Maria Bello’s new book was inspired by her hugely popular Modern Love column for The New York Times.NEVILLE ELDER/The Globe and Mail
Upstairs in the Bowery Hotel in New York, Maria Bello prepares to be photographed. The room is cavernous and louche, and the light streams through one of the tall back windows, illuminating a spot on the old, dark wooden floor. She moves into it, shakes her head a bit to allow her hair to fall loosely around her face, and looks into the camera as if it were the gaze of a long-lost lover.
She stands there in an unprepossessing manner, her arms by her side, casual. It's not glamour that the 48-year-old exudes, but rather a sense of clarity. Here I am, she seems to be saying. Like me or not, I don't care. The publication of her first book, Whatever… Love is Love, Questioning the Labels We Give Ourselves, has thrust her – and her ideas about motherhood and the modern family – into a different kind of spotlight than the one she is accustomed to as an actress who has appeared on television (ER, Law & Order: SVU, Prime Suspect) and in films (A History of Violence, Payback).
In November, 2013, The New York Times published an essay Bello wrote for the paper's Modern Love column, which went viral, becoming one of the 10 most popular to appear. In it, she described how her son, Jackson, then 12, asked about her romantic life. Nervously, she told him: She was involved with a woman, Clare Munn, someone Jackson knew as his godmother. "Whatever, Mom. Love is love," he replied.
"And that whole 'whatever, love is love' thing woke me up … partly because I saw that it really didn't matter to him," she tells me when we're seated together in the hotel lobby. Situated on the Lower East Side, the Bowery, once a place to be avoided at night, has the atmosphere of a baron's secret hideaway with low, worn leather chairs, antiques and a wide open fireplace you can imagine a piglet roasting in on a spit. The lobby is filled with creative types, some meeting to discuss ideas, others staring into the screens of their laptops as if awaiting divine inspiration.
Bello is right at home. She always stays here when she travels to New York from her home in Venice, Calif., she explains as she plops herself down in a comfy chair and orders a huge dish of chicken, cauliflower and spinach. Dressed in leather pants, a loose white blouse and a cotton vest that's belted, she looks like an adult Peter Pan, ready for an adventure in her chunky short boots.
It's not until she starts talking that she becomes a sort of cool California girl, one who has clearly had her share of therapy, spiritual investigation, lovers, quacky healers and famous mentors such as the late Hollywood producer, John Calley. (His greatest insight about the secret of life was that there isn't one. You just have to be yourself and get on with it.)
"One of the most important things for Jackson is to know that everything changes," she explains when asked how she creates security for her son as a single mother. "For me, when I live in the questions of life, it is the most mindful I am, the most joyful, the most loving; when I can stay in that place; when I don't have to fight for something to stay the same. And that's what I want my son to know, too."
She and her ex, Dan McDermott, a writer and producer, have remained friends. "When we broke up when Jack was 2. we always said that our son is first no matter what and we always continued to be a family. Not that we didn't fight. Not that we don't disagree. We don't live in the same house. Still, we are over at his place a lot. And he comes to us. He has a new girlfriend we all love, who is part of the modern family. So Jackson saw that just because you don't live together doesn't mean you don't love each other."
Her book has some delightfully naughty bits. For years, she had a Prince Charming Syndrome, expecting a man to complete her or to fix her and make her dream come true. She describes a few of these men, without naming famous names, including Prince Charmingly Unconscious, who would only express his love for her when he was on Vicodin. Another one she names Prince Bad Charming confessed his love of threesomes the night he met her. But then he told her she was the only woman with whom he felt both a sexual and spiritual connection. She was sure he was The One. But after several hot make-out sessions and the revelation he already had a girlfriend, they had brief, bad sex.
And then there's the actor, a married man, she had an affair with, pieces of whose cloying correspondence – including his tendency to call her "sweet girl" – she puts in her book. Years after they ended their affair, she watched him in a movie and realized that he had a repertoire of looks and glances that he used in his private life as well as on film. "Oh, I cringe for sure," she blurts in a gale of laughter now. "I was 'Oh my God!' I literally was a character in his play – and he was a character in mine. But I would never say that I regret the relationship or that he was a bad person."
She is concerned about her son reading those parts – he has been too busy with school and soccer to read her book yet – but she also forgives herself for a youth she describes as "neurotic."
"I find it universal what I was doing back then looking for love. And this book sort of turns all that on its head. We all have this vision of what great passion and love is. And in the end, you realize it's not so much about that vision. It's different for everybody, but the idealized version of it is not the way it goes for most people."
Before the book was published, she told her son there were things he might find out about her that he didn't know. One was that she is bipolar. He asked why she hadn't told him before. "I thought you were too young to understand," she recalls telling him. "It's nothing to be ashamed of," her son said, relating the diagnosis to that of friends who have ADHD and need to take medication. "This generation are so much more educated than we were about these things," Bello explains.
"I'm proud of my family so I want to tell the world," she says when asked if it irks her that she and Munn, a social activist and entrepreneur she has known for five years, have garnered more attention as a couple because they're both women. "The attention is not a matter of having a thick skin. I'm so inspired by this younger generation. I didn't realize it at the time [writing the Modern Love column] how many untraditional families and partnerships were out there. They don't have a label to define the structure of their relationships. The millennials are saying, 'The tide is changing. Catch up to it.' I haven't felt any negative reaction from people, from Hollywood or the world in general."
Bello is not like you and me, even though she looks as though she could be. Growing up in Philadelphia, one of four children in a family headed by an alcoholic, bipolar father who once chased them through the backyard with a gun, she has transcended her struggles in a way few do. She has forgiven those who hurt her, explaining that in her childhood home, "there was an underbelly of love I can't explain." The family remains close.
"Maybe it's magical thinking. That could sound a little woo-woo. But I am grounded in a deep faith in love. That's what I call God."
She has accepted her imperfection, especially in her role as a mother. "It's the biggest struggle, the good mommy/bad mommy syndrome," she acknowledges. "That child is the person I love the most and I want to do it right. But what is doing it right? I happen to have a child who asks questions and who has helped me grow and helped me to be more authentic. Maybe I'm just the perfect Mom for him."