Novelist details caring for ill mom
“Death was a longtime fascination,” novelist Lynne Tillman writes in “Mothercare,” her new memoir. At age 5, decades before the contours of a heartbreaking family illness became visible, she asked her father to bury her in a coffin. She wanted her blanket with her, “so I wouldn’t be cold if I woke up dead.”
More than 40 years later, in 1994, those contours became more pronounced. Tillman “learned what I never wanted to know” when her mother, Sophie, showed signs of serious decline. The 11 years Tillman and her two sisters devoted to caring for her are the focus of this book.
Neurologists disagreed on a diagnosis until one doctor identified the correct cause: normal pressure hydrocephalus, a rare condition that places too much fluid on the patient’s brain. Until Sophie’s 2006 death, Tillman and her sisters helped Sophie through various medical procedures described in unstinting detail, from shunts that sometimes clogged to staffers who forgot Sophie and left her alone on a gurney in a hospital corridor.
Tillman unleashes a lot of anger in this book, much of it directed at medical professionals. Although she acknowledges that doctors have a tough job, she castigates people like the “arrogant” head of neurology whose misdiagnosis adversely affected Sophie’s condition, the “useless” geriatric consultant, or the “incompetent and indifferent” staff at a hospital’s luxury wing.
Tillman also has choice comments about Sophie. From age 6, “I had disliked my mother,” and admits she “never felt guilty” about her conflicted feelings during Sophie’s illness — obliged to care for her mother yet wanting time to write.
Photos that appear throughout the book add little and sometimes come across as insensitive. For the most part, however, this is a well-written, memorably unsentimental account of one family’s medical struggles and the ill feelings they released. Tillman’s goal was to tell a “cautionary tale” that “may be helpful, informative, consoling or upsetting.” She was right on all counts. — Michael Magras, Minneapolis Star Tribune
Memoir is a formulaic genre.
A well-told one reassembles the oddshaped pieces of human experience and fits them into a neat mosaic, in which every event contributes to the picture. And yet, life is messy and inherently unpredictable. It doesn’t
conform to narrative archetypes.
Jesse Ball’s “Autoportrait” reckons with this problem by discarding meaning-making. In one long, unbroken paragraph, he recounts events from his life as they occur to him. Weighty events butt up against quotidiana. He lists how many drugs he did at once, only to slide into a childhood account of imitating his brother a few sentences later. The effect is to make everything equally important and equally unimportant.
The style here is direct, frank. We learn about unflattering aspects of Ball’s personality, such as his “horrendous temper,” as well as the great extent to which he includes his mother in his life. We learn of his many surgeries, his aversion to sunlight, and the time he belly-flopped off a cliff in Mallorca. Reading the book is similar to spending all night talking with a friend, as a conversation of such intimacy may mean you learn more than you want.
“Autoportrait” is an antidote to a genre that has become overly codified. Many writers are disrupting the memoir form, but often the shortest route to the bestseller list is by following a familiar arc.
Ball provides an authentic look at what life is really like and offers the reader a way to encounter life outside the parameters that society, and narrative convention, would impose on it. If everything is equally important, then we must live life moment to moment, as if each portion of our day has the same opportunity for value. Or, as Ball puts it, “the world is horrible; it is also cause for ecstasy.”