A masterfully-wrought story of ambivalence that is both heartbreaking and exasperating ... In staccato prose that can be brilliantly maddening — the narrator often repeats herself within the same paragraph, the language circling back and forth in time and place, contradicting itself, meandering — the reader is taken on a narratively idiosyncratic journey that mirrors almost exactly the dissociative, circuitous nature ... Wrapped around this stunning story of caregiving, with its questions of obligation and ethics and what it means to care for someone who, perhaps, didn’t care for you, is the hint of familial disconnection ... Starkly-told.
Lynne Tillman offers an account that is startling in its blunt, even brutal, refusal of sentimentality ... The book is mostly composed of personal recollections, but Tillman occasionally offers some explicit words of guidance for anyone who might be in a similar situation ... Where another writer might seek the most self-flattering light, Tillman is unsparingly frank about the power she knew she had ... There’s something surprisingly retrograde in Tillman’s intergenerational mother-blame, but I suppose there’s something revealing in it, too ... Tillman is too aware of ambiguity and ambivalence to reduce her mother to [a] caricature, rounding it out with a fuller portrait, almost in spite of herself.
Tillman 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.
Tillman offers her story in part as a cautionary tale, in part as a variation on this familiar if nebulous tale ... Tillman isn’t the type of writer you might expect to take something so domestic, so personal, so logistical, as family caregiving for her subject, and she admits that writing Mothercare didn’t come naturally ... Nor is Tillman’s style given to lucidity or grounded details ... As the book progresses and the Tillman family settles into whatever routine is possible in the circumstances, Tillman’s reflections become more circular, mimicking, perhaps, her own experience ... In an emotionally flattened, repetitive style, Tillman alternates between resignation, frustration, resentment, regret, feeling bored to tears, fed up ... As understandable as it may be to repress or forget painful moments experienced under strain, it is the task of the memoirist to at least try to unearth the particulars. Ultimately, with all its elisions and gaps, its gnomic reflections, the book feels like it never overcomes Tillman’s ambivalence about the topic ... Tillman recognizes the narrative possibilities...but fails to fully inhabit or develop them.
... is revelatory not only for its honest discussion of this thankless task, but also for Tillman’s candor about having her life drip away in service to someone she cares for more than she cares about ... forces us to question our assumptions about what is owed to us and about our responsibility to our family members ... Not only does Tillman now know the exhausting labor of caregiving and the demographics of the people who do it, she recognizes the total denial of those who look away ... So many of the revelations of this book — and indeed the predicament that we find ourselves in when caring for others — come down to, as Tillman puts it, learning what we never wanted to know. But it seems unlikely that conditions will improve unless we approach the crisis, as Tillman has done in this book, with unsparing honesty.
... powerful ... Tillman unleashes a lot of anger in this book, much of it directed at medical professionals. She doesn't mince words ... Photos that appear throughout the book add little and sometimes come across as insensitive. The passage in which Tillman writes that her mother took up painting includes a photo of 1980s TV personality Bob Ross with one of his cookie-cutter oils. For the most part, however, this is a well written, memorably unsentimental account of one family's medical struggles and the ill feelings they released. Tillman's goal was to tell a 'cautionary tale' that 'may be helpful, informative, consoling, or upsetting.' She was right on all counts.
While it is unflinching, this book isn’t primarily about the vexed origins or aftereffects of the fraught mother-daughter relationship it describes (although all of that is in here). Rather, it is about performing the duty of keeping a person safe in an age when medicine often prolongs our lives long past our capacities. In this sense, Mothercare is more of an essay, or a dispatch: reportage from the trenches of care work ... offers an unsparing account of the American health-care system and a starkly unsentimental portrait of the mechanics of looking after a person who is dying very slowly. Drawing on skills she’s honed as a novelist and cultural critic, she crafts an account at once formally restrained and emotionally weighty. The result is a distinctive and, in Hardwick’s terms, useful demolition of the sentimentally larded stories our culture tends to tell about families and illness ... Tillman bitingly conveys the frustrations and powerlessness of what is now called 'medical gaslighting,' noting how much it spills over into family life ... With economy and lacerating brio, Tillman makes you feel the family’s despair and frustration, and captures the messy reality of medical care ... The core of the book is Tillman’s skillful portrait of the unsentimental reality of motherhood ... Tillman is exquisitely detailed about what is involved in hiring a person you don’t know to care intimately for your parent ... Though you might not expect it, Mothercare is an invigorating page-turner of a book, propelled by Tillman’s wit and incisiveness. She is the guide I would want through the purgatory that is caretaking without clear end—a landscape she animates in barbed and direct prose. An emotional irony propels the book ... Though this is not really a book of grief—see, above, their estrangement—one feels nonetheless Tillman’s preoccupation with doing right by her mother ... The sense of needing to think one’s way through an experience, is, in the end, what makes this an urgent piece of nonfiction. Couple that urgency with Tillman’s formal restraint, and the resulting story becomes pressurized. One feels trapped and limited along with her, stuck in the room of caretaking, where a person’s body—their being—becomes a series of tasks to undertake. That this story of mothercare is more philosophical and pragmatic than psychological is, in the end, the point: the structure’s the thing, dummy. Most readers, after all, can imagine not wanting to help a parent defecate—even those of us who are less ambivalent than Tillman about our role as children. That entrapment isn’t just the tedium or mortal fear that can descend when one is 'on call.' It’s also the life that is not led, in this case by both mother and daughter.
... unflinching ... Part memoir, part manual, the personal account opens up to warn us all of the hardships of caring for a sick parent. Tillman, who’s known for her wildly inventive fiction, has never before written about her own experiences. Here, her ideas can turn and flare out to encompass contradictions, such as the book’s generosity towards the doctor who nearly kills her mother ... Even as I know how the story will end, it grips me ... In Tillman’s hands, too, the idea of progress or narrative time is undermined. After all, what is progress to the dying person? The story loops and circles as if mimetic to how time dissolves for the sick, their family and caregivers ... I am always grateful for stories that undo narrative time, chronological time, bound as they are with notions of progress and capitalism ... Tillman writes bravely about the impossible economics of care as women’s work and its enduring legacy tied to capitalism and colonialism.
Tillman is harder-pressed to find the right words. She tells her story drily, almost grudgingly, like a resistant therapy patient ... Happily for the readers, Tillman is too layered to be an Everywoman. Her attempt to package her experience as an advice book has the feel of what Freud called secondary revision, the effort to master chaotic psychic material by shoehorning it into a reasonable-sounding narrative. But Tillman’s own unprocessed intensity leaks through. None of the sins that she attributes to her mother seem quite commensurate with the fury she expresses about her ... She’s so all over the place that when she insists she feels nothing for her mother, we suspect the opposite, that she can’t tolerate a longing she perceives as unrequited.
Mothercare is, at least on the surface, a straightforward memoir ... It’s in the descriptions of these carers – women who are both inside and outside the family – that Mothercare begins to resemble a typical Tillman novel. She demonstrates the same talent for compression, the same affection for bizarre behaviour, that characterised earlier books ... Mothercare is a peculiarly un-American book, free of self-actualisation or therapy speak ... Reading it, you feel Tillman’s clammy grip on your wrist reminding you not to waste time. She offers a writer’s prescription: examine the world closely, and as only you can.
Unvarnished, bracing, at times funny ... 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.
Some of the most affecting passages are about caregivers ... 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.
Discerning if uneven ... 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 ... Despite being something of a mixed bag, Tillman’s frank insights on love and loss are cannily original.
