My Mother's Ghost [Hardcover]

Fergus M. Bordewich (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 26, 2000

A luminous memoir of how the author's involvement in his mother's accidental death reshaped the emotional landscape of his childhood and adult life.
In 1962, at the age of fourteen, Fergus Bordewich's life was shattered as his mother attempted to jump off a runaway horse and fell calamitously under the galloping hooves of the horse Fergus was riding. Crouching beside her in a gathering pool of blood, he convinced himself that she would be fine. But an hour later, in the hospital waiting room, he and his father listened in shock as the doctor told them that she had been dead on arrival. At that moment, he thought to himself, I've killed my mother.

So begins My Mother's Ghost, veteran reporter Fergus Bordewich's anguished attempt to come to terms with the emotional chaos his life was thrown into with his mother's death. For all practical purposes, Fergus's childhood was over. His mother, a fierce, fireball of a woman, had been the dominant figure not just in his family, but, as the executive director of the Association on American Indian Affairs, a galvanizing force in national politics behind Native American activism and tribal rights. She was a woman who traveled the country meeting with tribal chiefs and regularly dined with senators and congressmen. And Fergus had been the son she doted on. In the aftermath of her death, his father slipped further into alcoholism and silence. In the decade that followed, Fergus would follow his father into a life of despair and drink. By the age of twenty-seven, he was close to suicide.

A devastating and beautifully written account of Bordewich's attempt to make peace with his mother's death and rediscover her place in his heart, My Mother's Ghost is a poignant and heartrending memoir that, like Angela's Ashes, is neither easily put down nor readily forgotten.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

At age 14, Bordewich (Killing the White Man's Indian) witnessed his beloved mother's fatal fall from her runaway horseAand her accidental landing beneath the hooves of his own galloping horse, which he had urged forward in an attempt to help her. An only child, he had been unusually close to his mother, viewing her as "bold and courageous and indefatigable"Avery different from his father. She was, indeed, a remarkable woman: intelligent, well-educated and passionate about her work on behalf of Native American tribes in the early 1960s, often traveling alone and fearlessly standing up to both Indian chiefs and congressmen who were suspicious of her motives as a diminutive blonde woman of Irish descent. The core of his account is more biography than memoir, as professional journalist Bordewich delves into his mother's world, ferreting through dusty boxes and yellowed library archives, interviewing octogenarians who remembered his mother from New York University, the Association on American Indian Affairs (which she directed for many years) and the reservations she had frequently visited, sometimes accompanied by her son. Through a synthesis of memory and investigation, the author is able to reconstruct an image of a woman who was not only the confident, heroic figure he admired, but who also had a darker side, and whose world was quickly falling apart (the end of her marriage, the loss of her lover) just before her tragic death. Returning to the Vermont vacation home of his youth with his own family, Bordewich finds that fatherhood finally allows him to let go of the past and releases him from his guilty obsession with his mother's death. Agent, Carl Brandt of Brandt & Brandt Literary Agency. (Dec. 26)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Every few years, a book comes along that wakes one up to the sheer joy of reading. This gripping, unforgettable memoir is such a book. That Bordewich unravels the somber consequences of childhood trauma--in his case, witnessing the bloody, accidental death of his mother--accounts for much of its appeal, for many others struggle with forgiving their parents, the world, themselves, or all three, and appreciate the stories of "survivors," despite horrific specifics. That Bordewich's mother was such a compelling person--a national leader in advocating the rights of indigenous peoples, though she was not herself Indian--makes it an important book, for there are few biographies of the pioneers of that movement. But it is the emotional power with which Bordewich tells the double story of the driven yet loving mother and the son who struggled to come to terms with losing her that raises the book above the ranks of typical autobiographies. Bordewich, who honed his craft in several earlier nonfiction books, including the trenchant Killing the White Man's Indian (1996), is a master of pacing, sensuous detail, and filmlike narrative. But he does not hide behind or within technique; he lets us share the complexities of his search for wholeness. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1st edition (December 26, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385491298
• ISBN-13: 978-0385491297
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,211,281 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A small masterpiece, July 20, 2001

By 

Daniel Akst (Hudson Valley) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: My Mother's Ghost (Hardcover)

This exquisitely crafted memoir so powerfully conveys the author's terrible loss that at times it's almost excruciating, but like the loss itself, the project is redeemed by Bordewich's remarkable writing, suspenseful narrative and indefatigable reportage. It's not just an investigation of his amazing mother and the gaping hole she left in his life, it's also a profound meditation on memory and loss, not to mention a vivid portrait of its times. The book deserves a much wider audience.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Moving Memoir, March 11, 2001

By 

"helenhs" (St. Petersburg, FL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Mother's Ghost (Hardcover)

Fergus Bordewich gives us a beautifully written book that intertwines his mother's story with his own story of obsession, alocoholism and recovery as he comes to terms with her death. LaVerne Madigan was a classical scholar at New York University in the darkest years of the Depression, a member of the Communist Party and writer of sonnets. After her marriage, she was anything but the typical suburban mom, sharing with her young son her love for Latin phrases and compassion for minorities. She took him with her on trips to Indian Reservations as she crisscrossed the country for her job as executive director of the Association on American Indian Affairs. To him, she was a fearless woman who could accomplish anything. Her death in a horseback riding accident when Bordewich was 14 left him devastated. Bordewich takes the reader on a journey first of despair, depression and near suicide and then of recovery. An accomplished writer, he decides to research his mother's life and that of her parents and grandparents, separating truth from family legends. He walks in his mother's footsteps, fingers her papers and sniffs the stains her coffee cups left behind. In the process, he finds healing. He gives us an emotional and engrossing story readers won't want to put down.

3.0 out of 5 stars An Angelic Ghost Of An Exceptional Mother., May 16, 2005

By 

Betty Burks "Betty Burks" (Knoxville, TN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Mother's Ghost (Hardcover)

This memoir was about a family tragedy, the first-hand experience of the accident in which his mother died instantly. He had witnessed her fall from a horse directly in front of the horse he was riding. He'd felt guilty and, as a boy of fourteen, he believed that he had killed his mother.

A son never gets over the loss of his mother at a young age. My brother would have been sixteen when our mother died of cancer. My father was having problems adjusting to the death of his first wife (even though it had been a long and horrible way watch her die), and so he took out his pain on Ralph and Cecil. To escape the daily thrashings and humiliation, Ralph got married the next year at the age of seventeen -- to leave a tormented home situation. In 1990 (42 years later), Ralph was dying from emphesema and liver failure when I visited him in the hospital. A nurse came in his room as he and I were alone and conversing (I lived 200 miles from here then), and casually asked him, "When did your pain begin?" The 58-yr-old man sobbed and said "when my mother died."

Like Ralph, Mr. Bordewich became a man overnight and had to cope with an alcoholic father. But life goes on and he lived through the turmoil to become a father himself. His mother (a beautiful person) was an important person, well-known on a national level. Our mother was an abused woman who'd borne nine children (five died at birth) without a doctor's care -- even I, the baby of the family, had been born at home -- and as a result developed cancer of the uterus. In effect, our fahter killed her. I was nine years younger than Ralph; Cecil and I both thought that we would die at the age of 36, our mother's longevity. My mother did not leave a ghost behind; Fergus is lucky to have had her lingering presence to remind him how fleeting life is.

This is much better than ANGELA'S ASHES and more substantial and heartfelt. Those brothers in New York City even considered putting Angela's remains in a garbage bag out for the trash collectors to get.

So much for being a mother of boys -- you devote your young years to be their chaffeur, first teacher, cook, supporter and see that they are properly cared for, and what glory do you have when they are grown with families of their own.

I'm glad his mother was Irish. I've always like to think mine had been, with the blue eyes and light brown hair. We inherited my dad's dark eyes and dark brown hair; his father's family had mixed with the Cherokee Indians of the Smoky Mtns. When my mother was in her casket, they'd pulled her long hair behind her head and I kept asking, why does she look like a man? Such is life for the youngest left behind.

He has written books on diverse subjects, including the Underground Railroad and many articles published in "American Heritage,' 'Smithsonian Magazine,' and 'The Atlantic Monthly' among others. More power to him!