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Reviewed by Velma Lang for Readers' Favorite
How I Lost my Mother is about Leslie Swartz’s mother’s life and death and explores his conflicted relationship with her and so ultimately becomes a journey of self-discovery. He recounts Elsie’s difficult childhood in a struggling Jewish immigrant family in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and eventually her married life in South Africa. After marriage, the family’s rise to a privileged middle-class status as a white minority allows Leslie the opportunity for a university education which Elsie never had. An aspiring writer, Leslie chronicles her intellectual yearnings in spite of years of depression and society’s conservative repression as a trapped middle-class housewife of the times. Leslie eventually reconciles his feelings of failing her expectations when he and his wife care for Elsie until her death.
How I Lost my Mother is a wonderfully detailed and intimate portrait of caregiving for any reader who has cared for and lost a loved one. Against a backdrop of apartheid, social awareness, and exploitation, Leslie Swartz writes compassionately about caregivers employed on barely subsistence wages. He shares the minor details of family dynamics which become major hostilities as death nears. I especially appreciated the account of sibling rivalry over a family cat from childhood re-emerging as Elsie dies. As Leslie negotiates his introspective path of sometimes tenuous but unbreakable bonds with Elsie, he engages the reader in their emotional, universal story of love. I recommend this memoir because while learning to cope with death and grief, it is written with humanity and hope.
