"Ingenious out of necessity, A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing centers around the scapegoating and exile of the author by her mother. In these essays, Kimberly Grey harnesses her formidable intellectual and creative resources to create coherence for an unstable, traumatized self. To do so, she calls on-beseeches-dozens of brilliant thinkers and artists for help, among them Etel Adnan, Roland Barthes, John Cage, Anna Freud, Mina Loy, Elaine Scarry,...