Me & My Mom

by Marianne Hauser

The narrator, a practical and down-to-earth sort, has feelings of guilt once she is forced to put her mother, a lifelong dreamer, in a nursing home

78 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1993

About the author

In the course of her long career, Marianne Hauser published numerous works of fiction, including Prince Ishmael, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and selected by The New York Times as one of the year's outstanding books.

She worked as a literary critic for the Saturday Review of Literature, the New Republic, the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, and the Sewanee Review. She also was a columnist for Swiss and French periodicals and newspapers, which allowed her to travel throughout North Africa, India, China, Japan, and Hawaii from 1931-1939. She taught at Queens College in New York City from 1966-1978 and at New York University in 1979.

Reviews

[Jon Frankel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Hauser's second to last book, a late work of remarkable compression and emotional intensity,as well as the demented humor I expect from her. In just 65 pages we get the relationship of an old, senile mother and her guilt stricken daughter who has put her in the Bide-A-Wee nursing home. The narrator in some ways seems an adult version of The Talking Room's B. She's angry, reactive and contemptuous, of just about everything. The author's satiric barbs are reserved mostly for doctors and nursing homes but age, the mother, American hypocrisy and, especially, the city of NY, which is a character, come in for her lambasting. The language is loose and colloquial and, in some of the slang, dated. Hauser says it took her a long time to write as did all of her novels, but it has the feel of an improvisation. Especially good is the image of NY in collapse. Hauser rode the subway to work every day, from Manhattan to Queens College, and the books is full of subways and pocket parks, and the nuts who roam the streets. The mother flickers in and out of coherence, and the daughter really wants to just get rid of her, but can't. Written in brief bursts of remorse and manic invective,the book is relevant, entertaining and by the end full of the sadness of life.