Mother Millett - Softcover

Among Kate Millett‘s other books are Flying Sita, The Basement, and The Loony Bin Trip. Millett is a founder of the Women’s Art Colony in Poughkeepsie, New York. She also lives in New York City.

When feminist icon and writer Millett (Sexual Politics, etc.) was summoned home to St. Paul to attend to her dying mother, she thought it might be her last such journey. Instead, it was merely the beginning of a fervent attempt to reclaim her mother from infirmity and dependence, to liberate her from the highly rated, wholly pitiless nursing home she detested. There is ample irony hereMother Millett had, after all, signed the commitment papers that had placed daughter Kate in a psychiatric ward years before. It was that experience, documented in Millett's The Loony Bin Trip, that made it impossible for her to agree to her mother's incarceration in St. Mary's, with its ever-present threat of medicated confusion and physical restraint. As she struggles to redeem her mother and return her to her beloved Manhattan apartment, Millett's conflicts with nursing-home managers, her own family and her sense of failure and self-doubt become a kind of universal history of children and aged parents in an America where the needs of the elderly commonly take second place to those of their families. Determined to be a better caretaker of her mother than her mother was of her, Millett sometimes claims the moral high ground too readily, though her rueful recognition that she will herself soon enough be old and facing financial circumstances far less secure than her mother's provides a sobering balance. (May 13)Forecast: Millett's reputation should draw review attention to this passionate rejection of the institutionalization and infantilization of the old and ailing, which, via Mother's Day displays, has the potential to appeal to a wider audience than Millett's core readership of boomer feminists.

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