The Year My Mother Came Back: A Memoir
Written and Narrated By: Alice Cohen
Length: 5 hrs and 53 mins
Oy, the crud we choose to hold onto…
Noooo, I actually avoided the Publisher’s Summary whenst perusing The Year My Mother Came Back and was deciding whether to purchase it. Nope, I checked out the (Glowing!) reviews and thought it’d be perfect for Mother’s Day, a kinda sorta story of mothers and daughters and a reeeeeally tough year with, what a reviewer described: Some magical realism thrown in. This is because daughter Alice Cohen’s mom died thirty years before when all the hell of the year takes place, and her mom, in the flesh, reappears to seemingly guide her through it.
Uhm… noooot quiiiiite…
What I got from it was that some of us TOTALLY choose to hold onto to cr… crud… and we choose to live in fear, speak in fear, act in fear. Alice believes, most strongly and NOT as just a literary device, in the Evil Eye. If times are good? Oh good golly gosh: Can’t have THAT! Must throw salt over the shoulder, must spit three times through the fingers, must turn a glass upside down (And just hooooow long are you supposed to leave it overturned, Alice wonders?).
Truly, the woman was having one of the most trying years imaginable, I very much agree with her on that. Her youngest daughter is about to have major surgery to start lengthening her leg; her oldest daughter is off to Princeton and wants to meet her birthmother, and she herself is diagnosed with breast cancer and needs surgery and weeks of radiation. Aha, Alice thinks to herself: I turned the glass over waaaay too early! And so she starts seeing her mother, and this brings back AWFUL memories of the woman.
Because, and I get her, her mother had a radical double mastectomy at 47 after her own diagnosis of breast cancer, and this woman who was once quippy and ultra-active, an activist and a feminist waaaay early in the 60s and 70s, came back an old and bitter woman. That Alice should hit puberty in a BIG way, developing her own very large breasts at this time just threw Mom over the edge, and she turned vicious! I mean, reeeeeally mean.
A glance at Alice, and she’s yelling at her that she needs to stop eating, start losing weight; she’s getting too big, her thighs are massive. Bitter, awful things come out of Mom’s mouth, and Alice starts truly hating her. Whatever closeness they had turns into glacial iciness for yeeeears…
-And- THIS Alice has held onto. Tho’ we’re treated to special and warm little talks with (Dead) Mom now? Oh nooooo, the book is how very poorly Alice was treated. And Mom, yes that was brutal, but she sounds like a woman brave, bold, vocal about injustice, waaaaay ahead of her time. AWEsome. And when Alice gets together with her two sisters, they very much see the best in their childhoods, granted they did NOT hit puberty at such a difficult time and were spared a very very sharp tongue, but they viewed things like this: They were the only Jews on the block, and they remembered their Mother holding her head up, teaching them about dignity and courage. Alice? She remembers the slashed tires and the word: JEW spelled on their property. And that’s all.
It’s all in the way ya chooooose to view things, and we all have DESperately awful things that have happened to us; Alice ain’t the only one out there. But to have your negativity carry the day, to carry it around, making you fearful of everything, to have it choose how negatively you’re going to speak with and deal with your own children? Good cow! I wanted to pop her one on the head. She moans, she cries, she yells with indignation. She gets pissed when she’s given reality checks.
But she’s still held fast to fear, to the extent that she’s unable to care for her youngest daughter after the girl’s surgery. It’s toooo much, she wails! Her husband has to take over care. And the birthmother, Zoe? She judges Zoe harshly for being so very happy that she gave up her child to them, telling Alice that she knew she’d be a wonderful mother. Noooo, Alice seethes: SUREly she should be feeling remorse and self-loathing?
Add to this OVERacting whenst she narrates this herself. Yes indeed, SINGING songs her father (Who was extreeeeemely detached and let Mom handle the heavy stuff; but Dad gets a pass, even tho’ he soooo was NOT there for his children, even tho’ he cheated and had affair(s). And she uses various voices for each and every different character, doing snippy vocal gyrations, speaking slowly to us as though we’re third graders. Oy, I was sooo tired, I cranked m’ listening speed up to x1.8 to get it over with.
Did I haaaate this? Not exactly; but I DID find it so very exasperating as who wants to listen to all that fear and anger and dithering and resentment? Yeh yeh yeh, looooovely (Insert Eye-Roll here…) forgiveness for the very last chapter, but the way she wrote the entirety of the book? Dude, Alice is way in touch with such anger even still; it’s right at her fingertips, and she let’s us know about her wretchedness.
Rave reviews, goin’ against the grain here, but egads! I’m soooo happy I’m done with this. Her mother, Louise, deserved way better than this…!
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