About this item
For readers of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, and Simone de Beauvior's A Very Easy Death, MOTHERCARE is an honest and beautifully written account of a sudden and drastically changed relationship with one's mother, and of the time and labor spent navigating the American healthcare systemWhen a parent's unusual health condition renders her entirely dependent upon you, your siblings, caregivers, and companions, the unimaginable will become daily life. Brilliantly original novelist and cultural critic Lynne Tillman became one of nearly 53 million Americans who care for a sick family member when her mother developed an unusual and little understood condition called Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus.Instantly, Tillman's independent and spirited mother went from someone she knew to someone else, a woman entirely dependent on her children - an eleven-year process through which her mother underwent many surgeries and some misdiagnoses, while the family navigated consultations and confrontations with doctors, adjusting to the complexity of her cognitive issues, including memory loss.
About the Author
Here's an Author's Bio. It could be written differently. I've written many for myself and read lots of other people's. None is right or sufficient, each slants one way or the other. So, a kind of fiction - selection of events and facts.. So let me just say: I wanted to be a writer since I was eight years old. That I actually do write stories and novels and essays, and that they get published, still astonishes me. Right now, I'm working on a novel, my sixth, and also some stories and will be working on an art essay or two soon.In April, a new collection of stories, Someday This Will Be Funny, will be pubbed by Red Lemonade Press. There is no story called Someday This Will Be Funny in it: it's a title that comments on all the stories, maybe.Each spring, I teach writing at University at Albany, in the English Dept., and in the fall, at The New School, in the Writing Dept.I've lived with David Hofstra, a bass player, for many years. It makes a lot of sense to me that I live with a bass player, since time and rhythm are extremely important to my writing. He's also a wonderful man.As time goes by, my thoughts about writing change, how to write THIS, or why I do. There are no stable answers to a process that changes, and a life that does too. Writing, when I'm inhabiting its world, makes me happy, or less unhappy. I also feel engaged in and caught up in politics here, and in worlds farther away.When I work inside the world in which I do make choices, I'm completely absorbed in what happens, in what can emerge. Writing is a beautiful, difficult relationship with what you know and don't know, have or haven't experienced, with grammar and syntax, with words, primarily, with ideas, and with everything else that's been written.
