The Almost Moon

The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold will ring true to anyone who has a history of mental illness in his or her family. From the very first sentence--"When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily"--we know we're in for a whopper.

Helen and her mother Clair are trapped in a co-dependent relationship, the agoraphobic, paranoid, and increasingly demented Clair demanding near-constant care and attention and repaying her seemingly devoted daughter, Helen, with epithets like "Bitch." Helen explains that her mother's dementia has revealed the "core" of her dysfunctional personality, a core "rotten like the brackish water at the bottom of a weeks-old vase of flowers."

Helen has known for most of her life that Clair lacks the capacity to love her. Since she was a teenager she has frequently fantasized about dismembering Clair and shipping her body parts to various far off locales. What is fascinating about the relationship is that Helen snaps not as a teenager or young mother when she is perhaps most acutely aware of her mother's failings, but rather on the very day she recognizes that Clair needs hospice care. In other words, Clair is incredibly close to death, but Helen simply can't take it any more. Struggling to move Clair's body into a position where she can clean her of the feces from her most recent accident, Helen come face to face with the weight of Clair, the burden of Clair. She says: There is no excuse to give, I know, so here is what I did: I took the towels with which I had meant to bathe her [and] ... I smashed these downy towels into my mother's face. Once begun, I did not stop. ... I held the towels for a long time, staring right at her, until I felt the tip of her nose snap and saw the muscles of her body go suddenly slack and knew that she had died." The murder, in fact, after the intense animosity Helen has expressed toward Clair, is practically anticlimactic.

The latter, perhaps ultimately more interesting, half of the novel deals with Helen's understanding of how Clair's pathology has twisted its way into every other aspect of her life, from her father's suicide to her relationships with men, to her relationships with her daughters. Helen must ultimately decide whether to let Clair determine her entire future, follow in her father's footsteps, and shoot herself, or instead salvage what she can of her relationships with her ex-husband, daughters, and grandchildren by attempting to break the cycle of mental illness. It's a tough decision and not one with which every reader will agree, but a brave one nonetheless.