Diaz and Moore

                The stories How to Talk to Your Mother and How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie) are both how-to stories, implied by the title, that apply to very specific people for their specific situation. As such, they aren’t meant to be followed step by step; rather they are a story of the author’s personal experience that just happens to be told in a specific format.

                The first story is from the perspective of a presumably young black man. He tries his absolute hardest to impress the girl he has a date with, without giving her the impression of trying too hard. He’s interested in this girl for all the wrong reasons, though, evidenced by “If she’s a whitegirl you know you’ll at least get a hand job.” It’d be a lie to say that the average person doesn’t think about sex when it comes to dating, but the way he put it in the story seemed very crude.

Throughout the story, the author uses a lot of “ifs” (i.e. “If she’s a whitegirl” or “a homegirl would have”) that give the story an appeal to a slightly wider audience, enough to make the reader think that this was not written as a personal experience. However, there are some dead giveaways that this is indeed a personal story. “But usually it won’t work this way. Be prepared. She will not want to kiss you…. I don’t like anybody touching my hair, she will say. She will act like somebody you don’t know…. You will not know what to say.” This quote gives the story a very personal touch; the author explains explicitly how things can go wrong, and with such detail it is assumed that it has happened before.

The mode of storytelling in How to Talk to Your Mother was a bit peculiar – the author chose to re-tell specific events from her life in reverse order. This made it tough to follow the life of the protagonist; certain events came into play without any context of how or why they were talking about it. For that reason, I felt the story was too hard to follow and detracted from the point the author was trying to make, as a result making the story less enjoyable. The message I understood was that a healthy relationship with your mother when you are young is essential, and you will regret not having such a relationship later on in life. The author also chose to write about specific details of the protagonist’s life that were not directly about her mother, but may have been a result of the relationship between them. At one point, the author wrote “you have an abortion.” And at another point “You are pregnant again. Decide what you must do.” The first abortion shows that she is scared of being a mother, perhaps because of how she felt about her own mom. The latter pregnancy shows that she has not made her decision yet, but it is up for debate and could potentially go either way. And she is definitely still scared. Her relationship with her mother has affected her life in several ways, although they all seem so indirect.