Who wants to read a book about something that no one wants to think about? Lynne Tillman's biting honesty broke my heart and opened my mind in this heartbreaker, in which she details what it's like taking care of her mother at the end of her life and explores what their relationship has meant to her. It's short, and that's a good thing, because god does it hurt.

Do you know what to do if your parent or another older loved one begins to decline physically and cognitively? The type of doctor(s) you might take them to for a diagnosis? Or what to do if there is no confirmation among varied doctors about the diagnosis? What about Medicare and Medicaid coverage? Who will help you navigate funding for their care and wait on hold for the never-ending series of calls? If you have siblings, cousins, or paid caregivers involved, how might you best share the responsibilities of long-term care so that no single one of you bears the potential stress and isolation on their own?

In the mid-1990s Tillman and her two sisters began an eleven-year journey of care for their widowed mother. Tillman explores these questions and more in Mothercare (Soft Skull Press, 2022) her memoir/cultural commentary on the United States health care system, and the challenges older adults, and often their “sandwich generation” kids or grandkids, tackle unaware. As Tillman and her two sisters experienced during their eleven-year journey of care for their mother, beginning in the mid-1990s, the handbook for elder care is often cobbled together with paperclips, string, and the luck of finding generous health and community care professionals along the way.

Readers of Amy Bloom, Delia Ephron, Katherine May, Meghan O’ Rourke might enjoy!

Thank you to NetGalley, Soft Skull Press, and Lynn Tillman for the eARC.

With a mother experiencing Stage 4 cancer and a comparison to Joan Didion in the description, I knew I wanted to read this book.

Colm Toiban comments on her ability to notice things, and I will agree with that--the elements Tillman weaves in as she observes her mother's slow descent are striking, and I appreciated them.

But there were two nagging elements that repelled me from this book:

Her writing style is not one that aligns with what appeals to me. I recognize that she is a member of a literary trend and that she does well with that trend: very stripped down observations, purposeful comma splices, a very detached voice. But I yearned for details I knew she wouldn't--and perhaps, because of her style, couldn't--provide. We were given no real sensory details, no figurative language. This isn't wrong, by any means, but it is not a style of writing I seek out,

The other element is, perhaps, what will appeal to other readers. She is contradictory, but not in a way that felt incredibly aware. She writes of this Mother character, whom she admits to having stopped liking when she was six and was relieved to see finally die, but she also calls herself a good daughter for caring for her. She admits her other New York sister did more work, but she also speaks of how much she sacrificed, how much her mother took from her. I am by no means judging anyone who stops liking her mother at a young age or feels a freedom after she passes--we all experience family differently, and eleven years is an awfully long time to fight for someone through paperwork and caregivers and hospital visits and the litany of medications her mother had to take was stunning--this isn't my qualm. I think, instead, it's a kind of self-righteous tone that made me think that this woman would have been a similarly narcissistic figure in her own children's lives if she had children.

More contradictions are rooted in the ways in which she looks at the caretakers who drift in and out of her mother's life and the one who remains for a decade. She is unkind in her depictions of all of them. We get reminders of the fraught lives they lead: lack of documentation, minimum wage, families left behind so they can send money home. We also get a list of the generosities her family provides: a computer from her sister, paying for one caregiver's daughter's wedding. But these women are also called nuts and several passages include descriptions of how they stole, but she looked the other way because of how desperate she was for their care. They are terrible and yet they did the thing the author was unwilling to do, which was care for an elderly woman with many serious ailments. For minimum wage.

And: her mother's knitting instructor seemed to adore her, but she did not check in with the sisters after the funeral, so she was dishonest.

These contradictions, as they built up, felt frustrating rather than relieving.

I received an advance ARC of this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I also want to not that the version sent to my Kindle app was similar to another user's note here: the words had no spaces between them and there were weird breaks, etc. I read it instead on my phone, where I downloaded it directly on the NetGalley app.

I wanted very much to read Tillman's memoir of caring for her ailing mother over the course of a decade, and being with her at her death. Unfortunately, the eARC provided by NetGalley was one continuous run-on sentence. There were no spaces between words and punctuation was sparse. I hope to read this and offer a more complete review when it is released in book form.

This is a beautifully written account of taking care of one's mother in old age and infirmity. I'd easily recommend it to anyone who has older parents. It's realistic, useful, and brutally honest. It also has an even tone to it and reads very smoothly. As someone who went through this same journey, also in New York City, all of it rang true to me.