Mother Millett [Hardcover]

Kate Millett (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2001

A poignant memoir of loss and reestablishment.

Kate Millett's tremulous and hauntingly beautiful memoir begins with a telephone call from Minnesota where her mother is dying. Her return home to a severe, intelligent, and controlling matriarch is the catalyst for a meditation on her upbringing in middle America and her subsequent outcast status as a political activist, artist, and lesbian.

Mother Millett is an intensely personal journey through the author's interior life, a subject she has visited over the years in such classic texts as Sita and The Loony Bin Trip. In these pages are reflections on a life of political engagement, beginning with the sexual politics of the feminist movement, proceeding to the struggle for gay liberation, and culminating in her campaign for housing rights on the Lower East Side of New York where she and her neighbors currently face eviction. Throughout, Millett confronts her fears of losing her mother, the anchor to a world she has long ago rejected but which continues to define her.

Echoing Philip Roth's Patrimony, Millett writes with great poignancy about caring for the person who brought her into the world, a role reversal that brings with it both devastation and grace.

Editorial Reviews

From 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, Inc.

From 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 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 260 pages
• Publisher: Verso (May 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1859846076
• ISBN-13: 978-1859846070
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,952,067 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Family Matters, July 2, 2001

By 

Pat (Twin Cites MN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mother Millett (Hardcover)

Kate Millett has an easy to read style. Her family whom she loves fight back and forth over how to care for their Mother.....when her health declines....... The book also covers Kates political thoughts which always seem to blame Republicans....Since I am a Republican....I disagree with her but I think the book is important because it shows the fear that her mother and any older person must have when they think their family is ignoring what they want and treat them like children.

I hope Kate Millett gets some press on this book......it deserves it......and everyone should read it....

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Intense, beautiful tribute, July 28, 2001

By 

"blissengine" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mother Millett (Hardcover)

Kate Millett returns home in the early 1990s to care for her ailing mother and finds herself mired in the delicious and maddening familiarity of one's mother's love. Kate struggles to help her mother achieve better health, in order to avoid the imprisonment that nursing homes provide. The book is an obsessive blend of the personal and the political (which is Millett's exceptional forte), and the beauty of her writing, of her imagery, of her universality of experience all make this a remarkable memoir. Not only for the conveyance of why nursing homes are such dumping grounds of people, but also because of the beauty of reestablishing a relationship with one's own mother in the time before the mother's final days. It is this graceful, simple love between a mother and a daughter which makes this book shine, and which makes its universality so potent. This is a biography to hold close to the heart, long after the final pages.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Rough sledding, but a worthwhile ride!, June 29, 2002

By 

middlemoo "maraschino" (United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mother Millett (Hardcover)

Baby boomers especially will find much stimulation in these ponderings on learning to manage ageing, infirmity, family strife, duty, and forgiveness. Kate Millett faced a lot in living through and then writing about the lessons of this book. While not everyone will agree with her choices (or her politics!?) she still presents a coherent story that moved and involved me and I was gratified at her success in liberating her mother from the nursing home, as well as liberating HERSELF from many of her own personal demons. Everyone feels SOME ambivalence towards their parents, and if we assume responsibility for their care, there are bound to be unpredictable issues arising. Kate constantly reminds us (and herself!) of her mother's humanity and winds up handling most of her issues with grace, eventually coming to peace with ALL of them - both she and her mother are heroines here!