Publisher's Weekly Review
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.)
Kirkus Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In this unvarnished, bracing, at times funny memoir, novelist and critic Tillman (Men and Apparitions, 2018) recounts the 11 years leading up to her mother's death at age 98. Tillman and her two sisters honor their mother's wish to remain in her Manhattan apartment and hire a full-time caregiver. She deftly and candidly weaves together the facts about how too much fluid on her brain let to her mom's memory loss with the conflicting emotions she feels about her. "From the age of six, I had disliked my mother, but I didn't wish her dead." She does recounts how, when her parents were listening to Orson Welles' infamous 1936 radio broadcast, War of the Worlds, her "rational, smart" mom said, "Turn to another station." Tillman considers age and a flawed medical system that has more plastic surgeons than gerontologists. Depressingly, she feels her mom loved herself more than Tillman. Indeed, when Tillman gets a Guggenheim Fellowship six weeks before her mother dies, her mom says, "If I had wanted to be, I would have been a better writer than you."
