 |
 |
||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
|
||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
||
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|||||||||||
Finding Rosa:
A Mother with Alzheimer's, a Daughter in Search of the Past
by Caterina Edwards
Vancouver: Greystone
Books, 2008, ISBN 978-1-55365-389-9, 338 pp., $30 cloth.
The mother who dominates the early pages of Caterina Edwards' Finding Rosa is the kind of woman most daughters would long to forget. "Hurricane Rosa" descends on the apartment of the newly married, twenty-three-year-old Caterina and proceeds to empty her closet, tossing the clothes she deems inappropriate (which is to say most of them) into a jumbled pile and then blaming her daughter for the mess--all before Caterina herself has even returned from work. Insults follow the intrusion, Rosa bemoans her fate in giving birth to such a child, and within minutes in her mother's company, Caterina is reduced to helpless rage.Imagine how that frustrated rage surfaces again years later when Caterina is forced by her father's death and other family circumstances to become her mother's principal caregiver. As emotionally intense as ever, Rosa now struggles with Alzheimer's disease as well. Much as she might like to, Caterina cannot forget her mother; instead, ironically, she becomes guardian of her mother's memory. But as she soon discovers, Rosa's memory was never an untroubled one; nor is Alzheimer's the sole explanation for her anxiety, confusion, and alienation from others. For Rosa was born in Italian Istria (now Croatia), and the area's ethnic cleansings--hidden, unacknowledged, deliberately erased--robbed her of her past long before the onset of dementia.
Worn out from the demands of working, raising teenage daughters, supervising the renovation of her home, and caring for her difficult and demanding parent, Caterina worries that she is becoming her mother--neurotic, tense, and self-dramatizing. Nevertheless, she embarks on a journey to make sense of her mother's fragmented past. However foolish the search may seem to others--including some of her own friends and relatives, who are either threatened by or annoyed with her obsession--it's a journey she feels compelled to make. As Caterina's mother descends, inch by inch, into the fog of Alzheimer's, the author (and the reader) slowly confront a parallel darkness in the suppressed history of Istria. This parallel never feels forced, for the more Edwards learns about Istrian history, the more she understands "Hurricane Rosa"--and the more she understands her mother, the more she understands herself.
Edwards, who has previously published a novel, two novellas, a book of stories, a play, a docudrama, and other nonfiction, confesses her impatience with traditional genre categories. Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that Finding Rosa successfully combines elements of history, biography, travel writing, and several other sub-genres. Among the most powerful sections of this book, for me, were those in which Edwards frankly imagines her way into her mother's and grandfather's lives. Some might question the legitimacy of fictional passages in a work of nonfiction, but here, I think they are more than justified. One could even argue that they are required. The destruction, loss, and falsification of records in her mother's homeland have made facts elusive and truth and memory contested categories. So in Edwards' story, the fictional sections serve a dual purpose. They uncover emotional truths not accessible through standard forms of research, while at the same time they highlight the unreliability of more conventional sources.
Finding Rosa recently won the Wilfred Eggleston Award for Nonfiction and has been nominated for a City of Edmonton Book Award. It is a funny, searching, honest, and deeply compassionate book. Anyone who has ever cared for an aging relative or a challenging child (or both), anyone who has ever felt burdened by the demands of the caregiver role will sympathize with Edwards' predicament. Her openness about her own depression, stress, and guilt in the face of her mother's seemingly ceaseless needs will speak powerfully to many readers in the "sandwich generation." What makes this book especially shine, however, is the writing. With intensity and passion, Edwards portrays "Hurricane Rosa" as she used to see her--portrays her so vividly that we thoroughly sympathize and share in her younger self's view. At the same time, she shows us the mother she's come to know as an adult--not an angry, selfish harridan so much as a woman cut off from her own past--and she convinces us of that view, as well. This doubleness of vision, this balancing of past and present, is one of memoir's special gifts. Finding Rosa demonstrates why the genre is so perennially necessary, and so important.
Susan Olding thinks a good memoir is anything but self-indulgent.
Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.