In Notes on my Mother, Hilton Als describes his distant relationship with his mother whilst trying to understand her. The first quote that stood out to me was, “I was so lonely knowing her; she was so busy dying”. For several reasons there was a disconnection between them, which he explains while discussing his upbringing. He was never able to connect with his family as a whole, and his mother failed to improve the situation or attempting to connect them. She didn’t attempt to ever connect Als and his father, her second husband. Missing any parent and having that absent relationship can lead to no good. His mother left her relationship with his father as a mystery. His mother also had the inability to create a unified family, rather keeping the bond between her and his father private. She was a lot more focused on maintaining her relationship with her significant others than her children and Als was never able to heal from that. His mother also never approved of him being a gay man, a “Negress,” and looked down upon it. She called him an “auntie man,” a commonly used derogatory Caribbean term, which I’m sure hurt him tremendously that his mother couldn’t accept him. Dying at a young age, his mother was never able to develop a relationship with him, leading to his sense on loneliness, and he felt closer to her experiences than her as a person. They both had their experiences lusting over men, to which he could relate. This leads to the next quote, “All the women in my family wanted me to become a black male for the same reason: they wanted to define themselves against me.” The women in his life wanted to separate him from themselves, even though he considered himself more of a woman. This led to further diconnect, where Als was estranged in his own family.