Customer Reviews

My Mother's Ghost

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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.

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.

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!