If You Knew Suzy is unlike any memoir or biography I've ever read; it's intensely personal and poignant, yet Rosman is also every inch the journalist. In setting out to cover her mom's life, and death, she has a plan of sorts: to focus on the parts of her mom's life she didn't know much about, and to investigate why her mother was so reluctant to face the reality of the cancer that ravaged her.
Rosman takes her mother's handwritten address book and attacks it with vigor, calling everyone remotely associated with her mother. For me, it's some of the small details that stand out; her mother saying, "Take care of my eBay!" before heading in to surgery, her chastising Rosman for writing about orgasms.
Along the way, we learn about Augusta National and golf, a subject which I can safely say I have very little interest in per se, but Rosman personalizes it, from the story of getting her stepfather the chance to play at the famed (and famously exclusive) club to a woman who was Suzy's caddie and went on to a storied business career. In some ways, these side characters to the story are amongst the most fascinating, and show the ways that Suzy Rosin touched countless people. We get a Pilates history lesson and a look at a preacher who used his own grief to help many others; this cross-religious communication, a tale of the kindness of strangers, where Rosman's actions in the course of writing the book extend far beyond the page, is one that will stay with me for a long time.
Ultimately, If You Knew Suzy forces to the reader to ask the question of whether any of us would want to be reported on in such a way, by anyone. The scrutiny with which she analyzes every detail of her mother's life is fascinating to us as readers but is also so minute, there were times I felt torn between marveling at her skill as a writer and her mother's request for privacy. That is a tension that hangs throughout the book and is never fully resolved. Yet I walked away feeling that, despite these qualms, this book was a tribute to her mother in the very best sense, by introducing her (or at least, a version of her) to the world. Rosman never tries to be impartial, as that would be impossible.
There's the occasional passage where it seems Rosman has glossed over something negative about her mother, though more often, her compass is on her own perceived flaws in dealing with her mother and the tensions she (and sometimes her sister) had with the mother-daughter relationship. She does at times seem to be arguing with her mother, not out of anger, though, but out of love, trying to find out why her mother confided certain fears to strangers. These are the kinds of intimacies that left me with mixed feelings as to their place in the book, but ultimately helped create a portrait of a woman fighting, literally, for her life. Rosman's relationship with her mother, in all its closeness and tension and, at times, confusion, is the true core of this book. I think many, like me, will marveled at how close they were, talking every day, and that makes the things unearthed in Rosman's research all the more striking.
If You Knew Suzy is moving, powerful, and a testament to a daughter's love without devolving into a sappy Hallmark greeting type of sentiment. It's a gripping family portrait that, while extremely personal, will also speak to those who've lost a family member to a prolonged illness and those with unresolved questions between family members, living or dead.
