Mother’s Day is approaching and The Irish Times today ran a piece by literary correspondent Eileen Battersby.

In “Eileen Battersby picks her favorite fictional mums for Mother’s Day,” the journalist names John Steinbeck’s Ma Joad (The Grapes of Wrath) as one of her favorites. She also cites moms who appeared in fiction by James Stephen, Virginia Woolf, Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, Cynthia Ozick, Thomas Wolfe, Tim Winton, Paul Smith, Toni Morrison, Harriette Arrow, William Maxwell, Bertolt Brecht, Sun-Mi Hwang, and John Updike.

Which mom could it possible be from the Updike canon, you wonder? Certainly not Ma Springer or Harry’s mom, and of course Janice is a big no. The mothers from The Witches of Eastwick were hardly moms at all. The mom from Of the Farm? Close.

Battersby admires the mother remembered in Updike’s prize-winning short story, “A Sandstone Farmhouse,” which was republished in The Afterlife and Other Stories by John Updike (1995).

“In this wonderful story, among his finest, the great Updike describes a middle-aged man, Joey, remembering his mother at various stages of her life. It is a story about his mother, and about every mother, because every mother was also once a very different person. At the heart of the story is the mother’s determination to move her family, her parents as well as her son, to the family home she set out to restore. It is about how a mother returned to her family home and sustained it was the place where both her vital years and her old age were spent.”

Pictured is Ma Joad from John Ford’s film version of Steinbeck’s Dustbowl novel, who gets one of the film’s best lines:  “Rich fellas come up an’ they die, an’ their kids ain’t no good an’ they die out. But we keep a’comin’. We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out; they can’t like us. We’ll go on forever, Pa, ’cause we’re the people.”