A WOMAN'S BATTLES AND TRANSFORMATIONS

A son bears witness to his mother’s struggles.

In a slim, tender memoir, novelist and editor Louis offers an empathetic portrait of his mother, who for 20 years lived with her abusive husband, “her life deformed and almost destroyed by misery and masculine violence.” A lively young woman who hoped to become a chef, her dream was crushed when she became pregnant at 17 and married the baby’s father, who turned out to be a drunk. Soon they had another child, but by the time she was 20, she had left him and married her second husband, Louis’ father. He, too, was an alcoholic, cruel and demanding. “Nothing could happen unless it involved my father,” Louis recalls. Over the years, she could imagine no way to leave her husband and children, but Louis could not understand her passivity. He was resentful and ashamed of her, refusing to confide his pain over being called a “faggot” by boys at school. He saw himself as a “dissident, monstrous child”—a loser, like his mother. “The first pages of this story,” he writes, “could have been called: A Son’s Struggle Not to Become a Son.” As much as he later came to sympathize with her yearning “for the right to exist as a woman,” as a boy, he treated her with condescension and cruelty. His violence, he admits with regret, was a form of “revenge against my childhood.” When his mother was 45, long after Louis had left home to attend a lycée and university, she finally threw his father out. To support herself, she became a home health aide, a satisfying job that made her proud. She met a man and joined him in Paris, where Louis was living. He depicts her transformation into a happy, attractive woman, reveling in pleasure and hard-won freedom, as a gift to them both.

A sensitive meditation on a woman’s difficult life.