Someone Not Really Her Mother [Hardcover]

Harriet Scott Chessman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 19, 2004

The captivating story of a contemporary American family, in which three generations of women confront the intricacies of memory, geography, and motherhood, from the lauded author of Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper

As Hannah Pearl’s memories of her 1940 escape to England from war-torn France come to the foreground of her consciousness, her memory of her more recent American life, including her relationships with her daughter and granddaughters, is almost erased. Her daughter, Miranda, attempts to bring her mother into the present and the daily activities of family life, yet finds herself instead pulled into Hannah’s unresolved past. Miranda’s daughters confront the shadows of history in their own ways. Fiona, content with her life as a new mother, tries to ignore the ghostly presence of Hannah’s family, who perished in the war, while Ida clings to Hannah’s revelations as if they form a lifeline. Facing the mystery of Hannah’s unspoken memories of grief, each woman must ask how well anyone can know the inner life of another person, even of someone one cherishes.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"How long can a war last?" This question—metaphorical, physical and above all, emotional—sits at the heart of this brief novel by Chessman (Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper; Ohio Angels), centered around Hannah Pearl, a French-born World War II survivor now residing in a Connecticut nursing home, where she is increasingly prey to memory loss. The author uses Hannah's condition as the starting place for a series of finely crafted meditations that blur the lines between past and present, English and French. This technique allows for many melancholy confusions. Hannah's ongoing encounters with unrecognizable yet familiar family members convey a quiet, heartbreaking grace as they digress into memories of loss undiscussed for years: Hannah's departure from France as a teenager in the 1930s, the loss of her family in the Holocaust, her marriage to an Englishman, his death in the war. Hannah's daughter, a museum curator, and her granddaughters, a young mother and a college student, write and visit, but cannot penetrate the fog in which Hannah is lost. Chessman creates a lovely if precious world filled with snapshots, letters and internal dialogue, but the gradual fading away of the protagonist leaves a hole at the book's center.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Hannah Pearl can't remember whether the nursing home aide is her daughter, her sister, or a stranger. She can't remember whether she is still in occupied France in 1940, in England during and after the war, or in America raising her daughter alone. She has Alzheimer's, and the very memories of losing her entire family in the concentration camps and her husband in a freak accident are the only ones clear to her anymore. Her daughter, Miranda, waits for the brief moments her mother knows her to tell her what is happening in her life. Her granddaughter, Ida, wants to put Hannah's life in a poem but is too late to catch the memories. And Fiona is haunted by the lost family in France. Told through the voices of these four women, the novel intricately reveals the fleetingness of memory and the delicate lacework of love between mothers and daughters. This is a lovely and poignant story to savor. Elizabeth Dickie
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Dutton Adult; First Edition edition (August 19, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0525947930
• ISBN-13: 978-0525947936
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,955,415 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars VIVIDLY WRITTEN AND ABSORBING!, October 30, 2004

By 

Dorie "a lover of historical fiction" (Mequon, Wisconsin) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Someone Not Really Her Mother (Hardcover)

This is a bittersweet story of a woman who is slowing losing her memory while she resides in a nursing home. Born French, she departed for France as a teenager, sent by her parents during the Holocaust. She worked as an au pair in England ultimately to find that she had lost her family to the concentration camps. She had married an Englishman, lost him to the war and left to come to America with her young baby.

The first person narrative allows us insight into how Hannah's memory of present day events fades while resurrecting past experiences very vividly. We learn of the frustrations of her daughter and grandchildren to hold on to Hannah and keep her in the present. She has flashes of memory that within minutes fails her once again.

The characters are well developed and the story interesting. What I found interesting is that Hannah in the end is not depressed because of her situation but rather feels "does it matter if I don't know the right words?" Her grandchild struggles onto her bed and whispers a new word he has learned into her ear. She holds him close and smells his sweet child smell and is satisfied and reflecting on her life she states, "To love that went well".

I would recommend this book for book clubs; in the end it is not a depressing tale but a window into an elderly mind.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars riding along the sun's brief gleams, December 29, 2004

By 

Cynthia Rucker "[e-mail]" (Mount Perry, OH United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Someone Not Really Her Mother (Hardcover)

If you've ever driven past narrowly spaced trees with bright sun sharply angled, you will understand Hannah Pearl's condition: light/darkness, light/dark, wending so fast that one becomes dizzy after 30 seconds. Hannah, too, is in/out all day, from the time she spends at Tikkun, a nursing home, to her brief jaunts with Miranda, the daughter whom she refers to as "maman" halfway through this short novel. Sometimes Hannah can recall reality: her daughter Mir, her 20somethings granddaughters. Mostly, though, she lives on the periphery of reality, where her own mind creates the most vivid and understandable scenarios.
Chessman's style, as in "Lydia Cassat," a previous novel, reminds one a bit of Virginia Woolf: the writing flows lyrically, at times like poetry. There are numerous references to color, flowers, and other inhabitants of nature. I love how she weaves Hannah's French language into her thoughts and utterances, and how confused the other characters are by her native language. The scene in which Hannah is lost in a drugstore is particularly moving, as is the final scene with Hannah and her great-grandson.
I want to send a copy of this to a young woman who was in the same writing class as I was this summer. She was writing a lovely, heartbreaking memoir of her grandmother's gradual decline into Alzheimer's. Although Chessman's book is not a memoir, technically, it reads much like one--a very good one.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I buy books for my wife., September 22, 2004

By 

G. Coward - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Someone Not Really Her Mother (Hardcover)

I buy books for my wife because she can never make up her mind from the thousands available. Generally I buy only those books that received good customer reviews. But this one I bought on a whim since there weren't yet any customer reviews available. Well she really liked it. And since I am so big on customer reviews I will tell you about a few others I bought that she just loved. She loved A YEAR SINCE YESTERDAY by George Edward Zintel. That book came in soft-cover (not paperback even though it is listed as such) and was one of the best books she has ever read. Another is NIGHTS OF RAIN AND STARS by Maeve Bichney. BOTH of those books she has read several times. I also give books as Christmas presents, and I would recommend any of those I mentioned as gifts.