Friends have started saying you are a saint. They say it warmly and it lands like a door closing, because a saint has no complaints to make. Your brother phones on Sundays and asks how she is, never how the week went. The doctor talks to you in the corridor now, in shorter sentences than last year, and has stopped explaining what the words mean.
Nobody asks the other question. Not the neighbour who brings soup, not the brother on Sundays. What is it like to watch the person who raised you become someone who needs the toilet found for them, and to be too tired at the end of it to feel anything you would want to admit to.
These three books ask it.
Roz Chast · 2014
Drawn over the decade her parents declined in the Brooklyn apartment they refused to leave, by a daughter driving in from Connecticut. Chast puts in the things memoirs leave out: the money, the smell, the arguing about the stair rail, her own dread on the drive over. It is funny in the way that only exhausted people are funny, and it is the one book here that will make the situation smaller for an evening.
Vivian Gornick · 1987
Two women walk around Manhattan and argue. That is the whole book, and it goes further into the mother-and-child knot than almost anything written since. Gornick is past fifty when she writes it, her mother is old, and the walks are not a device: they are what was left of the relationship after everything else had been said. The argument keeps circling one thing: love and irritation are not stages to be worked through, they are the same current running both ways at once, hourly, for a lifetime. The reader who has caught themselves being sharp with a frightened old woman and hated themselves for an hour afterwards will find that hour described here, without absolution and without blame.
Penelope Lively · 2013
Written in London at eighty: old age reported from the inside by someone still entirely herself, on memory, on what it is like when the body becomes the day's main event. Read as a corrective. The parent in the next room is having an experience of their own, and this is the closest anyone gets to putting it on paper.
Answer the questions and let the Oracle read you
