Pieces of My Mother

February 23, 2015
An undercurrent of unresolved hurt and anger runs through this affecting and deeply restrained narrative of a mother’s abandonment of her children. San Francisco bookseller Cistaro alternates between 2003, when the author, the mother of two small children in L.A., was summoned suddenly over Christmas to her dying mother’s rural home in Olympia, and the 1970s, when Cistaro and her two brothers were growing up in the care of their overburdened father. Cistaro was four when her hard-drinking, chain-smoking mother took off from their San Jose duplex in her baby-blue Dodge Dart to “take a break” from the responsibilities of her vivacious sons and daughter. Subsequently, the children rarely saw their mother, who lived from one boyfriend to the next, working occasionally as a cocktail hostess. They blamed themselves for making her leave, and while the boys spiraled into drug and alcohol abuse, the author became the “good girl” who never begged or made a scene. As her mother lay dying, Cistaro found a cache of “Letters never sent” in her mother’s house, and though they help Cistaro sift through the wounded memories, there is no tidy reckoning between mother and daughter in this sad cycle of emotional devastation.