The Center of the Universe

March 30, 2009
Piquant and ribald, Bachrach's debut memoir about her dotty mother from Providence, R.I., revolves around the accidental gassing accident aboard her parents' boat in 1983 that left her father dead of exhaust asphyxiation and her mother with severe brain damage. The author was then a 33-year-old advertising executive working in Paris on a new (ultimately doomed) campaign to introduce antiperspirant to the French, when she rushed back to the U.S. at the behest of her two professional siblings, expecting a double funeral but finding her tenacious, irrepressible 56-year-old mother, Lola, emerging from a coma. Widowed, confused and mis-medicated, Lola was not expected to recover from her carbon-monoxide poisoning, but her long-suffering children knew better, having endured a long history of Lola's erratic, flamboyant, bipolar yo-yoing requiring years of psychiatry, shock treatment and hospitalization. Over time her aphasia, echolalia, catatonia and incontinence amazingly do turn around, but Lola is ever a force to be reckoned with, the granddaughter of a prominent Rhode Island rabbi, molested in her youth, lustily married to so-called Mr. Fix It (also the name of the boat, which he incorrectly rewired, causing the release of gas vapors that killed him) and gamely re-marriageable (“Men are like buses,” she maintained, lining up another husband: “Miss one, hop on another”). Bachrach's prose is wry, risky, and feels like she has found her moment at last.

April 1, 2009
A sophisticated, funny debut about growing up with a manic mother and coming to terms with a fatal family accident.

Bachrach was in Paris launching a hopeless antiperspirant ad campaign when her brother called with the news that their father Mort was dead and that their mother Lola was in a coma. The couple had spent the night on their docked boat, Mr. Fix It, breathing in carbon monoxide from a generator incorrectly repaired by Mort. Lola, who slept near a leaky porthole that provided a stream of oxygen, was still alive but not expected to pull through. Told to prepare herself for a double funeral, Bachrach wondered how she would do that:"Pack two of everything? Pack clothes that are very black?" The author's humor is acerbic, rich with allusion and beautifully timed. She describes her mother, pre-coma, theatrically imparting the vision that Lola was the center of the universe and everyone else revolved around her:"She is Salome, stripping the veil off the face of the cosmos. She is my mother, Lola Hornstein. And she is crazy." Bachrach returned to Providence to aid her siblings, a piano-playing surgeon and an art-therapy professor. Mort's funeral was packed."My father on his own would have been a so-so draw," she writes,"but this crowd thought they were coming for a double bill." Instead, Lola awoke, but as a sedated, babbling version of the brilliant, electrically energetic woman who raised them. Bachrach rooted for her mother to overcome the doctors' diagnoses of permanent brain damage, but she was carrying around some bitterness from a quirky childhood, and intermittent flashbacks make it easy to see why. Lola's manic episodes weren't unique; the family history was rife with mad geniuses.

With smart, subtle prose, Bachrach limns a journey toward love that feels fresh, organic and as unpredictable as life itself.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

May 11, 2009
While working as an advertising executive in Paris, debut memoirist Bachrach received word that her father died of carbon monoxide poisoning on his boat and that her mother, also on board, fell into a coma. From this dramatic opening, readers go back in time to learn what it was like to have parents like Mort, a would-be inventor and failed handyman, and Lola, who has an assortment of psychiatric issues. A second thread follows Lola's recovery. Unfortunately, the stories never quite coalesce, probably owing to Bachrach's contempt for her parents and her constant, failed attempts at humor. Pass, unless your hate runs as deep as hers.-Elizabeth Brinkley, Granite Falls, WA

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2009
Bachrachs account of herchildhood with a bipolar mother has a freshness and loopy humor as she describes Lola, her red-haired mom who believed that proper connection with the Fibonacci numerical sequence would lead to God. Equally palpable are Bachrachs memories of her and her siblingsconfusion duringtorrential emotional scenes, which were sometimes followed by openly, wildly sexual reconciliations between her parents. HypersexualLolas medical history includes the usual 1950s shock treatments, so that whole chunks of Lola were scorched earth.Returning to Providence when a boating accident kills Dad and renders Mom comatose, the three adult siblings gather at Morts surreally funny funeral, and at Lolas bedside, where the patientsserenity makes her unrecognizable, as though someone pressed the mute button on her personality.What follows Lolas rising from metaphorical ashesas Bachrach cares for her recovering mom are funny-sad revelations of family secrets and identities, well-placed flashbacks, and a scary chronicle of Lolas subsequentbreakdown.All is infused with humanizing pathos, and readers may well tear through this compelling read in a single sitting.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)