Mother Millett

Gloria Steinem

A journey of heart and time that many of us will take, and from which all of us can learn.

Yoko Ono

An extraordinarily rich and sensitive narrative.

Publishers Weekly

When feminist icon and writer Millett (Sexual Politics, etc.) was summoned home to St. Paul to attend to her dying mother, she thought it might be her last such journey. Instead, it was merely the beginning of a fervent attempt to reclaim her mother from infirmity and dependence, to liberate her from the highly rated, wholly pitiless nursing home she detested. There is ample irony hereMother Millett had, after all, signed the commitment papers that had placed daughter Kate in a psychiatric ward years before. It was that experience, documented in Millett's The Loony Bin Trip, that made it impossible for her to agree to her mother's incarceration in St. Mary's, with its ever-present threat of medicated confusion and physical restraint. As she struggles to redeem her mother and return her to her beloved Manhattan apartment, Millett's conflicts with nursing-home managers, her own family and her sense of failure and self-doubt become a kind of universal history of children and aged parents in an America where the needs of the elderly commonly take second place to those of their families. Determined to be a better caretaker of her mother than her mother was of her, Millett sometimes claims the moral high ground too readily, though her rueful recognition that she will herself soon enough be old and facing financial circumstances far less secure than her mother's provides a sobering balance. (May 13) Forecast: Millett's reputation should draw review attention to this passionate rejection of the institutionalization and infantilization of the old and ailing, which, via Mother's Day displays, has the potential to appeal to a wider audience than Millett's core readership of boomer feminists. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Modern literature has often portrayed mothers as both nurturing and domineering self-sacrificing yet adamant characters who at once build and destroy their child's sense of worth. In more ways than one, Helen Feely Millett is such a mother. Like Mersault's mother in The Stranger, she was responsible for much of her child's anguish but was also the driving force behind her victories. And despite the occasional lapses, she was fiercely independent and valiant. Unsurprisingly, then, her death should not symbolize the beginning of pain but a celebration of an extraordinary life and her child's realization that she is deserving of so much more than tears. This deeply personal and brooding memoir about Millett's mother's last days may not intrigue those who have an insatiable appetite for Millett's ideas on feminism (see Sexual Politics), but her writing is so impeccably fluent and her thoughts so articulate despite the lack of linear narrative that Millett's openness should appeal to anyone who values the technique at least as much as the theme. And since the memoir is as much about the daughter as it is about the mother Millett says so at the onset it is really a unique mix of autobiography and biography. An essential purchase. Mirela Roncevic, "Library Journal" Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

While Millett continues to be preoccupied with the themes that she explored in such seminal works as , here these motifs are leavened by the lesbian feminist's reflections on caretaking her mother and facing mortality. The memoir concludes with a tender eulogy. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)