Jennifer says:
Someone Not Really Her Mother by Harriet Scott Chessman
Read by Myra Platt
Hannah Pearl is forgetting everything. Her life is as good as can be expected, given the advanced stage of her dementia: she lives in a high quality elder care home, and is well taken care of by its staff; her family dotes on her and visits often; she can talk with friends, enjoy food, and dress herself. She just doesn’t know who she is. What flashes through her mind, instead, are vivid memories, both beautiful and terrible, of her life before she emigrated to America. The man in England who she loved, and who gave her a daughter; the dear family she left behind in France, who perished in the Holocaust. Hannah was also a poet, and her instinct for metaphor has been retained — we learn this from her thoughts, which, scattered as they are, also give us a strong sense of who she once was. The arc of her life also plays out through her daughter, now grown, and her granddaughters, one a poet, one a new mother. Affection and joy in the present are the only things that bridge the gulf between those who still know themselves, and the one who can no longer find herself. Gorgeously written and read clearly and simply by Myra Platt, this is an audiobook that will stay with you.
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