“Some people think about it, some don’t. I’ve been thinking about it for thirty years. I try to prepare myself.”
After reading, we found ourselves emotionally exhausted, perhaps still partly so. A book that sooner or later, in a form we cannot imagine, we will find ourselves writing. Each in their own way, each with the right amount of blank pages and unfinished sentences.
How much do we really know our mother? Beyond her social role as our parent, how much do we know about her life journey, up until the moment she became a mother? What if all the suppositions, conjectures, and feelings were swept away by the breath of an illness we hadn’t thought of?
Conceiving that a parent had a life of our own is not an easy exercise. Imagining the one who represented everything to us, perhaps in turn a helpless daughter, a jilted girlfriend, capable of stupid thoughts, or something else, is one of the locks we must unlock to reach adulthood.
The author recounts her relationship with her mother, Ann, starting from the moment she realizes she has lost her forever.
The chapters alternate between the present tense, with the elderly mother confined first to the hospital and then to a nursing home, and the young mother, discovered by the author through the stories of those who knew her and some diaries, until she uncovers a secret she will never be entirely certain of.
Caring for Ann after a fall at home forces the author to confront a series of obligations and duties she had never considered, clashing head-on with the French healthcare system and even with bureaucracy.
A society capable of caring only for those capable of producing and consuming, while the elderly are an unwanted burden to be shed as quickly as possible so it can continue to function at full capacity.
Reading this book made us feel like children again, with the worries of adults, accompanied by delightful writing.
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Julia Deck, Anna d’Inghilterra, Adelphi, Milano, 2025
Original edition: Ann d’Angleterre, Paris, Seuil, 2024