Nightshade Mother

""...pure pleasure to read a book that crackles with intelligence, sparks of wit and insight."" -- ""Pamela Petro"" ""Lewis's persistence in naming, taming and understanding her mother's worst features makes Nightshade Mother an original and valuable exploration of a tragically mismatched mother and daughter."" -- ""TLS"" ""This compelling memoir, daring to voice its own truth, proves it can be done."" -- ""Spectator"" ""This is an astonishing memoir. It is remarkable, the combination of unrelenting clarity and straightforwardness, and the subtlety of all the insidious and insistent terror (and rage) described. The book seems to me a triumph of tone and poise amidst so much disarray and confusion. It floats free of the by now all too familiar Sanity, Madness and the Family accounts of devastated childhoods. It's utterly free of sentimentality and special pleading - and shows us something partly explained by plain and lucid and understatedly poetic description. It seems to me extraordinary that Gwyneth Lewis is more than able to write this unique version of the growth of the poet's mind. We are all failures because we fail to cure our parents; this book shows the terrible impossibility of the founding task of everyone's life."" -- ""Adam Phillips"" ""What sort of parenting can make an adult, decades on, feel like 'a trespasser in their own life'? In this unsparing memoir of a passionately controlling mother, who needs to keep a gifted child in her place, Gwyneth Lewis explores the nature of the damage done, the discovery of patchy but real vehicles of healing, the challenges of where and how to offer - or to postpone - forgiveness. All this is done with authority and (in the best sense) dispassion -- not chill, not absent feeling, but clarity in and about feeling. It is a moving, difficult, and, ultimately, loving record, insisting on growing beyond both collusion and resentment."" -- ""Rowan Williams""