At a certain point in most people's lives, the parent and the child switch roles, whether due to disease, injury, or just plain aging. It becomes the child's responsibility to keep parents housed, fed, entertained, and safe, a duty that comes with baggage. Even good relationships are challenged when aging parents insist on driving when they can't really see or living alone despite a series of falls. Morton's mother, Tasha, was a gifted teacher and outspoken supporter of education, but Morton was never sure where he fit into her life. In their final time together, he tries to understand a woman who remains feisty while losing herself to dementia. Morton has an appealing style and shares his challenges (including finding a welcoming nursing home and spying on the home health worker Tasha claims verbally abuses her) with a dose of humor and self-deprecation. He's also honest about his hesitancy to bring his mother into his own home and his own feelings of inadequacy. This is a personal story, but anyone facing the same challenges will be nodding along in agreement.

In his latest work, a son's loving and hard reflection on his mother, novelist Morton (Starting Out in the Evening) does his best to piece together the complex woman his mother was--from the progressive elementary school teacher, to the scatterbrained woman he remembered, to a woman in mental decline after the death of her husband. Morton attempts to see his mother as a "whole," outside of the eccentricities he experienced as her child. His memoir takes in his mother's journal entries, which offered a window into her inner life and revealed secrets Morton hadn't been aware of during his youth. At times, he steps out of his narrative briefly to comment on the state of health care and elder care in the United States and to air his frustrations with how these systems affected him and his mother. Still, Morton's writing is conversational and engaging throughout, offering a vivid portrait of a sometimes-hilarious, sometimes-challenging relationship between a mother and son. VERDICT This is a charming and sad memoir, reminding readers of life's inevitabilities, the beauty of the journey, and the lesson to hold on to those close to them with a fierceness.--Amanda Ray

The tumultuous bond between a mother and son animates this unstinting yet tender work from novelist Morton (Florence Gordon). When, after years of "successfully her at arm's length," Morton's mother's worsening dementia forced the two of them to reconnect, Morton aired his frustrations on paper. While he confesses to satirizing his difficult and "voluble Jewish mother" in his novel, The Dylanist, he offers a more nuanced look here at the woman who believed "the people she loved were depriving her." Morton details how his octogenarian mother, Tasha--once a sharp-witted New Jersey teacher--slowly lost her memory, and how he and his sister struggled to find her care in the process ("We got the names of people who could supposedly guide us... but it turned out that they too were working in the dark"). Despite Tasha's obstinacy--which only grew as her health declined--Morton describes her antics with measured compassion and gallows humor. Contemplating her last words--"Go to hell.... I hate you"--he crafts an imagined deathbed monologue for Tasha, a single-sentence two-page tour de force that paints her complexities in a humanizing light ("Who I was is just too much for you," she explains). Part gut-punch comedy, part eulogy, this tribute is dazzling. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson, & Lerner. (Apr.)