ALWAYS IN LOVE WITH AMY

A woman recounts the impact of her mother’s battle with mental illness in this memoir.

With this book, comprised primarily of lucid memories and anecdotes, Smitherman, a third-generation Black Washingtonian, realizes a lifelong desire to uncover her family’s origins, a need that’s been in her “head for decades.” Her chronicle begins in the 1950s, when she was 10 years old, growing up in northwest Washington, D.C., and becoming horrified when her manic, diminutive, schizophrenic mother, Amy, would scream at the ceiling and mutter gibberish. Her father, a Marine stationed in Japan, came home infrequently and couldn’t deliver the parental attention that the author craved. In these pages, she recalls her mother’s “feral” behavior. Smitherman remembers that they always seemed estranged as compared to the bond her mother shared with the author’s brother, Billy: “Although she loved me in her own distant way, she looked at me with such indifference that it affected me deeply.” Smitherman asserts that the only time her mother focused on her was when the author was nearly killed by a motorcyclist as a child. Smitherman’s grandmother Florence and doting aunt Sarah stepped in and delivered the love she needed, though her mother’s worsening condition fractured the family as a whole. The author also recounts cruelties by other relatives, including her curmudgeonly grandfather, who told her mother, when she gave birth to Smitherman at 16, that her baby was “too Black.” Years later, he tried to kill the author when she was a teenager simply because of her clumsy cooking skills. Overall, her childhood was a grim, sad one, filled with an insufficient amount of love from her unstable mother. Conversely, Smitherman extolls the power of family despite quarrels, and how the bond “always remains crucial in the end,” even through the author’s own pregnancies and illnesses. The account is hobbled somewhat by its repetitive, often overstated assertions and sentiments as well as a nonlinear timeline. But the moving memoir is fortified by Smitherman’s astute opinions on genetics, a family’s evolution through a serious illness, and the precarious nature of love. Though she believes she was not her mother’s favorite, the author’s devotion to her was striking and unwavering, even when Smitherman assumed caregiving duties during her mother’s final years.

A heartfelt, bittersweet, cathartic family portrait that’s imbued with illness and compassion at its core.