Making an Exit: A Mother-Daughter Drama with Alzheimer's, Machine Tools, and Laughter - Softcover

Fuchs, Elinor

3.46

35 ratings by Goodreads

9780805080070: Making an Exit: A Mother-Daughter Drama with Alzheimer's, Machine Tools, and Laughter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805080074 ISBN 13: 9780805080070

Publisher: Picador, 2006

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Written with "humanity, compassion, and dignity," an unexpected love story of a career-driven mother, a once-resentful daughter, and a ten-year battle with Alzheimer's (Los Angeles Times)

At a time when such things were rare, Elinor Fuchs's mother, Lil, escaped a miserable marriage and left young Elinor to be raised by grandparents as she traveled the world selling automotive parts and military gear. With her stunning looks and ambition, Lil was less a mother to love than a figure to admire--and, once in college, Elinor determined to keep her distance.
Making an Exit is the moving account of what happens afterward, following Lil's diagnosis with Alzheimer's. As the disease progresses, both women are transformed: Elinor, with growing compassion, becomes her mother's mother; Lil, regularly speaking of "love," connects with her daughter as never before through the poetry of her disintegrating language.
With wit, wisdom, and theatrical flair, Making an Exit tells an uncommon story of a parent's decline--and a rekindled relationship. "The last ten years," writes Fuchs, "they were our best."

"How these women touched me! Driven and real, Making an Exit hurtles toward its truths with uncommon feeling and
honesty." --Gish Jen, author of The Love Wife

"Tremendous . . . brilliant . . . filled with unexpected glimmers of hope, wisdom, and joy." --The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

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About the Author:

Elinor Fuchs, a professor at the Yale School of Drama, is an award-winning
playwright and theater critic. She has contributed to The Village Voice, The New York Times, Vogue, and American Theatre. She lives in Brooklyn.

I finish teaching Wednesday and arrive Thursday from New York to find that Mother has staged a riot earlier in the day. It was noon, she was supposed to have her hair done, the one-room salon off the lobby was full of patrons under dryers. Betty comes forward with a plastic apron, and-WHOOP!-mother is defending herself against an ax murderer. On the loose! She screams, shouts for help, hurls insults, tears, bites. People run to help from the lobby, the nurse's office, and housekeeping. Residents are disgusted and wish Lil would just move out. I bring her back later in the day and soothe her through color, trim, and blow-dry.

"She's impossible!" says Betty, who runs the shop. "I feel sorry for her. I feel sorry for you!"

I didn't tell Betty: Mother was always impossible.

She was not impossible because she was cruel or cold. She was impossible because there was so much of her. You could admire her, enjoy her-as indeed she did herself-but you couldn't exactly love her . . . Love was one of the soft-creepy words, like "God," "soul," "woman," and, until later in life, "mother." That was Lil, with her booming voice, her high energy, her self-promotion, her drive for success, her critical intelligence, her scorn for stupidity.
And it is not so different here, at the nursing home.

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