Swallow the Ocean: A Memoir

It was 1975, and nine-year-old Flynn was sitting with her mother on the floor of their San Francisco apartment with a pile of money as her mother explained that the “faces of these men on the coins and bills in front of us... had impact on people and events.” Flynn’s father had moved out a year earlier; her two sisters were at school, where she, too, should have been; instead, her mother needed to talk with her about all those faces on the money. This is how Flynn, a writing instructor at the University of Minnesota, begins her elegantly written story of how her mother had been an adventurous bohemian in the 1950s and ’60s, before she became unhinged by what was later diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia. Family life became bizarrely unpredictable as her mother became attached to stranger and stranger notions. After her father moved out, “mother laid out the new terms of our lives... staying inside, and cutting all our ties to other people... careful about what we ate, and what we wore.” Readers begin to share Flynn’s “sense of dread” about what her mother might do next, heightened by the disturbingly controlled calm of her narration. (Feb.)