'Year My Mother Came Back': Memoir of being several mothers

The Year My Mother
Came Back

By Alice Eve Cohen

Algonquin Books. 288 pp. $23.95

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Reviewed by Jen A. Miller

Right before I graduated from college, I came out of a restaurant bathroom, looked up in a mirror while washing my hands, and saw my mother staring back at me. I ducked. When the same thing happens to Alice Eve Cohen, her mother is in the medicine cabinet mirror:

In a panic, I swing open the door of the medicine cabinet, so I can't see the mirror. I distractedly rearrange the cluster of antacids, tamoxifen, Band-Aids, and pain meds, and sit on the edge of the tub, my heart pounding.

Cohen's mother had been dead for 30 years, and she wasn't seeing how she resembled her mother in the mirror. Instead, she saw her actual mother, who had been visiting her in regular bouts in a year when she has been diagnosed with breast cancer.

That time is the setting for The Year My Mother Came Back, Cohen's meditation on what it means to be a mother, in all its forms: depressed mother, sick mother, attentive mother, biological and adopted mother.

Cohen is all of these. Told she would never have children, she adopted a daughter who, at the time in which this memoir is anchored, is about to go to college and to find her birth mother. At 44, Cohen had a surprise pregnancy, and here that daughter is about to undergo leg-lengthening surgery to correct a three-inch imbalance. The surgery is postponed when Cohen is diagnosed with breast cancer.

Cohen's mother visits her in many forms. She appears typing at Cohen's kitchen table, reading a People magazine during Cohen's radiation treatment, out at a restaurant having drinks and dinner. The age of her mother changes, too: She goes from a young, gorgeous woman to the depressed shade she turned into after her own breast cancer and double mastectomy, to an old woman in a form and age she never reached.

Through these visitations, Cohen contemplates what it means to be a mother - trying to be all things to her daughters at different tumultuous times in their lives. But she also reexamines her former role as a daughter, and what she carried from her mother into her own life.  There's a jarring turn near the end toward suspense, but it is smoothed over when Cohen's mother eventually leaves. The Year My Mother Came Back is not quite a Mother's Day gift, but it is a short and swift reflection of what it means to be a mother or to have one - whether or not you see her in your reflection.