Madder

August 2, 2021
“A weed is of no use to one who has no use for it... I will burn up this uselessness to tell a story,” writes Wilkinson, a horticulturist and editor, in his idiosyncratic debut. A sort of reckoning with common weeds—a subject the author is well versed in from his training at Brooklyn Botanic Garden—Wilkinson’s memoir looks at the entangled stories of his upbringing, lineage, and sexuality. He wrestles with his identity as the only son of a single mother and hardworking Uruguayan immigrant and charts how, after growing up in the shadow of his absent father—who left Wilkinson’s mother not long after he was born—he established his independence as a gay man eager to carve his own path. Many chapters retread the same ground, as he navigates his complicated past, his fraught relationship with his mother, and his need for “some portion of stability” like the burdock root whose “taproot runs deep and thick into the clinching earth.” In describing his mother’s fury and neglect, he invokes the “shepherd’s purse’s bitter juice... effective in the binding up of all wounds.” Despite its sometimes repetitive feel, Wilkinson’s narrative shines in the lines of verse interspersed throughout (“how could she/ask me to father/into this world the next?”). This will intrigue patient readers who appreciate a flair for the poetic.

September 1, 2021
Foraging in search of oneself. Essayist and horticulturalist Wilkinson makes his book debut with a sensuous memoir, laid out in impressionistic vignettes, reflecting on rootedness, loss, and the solace of nature. "I am not telling the truth," he warns. "I am letting you in on what I have, stolen from the sealed archives, overheard from around corners, wrenched from clenched hands by screaming and shouting, fantasized out of thin air into a cobweb of a life." Central to the story is his overprotective, possessive mother, who left her family's home in Uruguay, where she felt exploited, to come to Rhode Island. Pregnant, she was taken in by relatives who had immigrated before her. A single mother, she worked as a house cleaner and in a chemical factory. On official forms, she instructed her son to write "Donald Wilkinson" as his father's name, but she refused to reveal anything more. The name, notes the author, became a "typed shadow across my life." He felt he was "always heading just off course, steering my boat by the dark light of a missing father's wrong name, by the terrifying light of a mother blazing with the sweat of two and three jobs." Not until he was 21 did he learn that his father's name was Marco, and he later discovered that he had lived near their home in Rhode Island. But by then, his father's absence had become a deep ache. Wilkinson offers sensitive reflections on his aimless path after graduating from NYU; on being gay--in New York, he first kissed a man; and on travels--he calls them pilgrimages--to India, Uruguay, and Patagonia. He evokes, as well, vibrant details of burrs and burdock, madder and thistles, moss and fungi. Nature yields mysteries and metaphor: The author trained as a horticulturalist, he writes, to find "a love of something that might anchor me in place." A lyrical meditation on family, grief, and memory.

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