Q&A with Candice Fox, writer and star of one-woman show “Cheers Mom”
I’ve got your Mother’s Day right here
Mother’s Day is this Sunday, and I have complicated feelings about it. I am fortunate enough that my mom is still alive and she’s been a pretty great mom. But for people who have complicated relationships with their moms or absent moms in some way, Mother’s Day can be a tough holiday.
So I thought this year, instead of listing my gripes again about Mother’s Day, I’d introduce you to my friend Candice Fox. Candice and I met at a writing retreat a couple years ago and have since become good friends. Candice wrote and stars in the one-woman show “Cheers Mom! Eulogy for a Living Parent,” which tells the story of her estrangement with her alcoholic mother through the stages of grief. She debuted “Cheers Mom” in NYC in October last year, and having seen the show, I can report that it is poignant, emotional, and (trust me) quite funny.
She took the show to LA this past March, and it’s returning to NYC this May, including on Mother’s Day weekend.
I’ll put her official bio right here (tldr; she’s awesome):
Candice Fox is a writer, filmmaker, and performer based in New York City. Her short films have screened at international festivals including the New York Movie Awards and the Paris Film Awards. She is currently directing her first feature-length documentary, a deeply personal exploration of trauma, identity, and healing. Candice’s writing has been featured on Invisible Illness, Medium’s largest mental health platform, where she shares personal essays. In 2022, she published Mental Maps, a collection of poetry exploring themes of memory and transformation. Her debut play was selected for the Hollywood Fringe Festival in 2016. Most recently, she took the stage in NYC with her one-woman show, Cheers, Mom! Eulogy For A Living Parent, presented as part of the Days of the Dead Festival, an unflinching theatrical reflection on family, grief, and survival.Her work consistently engages with topics like addiction, complicated family dynamics, and the messiness of being human.
I hope you’re not sick of me doing this Q&As, because I really love doing them and I loved this convo with Candice, in which we cover motherhood, alcoholic mothers, grief, female friendships, the value of a good therapist, creativity and ambition.
Tell me about “Cheers Mom! Eulogy for a Living Parent.”
This is my one-hour solo show. I guess I would classify it as a dramedy. It's structured around the five stages of grief, and it is inspired by my relationship with my alcoholic mother, who I am estranged from.
And it was sort of inspired by, honestly, my therapist. I had been having a really hard time processing my feelings around not having my mom in my life. I basically got to a point where I was sort of secretly and shamefully wishing that she would just die already because it was so painful to continue to know that she was out there suffering and to just live with the anxiety of always waiting to get a call. My therapist introduced the idea of “complicated grief” to me and the idea that I could grieve her before she is dead. She really put me at ease about the shame that I was carrying around, that I just felt like it was such an evil thing to to hope for. She framed it in a way that made sense to me. She said “People who are, you know, watching a loved one suffer from terminal cancer or from any type of terminal illness feel this way at a certain point, because it is really painful to continue to watch somebody be in so much pain. It's okay that you want relief. It's not because you're evil, it's not because you hate her, it's not because you're a bad person.” Alcoholism is a disease, and it's not always terminal, but it can be. And I think in my mother's case, it will be, I don't think there's any coming back from it.
A lot of really well-meaning people when I would share my estrangement with them would say things like “well, she could get better.” And it's true – she could or she couldn't. But I can't continue to live my life in this space of hoping for that because it was creating a lot of pain for me.
So that was the inspiration behind the show!
How did you come up with the concept of a “eulogy for a living parent”?
I came up with the name “Eulogy for a Living Parent” before anything else. “Cheers Mom” actually came much later, once I was really developing the show and I realized that the show had a lot of levity to it.
But I was just grappling with this idea of wanting to be able to reflect on her and in a positive way. So much of my life for the last 15 years has been tied up in chaos with her and really difficult memories, and I liked the idea of choosing how I wanted to think of her and view her and honor her, while also sharing the truth about who she is and my relationship to her. That happens for me a lot – I'll just come up with a phrase or a title, and then I'll build out from there. I think it's intriguing for people when they hear that, to eulogize anyone who's still alive. It seems sort of dark, yeah, but also, that's what I'm doing, you know?
You say in the show that people generally don't understand estrangement. Can you tell me more? It feels like this middle ground of them being in your life and I guess being dead. How do you understand or experience estrangement?
It's changed over the years. Allowing myself to move through the grieving process, estrangement has become a much easier thing for me to grapple with. Before it was just this sort of strange space that I lived in. I don't really feel like a lot of people do understand it. Especially when it's with a parent, especially when it's with a mother, there's such a sense of needing to protect your mother, to make sacrifices for her, to be there for her in the ways that she was there for you. I felt very misunderstood, and I didn't even like sharing with people that we were estranged. It would just lead to a lot of questions that I didn't want to answer. I didn't know how to answer, and I didn't feel comfortable answering.
I think it looks different for everybody. For me, it really does look like living as though she's no longer here, because in a lot of ways, she's not. Her disease has taken such a hold of her that the version of her that maybe I do remember from my childhood – where she was healthy and she was actually a really great mom who did show up for me and did care for me and love me and give me so much affection and so much support – she is gone. For me, living my life as though she's in the past tense, which is how I often refer to her, is a healthier way for me to move forward.
I had to get to a place where I needed to move forward for myself. When it comes to addiction and being so enmeshed with somebody who is an addict, it can feel impossible to take care of yourself and even like a bad thing to do that. You start to prioritize their needs over your own. When it's a family member, especially when it's a mother, you feel a sense of responsibility for them. I felt like I owed her for a long time, and that's why I just kept showing up for her. It felt like it was my responsibility, and if I didn't do it, who would? It was such a struggle to carry the weight of that responsibility and to feel as though, if she were to die, or if something were to happen to her, that the blood would be on my hands.
I have three siblings, and we’re all estranged from her. For each of us, it came at different times in our lives for different reasons. It might sound weird, but I'm really proud of us. I'm really proud of us because I know how hard it is. I think it's really sad we're all estranged from her, but I also know the work it takes to make that decision. It's not like you make it and then you wash your hands clean of it and you move on and you don't think about it. I think about it almost every day, and it's a choice that I have to make almost every day. Because even though I am moving through this grief, there's a little voice in the back of my head that's like, “well, you could just call her, you could just get on a plane and go out there, you could just try to help.” That's what makes it so complicated. It's the denial that you go through in grief, and it’s that much more complex when it's someone who's still alive. Because you can live in that space forever.
You hit on something interesting about mothers specifically. How has your relationship with your mom affected your view of motherhood?
It's interesting. I mean, as far as myself with motherhood, I've never wanted to be a mother. I'm 34 now, and it's really not something that's ever appealed to me. I don't know if that is because of my mom or not. It's just not something that, even growing up as a kid, I ever dreamt of having children or being a mother myself. I think I empathize, though, with mothers more because of my mom. I see her as such a flawed human, and I think she genuinely did her best. I don't hold it against her in any way. I think she went through a lot in her childhood, and I think she never did the work to recover from any of her traumas. That it hindered her ability to be there for us. I don’t fault her for that, I really don’t.
It helps me understand what it means to be a mom and to also be a really complicated human at the same time, which is, I would imagine, most mothers.
How do you think this relationship or this experience with your mom has affected your experience with female friendships?
For years, I didn't think I needed female friends, and I didn't correlate that at all to my relationship with my mother. I chalked it up to the fact that I was a professional dancer in my 20s, and so I was surrounded by a lot of gay men, who I got along really well with. It wasn't until therapy a couple of years in, right before I turned 30, where I had this revelation about not having any women in my life. I finally started to look at how that had to do with my mom and with my sense of safety around women.
Beyond my mother being an alcoholic, she was incredibly judgmental of other women. Being a dancer didn't help me in any way, because that’s an incredibly competitive industry where you’re conditioned to compare constantly. I felt really insecure around women. I felt really unsafe around them. I didn't trust them. I'm really close to my sister, and I kind of thought that's all I need.
It's so funny and also incredible to see now the group of women in the last years of my life that I've brought in. They're so incredible, and I love them so much. I’m like, how was I living for so long without this? How could I have possibly believed that I could continue to live without this? A lot of that came from the healing, and having these friendships has also contributed to so much healing. I feel more and more safe, more and more supported, more and more like I can rely on women and that I don't have to feel responsible for taking care of them, and they also don't need to feel responsible for taking care of me. It's been really cool to have women in my life, women of all ages, some who are mothers themselves, some who aren't, but who I feel like I'm on a level playing field with. I don't have to seek to fill that mommy-shaped hole in my heart with them.
So this is the week before Mother's Day. I have very complicated feelings about Mother's Day as a mother. How do you experience Mother's Day?
As with most commercialized holidays, I think it's stupid. I also think Valentine's Day is stupid. But in general, it's a day that I tend to feel a little bit fragile. I always make it a point to reach out to my friends who are moms, to wish them a happy Mother's Day. I don't just write off the whole holiday and say “if I can't have a mom that I can reach out to, then fuck it, this day doesn't exist.” I think it's still an important day to acknowledge the people in my life who are moms, but you know, I avoid social media. It's painful. I feel jealous because I see people in my life who have these healthy relationships with their mothers that are being celebrated, and of course I'm happy for them. But at the same time, I'm sad for myself. It just brings up a lot of yucky feelings – no one likes feeling jealous, and we all want to be happy for the people in our lives who have great things. Yeah, I generally feel a bit fragile. I stay away from social media, and I think I just try to use it a day to take care of myself and to mother myself.
In the show, you say “sometimes hope can keep us trapped in a delusion.” This was striking to me. We live in a world where we get these messages all the time about keeping hope alive and don't lose hope. As if hope is a moral virtue of some kind. Knowing you as I do, I think you're an extremely optimistic person. So how do you square that? How do you let go of hope in this context?
I do think I'm generally very positive! Someone said to me recently after they came to the show that “hope is a four letter word.” I loved that because I was like, yeah, it is, it's sort of this bad word. But we're all taught to believe that it's a good word and it's a good thing and it's something that we have to hold on to no matter what. I think it depends on the context, but with my mom, I did feel like the hope was becoming really damaging. The hope was keeping me in this space of denial with her disease, and it was keeping me from being able to deal with all of the feelings surrounding it.
For me, I needed to completely move on from the idea of staying hopeful about her recovery, because it was keeping me from being able to recover in my own way and in my own life. Well-meaning people trying to say the right things, like “Anything can happen, right? Don’t lose hope!” But those things are actually really painful and damaging.
In a way, I wanted to educate people with the show. For the people that I've spoken with who have had addicts in their lives, they really understand a lot of this. But for the people that haven't, it's like I'm speaking another language, and it's almost upsetting to them to hear something like hope is a bad thing, and it's not always the right thing to do. It was important for me to try to get that point across to people that didn't totally share my experience.
I saw your show in October, and I think it's so generous and kind actually, because despite everything that you've been through with your mom, the anger and sadness doesn't seem to dominate. You say “The truth is, my mother was a good mom and a bad mom and just an okay mom. All these things can be true.” I love that line because I think that's true of all of us and all of our roles, whatever they might be, whether it's mom, friend, sister, worker or whatever it is. I'm curious how you were able to find it in yourself to see her as a full human, not just as a bad or absent mom.
Well, it's funny, because I think part of the problem with me being able to even accept that she was an alcoholic and then to move through this grief was that I did have so many really fond memories of her. I think for some people that's not the case, and they're always kind of pining for this imaginary version that they never met. For me, I did know this really wonderful version of her who was a really good mom. And it wasn't made up, I didn’t embellish these memories as a form of self preservation. I certainly knew her before her disease had really taken a hold of her. In some ways that's really wonderful, and in some ways that has made it harder.
She's a human being, and unless you're a total sociopath, you do have the capacity for being good and being bad and being everything in between. It would be so easy to vilify her and just say that she's been horrible to me, but I don't have resentment towards her. I really, really don't. There have been times where I've been angry, and that's been a difficult thing to navigate. When you're angry with an addict, you're angry with a sick person, and that feels really wrong. You're not allowed to be mad at the sick person because they need help. It leaves you in this weird space where you have a lot of anger that you end up shoving away and ignoring. It's been really powerful for me to move through a lot of that, but I haven't held on to it. It still comes up. I have moments where I get really angry, but they all keep cycling through, right? I mean, it's not like you sign your certificate of completing the stages of grief and then you're like “all right, moving on!”
Why a one-woman show to tell this story? Why not a novel or a memoir or an essay? How did it come out this way?
I'm laughing because I still can't believe I'm doing this! I'm not an actor, and though I had a career as a dancer in my 20s, that never required me to speak. I was always sort of comfortably in the background and moving my body and not not using my voice. God, there's so much I can say about this! I was doing so much revolving around this. I had been writing a lot of essays that I wanted to put into a memoir, and I had been writing a novel that was sort of a sci-fi fictionalized version of my life. I'd been doing a lot of work to feel comfortable and safe, using my voice, because as a woman, as the daughter of an alcoholic, as a dancer who was never allowed to speak up, I had created this blockage over the years. The idea of a one-woman show started as this little whisper inside of me. And then it got louder. It just kept getting louder.
In conjunction with me wanting to use my voice, a big part of it was also that I had control. When it comes to writing, I'm like “Please someone publish me. Please someone be my agent. Please someone give me permission to put this work out into the world.” And there wasn't a lot of gatekeeping with this. I could have full control. Once I had a director who was on board, who believed in it, I was like, “Okay, well, then we can do this, and it's New York City, and we can find a little black box venue, and we could do this anywhere. We could do this in the in the fucking park, if we wanted to.” Having that agency, over the work and over putting it out there, is why it ended up being a one-woman show. I would have much rather this been a book that I could publish about my mother, where I could not have to get up in front of an audience and not have to convince people to come and sell the tickets.
I think this is just the beginning of what will ultimately evolve to become beyond a one-woman show. I would love for it to evolve to a place where I'm not performing it on stage by myself, because it's really scary.
I love how you use your therapist Andrea as a storytelling tool in the show. Tell me more about how you thought to do that?
There are so many different ways you could do a one-person show, I guess. I knew I didn't want to play a bunch of different characters – my background isn't in acting, and that just didn't feel natural to me. Taking a storyteller approach felt really natural because I'm a writer. But Andrea really has been such a big part of all of this healing, and there are so many moments where I wanted to reference things that she had said to me. It made sense to introduce her as a character and to keep referring back to her.
Maybe even subconsciously for me, it gave me a sense of safety on the stage where I felt like Andrea has got my back. And I also have my mom, she's there with me too. There are moments in the show where I look to her photo to anchor me and to make me feel like I'm not up there totally alone.
Andrea is amazing. When I found Andrea, I was 29, and I just had hit a point where I was like, I can't do this anymore by myself. She was the first therapist I had a phone call with, and I swear it was the universe aligning for me, because I don't think I had it in me to go through a bunch of different people that didn't work out. I needed to just meet my person and feel safe with her and trust her. And I did it. It's been over five years, and I constantly remark at the fact that she's been such a great fit for me.
You were a professional dancer, and there is a dance sequence in the show to convey your sadness. How did you decide to do that? I was blown away by that.
Thank you! So my director and I met 15 years ago through dance. Actually, my first ever professional dance job was with him, and he's still dancing. He's in “Hamilton,” and he’s amazing. But we had said from the very beginning that we didn't want to include dance, especially for me. I've really been trying to move away from that part of my life and step into this new identity as a writer, which has been a huge process, and a whole separate grieving process as well. We can grieve so many things, not just people. Then about maybe three weeks before my show in New York, I had this moment, this epiphany, where I even pulled out my phone and wrote it in my notes. The way that dance affects people is so powerful. I forget that a lot because it was my world for so long. As with anything, you become a bit jaded when that's what you're surrounded by. But there's a reason why people love dance, and I think it's because it speaks to these parts of us that we don't have language for with words. All of a sudden it dawned on me that it would be a huge disservice to not utilize that, if not for my sake, then for the audience's sake. I think they needed that moment where they could breathe and not have me talking at them. The dance is during the depression scene, and I realized that there was no way to articulate it, and the only way was going to be through movement. Why not move if it's a tool that I've got in my belt. But yeah, it came about pretty late in the game.
You know, I think that there's something so powerful, and it's not even because I'm a dancer. We all have these bodies that we live inside of, that we are constantly moving through the world in, and that is a form of dance. We're constantly dancing in the same way that we're constantly improvising. When you think about it, that's all we're doing right now, we are improvising this conversation. It's not just using our voices to communicate.
You're taking “Cheers Mom” to the famed Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer. That's so exciting! You alluded to this a little bit, but what else do you have planned for “Cheers Mom”?
Edinburgh is going to be big. It's going to be 17 shows in, like, 19 days. It wasn't something I was planning on doing. I decided to do it a bit last minute, as I seem to do with a lot of things. After my LA run, I just felt really motivated and really encouraged, and it felt important for me to continue to share this story. But it's not the summit. I hope Edinburgh will lead to more things, the evolution of the show. Maybe that means the show not continuing to be a one-woman show. Maybe it becomes a play. Maybe it becomes a series.
I do have pretty lofty ambitions for the show, but I think that's a hard thing to admit sometimes. It can feel so egotistical. But ever since I've started to view myself as a vessel for this story, I feel really comfortable and safe sharing those ambitions, because I know that it's really not about me. There are so many things out in the world that are shared from the alcoholic's perspective, in media and TV and film and books, and even then, I don't think they always get it right. It's often romanticized in a weird way. A big reason I made this show was because I didn't see anything that was reflecting back my own experience, and I wanted to make something for people like me to be able to go “Yes, that's it.”
Thank you, Candice, for this conversation! I’ll be seeing “Cheers Mom” again this May and can’t wait to see Candice take the stage again. You can follow her on Instagram at @candypantz. And you should definitely follow her dog on Instagram (seriously, he’s amazing) @instamirf.
Speaking of women taking the stage…
I saw Sharon Van Etten & the Attachment Theory in Brooklyn last week – great show. She rocked, and that voice of hers could melt steel. But cooler than that was that she not only called out and thanked each member of her band, she went on to thank, by name, so many others who contribute to her tour, including the bus driver, the lighting director, and so many others. I haven’t seen that at a concert before, and I loved it. It takes a village…
I was so sad to read about Jill Sobule dying in a house fire last week. I saw her show, “F*ck 7th Grade,” on November 7 last year, two days after the election. At the time, I wasn’t in the mood to go to a show, but I ended up being so glad I did. She brought so much energy and love and care to the stage. RIP.