Sons and Mothers

Photographs by Amy Elkins 1. When I was 13, not long after my father had committed suicide, I asked my mother, “What’s the Oedipus complex?” “Why?” she replied at once. “Are you afraid you’ve got it?” Maybe. I wasn’t aware of wanting to murder my father, but in the four years after he suffered a massive stroke at 43, he’d been a volatile presence in our house, given to bursts of rage and tears, or rendered ominously mute by his paralysis. When he disappeared on December 6, 1972, leaving my moth

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