Me & My Mom

the long version

In her first novel since 1986, Marianne Hauser explores the painful struggle between generations. A young woman, forced to place her mother in a nursing home, comes face to face with her own guilt and mortality. The narrator of Me & My Mom is a definite product of our time. Dressed in "prewashed jeans slit and frazzled at the knees for the funky look," she loves and hates New York City, and is practical and down-to-earth on nearly all matters, including her love for her out-of-work husband, Jack. She represents nearly everything her mother, whom she has consigned to the Bide-a-Wee nursing home, hates; for the mother is a dreamer who has aspired, throughout her life, to better things. No solutions to this eternal battle are proffered by this painfully touching story; but seldom have the lines - between the past and the present, between dangerous dreams and coarse reality, between youth and age - been so brilliantly exposed.