which concludes with one of my mother’s scriptures: “There are no neat, happy endings, only the next step in the journey.” I feel so thankful for my mama—her sacrifices and efforts—and her testimony earning me a future.
An excerpt from This Is Your Mother
In the middle of my junior year, Mama called me into her room, sat me on the edge of the bed, and pulled a pamphlet from her bedside table. A trifold, just like her business brochures. The one she held was titled What to Do Next and decorated with pink ribbons. Beneath the title, bald women smiled wide and clutched onto each other. She spoke gently.
“The cancer is back.” She paused, allowing me time to process. I wasn’t sure what to say. It was happening again. The recurring nightmare we were trapped inside. Sickness startling us awake every time we dared to rest.
“They say I could live up to five more years. But I know my God, and I think I have a lot more time left in me.” Mama winked. Like the cancer was in the room with us and we were sharing an inside joke.
I tried to comprehend. “Do you have to take chemo again?” My eyes were trained on the happy bald women in the pamphlet. Mrs. Cleans. I wondered if they were still alive.
“I’m going to avoid it as long as possible. So Mommy doesn’t get weak. You know I got big goals for my business.”
Five years. She’d beaten it before. Was she strong enough to do it again? Maybe it was more about accomplishing her goals while she was still here. I could already tell from her tone that she was going to use everything she had—not to heal, but to hustle.
Which meant I had to do the same. I needed to become somebody before time ran out. What if the only way forward was on me? How could I give both of us a future?
A perk of being the baby girl was that I could learn from both Mama and Samantha, take what worked and leave the rest. Samantha had ridden Verse 3:1 on education all the way up north. I respected it, but it wasn’t my style. Education was too slow and steady wins the race for me; I needed big coin if I was gonna save me and Mama from the clutches of check-to-check living. Mama had a plethora of licenses and degrees and it hadn’t protected us from anything. But I’d had something simmering for a while now.
Family lore said that when I was only a few months old Grandma Jamie dreamed she saw me on television, her grandbaby performing for an audience. Too bad she didn’t see anything about her son not raising me, but she dropped a prophecy at least. My audition for local television in fourth grade may not have gone anywhere, but the dream never left my veins.
There was a year and a half left of high school, five alleged years left of Mama. Logically speaking, I needed to get to Hollywood. I just had to focus on the vision. If life was a stage, whatever was supposed to happen could start right here in the classroom.
In Decatur, Georgia, high school swayed like Motown. Judging from the old bullet hole lodged in one of the front windows of Towers, you’d think our boys were gang-banging, but really they were rapping. Any one of them could be the next Fabo, T.I., Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz. At lunch you’d hear fists beating against tabletops, a mouth titititing, and then somebody would start freestyling about being fresh to death and running the city. Soulja Boy was our age and he had popped from cranking his dance all over YouTube. A couple guys from our school got a hit on the radio called “Juke Ya Boi.” It seemed like the only way to make it onward and upward was entertainment.
Not to be outdone, the girls were singing soulful in the bathroom stalls between classes. Their crew would whoop and shout and encourage each other to audition for American Idol. A girl from Towers made it past the first round but then got cut, though you’d have sworn she had an album out from our reaction.
In tenth grade, I’d formed a clique: Me, Amber, Courtney, Krystal, and Uche. We came to call ourselves Le Entourage and hung tight in all our AP classes, laughing nonstop. A girl sat in one of our unofficial assigned seats once and we got so irritated that we wrote a diss track. Rapping her name backward and calling her a ho, we realized we had potential, and made Le Entourage a rap group.
We performed our debut track, “Eat Me Out,” in the gymnasium during our lunch period. Both times, we were met with jeers from the boys, who only wanted to hear other boys rap about getting their dicks sucked. Not to be discouraged, Krystal and I used the studio in her basement at home. The girls from Crime Mob had recorded a track with her stepfather in the same room!
It took us a whole Saturday afternoon to get it perfect. When we played it for her mother, stepfather, and sisters that night, we smiled with anticipation, praying they’d say we had what it took to make the radio, become local legends, get signed, and end up holding microphones on 106 & Park with Free and AJ. Instead, they balked at our fifteen-year-old asses begging for head on the track and her mother yanked the CD from the boombox and snapped it in half.
Rap had been a detour. Girl groups weren’t the way. Beyoncé had just left Destiny’s Child after all. It was time for me to break out. Sports was an option, but it worked better for the football boys. My friend Ellen had already been the girl who played football on the boys’ team, so that niche was taken. Volleyball had cute uniforms, but I was only good at serving. I tried my hand at soccer, playing some decent defense, but I wasn’t full-ride-to-college good at all. I tore my ACL before the season was out.
Inspired by my pages of fan fiction, I gave writing a try, circulating a novella I’d written in a spiral notebook titled Zane with a picture of the rapper Zane glued on top and starring a character named Zane, who was supersmart and trying to get out of the ghetto but gets shot and killed before he can make it. Riveting stuff, but after a few passes around school I wasn’t sure what to do next.
Excerpted from This Is Your Mother by Erika J. Simpson. Copyright 2025 © by Erika J. Simpson. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.
