Collect Call to My Mother: Essays on Love, Grief, and Getting a Good Night’s Sleep

English professor Horvitz (The Girls of Usually) recounts her struggle to find love and her fraught relationship with her mother in this probing memoir in essays. After graduating college, Horvitz backpacked across Europe and placed a collect call home that her mother rejected. Four years later, the author’s mother was killed in a car accident, which led Horvitz to reflect on her mother’s emotional unavailability: “I don’t remember my mother ever hugging me, or reading me a book, or even listening... to me.” Horvitz’s despair cast a long shadow over her adulthood, and she imagines her grief as a “bruised-up bluebird” and a darkness that invades her lungs. When thinking about the women she’d dated, Horvitz realized she was “addicted to addicts” who couldn’t fulfill her needs. She eventually found healing through therapy and the wisdom of age: “If I had parents who nourished me, maybe it wouldn’t have taken until my mid-fifties to figure out what a healthy relationship should look like.” Horvitz’s lucid prose offers a nuanced depiction of her rocky path to self-acceptance. Lyrical, frank, and meditative, this consideration of grief and identity resonates. (Feb.)