The Year My Mother Came Back is a memoir about mothers and daughters and daughters who become mothers. It’s funny and honest and surprising with a blend of realism and imagination.
I don’t often print summaries, but this one explains the book well without revealing too much, which is what I seek to do in book reviews:
Thirty years after her death, Alice Eve Cohen’s mother appears to her, seemingly in the flesh, and continues to do so during the hardest year Alice has had to face: the year her youngest daughter needs a harrowing surgery, her eldest daughter decides to reunite with her birth mother, and Alice herself receives a cancer diagnosis. As it turns out, it’s entirely possible for the people we’ve lost to come back to us when we need them the most.
Although letting her mother back into her life is not an easy thing, Alice approaches it with humor, intelligence, and honesty. What she learns is that she must revisit her childhood and allow herself to be a daughter once more in order to take care of her own girls. Understanding and forgiving her mother’s parenting transgressions leads her to accept her own and to realize that she doesn’t have to be perfect to be a good mother.
What struck me most about Cohen’s story is that the transgressions which she forgives her mother are completely forgivable! I may have glossed over and forgotten something, but in general, her mother was distracted at times, “unfair” at others, especially when Alice was a teenager, and often embarrassing — in short, a mother. Her mother has been gone for 30 years. Alice was not a mother herself when she lost her mother, just barely into adulthood, that time when mothers become a little less horrid.
So when she begins cancer treatment, her mother who also battled cancer appears in her mind in a semi-physical format give her what she needs: advice, comfort, information, perspective. It’s not a ghost story at all. It makes sense when you’re reading it.
For those of you like me who have lost your mothers, you know there are times when you face a milestone or an obstacle and you wonder what your mother might say. And perhaps you imagine yourself having a tete a tete with her.
This memoirist tackled some emotionally resonant subjects like adoption, her own illness, and a serious medical treatment of her daughter, sending a daughter to college, and yet it still managed to be a light and easy read. I enjoyed it.