Mothercare: On Obligation, Love, Death, and Ambivalence

"“Not everything can be put away,” Lynne Tillman concludes in the opening paragraph of this spare, saturated memoir of her mother’s long decline and its effects on her sisters and herself. What reappears like dust, in Tillman’s telling, is both emotional and practical: the medical industry’s failures, the tensions between professional caregivers and family, the roil of emotions continually exposed as a difficult parent becomes more and more like a problem child. A great formal experimenter in her many other books, Tillman aims here for absolute, unsentimental clarity. She spares no one, including herself, facing death’s trap and the equally inevitable human urge to avoid it. A must-read for anyone with an ailing elder, or really anyone who is mortal."