"My mother felt it was time that I had some parental control, so I went off to America and went to New York"
About this Quote
Parental control, in Diane Cilento's telling, doesn’t arrive as rules or supervision. It arrives as an ocean. The joke lands because it flips the expected direction of discipline: instead of parents tightening the leash, the parent effectively cuts it and calls that management. “Some parental control” becomes a euphemism for enforced distance, a way to restore order by removing the problem from the room.
As an actress with a public life in a mid-century culture that loved grooming women into presentable narratives, Cilento’s line reads like a tiny act of rebellion. She gives you the family drama in a single dry pivot: the mother’s authority is real, but it’s exercised through a strategy that sounds suspiciously like exile dressed up as opportunity. The phrase “went off to America” carries a whole period’s mythology - America as reinvention, as escape hatch, as glamorous disciplinary school for the ambitious. Then she narrows it to “New York,” the city that functions in the cultural imagination as both finishing school and pressure cooker. If you’re going to be “controlled,” you may as well be controlled by the most chaotic place available.
The subtext is class and reputation management. A daughter with momentum (or mess) is steered into a destination that’s respectable to mention and far enough away to stop being a daily negotiation. Cilento makes it funny because humor is how you admit the sting without sounding wounded: she’s telling you she was managed, not protected, and she’s still smart enough to narrate the management on her own terms.
As an actress with a public life in a mid-century culture that loved grooming women into presentable narratives, Cilento’s line reads like a tiny act of rebellion. She gives you the family drama in a single dry pivot: the mother’s authority is real, but it’s exercised through a strategy that sounds suspiciously like exile dressed up as opportunity. The phrase “went off to America” carries a whole period’s mythology - America as reinvention, as escape hatch, as glamorous disciplinary school for the ambitious. Then she narrows it to “New York,” the city that functions in the cultural imagination as both finishing school and pressure cooker. If you’re going to be “controlled,” you may as well be controlled by the most chaotic place available.
The subtext is class and reputation management. A daughter with momentum (or mess) is steered into a destination that’s respectable to mention and far enough away to stop being a daily negotiation. Cilento makes it funny because humor is how you admit the sting without sounding wounded: she’s telling you she was managed, not protected, and she’s still smart enough to narrate the management on her own terms.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mother |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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