Lynne Tillman - Mothercare: On Obligation, Love, Death, and Ambivalence

MOTHERCARE is a close examination of the American healthcare system, the constraints of family, and the complexities of care. Tillmans writing is devastatingunsentimental, honest, full of sharp intelligence, and irrepressible wit. MOTHERCARE resonates.

KATIE KITAMURA , author of Intimacies

Lynne Tillmans terrifying, fascinating memoir shows how it is, the intimacy of mother-daughter connection at the ending, close-up yet playing out within the larger world of race and class.

NELL PAINTER , author of Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over

We know Lynne Tillman as a brilliant stylist in the first person, but she has never written a work as intimate and frank as MOTHERCARE. This philosophical memoir deepens my admiration for her inimitable sentences, drawing me confidently and calmly into contemplation of two universal, terrifying, awe-inspiring, ever-intertwined themes: death and moms.

LUCY IVES , author of Cosmogony

Only Lynne Tillman can write a clear-eyed account examining a topic that is anything but clearly comprehensible. This is a book about caring for the ill and dying, loss, regret, resentment, and contradictory emotions... MOTHERCARE is written with lucid, beautifully crafted prose. As in her novels, Tillman makes the ineffable a plain fact through her craft by defying genres and presenting us with a text thats impossible to put down despite its difficult subject... The book is a pleasure to read, painful and funny but never maudlin. And that is an even greater achievement.

GREGG BORDOWITZ , author of Some Styles of Masculinity

A touching, heartfelt guide for the care of an ailing parent in need of compassion and lifesaving medical assistance. In an era when modern medicine is fast paced, patient advocacy is essential, not only so that our loved ones receive the best possible care but also so that it respects their dignity.

DR. VIJAY VAD , author of Back RX and sports medicine specialist at the Hospital for Special Surgery, New York

Tillmans novel is a patient, insistent exploration of what it means to live inside such a mind... There are elements of it that brought to mind writers as diverse as Ali Smith and Saul Bellow, Joy Williams and A. R. Ammons, but the cumulative effect is sui generis.

The New York Times Book Review

[A] ruminative and amusing novel... At times aphoristic... the book succeeds.

The New Yorker, Briefly Noted

A beautiful meditation on photography.

COLM TIBN , The Guardian

Cult favorite Lynne Tillman... takes readers for a rollicking, frolicking, outstandingly original ride that explores the roots of feminism, the death of masculinity, and the cultural identities weve gleaned along the way.

POPSUGAR

Tillman insists that there are formal and social conventions yet to be upended and rethought. Even if she doesnt achieve it herself, the magic is that you can see them materializing in your hand... These layers are part of her brilliance in conveying the self-in-progress.

The New Republic

Men and Apparitions is a work of fiction as ventriloquy by a winking puppet.

Los Angeles Review of Books

A profoundly wise and remarkably supple novel from an outstanding writer.

Chicago Review of Books, Most Anticipated Fiction of 2018

Tillman has forged a mischievous conflation of criticism and fiction.

Booklist (starred review)

Men and Apparitions tells a fully human story while miraculously feeding ones mind with the complex narrators observations about childhood, family, photography and representation, self and self-understanding, culture, and the art and fallibility of seeing.

LYDIA DAVIS , Literary Hub

NOVELS

Haunted Houses (1987)

Motion Sickness (1991)

Cast in Doubt (1992)

No Lease on Life (1998)

American Genius, A Comedy (2006)

Men and Apparitions (2018)

SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

Absence Makes the Heart (1990)

The Madame Realism Complex (1992)

This Is Not It (2002)

Someday This Will Be Funny (2011)

Weird Fucks (2015)

The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories (2016)

NONFICTION

The Velvet Years: Warhols Factory 196567 (1995)

The Broad Picture: Essays 19871996 (1997)

Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co. (1999)

What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (2014)

To caregivers, paid and unpaid

Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt.

The fates lead him who will, drag him who will not.

I once embedded dreams in stories, then lost faith in their meanings for anyone but me. Lately, a messy house has shown up in them. Mother kept an orderly house, nothing out of place, furniture dusted, carpets vacuumed, wood floors waxed, no clutter except in my bedroom. I didnt put everything away, clothes, books, and didnt care until she saw it. Mother became enraged by my messy dresser drawers, and occasionally dumped them out onto the floor. That infuriated me. The messy house dream appears, it repeats like disorderly thoughts. Not everything can be put away.

In late 1994, Mother became ill. For about eleven years, she was dependent on her three daughters, my two sisters and me, and on doctors, companions, aides, physical therapists, and other professionals. She remained at home in her Manhattan apartment with a full-time caregiver. My sisters and I shared in her upkeep, deciding medical issues, and maintaining her in a comfortable home. Keeping her alive was done generously, but not selflessly, and also as a grueling obligation. Those eleven years were frustrating, an education, oddly enlightening, lets say, they were morbidly enlightened. Those years were maddening and depressing. And I learned what I never wanted to know.

To adult children who care for sick parents, this story will be familiar, with variations, since the problems are the same and also different. To adult children who have not yet needed to care for their parents, or may never, lucky dogs, this may be a cautionary tale.

Other families will tell other stories and will have had stranger experiences. My sisters would tell different versions of the same events and relate other events. Any incident is filtered subjectively, which causes memoirs and oral histories to be compelling as much for their versions of honesty, what they remember, the facts of their lives, as for their untrustworthiness, misinformation, and bias.

Ironically, I once wrote: Experience teaches not to trust experience, and thats true, certainly someone elses should be suspect. And what people gain from their own experience is not necessarily helpful to them.