Someone Not Really Her Mother

by Harriet Scott Chessman

Book Overview

This masterful and compassionate novel is split into a series of interlinked stories that tell the tale of Hannah Pearl. As Hannah's memory of the present begins to fade, she increasingly inhabits the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0525947930
• ISBN13: 9780525947936
• Release Date: August 2004
• Publisher: Dutton Books
• Length: 162 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Book groups will love this wonderful book.

Yes, Harriet Chessman is a wonderful writer. And yes, Someone Not Really Her Mother has deserved all of the critical acclaim it has received. What I love about this book, though, is the delicacy with which it illuminates the relationship between middle-aged women and their mothers. Book groups will find much to discuss here about their own lives. You may buy this book because of Chessman's elegant prose and her storytelling, but you will remember it long after for its insights into the changing bond between mothers and daughters as they both age.

The essence of a masterpiece

The difference between the many very good works on a topic and a masterpiece on that topic is that the masterpiece penetrates so deeply that it awakens questions the topic itself, more narrowly or less profoundly addressed, does not inherently raise. Ms. Chessman's book makes us wonder not just what it's like to care for or even to be an Alzheimer's sufferer, but what the relationship is between memory and human connectedness, between consciousness and reality, even between mind and soul. In this case, it's also an efficient masterpiece -- a short book, almost a prose poem -- in which, literally, even the punctuation can be devastatingly touching and intellectually provocative.

riding along the sun's brief gleams

If you've ever driven past narrowly spaced trees with bright sun sharply angled, you will understand Hannah Pearl's condition: light/darkness, light/dark, wending so fast that one becomes dizzy after 30 seconds. Hannah, too, is in/out all day, from the time she spends at Tikkun, a nursing home, to her brief jaunts with Miranda, the daughter whom she refers to as "maman" halfway through this short novel. Sometimes Hannah can recall reality: her daughter Mir, her 20somethings granddaughters. Mostly, though, she lives on the periphery of reality, where her own mind creates the most vivid and understandable scenarios. Chessman's style, as in "Lydia Cassat," a previous novel, reminds one a bit of Virginia Woolf: the writing flows lyrically, at times like poetry. There are numerous references to color, flowers, and other inhabitants of nature. I love how she weaves Hannah's French language into her thoughts and utterances, and how confused the other characters are by her native language. The scene in which Hannah is lost in a drugstore is particularly moving, as is the final scene with Hannah and her great-grandson. I want to send a copy of this to a young woman who was in the same writing class as I was this summer. She was writing a lovely, heartbreaking memoir of her grandmother's gradual decline into Alzheimer's. Although Chessman's book is not a memoir, technically, it reads much like one--a very good one.

VIVIDLY WRITTEN AND ABSORBING!

This is a bittersweet story of a woman who is slowing losing her memory while she resides in a nursing home. Born French, she departed for France as a teenager, sent by her parents during the Holocaust. She worked as an au pair in England ultimately to find that she had lost her family to the concentration camps. She had married an Englishman, lost him to the war and left to come to America with her young baby. The first person narrative allows us insight into how Hannah's memory of present day events fades while resurrecting past experiences very vividly. We learn of the frustrations of her daughter and grandchildren to hold on to Hannah and keep her in the present. She has flashes of memory that within minutes fails her once again. The characters are well developed and the story interesting. What I found interesting is that Hannah in the end is not depressed because of her situation but rather feels "does it matter if I don't know the right words?" Her grandchild struggles onto her bed and whispers a new word he has learned into her ear. She holds him close and smells his sweet child smell and is satisfied and reflecting on her life she states, "To love that went well". I would recommend this book for book clubs; in the end it is not a depressing tale but a window into an elderly mind.

I buy books for my wife.

I buy books for my wife because she can never make up her mind from the thousands available. Generally I buy only those books that received good customer reviews. But this one I bought on a whim since there weren't yet any customer reviews available. Well she really liked it. And since I am so big on customer reviews I will tell you about a few others I bought that she just loved. She loved A YEAR SINCE YESTERDAY by George Edward Zintel. That book came in soft-cover (not paperback even though it is listed as such) and was one of the best books she has ever read. Another is NIGHTS OF RAIN AND STARS by Maeve Bichney. BOTH of those books she has read several times. I also give books as Christmas presents, and I would recommend any of those I mentioned as gifts.