How well can we ever really know our parents?
For Nancy Head Thode, that question became the beginning of an extraordinary journey into the life of her mother, Ann Head, a once widely read mid-century writer whose fiction explored women, marriage, pregnancy, class and independence at a time when many of those subjects were still spoken about carefully, if at all.
Ann Head was more than a novelist. She was part of the literary life of Beaufort, South Carolina, and an influential teacher and mentor whose students included a young Pat Conroy, years before he would become the celebrated author of The Great Santini and The Prince of Tides.
But to Nancy, she was Mom.
In this encore presentation of HarmonyTALK, host Lisa Champeau talks with Nancy about the woman behind the books and Nancy’s own journey to understand her. That journey eventually led to Ahead of Her Time: The Trailblazing Life and Literary Legacy of Ann Head, Nancy’s biography of her mother.
Drawing from journals, family memories, archival material and correspondence, Nancy began piecing together a fuller portrait of a woman who was ambitious, unconventional, creative and complicated.
The project also forced Nancy to look again at her own childhood and at the difference between what children see and what adults later come to understand.
Nancy brings an unusual perspective to that process. A longtime family psychotherapist and early advocate for family mediation, she has spent much of her professional life helping people understand relationships, conflict and the stories families carry.
Now she has turned that careful attention toward her own family.
It is a conversation about mothers and daughters, memory, writing, the lives women were expected to lead and what can happen when a daughter decides her mother’s story deserves to be told again.