This Is Your Mother: A Memoir

A daughter’s long-distance deathwatch animates Simpson’s bewitching debut, which unfolds on two parallel tracks. One follows an adult Simpson as she agonizes over whether to leave Chicago and visit her mother, Sallie Carol, as she’s dying in Georgia. The other paints a colorful portrait of Sallie, the larger-than-life matriarch who oversaw Simpson’s financially unstable childhood. A daughter of sharecroppers, Sallie survived a cheating husband and cancers of the brain, breasts, and ovaries while raising Simpson and her sister on a science teacher’s salary. Though Sallie was a devout Christian, she was also a hustler: she skipped rent, wrote bad checks, and stiffed restaurants, cab drivers, and baggage handlers, always relying on her conviction that people “could be swayed by the grace of God to help us survive.” Simpson enlivens the often bleak proceedings with innovative narrative techniques: she writes exclusively in the present tense, frames some of Sallie’s most outrageous antics as a sitcom script, and signposts the account with chapter and verse quotes from the imaginary “Book of Sallie Carol” (“2:6: Conceal what’s real”). Readers will be wowed. Agent: Cindy Uh, CAA. (May)