I’ve recently read two very different books by and about women dealing with the pressures of family life.
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Kate Mulgrew’s second book, How To Forget: A Daughter’s Memoir, is quite a different tale from her earlier 
Born With Teeth. The former covered her acting career, up to the early years of Star Trek: Voyager. I am a fan of both her acting and her writing.
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How To Forget has very little to do with Mulgrew’s life in the theater and everything to do with the deaths of her parents and her relationships with her five surviving siblings.The whole family was heavily influenced by the childhood deaths of two sisters, one as an infant, and one from inoperable cancer as a young teen.
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Mulgrew gives us the lives and eventual deaths of her parents, separated by only a couple of years. While her father died fairly quickly after a terminal cancer diagnosis, preferring not to endure treatment, her mother spent several years fading away with Alzheimer’s Disease, eventually requiring 24/7 care, totally unresponsive.
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Having lost both my parents to cancer and my husband to the lingering effects of Alzheimer’s, I found Mulgrew’s story very relatable. On the other hand, her description of her parents, rather distant by nature from one another and from their large brood of children, made me grateful for the astoundingly normal family I grew up in.
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Definitely a book worth reading, especially for anyone who has or will be trying to help parents deal with the end of life—and that’s really all of us, isn’t it?
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I read Jean Kerr’s Please Don’t Eat the Daisies decades ago (it was originally published in 1957) and remembered it fondly, so when I saw an ebook version wander by (from Open Road Media) I grabbed it. And
the book is just as funny as I remembered. The title comes from one of her essays about raising children (the inspiration for a movie), but much of the short book is about writing (Kerr was a respected playwright, her husband a drama critic) and life in general. Don’t skip the introduction, which may be the funniest piece in the book, in which she explains how she became a writer in order to fulfill her greatest goal in life: sleeping late in the morning.
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I hope Open Road rescues Kerr’s other books (The Snake Has All the Lines, Penny Candy), which also appear to be long out of print.
Kay Hudson 