How to navigate complicated family dynamics (w/ Emerson Whitney)

Emerson Whitney’s mother died by suicide after being arrested for shoplifting at a Walmart. The arrest was going to appear in the local paper, and Whitney believes the shame was the driving force. In his memoir O Mother, written in second person and addressed to his mother, Whitney works through the last two years of her life, their shared chronic pain and neurodivergence, and the question of what makes a life feel unlivable. The book is an attempt to give his mother “a parade” — to counter the family and community shame that followed her death with a fuller, more loving portrait.

The trap of self-blame

Whitney describes a recurring pattern he saw both in his family and in his students at Los Angeles Community College. When teaching about the 2008 housing crisis, he noticed that nearly every person who had been targeted for predatory loans blamed themselves — even though the loans were designed to trick them. “My students would yell: They were trying to trick people! So why did everyone think it was their fault?” Whitney says this is the logic of “bootstraps culture”: even when a system actively harms you, the failure still lands on you.