The Center of the Universe: A Memoir

by Nancy Bachrach
Knopf, 235 pp., $24.95

There are the stock phrases, the banalities, we use in the face of tragedy – “prepare yourself,” for one – that most people don’t bother to ponder. But Bachrach, a former ad exec, is more literal-minded. When her brother breaks the news of the freak accident that killed her father and put her mother in a deep coma, she wonders: “How do I prepare for a double funeral? Pack two of everything? Pack clothes that are very black?” Bachrach applies that kind of funny and raging scrutiny throughout her first book, The Center of the Universe, a memoir that recounts her mother Lola’s long – and frankly horrifying – recovery from carbon monoxide poisoning.

At the time of the accident in 1983, Bachrach, then living in Paris, was if not estranged from her mother then certainly keeping her at arm’s length – a coping mechanism she developed early to deal with her brilliant but disordered mother’s manic episodes (Lola once hired strippers for the luncheon entertainment at the Ladies Home for the Aged, one of the more lighthearted examples of her mania). The title refers to Lola’s place in the family dynamic, and indeed every one of Bachrach’s often brutal childhood memories is framed by what stage of breakdown Lola is in, pre- or post-shock treatment. As Bachrach and her siblings keep vigil, they wonder if Lola will wake from her coma and, if so, what state she’ll be in. “What happens after the brain swells like a soufflé in a pan?” Bachrach asks with typically vivid imagery (one wishes, however, she trimmed some of the many extended similes and metaphors). Lola does eventually awake, but brain-damaged, and Bachrach details every motor and cognitive function her mother has lost and every indignity heaped on her, too.

If there’s a black-comic angle, Bachrach will find it. (When her mother’s cat is electrocuted on her watch, she musters a quick prayer to the god she doesn’t believe in: “May he find an afterlife of unrun pantyhose. And may his claws be eternally sharp. Amen.”) But she never uses the humor to hedge, and if she held anything back, it’s not clear from these pages. Lola’s case is an extreme one, but Bachrach’s book – unsentimental and all the more moving for it – is ultimately about a universal condition: the renegotiation of the adult child’s relationship with her parent.

This article appears in June 5 • 2009.

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A graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Kimberley has written about film, books, and pop culture for The Austin Chronicle since 2000. She was named Editor of the Chronicle in 2016; she previously served as the paper’s Managing Editor, Screens Editor, Books Editor, and proofreader. Her work has been awarded by the Association of Alternative Newsmedia for excellence in arts criticism, team reporting, and special section (Best of Austin). The Austin Alliance for Women...