My sister lent me this book as something I should read. I haven’t read any of Alice Sebold’s other books (Lovely Bones & Lucky), but now I think I shall.
Almost Moon begins relatively simple. Middle-aged single daughter, Helen, cares for her aging mother. The mother, as we learn is suffering from Dementia, and probably a host of other mental illnesses. Helen narrates through the struggles of caring for someone so close, so troubled.
She takes on this task of her mother mostly alone. She is the only child of her parents. Once a day, Mrs. Castle checked on Helen’s mother, brought her flowers from her garden and food from her kitchen. Helen makes it clear that Mrs. Castle does this only to ensure that her mother has woken each day and is still alive.
Helen finds herself going through routines with her mother, rout from a mother-daughter obligation. During these mundane visits, Helen flashes back to memories of her mother when she was a child, when her children were grandchildren, and even when her mother had the chances to interact with the great-grandchildren.
I picked the book up to read one night before bed. The pages flipped by. I thought I might get through a good chunk of it in one sitting. Then the first chapter ended. And it ended hard.
The book sat on my nightstand for quite a few nights. Alone.
Finally, I felt able to open it up again. I reread the last paragraph of the first chapter to make sure I had read it right. I did. It took a few pages into the second chapter to get back in the groove of Helen’s voice, but once I did, the pages flipped by again.
Helen takes the reader on a journey. It is a familiar journey between the intricacies of our kinship relationships and the outside world. Sebold sucks us into Helen’s vacuum in which the relationships with her daughters are all that matter, and the memories of her parents are all she can think about.
Mid-way through the book, Helen reflects on her father explaining her mother to her. He uses the moon as an example, and how it’s always there, but not always seen in full. Sebold has her title and Helen accepts that her mother will always be there, seen or unseen.
The book continues to weave Helen’s struggle with what she’s done and how to continue the life she knew. I yearned for her to make the right decisions from this point out, but Helen can’t see right from wrong anymore. Her view is jaded by her actions, her motivations, and her reasoning.
In the end, I felt like there would be more of an end. However, like her mother, and like the moon, Helen develops almost full circle. I closed the book with great satisfaction.
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