October 06, 2004

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Palo Alto Online

A journey of the mind

by Jennifer Deitz Berry

I wasn't sure I was going to like "Someone Not Really Her Mother" when I first picked it up.

The book jacket said this would be a story about an aging woman struggling with her memories of the holocaust, that it would be about the relationships between three generations of women, and that it was going to be a "keenly drawn portrait of love, memory and loss." I was already beginning to picture it as one of those sweet sappy stories that are just waiting to be spun into a movie on Lifetime or the Oxygen channel.

I was surprised instead to be drawn into a quiet, intelligent, dream-like novel that was ended before I wanted it to be over.

The author, Harriet Scott Chessman, is a former professor of literature and women's studies at Yale University and a mother of three. She relocated to Palo Alto two years ago after her husband was offered a faculty position at Stanford. Chessman said the novel is, in part, a tribute to the home in Connecticut she left behind. But the book also seems to pay homage to other themes in her life - particularly literature and family.

"Someone Not Really Her Mother" is about Hannah Pearl, a woman who lost her family in the Holocaust and narrowly avoided being killed herself when the Nazis took over France in World War II.

Hannah manages to put her past behind her and goes on to lead a full life, working, writing poetry and raising her daughter.

But at the point at which the reader is introduced to Hannah, things have taken a turn. Hannah is now an old woman living in a nursing home in Connecticut, suffering from what would appear to be Alzheimer's. She is disoriented from the moment she wakes up, not sure where she is or who the strange woman is who has appeared in bedroom and is now lifting her out of bed and helping her to the toilet.

The good news about this book is that it doesn't try too hard to tug at the reader's heart-strings. Rather than wallow in the drearier aspects of Hannah's existence, Chessman is able to infuse many of the scenes with bits of humor and irony.

Take the opening line: "Morning here is not like any mornings Hannah Pearl has ever known." On the one hand, it sounds like the kind of thought an elderly woman like Hannah might be having as she reflects on how different it is to be dependent on a nurse for care after so many years of being independent, looking after herself and her child.

But read the same line another way and it can sound almost like a bad joke, since while the morning may not feel to Hannah like anything she's ever known, it's obvious from the way the nurse approaches her that the two of them have been going through the exact same morning routine for some time now. But since Hannah wakes up each day unable to remember the one before, every morning is liable to feel new and unfamiliar, and unlike anything she's ever known.

Some of the most wrenching moments in the book are when we see Hannah's family - especially her daughter and granddaughters - trying to connect with Hannah despite her failing memory. Her daughter Miranda takes Hannah out to lunch each week and talks to her about the family, hoping that something of what she says will trigger something in her mother and pull her back into the present. Hannah's granddaughter sends letters to her grandmother that never get answered. But the story is wrenching, in a different way, for the reader who is privy to the inner workings of Hannah's mind.

In an early scene with the nurse, Hannah remembers a line of poetry - "and, all in tears, she melted, dissolving, queen no longer of those waters" - and her mind begins to wander as she tries to remember who wrote it, so when the nurse interrupts her thoughts to ask a question, Hannah says out loud, "she melted." Of course, it sounds like nonsense, and the nurse good-naturedly brushes the comment aside. Only the reader can see that at the root of her mad babbling there is an element of reason.

In that way, Hannah shares something in common with the Shakespeare characters whose lines she is often drawn back to. She's reminiscent of characters such as King Lear, or even Hamlet, who seem to sink deeper into madness as they face difficult truths, but who, paradoxically achieve another kind of sanity - or clarity of vision, at least - by looking their demons in the eye.

This element of discord gives the book its complexity. On the one hand, the reader shares in the frustrations of Hannah's daughter who is trying to pull Hannah out of her thoughts and get her to focus on what's happening in the present. She wants her to be able to share in the lives of her grandchildren, one who is following in her grandmother's footsteps by launching a career in poetry and journalism, and the other who is married and just had a baby.

But on the other hand, the reader gets the sense that the only way Hannah will be able to make peace with what's happened is if she delves further into her past to dredge up these old memories and make sense of them. Whether she will be able to do this without losing her mind completely is never clear, and it is that that keeps the reader flipping pages.

If there is a flaw in this book, it is that the story ends too quickly. We get an impression of Hannah, and of how her history has been refracted in the lives of her daughter and granddaughters, but there isn't time spent on any of these women to get to know them as well as I would've liked to.

Nonetheless, this was a beautifully-written and haunting story that is well worth the read.

Jennifer Dietz Berry is a local freelance writer and a former Weekly education reporter.

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