Kate Mulgrew Talks About Caring for Her Dying Parents in How To Forget
One of Star Trek’s most trailblazing captains has a new book out.
Kate Mulgrew, Star Trek: Voyager’s Captain Janeway, has released her second book, How to Forget, and she sat down with TrekMovie.com to discuss its major themes.
The book is described on Amazon: “In this profoundly honest and examined memoir about returning to Iowa to care for her ailing parents, the star of Orange Is the New Black and bestselling author of Born with Teeth takes us on an unexpected journey of loss, betrayal, and the transcendent nature of a daughter’s love for her parents.”
In part one of the two-part TrekMovie interview, Mulgrew speaks mainly about the process of writing the book and the journey she went on completing it. TrekMovie asked whether she cried while writing, and Mulgrew answered: “I cried a lot. [...] Not during the writing. That happened occasionally. But after the day’s writing I would cry. And those were the tears of, I think, excavation. I think if you dig deep enough to physicalize the scratching, the wrenching, the ripping apart, you’re going to cry out in pain, and in lucid memory. And a lot of those tears were for little Katie, who didn’t have much of a say at all in Born With Teeth, but does have a little bit more of a say in How To Forget. And her journey was an intense one to take this time.”
Mulgrew went on to explain that she wanted to tell this story, because it’s “every man’s experience”. She said: “These are the people who shaped me, without whom I lack all definition. And to have taken the journey of life with them, and then suddenly to have taken that turn in the road to sickness, and then to death, is a universal trip. And it cannot be other than austere in its frankness, because that is what it is. We know that that turn, that bend in the road, does not go into the flowering meadow, but into a darkening thicket from which they will never return.”
Kate Mulgrew’s new book, How to Forget: A Daughter’s Memoir, is out in hardcover and Kindle now, or on audiobook, read by Mulgrew herself.
