Do you know your mother? I don’t mean her identity but who she is as a person. Does she know you? Truly know you. Mother-daughter relationships are fraught even under ideal conditions. What if your mother has dark secrets she’s unwilling to divulge? What if she might be mentally ill? How about if she develops degenerative dementia causing her to fade away before your very eyes? Toronto-based poet Damian Rogers grapples with these issues and much else in her graceful, melancholy memoir An Alphabet for Joanna: A Portrait of My Mother in 26 Fragments (Knopf Canada).
Rogers travels to the Montana plains to trace her matrilineal line. She tries to unlock how her mother became such a closed book. “I’m aware that this idea of inheritance scares me. In one of the back rooms of my brain, I struggle to draw a line between my mother’s life and my own.” Through her research she finds a series of tough women who appear to have barely revealed themselves to anyone in their orbit. In Joanna’s case the key may or may not lie in the abuse she suffered at the hands of a troubled older brother.
