In 1994, Lynne Tillman’s 87-year old mother Sophie was diagnosed with Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH), an abnormal accumulation of fluid throughout the brain and upper spinal column. For 11 years, Tillman and her two sisters, supported by live-in caregivers, watched over Sophie in her Manhattan apartment, attending her medical appointments and handling her affairs. Now, 17 years after her mother’s death, Tillman has produced a memoir of those years. I wondered why. The self-crediting epiphanies found in most memoirs don’t comport with Tillman’s mode. “She is not here to imitate reality,” remarked Lucy Ives about “Madame Realism,” a stand-in character for Tillman in some of her stories. “She’s here to explain to us how the related fictional affordances of narrative and point of view function.”
Nevertheless, many of the typical descriptors of memoir – “raw,” “touching,” “consoling,” “devastating” – apply to Mothercare, but perhaps not in the usual way. This is a memoir about having had to do what one doesn’t want to do. “I performed the good daughter, my heart wasn’t in it, my conscience was. All of us sisters were goaded by conscience. That’s not a terrible thing,” she writes. The final bit, “That’s not a terrible thing,” comes off as something not believed in full. Mother “had several illusions about herself, including that she was perfect,” Tillman says in one of her swift dismissals. But NPH deflated Mother’s “unflappable narcissism,” leaving Tillman plus two siblings to nurse their mother without the orienting jabs of her disparagements.
In Tillman’s story “But There’s A Family Resemblance,” the narrator says, “After people die, my mother put it, all that remains are photographs, that’s why we take them. Then she said to me, more sharply, Your interest in the family photographs is morbid, the photos, videos, you’re holding on to your childhood, it’s sick. I ignored her and still do, even though she’s dead. Often when people die, you reconsider their statements. I just look at their pictures.” The mordancy is almost the whole show here – tone is the residue of experience. And so, when a reviewer claims that in Mothercare Tillman is writing against her tendencies and preferences, I have to disagree. Tone is the sound of family cohesion as the parts abrade on each other. Tillman doesn’t tell the tale of her mother’s demise “to imitate reality,” as Ives noted about Madame Realism.
“I didn’t grieve for Mother or mourn her,” she recalls. “I was stunned with relief and deadened by exhaustion, inducing lightheadedness, not giddiness. The pressure of eleven years, Mother, was gone, dead like her. But it, that psychic load, took more time to dissipate.” Did it dissipate? If yes, then what are we listening to? I think in the intervening 17 years since Sophie died (Tillman doesn’t find it necessary to state her sisters’ names – “the New York sister” suffices for her), these family materials have attained the nature of her fictional materials in which attitude is the main attraction.
I gave my copy of Mothercare to my oldest daughter who practices oncological “survivorship” at a Boston hospital. On Friday, September 2, she and I and my wife and two other daughters sat at my mother’s hospice bedside. “I don’t get why she’s still cranking about the doctors she didn’t like,” my daughter said. I hypothesized that those bad doctors, like Mother, are portrayed as arrogantly self-assured – and the good doctors, like Tillman, are portrayed as attending with cool skillfulness to what is actual (even if Dr. A would prefer to be on the golf course). They have better information, unaffected by stubborn prejudices. Stanley Plumly once said that “autobiography is the means by which archetypes are renewed,” so maybe writing Mothercare presented Tillman with an opportunity to reanimate some of her essential, disquieting psychic figures. And as for why it took 17 years for the narrative to emerge, maybe that’s because for a certain type of artist, the unexpressed requires long resistance.
My mother died at 4:01 pm. I had been solely responsible for her care and affairs since my father died in 2012. What Tillman says about being “stunned with relief and deadened by exhaustion” is exactly what I have felt in the days since. Cortisol is the body’s primary stress hormone; when the stress is over, the ebbing of cortisol allows ease and respite. I, too, preferred to be at my desk or taking care of my own body on some of those days when I served my mother, who always let you know she was suffering from something or other, physical or otherwise, and who ran low on emotional intelligence. I picked up Mothercare to read because of the last word in its subtitle: “On obligation, love, death, and ambivalence.” I admire and appreciate this narrative for its deficits (which are my own) — and its insights, sometimes uncannily sharp, into the nature of a family’s and caregiver’s psyche:
“I will say, without caution, when a parent becomes dependent, a family is inundated with surprising, bewildering, and constant, complicated issues. Never-before-faced issues. It will be shocked by the magnitude and mystery and consequence of this new and old fact of life. Unforeseeable and nasty accidents and diagnoses present themselves, and families may do research or react impulsively, they may deliberate or become numb with trepidation. Often families are eviscerated by their differences. Often only one child cares for the parent, and all burdens rest on them. But when several adults are in charge, a hell of resentments and conflicts can overwhelm functioning.”
[Published by Soft Skull Press on August 2, 2022, 176 pages, $23.00 hardcover]
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Eduardo Halfon returned to Guatamala in 1993 after living and attending university in the U.S. for ten years. His Lebanese-born Jewish grandfather and family had emigrated to Central America in 1917. It is said that the Guatamala’s civil war, fought between leftist rebels and the militarist government, concluded in 1996 through an agreement brokered by the United Nations. But the state’s intimidation of writers and journalists, and all those perceived to be enemies, has continued. Halfon has spoken about how he was followed and threatened in his own house after his first novel was published in 2004. In his latest “literary project,” Canción (neither he nor his publisher calls it a memoir or novel), he considers the fragments of memory that comprise the story of the kidnapping of his grandfather in 1967, four years before Halfon’s birth.
Although Halfon wants us to feel the grip of history on our necks, his books aren’t pronunciamentos disguised as stories. His interest lies in how the remnants of family history, its anecdotes and remaining artifacts, influence one’s identity and manner of thought. It is a world of both after-effects and recurring conditions. The stabilizing locus of Canción, its present moment, is a bar in Guatamala City where Halfon meets a woman who has information about the earlier kidnapping. The narrative darts between various times, starting with Halfon’s appearance at a Lebanese writer’s conference in Tokyo (where his credentials as a Lebanese writer are questioned), then on to initial memories of his youth, including an episode in which soldiers barge into his grandfather’s house, apparently to demand money:
“Nobody said a word. Nobody moved. The adults were attempting to calm the children, stroking them and whispering to them, while also attempting to determine what was going on, what so many soldiers wanted with my grandfather, whose were the strident, intrusive voices we now heard coming from all over the house. Some from the huge foyer. Others, more muted, from the study. Others mixed in with wheezing from the stairs and second floor. Others from the kitchen or the backyard. I remember thinking that I wanted to be deaf. “
The memory of that home invasion leads to Canción – a man who was involved in that event as well as the kidnapping – and more. He lingers in the narrative’s atmosphere like a fog, a perennial menace whose violent work isn’t quite finished. Along the way, Halfon touches on the sinister presence of the Kaibiles, the elite commandos of the army, perpetrators of the Mayan genocide.
The psychic hyperactivity of Halfon’s narrator is mediated by the lucidity and stark elegance of his prose. Halfon can linger and expand on a detail, or step to the side for a lyrical rumination. At its core, Halfon’s work is elegiac, a reach toward times fading out. But it speaks out of the restive present and the instinctive effort to consider this, consider that. In short, Canción portrays the surprises the mind gives as gifts to itself when it is free to speculate and uncover the linkages obscured by grief and time itself.
[Published by Bellevue Literary Press on September 20, 2022, 160 pages, $17.99 paperback]