Wait Until Tomorrow: A Daughter%E2%80%99s Memoir

In a straightforward, take-off-the-rose-colored-glasses fashion, novelist MacEnulty (From May to September) tells a sad though familiar story of a family ruptured by illness and old age. MacEnulty grew up in Jacksonville, Fla., in a fatherless household; she descended into drug addiction in her teens, and finally turned herself around through education and a teaching and writing career. Her mother, a retired pianist and composer in Edenton, N.C., whose early ambitions were largely thwarted by her overbearing husband, grew needy and ill. Little by little illness began to sap the family%E2%80%99s strength: MacEnulty developed a debilitating case of hepatitis C (contracted from her drug use years earlier), and she was later diagnosed with abdominal cancer, while MacEnulty%E2%80%99s mother became crippled and no longer able to care for herself. A move into assisted living proved expensive and unsatisfying, however necessary, as her mother was constantly ending up in the hospital; moreover, she was unpleasant to be around: "Now she is no longer the grande dame," writes MacEnulty with hard resignation, "she is just another addled old person with a walker." MacEnulty%E2%80%99s memoir of feeling torn by her mother%E2%80%99s illness, her faltering relationship with her spouse, chronic money worries, and anxieties for her teenage daughter all resonate with Job-like finality, though she does bring to her prose a little levity to sweeten the numbing detail. (May)