Lynne Tillman

“Life doesn’t proceed in an orderly way. It frustrates people who need to control every part of their lives, who go berserk when anything changes on them. Life doesn’t allow it, total control, and things will go south, and north, every which unexpected way.”

“I thought I knew my limits, I thought I should have limits, but limits and boundaries are erased and erected and erased again. There is nothing stable when dealing with a parent or friend whose condition is essentially show more unstable.”

Lynne Tillman initially presents her mother, Sophie—whose final years are the subject of this book—as she imagines her when young: talented and ambitious, a girl who dreamt of painting and writing. Marriage had apparently changed everything for her. This attractive, smart, and resourceful woman had tried to contort herself into the ideal 1950s American wife and mother: she stayed home and raised three daughters in the suburbs. It made her very angry. When her husband retired, the couple moved to Florida. After his death in 1984, her eldest daughter found her an ideal Manhattan apartment. Nearly 79 years old, Sophie was finally back in the lively city of her birth, the place where she belonged.

She spent seven-and-a-half years strolling the streets she loved and enjoying all that New York had to offer. But that’s not what this book is about. Its focus is the eleven years that Tillman and her two older sisters cared for Sophie when she became ill. “Keeping her alive was done generously,” writes the author, “but not selflessly.” Since childhood, Lynne had disliked her mother, so being involved in her care for such a long period was “a gruelling obligation.” Life felt “narrower”, “disturbed by emergencies, eruptions, and thudding repetitions.” Time was being “stolen” by her parent. A paragon of rationality, practicality, and organizational ability Sophie may have been, but she was also blunt, rude, arrogant, competitive, narcissistic, and envious of her daughters—the youngest in particular. It is the tension between ego and superego—the author’s actual feelings towards her parent and the sense of obligation to her—that makes this memoir so compelling.

Tillman makes it clear that she’s not speaking for her sisters here; the reflections in the book are hers alone. Late in the memoir, she explains why her reactions to the circumstances were unlike those of Sophie’s older daughters:

Each of us sisters had a different mother and father. It’s remarkable and true that siblings experience their parents differently, and each can say, “That wasn’t how he was with me,” or “She liked you better,” and “We had different parents,” the main source of disorder among them. It is confounding to comprehend just how different parental differences can be. Winnicott’s good-enough mother might be good enough for one, not the other.

The author also notes that the terminal illness of a mother or father places unique strains on adult children. Differences in siblings’ sense of duty and their understanding of how a parent’s care should be handled can permanently break and divide families. Although not explicitly discussed, their awareness of the potential for estrangement, as well as “a decided practicality,” informed the Tillman sisters’ interactions with each other and “encouraged getting along.”

Sophie’s health problems were first apparent to Tillman in 1994 when she returned to New York after four months abroad. Her mother’s behaviour had become strange: she was unkempt and distant, she stared vacantly in front of her, and she seemed depressed. Dementia, you might think—everyone does, including doctors, when an elderly person presents as cognitively impaired. However, when you hear hoofbeats, it’s not always horses; sometimes there really can be zebras.

Sophie had normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH), a little-known and often missed condition, mainly affecting the elderly. Cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) accumulates in the ventricles (fluid-filled chambers) of the brain, which then press on tissues and structures. While the cause of NPH can’t always be determined, it’s often due to a head injury, hemorrhage, infection, inflammation, or a tumour, which impedes CSF flow. When the condition was first named, the pressure of the fluid was thought to be normal, but it can, in fact, run quite high. Memory loss, urinary frequency/poor bladder control, and problems walking are the main signs.

The Tillmans were both lucky and unlucky. A good internist made this “subtle” diagnosis based on symptoms and an MRI, but the arrogant neurologist to whom he referred the family for confirmation of the diagnosis did not agree with it. The specialist believed the patient’s adult daughters were simply refusing to face the truth: Sophie had Alzheimer’s. He ridiculed them, dismissing their point that her cognitive decline had been precipitous, not an insidious process, as is the case with Alzheimer’s disease. The differing opinions of two other physicians further muddied the waters.

Ultimately, the condition was treated as NPH. A neurosurgeon operated, placing a shunt in Sophie’s brain. This would allow CSF to drain through tubing from the brain’s ventricles, down the neck, and into the abdomen. Unfortunately, the surgery failed. Within days of being released from hospital, Sophie began to have seizures. The tubing was too long and had twisted, and the CSF was unable to drain. A “revision” surgery was performed to adjust the tube’s length, but the patient still didn’t progress: she was immobile, even semi-comatose. For the neurologist, this confirmed his view that the patient did not have hydrocephalus at all. A new neurologist provided assistance and a fresh perspective on care of the elderly. Sophie underwent further revision to address a tube-clogging issue (a common problem), and though the surgical delay had caused permanent brain damage, she did begin to recover some of her faculties. Over the years, a total of six revisions would be performed. According to Tillman, when the shunt was functional, Sophie was lucid. Towards the end, however, its malfunction caused significant seizure activity.

During the last decade of her life. Sophie was also on a whole host of ever-changing medications. Over a dozen were administered at breakfast alone. The impression the author gives is that her mother, though wheelchair-bound, was active and engaged with life. She took lessons to relearn how to knit and paint, she enjoyed being taken to the park and the theatre by her caregiver, and she derived pleasure from the birthday parties her daughters threw for her.

I admit that I was skeptical about an elderly person (in her 80s, then 90s) going through multiple surgeries and setbacks. Was the payoff worth the cost for this mother and her daughters? It’s hard to say. The second neurologist was free of the ageist bias of the first. An optimist with high expectations, he told Sophie’s daughters that if this were his mother, he would choose as they did. Tillman stresses how fit, vigorous, and generally together her mother had been prior to the onset of the NPH symptoms and how determined and resilient she was after.

Much of the book concerns the challenges around finding reliable, competent, full-time caregivers for Sophie. She had not wanted to be placed in a home, and the sisters did their utmost to respect her wishes. However, there were financial constraints and ethical dilemmas, not the least of which was hiring women of colour at minimum wage to do the demanding work. Some of the carers were incompetent, thieving, or downright loopy, and had to be let go. Frances, the caregiver who stayed the longest, treating Sophie like her own mother, stole from the family and regularly rang up huge phone bills. Tillman turned a blind eye to it all. If this was the price that had to be paid for care—and to save Tillman from spending more time in the apartment than she had to—then so be it.

A short, absorbing memoir, Mothercare acknowledges some hard truths. Children do not always love their parents. Even when they do, caring for them is demanding and life-altering. “I learned what I never wanted to know,” writes Tillman, who was clearly transformed by the experience. The fifteen years between Sophie’s death in 2007 and the writing of this book appear to have provided time for reflection and understanding. This is a thoughtful, honest, and mature work that comes not from the wound but the scar. Tillman concludes with some thoughts on mortality, but it’s her remarks about the aged among us that most struck me:

In New York City, these people are not hidden from sight, they are in plain sight, if you notice them. The healthy and capable elderly take buses, go shopping, go to movies, take walks, slowly, go to restaurants alone or with friends, they live among and with us. They live. That’s the point.

The turning away interests me, the ignoring, ways to ignore inevitability. Now that I have seen the inevitable, against my will, which I didn’t want to see or know, I can rarely pretend it won’t happen to me, and pay more attention. Let’s say, I have become aware. show less

American Genius: a Comedy falls into the category of post-modern self-referential novels a la Wittgenstein's Mistress, Wittgenstein's Nephew, and perhaps Jaeggy's Sweet Days of Discipline. All of these present a first person narrative: an isolated individual enjoys the dubious privilege of existing in an institution that allows them time to think--that is, time to follow a thought at leisure--with very minimal outside interference.
(Mann's Magic Mountain also partially satisfies this show more criteria--as generally do most novels set in sanatoriums).

On the whole, this genre can be differentiated by the specificity of the protagonist’s “triggers,” or “tics,” and the extent to which they are artfully woven into their personal, stream of consciousness narrative.

Our protagonist, Helen, has her own peculiar idiosyncratic preoccupations: they center around skin conditions, ergonomic mid-century modern chairs, animals her parents killed, American History, Puritanism, fabric, memory (and its loss), time, sexuality, etc., to name but a few. She has a neurotic’s sense of humor; she is tactilely & socially sensitive; for each described instance, she exhaustively enumerates the psychology which might explain a particular human behavior.

If the specific topics mentioned are not of interest to you, then I would advise skipping this book. If you have any interest in contemplating (or ruminating on) the complexity of superficiality, or the profundity of the phrase “skin-deep,” then this is the book for you. show less

This "novel" took me an inordinate amount of time to read. And it's only 292 pages in length! I kept picking it up and putting it down. I read one big chunk on a flight from Tucson to Oakland, however, which served to solidify this dense and almost maddeningly recursive anti-narrative for me. A nouveau stream-of-consciousness novel a la 21st century Virginia Woolf perhaps. The narrator, Helen, a middle-aged woman with extremely sensitive skin and subject to a "nonorganic pressure on the show more heart" is a disassembler of objects, memories, ideas, theories and personalities who has taken up temporary residence at a kind of mental-health rest home or personal growth institute. She introduces herself as "a recorder and collector, a listmaker, I studied history, philosophy, literature and have taught American history, but dissuaded from the academic life after receiving a Ph.D., or unsuited for its piquant rigors, even though well equipped to be an historian, since I could read something and remember it, I subsequently trained as an object maker and designer, while haphazardly pursuing odd jobs. I also wait." An intellectual obsessive, she collects facts about just about everything imaginable, examines them as if under a microscope and then makes paratactic leaps from subject to subject, obsession to obsession, childhood memory to excruciatingly detailed observation of the goings on of the other residents. And the other residents are a decidedly colorful bunch: the Count, Contessa AKA Violet, the Magician, the demanding man, the balding man, the Turkish poet, the disconsolate woman, the mathematician Spike, etc. Helen notes that "many of the residents here are not equipped for life as it is commonly regulated but they struggle on." Other recurring characters in Helen's mental cabinet of curiosities are her dead father, her out-of-touch brother, her senile mother, various cats and a dog, her Polish esthetician, various chairs both poorly and well-designed and the imprisoned Leslie Van Houten. Above all else, however, American Genius is about time, about the body, the mind and mortality. Tillman's prose throughout is nothing but surprising; her sentences invite delectation. This is a book for readers who delight in the journey without concern for the destination. show less

Summary: The story of Jeanette Watson and Books & Co., once one of the premier independent bookstores in New York City, connecting readers with books and their writers until their closing in 1997.

Jeanette Watson is the grand-daughter of the founder of IBM, and the daughter of Thomas Watson, Jr. who built the company into a computer industry leader. A reader from childhood, this daughter of wealth spent her early adult years working in early childhood education, mental health care, and going show more through one marriage and divorce. She struggled with depression, then faced hip surgery for congenital hip dysplasia. Facing surgery and a long recovery, she reached a turning point:

“I had a dream. The dream came almost immediately after I was told I needed surgery. I dreamed I was in a bookstore, surrounded by books, hundreds of books, and the place had two floors, and it was cozy. It looked like what would become Books & Co.

* * * * *

“Throughout the ordeal, the operation and the long recovery, the dream sustained me. I was determined there would be a bookstore at the end of the tunnel. One day I invited my friend Steve Aronson out for lunch. He was the only person I knew who was actually in publishing. I told Steven I wanted a bookstore that would look very old-fashioned, be like a private home, and carry wonderful books. There would be events, parties and gallery openings” (p. 13).

This book tells the story of the bookstore that came out of that dream, its twenty year run, and how Watson found her own calling in life in the process. The book, though authored by Lynne Tillman, is Jeanette Watson’s narrative of the history of Books & Co. and her own love of bookselling, interspersed with memories from publishers, writers, representatives, other booksellers, customers and celebrities about there experiences at Books & Co. The contributors anecdotes give us a sense of how Books & Co. served as kind of a literary nexus during this time.

It begins with Watson and her father investing in the startup after finding an old brownstone down the street from the Whitney, who owned the property, on Madison Avenue. She links up with Burt Britton, a book trade veteran who she signs on as a partner. The partnership lasted a year and resulted in “The Wall” representing the best of past and present literary fiction. Burt knew no limits to spending or acquiring books and eventually, Watson ended the partnership to try to meet the bottom line.

Watson realized her dream. She created a two story bookstore that included a green sofa on the second floor, and a curated collection of books centered on literature, philosophy, art, and children’s literature. She became renown for the authors who appeared and did readings in her stores. The list of those who did readings which appears at the back of the book is a snapshot of the literary world in New York in the from the late 1970’s to the late 1990’s. She was an aspiring writer’s friend, and introduced writers, and works she liked to the literary world, and underscored the important role booksellers play in promoting great writing.

Perhaps her greatest joy was connecting people with books, everyone from Woody Allen and Michael Jackson to ordinary residents of the city. Watson comments:

“There’s a significance too–almost a drama–in introducing readers to books. Dramatic because books can and do change people’s lives. I’ve felt that importance as much as I’ve felt it about introducing new writers to readers. Burt used to say, ‘It’s just as easy to read a good book as a bad book.’ If people were given the right book, they could experience something wonderful. One woman told me that she wasn’t a reader until the bookstore opened, but because of my suggestions, she was reading Balzac. It’s what I’m most proud of doing over the years” (p.52).

The book chronicles not only the joys but the struggles of bookselling. Apart from a few boom years in the 1980’s, it was a constant struggle to break even and Watson put a lot of her own money into the store. We get a glimpse behind the scenes of working with publishers representatives and making decisions about book acquisitions, working with distributors and staff, paying bills and making returns.

We also see the beginnings of a transformation of the book trade. Readers interested in the serious works sold by a store like this seemed to be aging and their numbers declining. The advent of the big chains like Barnes and Noble and Borders (!) began to erode sales as people turned to booksellers who discounted. Amazon was just new, and not yet perceived as the force that would threaten them all. E-books were still in the future. But the internet was dawning and cable and video were supplanting reading.

The death knell of this great indie was rent. For many years the Whitney and Books & Co. enjoyed a symbiotic relationship, with people often visiting both. The Whitney was landlord, and as Madison Avenue rents were rising, it became necessary for the Whitney to raise rents on its properties to attend to their own bottom line. These rents became increasingly difficult to meet. There were negotiations, explorations of a merger with the Whitney, all coming to nought. After Christmas in 1996, Jeanette Watson announced the closing of the store on May 31, 1997. Some attempted to save the store, but it was not to happen. The last part of the book is painful in some ways, as the attempts to sustain the life of a dying patient.

Reading the book brought to mind the wonderful encounters I’ve had with great bookstores over the year, especially the ones where the booksellers knew their books and loved connecting their customers with books they would love. I wish I had visited this one. It also reminded me of the passing of so many of these, each like the death of a friend.

At the same time, the pronounced death of the indie bookstores seems premature. Their number is actually growing while Borders is no more and Barnes and Noble is struggling. People are still reading Jane Austin and Dostoevsky, and so much else.

This autobiography, of Watson and her bookstore gives a glimpse into what it takes to make a great bookstore. There is one wrinkle in the book that may be off-putting to some. Watson, like so many bibliophiles, has a curiosity for everything and writes with more fascination than some might find comfortable of inter-species sex and every form of human sexuality, as well as an author’s study of cannibalism. Clearly, this is written in the progressive (and transgressive?) literary milieu of New York City. At the same time, we see the power of books to introduce us to so much of the world beyond just our own experience and the wonderful gift bookstores like Books & Co can be to writers and readers.

Jeanette Watson’s new memoir, It’s My Party , was released October 10, 2017. A video interview with Watson on her book is available on YouTube . show less