cover image My Mother Dying

My Mother Dying

Hillary Johnson, Hilary Johnson. St. Martin's Press, $25 (192pp) ISBN 978-0-312-19930-2

When her mother, Ruth, was diagnosed with terminal cancer of the esophagus, Johnson, an author (Osler's Web) and journalist, moved from New York to Minneapolis to be with her, staying until she died four years later. What distinguishes this from other memoirs of caring for a dying parent is Johnson's perceptive rendering of her struggle to reestablish a loving relationship with her charismatic but troubled mother. As a parent, Ruth had been erratic at best, sometimes even destructive to Johnson and her brother. In 1953, when the author was three and her brother six, Ruth abruptly left her husband and took her two children to Paris, placing them on a rustic farm while she joined the literary and artistic circle that included James Baldwin; she also became novelist Frank Yerby's lover. After a year, she and the children returned home; Ruth eventually got a divorce. Although she acknowledges Ruth's flaws (including excessive drinking and smoking), Johnson portrays her in a nonjudgmental manner reminiscent of Mary Karr's depiction of her father in The Liar's Club. When Ruth was 50 and happily remarried, she enrolled in art school and experienced great joy by creating unusual paintings and drawings, some of which are reproduced in this book. Johnson's writing skill is apparent both in her poignant account of how she witnessed her mother's extreme unhappiness through a child's eyes and in several chilling anecdotes detaling the unnecessary suffering inflicted on her mother by incompetent physicians during the last months of her life. B&w and color illustrations. (Aug.)