A Mother's Story

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In 1988, the author's 23-year-old son, Carter Vanderbilt Cooper-Princeton graduate, editor at American Heritage, outwardly confident and in control of his life-committed suicide, falling from the terrace of her Manhattan apartment as she watched helplessly. This luminous, wise, healing and deeply moving memoir opens with Vanderbilt's flashbacks to other personal losses, including abandonment by her mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, who left for Paris in 1925, dumping her at the age of one year on her maternal grandmother and an Irish nurse; the death of her father, Reginald, three months later; and the death of her actor/screenwriter husband, Wyatt Cooper, in 1978 after he suffered several heart attacks. Some of these traumas were covered in her 1985 autobiography, Once Upon a Time, and the self-conscious narrative is padded with diary excerpts from 1971. But when Vanderbilt finally recalls her son's death-which she believes was the result of a psychotic episode induced by a prescription allergy drug, Proventil-the writing shines, communicating her almost unbearable pain and sorrow with shattering intensity. (May)

Library Journal

Vanderbilt's affecting memoir tells of the 1988 suicide of her 24-year-old son, Carter Cooper. This and her two earlier autobiographies (Once Upon a Time, LJ 5/1/85; Black Knight, White Knight, LJ 5/15/87) and an inspirational book about creativity (Woman to Woman, LJ 2/1/79) are all offered in the same vein: to share her experiences in the hopes of encouraging others. Here Vanderbilt recounts a childhood filled with loss and abandonment, her husband Wyatt Cooper's strong family background, and their happy and mutually sustaining marriage. Against this backdrop of familial love she describes Wyatt's death in 1978 and then the day that Carter jumped from her 14th-story terrace while she watched. In spare, unadorned prose Vanderbilt relates "the loss that had no echo" and her own survival. Most public libraries will want this haunting portrayal. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/96.]-Wendy Knickerbocker, Rhode Island Coll. Lib., Providence

Kirkus Reviews

A poignant and painful memoir of a son's suicide—the dark side of Mother's Day.

At one point in this brief volume, Vanderbilt (The Memory Book of Starr Faithfull, 1994) says of herself, "There's a place deep inside me that is hard as a diamond." It would have to be to survive not only the traumas of Vanderbilt's childhood (described in 1985's Once Upon a Time), but the sudden death of her husband Wyatt Cooper when their two sons were still young, and the death of her son Carter at age 24. The story begins as a celebration of the family that Gloria and Wyatt Cooper built together. The narrative is interspersed with diary entries recalling an idyllic family summer at the beach, with eulogies from Carter's brother and friends, and a prescient poem by Carter. Even after their father's death, the boys escape the spoiled rich kid syndrome. Carter finishes college, gets a job, falls in love, all the while impressing his peers as "pure" and "good." On the day he dies, Carter does move back to his mother's house, exhibiting somewhat curious but not worrisome behavior. Waking from a long afternoon nap, Carter is at first disoriented and then, in an aberrant act, he races to the terrace of the apartment, climbs on its rampart and sits there before dropping to his death on the street below. His mother tries desperately to reach him, to talk him back down off the ledge, to recall him to sanity, to no avail. Vanderbilt relives that day and those moments again and again, in therapy, with her friends, and in the sorrowful letters she writes to Carter. Slowly she begins to heal—that is her message—but she will never be the same.

A sometimes clumsy structure only underlines the remarkable intensity of feeling that Vanderbilt conveys. The reader will bear the weight of her sorrow, even after the book is closed.