All Gone: A Memoir of My Mother’s Dementia, with Refreshments

New York Times Magazine writer, columnist, and novelist Witchel saw her mother descend into uncharacteristic forgetfulness and lethargy in the mid-2000s, prompting the author’s rueful, occasionally vitriolic rumination on childhood and familial relations. Growing up in Passaic, N.J., in a mostly nonreligious Jewish community, before moving to Scarsdale (at age 12) as her dad moved up at his Madison Avenue job, Witchel recalls an uneasy “bomb-shelter mentality” pervading their house in the late 1950s and 1960s, a love affair with synthetic food products like Bac-Os that translated into comforting Jewish menus she still loves to cook and for which she offers recipes: meatloaf with cornflakes, frankfurter goulash, fried meat kreplach, and so on. Witchel adored her cerebral mother, who got her doctorate in psychology later in life, teaching for three-plus decades at Iona College, although she was often absent from home, earning the wrath of her husband, Witchel’s father, whose criticism of his daughter’s writing early on convinced her she had no talent. Witchel’s close bond with her mother, described as evolving from helper to lawyer to bodyguard, meant Witchel was stricken personally by her mother’s aging condition, receiving her forgetfulness as a personal failure and betrayal. Being the good daughter only went so far, and Witchel bares her distress frankly in this thin, taut contribution to the growing body of literature devoted to the toll of parent-care. (Oct.)