My Mother Ruth: A Memoir of Love, Loss And Art

My Mother Ruth is a beautifully written and emotionally compelling account of how two women get to look beyond the role of mother and daughter and see two complex individuals who are given a final chance to truly know one another under the pressure of impending death. “A fine example of the memoir as an act of discovery…intimate in the best sense, connecting us with another vulnerable human being rather than brandishing secrets that embarrass us. Do we ever really know our mothers or fathers? Must we wait till the brightness of their living as dimmed before approaching them honestly?…Through losing her mother to esophageal cancer, Johnson manages to find and honor the richness of Jones’s life. Through vivid memories, careful observation, and research, Johnson balances a reporter’s tendency to gaze from an objective distance with a novelist’s immersion in the feelings and thoughts that accompany her mother’s terminal illness.” —The Sunday Oregonian