Bettyville: A Memoir

By George Hodgman.
Published by Two Roads.

Late one evening, soon after return-ing to his childhood home of Paris, Missouri (population 1,246 and falling), George Hodgman looks in on his sleeping mother, Betty. He sees she has kicked off her covers, so he puts an old, soft towel in the dryer to warm up and then spreads it around her feet, which she com-plains get cold at night. 

This single gesture of kindness epitomises the core of Hodgman — the former class clown, doting only child, veteran magazine and books editor, recovering addict and struggling homosexual. He had been forced back from New York in 2011 “for two weeks” after his irascible 89-year-old mother drove into a ditch and had her licence revoked. Hodgman’s touching memoir of their often hilarious next three years together has become a word-of-mouth bestseller, delving into the lives of two characters rarely written about — the conservative Midwest American mother and her gay son. It is a book that has you emailing friends: “You have to read this.” 

First published in America in March last year, Bettyville has now been commissioned as a Paramount Television show with Shirley MacLaine playing Betty and Matthew Broderick as George. So why all the fuss? 

Hodgman is a gifted comic and approval-seeker who can ably write as well as edit. In his mother, Betty, a woman who once sped across the plains in her blue Impala, Kent cigarette in hand, but who now answers the phone with “Speak!” and obsessively asks “What is that stuff you drink at Christmas?”, he is provided with an abundance of material. 

They find themselves thrown together in the house on Sherwood Road that his late father built, in a town destroyed by the three things that changed rural America: Walmart, the break-up of the family farm and meth. (I look up their house in Paris, Missouri, on Google Maps and am taken down an empty bitumen road of soulless clapboard bungalows on the edge of town.) 

Both domestically challenged (tuna bake made with Campbell’s mushroom soup, anyone?), Betty and George shuffle around, barking at each other about lavatory paper and gastric bypasses, distracting themselves from their unsaid fears by watching the American game show Wheel of Fortune, a programme “we despise so avidly we cannot ever miss it”. This is a book that will resonate with all baby boomers who have entered the ever shrinking world of their aged parents. Those who have will recognise Betty’s refusal to wear anything other than her favourite sandals and George’s capitulation in the face of such belligerence. “When dealing with older women, a trip to the hairdresser and two bloody marys go further than any prescription drug,” he wisely advises. 

Into this war-of-shoes narrative Hodgman weaves the family history and his own story of growing up in a tiny, God-fearing community. What he remembers most about his childhood is his parents saying “That book is for girls” and “Why would you want to wear that?” 

His father, a big round-faced man, who owned a lumberyard and whom Hodgman most resembles, would also say: “You can always tell me anything.” 

But George never did, and nor did his parents. 

If this is a memoir about the final years of a woman uniquely shaped by 20th-century small-town America, it also serves as a lesson in the destructive power of silence. As Hodgman writes: “We never broke open. It was too frightening and we have all paid the price.” 

He escaped to New York, using his talents as a wordsmith to work for the likes of Vanity Fair in the 1990s, “a magazine so slick its pages were perfumed”. Hodgman writes a riveting chapter on Graydon Carter, the magazine’s judgmental editor, a vulnerable man who tallied up style offences, imagined slights and was “more attentive to hair-related error than any human I have ever known”. 

Such intolerable work pressure combined with a disastrous love life turned Hodgman to drugs (“only enough to kill a rock band”) and eventually led to him being sacked. When his shrink later accuses him of running away from his feelings, he quips: “I know. Let’s hope they are fat and slow.” 

The turning point comes with the death of his father when, after the funeral, Hodgman finally finds an opportunity to tell Betty he is gay. “I thought it would pass,” is all his mother would say. “You never talked about it? With him?” Hodgman asks. Betty shakes her head to confirm they never spoke of who their only child really was. 

Redemption for the author arrives in the form of an unconditionally loving black puppy called Raj, who is pictured on the book cover, and in the success of the memoir itself. Scroll through Hodgman’s Facebook page and you can read posts from a man bemused by the respect that he now commands for the way he cared for Betty Baker Hodgman, born August 4, 1922, in Madison, Missouri. 

Because who of us wouldn’t want to be Betty in her dying days? 

We should all be so lucky to have someone we love swathe our feet in warm soft cotton as we sleep.