Descriere & specificații

Linda Seidel 's lightly fictionalized memoir lets readers feel what it's like for a naturally skeptical, yet persistently na ve, older woman to watch her parents age out of life, to think about the epiphanies they enable her to have, and to reflect on the lives of "elders" she didn't appreciate until she'd worn through some years herself. The elders whose stories Seidel reconstructs were quintessentially American--meaning complex, subtle and challenging--whether it's a "shell shocked" grandfather who immigrated to Pennsylvania almost a century ago after fighting for Germany in a World War, or a mother who was secretly spitting out her pills at the "Lucky Stroke Nursing Home" in Missouri in 2018. The Chronicles are organized organically, starting with a Prologue about Belinda's "search for a genre." The genre which she discovers is a series of vignettes, gently shaped and pruned so that readers can study them individually, as smaller sets, and cumulatively. Thus, for example, the initial series of nine short pieces is gathered under the title "Women and Mothers." It includes stories about her mother's childhood ("Trudi's Parents"), her grandmother's old age ("Lotte"), and several about her mother Trudi's last months, branching into dead-on accurate sketches of contemporary nursing home life and workers ("Marty the Nurse"). The final vignette of "Women and Mothers" ( titled "Wasting Time: Love and Class") involves reflections on a pair of potential marriages which didn't happen