Joanne Nelson has a smooth, direct style that recreates times both stressful and joyful with graceful prose. I admire the candor of this beautiful memoir. From shoveling snow in the alley as a family during Wisconsin winters to tucking her alcoholic mother in at night and going with her recently single mother and an aunt to dances, this resonant memoir explores endurance. It includes reflections on many kinds of parenting: being parented by two struggling adults, parenting the next generation, and also about parenting oneself into a productive, healthy adult.
The book is divided into chapters that have meaningful, thematic titles. The first two-thirds of the memoir focuses on the author’s growing-up years, with tender passages about days spent with her grandparents, Grandpa Eli and Grandma Dora, and harrowing memories of her father’s abusive anger and his affair. With her elder brothers gone to college, her father leaves their home shortly after she hears him softly whispering into the phone while her mother is at her once-a-week evening job. Several chapters follow the aftermath of her parents’ divorce and milestones in her teenage life, from first kisses and a high-school breakup to waiting anxiously late at night for her mother to stumble home from the tavern.
The author flashes forward in time with ease and takes the reader through the challenging final days of her mother’s life and the many emotions that arise as she—as the only daughter in the family who also lives closest to their mother—becomes de facto caregiver and medical contact.
Nelson does not shy away from her frustrations that she cannot keep separate her mother’s messy decline from her much more calm family life that she’s built with her husband and young daughters. Nor does she turn away from meeting her mother’s needs, cleaning up and cleaning out her mother’s house, and detailing multiple visits to her mother in the hospital and (later) care facility. One of my favorite chapters in the book about the mother-daughter relationship is “I’m Sorry.” Nelson also reflects on a warm memory from early childhood when she and her mother cozied up and snacked and read before bed (in “Just a Hum in the Background”). I was also very moved by the chapter where she visits her alcoholic, reclusive brother for the last time before his death and cooks for him (“Things That Won’t Happen Again”). Ultimately, this is a story of familial boundaries and familial love.
Much of the book is serious and reflective, which I enjoy; I also very much savored the author’s wry humor. The second third of the book includes essays about the author’s parenting of teen daughters and includes many humorous reflections. “The Hallway in My House” focuses on picking her teen daughter up from a friend’s 14th birthday party held at a McMansion with a braggart host and explores social class/ fitting-in themes that resound, while “On Coming Home from the Conference” finds the author discovering a new body wash in the family shower that inadvertently raises suspicions. There’s also a final chapter on the bittersweet years when the daughters no longer want to decorate the tree as a family that perfectly ties together the poignant and the funny.
I loved the motifs of both keys and the cars on the highway that border her property’s yard that are skillfully woven throughout the book. I look greatly forward to Nelson’s next book!
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