PositiveNew York Times Book ReviewTillman 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 ... Changing your mother’s diaper, however, is the definition of unrewarding. Both parties are humiliated. It’s hard to write about without its becoming comedy. It’s hard to write about at all. Mothercare manages, and without bathos or squeamishness — though Tillman confesses she never got used to the more excremental of her responsibilities ... Mothercare is practical, not sentimental. It flirts with being analytical. It’s even useful.
