The Problem With Mothers and Daughters
The evening before my mother slipped into the fugue state she was in until she died, I said goodnight with my usual “I love you, Mom.” “But do you?” she murmured. “Of course I do,” I said, automatically. And that was that, her one invitation to have that conversation, declined.
But what should I have said? “I admire you”? It was true. “It’s complicated”? Also true. A lot of things were true. There was love, anger, guilt, regret. How much truth does a dying woman need to hear? The mother-daughter relationship is complicated, and deathbed scenes don’t lend themselves to nuanced expression. Parent memoirs have become so common that we may fail to appreciate the challenge that the novelists Elizabeth McCracken (the author of witty novels and stories and a heartbreaking memoir about a stillborn son) and Lynne Tillman (an edgy, cerebral novelist and critic) took on in their recent books. In both McCracken’s The Hero of This Book and Tillman’s Mothercare: On Obligation, Love, Death, and Ambivalence, daughters try to transcribe the discordant emotions provoked by a mother’s decline and death.
The two works differ in genre and tone. McCracken has written a novel of sorts, Tillman a straightforward memoir. McCracken’s narrator radiates love for her mother, a feisty enthusiast with untamable curls who is indeed the hero of her book. Tillman professes a cold rage; her mother was high-handed and withholding. But both authors
