The Mother Knot: A Memoir [Paperback]

In Harrison's case, it seems to have been for much, much worse. Her mother, pregnant at 17 and married briefly, moved into her own place when her daughter was six, leaving Harrison to be raised, with scrupulous care and scant understanding, by her grandparents. Although her mother remained nearby and saw her child on weekends, they never lived together again. She died at 42, of breast cancer.

A mother who was there, yet absent. A mother whom she adored and hated in equal measure. A mother she never really had who nonetheless occupied huge real estate in Harrison's psyche and affected her own sense of parenthood. THE MOTHER KNOT begins with Harrison thrown into a spiral of despair over two apparently unrelated events: her decision to stop breast-feeding her third child (a daughter) and her son's bout with severe asthma. The depression and eating disorders she had developed in childhood now return; she goes back to her longtime analyst; she starts taking medication and losing weight; she feels responsible for her son's illness, overcome by a black, vindictive force that at last she identifies as her mother --- or Harrison's internalized version of her.

Whew. Strong stuff --- yet for me, this sea of troubles didn't really register at first; it was too neat, too practiced. THE MOTHER KNOT struck me as: (a) something of a gyp (96 pages for $19.95? Please.) and (b) traversing confessional ground already mined by the author in her novels THICKER THAN WATER and EXPOSURE: parental abandonment, anorexia, depression, incest. In fact, it is a sort of maternal bookend for Harrison's earlier (and rather notorious) memoir, THE KISS, which revealed an incestuous affair with her father, whom she finally met at the age of 20. I got the sense that she was simply going over the same territory, and I was curiously unmoved.

But something shifted --- in me or in the book, or both --- about midway through. (My interest level rose, I now realize, the moment Harrison stopped acting like a victim.) She summons a scene from her honeymoon trip to India, when she and her husband see a woman's body floating on the Ganges River, and she devises a way to exorcise her mother's spirit: have the body (now buried in California) disinterred, cremated, and sent to her in New York, then scatter the ashes "into a river, or into the sea. I'm going to say good-bye."

Letting go is painful, impossible, essential, universal. Ritual makes it a little more tolerable, whether or not we're conventionally religious, and Harrison recognizes that. There is a ceremonial aspect to the moment she relinquishes her mother's possessions, things she had kept through four changes of address: "As if under a spell, I opened the top drawer of my bureau and took out lingerie, old slips and camisoles of my mother's. ... I put them in a shopping bag to drop off at the local Salvation Army, hunted through my closet for whatever else I'd inherited from her: a pullover; an evening jacket; two cardigan sweaters; a black velvet dress I'd stepped into and buttoned and, when I saw myself in the mirror, taken off, at least once each winter since her death ... Then I dumped my clutch of cosmetics out on the bathroom counter and extracted a compact of rouge, a concealer stick, and three eye pencils --- also my mother's --- and threw them away."

When the ashes arrive, on a winter day (28 degrees!), she drives to a beach on Long Island where she and her mother once walked, wades into the freezing ocean, and gives her to the sea. It is a scene of grace and clarity, almost a primeval rite. Her mother is departing, Harrison writes, "because at last I was allowing her to go."

Autobiography is difficult to do well, and in the early stages of this book Harrison's narrative seemed to me more self-absorbed than enlightening. The last half, though, is something of a tour de force. However the details of our stories differ, we all have a "mother knot": anger bound up with love, dependence with defiance. Harrison's memoir may inspire you to break free of your own tangle. It helped with mine.

--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman