A NPR Best Book of the Year
A Slate Best Book of the Year
"Tillman has in this slim memoir of the final years of her mother’s life zeroed in on an underrepresented facet of the universal contract: our queasy anxiety that the relationship might, in the end, be transactional . . . MOTHERCARE is practical, not sentimental. It flirts with being analytical. It’s even useful, as Tillman runs through her and her sisters’ travails dealing with doctors and home care. Though it is memoir and not a novel, only Tillman the novelist could have produced it." —Jeremy M. Davies, The New York Times Book Review
"What happens when the parent-child relationship is inverted? Tillman, a novelist and critic, cared for her mother as she neared death, and in this book she captures her shifting feelings and responsibilities in unsparing detail." —The New York Times
"MOTHERCARE represents an investigation of the question of duty, or conscience, what we owe or want to provide to the people in our lives . . . For a reader, there’s something bracing about Tillman’s honesty, which transforms MOTHERCARE from a record or a logbook into a work of art." —David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
"A masterfully-wrought story of ambivalence that is both heartbreaking and exasperating . . . [A] stunning story of caregiving." —Elissa Altman, The Boston Globe
"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, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
"The prose of MOTHERCARE is in line with Tillman’s criticism and novels: chatty, quick and devoid of pretentiousness. Her sentences are simple and stuffed with blunt declarations. The pace is fast—Tillman is constantly moving, letting her mind wander and join dots haphazardly. As she explores the intricacies of care, the failures of doctors, the rituals of death and the web of resentments, one wishes Tillman would slow down and zero in on a topic for longer. Yet this unrestrained quality of Tillman’s work is also her greatest strength. She lets it all out, no matter how uncomfortable or miserable, in order to leave ugliness and indignity behind." —Isabella Trimboli, The Saturday Paper
"As Tillman expresses at the outset, each story of caregiving will be defined by the particulars: the medical conditions, the geography, the insurance, the budget, and the people involved, with their pasts and predispositions. Caring for her mother showed Tillman how much she herself had wanted to be cared for, how hard it is to share the burden with anyone else . . . Caring reveals, too, the threadbare nature of the support networks we have to cobble together when, predictably, inevitably, someone needs care; in this country, family obligations remain intensely personal. It is the reason, perhaps, why these common problems remains so uncommonly discussed." —Anna Altman, The New Republic
"Electrifying." —Vulture, A Best Book of the Year
"The book’s great service is to disentangle love from care, or at least complicate their relationship—a radical proposition for women especially . . . As Tillman shows, caregiving is not intrinsically virtuous, a sacred act to be reified; sometimes it is simply necessity." —Kate Wolf, N+1
"Tillman captures such complexities around the human condition without sentimentality and, as always, makes vital our deepest flaws—she is as unsparing of her mother as she is herself, and is incredibly frank about loving and living with a difficult parent. Realistic and imbued with her familiar candour, I’m grateful for the strength and presence she packs on the page." —Anna Cafolla, The Face
"Lynne Tillman has a way of perceiving and writing that’s both nuanced and incisive." —Anne Yoder, The Millions, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year
“Both a treatise on the ‘grueling obligation’ of caregiving and an ineffectual American healthcare system, as well as the frank recounting of loving and living with a difficult parent, MOTHERCARE feels particularly apt for an era in which caregivers are more burnt than out than ever (or, perhaps more accurately, an era in which we’re finally paying attention." —Eliza Smith, A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year
"Unflinching . . . It offers an unsparing account of the American health-care system and a starkly unsentimental portrait of the mechanics of looking after a person who is dying very slowly. Drawing on skills she’s honed as a novelist and cultural critic, she crafts an account at once formally restrained and emotionally weighty. The result is a distinctive and, in Hardwick’s terms, useful demolition of the sentimentally larded stories our culture tends to tell about families and illness. . . With economy and lacerating brio, Tillman makes you feel the family’s despair and frustration, and captures the messy reality of medical care . . . MOTHERCARE is an invigorating page-turner of a book, propelled by Tillman’s wit and incisiveness . . . An urgent piece of nonfiction." —Meghan O'Rourke, Bookforum
"[An] unvarnished, bracing, at times funny memoir." —Booklist
"An unsparing and heart-wrenching exploration of serious illness and its impact on everyone it touches." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Discerning . . . Tillman’s frank insights on love and loss are cannily original." —Publishers Weekly
"MOTHERCARE is a close examination of the American healthcare system, the constraints of family, and the complexities of care. Tillman’s writing is devastating—unsentimental, honest, full of sharp intelligence, and irrepressible wit. MOTHERCARE resonates." —Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies
06/06/2022
In this discerning if uneven work, novelist and critic Tillman (Men and Apparitions) reckons with the equivocations and guilt she weathered while caring for her ailing mother at the end of her life. Recalling the 11 years she and her sisters spent tending to their mother (referred to as “Mother” here) after she was diagnosed in 1994 with a rare condition that caused memory loss, Tillman suggests that “keeping her alive was done generously, but not selflessly, and also as a grueling obligation.” As she traces Mother’s decline, Tillman details her frustrations with a medical community unable to properly handle her mother’s unusual case, including an “arrogant neurologist” and a “lunatic” caregiver who’s later fired for being “utterly ineffective.” Though the intellectual rigor and analysis that mark Tillman’s criticism are evident, they often lend a dispassionate distance to her observations, even as intimate details are shared. Two recurring themes lend propulsive force to the book: Mother’s love for an abandoned cat, and a late-in-life declaration to her daughter that “if I had wanted to be, I would have been a better writer than you.” It’s this “unvarnished truth” that gives the work its emotional texture, underscoring the complicated binds that make up families. Despite being something of a mixed bag, Tillman’s frank insights on love and loss are cannily original. (Aug.)
03/01/2022
Currently president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate, Leahy gives us a sweeping view of U.S. politics as he tells his story as the country's longest-serving senator in The Road Taken (75,000-copy first printing). A leading light in film and television, also featured in four Broadway shows, Lewis (The Mother of Black Hollywood) recounts personal experiences encapsulating the vagaries of modern life while highlighting what she's learned about Walking in My Joy (125,00-copy first printing). In Deer Creek Drive, AWP Award-winning novelist/memoirist Lowry recalls the particularly vicious 1948 murder of society matron Idella Thompson near where she grew up in the solidly Jim Crow Mississippi Delta, with neighbors protesting the conviction of Thompson's daughter even though her claims about a fleeing Black man proved spurious. Proclaiming I'm Glad My Mom Died, actor/director McCurdy relates what it was like to be a child star (iCarly) wrestling with an eating disorder, addiction, and a controlling and aggressively ambitious mother (75,000-copy first printing). In a memoir rejecting the standard resilience trope, Nietfeld chronicles traversing a childhood encompassing a mother who put her on antipsychotics, icy foster care, Adderall addiction, and homelessness to arrive at Harvard, Big Tech, and Acceptance—crucially, of herself. Award-winning critic/novelist Tillman relates a life taken over by Mothercare after her mother was diagnosed with Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (after several wrong assumptions), leading to seven surgeries, memory loss, and total dependence on her daughters.
★ 2022-03-22
An extended essay plumbs the effects of aging and illness on patient and caregivers alike.
“Mother was a smart, resourceful, attractive, tactless, competitive, and practical person.” Novelist and critic Tillman emphasizes these qualities of her mother’s to convey the shock she felt when, in 1995, she returned from a trip abroad to find her 86-year-old mother unusually passive and disheveled. After several tests, one doctor offered a diagnosis of normal pressure hydrocephalus, a condition virtually unknown then—and one that remains poorly understood today: “700,000 people in the United States are supposed to have hydrocephalus, but only 20 percent have been correctly diagnosed.” Tillman’s mother had a shunt implanted to drain excessive fluid from her ventricles. However, though this treatment is common and effective, it isn’t perfect; over 10 years, she would receive seven revisions. Tillman never shies away from the difficult realities of her mother’s illness nor from the fact that her mother was a harsh and narcissistic person all her life. She painstakingly catalogs the numerous challenges of illness, not only for the patient, but also for those around her, including the frustrations of finding good or even adequate care. Doctors and hospitals could be indifferent or unhelpful, particularly because her mother was elderly, and “the elderly especially are seen as dead weight to the medical industry.” Some of the most affecting passages are about caregivers, one of whom the family employed for a decade. Most often women of color and frequently undocumented, these women were crucial to her mother’s care and allowed her to maintain some measure of her own freedom, but their role, integral to the family’s functioning and yet still outsiders, proved difficult to navigate. Tillman’s detailed account will be enlightening to readers who, like her, had no idea how horrible these processes could be until she cared for someone who was sick and comforting to those who see themselves represented in such struggles.
An unsparing and heart-wrenching exploration of serious illness and its impact on everyone it touches.
